The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  On that bright July afternoon on the strand, looking out over the bars and the sea, I asked my dear old Julian: “Why this?”

  He did not answer, but turned to hold me, while we shed tears together.

  Later, as we were walking away from the sea and the beach, I asked Julian another question. “How does even a single mistake made by a good and selfless man like Tom take on a nether life of its own, hounding the unfortunate wretch like that black river dog Cerberus?”

  Julian did not look at me as we walked. He said only: “Wasn’t it the Goddess Folly who once asked,

  ‘Why should I envy other gods,

  When all men eagerly offer greater sacrifices to me?’”

  There are moments in our lives when such thoughts plague us, just as there are moments of happiness and glory and love. But that day in July on the beach was one of the lowest moments of my life.

  SO I GRIEVED my dear brother and companion. Then I joined many others in grieving the Spooners, and Margaret and her young family. And then sore at heart I returned to my rooms in Boston, allowing no visitors save Phebe Miles, my new pupil. I had met the Miles family again at the memorial service for Margaret. Having abandoned Newspirit in the second year, Mr. Miles had opened a school in Roxbury, where the family resided. Phebe, now a young lady of twenty, taught the ornamental arts to her father’s female scholars. In the course of months my wounds began to heal, and I returned fully to my own life, as we human creatures do after great pain or loss.

  I saw Chas for a time. You may well ask, reader, why I did not marry him. I now believe my mind was quite made up during that long period of our separation. Still, to own the truth, I was not always certain what was happening in my heart. I can say only that Tom’s, Margaret’s, and the Spooners’ terrible end buried a particular emptiness and sorrow deep, very deep, in my soul.

  Yet how could I have relished attaching myself to a man I would have to share with others, and I came to feel that he was perhaps sated with me in the course of two or three months anyway. And one thing more, a further consideration as well: a woman who depends upon the fine arts for her livelihood can not, in New England, afford a public scandal—something I narrowly avoided more than once in my adventures. Despite Chas’s arguments, Boston then was not the place for a woman to earn her independence steeped in public censure.

  So I let Chas return to his sweet, luscious little dears and continued to forge a life of my own. I became, after all, that “spinster artist” one reviewer had christened me, or that “chaste priestess of the painterly muse,” as another had phrased it in his ignorance. For such are the categories by which the world must see us—or by categories more reproachful, which certainly might have been used against me.

  SINCE THE WRECK of the Elizabeth, and especially all these years later as I now spend my days writing this personal history, I think often of Tom and the Spooners and my friend Margaret Fuller Ossoli. I think particularly of her failures and successes, of the meaning of her strange life and the flowering of her truest self in dangerous times and places during her final years. Although I have always remained thankful for every encouragement and generosity from Mr. and Mrs. Spooner, as well as from Mr. Neal, from Julian, from Tom, and from Gibbon, it was Miss Fuller herself, during my last year in Italy, who became my cynosure, and she still burns brightly to light my own way, all the more so in life’s darker moments. Although some have ridiculed and reviled her before and since her death as a “he-woman” and “She-Crichton,” as an “intellectual Bloomer in cerulean stockings,” or as one who “understood Socrates better than Plato did, Faust better than Goethe did, Kant better than Kant did,” she labored mightily—against enormous intolerance—to create a place for herself in the ruthless world of ideas, letters, and revolutions. By such labors she demonstrated the possibilities for those of us who have come along beside her and after her, and who have chosen to discover our own vita nuova despite the unwelcoming world.

  Such were my thoughts one summer evening as I stood behind Phebe while she worked in oils upon a task I had set her.

  “I think I’m losing the best light, Mrs. Fullerton,” she said. “Do you think we should finish up for today? The colors seem all off to me.”

  “Surely, Phebe, we can not work without light,” I said. “And darkness ever comes soon enough. Let’s keep on but another quarter hour. Unfortunately, we’ll have no time together for the remainder of this week.”

  “If you say so, Mrs. Fullerton.” She continued to apply her brush diligently to the marine.

  I turned to the window and removed the half-curtain to let in more light. I thought of Margaret again. Recalling the many criticisms of others that I have mentioned reminded me, as well, of Mr. Channing’s more trenchant description of Margaret, during the service in her memory.

  “She was,” he had said, “our first female correspondent abroad, our first female social and literary critic of distinction, our great mother in the movement for the rights of American women, and, ultimately, one of our most brilliant voices of conscience and sanity in the long, continuing conflict over the liberation of America’s slaves.

  “Two years ago,” he continued, “she wrote to me that slavery was our American cancer, out of which had grown the fistula of our war with Mexico. ‘I listen to the same arguments,’ she wrote, ‘against the emancipation of Italy that are used against the emancipation of our blacks; the same arguments in favor of the spoliation of Poland, as for the conquest of Mexico.’ Her hope for a better future lay in the youth of our country and of Europe, touched by the light of high hopes, as yet not seceded, as so many of her peers, to become middle-aged indolents, voluptuaries, or, as she phrased it, ‘mere family men who think it quite life enough to win bread for half a dozen people and treat them decently.’ Do you recall, my friends, her New Year’s message to her country in the Tribune? ‘May America be worthy of the privileges she possesses, while others are lavishing their blood to win them.’

  “Indeed, had her great work on the economics and politics of revolutionary Europe survived the wreck of the Elizabeth, does any one of us gathered here today doubt that she would be held in acclaim as a courageous visionary-without-peer? Held, further, as one who understood and clarified the great industrial and political transformations of the Old World—yet in progress—during this very noon of our bloodstained century?”

  I turned again to look closely at Phebe’s progress now, placing a hand softly on her shoulder. The light she had thrown upon her ships in Boston Harbor was striking and bold. She seemed to be capturing something of that old feeling from a moment in my own childhood, and suddenly I did not doubt that she too had once seen that flash of the Sun God’s sword above lambent waters. Here was a child who, unlike little Effie, had lived into the promise of her womanhood.

  “I think I must stop for today,” she said finally.

  “Yes, Phebe. That’s quite all right,” I said. “That is, indeed, quite well and quite beautiful for today.”

  I returned to the window and looked down on the street. People were busily enjoying the end of another summer’s day.

  Yes, Mr. Channing, I said to myself, it was your astonishing Margaret who over the years became my dearest friend and guide. The one who said, “Very early I knew that the only object in life was to grow.” The one who showed me that all painting, like all writing, is worthless except as the record of a life. The one who showed me, and many others, how to face the world—alone if need be. How to struggle to be, as she put it, “natural and true in one’s work while living in a world out of harmony with naturalness and truth.” And how, finally, to remain constant to the true path of our singular lives.

  New England history has been a long-time fascination for me, especially the seventeenth century (the setting for The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin) and the antebellum decades of our early Republic—the setting for The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton. Allegra’s adventures (from 1837 to 1850) provide a glimpse through her eyes into t
hat heyday of Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Stowe; that “yeasty time” of transcendentalism, abolitionism, and women’s rights; that moment when the American landscape and culture began to change under the influences of the industrial revolution.

  While casting about for another ticket to the foreign country of the past, I stumbled upon two traditions that engaged my imagination. First was the tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors who created the female picaresque; second was the tradition of those American itinerant portrait painters who went on the road to make their living by wit, risk, and rough skill. I found that only about a dozen of these adventurous, painting souls had been women, while there were scores of men who had tried their “primitive” hands. Some few had ambitions to become fine artists. I soon discovered that I was in for about four years of living, so to speak, in early nineteenth-century America, just as I had once lived for three years on the New England frontier in the seventeenth. My own adventure into those early years of “Victorian America” completed, I’ve come home again to Newfields, NH, and the twentieth century. But my hope is that the intrepid reader will be engaged by the journey back as much as I was.