Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim

2. Hungry for Love

dency to idealize their family’s functioning and avoid any talk that acknowledged pathology. Erysichthon, like Timothy, held a tyrannical power over his daughter. After going through his fortune in trying to satiate his hunger, Erysichthon sold his daughter as a slave. Mestra, whom Ovid thought “worthy of a better father,” at first resisted her father’s attempt to sell her into slavery. She ran to the sea and begged her lover, Neptune, to save her, crying out, “Oh, you, . . . Who have deprived me of virginity, / Deliver me from such a master’s power!” Neptune transformed her into a “fisher-man,” a gender-switch disguise that let Mestra escape her abusive father, for in the form of a man Mestra knew her father would not recognize her and thus could not hurt her.44 To a thirty-year-old woman trying to reconstruct what it felt like to have been controlled by a tyrannical father, stories like Mestra’s and others by Ovid provided themes and images as well as a frame into which Fuller could fit together dimly remembered scenes from her difficult past so as to make of them a coherent story. Placed within this frame, disturbing memories were lifted by the child out of their ordinary context and instilled with mythical meaning. Thus literature gave Fuller as a child a way to deal with a distressing reality, just as it also enabled her as an adult to interpret the past. It gave her images and ideas to express her pain.45 Images in a recurring dream of following “to the grave the body of her mother” derived from Fuller’s memory of her sister’s funeral. This dream captures two of Fuller’s emotional concerns: her sister’s death and her fear as a child that she might likewise lose her mother, who already in a way seemed dead to her. Such bad dreams upset the child, as did a need to be relieved of a sleep-disrupting tension that was caused in part by the unspoken strain in her parents’ relationship but also by Timothy’s routine at night of entering the room where his children slept “and pressing a kiss upon their unconscious lips.” Stimulated by this intense expression of fatherly affection, Margaret walked in her sleep. Fuller tells how once when she sleepwalked and her parents “heard her, and came and waked her,” and she told them about her dreams, her father offered her no comfort. Instead he “sharply bid her ‘leave off thinking of such nonsense, or she would be crazy,’—never knowing,” says Fuller, “that he was himself the cause of all these horrors of the night.”46 2SHungry for Love In her autobiographical romance, Fuller depicts her father as a man whose tyrannical control she, like Mestra, tried unsuccessfully to evade. Her mother she paints as a passive person with a delicate, flowerlike nature, a shadowy figure who played only a small part in helping to shape her firstborn’s life. Time and fantasy have, to some extent, colored Fuller’s memory. For during her first two years Fuller was, indeed, as scholars say, “surrounded with love and affection,” and her mother probably was not as “self-effacing” as Fuller and also Higginson later recalled Hungry for Love 23 24 “no natural childhood” her as being. If Margarett Crane subordinated herself to her husband, it was not because she lacked spunk, but rather because, like her husband, she was raised in a world that accepted as Truth the Law as outlined in Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), which presumes that a wife must obey her husband. While teaching at Leicester Academy, Timothy had read Blackstone, who says that “husband and wife are one person in law”: that the wife is to her husband like a piece of property subject to a power “that ceaseth onely in Death.” Unquestioningly accepting this view, Margarett Crane wrote Timothy in March 1818, that this is “as it should be.”1 Though Blackstone here misrepresented the actual letter of the law of equity, Timothy—who, as his father had before him, argued the need for education for women but was himself in fact frighteningly dictatorial with women—behaved in a way he felt was in accord with “the law.” The letters he and his wife exchanged when he was in Washington reveal that a willful Margarett Crane dutifully submitted to her husband’s command, whether it be to write him a daily...