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188 the “fine castle” of her writing legal battle she intends to wage against all men in all ages and cultures who have limited women’s lives with their laws, customs, and moral codes, and their built-in bias that men are superior to women. As a result of her 1839–40 religious experience , one rooted as much in pagan mystery rituals and the quasi-mystical machinations of mesmerism as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Fuller felt that she had been born again as a woman in touch with the mystical energies in her soul. What she felt was her “soul” hence now seemed full with the electrical flow of a creative power greater than her own, what she and other Romantics preferred to call, not God the father, but the great creative spirit. Awake with this intense yet highly personal religiosity, a religious sense that was in fact greatly at odds with Emerson’s, Fuller no doubt knew about the Adventist journal edited by Miller in Boston, Signs of the Times, which was also the title of Carlyle’s famous 1829 essay on the Romantics . Nor could she have missed excited talk in the wider community about how the Reverend Miller expected the end of time to take place between 21 March 1843 and 21 March 1844.6 29SFuller’s Apocalypse Within the electric context of religious enthusiasts awaiting the Second Coming , Margaret Fuller wrote “The Great Lawsuit” in which she forwarded her case against every man—including her lawyer-congressman father—who wishes, in her words, “to be lord” in his “little world.” As men in the past had felt called by God to offer mankind a celestial vision, so Fuller, extending Emerson’s call for soul liberty to include women, felt called by God to give birth to a vision of a New Jerusalem in which the relationship between the sexes had been righted and music restored to the spheres. In generating this vision of “celestial harmony,” Fuller mingled ideas and images familiar to her from ancient myth and history with images from two popular cultural movements. In writing the essay she thus fused Plato’s notion of the Forms with nineteenth-century millennialists’ hopes for Christ’s imminent Second Coming and mesmerists’ ideas about animal magnetism , transmuting all into “psychotheistic” terms that transferred the theater of apocalyptic events from the heavens and earth to the site of the individual female soul. In so doing she shifted the task of redeeming humanity from man to woman. And she did this even as she introduced an ideal female figure named Miranda, whose “dignified sense of self-dependence” she attributes ironically to a father who held “a firm belief in the equality of the sexes” and respectfully addressed her as “a living mind.” To Fuller, Miranda’s excellence as a woman is just one of the “signs of the times” indicating that this new era in America was fast approaching, one in which man would relate to woman not as father but as brother, and marriage would be an ideal union of man and woman traveling side by side as pilgrims to heaven.1 Fuller thus begins her essay by noting how far men have fallen from the Platonic ideal of man, from what men might have been had they heeded the vision preached by Jesus that “all created beings are brothers.” Lifted by Jesus, men lived for awhile in harmony with the law of the “universe-spirit.”2 But Jesus was crucified and mankind now needed, wrote Fuller, another leader: a being of “purer blood” who could, in the words of an eighteenth-century French mystic, “purge the terrestrial atmosphere from the poisons that infect it.” Because even Jesus failed to provide humanity with the answer to evil, man is “still a pleader, still a pilgrim.”3 Though “The Great Lawsuit” is permeated with the language of the anticipated impending millennium when Christ would come again and save believers’ souls, Fuller was no traditional Christian, but a Romantic. As such she gave broad play to the power of human imagination and agency to re-create paradise on earth. Fuller thus says she has “no doubt” that a “new manifestation is at hand, a new hour in the day of man,” when humans will act to turn earth into heaven. Then, the promise of the Declaration of Independence will be fulfilled, slavery will end, and women and men will be filled with conviction that God is within all people...

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