Margaret Fuller by Megan Marshall

Author:Megan Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

No angel can ascend to heaven

till the whole heart has fallen

to the earth in ashes—

And she implored him to “come tomorrow morng without fail.” Loudly called by passion, she would not “yield”—but she would not yield up James Nathan either.

The year before, as Margaret had struggled to “wean” herself from “close habits of personal relations,” she had reread an old letter from Sam Ward and copied a portion of it into her journal—a passage that had struck her so powerfully on first reading, the sentences had imprinted themselves on her memory almost word for word. The subject was “Platonic affection,” which Margaret had advocated in those earlier days of covenants and constellations—and that Sam Ward admitted he also had once “recognized” as a “possibility” before he’d fallen in love with and married Anna Barker. But, Sam informed Margaret, for “those whose personal experience of passion has been thorough,” who “have passed that line” to discover “the existence of a new, vast, and tumultuous class of human emotions,” the physical passions—for these “more experienced” people, “the higher emotions and the passions are apt to be always afterward inextricably commingled.” Platonic affection “is possible,” Sam explained, only “to those who have never passed the line,” whose “personal experience of passion . . . remain[s] comparatively undeveloped.”

“Your views of life and affection are perfectly true to you,” Sam had conceded; they may give “brightness to the fancy and earnestness to the thoughts.” Yet “Platonic affection” can only seem “sublimated and idealized to the more experienced.” It was a painful message for Margaret, an unmarried woman with no romantic prospects but with a deep need for connection with men. Yet there it was: there could be no turning back to the Platonic after a “thorough” experience of passion. Worse, her quest for Platonic affection, for connections or covenants that dwelled only in “the higher emotions,” marked her as “undeveloped”—a notion that Margaret, with her credo of self-expansion, could scarcely tolerate. Sam’s words made so profound an impression, she had paraphrased them in “The Great Lawsuit,” writing in her defense of “the class contemptuously designated old maids” that “those, who have a complete experience of the human instincts” often maintain a “distrust” as to whether those who do not “can be thoroughly human.” A year ago Margaret had read Sam’s letter once more, copied out the passage, and then sealed it up—to “read not again ever perhaps.” Its contents were too disturbing, Sam’s careful honesty too humiliating, even as Margaret sensed there was truth in his letter too vital to be forgotten.

And now James Nathan had appeared to force the question. Margaret longed for “childish rest and play, instead of all the depths,” she wrote to him; “can it not be again?” Was the problem that Margaret “was not enough a child at the right time,” had been “called on for wisdom and dignity long before my leading strings were off” —“and now am too childish”?

The “new, vast, and tumultuous” carnal emotions, those of an

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