Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim

3. “Gate of Paradise”

30 “no natural childhood” to parents and in all essentials he required this of [Margaret].” Hence in his letters from Washington he demands that Margaret excel in all she endeavors to do— whether it be to commit to memory passages from Gombach’s Greek Testament or to learn to play like a “lady” the piano he bought expressly for her to learn to play. While on the one hand it seemed to Margaret that Timothy wanted her to be feminine like the ladies he was meeting in Washington, on the other it seemed he wanted her to excel as a masculine intellectual like himself, an accomplishment that would make her his equal. This latter prospect appealed to Margaret’s fancy. For it was becoming increasingly clear to her that the way to become her father’s companion and to win the hearts of pretty women like her mother was to be a man like her father: witty, charming, and full of the kind of power he had as a U.S. congressman . In an undated fragment about her sister’s death, Fuller envisions herself as a boy who seeks to comfort his mother after her daughter’s death. The mother pines her life away after the infant dies. Her death leaves her surviving child, her boy, with a “feeling of infinite loss.” Had the mother lived, says Fuller of her male self, “there was enough in me corresponding with her unconscious wants to have roused her intellect and occupied her affections.”19 3S“Gate of Paradise” In light of the child’s hunger for love, it is easy then to see how Margaret, age seven, attached herself passionately to Ellen Kilshaw, the lovely daughter of a wealthy Liverpool merchant who met the Fullers in the summer of 1817 during her visit with her sister and brother-in-law in Boston. Timothy thought Ellen, who was about the same age as his wife, pretty, and initiated a friendship with her. In her autobiographical romance, which she wrote during her 1839–41 spiritual and gender identity crisis, Fuller wrote of her love for Ellen that this was “my first real interest in my kind.” The minute in church Margaret first saw Ellen—“her dress, her hazel eyes, and clustering locks”—“my thoughts,” she recalls, “were fixed on her.”1 Timothy invited Ellen to their Cambridgeport home. In a letter she wrote the Fullers after her return to Liverpool in November 1817, Ellen recalled how the seven-year-old child had stood at the window and “flushed” excitedly as she approached, how she had opened the door for her, then “ran, and concealed herself ” behind a chair. Flattered, Ellen invited Margaret to her place. Twenty-three years later, Fuller would depict Ellen, who painted in oils and played the harp, as the embodiment of female perfection. When they walked hand in hand in the fields behind Ellen’s house, Margaret was in heaven: Ellen’s “presence” was to her “a gate of Paradise” in the same way that the gate at the back of her mother’s garden had both opened out into the fields, and sealed her safe within a womblike fairyland , a place apart from the real world of human cruelty, coercion, pain.2 In Ellen the child found an ideal female with whom she could enact a motherdaughter relationship in which the mother would be more loving. Ellen would love the lonely child and not let her father interrupt the love they shared in their private garden. To some extent, Kilshaw filled the part. She “was not cold” but turned on the girl looks “of full-eyed sweetness” as she guided her through paradisiacal fields where every bird and tree “greeted” the duo and said, recalled Fuller, “what I felt, ‘She is the first angel of your life.’”3 Ellen was Margaret’s angel in much the same way Margarett Crane had been an “Angel” to Timothy. In loving Ellen, Margaret thus played the role, not only of a child searching for a mother to love her, but also of a man able to satisfy his wife’s—as Fuller put it in the fragment about her sister’s death wherein she envisions herself a boy capable of satisfying her mother’s emotional needs—“unconscious wants.” In an unsent letter she wrote Ellen in November 1819, two years after the latter’s return to England, Margaret tells Ellen how she likes writing her, since, “while I am writing to you...