Figuring, page 13
Margaret and Anna grew intensely close and sometimes shared a bed. What ecstatic fusion happened in that bed, between those bodies and the minds that commanded them into action or abstinence? Again we collide with the impulse to classify and label, with the tempting anachronism of containing in present labels things of a past in which such labels would be entirely foreign, things which are uncontainable in any label at all. “It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man,” Margaret would later write, “for it is the same love which angels feel [and] is regulated by the same law as that of love between persons of different sexes.”
Turning to poetry—that most spacious and porous container of the uncontainable—Margaret channeled her love for Anna into a series of six sonnets. In one, she imagines whisking Anna away to “some isle far apart from the haunts of men”—most likely, given her voracious appetite for Greek mythology, an allusion to the isle of Lesbos. In another, she writes:
When with soft eyes, beaming the tenderest love,
I see thy dear face, Anna! Far above,—
By magnet drawn up to thee I seem.
There it is again, the divine magnet that charged Melville’s impassioned letters to Hawthorne. It is neither coincidence nor imitation, but a function of how poetry and science have long fomented one another’s imagination: Magnetism was one of the era’s most thrilling scientific subjects. Fuller’s beloved Goethe, in fact, was the supreme cross-pollinator of nineteenth-century science and poetry.
Although he had grown to be Europe’s most revered poet, Goethe saw himself equally as a scientist. He is responsible for the cloud names we use today—the invention of a young amateur astronomer by the name of Luke Howard, whose self-published cloud classification system was met with severe criticism by the scientific establishment for using Latin names instead of common English words. Goethe, who followed science closely through the era’s major journals and his extensive correspondence with Europe’s leading scientists, rose in solidarity with Howard—the clouds, he argued, were common to humanity and deserved to have names “accepted in all languages” rather than local translations. Goethe sent Howard—the only Englishman he would ever address as “Master”—an effusive fan letter, then enlisted his mightiest instrument in the classification’s public defense. He adapted Howard’s original essay into a suite of short musical poems for the different cloud types, titled with Howard’s Latin names. He even celebrated the young scientist himself:
To find yourself in the infinite,
You must distinguish and then combine;
Therefore my winged song thanks
The man who distinguished cloud from cloud.
A decade earlier, Goethe had invented morphology—the study of organic forms and structures—and now his poems sealed the morphological fate of the skies.
But Goethe was the kind of scientist that Einstein was a violinist—passionate and mediocre. His greatest contribution lies not in original scientific discoveries but in synthesizing and popularizing science, in wresting from it powerful metaphors that would lodge themselves in the popular imagination for centuries. His widely circulated theory of color and emotion, written as a refutation of Newton, turned out to have no scientific validity. But it brimmed with prescient insight into aspects of perception that wouldn’t be studied until long after his death: synesthesia, optical illusions, and the psychological effects of color. It was his literary work that had the greatest impact on science as a catalytic force on generations of imaginations—nowhere more famously than in the fabled case of Nikola Tesla’s invention of the self-starting alternating current motor, the vision for which arrived to him almost as a hallucination. An enchanting sunset in Budapest Park inspired Tesla to recite a Goethe stanza, which suddenly gave him the vision of a rotating magnetic field:
The glow retreats, done is our day of toil;
It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring;
Ah, that no wing can lift me from this soil,
Upon its track to follow, follow soaring…
The relationship was symbiotic—poets intentionally mined the golden age of nineteenth-century science for material. Coleridge famously attended Humphry Davy’s chemistry lectures in search of new metaphors. Goethe himself, in his pioneering 1817 treatise on morphology, fulminated against the artificial divide between poetry and science:
Nowhere would anyone grant that science and poetry can be united. They forgot that science arose from poetry, and did not see that when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.
* * *
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One of Goethe’s most imaginative cross-pollinations of art and science captivated Margaret Fuller and shaped her understanding of love.
In science as in romance, the unknown is disrobed sheath by sheath as fervid fantasies imagine the possibilities conquerable by knowledge—fantasies that far outstrip the reality eventually revealed as knowledge progresses. Where are our jet packs, our time travel, our teleportation? In the early nineteenth century, the new chemistry provided some of the most exhilarating frontiers of possibility, and it was on chemistry that Goethe drew in his novel Elective Affinities, which pioneered the notion of erotic chemistry by proposing that indomitable chemical “affinities” charge romantic attractions. Goethe painted these charges as so powerful that no artificial constraints imposed on them—not even marital ties—could keep apart lovers they alloyed. To Fuller, who was already coming to mistrust the traditional institution of marriage as a source of fulfillment and to mistrust even more her own capacity to tolerate it, this was a liberating notion that made her serial infatuations bearable by making them natural.
Goethe’s scandalous notion must have resonated as deeply with the joylessly married Emerson, who would soon become Fuller’s most complex, category-defying, and enduring “elective affinity.” He would write in his journal:
Marriage should be a temporary relation, it should have its natural birth, climax, & decay, without violence of any kind—violence to bind, or violence to rend. When each of two souls had exhausted the other of that good which each held for the other, they should part in the same peace in which they met, not parting from each other, but drawn to new society. The new love is the balm to prevent a wound from forming where the old love was detached.
Margaret Fuller was twenty-five and bereaved after her father’s sudden death when she met the thirty-two-year-old Emerson, whom Walt Whitman would later remember as “physically and morally magnetic, arm’d at every point, and when he chose, wielding the emotional just as well as the intellectual,” and as “a just man, poised on himself, all-loving, all-inclosing, and sane and clear as the sun.” Newly remarried, Emerson was still grieving for the young first wife—a poet—whom he had lost to tuberculosis six years earlier, shortly after their marriage.
After his dramatic exit from the clergy, Emerson had launched a wildly popular lecture series in Boston, offering not a sectarian but a humanist view of life’s most vital aspects. Fuller longed to know personally the sage whom all of New England worshipped. But it was Emerson that made the first overture to the young woman whose reputation had rippled to Concord. The ensuing relationship would be in many ways the most influential in both of their lives, and the most conflicted.
The revolutionary education reformer and editorial entrepreneur Elizabeth Peabody made the formal introduction. Eight years earlier, Peabody had met the teenage Margaret and come away enchanted by her elevated clarity of mind. “I had seen the Universe,” she would later recount of that first encounter. Well before Peabody founded America’s first formal kindergarten, composed the first English translation of Buddhist scripture, launched the country’s first foreign-language bookstore, and published the first American edition of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, she coined the term “Transcendentalism.” A generation earlier, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant had puzzled over his theory of mind and proposed a doctrine of “transcendental idealism,” which holds that concepts like space and time are transcendental—we experience them subjectively and intuitively, as they appear to us, rather than as they are in objective physical reality. But it was Peabody who, inspired by Coleridge’s use of the word “transcendental” more than by Kant’s philosophy, devised “Transcendentalism” to define the philosophical current sweeping New England. “Everything in the forms of society & almost in the forms of thought is in a state of flux,” she wrote of the movement. Coleridge had written of consciousness in terms similar to Kant’s, but he had located the moral conscience within the individual rather than in the hands of an external divinity dispensing and dictating it. In this transcendental conscience, Peabody saw an analog of the emerging ethos of self-reliance that was riveting New England, with its core belief that personal reform is the driving force of all social reform. She would later laud Emerson as the epicenter of the age’s spirit, but it was she who first gave form to that spirit in an ideological container.
In early 1835, just after Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville received their landmark Royal Astronomical Society admission across the Atlantic, twenty-five-year-old Margaret Fuller was at last admitted into the society of New England’s intellectual royalty: Peabody procured an invitation for her young friend to visit Emerson in Concord.
At first jarred by Fuller’s freely expressed strong opinions and lack of deference, Emerson was eventually won over—quite possibly by a poem she had recently written and published in a Boston newspaper, under the near-anonymous byline “F,” elegizing the death of Emerson’s beloved younger brother; or possibly by her countercultural proclamation that “all the marriages she knew were a mutual degradation,” which Waldo—as the Sage of Concord was known to his intimates—later reported to Elizabeth Peabody. He affirmed Peabody’s admiration for Fuller’s intellect, writing that “she has the quickest apprehension.” Within two years, Fuller would become the first woman to attend Emerson’s all-male Transcendental Club—an occasional gathering of like-minded liberals—in a meeting from which Peabody herself would be excluded.
But Margaret and Waldo’s initial meeting of minds soon became a contact point magnetized by something beyond the intellect—something she hoped, at least for a while, would propel each toward the “fulness of being” she held up as the ultimate aim of existence, something that would prompt him to shudder in the pages of his journal: “There is no terror like that of being known.”
7
TO BRAVE THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD
Several months before Fuller met Emerson, she had made her literary debut when James Freeman Clarke published some of her writing—anonymously—in his magazine, The Western Messenger. She was the only woman in the volume. In one piece, penned five years before Frederick Douglass’s “Pictures and Progress,” she contemplated beauty as a mode of exploring the unknown and a means of reaching higher meaning:
The abandon of genius has its beauty—far more beautiful its voluntary submission to wise law.—A picture, a description has beauty, the beauty of life; these pictures, these descriptions arranged upon a plan, made subservient to a purpose, have a higher beauty, that of the mind of man acting upon life. Art is Nature, but nature, new modelled, condensed, and harmonized. We are not merely mirrors to reflect our own times to those more distant. The mind has a mind of its own, and by it illuminates what it recreates.
This notion of critical reflection as a creative act of singular radiance would become the animating ethos of Fuller’s journalistic work. After her death, the prominent Unitarian minister, women’s rights advocate, and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson—the first to bring Emily Dickinson’s genius to light, and Fuller’s eventual biographer—would write that “there is probably no American author, save Emerson, who has planted so many germs of high thought in other minds.”
An early feminist and devout champion of equality, Higginson was a man who lived his convictions. At thirty, he broke down a courthouse door in an effort to free a fugitive slave. At forty, he served in the Civil War as colonel in the first federally authorized black battalion, after turning his home into a well-trodden stop on the Underground Railroad. At fifty, he was editor of the official journal of the American Woman Suffrage Association, which he had cofounded—a position he would hold for fourteen years. In his sixties, he became Margaret Fuller’s biographer, after having raised her sister’s maternally orphaned and paternally abandoned daughter, Margaret Fuller Channing.
Early in his career as a Unitarian minister, Higginson had scribbled into his notebook the plan for a sermon entitled “The Dreamer & worker—the day & night of the soul”—a meditation on the relationship between profit and poetry in a materialistic society where the work of artists was in danger of being discarded as devoid of utility. He insisted that the dreamer and the worker are naturally symbiotic in each of us and that it would be a mistake for society to sacrifice the poetic at the altar of the practicable and the profitable. “Do not throw up yr ideas, but realize them,” he wrote in his sermon notes. “The boy who never built a castle in the air will never build one on earth.” Perhaps he was drawn to Margaret Fuller’s example because she had refused either side of the sacrifice and had instead twined her “fulness of being” by the equal strands of dreamer and doer. Another interplay she refused to sever was that of truth and beauty in the cocreation of meaning, which Emily Dickinson—who read and admired Fuller—would later articulate in her exquisite poem “I died for beauty,” built around an allusion to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s vision of true poets as those “who died for Beauty as martyrs do / For Truth—the ends being scarcely two.”
I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
“For beauty,” I replied.
“And I for truth,—the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
But while Fuller enlisted beauty in the pursuit of meaning in her public work, she regarded it with an embittered disinterest in her own private person. In childhood, her father had tried to straighten Margaret’s figure by marching her through the house while banging a drum strapped to her shoulders. With her slouching spine and nearsighted squint—the price she paid for her heavy childhood reading—she had grown up experiencing herself as unbeautiful. “I hate not to be beautiful when all around is so,” she lamented. Higginson, a childhood friend of her brother’s, remembered her as a woman “with no personal attractions, with a habit of saying things very explicitly and of using the first person singular a good deal too much”—in other words, a woman who, despite her crescent spine, stood tall in her personal conviction at a time when she was expected to be a subservient and agreeable listener.
As Fuller filled every room she walked into with a vibrancy of mind and spirit that hollowed her society of expectation and stunned all present, her image was transfigured in the eyes of her beholders, and beauty of a different order came to halo her being. Sophia Peabody saw Fuller in her element as “a Sybil on her tripod,” invoking the mythic oracles of ancient Greece who channeled divine inspiration. Reverend Channing, the influential founding father of Unitarianism, extolled her “commanding charm.” He found an enchantment in her squint and her peculiar posture bordering on the supernatural as he described her two most distinctive physical traits:
The first was a contraction of the eyelids almost to a point…and then a sudden dilation, till the iris seemed to emit flashes,—an effect, no doubt, dependent on her highly-magnetized condition. The second was a singular pliancy of the vertebrae and muscles of the neck, enabling her by a mere movement to denote each varying emotion; in moments of tenderness, or pensive feeling, its curves were swan-like in grace, but when she was scornful or indignant it contracted, and made swift turns like that of a bird of prey.
But as much as Fuller may have wished to be a disembodied intellect, her mind was housed in a body she had to sustain. The notion of earning a living by her thought and her pen was still an improbable dream, so she reached for a career as a schoolteacher—the sole profession open to both sexes, and the only remunerable path available to intellectually driven women. Although it was commonly seen as a temporary endeavor until marriage furnished a woman with the financial support of a husband, a generation earlier Elizabeth Peabody had upended convention by making education not a way station on the path to marriage but a destination in its own right.
Peabody’s career as a rebel had begun at the age of twelve, when she taught herself Hebrew in order to read the original Old Testament and “find out the truth” after her parents discovered her “heretical tendencies” and tried to force on her a moralistic religiosity with which she did not agree. At seventeen, she spearheaded a school devoted to “educating children morally and spiritually as well as intellectually” from the youngest age. She developed innovative hands-on methods of teaching mathematics with dried beans and helped her students master grammar by seeding in them a spirited love of words, “the signs of our thoughts and feelings in all their minutest shades and variations.” At eighteen, she set out to perfect her Greek, which she had begun learning as a child, by hiring a tutor—the nineteen-year-old Emerson, newly graduated from Harvard and introduced to Elizabeth by her dancing partner, his cousin. “If it is best for the minds of boys—it is best also for the minds of girls,” she wrote to her sister Sophia at home, encouraging her to also immerse herself in the classics. When she asked for Emerson’s invoice at the end of their study sessions, he told her that he had “no bill to render,” for he had found that he could teach her nothing. By her early twenties, Elizabeth had given herself the equivalent of a graduate school education, then devoted her energies to revolutionizing the teaching profession. Most radical of all was her choice to teach not by lecture but by conversation. Her experimental school made Peabody a central figure in Boston’s cultural landscape.
