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204 the “fine castle” of her writing 32SDiscordant Energies On her way home from Chicago, Fuller stopped to visit William Channing in New York, where he was a minister and leading social activist. Channing introduced her to his friends, including Horace Greeley, the progressive editor of the NewYork Daily Tribune. Back in Cambridge by September, Fuller, between migraines, prepared for her fifth round of Conversation classes; the first of twenty-four sessions was to meet at eleven on the morning of November 16 at Elizabeth Peabody’s place in downtown Boston. She also gathered materials for a Washington Irving– like sketchbook, her memoir of her “summer’s wanderings,” Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Along with sketches of places she had visited, she hoped to capture in writing those moments in nature when, as Wordsworth put it, “the light of sense / Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed / The invisible world.”1 Yet as she wrote, Fuller found herself focusing less on divine moments in nature than on scenes conveying the discord she experienced in trying to relate to the raw, new world around her. She had meant, for instance, to experience a moment of transcendence at Niagara Falls but was filled instead with a sense of dread, of uncanny fear that “naked savages” were creeping up on her “with uplifted tomahawks ,” so she kept starting and looking behind her. She had felt the same fear as a child at night when the light had been taken away and she was left alone with visions of detached heads coming at her through the dark. Her current fear may have been fed by tomahawk marks she had seen on felled trees in Illinois. Perhaps Fuller’s fear of being scalped stemmed in part from her ability to identify with the rage of these displaced people who had been driven from their home by invading white men. These white men, wrote Fuller, had grown to loathe the Indian on whom they had encroached, “the aversion of the injurer for him he has degraded.”2 Like the displaced Indians, Fuller felt a stranger in her native land, captive in a culture that prevented her from singing freely and also imprisoned her soul, it seemed, in collarets, corsets, and cumbersome crinolines. Eager to merge with Mother Nature, Fuller at Niagara Falls had seated herself on Table Rock, close to the great fall. Dressed perhaps in her cambric-lined and corseted black mousseline dress—her folding eyeglass pressed to her nearsighted eyes—Fuller says she was still hoping to lose all consciousness of herself in the spectacular sights and sounds of the cascading falls when she was interrupted by a tourist. He had come, he told her, “to take his first look,” then, “spat into it.”3 As Fuller sat at her writing desk and looked out to the river, it occurred to her that, though she had meant to imitate Irving, her story was in fact not at all like his. No gentleman of leisure, Fuller was a comparatively poor female intellect, though one gaining respect in New England as a writer. She had even been given permis- sion—the first woman ever—to use Harvard’s library for research.4 Still, try as she did to write like Irving, Fuller’s pen would not comply. The style and content of Summer on the Lakes reveal how out of sync she felt with the literary conventions of her time. For instance, she had not been moved by the sight of the great falls but had instead felt most alive when she crossed the frail bridge to Goat Island. From the middle of the river she could see about a quarter mile of tumbling, rushing rapids and hear the roar of the waters sweeping beneath her feet. It occurred to Fuller then how often she had felt “most moved in the wrong place.” Early in Summer on the Lakes she mentions such a moment of disjunction when she tells about a chained eagle with a broken wing she had seen in the Niagara area. Unlike Wordsworth, who had visited childhood scenes to arouse slumbering feelings of wonder, Fuller had recalled how sad she had felt as a child when she saw a similar eagle “chained in the balcony of a museum” and people poking sticks at it. It had occurred to her even then that this “monarchbird ” ought to have been riding a “panoply of sunset”—like the wild eagle she reports she...

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