From: The Woman and The Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life & Writings (1994)
Author: Bell Gale Chevigny, Margaret Fuller
Published: Northeastern University Press 1976; 1994 Boston
CONTEMPORARIES ON FULLER
1. At thirteen, Frederic Henry Hedge [1852]
An ardent student of German idealistic philosophy and a charter Transcendentalist, Hedge (1805-1890) was one of Fuller’s first intellectual companions. He met her during his student days at Harvard. For the Memoirs, published in 1852, he wrote that his first impression was of excessive tight-lacing and irrepressible vitality.
. . . Margaret was then about thirteen,—a child in years, but so precocious in her mental and physical developments, that she passed for eighteen or twenty. Agreeably to this estimate, she had her place in society, as a lady full-grown.
When I recall her personal appearance, as it was then and for ten or twelve years subsequent to this, I have the idea of a blooming girl of a florid complexion and vigorous health, with a tendency to robustness, of which she was painfully conscious, and which, with little regard to hygienic principles, she endeavored to suppress or conceal, thereby preparing for herself much future suffering. With no pretensions to beauty then, or at any time, her face was one that attracted, that awakened a lively interest, that made one desirous of a nearer acquaintance. It was a face that fascinated, without satisfying. Never seen in repose, never allowing a steady perusal of its features, it baffled every attempt to judge the character by physiognomical induction. You saw the evidence of a mighty force, but what direction that force would assume,—whether it would determine itself to social triumphs, or to triumphs of art,—it was impossible to divine. Her moral tendencies, her sentiments, her true and prevailing character, did not appear in the lines of her face. She seemed equal to anything, but might not choose to put forth her strength. You felt that a great possibility lay behind that brow but you felt, also, that the talent that was in her might miscarry through indifference or caprice . . . .
Here let me say a word respecting the character of Margaret’s mind. It was what in woman is generally called a masculine mind; that is, its action was determined by ideas rather than by sentiments. And yet, with this masculine trait, she combined a woman’s appreciation of the beautiful in sentiment and the beautiful in action. Her intellect was rather solid than graceful, yet no one was more alive to grace. She was no artist,—she would never have written an epic, or romance, or drama,—yet no one knew better the qualities which go to the making of these; and though catholic as to kind, no one was more rigorously exacting as to quality. Nothing short of the best in each kind would content her . . . . [Memoirs, I, 91-95]
2. In the Transcendental Club, William Henry Channing [1852]
Channing (1810-1884), the Christian Socialist minister, also first knew Fuller when he studied at Harvard and the Divinity School. For the Memoirs, he described the style of her behavior at the meetings of reformers and intellectuals known forever by the name their mockers gave them—Transcendentalists.
. . . In conversations like these, one saw that the richness of Margaret’s genius resulted from a rare combination of opposite qualities. To her might have been well applied the words first used in describing George Sand: “Thou large-brained Woman, and large-hearted Man.” She blended in closest union and swift interplay feminine receptiveness with masculine energy. She was at once impressible and creative, impulsive and deliberate, pliant in sympathy yet firmly self-centred, confidingly responsive while commanding in originality. By the vivid intensity of her conceptions, she brought out in those around their own consciousness, and, by the glowing vigor of her intellect, roused into action their torpid powers. [Memoirs, II, 21]
3. Her temperament, Ralph Waldo Emerson [1852]
Emerson (1803-1882) did not come to know Fuller until 1836. Her nature seems to have caused him deeper perplexity and more lasting discomfort than it did her other biographers. After he had known her for two weeks he wrote, “It is always a great refreshment to see a very intelligent person. It is like being set in a large place. You stretch your limbs & dilate to your utmost size” (Rusk, Letters, II, 32). But later he wrote, “Woman should not be expected to write, or fight, or build, or compose scores; she does all by inspiring man to do all” (Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. E.W. Emerson and W. H. Forbes, VI, 134). It is difficult to be enlarged by a member of a group whose activities one believes should be limited. Emerson’s section in the Memoirs is his apology in both senses of the word for his response to Fuller; in it he admits and justifies his failure to understand her.
I said that Margaret had a broad good sense, which brought her near to all people. I am to say that she had also a strong temperament, which is that counter force which makes individuality, by driving all the powers in the direction of the ruling thought or feeling, and, when it is allowed full sway, isolating them. These two tendencies were always invading each other, and now one and now the other carried the day. This alternation perplexes the biographer, as it did the observer. We contradict on the second page what we affirm on the first: and I remember how often I was compelled to correct my impressions of her character when living; for after I had settled it once for all that she wanted this or that perception, at our next interview she would say with emphasis the very word.
I think, in her case, there was something abnormal in those obscure habits and necessities which we denote by the word Temperament. In the first days of our acquaintance, I felt her to be a foreigner,—that, with her, one would always be sensible of some barrier, as if in making up a friendship with a cultivated Spaniard or Turk. She had a strong constitution, and of course its reactions were strong; and this is the reason why in all her life she has so much to say of her fate. She was in jubilant spirits in the morning, and ended the day with nervous headache, whose spasms, my wife told me, produced total prostration. She had great energy of speech and action, and seemed formed for high emergencies . . . .
When I found she lived at a rate so much faster than mine, and which was violent compared with mine, I foreboded rash and painful crises, and had a feeling as if a voice cried, Stand from under!—as if, a little further on, this destiny was threatened with jars and reverses, which no friendship could avert or console. This feeling partly wore off, on better acquaintance, but remained latent; and I had always an impression that her energy was too much a force of blood, and therefore never felt the security for her peace which belongs to more purely intellectual natures. She seemed more vulnerable. For the same reason, she remained inscrutable to me; her strength was not my strength,—her powers were a surprise. She passed into new states of great advance, but I understood these no better. It were long to tell her peculiarities. Her childhood was full of presentiments. She was then a somnambulist. She was subject to attacks of delirium, and, later, perceived that she had spectral illusions. When she was twelve, she had a determination of blood to the head. “My parents,” she said, “were much mortified to see the fineness of my complexion destroyed. My own vanity was for a time severely wounded; but I recovered, and made up my mind to be bright and ugly.” . . .
She had a feeling that she ought to have been a man, and said of herself, “A man’s ambition with a woman’s heart, is an evil lot.” In some verses which she wrote “To the Moon,” occur these lines:—
A human secret, like my own, I trace;
For, through the woman’s smile looks the male eye.” . . .
Margaret at first astonished and repelled us by a complacency that seemed the most assured since the days of Scaliger. She spoke, in the quietest manner, of the girls she had formed, the young men who owed everything to her, the fine companions she had long ago exhausted. In the coolest way, she said to her friends, “I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.” . . .
It is certain that Margaret occasionally let slip, with all the innocence imaginable, some phrase betraying the presence of a rather mountainous me, in a way to surprise those who knew her good sense. She could say, as if she were stating a scientific fact, in enumerating the merits of somebody, “He appreciates me.” There was something of hereditary organization in this, and something of unfavorable circumstance in the fact, that she had in early life no companion, and few afterwards, in her finer studies; but there was also an ebullient sense of power, which she felt to be in her, which as yet had found no right channels. I remember she once said to me, what I heard as a mere statement of fact, and nowise as unbecoming, that “no man gave such invitation to her mind as to tempt her to a full expression: that she felt a power to enrich her thought with such wealth and variety of embellishment as would, no doubt, be tedious to such as she conversed with.”
Her impatience she expressed as she could. “I feel within myself,” she said, “an immense force, but I cannot bring it out. It may sound like a joke, but I do feel something corresponding to that tale of the Destinies falling in love with Hermes.” [Memoirs, I, 227-29, 234, 236]
4. As a force, Samuel Gray Ward [1850-51]
Romantically involved with Fuller when she was in her twenties and a friend for the rest of her life, Ward (1817-1907) agreed originally to collaborate on the Memoirs. Later he withdrew, posing these questions to Emerson.
How can you describe a Force? How can you write the life of Margaret? [Emerson, Notebook on MFO]
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