Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim

4. The World of Books

Aunt Elizabeth, one of Timothy’s two unmarried older sisters who visited when Timo was away, as did Aunt Abigail (“Abba”) Crane, who was loving. Margaret disliked Elizabeth because she reported the children’s bad behavior to Timothy. In this 16 December letter to a father who seems hauntingly present even in absence, Margaret confesses: “If you have spies [her aunts and mother] they will certainly inform you that we are not very dissipated.”10 This possession by the father’s spirit—this sense his “watching eyes” are everywhere —made Margaret exceedingly self-conscious even as it contributed to her exaggerated sense of herself. It was as if Timothy were not only watching her activities but living in her as a part of her self. The resulting egotism is evident in her boastful November 1819 letter to Ellen: “I as you well know am a queen.” Elsewhere she calls herself “prince-like.” Her father fostered her inflated sense of self. Seeing her one day in the garden, Timothy, she recalls, said, “Incedit Regina.”11 But this feeling of regality was not a constant in Fuller’s life. Her letters and recollections reveal a pervasive sense of insecurity and concomitant psychic depression that inevitably dissipated her ego-inflating dreams. In the letter to Ellen where she says she is a queen, Margaret is uncertain about her writing ability, confessing that she cannot write “as easy as some persons who seem to have so much to say.” This underlying sense of insecurity had deepened when Ellen sailed to Liverpool in November 1817. According to Fuller, Ellen’s failure to stay and play the role of perfect parent that Margaret had scripted for her caused the child to fall “into a profound depression,” the kind of soul-devastating sense of disappointment with the ideal object that psychologists say accompanies the collapse of such an egoinflating , merged, idealized state.12 Even if she exaggerates, Fuller had reason to be depressed. Not only had Ellen failedtorescueherfromheremotionalwasteland,butalso,inDecember,onemonth after Ellen had sailed to England, Timothy had departed for Washington. Fuller recalls how she withdrew into fantasy and became cold and uncommunicative. She avoided the dinner table, took long walks, and lay hours on the floor of her room, behavior Fuller will later see as being “out of the . . . natural course.” Such “joy,” she says, as there might have been in her father’s Cambridgeport house, “seemed to have departed with [Ellen], and the emptiness of our house stood revealed.”13 4SThe World of Books With Ellen gone, Margaret became more dependent than ever for affection on her father, who had made it a condition for his love that she excel intellectually. Intent on fulfilling his high expectations, she was soon doing just as he asked: reciting not just Latin but Greek twice a week for her uncle Elisha, the youngest and most genial of the Fuller brothers, who was then a student at Harvard Divinity School. At her father’s insistence she was learning to play the piano and also taking singing The World of Books 33 34 “no natural childhood” lessons (which she hated), as well as attending classes at the “Cambridge Port Private Grammar School.” The Port School, as it was commonly called, was the school of choice for parents who did not want to send their sons into the city to attend Boston Latin, the traditional school for preparing boys for Harvard. Unlike Boston Latin, the Port School admitted girls. It had a rigorous curriculum, and when Fuller attended it she became more proficient at translating and reciting passages from Virgil and Cicero, as well as at translating English texts into Latin. She also learned to write English compositions, one of which she enclosed in a letter to Timothy, noting that she had “made almost as many corrections [on it] as your critical self would were you at home.”1 For Margaret knew that Timothy’s “corrections” were inevitable. On the cold, windy Christmas Day of 1819 she hence defensively confessed in a letter to him that her translation of Goldsmith’s Deserted Village into Latin “goes on slowly.” As if to deflect his attention from the fact that she has “only translated a page and a half,” she tells him about a book she is reading, Mrs. Ross’s recently published Hesitation; or, To Marry, or Not to Marry? This “moral-novel,” as Margaret refers to it, tells in 532 pages how the principal characters, both of whom are well...