Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim

18. A Divine Madness

140 the seductive lure of nature tuality was flowing into sexual fervor, Finney continued to argue for “an ingenuous breaking down” of constraints and “a pouring out of the heart” till “the flood-gates will soon burst open, and salvation will flow over the place.” Though Finney was obviously not advocating free love, the connection between religious enthusiasm and erotic excitement is nonetheless clear.4 Todd, Groton’s fiery fundamentalist preacher when the Fullers moved there in April 1833, used the liquid metaphor in a different way. Todd’s popular Student’s Manual had, as we have seen, linked male genitalia with the soul. Todd accepted as fact the then widely held notion that semen flows through the blood from the brain to the genitals. Hence he was, we recall, urging young men to abstain from masturbation, since the release of sperm by this “evil” practice, to use Todd’s word, depleted a man of the energy necessary for creative effort. Fuller’s reference in an 1835 letter to Clarke to the flood of words she would “pour forth” to him if only he would visit her in Groton, as well as her talk in her crisis of “tides of feeling,” of the “life that flows in upon me,” the “dews of night,” and “seas surg[ing] between me and you,” thus reflects to some extent her internalization of terms commonly used by evangelists like Finney and Todd. But it also reflects her absorption of terms frequently used by the European Romantics, for whom surging seas connote, among other things, sexual excitement and orgasm.5 Water imagery floods Fuller’s letters to Emerson; in letters to friends during this period of personal probing, Fuller tends to summon up images—like those of flowing fluids—that suggest that, during the winter months of 1839–40, she was undergoing not only a spiritual renewal but also, as an uneasy Emerson suspected, a sexual awakening. This baptism was fed by her immersion in the exotic writings of the European Romantics and ancient Greeks, as well as in the electric flow of luxurious nature.6 18SA Divine Madness After she had come home to Groton in January 1839, Fuller focused her attention on the writings of Plato that had enchanted her in 1833. She borrowed again Emerson’s volume of Plato, but this time she limited her reading to two dialogues: Phaedrus and the Symposium. In the latter, which Fuller called “The Banquet,” Socrates explores the meaning of love, and in the Phaedrus he argues that love is a form of “divine madness.” Socrates was always interested in eros, particularly of a homoerotic kind, but only in these two late dialogues did Plato’s teacher attempt to anchor eros in a metaphysical search for a transcendent vision of Beauty. In the Symposium, where Socrates reportedly fell into mystical fits of abstraction, his vision is spoken through the wise woman Diotima, who says that people more creative in their souls than in their bodies conceive wisdom and virtue, instead of babies. He goes further in the Phaedrus, saying that although the poet whose “organs” enable him to see beauty may seem demented to others, such a person is really divinely possessed, “and when he that loves beauty is touched by such madness he is called a lover.” Such love, says Socrates, is above bodies fusing; it is the restoration of the soul’s wings, the regaining of purity through the contemplation of the ideal form of beauty. Though poets and artists who see a perfected form of beauty in a mortal may seem “strange” to others, they are in truth suffering from the “fever” that comes when a person perceives divine being behind the ordinary objects of everyday life.1 In these dialogues, Plato turns to Orphism for its mystic vision, making Diotima its advocate. Orphism was a mystical strand that came by route of Pythagoras, who had refined the doctrines of Orphism, just as Orphic ritual had been an intellectual upgrade of Bacchic orgiastic rites. This religion was born of the fertility rites honoring the Thracian Bacchus. God of the vine, Bacchus was imprisoned in winter and released in spring, and his reformer, Orpheus, had the power through his music to charm trees and animals and even persuaded the rulers of the dead with his music to let him attempt to retrieve his wife, Eurydice, from the underworld. The women who worshipped Bacchus (or Dionysus) celebrated the god’s death and resurrection with wild...