-
7. Metamorphosis in Her Young Adulthood
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
has “endeavored to comply with [his] wishes,” she has been unable to send him some notes about music he had requested because she “cannot copy music.” It is for her, however, “a subject of extreme regret” when her father expresses “the slightest wish” that she “cannot fulfil.” Still, insists Margaret, “it is not in my power to comply with your desire on this head.”11 Nor did it seem within her power to fulfill the wish of her critical father that she write him tidy letters (she confessed that her letter of 5 January had “blots” on it), or be the clever, pretty lady her father expected. It was hard for her to be pretty when her face erupted in a feverish red rash (likely adolescent acne) that “destroyed,” she said, her complexion. Aware that she could never be pretty enough to please her “papa,” that she would not be content, at any rate, with securing merely the “succes de societe,” Fuller vowed in her July 1825 letter to Prescott to attain “distinction” by means of her intellect. She aimed to be, as she put it bluntly elsewhere, “bright & ugly.”12 7SMetamorphosis in Her Young Adulthood There was nothing about Margarett Crane’s ambitious, irreverent daughter that would have fit a conventional nineteenth-century American mother’s expectations of what a lady should be. Nor did Margaret seem to indicate any desire or aptitude to be remade into a lady. On the contrary, after returning to Cambridgeport in the spring of 1825, Margaret worked hard to achieve the goal of intellectual perfection that her father had set out for her. More obstinate than ever, she strove to turn herself into an intellectual person worthy of a place at her father’s side as an equal, rather than try to meet the contrary expectations of both her parents that she be an enlightened feminine lady. To achieve intellectual perfection, Fuller on a typical summer day in her fifteenth year got up before five, walked for an hour, then practiced piano until the family breakfasted at seven. Next, as she wrote Prescott in July 1825, she read French “till eight, then two or three lectures in Brown’s philosophy.” At half-past nine she was off to “Mr. Perkins’s school,” where she studied “Greek till twelve,” after which she recited, went home, and practiced piano “again till dinner, at two.” After dinner, if the conversation suited her, she lingered over her dessert for “half an hour.” Then, when possible, she spent two hours reading Italian. At six she went out for a walk or drive, after which she yet again practiced piano, or sang. At eleven she retired to her room, writing in her diary before going to bed.1 Students at the Port School where Yale graduate George Perkins now taught and Fuller took a class in Greek recitation reported that she would strut into the classroom like a queen. Squinting through half-shut eyes, she carried her head and long neck in a “peculiar” swanlike way (“ophidian,” said her enemies), “which,” as Hedge recalls, “all who knew her” remembered “as the most characteristic trait in Metamorphosis in Her Young Adulthood 55 56 the transition years her personal appearance.” But many schoolmates, especially younger girls, now treated her with respect. Still given to dramatically acting, the teenage Fuller now flaunted her intellectual prowess, and she walked with a saucy sprightliness that enchanted some but repelled others and made them shun her. In one of the village shops was a library she routinely visited. Taking off her cloak, Fuller would fill its hood with books, then swing it over her shoulder and carry it home. One young female admirer said, “We all wished that our mothers would let us have hooded cloaks, that we might carry our books in the same way.”2 While young girls admired her, many of the boys, even the smartest, were intimidated by her intelligence. One former Port School classmate, the writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, later described in a recollection cited by Higginson in his Fuller biography “the awe with which he regarded the opening sentence of one of her school compositions: ‘It is a trite remark.’” Holmes later confessed that he had no idea at the time what “trite” meant.3 A friend of Higginson recalled Fuller’s appearance in her home at a party for children. Fuller, who was then fifteen, had in hand a fashionably large handkerchief . Rolling her handkerchief into a baton, she...