Figuring, page 14
A decade after Peabody’s example, twenty-four-year-old Margaret Fuller took her first teaching job as an assistant at the Temple School, founded by the progressive-minded philosopher and idealistic education reformer Bronson Alcott, father of the future author of Little Women. Fuller had no idea that all three Peabody sisters, who had rendered the school a popular success with their rigorous lessons in Latin, math, and geography, had recently quit after Alcott failed to pay them for two years of work. After four months of unpaid work, she, too, resigned—but not before thoroughly impressing Alcott, who would remain one of her greatest supporters and admirers for the remainder of her life.
When another ambitious education reformer heard that Fuller was free, he offered her a job at his posh new Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, housed in a spacious new building modeled after a Greek temple. Having learned her lesson at Alcott’s school, Fuller demanded that two conditions be met if she were to take the offer: complete creative freedom in what she taught and how she taught it, and an annual salary of $1,000, equivalent to that of a Harvard professor—an impressive feat given the non-negligible grain of truth in the standard twenty-first century explanation that the gender wage gap is due in large part due to women’s unwillingness to negotiate about salaries. Fuller’s was an act of tremendous confidence and courage—nearly thirty years later, when Vassar begins courting Maria Mitchell for a faculty position, she would be so uncomfortable with aligning the value of her intellect with the price of her employment that she would negotiate her salary down by nearly half. “I do not believe I am worth it!” she would write of the $1,500 Vassar originally offered, instead taking $800 per year, along with free room and board for herself and her father, while male Vassar professors were salaried at a fixed $2,000.
With her conditions met, Fuller took the job in Providence, seeing it as a means of putting her younger brothers—whom she had educated since childhood—through Harvard, an institution closed to her. The Panic of 1837—America’s first major financial crisis—had just swept the nation and left it so dumbfounded that Emerson, mining science for his metaphor, likened all attempts to make sense of it to “learning geology the morning after an earthquake.” It was Emerson who took the podium at the opening of the Greene Street School and exhorted the educators gathered there, Margaret among them, to teach the boys and girls in their charge “to aspire to be all they can,” to “believe in their noble nature,” not to let their existential aspirations “degenerate into the mere love of money,” and never to forget “the capital secret of [the teaching] profession, namely, to convert life into truth.”
Fuller chose beauty as her transmutation agent, immersing the sixty girls in her class—ages ten to eighteen—in ethics explored through poetry and science humanized by the classics, taught next to a grand piano adorned with vases of fresh-cut flowers. In world history, she highlighted the lives of powerful women. In literature, she required reading by women authors. In natural history, she drew on Greek mythology, leading the girls to overcome their terror of spiders, now clinically known as arachnophobia, by telling them the myth of Arachne—the talented and ambitious mortal woman who challenges Athena, the goddess of wisdom and the crafts, to a weaving contest, and wins with a work so superior that the furious Athena turns her into a spider.
But Fuller’s greatest gift to the girls lay in drawing out their minds through the art of conversation, a faculty she lamented as atrophied in women amid a culture that required them to be receptacles of male wisdom, perennially on the receiving end of what we now call “mansplaining”—a term inspired by Rebecca Solnit, who is in many ways Fuller’s twenty-first-century counterpart. Fuller reconfigured the schoolrooms designed for lectures into spaces for conversation, participation in which had only one rule: the girls must be willing to speak their minds freely.
To her frustration, this proved far more challenging than she had anticipated—a challenge that distracted her from the demanding project she had undertaken alongside her teaching schedule: to translate Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe as part of her even more ambitious endeavor of composing the first English biography of her German hero. Despite sleeping no more than six hours a night, her progress was slow and painful. “I have, maugre my best efforts, been able to do very little,” she lamented to Emerson in mid-August.
Two weeks later, Emerson charged Harvard with an ideological lightning bolt—a speech so incendiary in its call for self-culture and independence from the establishment that it riled the Harvard authorities, and so empowering in its appeal to self-reliance that all five hundred copies of its print adaptation, published under the title The American Scholar, sold out in a flash. The Boston polymath Oliver Wendell Holmes termed it America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.” Emerson urged the young to use this time of uncertainty as a springboard toward transformation and to leap courageously into the intellectual future. “Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty,” he exhorted, “we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.” Life, he argued—and not the ivory tower of the academy—was the best teacher:
Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truths? He can still fall back on this elemental force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act….The scholar loses no hour which the man lives.
The following year, Emerson returned to address the graduating class at the Harvard Divinity School and delivered a speech even more inflammatory—one that would cause him to be banned from Harvard’s campus for thirty years. In it, Emerson argued that only by speaking the truth—even at the cost of defying convention—“is the universe made safe and habitable.” This was his way of urging the nation’s most promising young theologians to do away with church dogma and instead “dare to love God without mediator or veil,” locating divinity in every human being. “The doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man,” he proclaimed.
But as much as Fuller admired Emerson’s ideas, she was not “every man,” and she wanted entry into the temple, which was only part metaphor. Boston’s Athenaeum—America’s premier bastion of erudition, modeled after a Greek temple—was formally closed to women. When Elizabeth Peabody was allowed to enter it, after a special vote by the board of trustees, she took out twenty-three books in a single month. Surely, Fuller wondered what would become of women—and of society at large—if such voracious appetite for learning was given free rein. It did not escape her attention that in his visionary speeches, Emerson cast the ideal of personhood and citizenship as “Man Thinking.” What would the temple—the nation, the world—look like if humanity doubled its cultivation of thought and opened the doors to “every woman,” inviting “Woman Thinking” into the conversation?
Despite her disappointing experience with the girls in her class, Fuller was not ready to relinquish her conviction that conversation was indeed what best loosened the ligaments of thought and trained the mind to leap. “Words are events,” Ursula K. Le Guin would write a century and a half later, “they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” It was Fuller who formalized conversation as the supreme intellectual instrument of Transcendentalism and made the free-flowing exchange of words the electric current that charged the women’s emancipation movement.
In the summer of 1839, Fuller conceived of a series of conversations for women, designed “to systematize thought and give a precision and clearness in which our sex is so deficient”—a deficiency she attributed to a chronic withholding of opportunity on society’s behalf. She reasoned that because women’s opinions were dismissed by default, they never properly learned the tools of critical thinking that would allow them to transfigure “impressions into thoughts.” Instead, she believed the mind could be trained to “need no aid from rouge or candlelight to brave the light of the world.” She resolved to eradicate the small talk and gossip to which society had conditioned women’s conversation, instead leading the group to “review the departments of thought and knowledge, and to endeavor to place them in due relation to one another”—that is, to cultivate the capacity for relational insight and dot-connecting that transmutes mere information into illumination. The chief object would be to figure out “how we may make best use of our means for building up the life of thought upon the life of action.”
When Fuller shared the idea with Bronson Alcott, he thought it to be “a hopeful fact” and enthused in his journal:
She is the most commanding talker of the day, of her sex, and must sway society: such a position is worthy of her gifts. I trust those who shall hear her will reap a rich harvest of thought and become powers of like seed in the bosom of the Age.
But like most forces of cultural transformation, the series with which Fuller was about to revolutionize culture had deeply personal roots.
That summer, as she was preparing to launch the conversation salons that would seal her public image, her private world was in tumult. Several months earlier, Margaret had found herself in another romantic intoxication with one of her former students: Caroline Sturgis—the vivacious nineteen-year-old daughter of a China trade mogul. Their relationship had been “intensating,” as Margaret wrote, in the time since they ceased to be teacher and pupil—so much so that they made a plan to live together for a few months and were crushed when Caroline’s father forbade it. “Cary,” like Anna, adored and admired Margaret—but her feelings would soon prove too unmuscular to withstand the force of Margaret’s ardor, which demanded more than admiration, more than adoration, more than even love.
Margaret Fuller experienced friendship and romance much as she did male and female—in a nonbinary way. A century before Virginia Woolf subverted the millennia-old cultural rhetoric of gender with her assertion that “in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female,” making her case for the androgynous mind as the best possible mind, “resonant and porous…naturally creative, incandescent and undivided,” Fuller denounced the dualism of gender and insisted that “there is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” The boundary, she argued far ahead of Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir in her groundbreaking Woman in the Nineteenth Century, is indeed porous, so that a kind of ongoing transmutation takes place: “Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid” as male and female “are perpetually passing into one another.”
Fuller was highly discriminating about her intimate relationships, but once she admitted another into the innermost chambers of her being, she demanded of them nothing less than everything—having tasted Goethe’s notion of “the All,” why salivate over mere fragments of feeling? But this boundless and all-consuming emotional intensity eventually repelled its objects—a parade of brilliant and beautiful men and women, none of whom could fully understand it, much less reciprocate it. Hers was a diamagnetic being, endowed with nonbinary magnetism yet repelling by both poles.
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In the spring of 1839, Margaret and Cary took a trip together to a seaside resort. Some demand for “the All” was made, some significant portion of it withheld. Caroline would later recall: “Margaret asked me if I loved her, but I could not at once say yes.” Margaret, who loved wholly and unhesitatingly once she did love, was irreparably wounded by the reservation. Caroline wrote to her after the trip, trying to restore their intimacy, but Margaret replied coolly—addressing her not as “Cary” but as “Caroline”—that while she didn’t doubt they could remain friends, she didn’t feel they could continue to be intimate.
Instead, she swiftly transferred her longing for mutuality to another candidate: Samuel Ward, Julia Ward Howe’s brilliant and charismatic older brother, seven years younger than Margaret. The two had met four years earlier, in the summer of 1835—shortly after Margaret had fallen in love with Anna Barker—on a voyage up the Hudson River to see the natural wonders of upstate New York. Both had been invited on the journey by Anna’s older cousin, Eliza Farrar—another striking woman with whom the eighteen-year-old Margaret had been briefly infatuated a decade earlier, now wedded to a Harvard mathematics professor in a marriage of intellectual equals. The eighteen-year-old Sam was boarding at the Farrars’ house, having just returned from Europe, where he had studied as Longfellow’s classmate at Tübingen University—Kepler’s alma mater—and had grown fluent in German and French. He had declined the standard commercial careers laid out before him and become an artist instead—bold idealism that moved Margaret. She had just published her first poetry and was working feverishly on her translations of Goethe. The two were so taken with each other’s company that Sam offered to be her escort back to Boston, where she was eager to introduce him to Anna. She was too preoccupied with Anna then, and Sam was too young, for a romantic spark to ignite. But the trip impressed upon Margaret the strong sense that her soul and Sam’s spoke a common language.
The two resumed contact three years later, after Sam returned from a trip to Europe with the Farrars—a trip on which Margaret, too, had been invited, but the shock of her father’s death that year had petrified her into staying home. Sam was now twenty-one and Margaret twenty-eight. She had just published, under the unsexed byline S. M. Fuller, her translations of Goethe in a collection of his poetry, to which she was once again the only female contributor and which became the subject of one of teenage Julia Ward Howe’s first literary reviews.
Perhaps Margaret saw in Sam part male alter ego of who she was, part projection of who she wanted to be but constitutionally could not. Like her, he translated Goethe; like her, he was in correspondence with Emerson. But unlike her, he had the doors to the temple swung open to him with the highest educational opportunity and cultural privilege; unlike her, he was notoriously handsome.
By 1839, a fervent correspondence had ensued between them—so much so that Margaret asked Caroline, who had given her a beautiful box to hold all of Margaret’s letters, to send her another box solely for her letters from Sam. “I will keep it devoted to him while I live,” she vowed. That spring, just as the drama with Caroline was unfolding, Sam and Margaret began spending more and more time together, savoring nature and Boston’s art galleries. She came to call him her “Raffaello.” Sweet confidences were exchanged, but once again Margaret found herself on the indigent end of an asymmetrical affinity.
Without explanation, Sam began to retreat. His letters informed her of art exhibitions but didn’t invite her to see them with him. He mailed her books, but only asked her critical opinion of them. Margaret was first baffled, then hurt, and finally angry. In mid-July, with a self-assured fury, she confronted him about his pivot from romance to reserve:
You would not be so irreverent as to dare tamper with a nature like mine, you could not treat so generous a person with levity.
The kernel of affection is the same, no doubt, but it lies dormant in the husk….The bitterness of checked affections, the sickness of hope deferred, the dreariness of aspirations broken from the anchorage. I know them all, and I have borne at the same time domestic unhappiness and ruined health.
Lucid about Sam’s prospects, she acknowledges that he—handsome, brilliant, erudite—must be on the receiving end of ample attentions, but then she drives the spear of her singular demand, suggesting that choosing her over superficial suitors would be an act of moral superiority:
If you are like me, you can trample upon such petty impossibilities; if you love me as I deserve to be loved, you cannot dispense with seeing me.
In French, she tells him that she will wait for him and in the meantime will bury herself in work to give him space and time to make up his mind. But then she poses the all-or-nothing ultimatum of one whose much always calls for more:
If we ceased to be intimate, we must become nothing to one another….It must not be my love alone that binds us.
She doesn’t sign the letter but ends it with a line from the fourth stanza of Lord Byron’s piercing “Stanzas to Augusta”—a love poem to the half sister who had caused the collapse of his marriage to Ada Lovelace’s mother, composed just before Byron left England for good: “Though loved, thou forborest to grieve me.” Margaret assumes that Sam knows the poem—as any intellect of his caliber would—which begins with these lines:
Though the day of my destiny’s over,
And the star of my fate hath declined,
Thy soft heart refused to discover
