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 II
The Friend
As we shall see in the autobiographical sketch, “Mariana” (II:7), friendship came late and as a crisis into Fuller’s life. In her letters and in reminiscences about her from her New England years, a sense of life dramatically heightened usually informs her contact with others. At that time, friendship had the importance and freshness of a new idea; New Englanders were self-conscious and delighted with it, possibly more eager to define it than love, and not insistent on distinguishing the two.1 The cult of friendship was part of the romanticism of the times. When Fuller thanked Susan Prescott for giving her “the true life-the love of Trust and Honor,” she was both anticipating the thanks dozens of friends would give her and naming the standard to which she would hold them and herself. Romanticism also fed the uninhibited sentimentality and passionate style of much discourse of the time, and the belief in irresistible, quasi-mystical “affinities” between persons. At the same time, in the 1830s and 1840s, friendship was becoming an intellectual phenomenon. Through their criticism of social institutions and materialism, intellectuals, especially the Transcendentalists, were beginning to think of themselves as a separate class, and this experience enhanced their need and appreciation of each other. The effort to nurture, analyze, and criticize intimacy, to share letters of friends, and to compare one friend with another, became habitual. Believing as they did in the richness of individuality and the infinite powers of consciousness, they found few occupations more valuable than sharing thought and feeling with a friend. Even Emerson, who found warmth toward people so difficult to sustain, believed friends “incomparably the richest informations of the power and order that lie at the heart of things.”2
In the Memoirs, Fuller is treated most fully in her capacity as friend, with Channing quite simply regarding friendship as her vocation and Emerson calling her conversation the “most entertaining” in America. But these two men made no secret of the way they were initially repelled by her manner of dominating a group. Significantly, their antagonism found the same image, with Emerson saying “the men thought she carried too many guns” and Channing confessing that he avoided “one so armed from head to foot in saucy sprightliness.”3 For both, closer acquaintance with Fuller, particularly a tête-à-tête, broke down their resistance. Sarah Clarke attested to a similar double take in the process of becoming Fuller’s friend, an experience of warfare that gave way to exhilarating peace—exhilarating because she found she was taken seriously as never before. Fuller had no tact. Wanting the substance of a person before her, she was too impatient for manners. But while Sarah Clarke felt fuller’s assault on her reserves and pretenses, the men were apparently wounded in their vanity and in their sense of what is proper to the gentler sex.
Once Fuller as warrior had broken through the shields of privacy or prejudice, she could lay down arms and disclose herself as the friend of striking talents. Certainly she was exacting and often difficult in this second phase, demanding friendship on her own terms. But her friendship was rare and original, for it drew on the provinces, as then understood, of both sexes. She was always active, searching, critical—the qualities she called “masculine”; but the “feminine” attributes—loyalty, nurture, tenderness, passion-were there too, now galvanized by the “masculine.” With modern psychological insight, she understood that the secret, even shameful, aspects of the personality had to be exposed and understood for the integrated, or ideal, self to flourish. The intimate moral effect of her friendship is similar in all accounts and well summed up by James Clarke, who wrote her,
And remarkably, once he came to know Fuller, Channing translated his early fear of her emasculating power into a source of virile strength: “The very thought of her aroused manliness to emulate the vigorous freedom, with which one was assured, that wherever placed she was that instant acting.”5
Not everyone seized the offer of such friendship. The volatile young poet, Ellery Channing, refused the prospect of having his ideal self always held before him, liking to “grow backward” as much as forward. The pugnacious Unitarian reformer, Theodore Parker, rejected the initial conditions of her friendship. He and Fuller never became close, according to Caroline Healey Dall, because both “required a sort of personal submission before newcomers could be admitted to a cordial understanding.” A few young women felt “put on” by Fuller and allowed “no chance”; one of them, “jealous of another’s influence,” as Emerson put it privately, resisted “with petulance.” The women who welcomed her intimacy probably did so with the quality of reasoned courage disclosed by the odd locution of Sarah Shaw nearly four decades after Fuller’s death: “I feel proud that I had the sense to love and venerate her as I did.”6 To be Fuller’s friend took a certain daring.
Though it fused her disparate energies, sharpened her identity, served her differing needs as they emerged, and brought something new to the culture of New England, the art of friendship alone could not be her vocation. The sheer exercise of her formidable personality could not long conceal the absence of real function. Thus Fuller excited herself with her own extemporaneous gifts but regretted that they did not readily translate into writing and judged that her need of a companion to “call out” her best “bespeaks a second-rate mind.”7 And as we shall see, on the two occasions when she tried to make relationships fill the need of a vocation, she did the greatest injustice to herself and to reality. But all her friendships worked eventually to move her toward her vocation: by exorcising some of her fantasies and exercising many of her anomalous drives, friendship helped to accustom Fuller to reality and society to Margaret Fuller.
Her earliest friendships were essentially rescues, usually conducted by older women, eager to engage the girl who was either isolating or aggressively alienating herself through self-pity, self-dramatization, and ignorance of all arts of friendship. Despite their differences, the coquettish British visitor Ellen Kilshaw, the earnest schoolmistress Susan Prescott, and the cosmopolitan author of a manual on etiquette Eliza Farrar all worked to domesticate the young Fuller, to make the ideal of womanhood, stretched just slightly, fit her better. Thus, after Fuller’s ebullient and sharp-tongued behavior had put off a number of Cambridge matrons, Eliza Farrar, who admired her greatly, “undertook to mould her externally, to make her less abrupt, less self-asserting, more comme il faut in ideas, manners, and even costume.”8 Apparently, Fuller was grateful to this urbane and generous friend, who had time and skills her own mother lacked and could temporarily serve as role model.
Eliza Farrar introduced her to a number of women her age and younger who became devoted companions. Intense relationships with one or another young woman were a constant element in her life from her late teens to her early thirties when she left New England. There was Anna Barker, the talented Southern kinswoman of Farrar’s, whose beauty moved Emerson to call her “that very human piece of divinity”9 and Fuller to confide in her journal: “It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man” (II:16). Her relation with Anna reminded her of the love between brilliant de Stael and beautiful Récamier. Later, Fuller made a friend of a young student, the gypsy-like,” mischievous, and gifted Caroline Sturgis. Their early correspondence is marked by rhetoric of ecstasy, jealousy, withdrawal, and cautious return. The fervor and erotic overtones of these relationships beg for analysis.
It is possible that these women were more than half-consciously mimicking the intimacies of the romantic movement in Europe. Fuller had introduced to an enthralled circle of friends the fictionalized Conversations with a Child, supposedly a record of Goethe’s friendship with Bettina Brentano, daughter of a wealthy merchant. But she had come to judge it somewhat distasteful, with its “air of an elderly guardian flirting cautiously with a giddy, inexperienced ward,” or a “Father Confessor” using his office “to gratify his curiosity.” More pleased by the relation between the spirited girl and Karoline von Günderode, eight years older, a canoness of a religious order, Fuller translated part of their correspondence. In this extravagant exhibit of romantic friendship, each mind was “at equal expense of keeping up its fires.” Fiery indeed was the relation between the two women, particularly when Günderode fell victim to despair like “a chasm here in the breast” (Bettina: “can I not fill it? this chasm?” Günderode: “That also would pain me”). Or when Bettina writes: “Thou hast said that thy desire is to be free; but I do not desire to be free, but to take root in thee, a wood-rose refreshing itself in its own fragrance, it opens its bosom to the sun, but there if the earth crumbles away from its roots, all is over . . . when I think of the fiery radiance with which thou has so oft shone through my soul-abide with me yet.”10 Günderode’s hot-and-cold magic, her brew of ideality and ardor, was not unlike that which Fuller served up to Barker and Sturgis.
But in America at this period, the language of Eros in female friendship was not unique to the talk and letters of Fuller’s literary friends; it was a broader cultural phenomenon. A native explanation for it is connected to the cult of “true womanhood.” Though initially backed by the need to make women satisfied and productive in the narrowed sphere of the home, the notion that women were essentially different from men began to produce unexpected and slightly subversive results. The myth that women alone possessed purity and spirituality undermined the case for heterosexuality and even for confinement to the nuclear family. For women could not expect to share these qualities with coarse, corrupted men and would need to look beyond the home for “kindred spirits.” They would generate a “sisterhood of sensibility” in religious and reform organizations and especially in friendships.11 One might further imagine that, since women brought up on this ideology were trained to believe that only men were burdened with sexual feeling, when such feeling arose in them they would not entirely recognize it for what it was. Rather, interpreting it as a potent effusion of the spirit, they would share this too with their dearest friends. Under the governing assumption that they shared purity, women could safely vent amorous feelings without needing to examine them. A side effect of the cult of true womanhood was thus an elaborate system of permitted passion. A thin line here separates healthy emotional freedom from damaging self-deception. Fuller probably recognized this both in her instinctive retreat from the emotional exhaustion of her meetings with Barker and in her mysterious remark that her connection with Sturgis had been “redeemed from the search after Eros” (II:18).
When the intensity diminished, quieter relations, like those Fuller sustained with other women, prevailed. Then the situations of her friends became opportunities to struggle with the problems of women: the unreflective reading habits of one, the need of another for more thoughtful companions, the stultifying marriage of a gifted poet, the paralyzing motherhood of a girl not yet developed. Such friendships could also become the theater for her self-expression or a laboratory in which she could test acceptance of her own anomalous yearnings.
Her friendships with men-though those with women were said to be six times more numerous-were equally important in keeping alive her hope for recognition and for the emergence somehow of a vocation. Harvard students, they were, for the most part, better equipped than the women to meet her on intellectual grounds and to sustain the energies charged by her father’s pedagogy. She appears to have been content, in her Cambridge years, with the platonic nature of these relations. The single exception was her distant cousin George Davis. “His mirth,” she wrote, “unsettled all things from their foundations”;12 she might have hoped that his famous wit was token of a courageous iconoclasm. His failure to reciprocate her feelings hurt her briefly, but other stimulating companions, especially James Clarke, offered compensation.
When the pattern of her life was changed at twenty-three by the family’s move to the farm at Groton, forty miles from Boston, correspondence with these friends assumed greater importance. Like the regular course of study she assigned herself in her spare time (German, French, and English Romanticism, European and American history, architecture, and astronomy), the correspondence in which she discussed her reading and thoughts was an antidote to the standard women’s work she now did in keeping house, caring for the illnesses of her mother and grandmother, and sewing. (“Plain sewing is decidedly immoral,” Fuller firmly opined.13) She also tutored the four youngest of her six siblings—Ellen, Arthur, Richard, and Lloyd—for five to eight hours a day. Though her father promised her a trip to Europe as a reward, and though he read American history with her, Fuller often felt frozen with resentment over the loss of the social and intellectual life of Cambridge. And, in an anecdote from September 1835, we get some measure of the stiffness he exhibited even when he meant to be tender. She had fallen into an illness—then called “brain fever”14—which it was feared she might not survive. “Habitually so sparing in tokens of affection,” her father expressed his feelings for her more strongly than he had ever done: “My dear, I have been thinking of you in the night, and I cannot remember that you have any faults. You have defects, of course, as all mortals have, but I do not know that you have a single fault.”15 She had barely recovered her health when the long-planned course of her life was deflected by his sudden death from cholera on October 1.
Two new kinds of relationship were among the consequences of this shock to Fuller. In the first, she stepped into Timothy’s shoes, acting as helpmeet to her mother and father to the children; in the second she remained in part the child in painful search for the father who had withheld himself up to the ultimate withdrawal. She took the first role when she called the younger children to her father’s corpse and pledged on her knees that, “if she had ever been ungrateful or unfilial to her father, she would atone for it by fidelity to her brothers and sisters.”16 She kept her vow, first by fighting for her sister’s right to education against her narrow-minded domineering Uncle Abraham, who took it upon himself to settle his brother’s meager estate. She complained bitterly that she was deprived by gender of legal authority over the children. Then, with a devotion little recognized in the Fuller of the Memoirs, she set herself to learn how to handle the family business and financial matters, for which she felt she had little skill but her mother no capacity at all. Painfully she relinquished the long-cherished dream of going with the Farrars and an attractive new friend, Sam Ward, to Europe, where Harriet Martineau would have introduced her to the larger literary world for which she longed. For two years she taught school to help support the family—first in Bronson Alcott’s controversial Temple School, then in Providence. In her frequent letters to all members of her family, she shepherded them individually and kept them in touch with each other. Thus she watched over the business careers of her brothers Eugene in New Orleans and William Henry in Cincinnati, and the uneasy marriage of Ellen to the quixotic poet Ellery Channing, helping them all plan where and how to live. In Arthur first, then Richard, she invested her own ambitions for a while, worked to finance their professional training, and advised them even about women. With poignant empathy, she arranged for education or treatment for the retarded brother, Lloyd. And her mother, no longer overshadowed by the domineering Timothy, became the object of unremitting affection; from near or far, Fuller devised comforts for her, or company and help with her garden. She scrutinized members of her family, like her friends, through the lens of their ideal development as she saw it, but she was generally hardheaded about their practical needs. She could be hurt by their failure to confide in her, but she learned to feel toward them a realistic acceptance that, as we shall see, anticipated her later friendships abroad.
The loss of her father, which forced her to become the head of the family, also left unresolved her need for simple affection; Timothy had always offered instead intellectual rigor and pride in her. Thus, at thirty, she recalls in her journal her childish desire for another relation with him: “When I recollect how deep the anguish, how deeper still the want with which I walked alone in hours of childish passion and called for a father, after saying the word a hundred times, till it was stifled by sobs, how great seems the duty that name imposes.”17 The duty Timothy had shunned was showing his daughter what to do with what he had made her: how to unify the “masculine” and “feminine” poles in her character. Instead, he had abandoned her to a society in which she could only be useless and freakish.
Eventually, a feeling of respect and “relenting tenderness”18 replaced the longing, resentment, and confusion she felt in relation to her father. But first she would try to find personal coherence and self-definition through two men. Such projects are disastrous from their inception, burdening relationships with a load they cannot bear. As if to lighten the burden, Fuller tried to simplify her nature (and necessarily distorted it), electing in the first case to deny her sex and in the second to force herself into the role of conventional woman. To make matters still worse, she fixed on two men who were peculiarly ill-adapted for such experiments.
Emerson was the first of these, and one of the most important friends in her life. A man she had longed to meet for years before she managed it, she continued to regard him with love and reverence long after she discerned how little he could directly help or understand her. Each became for the other a touchstone for values attractively alien, and their friendship did much to clarify for both the bounds their temperaments set on them. Eight years older than Fuller, Emerson must have first drawn her by his likeness to Timothy in reserve and intellectual earnestness. More important, he seemed to offer what Timothy could not, an end to her anomalous social status-if not something to do, at least a way to be. Calling his influence more “beneficial” than that of “any American,” Fuller wrote, “from him I first learned what is meant by an inward life” (II:23). Early in their friendship, he read aloud his “Nature,” the conclusion of which may have sounded to her like a solution. “Build therefore your own world,” he had written. “As fast as you can conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions . . . . The advancing spirit . . . shall draw beautiful faces, warm hearts, wise discourse, and heroic acts, around its way, until evil is no more seen.” In short, through his Transcendental faith he held out to her an alternative to the inhospitable social world, to American historical reality—a world fashioned after her individuality, not resistant to it.
In the beginning there was a pleasing reciprocity. When they met in 1836, Emerson, like Fuller, was grieving, and the loss of his brother Charles was such that the “very sober joy” in his second wife Lidian—one of the most frail, pious, and self-sacrificing of the Transcendentalists19—could not compensate for it. In exchange for the private world of consciousness, of introspective power and private harmony, Fuller tendered the best of real society, sharing her world of friendship. Sometimes Emerson was exuberantly grateful for the company of Fuller and the young friends—Caroline Sturgis, Anna Barker, Sam Ward—whom she freely shared with him: “your poor hermit . . . will come yet to know the world through your eyes.” But just as Fuller eventually felt constrained by Emerson’s ahistorical and solipsistic “inwardness,” so did Emerson resist breaking out of his inveterate reserve. A tension developed as part of their friendship, for which both used the same striking word. Emerson’s use of Montaigne’s phrase, “Oh, my friends, there are no friends,” was for Fuller “a paralyzing conviction,” while Emerson confided in his journal after one of her visits, “Life too near paralyzes art.”20 What they had to offer one another was great, but given the ascetic basis of his craft and her need for vital relation, the threat of mutual paralysis was always near.
Other threats were more covert. One was emotional dishonesty bred of the cult of friendship and heightened by the mystique of Transcendentalism. This was expressed most simply by Fuller’s and Emerson’s complicity in refusing to recognize the effect of their intimacy on Lidian, who was also quite at a loss to express her discomfort. A more complex (and potentially more destructive) evasion was involved in the way in which, teaching self-reliance, Emerson instilled expectations, even dependencies, for which he was unable to take responsibility. One contradiction lay between Emerson’s belief that each person should follow his or her own interior convictions and his wish that those convictions should take on the coloration of Emerson’s own. Another contradiction was Fuller’s: she could not separate her desire to forge an independent and richly synthesized self from a desire to have that self accepted, even sanctioned, by a person of Emerson’s stature. Early in 1840, when her strenuous work on The Dial threw her into more regular and tantalizing contact with him, she broached indirectly her desire for such comprehensive acceptance. In a letter to her dear Waldo, she constructed a parable about herself as a “poor traveler of the desert” who toiled all day to reach a distant palm: “But when he reached it, alas! it had grown too high to shade the weary man at its foot.” At the end she asks, “Why do I write thus to one who must ever regard the deepest tones of my nature as those of childish fancy or worldly discontent.”21 Why, indeed, we might ask, if it were not that Emerson, like the palm, was giving Fuller ambiguous signals, alternately inviting her to approach with her vision and her society and withdrawing from her intensity with chill, lofty complacency?
As the year advanced, they both moved to deepen their friendship, but from fatally diverse motivations. Emerson contemplated writing an essay on friendship, though to Fuller he confessed to being “perplexed lately with a droll experience of limitation as if our faculties set a limit on our affections.”22 In exploring the field with Fuller as guide, he sought to identify his limits; by contrast, Fuller sought through the connection with Emerson to arrive at her greatest potential. (In such a contest, the conservative objective prevails.) She resolved to make the palm stoop for the weary traveler. Thus she wrote on an undated sheet of a journal, surely from this period and about Emerson,
The passage is full of interesting contradictions. The sense that he draws on her “masculine” and “feminine” qualities counters her feeling that she cannot be “childlike” (by which she usually means playful, mystical, or fanciful) but only “manlike.” And the effort to be noble, to refuse self-indulgence and spontaneity counters the bald possessiveness of the first sentence. We sense, under the confusion, the wish for wholeness and vocation narrowly construed as an exclusive mutual dependency.
The wish became explicit in the summer of 1840, a season of crisis for Fuller. Sam Ward and Anna Barker, each of whom had roused tumultuous feelings in her, were in the last stages of a problematic courtship,24 and Fuller was probably struggling to feel a generous joy in their union. Then her arduous editorial work conflicted with a series of religious experiences that Emerson mistrusted as unhealthy and transitory. In August, exhausted and vulnerable, she turned to Emerson, challenging him to enlarge the grounds of their friendship, which she “stigmatized” as “commercial.” He wrote to Sturgis that Fuller had “taxed me on both your parts with a certain inhospitality of soul,” had accused him of remaining a critical stranger to women willing to be friends “in the full and sacred sense.” He was disposed at first to meet the challenge (“If I count & weigh, I love also”), but he little knew how.25
Judging by his letters and the one of hers that survives from the ensuing debate, we can assume she was making a demand on Emerson as insupportable as it was inevitable. Having resolved as a child to be “bright and ugly,” but discovering as she grew that her capacity for strong feeling and her “violent bodily” need for action only increased, she experimented with the idea of subsuming all these energies within a vital and generous intelligence. In effect, she wanted to enlarge her “manlike” side until it included the rest of her. Choosing for her partner in this enterprise of boundless mutual exploration a man of exceptional and bold thought, she hoped to bridge the sexual distinctions in herself, perhaps to abolish them. Then her assumption that Emerson could not respond sexually to her because he was married probably worked only to intensify the paradoxically passionate way in which she argued for a meeting of spirit. In pushing the lid off friendship, she was concealing her motives twice over: hiding her urge to dependence in heroics over free development and forcing the straining and ecstasy of sex into the locutions of the mind.
Fortunately for the future of her independence and self-awareness, Emerson refused her experiment. In an entry in his journal responding to one of her lost letters, he upbraids her as he never could directly:
In its own way, this is as revealing about Emerson as Fuller’s private thought on being “his only friend” is about her. As she sought an exclusive, mutual, and total comprehension, he wanted from her and others only what was potential, suggestive, and fleeting-what, in short, could be absorbed in his own system. The fixed past or hard edge, the time-bound and circumstantial dimension, the persistent challenging otherness of a friend called up no response in him.
Emerson’s developed theory of friendship is consistent with this bias. When Fuller, angered by his insistence that she was alien to him, threw in his face virtual quotations from his essay- writing, “But did you not ask for a foe in your friend? Did you not ask for a ‘large formidable nature?’” (II:25)—she was seeing only part of that theory, for in that same essay he rationalized his retreat. Although he does not analyze it thus, it seems that, precisely because his requirements for friendship are so total (it is essential that in dialogue “each stands for the whole world”), the ideal friendship is threatening: “Though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own” The safe way is confessedly the exploitation of life for the soul’s benefit: “The soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.” Thus, as he encouraged intense relations with Fuller to pursue his understanding of friendship, so, when the essay is done, did he follow his own analysis and withdraw. “I see very dimly in writing on this topic,” he wrote her on October 24. “Do not expect it of me for a very long time.”27
Fuller accepted his plea to return with good will to their old footing, and they remained friends all of her life. But beyond the emotional obfuscation, their crisis had exposed differences about the value of friendship which had intellectual and even ideological implications. Of course, Fuller too made use of friends, but generally her friends were not symbols. Their value lay in mutual support and she created with them a vital, congenial society; they and one’s response to them were a road to the real world, not a replacement of it. Even in her incoherent desire to be Emerson’s “only friend” she never intended to take more than she gave. Where Emerson’s mode was evasion—”hovering like an eagle, skimming like a swallow . . . but never with me, nor in the depths”28—hers was commitment—”Why am I to love my friend the less for any obstruction in his life? Is not the very time for me to love most tenderly when I must see his life in despite of seeming?” (II:12). Fidelity, in fact, was a crucial test of one’s capacity for reality: “To me it seems that the man or woman who can become indifferent to those they have loved, can hardly be depended on for reality in anything.”29 She connected her conviction to her gender, when she begged not to be exiled from the dark hour of her friend: “The manly mind might love best in the triumphant hour; but the woman could no more stay from the foot of the cross than from the transfiguration” (II:12a). In her last visit with the Emersons, in 1844, she teased him lightly about how Concord lacked “the animating influence of Discord,”30 but she was making a related point. Where she differed from Emerson was in seeking to know the whole selves of friends, in wanting to share their pain, and in believing in the creative good of contrast. As we shall see, these attitudes were echoed in her response to Emersonian Transcendentalism and in her move away from it.
Only one more time, so far as we know, did she feel and yield to the lust of dependency. That was in 1845 when, shortly after her arrival at the Greeleys’ in New York, she met and fell in love with the German-Jewish businessman James Nathan, aged thirty-four like herself. We know little about this gentle, blue-eyed man beyond the facts that he was an amateur of the arts, played lieder on his guitar for Fuller, and later aspired to publish travel pieces. When the Greeleys apparently showed disapproval of him, they met secretly and undertook a vigorous correspondence. Far from denying her sex as with Emerson, Fuller now adopted the stance of the stereotypical woman, passive and fixed on her man. But less than in any of her relationships did this work to draw together her various energies. It filled her alternately with frustrated restlessness and regressive yearnings for rest. The language of birds and blossoms crowded out all her thought, and his attraction almost obliterated her respect for self. (“I am with you as never with any other one, I like to be quite still and have you the actor and the voice. You have life enough for both; you will indulge me in this dear repose.”31)
Fuller’s letters that feverish spring show how near repressed passion lay to repressed filial and maternal longings. In a poem to Nathan, for instance, she calls herself “mother of thy spirit life,/ And so in law thy wife,” names him her “sire,” and identifies their “mutual birth” with spiritual procreation.32 What holds together the roles she assumes here- mother, child, and lover-is the quality of willed self-effacement, the apparent choice, for the first and last time in her life, of the vicarious existence then believed woman’s natural end. It is tempting to imagine that Fuller was conducting another experiment, for the willfully “feminine” role was as artificial for her as the willfully “masculine” had been. It seems more likely, however, that her sexuality was more aroused than ever before and that for the emergency the “feminine” idiom was the nearest to hand.
This is not to say that she could now lay claim to self-knowledge. In her communications with Nathan, she was still the daughter of the Puritans. We do not have Nathan’s letters, but we can deduce that, although he was the countryman of Bettina, he lacked the benefit of indoctrination into New England’s codified Platonism. Thus, when she wrote, “Are you my guardian to domesticate me in the body, and attach it more firmly to the earth?” he took it as a sexual invitation. But when he made advances Fuller was shocked at the revelation of his “lower nature” and required apologies. A modem reader may sympathize with the foreigner to New England’s ways and find Nathan’s misunderstanding entirely comprehensible. A modem reader may even doubt that he had entirely misunderstood Fuller’s meaning. Nathan did learn enough to be wary and eventually to retreat, in the late spring, returning to Europe, ostensibly for business. The promised reunion never took place. Plainly, he was no match for her on any level. From Europe he wrote only to ask favors and letters of reference; and his ultimate refusal, however sugar-coated, to return her letters held the menace that he might put them to some use.33
Despite the pain, as in the crisis with Emerson, Fuller made progress with reality. She was losing her ability to deceive herself about the content of feeling. Months after Nathan’s departure she could write, “I have felt . . . a desire for you that amounted almost to anguish.”34 Perhaps she was also beginning to understand that the complexity of her character could be expressed in no single relationship and that even love could not replace her need of the world. Only in Paris would she meet a man who could articulate all these needs. She met no American who could.
Notes
1. Thus Fuller wrote, “Love is no nobler than friendship, no more worthy of permanent life; but it searches deeper and drinks more life-blood” (BPL MS, no date).
2. Memoirs, I, 57; “Nature,” Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 25.
3. Memoirs, I, 308, 202; II, 6.
4. March 1, 1838, Letters of James Freeman Clarke, ed. John Wesley Thomas (Hamburg, Germany: Cram, de Gruyter & Co., 1957), p. 129. Clarke added, concurring with Channing’s judgment, “this great and benign influence” is “what God has given you to work.”
5. Memoirs, II, 114.
6. Barbara Welter, “The Merchant’s Daughter: A Tale for Life,” New England Quarterly, 52 (1969), 10; Emerson, Notebook on MFO; May 20, 1884, to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, BPL MS.
7. Memoirs, I, 107.
8. Higginson, p. 36. Of old Nantucket whaling stock, Eliza Farrar (1791-1870), born at Dunkirk during the French Revolution, passed her childhood in England, where she knew eminent reformers and artists. She came to America in her twenties and at thirty-seven married a Harvard professor; in 1836, she published The Young Lady’s Friend, a popular and practical manual which, while conservative in its stance toward women’s sphere, urged women “to find pleasure in intellectual effort.”
9. Rusk, Letters, II, 228.
10. “Bettina Brentano and Her Friend Günderode,” Dial, II (1841), 316, 323, 329; “Preface,” Günderode (Boston: E. P. Peabody), p. 2. The language and values of friendship in Günderode most directly influenced Fuller’s reminiscences about Ellen Kilshaw in the autobiographical romance.
11. See William R. Taylor and Christopher Lasch, “Two Kindred Spirits: Sorority and Family in New England 1839-1846,” New England Quarterly, 36 (1963), 23-41.
12. Joseph Jay Deiss, The Roman Years of Margaret Fuller (New York: T.Y. Crowell, 1969), p. 58. Clarke’s letters suggest that Davis feared her influence and was unwilling to share his problems with her (Letters of James Freeman Clarke, pp. 56-5 7, 79).
13. Reminiscences of Ednah Dow Cheney (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1902), p. 201. Reporting the remark, Cheney explained, “many women content themselves with the thought of industry when stitching wristbands . . . while mind and soul are empty and unemployed,” adding “Margaret was no sentimentalist who valued self-sacrifice for its own sake” (p. 202).
14. This illness has prompted much speculation. Georgiana Bruce Kirby thought it was typhoid fever and that it caused Fuller’s spinal curvature which was mysteriously cured by a magnetic healer a decade later (Years of Experience (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1887), p. 213). (Cheney, however, thought the curvature was caused by Fuller’s tight-corseting in her teens.) On the other hand, Alexander E. Jones finds the illness psychosomatic; in “Margaret Fuller’s Attempts to Write Fiction” (Boston Public Library Quarterly, VI (April 1954), 67-73), he argues that a story she wrote involving George Davis and his wife precipitated gossip and made Fuller ill with guilt.
15. Memoirs, I, 154.
16. Higginson, p. 54.
17. Memoirs, II, 52.
18. Higginson, p. 32.
19. Though Lidian on the verge of marriage seemed to Sarah Clarke almost equal to Emerson and perhaps as independent in her thinking as Margaret Fuller, in coming years Lidian had many reservations about her husband’s iconoclastic views (Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), pp. 215, 226).
20. Rusk, Letters, II, 238; Harry R. Warfel, “Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson,” PMLA, 50 (1935), 583-84, 586. For further analysis of this friendship, see also Carl F. Strauch, “Hatreds Swift Repulsions: Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Others,” Studies in Romanticism, 7 (1968), 65-103, and Bell Gale Chevigny, “Growing Out of New England: The Emergence of Margaret Fuller’s Radicalism,” Women’s Studies, 4, No. 3 (1976).
21. Memoirs, I, 289-91.
22. Rusk, Letters, II, 248. Even when he engaged the task fully, he put it oddly—”I am determined by the help of heaven to suck this orange dry” (Letters, II, 332)—as if the task were finite and could try a man’s patience.
23. Sheet enclosed in Emerson’s Notebook on MFO. Until the argot of this circle is decoded, only intuition can help us measure the intensity of relationships. In reading letters or journal pieces as amorous in tone as this directed to “friend,” “brother,” or “sister,” we suspect either that the tone is artificially warm or the appellation artificially cool. I choose the latter interpretation for Fuller’s letter to Emerson in 1840.
24. Though Ward had hoped to live the life of an Emersonian scholar, he wrote later that his love for Anna, who was raised with the expectations of a society woman, made him desirous of satisfying “not only her feelings but her tastes by choosing the “lucrative profession” of business (David Baldwin, “Puritan Aristocrat in the Age of Emerson: A Study of Samuel Gray Ward,” Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1961, pp. 143-44). Apparently, Fuller took Ward’s part and Emerson, infatuated by the confidences of the lovely Anna, took hers.
25. Memoirs, I, 288; Rusk, Letters, II, 325.
26. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds.
A. W. Plumstead and Harrison Hayford (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), VII, 400.
27. “Friendship,” Complete Essays, 235, 226; Rusk, Letters, II, 353.
28. July 12, 1840, to Caroline Sturgis, Tappan Papers, Houghton.
29. BPL MS, no date.
30. Higginson, p. 70.
31. Love-Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1845-1846, introduction by Julia Ward Howe (New York: D. Appleton, 1903), p. 41.
32. Ibid., p. 90.
33. On November 27, 1846, he wrote enigmatically that her letters were “dear as ever to me and to a married man not quite unimportant,” but that after the death of either they should be burned unread. His will, however, stipulated that they be published (Houghton MS).
34. Love-Letters, p. 180.
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