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138 the seductive lure of nature This “Seductive Lure of Nature” section of the book thus necessarily begins with a reminder to readers as to why the idea of spiritual rebirth was so congenial to Fuller. It also reviews the texts she was reading (especially Plato and Plutarch) during her icy isolation in Groton in January 1839, texts that provided the intellectual and literary frame through which Fuller looked as she undertook her psychologically unsettling self-analysis. It then turns to look at Fuller’s exploration of external nature, after which it investigates not only the Eros-tinted nature of Fuller’s friendships (chapters 21 through 24 focus closely on this aspect of her life), but also her imaginative merging with powerful figures from both myth and European history in this crisis period when her sense of self was in flux. In this section I stress Fuller ’s imaginary identification with passionate female figures who undergo magical transformations of being, as Fuller was to feel that she had undergone a mystical metamorphosis upon emerging from her crisis. As we travel with Fuller in her letters and journals along the “stream of thought” as it flowed through her mind during these years 1839–41, we occasionally depart from a strictly chronological perspective. For, as in the exquisite pattern of a fine Persian carpet, the thematic threads of Fuller’s life are intricately tied and woven. From this nonlinear analysis of these brief years in Fuller’s life, we gain a clearer sense of what it was about her that both drew friends to her and drove them away. Such an analysis reveals how a crisis of identity that threatens one’s self-possession by seemingly drawing one down to the primal life “within” can likewise stir the imaginative mind to convert its knowledge into a work of creative genius. Fuller’s letters and journals reveal how the words and images she gleaned not only from her Puritan past, Emerson, Christian evangelicals, and the ancients, but also from her outings in nature, her friendships with women, her readings in Romantic literature , and her nighttime dreams all interwove in her fecund imagination into a vision of self-reliance for women.8 17SReligious Crisis Both by temperament and by the influence of her Puritan past, Fuller as an adult felt at ease with the idea of religious rebirth. As late as August 1844 she was still attending family devotionals, like one she took part in with her mother and Richard during which she read Charles Wesley’s hymn, “Jesus, My Strength, My Hope.”1 Still, like Emerson, Fuller had trouble accepting conventional religious dogma, whether it appeared in the literal terms of the fundamentalists or the rational precepts of liberal Unitarians. Craving a religion of the heart, part of Fuller responded to the more passionate vision of her Puritan ancestors for whom temptation, sin, and redemption were live ideas that helped determine their everyday actions. As a young woman she had hence rebelled against the religion of her father, a Unitarian who disliked not just Calvin’s dark view of humanity as depraved and of God as an almighty power that predetermines man’s destiny, but also the evangelical’s easy access to redemption through instantaneous conversion. Drawn to the religious vision of the Baptist and Methodist that gave hope of redemption through an intense emotional experience, Timothy’s daughter in Providence had responded positively to Baptist minister William Hague. Fuller admired the way Hague, a student in her German seminar, combined in his oratorical manner an active intellect with generous emotion. Though short, as was her father, Hague, she thought, nonetheless achieved in his preaching style the “perfect abandon” of his whole being that she sought to attain for herself. With his sparkling hazel blue eyes and sweet pleading tones “he throws himself,” she said, “into the hearts of his hearers,” as he apparently threw himself into hers. For on a July Sunday in 1838, she had partaken, she confessed, “for the first time, of the Lord’s Supper.” “Feeling strongly that God is love,” the Reverend Hague, she said, “speaks direct from the conviction of his spirit,” and “his mind has not been fettered by dogmas, and the worship of beauty finds a place there.”2 In light of her preference for Hague’s heated preaching, it is easy to understand Fuller’s fascination with the feverish preaching of the religious enthusiasts whose evangelical ultraism peaked in New England between 1825 and...

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