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

214 the “fine castle” of her writing 34SMother Power, Beastly Men, and Woman in the Nineteenth Century The complexity of human sexuality and gender was on Fuller’s mind as she revised “The Great Lawsuit” while vacationing with Cary from mid-October through November 1844 at Fishkill Landing (now Beacon, New York), a resort community on the Hudson River. In the quiet of her rented boardinghouse room, Fuller felt better situated than she had the previous summer during her restless journey through the West, where she had spent too many nights in noisy hotels to concentrate on her writing. Her evenings now were spent in the company of Cary, singing birds and katydids. From her window she could see over the tops of trees to the Hudson and the Catskills’ purple heights beyond.1 A letter she had written Sturgis two months earlier reveals that as she had packed for the mountains she was thinking about the complexity of gender as well as about her father, female friendships, and redemption. In that 4 August letter she wrote after visiting her father’s grave, Fuller addresses her dead father in an apostrophe . Recalling her experience with him as her tutor she says, “Father, thou hast taught me to prostrate myself in the dust, even with my brow in the dust and ask to be taught.” Though in October she will profess to being at peace, Fuller’s conflict here is clear. For even if her father had in fact forced her to prostrate herself before him, she nevertheless in her letter begs him to teach her. Fuller then suggests to Sturgis that, as a “pure” Christian, Cary may be “worthier to aid souls to a pure and enduring service” than is she.2 In this long August letter, Fuller expresses a wish that the next time she and Cary meet they might “redeem the hours” by making their time together “joyful and like the hour of Elizabeth and Mary.” She hopes that in meeting Cary she might be, as was Elizabeth in meeting the Virgin Mary, “filled with the Holy Ghost.”3 Fuller also alludes in her letter to the second Homeric “Hymn to Demeter,” whose mythical story was in her mind as she rewrote and expanded “The Great Lawsuit” into Woman in the Nineteenth Century. In the “Hymn” Persephone (Proserpina) is seen playing with her girlfriends in a field of violets, roses, irises, and crocuses. As she picks the narcissus, Hades appears, rapes her, and takes her to the underworld . While there, she eats the sacred pomegranate offered her by Hades, an act that binds her to spend three months each year in hell with him, where she is “consumed within herself by desire for her mother.” Fuller thus implies that if she and Cary cannot meet in peace, then, she writes Cary, she will be like Persephone’s forlorn mother Ceres (in Greek Demeter), who knows what it means “to wander.”4 In both this letter and one from September to Sarah Shaw, whose husband was a translator of George Sand’s writings, Fuller sees herself a virgin or virginal mother. She tells Sarah, who is Roman Catholic, that she feels like “a Mother” to her. Not- ing that the “Virgin was made worthy to be the mother of Jesus by her purity,” Fuller hopes that she, too, might be pure so as to be “worthy” of Sarah’s affection.5 In contrast to her relationship with Sarah, Fuller had good reason to doubt herself worthy to be Cary’s friend: just three weeks after she wrote Sarah, Fuller had dreamed Cary was dead on the seashore, an image that suggests Fuller’s lingering ambivalence about her friend. In her dream, the waves kept “wash[ing] up [Cary’s] dead body on the hard strand & then draw[ing] it back again,” while Fuller “seemed rooted to one spot,” her red silk cloak falling off each time she reached out to grab her dead friend.6 Despite her still obviously conflicted feelings for Cary, once she was sequestered in nature Fuller said she never felt in better health, perhaps, in her life. Close to “the sources of the streams, where the voice of hidden torrents is heard by night, and the eagle soars,” she felt in tune, she said, with the flow of Being, a substratum of seeming liquid energy that, on her last day of writing, kept the tract “spinning out beneath [her] hand.”7 S S S Thus into...

Share