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her mother’s body, Fuller similarly awoke terrified, in that case at the thought of losing her mother, whom she believed had failed to love and protect her. Maybe Fuller dreaded confronting the emotional concerns her night dreams suggested: her deep need for her mother’s love and the perverse intensity of her feeling for her father.13 Fuller’s appreciation of psychic conflict in writers like Goethe and Byron taught her to see that such anxiety can cause an “ache” that “is like a bodily wound, whose pain haunts even when it is not attended to, and disturbs the dreams of the patient who has fallen asleep from exhaustion.” Unfortunately for Fuller, such inner conflict tended to act as a “curse,” a “palsy” over her “affections.” Instead of inspiring, as it did for Romantic male artists like Byron and Goethe, it paralyzed her capacity to create. Later, in a November 1843 fantasy-laden letter addressed to Beethoven, Fuller will ask if her psychic paralysis has something to do with the fact that she is a woman: “Is it because as a woman I am bound by a physical law which prevents the soul from manifesting itself[?]” “Sometimes,” she ponders, “the moon seems mockingly to say so.”14 10SThe Farm in Groton Had Fuller stayed in Cambridge, she might have found a way to deal with the problems caused by her inner conflict about her parents. As an intellectual female, she would have received support from her Cambridge friends, who were arguing for radical reforms, including rights for women. Maybe she could have found a way to reconcile what one critic calls the “‘real me’ (the sense of self distinct from [the] dramatization)” with “‘the alien me,’” the public persona.1 Maybe. But her father’s decision to leave Cambridge deprived her of the chance to try. Timothy’s hope that John Quincy Adams might reward him with a diplomatic assignment to Europe for his campaign work in the president’s behalf disappeared when Adams first “forgot,” as Richard tells it, “to reward” Timothy with a position in 1825, and then lost his 1828 bid for president against Andrew Jackson. That disappointment, along with Timothy’s failure to win the race for Massachusetts ’s lieutenant governor, meant he had to either reopen his Boston law practice or find another way to support his family. Facing a financial strain, Timothy moved his family from the Dana mansion to the pre-Revolutionary house near Harvard Yard built by Colonel Brattle and owned by his wealthy brother Abraham. Instead of returning to law, Timothy now decided to follow in his father’s footsteps by trying his hand at farming.2 For over a year Timothy’s family lived in the Brattle Street house. On the grounds of her uncle’s grand house with their formal gardens, ponds, bridges, and springhouses , Margaret wandered and pondered the instability of her situation. On 7 August 1832 she confided to Clarke that she feels “quite lost; it is so long since I have The Farm in Groton 71 72 the transition years talked myself—To see so many acquaintances, to talk so many words and never tell my mind completely on any subject . . . makes me feel strangely vague and moveable .” In September she depicts herself in a letter to him as a “seeking soul, lost in an unspeakable labyrinth of doubts fears and conjectures.” To Clarke’s suggestion that she needs some “all-comprehending” system “to cling to” during this unstable time of transition, Fuller in jest talks about the ever-shifting nature of the self. She cites a passage from Novalis’s Die Lehringe zu Sais, which translated means, according to Ralph Manheim: “Anxiously, the novice listened to the criss-crossing voices. Each seemed to him right, and a strange confusion overcame his spirit.”3 Fuller confesses in this letter her feelings of confusion about the future and her hope that she find an intellectually superior person to talk to. She is seeking someone she can count on more than she feels she can her father, whose failure at law and politics has condemned them to exile in Groton. Just “the sight of a being so confident of his ground as to be unwilling” to yield his individuality to trying circumstances might entice her, she says, to become his “voluntary disciple.” Needing such a companion in her studies, she concedes, is her habit and suggests “a second-rate mind.”4 She assures Clarke that she is...

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