Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim

5. Boston Schooling

46 the transition years not so she could attend Harvard (where in the pattern of his father he intended to send his sons), but so she could help him homeschool her younger siblings, in particular her brothers. This demand broadened the breach between father and daughter that opened after Timothy moved his family yet again, this time from the heart of Cambridge’s scintillating society to a farm in Groton in 1833. The bitterness that hung in the air between Margaret and her father—especially after the latter insisted that for added income she tutor not only her little brothers and sister but also three neighborhood children—was to leave Margaret, upon her father’s abrupt death in October 1835, burdened with intense unresolved feelings of guilt and rage in relation to this difficult man whose contradictory demands had turned her into an intellectually gifted but emotionally conflicted woman, as we shall see in this part of the text titled “The Transition Years.”2 5SBoston Schooling On the subject of the effect on her of the early education forced on her by her father, Fuller notes in her autobiographical romance how her too-intense focus on books as a child had “given a cold aloofness” to her outward expression while the intensity of her inward life, as was evident in the “profound depression” she experienced when Ellen Kilshaw sailed home to England, “was out of the gradual and natural course.” Like the violent games Fuller played with neighborhood children, the letters she wrote her father when she was ten reveal her unusually intense feelings , in this case for her father, whose speeches before Congress made him seem to his daughter like a god and who was at last beginning to notice her antisocial nature. In late November 1820 she wrote him how, though he has not asked her to write him, she thinks he “would like to have me do it.” She hopes, however, he “will not criticise” her “writing very severely.” Mimicking Timothy’s stiffly arrogant tone, she asks him to send her his speeches to read since speeches by anyone else (excepting the famous orator John Randolph) she reads only “to laugh at.” Defensively she adds, “notwithstanding the very mean opinion you have of my understanding, I should value one of my dear fathers [sic] speeches more than a thousand lighter works,” more than the novels he tells her she is “foolish” for reading and is even “angry” at her “for being so.” “I know well,” she tells her father, “you think me, light, frivolous, and foolish,” “but—I am yet capable of affection to one to whom I stand so highly indebted as to you.”1 In this same defensively presumptuous tone, Margaret in January 1821 wrote her father that she expects him to bring her home from Washington “a complete case of jewels,” or at least “a gold ring plain or twisted.” Perhaps she had in mind a gold ring like that Huon had given Rezia as a pledge of their connubial love. She is “sorry” he writes her “so seldom” and fears his “affection” for her has “decreased.” She acknowledges she has often “pained” him, though she says it remains her hope that “you still love me,” then adds that she “should be most happy” to study with Dr. Park in Boston: “I will endeavor to gratify all your wishes.” Two weeks later she writes to assure him that she is keeping up with her studies and will soon be taught at home by a divinity school student whom the family has asked to come twice weekly to hear her recite “in Caesars Commentaries and the Greek Grammar.” In late January, she observes that although she has received only one letter from him that winter, she is nonetheless counting the days until he returns. She needs his affection more than ever in the absence of Miss Kilshaw, whose letters she fears have been lost at sea on a boat that “must be either wrecked or blown southward.”2 Concerned that his daughter was not growing into a well-mannered lady who preferred high-minded literature and writes tidy letters, Timothy had reluctantly come to the conclusion that going to a school with girls her age would improve her “manner and disposition.” So he had enrolled Margaret in Dr. Park’s Lyceum for Young Ladies in Boston, which she attended from April 1821 until December 1822. At first she had lived at home and walked three...