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15S“Drawn” by Fuller’s Siren Song By the end of the fall teaching term in late November 1838, Fuller was prostrated by pain. Earlier, in August 1838, she had noted in her journal that she was “in a state of sickly unresisting sensitiveness such as I do not remember in myself ever before.” By late autumn of that year, she was so stressed that she had trouble meeting her classes and resorted to asking Ellen, who was still sharing rooms with her on the second floor of Mrs. Aborn’s house, to cover her elementary-level sections in history and natural science for her.1 In December Fuller gave up teaching in Providence and moved home to live with her mother in snowbound Groton. Back in Groton, Fuller retired to her room. Dressed in loose-fitting gowns, she spent most of her time reading in bed; when not in bed reading, she sat at a table and wrote. By the end of January 1839 she had written more than fifty letters. Sick from fatigue from writing letters, after catching up with her correspondence she nonetheless turned to working on her four-hundred-page translation, Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life.2 Isolated from society, Fuller retreated again into reverie, and her feelings for her absent friends, both male and female, became increasingly eroticized. Emerson, flattered by her adulation, fed her fantasy by writing her warmly encouraging letters and by lending her books and essays, including Jones Very’s essay on Hamlet. Like Fuller, Very was an Emerson protégé. As a poet and Greek tutor at Harvard, Very in the autumn of 1838 had experienced a religious hallucination, believing himself to be a resurrected spirit sent by God to deliver a message. As a result, in September he had been committed to McLean’s Insane Asylum in Charlestown, the same place that Emerson had taken his brother Edward ten years earlier.3 In November 1838 Emerson reported to Fuller that Very, just released from the asylum, had visited Concord and confounded “us all with the question—whether he was insane?” “At first sight & speech,” said Emerson, “you would certainly pronounce him so.” “Talk with him a few hours,” he added, “and you will think all insane but he.” By the following March, however, Emerson had changed his mind. He wrote Fuller that Very is “becoming hopelessly mad.”4 Aware of his own ever-unsteady mental state, Emerson was finding increasingly unsettling his interaction with not only Very, who was verifiably mad, but also Fuller, whose taste for gems, ciphers, talismans, and omens, he later wrote, as well as her tendency to catch at straws of coincidence and to fuse man with maid, sea with sky, and heaven with earth he interpreted as either “the luxury of nearsightedness ” or an indication of her own incipient insanity. Whichever it was, both friends were on Emerson’s mind as he wrote his lecture on “Demonology,” which he read in the large lecture hall of the Masonic Temple in Boston on 20 February 1839.5 In this, the last of a series of lectures in the Human Life course he was giving “Drawn” by Fuller’s Siren Song 117 118 emerson, friend and guide in downtown Boston, a “course” of lectures he arranged through local contacts and was being paid for handsomely, Emerson seems almost to be talking to Fuller. For in it he cautioned his audience about placing faith in ephemeral phenomena that—though he did not say Fuller’s name he clearly had her in mind here— were being widely talked about: “Dreams, Omens, Coincidences, Luck, Sortilege, Magic,” and other so-called “facts” like those, he noted, of “Animal Magnetism.” Believers in dreams, omens, and amulets, said Emerson, who knew that Margaret always put on a carbuncle or other (in his words) “selected gem, to write letters to certain friends,” think that when they are about to die, ghosts announce “the fact to the kinsman in foreign parts.” Such people (including presumably Fuller, whom he will excoriate in the Memoirs for having been “attracted” to “Demonology”) who believe in these “moanings” from the spirit world do, indeed, he conceded, experience an exhilarating sense of dislocation between the self and reality. Yet when faced with “the storm at sea,” they are unable, he warned his audience, to steer their “rudder true.”6 In this lecture, a psychologically prescient Emerson notes how astonishing it is that in our dreams...

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