Margaret Fuller by Megan Marshall Read Free Book Online

“attainments” too soon?But Margaret felt more comfortable conversing with college men, and even the handful of college professors who sometimes appeared, than with schoolboys.
    In the classroom, Margaret gravitated to older girls as well, although less as friends than as objects of the competitive zeal fostered by Dr. Park’s teaching methods: here was an opportunity to “conquer obstacles.” At the end of each week, the student with the highest marks in a particular subject was awarded a medal and became the “head” of that class. A girl who collected twenty-one medals would earn the coveted “eye of Intelligence,” the Lyceum’s highest honor.Fourteen-year-old Susan Channing, niece of the eminent Reverend William Ellery Channing, had earned an impressive seventeen medals during her three months in the school previous to Margaret’s arrival. But this didn’t stop eleven-year-old Margaret from vowing to take the head in English away from Susan and rack up her own twenty-one in as short a time—and she did.
    Once again, a reputation for genius, if somewhat distorted, had preceded her and grew with her accomplishments. Margaret was that “prodigy of talent and accomplishment”and that “wonderful child at Dr. Park’s school, talking pure mathematics with her father, at 12 years.”Her forthright manner and awkward appearance may have contributed to another impression circulating: the girl “had not religion.”Margaret certainly made no effort to exhibit conventional piety in conversation or demeanor; anyone who heard her talk knew that Greek and Roman heroes, not Christian saints, were her lodestars. Her precocious reading of adult novels put her beyond the experience, at least imaginatively, of her peers and even many grown women.
    Before coming to Dr. Park’s school, she had seized on another novel from her father’s bookshelves, an English translation of the German author Christoph Wieland’s Oberon. At nine she wrote to Timothy that she had “never read anything that delighted me so much as that book.” Cleverly, she had not asked his permission to read it the first time, but she begged his approval for a second reading, once “I get the card that has Best upon it” at the Port School; there was no point in denying her.A medieval fantasy of Charlemagne’s court, with the fairy king and queen hovering in the background, Oberon is the tale of two fervid lovers, the pagan Princess Rezia and her devoted knight Huon, who struggle to obey Oberon’s order that they remain chaste while they travel by ship to Rome to ask permission for a Christian wedding. Even if the nine-year-old did not precisely understand the rapturous island scene in which Huon “defies the god,” Rezia “yields,” and “their secret union” is achieved, she could have perceived the couple’s transgression when they gave in to love’s “sweet control,” along with the passionate feelings that left them, afterward, “embath’d in bliss.”And she would have felt the tragedy when Oberon sends a storm their way as punishment, ordering Huon to give up his life to save his lover and the ship. Instead, both lovers leap overboard to drown together.
    The girl who thrilled to this tale, in which pagan sensuality and Christian law collide to tragic effect, could not pretend to “have religion” in the conventional sense. She could not settle down to the business of becoming one of “the dashing misses of the city,” dancing with schoolboys and giving herself over to “fashion and frivolity” with her new classmates.As Susan Channing’s younger brother William Henry, Margaret’s age mate, later recalled, “a sad feeling prevailed” that Margaret “was paying the penalty . . . in nearsightedness, awkward manners, extravagant tendencies of thought, and a pedantic style of talk” for having been “overtasked by her father, who wished to train her like a boy.” Little wonder that Margaret was “exposed to petty