Margaret Fuller by Megan Marshall Read Free Book Online Page A

persecutions” and became “a butt for the ridicule” of the more “frivolous” girls at Dr. Park’s Lyceum.She was a girl who found inspiration in male heroism, male transgression, hubris. She responded to the taunting “with indiscriminate sarcasms,” the weapon she had taken from her father’s arsenal along with his erudition, and “made herself formidable by her wit, and, of course, unpopular.”Perhaps even Dr. Park, for whom she had quickly become a prized pupil, would not have understood her, had she revealed to him her hidden “true life.” German literature, which he considered polluted with “rhapsodical intimations,” was not taught in his school.
    Although Margaret never spoke of the unpleasantness at Dr. Park’s Lyceum to her parents, Timothy withdrew her after eighteen months, sending her back to the Port School where she could supervise her two younger brothers in Latin. She was thirteen years old, and he kept her under his rule again while he searched for a boarding school to provide the “finish” for his oldest daughter’s education. No American college had yet opened its doors to women, and few parents, not even Timothy, thought it an opportunity lost. Although he was ambitious for his daughter, his plans for her future could have been no more definite than her own, and certainly featured a brilliant marriage as its centerpiece. As she entered her teens, Margaret became, to her parents, “this hopeful of ours.”Timothy began to fret more over his oldest child’s “manners and disposition” than her facility with Latin declensions and to insist she attend to “her musick & her sewing as well as to her Greek.”
    Dr. Park was sorry to let his prize pupil go. He drew Margaret aside to deliver a parting “address,” saying “that he never flattered, ”yet stating outright, Margarett Crane reported to Timothy, that “he had never had a pupil with half her attainments at her age.”Her classmates were less sorry. Hoping, at the last, to gain in their affection, Margaret planned a farewell dancing party at Cherry Street. Timothy was in Washington, but her Fuller uncles Elisha and Henry hired the musicians, and her mother paid out another fifty dollars for refreshments—after gaining Timothy’s permission and extracting the sum from tight-fisted Uncle Abraham. Margaret told her father it would be a party for forty friends, but she sent out ninety invitations to girls in Boston and her old Port School friends. Two days before the dance, only nine had responded.
    Margaret was chagrined, not hurt. Or she pretended not to be. When, deterred by the snowy evening or their young hostess’s “formidable” wit, scarcely more than the nine appeared for the dance, Margaret made matters worse by fawning over the few Boston girls and ignoring her old Cambridge friends. She never gave her father the full account of the proceedings he pressed for. The dance had been “exceedingly agreeable,” she lied.The event was “ well over, ” her mother summarized.If, as a result of the fiasco, Margaret was forced to realize she had become “notoriously unpopular with the ladies of her circle,” as Henry Hedge, the equally precocious son of the Harvard professor Levi Hedge, put it, she maintained a proud silence.Margaret had her “true” life to rely on, as she always had. In a letter she had written at age nine but never sent to Ellen Kilshaw, Margaret had spun out a fantasy of her family’s “nobility of blood,” with her brother William Henry as king, Eugene the “prince of Savoy,” and Margaret herself both “queen [and] the duchess of Marlborough.”It was a notion that would sustain her in later years as well, that “my natural position . . . is regal.—Without throne, sceptre, or guards, still a queen!”She would not let “circumstance”—her residence in dreary Cambridgeport, her difficulties with girls her own age, her alternately bullying and neglectful parents—erode her