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274 professional woman, private passion 45SYearning to Wash Her Soul of Sin In an 1839 fragment about her friend Elizabeth Randall, whose physician father had similarly subjected his daughter to an “unnatural taxing of her faculties,” Fuller says that if only Elizabeth had “grown up an unmolested flower by the side of some secret stream she had been a thing all natural . . . bloom and fragrance.” That is, if only Elizabeth (by extension, Fuller, too) had never been mistreated, then she would have been a “natural” woman, like Fuller’s mother, whom Fuller depicts as a rose. Along this line of thought, Fuller will protest in a 30 May 1845 letter to Nathan that a lowly violet has a right to grow “lovely and innocent,” despite the fact “she is not a rose” (emphasis added).1 Though the word “molest” did not convey in the nineteenth century the negative sexual connotation that it does today, that Fuller through the mask of her friend Elizabeth suggests that she would have been a “natural” woman had she not been “molested” as a child, taken in combination with the violent content of Fuller ’s dreams and the fact that her father had “frequently” sent her to bed “several hours too late” while expecting his wife to retire “early” when he is home from Washington certainly does, as Fuller herself said, “cast a deep shadow over her young days.”2 On the scrap of paper about her own life that she had attached to her dark remarks about Elizabeth’s, Fuller wrote that when she tried to tell “these things sometimes,” that is, about her dread of going to bed, “little notice was taken.” Worse, her mother “seemed ashamed” of her sleepwalking. On the scrap of paper Fuller notes that her mother’s shame gave her “an idea” there was “something ridiculous . . . attached to it.” Because of the unbearable feelings her father awakened in her, coupled with her mother’s apparent shame at her behavior, Fuller retreated from feeling, as is typical of children who have been deprived of love. Later she would confide to a friend, “those who live would scarcely consider that I am among the living,—and I am isolated, as you say.”3 Indeed to some extent she was emotionally isolated from others. Then in New York she met Nathan, whom she consciously linked with her father and whose “root,” she said, cut to the quick of her being. This piercing phallic image shows the strength of her reaction to Nathan. Instinctively she had dropped her defensive “reserve,” which is why the relationship brought her so much “pleasure”—as well as pain. Perhaps it was something he said during their first long conversation, his gaze at her from across the room at the New Year’s party where they met, or a touch of his hand or the brush of his sleeve that had brought them that night into momentary contact. Whatever it was, it had triggered in her a flood of feelings. Perhaps in the flood was some of that “erotic content” Capper surmises was part of her childhood feeling for her father. Underlying that was what the late Christopher Lasch described as “this boundless need that drew people to her in the first place[,] but [that] also drove them away, in droves,” as she initially drew Nathan to her, only eventually to drive him away. Indeed, Fuller’s “insatiable craving for love and admiration” gave her, wrote Lasch, an “almost grotesque power” to charm others. Thus Fuller at first felt “vibrations” pass between her and Nathan, and for a brief time the electricity between them was exhilarating—as the “excited beginning of the seduction” is always, says Shengold, “easier to repeat” than is “the subsequent terror, overstimulation, and rage.”4 In a September 1845 letter to Nathan wherein she endows Nathan with the power to cast out “sin,” Fuller depicts her father as “upright and pure,” a godlike being who is watching her “from that home of higher life” he now inhabits.5 In deifying not just Nathan but her father thus, she behaves like other people who have been mistreated as children by a parent. We have already seen how she defensively assumes her father’s identity as a mask to protect her “true” self from pain. In “A Rose for Emily” William Faulkner presents a parallel case. In that story, Emily, after the death of her tyrannical father who had stood between her and the men who...

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