In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

but also the pleasure that she attained, as she herself said, from the sense of an inward life “rich and deep, and of more calm and musical flow than ever before.” The danger for Fuller of relinquishing “self” possession in her drive to find truth was that, once touched and unloosed, her instinctual energies might push her to pursue, not truth, but an ignis fatuus to destruction. For the lure cast by nature is “especially deceptive.” It offers the tempting promise of achieving a final release from pain—a whole soul-body climax that frees one, through death, from anxiety, the tragic agony of life.11 19SThe Siren Song of Nature In her quest to affirm her female self, Fuller looked to find in literature a writer who could point the way to her “spiritual” awakening. So when the family moved to the house in Jamaica Plain, she continued her readings in the classics and the Romantics. She found Wordsworth’s faith in a sublime “presence” whose “dwelling is the light of setting suns” more spiritually uplifting at this time than what one preacher she admired called “the Idolatry of Jesus.” During the spring and summer of 1839, Fuller thus relaxed and let her emotions be drawn not just up to heaven but down to “that immortal sea” within whose “undulatory motions” she thought, like the stirring of a pool of water, “of all earthly things most lovely,” “the heaving of the bosom.”1 Like Indiana in George Sand’s 1832 novel who had always been “drawn to the banks of rivers” where she naively dreamed how “sweet” it would be “to die” by drowning, Fuller found the sight of a body of water so lovely that she felt she understood why “gazers on a riverside” might be tempted to drown themselves. Frustrated with men’s inability or unwillingness to give her the love she sought, Fuller turned in her search for reassurance and comfort away from male icons to Mother Nature. In letters she talks at this time of lying down by “gay little brooks” and of giving herself “up as much as possible to enjoyment of the fine weather.” The earth seems to her as “delicate as a bride.” On 10 June Fuller will write the poet Sarah Helen Whitman how “blest” she feels “now in living at harmony with myself which I never did in [Providence],” where Whitman had been in her graduate seminar. She says she believes she has earned “this beautiful episode” in her “Crusade ” in which “my desires dilate with my horizon.”2 Though Fuller in her 10 June letter to Whitman says that her mind “flows on its natural current,” she was, nevertheless, under great stress. She knew that these leisure months were but a respite and that she must soon return to work to earn money to support the family. Moreover, her fantasy romance with Sam Ward was disintegrating. And Emerson continued to deflect her love.3 Fuller that summer went again to the seashore where she sought soothing in the sound of the surf, the embrace of the breeze. The sea breeze is healing, she tells The Siren Song of Nature 143 144 the seductive lure of nature Elizabeth Hoar; “it soothes my brain, and new strings every sense.” She thinks Elizabeth, too, will be happy if only she will go to the seashore and be “embraced” by the “arms of nature.”4 While on one level Fuller’s talk is quintessentially Romantic, on another level something else is happening here in the way she views both nature and women. William Channing, in describing how Fuller appeared to him in 1839–40, wrote that, in temperament, she seemed to him a Bacchante. After writing it, he realized that this was how Fuller had described George Sand. Though he thought about striking the passage after realizing this coincidence, he decided, on second thought, to keep it, “as indicating an actual resemblance between these two grand women.”5 Channing here is perceptive. For Fuller was finding in Sand a woman who felt as passionate as did she about nature and the “problem” of “being a woman.” Fuller, who had known about Sand since 1832 when her novels Indiana and Valentine were published, by 1839 had surely heard about Sand’s 1833 succès de scandale, Lélia, an essaylike novel about the overwhelming force of female sexuality. After all, during the years 1832–33 she had consumed “romantic articles” in the “old Foreign...

Share