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
PART I
The Problem of Identity and Vocation
The problem of being Margaret Fuller was that of any woman who sought free self-development and an active life in a culture which could neither countenance nor even conceive such goals. But the illusion that they were free agents inculcated in many American girls made people locate the problem not in the culture but in the women themselves. One expression of this tendency was then, as it is today, to find uncomfortably “masculine” qualities in women seeking such freedom. Both Tocqueville and Martineau were struck by an American emphasis on sexual stereotyping unknown in Europe. “In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes, and to make them keep pace one with the other, but in two pathways which are always different,” Tocqueville observed, and “hence it is that the women of America, who often exhibit a masculine strength of understanding and a manly energy, generally preserve great delicacy of personal appearance and always retain the manners of women, although they sometimes show that they have the hearts and minds of men.” And Martineau judged sharply that “the prevalent persuasion that there are virtues which are peculiarly masculine, and others which are peculiarly feminine” effectively crushed the morals of both men and women.1
Among the causes for such polarization of human qualities in the first half of the nineteenth century was the anxiety about family cohesiveness caused by the migration from the coast into the interior. The development of a market economy beginning in the eighteenth century also had the effect of breaking down the natural and relatively egalitarian division of labor within the home; as men were drawn away from the home to sell commodities or their labor, women were thrust more decisively into it. Where both had, in differing ways, been “bread makers,” men alone became “breadwinners,” engaged in the all-important affairs of wresting a “living” from the world. For women, a different and narrower world emerged. Family relations became more private, especially in the increasingly distinct middle class, and as the home lost its productive function in the economy, its “moral” functions took on added weight. For as men learned to scant moral, religious, and emotional values in an increasingly competitive industrial society, women were expected to embody and enact these values for their men; hence the helpmeet was transformed into the “better”—and wholly other-half. Barbara Welter has located the years between 1820 and 1860 as those in which the “cult of True Womanhood,” the conviction that piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity were women’s essential virtues, held its potent sway.2
Given this atmosphere, it is not surprising that when the men who knew her best as a young woman tried to capture Fuller’s essence, they resorted to one of the following related strategies: they said she was indescribable or called her a “force,” ambiguously making her more or other than human; they said she was anomalous, as when Poe said that humanity is divided into three classes: men, women, and Margaret Fuller;3 they saw her as a hybrid, a union—sometimes happy, sometimes not—of two usually exclusive tendencies. Implicitly or explicitly, they identified these tendencies as “masculine” or “feminine.”
When, as a young woman, Fuller wrote about herself, she fell into all these strategies, especially the last. Since the notions of “masculine” and “feminine” were bound to cultural norms, it is clear that as long as she cast her problem in these terms, she was unwittingly conspiring to delay her progress toward freedom. Insofar as she brooded over the conventional formulations, she held herself back from acting as a whole free self; Fuller was not unlike the women in whose lives de Beauvoir later found “an inextricable confusion of revolt and complicity.”4 But it was virtually impossible for her to think beyond these formulations. By their natures, her parents reinforced the sexual stereotypes and by their method of rearing her they contributed to her sense of being hopelessly divided between these stereotypes.
If her mother, Margaret Crane, deviated in any way from the model of “true woman” (these words adorn her tombstone), no record of it survives. Although as a teen-aged schoolmistress she could keep rough boys in line, she seems to have submitted serenely as a wife to her husband’s domination, to illness, to the bearing of nine children and the loss of two of them in infancy. “Duty was her daily food,” her son Richard recalled, “self-sacrifice was as natural to her as self-gratification in many others.” Perhaps her passionate delight in flowers, which she said “had power to bring me into harmony with the Creator, and to soothe any irritation,” sustained her and helped her to infect her children with their “ideal sentiment.”5 (It is tempting to read between the lines the mother’s conditioned passivity and disengagement from her children’s lives in the world beyond home.)
Individuality, even idiosyncratic behavior, and strong opinion seem to have been all on the father’s side. Margaret’s grandfather was driven out of town for preaching against the Revolution to his congregation of Minutemen; returning as a farmer, he fought his way back into favor and represented the town at a constitutional convention, where he voted against the document because it recognized slavery. Inheriting this feisty independence, Timothy Fuller worked his way through Harvard, where he was demoted to second place in his class because of his participation in a student rebellion. Serving two terms in Congress before becoming Speaker of the Massachusetts house, he opposed the Missouri Compromise in 1820; first in his Jacobin reading and his Jeffersonian principles and later in his loyal and unpolitic support of John Quincy Adams as late as 1832, he showed his political independence. His political stances, his Unitarian faith, and his abrasive personality made him something of a renegade, and he raised his family on the social and political outskirts of Cambridge and Boston, until political discouragement drove him to the country to pursue farming as his father had finally done.
When in 1840, at the introspective age of thirty, Fuller came to write an autobiographical romance, she gave an ideal and generalized account of her parents which connects the woman with physical nature, emotionality, spirituality, and idealism, and the man with the social world, intellectual discipline, and practicality. The natural tendency of the daughter to learn to follow the mother was distorted in Fuller’s case by the unusually great influence of her father and the unusually retiring role of her mother. According to Higginson, after the death of his second child, Timothy took even more responsibility for Margaret, his first-born, than she related, supervising her dress, society, correspondence. Though her mother moved closer to Margaret after Timothy’s death, she appears to have been a shadowy, if loving, presence during Margaret’s childhood. A scholar himself who “grudged the hours nature demands for sleep,” Timothy imposed an adult regimen on Margaret, quizzing the six-year-old in Latin and English grammar till long past her bedtime.6 In his insistence on rigorous classical training, he flew in the face of the fashionable light and sentimental education then offered girls; in his rejection of apology, hesitation, qualification, or circumlocution in her performance, he sought virtually to cut her off from prevalent female speech patterns. But Fuller herself believed the physical and mental strain of these nocturnal drills caused her to suffer as a child from nightmares of trampling horses or of her mother’s funeral, and all her life from “continual headache, weakness, and nervous affections, of all kinds” (I:5).
In her psychological biography of Margaret Fuller, Katharine Anthony argues that both sets of symptoms sprang from an intense oedipal love which was also the “mainspring of her whole career.”7 While tempting and doubtless true in part, the Oedipus (or Electra) complex alone cannot account for Fuller’s distress or for her dream of her mother’s death. Fuller’s lifelong suffering from migraine, nervous prostration, and ill-defined pain, following the widespread pattern for “nervous” difficulty in ambitious women of the century, calls also for sociological and historical analysis.8 The dream of her mother’s death, which recurred at least as long as Fuller lived in New England, surely suggests feelings of guilt,9 but a remarkable fragmentary manuscript, never published, suggests additional interpretations. Full of autobiographical elements—the early death of a sister, the narrator’s wild grief, the presence of aunts in the house—it also takes a stunning liberty with the facts. Following the sister’s death, the mother dies from a combination of grief and the subtle neglect by a good husband (“a genuine though superficial character”) of her inner needs (leaving her with “feelings that early drank the oil from her lamp”).10 Fleshing out Fuller’s nightmare, this fiction hints that the unfulfillment of her mother’s life made it a slow death in the daughter’s imagination and effectively robbed her of both companion and exemplar. Possibly Fuller’s fear of such a life for herself, should she model herself on her mother, spurred a violent rejection she could not, in her waking moments, have reconciled with her love for her mother.
Finally, Fuller’s feeling for her father and his training was probably more ambivalent than the sort of oedipal love that Anthony paints, and this ambivalence dominates her autobiographical romance. On the positive side, the paternal influence whetted Fuller’s appetite for heroic action and realism, for meeting the challenges of the actual world with disciplined will—all the values she associated with the Romans, whose literature and culture Timothy, as a true son of the American Revolution, chiefly stressed. But his influence also confused her, for he failed to show her what she, as a female, could do with these powerful hungers. And it was negative—as she charged explicitly—in imposing without compromise the values of intellect, will, and action completely at the expense of others related to feeling, imagination, passion, and receptivity to nature.11
The constraining aspects of the Romans and Timothy’s nurture were later counterbalanced in some measure by Margaret’s discovery of the Greeks with their love of beauty and openness, of Shakespeare’s generosity and the profundity of his doubting Hamlet. But her earliest recourse was the most telling: it was to leave the father’s study altogether for the seclusion of the garden, which was significantly her mother’s cherished workplace. There she would indulge all afternoon in childish and passionate dreaminess. Quite naturally, then, she came to feel herself divided into separate selves. As the side nurtured by her father came to seem public, that associated with her mother became private, even invisible:
Probably this self-anatomy—the “female” nature repressed and blocked by the “male”-tells us less about the real quality of her childhood than about her problems at thirty. But she was deeply and consistently faithful to this vision in those later years. Thus her prose becomes sentimental and inflated when she describes how her first friend, a visiting British woman, touched those hidden reserves of feeling: “regions” of her being “which would else have laid in cold obstruction burst into leaf and bloom and song.” The point about Ellen Kilshaw, who captivated the parents as well as the eight-year-old Margaret,12 is not simply that she broke through barriers to the self the parents had not nourished. More important, this intelligent, charming, and seemingly independent woman broke down the alienation the young girl felt from others and even from herself by showing her a possible way to be a woman: “It was my first real interest in my kind, and it engrossed me wholly” (1:5), Fuller wrote. It is hardly relevant that Fuller later found her charm and cultivation artificial (and Kilshaw’s letters in the Houghton Library are conventionally coquettish to father, conventionally girlish and confidential to mother, and conventionally affectionate and admonitory to child). Kilshaw was desperately welcomed by the child because she could both strengthen the child’s confused ego and serve—for a while—as a model.
From early adolescence Fuller was preoccupied with the question of which of her drives, intellectual or emotional, was more fundamental to her identity. And she was temperamentally incapable of humor about the question or indifference to it, partly because of a third quality: a restless energy which even in childhood drove her to join with her peers only for “violent bodily exercise which relieved the nerves” (I:5) and which (as she and others remarked) of ten gave the quality of action to her study and thought. While it sustained her, this energy also drove her to try to settle the question or to find some means for combining her drives.
In trying to handle the problems of female adolescence, Fuller kept revising her strategies. At twelve, taking stock of her poor complexion and tendency to overweight, this lonely and strong-willed child made up her mind to be “bright and ugly.” But at fifteen, she confided to her teacher Susan Prescott her desire for womanly grace and polish to complement the intellectual genius she took for granted. Then again, she later reported that study filled her with “a gladiatorial disposition” that kept her from enjoying casual society.13
This vacillation did not end with adolescence. All her life Fuller’s confidence in her intellectual ability was a much-needed resource. “Soon I must retire into the Intellect,” she wrote in middle life, after an outburst of “childish feeling,” “for there, in sight at least, I am a man, and could write the words very calmly and in steadfast flow.” But calmness and steadfastness were not Fuller’s chief virtues, and she would have appreciated and affirmed the tribute of a woman who said of her, as had been said of Goethe, “Her heart, which few knew, was as great as her mind, which all knew,” adding that in character Fuller was of all she had seen “the largest woman, and not a woman who wished to be a man.”14 Again and again she affirmed her pleasure in being a woman; what she objected to was the narrowness society assigned womanhood, especially with regard to intellectual performance and activity in the world.
As she entered her twenties with the question of identity unresolved, the problem of finding a suitable vocation, the need to exercise all sides of herself, became increasingly pressing, and she looked about for a model. Many older women had stepped into the shoes of Ellen Kilshaw and had helped Fuller develop her retarded capacity for friendship. But they had not shown her what to do with her need for intellectual achievement and action. While there were in the 1830s several American women remarkable for knowledge and activism, Fuller was not able to take them as models. Learned women preceded her in Boston circles, but their styles of life did not challenge the reigning sexual stereotypes. For instance, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, Emerson’s relative and early mentor, was his model intellectual woman because “she was absolutely without pedantry” and her “delight in books was not tainted by any wish to shine or any appetite for praise or influence.”15 The enduring image of this woman—rocking the cradle, shelling peas, reading a treatise on optics, and helping her husband tutor young scholars for Harvard—was not calculated to satisfy Fuller’s romantic intensity. And Elizabeth Peabody, despite her prodigious learning and broad influence on education, fundamentally preferred supporting and disseminating the creativity of others to developing her own; Fuller found no guide for her unfocused independence and unconventionality in her. Not these women but Aspasia, the courtesan of Pericles, noted for bold wit and intellect, inspired Fuller. She described a picture of the head of Aspasia as marked by “the voluptuousness of intellect,” a locution which surely jarred on the New England imagination.16 When female activists, like the Grimké sisters, began to become prominent as abolitionists, Fuller was already in her late twenties, and her literary pursuits and Transcendentalist bias at that time prevented her knowing them; her avid self-preoccupation might also have made their dedication unappealing to her. As for those many abolitionists who became active feminists, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, they did so after Fuller left New England.
Thus, in her search for a vocation and a model, Fuller turned to women in Europe. There the institution of the salon in particular had long given women of intelligence, wit, and sympathy an influential role with men of letters and politics, a role unknown in America. For some salonières, like Madame de Staël, the salon had been a setting which helped women fashion their own political careers and develop their gifts as writers. As early as her sixteenth year, Fuller was attracted to de Staël not by her political audacity but by her large spirit; the brilliance of her conversation, her intense friendships, and the writing which captured the imagination of a generation amply compensated for her plain appearance. Fuller wrote Susan Prescott that she preferred de Staël to the “useful” moralistic novelist, Maria Edgeworth, “though de Staël is useful too, but it is on the grand scale, on liberalizing, regenerating principles, and has not the immediate practical success that Edgeworth has.”17 Later, Fuller’s contemporaries compared her with de Staël and also with the heroine of the Frenchwoman’s popular romance, Corinne, or Italy usually because Fuller too was given to rushes of magnetic, extemporaneous speech. The comparison must have pleased and supported Fuller, though she often disclaimed it. Actually, Corinne’s rejection of England for Italy—that is, for genius, self-expression freed of convention—provides a stronger, if prophetic, link to Fuller. The eventual defeat of Corinne’s independence must have disappointed Fuller, for she outgrew de Staël and eventually disparaged her for her vanity and sentimentality.
By contrast, she was long engaged by Mme. de Dudevant, the novelist who, despite social censure, took the name of George Sand and many lovers. Fuller’s letters plainly reveal her hope to find in Sand a synthesis of all her own qualities and her sharp disappointment when Sand cannot manage it, or when she too betrays “womanish” self-pity. Though she would later write warmly of Sand’s courage, Fuller’s anxiety about female weakness was too great in her younger years to let her choose Sand as a model. The “heroic common sense” instilled by her father was doing its work, making her disparage in women artists the emotionality she had come to cherish in her friends and leading her to discern egoism or natural inability when they sought to transcend the emotional sphere.
Her feelings about herself as a writer, especially during her years in New England, reflect these conflicts. Writing was a struggle, because in it she felt she committed herself to one part of herself while betraying another. The disparities that tormented other romantic writers—the battles between the willed and passive life, thought and action, intellect and feeling—were accentuated by her acute sense of the polar division of her own qualities. Yet her overriding energy drove her to write incessantly and in most of the available forms—poems, journals, reading notes, stories, letters, essays—hoping perhaps that the unrelenting pursuit of her dilemma or the finally accurate expression of it would produce its solution.
Meanwhile, she lived her life as richly as she could and bided her time. It is remarkable that among all Fuller’s writings there is no record that she expected to marry. No doubt Fuller’s combination of erudition and personal boldness drove off suitors as it tested the mettle even of friends. Then too she was not beautiful. Once in 1840 she lamented, “Of a disposition that requires the most refined, the most exalted tenderness, without charms to inspire it. Poor Mignon!” But more often she saw that beauty could become another trap. “I hear you are ‘lovely’ now,” she teased a young friend; “Heaven help you!” She cared greatly about beauty but thought women should learn to love it in all its manifestations, not simply to mirror it. (Later in her Conversations, she laughed at “all the young ladies of Boston sighing like furnace after being beautiful” and carefully distinguished beauty from prettiness.)18
But Fuller may also have not wished to marry.19 For she had a keen sense of the limitations of the married state that amounted almost at times to fear, as we saw in the fiction of her mother’s death. Elsewhere she wrote of the “fetters” of marriage and thought the curse of loneliness “nothing compared with that of those who have entered into those relations but not made them real.”20 Gradually her criticism of marriage was linked to her sense of society’s general restrictiveness. Thus, from Italy, she repeatedly warned her young brother Richard and his fiancee against a hasty marriage, for “in the present arrangements of society a choice of a companion for life acts as a Fate on the whole of life.”21 Increasingly her description of ideal marriage became a metaphor for the socially impossible—the discovery of one’s perfect complement or the total fulfillment of the self.
Sometimes the very absoluteness of these needs made her despair. Near the end of her life she looked less to ideal marriage than to death for these marvelous transformations: “by and by comes Death to reorganize perhaps for a fuller, freer life,” she wrote gnomically.22 But before that time she sought fulfillment characteristically in neither ideal marriage nor death but in herself, in an identity and vocation that would make her her own perfect mate by bringing all her “feminine” and “masculine” qualities together into powerful use.
Notes
1. Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Vintage, 1945), II, 223; Society in America (New York: Saunders and Otley, 1837), II, 233.
2. Ann D. Gordon, Mari Jo Buhle, and Nancy E. Schram, Women in American Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Radical America, 1972), pp. 25-28; “The Cult of True Womanhood,” The American Sisterhood, ed. Wendy Martin (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 243-56.
3. Margaret Fuller: American Romantic, ed. Perry Miller (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963), p. 192.
4. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), p. 356.
5. Memoirs, I, 381; Higginson, p. 19; Memoirs, I, 376.
6. Higginson, p. 28; Memoirs, I, 361.
7. Margaret Fuller: A Psychological Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1921), p. 25.
8. The most striking examples occur later in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth century, when ambitious women were more abundant. In The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), Christopher Lasch cites Jane Addams’ prolonged nervous depression before fixing on a life of active reform, and the breakdowns of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Margaret Sanger when they abandoned careers for marriage.
9. In an 1833 journal, she wrote that she “used to fancy these dreams sent by divine direction to make me treat her with a peculiar tenderness” (Houghton MS).
10. See I:6 within this volume.
11. Such charges recur throughout her letters and journals. From Italy she wrote that, despite her large endowments, before she was twenty she had squandered more vital energy “in inward conflict” than others in three score years and ten. Faith Chipperfield, In Quest of Love: The Life and Death of Margaret Fuller (New York: Coward-McCann, 1957), p. 267.
12. Failure to identify Ellen Kilshaw as the British visitor has led most biographers to accept an early guess that Fuller was thirteen when she met this woman. Letters to and from Kilshaw are in the Fuller collection in the Houghton Library.
13. Memoirs, I, 229, 56.
14. Memoirs, II, 95; I, 300.
15. F. B. Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years (Boston: Badger, 1909), II, 368.
16. August 1838 journal, Houghton MS; in her journal for December 1836, Fuller reflected, “Woman might be of use in this society by explaining the speculative man to the practical. But where could an Aspasia take her stand?” (Houghton MS copy.)
17. May 4, 1826, Memoirs, I, 55.
18. Emerson, Notebook on MFO; to Caroline Sturgis, April 17, 1845, Tappan Papers, Houghton; Memoirs, I, 343.
19. I reject the reductiveness of Emerson’s private judgment: “The unlooked for trait in all these journals to me is the Woman, Poor Woman: they are all hysterical. She is bewailing her virginity and languishing for a husband” (Emerson, Notebook on MFO).
20. Emerson, Notebook on MFO. In her story “Aglauron and Laurie” (Kindred Papers, pp. 183-216), Fuller criticizes not only marriages in effect forced on unreflective girls but also romantic marriages because they cannot satisfy the spirit’s longing for ideal fulfillment.
21. Venice (1847], Houghton MS.
22. January 8, 1848, Houghton MS; still later she wrote in an undated fragment, “Eternity is ours, beloved William—we will be true and full living beings yet” (BPL MS).
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