Figuring, page 11
Before the wedding, the manipulative Lady Waldemar, determined to conquer Romney for herself, had convinced Marian that she was unworthy of him, and that he regarded her as a mere charity case for his noble reformist ideals. Disheartened and affirmed in the self-doubt that had dogged her all along, Marian saw no choice but to leave London. She took “the blank, blind, weary way, which led . . where’er it led . . away at least,” not caring if the ship she boarded took her “to Sydney or to France.”
In a foreign tenement, she was drugged and gang-raped. Her life was not altered by seduction, as Aurora had assumed, but severed by a living death:
Do wolves seduce a wandering fawn in France?
Do eagles, who have pinched a lamb with claws,
Seduce it into carrion? So with me.
I was not ever as you say, seduced,
But simply murdered.
As Marian lays before Aurora the leaden truth—“Man’s violence, not man’s seduction, made me what I am”—Barrett Browning paints an unsparing description of how rape disfigures its survivors, leaving them
Half gibbering and half raving on the floor,
And wondering what had happened up in heaven,
That suns should dare to shine when God Himself
Was certainly abolished.
The men held Marian captive and violated her for weeks, plunging her into a spiral of madness. She tells Aurora of her release and harrowing escape:
They feared my eyes and loosed me, as boys might
A mad dog which they had tortured.
Up and down I went, by road and village, over tracts
Of open foreign country, large and strange,
Crossed everywhere by long thin poplar-lines
Like fingers of some ghastly skeleton hand
Through sunlight and through moonlight evermore
Pushed out from hell itself to pluck me back,
And resolute to get me, slow and sure…
But her getaway is incomplete—Marian finds herself pregnant. Deadened by the violence to her body and spirit, she decides to keep the child as her sole umbilical cord to life—“some coin of price” embedded in her flesh as recompense for the gruesome crime that had left her “half-dead, whole mangled.”
In a shattering soliloquy, Marian limns the razing of soul that rape inflicts on a being:
That little stone, called Marian Erle….
Was ground and tortured by the incessant sea
And bruised from what she was,—changed! death’s a change,
And she, I said, was murdered; Marian’s dead.
What can you do with people when they are dead,
But, if you are pious, sing a hymn and go;
Or, if you are tender, heave a sigh and go,
But go by all means,—and permit the grass
To keep its green feud up ’twixt them and you?
Then leave me,—let me rest. I’m dead, I say.
And if, to save the child from death as well,
The mother in me has survived the rest,
Why, that’s God’s miracle you must not tax,—
I’m not less dead for that: I’m nothing more
But just a mother. Only for the child,
I’m warm, and cold, and hungry, and afraid,
And smell the flowers a little, and see the sun,
And speak still, and am silent,—just for him!
I pray you therefore to mistake me not
And treat me haply, as I were alive;
For though you ran a pin into my soul,
I think it would not hurt nor trouble me.
Aurora, “convicted, broken utterly” by the story and shamed at her initial presumption, insists that Marian join her in Tuscany, where they would make a home and “live on toward the truer life” together, raising the boy so that he doesn’t miss a father, “since two mothers shall make that up to him.” In Florence, they settle into a peaceable life of shared sweetness as Marian mothers her child and Aurora, breadwinner by her art, works on her poetry and learns the names of the birds and the insects, of the snakes and the frogs, of nature in her many-splendored tessellations.
One evening, an astonishing presence slices through the golden Tuscan moonlight—Romney Leigh has gotten word of Marian’s fate and, propelled by his high moral code, has come to offer marriage, guardianship, paternity for the fatherless child.
But the rape—this murder—has made of Marian a ghost incapable of loving anything and anyone except her child. With time and distance, she has also realized that what she had felt for Romney in the first place was not love but worship—of his noble character, of his kindness to her—and worship is only a simulacrum of love. She rejects his proposal—not indignantly, but through grateful tears, governed by the conviction that she alone can be the bearer of her own redemption, that she is content and complete as a single mother.
In his bewilderment, Romney realizes that he has always loved Aurora only, whose book of poetry he has read in the intervening years and come to see as awesome proof of the ideals for which she had rejected him in their youth. Aurora, too, realizes that beneath her youthful indignation at Romney’s long-ago proposal and his haughty dismissal of art, she had indeed loved him deeply for his noble character, and had never ceased loving him.
He mistook the world:
but I mistook my own heart.
But she also perceives that he had been right to question her immature ideals—art cannot be some lofty chandelier dangling above life but must draw its light from the plane of living. Their wrongness had been evenly divided, and now they were to join their half-rightnesses into a whole.
There were words
That broke in utterance . . melted, in the fire;
Embrace, that was convulsion, . . then a kiss . .
As long and silent as the ecstatic night,—
And deep, deep, shuddering breaths, which meant beyond
Whatever could be told by word or kiss.
[…]
O dark, O moon and stars, O ecstasy
Of darkness! O great mystery of love,—
In which absorbed, loss, anguish, treason’s self
Enlarges rapture,—as a pebble dropt
In some full wine-cup, over-brims the wine!
Under the Tuscan moon, love prevails—love not as life’s supreme end, before which all else must subvert and prostrate itself, but love as art’s twin and equal, neither a sacrificial offering to the other, each a pillar of what is highest in the human spirit.
Beloved, let us love so well,
Our work shall still be better for our love,
And still our love be sweeter for our work,
And both, commended, for the sake of each,
By all true workers and true lovers, born.
Art, Barrett Browning concludes in the final scene of redemption, is an instrument of truth and transformation—for the human heart and, through it, for the body of the world:
The world’s old;
But the old world waits the hour to be renewed:
Toward which, new hearts in individual growth
Must quicken, and increase to multitude
In new dynasties of the race of men,—
Developed whence, shall grow spontaneously
New churches, new economies, new laws
Admitting freedom, new societies
Excluding falsehood.
* * *
—
As Aurora Leigh lived up to Barrett Browning’s germinal vision for a work “running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms,” her public success was wormed by her private sorrow at her father’s rejection. She had always known that he would not condone her independence—in art or in love—but somehow she stoked an embering hope that the living proof of her self-actualization would melt his icy obstinacy. In January 1857, as Aurora Leigh went into a second edition, Elizabeth beseeched her sister for news that their father had made a mention of it, any mention at all. He had not. She concluded in heartbroken resignation: “I dare say he is absolutely indifferent to me and my writings.” What difference does the admiration of millions make when love one longs for remains withheld? Like worship, admiration is only counterfeit love.
And yet Aurora Leigh would move the world, profoundly influencing the young Emily Dickinson and enchanting Maria Mitchell as no other piece of literature ever had, save perhaps Milton’s Paradise Lost. Perhaps Mitchell saw in Barrett Browning’s words a double vindication of poetry and science as “cognizant of life beyond this blood-beat,—passionate for truth beyond these senses.” In a diary entry from the ferocious first months of 1857, penned in a notebook Mitchell titled “Journal of the Hard Winter”—a winter so harsh that, a hundred miles north, Thoreau’s ink froze and he had to break the ice in his pail with a hammer as the mercury refused to leave the bulb of his thermometer below negative 20°F—Mitchell writes:
I bought a copy of Aurora Leigh just before the freezing up and I have been careful, as it is the only copy on the Island, to circulate it freely.
She may not have known that Aurora Leigh was modeled in large part on Margaret Fuller. In the final months of Fuller’s short life, having long esteemed her work, Barrett Browning had befriended the American writer, who in turn considered the poet the greatest “female writer the world has yet known.” Mitchell admired Aurora Leigh for the selfsame reasons she admired Fuller—here was a brilliant young woman who gives herself an education by reading Shakespeare and studying the classics, then lets her genius roam in a powerful coming of age as an artist and an instrument of change.
The poem’s deepest enchantment, for Dickinson as well as Mitchell, is its unapologetic insistence on the impossibility of disentwining art and life—an impossibility that was the wellspring of Margaret Fuller’s public triumph and her private ferment.
6
THE MUCH THAT CALLS FOR MORE
“I am determined on distinction,” Margaret Fuller writes to her former teacher. She is fifteen. The year is 1825 and she is ineligible for any formal education, so she has taken the reins of her character into her own hands, with resolute guidance from her father—a man who has tempered his disappointment that his firstborn child was not a son with the choice to treat his eldest daughter like a creature with a mind. When the first ringlets were snipped from her hair, he composed an ode to her head as a temple of divine intellect. At six, Margaret was reading in Latin. At twelve, she was conversing with her father in philosophy and pure mathematics. She would come to describe herself as “the much that calls for more.” At fifteen, this is her daily routine:
I rise a little before five, walk an hour, and then practise on the piano till seven, when we breakfast. Next, I read French—Sismondi’s Literature of the South of Europe—till eight; then two or three lectures in Brown’s Philosophy. About half past nine I go to Mr. Perkins’s school, and study Greek till twelve, when, the school being dismissed, I recite, go home, and practise again till dinner, at two. Then, when I can, I read two hours in Italian.
Many years later, she would write in response to the frequent criticism of her uncommon drive, often mistaken for arrogance, as women’s confident resolve tends to be:
In an environment like mine, what may have seemed too lofty or ambitious in my character was absolutely needed to keep the heart from breaking and enthusiasm from extinction.
From the platform of her precocious girlhood, Margaret undertakes an inquiry into the building blocks of character. “Nothing more widely distinguishes man from man than energy of will,” she writes in a six-page essay, positing that a conquering will is composed of imagination, perseverance, and “enthusiastic confidence in the future.” But these elements are not weighted equally—she prizes above all perseverance, which fuels the “unwearied climbing and scrambling” toward achievement. “The truly strong of will,” she writes, having lived just over a decade, “returns invigorated by the contest, calmed, not saddened by failure and wiser from its nature.”
Over the next twenty-five years, this teenager animated by what she calls “the all-powerful motive of ambition” would persevere to write the foundational treatise of the women’s emancipation movement, author the most trusted literary and art criticism in the nation, work as the first female editor for a major New York newspaper and the only woman in the newsroom, advocate for prison reform and Negro voting rights, and become America’s first foreign war correspondent. All of this she would accomplish while bedeviled by debilitating chronic pain at the base of her neck—the result of a congenital spinal deformity that made it difficult to tilt her head down in order to write and was often accompanied by acute depression.
Again and again, she would rise to reach for “incessant acts of vigorous beauty,” signing her influential editorials not with her name but with a single star—at first a symbol imbued with deliberate anonymity, designed to disguise the author’s gender and thus avoid any bias as to the article’s credibility, but soon the widely recognized seal of Fuller’s authoritative voice. Literature would be her weapon of choice—“a medium for viewing all humanity, a core around which all knowledge, all experience, all science, all the ideal as well as all the practical in our nature could gather.” Behind the public face of unprecedented distinction, Fuller would sorrow and struggle for private contentment—the same cerebral tidal force that swept away the barriers of prejudice and convention would end up drowning out her heart. Over and over, she would entangle herself in intellectual infatuations and half-requited loves that fell short of what she most fervently desired: “fulness of being”—the sublime integration of emotion, the intellect, and, as she would come to realize only at the end of her short life, the body. And yet she was as intent on having an examined inner life as she was on engaging with the life of the world, of the earth, of cosmic existence. “I cannot live without mine own particular star,” Fuller wrote at the age Maria Mitchell was when she discovered her comet, “but my foot is on the earth and I wish to walk over it until my wings be grown. I will use my microscope as well as my telescope.”
Months after the solar eclipse that revealed to twelve-year-old Maria Mitchell her astral calling, twenty-one-year-old Margaret Fuller arrived at her “own particular star” through a transcendent experience she later described as one of eclipsing “the extreme of passionate sorrow”—a revelation that stripped all sense of self and, in that nakedness of being, made her all the more herself. In her journal, Fuller recounts being forced to go to church on Thanksgiving Day while feeling “wearied out by mental conflicts, and in a mood of most childish, child-like sadness”—the sorrow of her symphonic potential muted by those tasked with directing her life. She would later recall:
I felt within myself great power, and generosity, and tenderness, but it seemed to me as if they were all unrecognized, and as if it was impossible that they should be used in life. I was only one-and-twenty; the past was worthless, the future hopeless; yet…my aspiration seemed very high.
Looking around the pews, this young woman who would later describe herself as having had “no natural childhood” now finds herself envying all the little children. Once liberated from the service, she heads into the fields and walks—almost runs—for hours, under “slow processions of sad clouds…passing over a cold blue sky.” She is unable to contain the thoughts that have seethed for years and have now erupted to the surface. “It seemed I could never return to a world in which I had no place…I could not act a part, nor seem to live any longer.” So she ceases to think and instead observes nature in its irrepressible aliveness—the trees “dark and silent”; the little stream “shrunken, voiceless, choked with withered leaves,” and yet “it did not quite lose itself in the earth.”
Suddenly the sun shone out with that transparent sweetness, like the last smile of a dying lover, which it will use when it has been unkind all a cold autumn day. And, even then, passed into my thought a beam from its true sun, from its native sphere, which has never since departed me.
The beam illuminates her memory of herself as a little girl, stopping midstep on the stairs to wonder how she came into being:
How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it? I remembered all the times and ways in which the same thought had returned. I saw how long it must be before the soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and space, and human nature; but I saw, also, that it must do it,—that it must make all this false true….I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the all, and all was mine.
Fuller borrows this final sentiment from her greatest literary hero, Goethe, whose work she had read passionately after teaching herself German and becoming a fluent translator in three months. The spring after Fuller’s death, Goethe’s notion of “the all” would make its way into Melville’s romantic letters to Hawthorne. As he is finishing Moby-Dick, a disenchanted Melville tempers Goethe’s exultation:
