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33SMesmerism and Romantic Yearning in Summer on the Lakes In Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, Fuller included the stories of two women who sought to escape an intolerable reality: the nineteenth-century German mystic Friederike Hauffe, Seeress of Prevorst, and the fictional Mariana, the rebellious boarding-school student whom Fuller modeled on herself. Into the narcissistic Mariana, Fuller projected the “me” that desired “a godlike embrace from some sufficient love,” a remark that appears in her July 1844 journal. In a June letter to Channing she confesses that though her friends could see her as Miranda in “The Great Lawsuit,” none dreamed that Mariana was also “like me.” In this sentimental tale of romantic yearning, Mariana, whom Fuller calls “the returning prodigal,” returns home from school and marries Sylvain, a name that Fuller took from an Austrian dancer, yet that suggests an ancient divinity of the woods, Silvanus. The Romans identified him with Pan, who had been endowed with so much sexual energy that he pursued boys and nymphs with equal ardor. We recall that Fuller kept near her as she wrote a drawing of the infant Pan in Silenus’s arms.1 In the story Mariana worships Sylvain, who does not share her intellectual interests. Mariana yearns for a more soulful communion with this man who sees his home as a place for “indolent repose” after having enjoyed “affairs of pleasure” in society. His desire for peace at home clashes with Mariana’s consuming desire to find a soul mate; it drives him to prefer society’s “careless . . . dames” to his wife, whose Cassandra-like passion, says the narrator, “overpowered” him. From the narrator’s perspective, Mariana’s “repression” of her “powers” destroyed her health; for want of love, she died.2 InthisstorywhereinFullerembodiesherselfinthelove-hungry,self-destructive Mariana, she includes her poem “Disappointment.” In it Fuller depicts Mariana as one of the “sad outcasts” from the “prize” of life awarded those who have been “wholly loved” as infants. Unlike the blest “Babe” of Wordsworth’s Prelude, who “Drinks in the feelings of his Mother’s eye!,” those like Mariana who have been deprived of love in childhood are doomed as adults to wander homeless until they die. Such women, says Fuller, “By father’s love were ne’er caressed, / Nor in a mother ’s eye saw heaven.” “Father,” cries the speaker, “they will not take me home, / To the poor child no heart is free; / In sleet and snow all night I roam; / Father,—was this decreed by thee?”3 Fuller’s poetic rendering of a female Ishmael thus has no happy ending: “I will not try another door, / To seek what I have never found; / Now, till the very last is o’er, / Upon the earth I’ll wander round.” This account of a female prodigal ends with an assertion of suicidal yearning: hers is a “thirst, that none can still, / Save those unfounden waters free” that “soothe me to Eternity!” Personifying Death as a woman who brings peace, the speaker in “Disappointment” croons: “Death, / Mesmerism and Romantic Yearning 207 208 the “fine castle” of her writing Opens her sweet white arms, and whispers Peace; / Come, say thy sorrows in this bosom!” This haunting image of feminine comfort—the white arms beckoning out in “the whelming wave”—ironically portends the tragic end Fuller would eventually find at sea.4 In the Seeress of Prevorst, Fuller offers her reader another female who fails to reconcile with reality. She introduces this section with a dialogue between four Platonic forms, each representing a different worldview. The first, Good Sense, urges people to heed the lessons of daily living. The second, Old Church, argues the necessity of maintaining the rituals and customs that link peoples’ lives in a shared symbolic system. Old Church believes that God intended to confine human knowledge within set limits lest by “wild speculation . . . we violate his will and incur” perhaps “fatal, consequences.” As a counter to Old Church, Fuller playfully parodies Emerson in Self-Poise, who argues for an “upright” life of “sublime prudence ” free of “nonsense.”5 Fuller speaks her own view through the fourth form, Free Hope, who, with the heretical fervor of Anne Hutchinson, acknowledges “no limit, set up by man’s opinion.” Like a Hutchinson influenced by mesmerists, Free Hope asserts the right of each person to tap “the hidden springs of life” for the source of power, the “dynamic of our mental mechanics, [the] human phase of electricity.” She wants to attain...

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