In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

was able to take “her place” in “the world of [the] mind.” To her “good father’s early trust,” Fuller-Miranda hence attributes her sense of self-dependence.7 To this ideal image of her father, to him whose “image” lived in her, Fuller paid homage in words that reveal her continuing bondage to a haunting, godlike man, her reluctance to see the dead father as flawed. In so doing she exposes her unconscious subjugation to the same social, religious, and legal laws that she questions in both her essay and later feminist tract, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. In Miranda, Fuller thus created a paper self free of inner conflict and troubling sexual urges, just as in the father she created a one-dimensional figure who, totally unlike Timothy, “cherished no sentimental reverence for woman,” a glorified parent entirely happy with his unattractive, intellectual daughter. In offering her reader as models these figures purged of their humanity and pain, Fuller evaded confronting the cause of her anxiety, her contradictory wish to be both man’s sister and equal and his dutiful yet desirable daughter, an obedient child whom the seeming “good” father leads lovingly “by the hand.”8 In both essay and tract, Fuller avoids discussing the emotional turmoil and social pressures actually experienced by women like Wollstonecraft and Sand when she implies that both irreparably stained their lives by failing to control their sexual impulses. In these works, Fuller will go so far as to argue that the lives of revolutionary leaders who would “reform the world” must be “unstained by passionate error,” and that those who break the laws should be deemed outlaws. She argues this even as she acknowledges that the laws must be altered so that “beings as these” will not “find themselves by birth in a place so narrow, that in breaking bonds they become outlaws.” In conceding that the laws must be altered to be more tolerant of women whom society has deemed to be sexually wayward, Fuller revealed her own underlying uneasiness about her millennialist vision that the world can in fact be “redeemed” by celibate, educated women. Regardless of the strength of her utopian longings, a realistic side of herself had doubts about the capacity of imperfect people—whatever their race, religion, or gender—to carry out idealistic revolutionary programs.9 31SPilgrims and Prodigals Like her Christian ancestors, Fuller saw her life as a pilgrimage from innocence, through the valley of sin and death, to the “hill-prospect,” where, by way of “wise” self-control,shewouldbeable,asshehadwrittenWilliamHenryChanningin1840, to “bring the lowest act” of her life “into sympathy” with her “highest thought.” Yet Fuller’s life journey, as James Clarke said, was only “almost Christian.” Impatient with the image of a suffering Jesus on the cross, Fuller thought religion should make her more aware, not of suffering, which she felt she knew too well, but of “unceasing revelation,” of a never-ending sense of harmony between herself and Pilgrims and Prodigals 199 200 the “fine castle” of her writing the celestial spheres. She felt especially frustrated with Christianity’s failure to put women “on a par” with men, to see them as men’s fellow pilgrims.1 For images of powerful female divinities, Fuller had turned to the mythical figures of Minerva and Isis, of Ceres and Proserpina, as well as of other forms in which the ancients embodied their idea of the divine in woman. One mythical figure she found appealing but did not mention in her essay was that of the human Psyche. To the dismay of the clergymen who attended her 1841 Conversations, she had interpreted Psyche’s journey from hardship to divinity as “the pilgrimage of a soul,” a “story of redemption.”2 In The Golden Ass, which Fuller had read, Apuleius tells how Psyche’s beauty is so radiant that no man will marry her. Despite the machinations and interventions of her parents and various gods, someone does indeed fall in love with her: Cupid (Eros). Cupid rescues her after her parents, obeying the oracle’s command, abandon her on a mountaintop where she is to await her future husband, whom she fears is death (Thanatos). Psyche and he then become lovers, but their love seems doomed. Having failed to respect Cupid’s request to love him nightly without trying to see him, she loses Cupid whereupon she throws herself into a river, whose waters carry her to shore. Only after many obstacles are surmounted, and Psyche...

Share