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186 the “fine castle” of her writing transmute the fleeting thoughts of her actual conversations with Emerson and the women who attended her classes into printed words with which she could converse , as it were, with the world. In short, it was time for her “proudly,” as Emerson had advised, to take up her real work, her writing.19 28SMillennial Fever During a blustering May—with the odious east winds beating against her windowpanes —Fuller, who in April had handed over Dial editorship to Emerson, sat down at her desk and wrote as much as the foul weather—and a hurting head— would let her. The result was “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women.” The title of this Dial essay, which she would later expand into Woman in the Nineteenth Century, points to how far she thought men and women have fallen from the Greek ideal (form) of what each might have been as man and woman. The essay is both a defense of Fuller as an unmarried, intellectual woman and an argument in behalf of women’s rights. As such it intertwines a theme of personal exploration and rebirth with a vision of an out-of-kilter earth soon to be restored to harmony by self-reliant women who have been given the freedom to seek selfknowledge and develop fully as men’s equal. In creating her vision of equality, Fuller mixed ideas and images she had gleaned through the years from sources including Romantic literature, utopian views on marriage and women, Emerson’s thoughts on self-reliance, mesmerists’ ideas on animal magnetism, as well as talk in her culture of the impending millennium. For beneath the text’s Orphic-influenced Platonism and infusing it with energy is not only Fuller’s belief in a universal electrical fluid called animal magnetism that influences both human behavior and planets’ motions, but also the spirit of millennial expectation permeating the air in that spring of 1843. Five years earlier, in 1837, the Northeast had suffered an economic depression, during which time people there increasingly turned to the word of God as preached by itinerant religious ultraists—Adventists, Baptists, and Wesleyan Methodists—who were seeing signs in the heavens of the Second Coming of Christ and who believed the end of time was near. Such men believed that when Christ came again he would cast the wicked into hell while ushering in a thousand-year period of heaven on earth for all who had led a genuinely “Christian” life.1 Chief among the millennial visionaries was William Miller (b. 1782), who in his youth had declared himself a deist, and whose followers became known as Millerites. During a Baptist revival in 1816, however, he had been converted and thereafter embraced the teachings of Baptists. Driven by his belief that Bible stories are factually accurate, Miller became obsessed with a notion shared by many of his contemporaries, that historic events and astrological signs indicated that Christ would appear on earth sometime around 1843, the year Fuller wrote “The Great Lawsuit.”2 Millennial thinking like Miller’s had been known before in northeastern New York, Vermont, and western Massachusetts, but only after reaching Boston in 1839 did it spread like wildfire. Orphism, to which Fuller had been attracted since 1839, similarly promised a person relief from stress through an apocalyptic fusion with God. And two years before that, we recall, she had been impressed by the preaching of William Hague, the Baptist minister who had been in her seminar in Providence , the city to which renegade mystics and Baptists in seventeenth-century New England had fled to escape persecution by the Puritans. Like the mystics of seventeenth-century Puritan Boston, Baptists like Hague believed that a person can be born again through a sudden and permanent change in the way he or she relates to the world, and that his or her life thereafter will be transfigured and lightened by that person’s faith in Christ.3 When Fuller wrote her essay she believed she had experienced a genuine spiritual rebirth, a permanent change in psychological outlook that dated, she said, “from the era of illumination in my mental life.” Hers, however, was not a rebirth based on an acceptance of Christ as her savior. She instead believed that the divine spirit had passed directly into her. The renegade nature of her faith was evident back in Providence when she took Communion for the first time from the Baptist Hague since...

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