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14SProvidence, Pain, and Escape into Illusion The excitement Fuller had felt in Emerson’s presence, a wild exhilaration followed by a prostrating anxiety, increased when in early June 1837, just a few weeks after her return, she left Groton to teach at Hiram Fuller’s (no relation) new Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island. The experience was at first uplifting, especially when Emerson appeared to give the school’s dedicatory address. But teaching was again to prove perplexing. The stress of dealing with recalcitrant students made Fuller’s head ache. For relief she turned to the medical pseudosciences of her day—phrenology, mesmerism, and animal magnetism—which were all the rage but failed to cure her migraines. In her distressed state she turned for reassurance and support to the fatherly Emerson as well as to her former student Cary Sturgis. And she turned, as she so often did, to fantasy. Her feelings of attraction for Emerson as an intellectual mentor became enmeshed with her frustrated sexual needs producing an anxious state of mind from which at this time she found no constructive outlet. Fuller had accepted the Providence job because it gave her a financial security she badly needed. In Groton she had not been able to do productive research on a biography of Goethe that George Ripley had invited her “to prepare,” she thought, “on very advantageous terms.” Uncertain about her talent and short of time, she had turned down the offer and instead signed a contract to translate Goethe’s conversations with his secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann. Eager for the independence a sure income of a thousand dollars a year would give her, a salary roughly equal to that of a Harvard professor, she had then accepted a job teaching young women in their late teens and early twenties at the school in Providence, which was to open in June. She had been told that it would require only four hours of classroom instruction a day and that she would be able to choose her own classes and arrange her own courses.1 Fuller’sfirstexperienceoftheschoolwaspositive.Herworkingenvironmentwas pleasant. The new schoolhouse—a one-story Greek revival building with portico and columns and white interior walls trimmed in pink—was lovely. She applied the Socratic pedagogical method she had learned from Alcott, also encouraging the girls she taught to speak freely in class and express their views. One female student saw the aim of “Miss Fuller” as being “to arouse our dormant faculties and break up the film over our mind in order that the rays of the sun might shine upon it.” In early July she wrote Emerson that her wish was to teach students to aspire to “activity of mind, accuracy in process, constant looking for principles, and [to] search after the good and beautiful.”2 All thus went well at first. Though already suffering from a headache and a touch of homesickness, Fuller had nonetheless experienced one of her “halcyon moments” when Emerson on 10 June 1837 gave the school’s dedicatory address Providence, Pain, and Escape 105 106 emerson, friend and guide in place of Alcott, whose February 1837 publication of volume two of his Conversations with Children had, as we have seen, cast a shadow over his character. Asked to speak after Alcott had wisely declined the invitation, Emerson reluctantly accepted. According to Capper it was a “Transcendental jeremiad” that Emerson delivered to an overflow audience in the Westminster Unitarian Church. In his talk he had said that “a desperate conservatism clings . . . to every dead form in the schools, in the state, in the church.” Instead of a truly religious people, there is now in America, he warned, a political, tithe-paying, churchgoing crowd that is afraid of thought and afraid of change. Scholars and educators must learn, observed Emerson, that “the capital secret of their profession” is to convert life into truth by guiding their students to see “the symbolic character of life.” They must teach that the key to overcoming apathy in a materialistic age is “self-trust.”3 Many in the audience were baffled by the talk, including a reporter from the Providence Daily Journal, who confessed, “There was much of what he said that I could not possibly understand.” Fuller, however, wrote Alcott later that month how “Mr Emerson’s ‘good words’” had “cheered and instructed” her. Even if for others in the audience Emerson’s Christlike seed of wisdom fell “on stony soil” and failed “to fertilize the spot...

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