Free Margaret Fuller by Megan Marshall Page B

the spine, now began to seem swanlike, not slumping. By the end of this education, Margaret looked back on her younger self as “the most intolerable girl that ever took a seat in a drawing room.”Crucially, however, she was not being schooled in deference; Eliza Farrar’s ideal woman was no demure drawing room fixture, as Margarett Crane so easily became in social settings. Margaret was learning to play the lady bountiful, to become a “gentlewoman,” as Eliza recommended in The Young Lady’s Friend, who could actively demonstrate her ability to “behave courteously and delicately to all.”From Eliza Farrar she was discovering, above all, that a strong-willed woman could give lessons to other women on what to think and how to behave.
    Although its publication was some years in the future, Eliza Farrar’s Young Lady’s Friend, which adroitly linked Yankee frugality and high-mindedness with Old World cultivation and noblesse oblige, speaks with the force of moral authority that Eliza must have exerted over Margaret. Eliza’s code of etiquette was based on a notion of class privilege within a democracy, and she gave her female readers instruction on upward mobility through displays of refinement—the means through which she had won her marriage to a distinguished Harvard professor. Her message must have registered with Margaret, who as a child had fancied herself a queen even as she thrilled to tales of the Roman Republic. “In no country is it more important to cultivate good manners, than in our own,” Eliza Farrar wrote, “where we acknowledge no distinctions but what are founded on character and manners.” America’s aristocracy of merit, still taking shape in the first decades of the nineteenth century, was open to all but the “person who is bold, coarse, vociferous, and inattentive to the rights and feelings of others,” for she “is a vulgar woman, let her possessions be ever so great, and her way of living ever so genteel. Thus we may see a lady sewing for her livelihood, and a vulgar woman presiding over a most expensive establishment.”
    Eliza Farrar admonished her readers to master and perform daily household chores—making their beds, tidying their rooms, even if they had servants on hand to discharge these tasks—as a means of showing respect to their social inferiors and earning their good favor. In fashion, Farrar declared, the way a woman carried her shawl—whether “dragged round the shoulders” or “worn in graceful folds”—mattered more than the quality of the fabric, because “true taste will generally be found on the side of economy.” A “love of finery” was to be discouraged; mothers were advised to give their daughters plainly dressed dolls so as to ward off an infatuation with “tawdry ornament.”To American women struggling to make ends meet in the financially turbulent decade of the 1830s, when many fortunes made in the early years of the republic were lost in what came to be known as the Panic of 1837, this was welcome news.
    She filled a chapter with recommendations on proper behavior at lectures, one of the few popular entertainments of the day that women could attend unescorted. Lectures provided opportunities for women to gather material for conversation and to practice their manners in mixed society. Those “who attend lectures together,” Eliza wrote, “meet on terms of perfect equality.”The lecture hall was a place where a ladylike seamstress might well attract a gentleman’s notice, so it was best to remember that a “gentlewoman” would not arrive late, or wear a large hat that might obstruct the view of those behind her, or “run, jump, scream, scramble, and push, in order to get a good seat.”Neither would a gentlewoman stand at the podium to address the crowd; so well understood was this prohibition that there had been no need to state it.
    Eliza Farrar’s program culminated in her chapter on conversation, “one of the highest attainments