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100 emerson, friend and guide effect his sanity—depended on his ability to resist Fuller’s seductive wiles, just as she, too, came in time to see that, to gain her center as a writer and hence “self” control, she had to resist his power over her.18 Though we have no record of their conversations, we do have Fuller’s voluminous notes and letters, which in James Clarke’s opinion “contain more of her mind” than “her published writings.” These private writings show how, during 1836–42, Fuller moved from a position of worshipful reverence for Emerson as an idealized father figure, through a sense of trust in him as a limited man who could not satisfy her deepest needs and desire, to a place where she was able to make some of his most vital ideas her own. She did this even as the exchange helped her also to see that he and she had significantly different points of view and powers. These personal writings reveal that Emerson was so effective in teaching Fuller to believe in her own unique power that, even though he initially enjoyed being swept up in the wave of her conversation, he came increasingly to fear that his “solitary river” was in danger of being depleted by her siphoning sea. When the wave became tidal, he abruptly withdrew, as we shall see, into an embarrassed silence.19 13SA “Forlorn” Boston Winter After her death Emerson observed of Fuller that, as “a woman, an orphan, without beauty, without money,” she had to overcome a lot of “negatives” in order to succeed as a teacher and writer. Fuller’s poverty was significant. Forced, in her words, to “get money,” in the fall of 1836 she moved to Boston to teach at the innovative Temple School of Human Culture run by the affable but impractical Bronson Alcott.1 Located in the Masonic Temple on Tremont Street, the school when it opened in 1834 had been heralded by Boston liberals as a welcome alternative to traditional schools where children learned by a recite-by-rote method. Countering Locke’s notion that we are born blank slates, Alcott believed that babies are born, as Wordsworth said, “trailing clouds of glory . . . from God” and that a teacher’s job was to stoke into flame each innocent child’s still-smoldering spark of divinity. He also thought that children should be taught to speak spontaneously. His Socratic pedagogical method was to lead on and bring out the minds of pupils rather than impose his views on them. Classes were taught by a conversational style in a pleasant environment in which no topic was seen as too profane to discuss, including ones concerning circumcision, conception, and birth.2 Fuller liked this approach to teaching. But Elizabeth Peabody, Alcott’s assistant since 1834, had been so distressed by gossip about the blasphemous nature of what students at Alcott’s school were learning that she had quit her job in July. On 2 August 1836, at the Emersons’ home, Alcott met Fuller. And before he had left Emerson’s house that day, Alcott, who instantly liked Fuller, offered her the vacated position as teacher of languages and recorder of his conversations with children. Fuller saw the offer as an opportunity to get to Boston, close to friends with whom she could communicate on an intellectual level, as she could not with the country people of Groton. It would also enable her to see more often her new friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Since her visit to Concord, Fuller’s drive to win Emerson’s friendship had included a couple of comical missed encounters between two people destined, it would seem, to travel in different directions. A 21 September letter to Emerson suggests that she had received an invitation from Mrs. Emerson to visit in Concord too late to make the proposed trip. From Boston, where she was visiting Anna Barker, Fuller expressed her exasperation that her minister, Mr. Robinson, had invited Emerson to exchange pulpits with him on the next Sunday when she would again be away. He had extended this invitation despite her having egotistically begged him not to invite Emerson to preach in Groton without first ascertaining if she would be there. “I detest Mr Robinson at this moment,” she wrote Emerson. Not only had she missed a visit with him in Concord and must also now miss him in Groton, still more disappointing was her discovery that she and Emerson had...

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