Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim

37. Fallen Women and Worldly Men

Hence, writing for a newspaper did not relieve her unresolved narcissistic tensions ; it did not satisfy her deepest need for love. She observed that her life and writing seemed characterized now by superficiality without and a sense of loneliness within. Channing, who saw her often in New York, said that Fuller treated people she met at literary gatherings as if they were too “frivolous” and “conventional” to warrant her time. Yet her seeming conceit was the old queenly demeanor she defensively used against those who did not really like her and to whom her private thoughts would have seemed strange.36 In New York she felt shackled to the wall of public opinion. Aware she must write to a middle-class audience, Fuller knew she could be liberal when commenting on issues such as prison reform and halfway houses but had to be cautious when dealing with human psychosexual complexity—on the sex and gender issues that intrigued her. In his comments on her life in the Memoirs, Greeley notes that it was during this period of prolific productivity that Fuller confessed in the private pages of her journal, “Father, let me not injure my fellows during this period of repression. I feel that when we meet my tones are not so sweet as I would have them.”37 Margaret Fuller now lived a divided life. In public she projected a persona full of confidence, control, supercilious charm. She enchanted, for instance, Mary Greeley’s friends, who, when they came to Turtle Bay, viewed her with a “strangely Oriental adoration.” In private, however, and alone at night, she lamented her lack of a complete love that would make everything right in her heart, mind, and soul. Rather than merging to form a synthesis in Fuller, these conflicting self-images persisted alienated from one another but side by side within her. In neither New England nor New York was Fuller able to reconcile the inner division she had acknowledged in the journal she had kept while vacationing with Cary at Fishkill Landing in the autumn of 1844: “The Woman in me kneels and weeps in tender rapture; the Man in me rushes forth, but only to be baffled.” “Yet the time will come,” she had said, looking forward to an imagined period of psychic harmony, “when, from the union of this tragic king and queen, shall be born a radiant sovereign self.”38 37SFallen Women and Worldly Men Once settled in New York, Fuller had meant to leave behind her personal conflicts. But walled off and denied, deep-seated archaic needs and early acquired patterns of behavior did not just vanish. From beneath the cool facade of a public-minded newspaper columnist, the “many voices” of Fuller’s “soul”—intense, passionate, anguishedvoices—twistedthroughherirondefensesandfoundanoutletinfantasyfilled letters to James Nathan.1 Fallen Women and Worldly Men 239 240 professional woman, private passion In contrast to these revealing personal letters, Fuller’s public columns represent her attempt to channel her conflicted energies into a moral vision acceptable to both herself as a social liberal and her morally conservative readers. Her strategy worked, and after a year she had gained respect in New York as a public voice of moral authority. Rumor had it that she and Anne Lynch went to Poe’s home to demand he return letters sent to him by the poet Frances Sargent Osgood, letters the women thought compromising to Osgood.2 While gaining respect as a moral authority on matters relating to sexual behavior , Fuller, though self-consciously professional in tone, was nonetheless unwittingly revealing in her writings her sexual yearnings. This dual message, expressive of the divided life she was living, is evident in both Fuller’s public and private presentations and writings during the twenty months she lived in the city—from December 1844, when she arrived there, to August 1846, when she left for Europe. It is evident in her literary reviews as well as in her public pronouncements about prison reform for women; it is especially evident, as we shall see, in her letters to Nathan. In her literary reviews the two sides of Fuller’s personality compete for ascendancy . In her 1 February 1845 commentary on French novelists, Margaret, sounding eerily like Timothy, self-righteously condemns behavior in others toward which her own “shadow side” is drawn. Margaret deplores French novels that corrupt the young by showing them “pictures of decrepit vice and prurient crime, such as would never, otherwise, be dreamed of here”—in America...