Margaret Fuller Read Online Free Page B

second surviving daughter, Ellen Kilshaw Fuller.
    With Julia Adelaide lost to her, the neighbor girls tiresome, and her mother preoccupied, Ellen Kilshaw was “my first real interest in my kind.”My kind? Ellen painted in oils, and she allowed eight-year-old Margaret to watch the pictures “growing beneath her hand.”She played the harp, and Margaret listened as if the sweet arpeggios were “heralds of the promised land I saw before me.”Ellen was a spellbinder—this was Margaret’s kind.
    Ellen Kilshaw beckoned Margaret toward that hazily imagined adulthood promising more than mediocrity, obscurity. Margaret’s days of reading and study now seemed drab to her; she lived for invitations to join Ellen and the other adults on country walks, when she could draw the older woman to her side and stroll hand in hand. Or for Ellen’s visits to the Cherry Street parlor, where Margaret studied Ellen “from a distance” and memorized “all her looks and motions.” She recognized that Ellen had “in its perfection the woman’s delicate sense for sympathies and attractions.” In company, she offered to all a “sweet courtesy” that “hung about her like a mantle,” even as “her thoughts were free”: she could “live two lives at the same moment.”
    Although her recollections of Ellen were written decades after the brief girlhood friendship, the child Margaret had sensed in Ellen the complexities of a lone woman’s life. A man would not need or wish to “live two lives” at the same moment—nor hope to cultivate that “delicate sense” of social alliances forming and re-forming. A man would not have to maintain a “reserve” like Ellen’s, which seemed, significantly to Margaret, the result of “self-possession” rather than “timidity.”Ellen’s virtues were feminine, as were her “accomplishments” in music and art: shown off to admiring friends in parlor and salon, not to strangers in a concert hall or gallery.
    Margaret’s parents observed their daughter’s fascination with Ellen Kilshaw and encouraged her attachment to a woman they also saw as embodying a feminine ideal—the perfection “in all things” that Timothy envisioned for his daughter, who, to his distress, was developing a slouch as her growth spurt worsened a congenital spinal curve, and whose intensive studies had given her a nearsighted squint. “ All accomplishments, & the whole circle of the virtues & graces should be your constant aim, my dear child,” he pressed her, and recommended she follow a program of marching through the house banging a drum harnessed to her shoulders, in hopes of improving her posture.
    Although Timothy was educating his oldest daughter to be “the heir of all he knew,” as Margaret would later recall, he was a man of conventional, if not retrograde, views of women.The two impulses warred within him: to cultivate his prodigy-daughter’s mind through the curriculum that had won him entry to Harvard, and to foster conventional, even ultra-feminine behavior, the sort that had drawn him to marry Margarett Crane.
    The same ambivalence caused him, one day in Washington, to pick up Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman —a book that, thirty years ago in England when it was published to great acclaim, had opened the question of equality of the sexes. It was a volume, Timothy wrote to his wife, that now “no woman dares to read, but she should be charged with libertinism,” because the author had been “discountenanced” as a result of her affair with a man “she loved so ardently & would not marry, but had a child by him.”Indeed Wollstonecraft, who’d taken her first lover while living in Paris, drawn there by the spirit of revolution, had conceived two children out of wedlock before dying in childbirth with the second. After reading Vindication, however, Timothy declared he was “so well pleased” he might send home a copy—only to waver yet again as he considered the