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250 professional woman, private passion To make excuses for Nathan, Fuller blamed his behavior on a “demon,” on that evil yet fascinating power to which she had earlier confessed that she was herself sometimes “mysteriously” drawn, a “power most obvious in the eye.” Where was God, she wonders in her letter, when she, “poor child,” needed him? To Nathan’s contention that it was not he but she who “sinned” against him by pretending to want him sexually, only then to assault him with insults and disdain, Fuller replied: “Not one moment have I sinned against you; to ‘disdain’ you would be to disdain myself.” If she could be “deceived” as was Eve by Satan, then she is, herself, at her core, “impure!”11 “Self-conscious now” in a way she has not been before as a sexual human being, Fuller defensively attests to Nathan: “You have touched my heart, and it thrilled at the centre, but that is all.” Here Fuller reveals that it was not an entirely pleasant sensation she felt when Nathan aroused her sexually. Yet, to feel a thrill for Fuller was truly to feel—something that it had been difficult for her to do since her childhood when, to survive psychologically, she had buried her “true life” “deep within.” Trying to further explain her reaction, Fuller says that if she has expressed herself more frankly than most, then he must know that “she has been in her way a queen and received . . . guests . . . of royal blood.” In a distant queenly voice she notes that Nathan’s “past conduct” has not been “severely true,” and with her, “truth is the first of jewels,—.”12 39SNarcissistic Wounds and Imaginary Mystic Entities “Truth at all cost” was Fuller’s maxim. And the truth is that Fuller’s past holds the reasons that her heart “thrilled” at Nathan’s touch and that she was shrill in her reaction to him. That she felt her mind folded into his and her body hence eerily out of her control “exposed” her to herself, it seemed, as being no better than the prostitutes to whom she had lectured on their need for moral redemption, women whose “lonely hours” were “haunted,” she thought, by “painful images” of their “contamination.” Afraid that she might actually be as great a sinner as they, Fuller confessed to Nathan eight days after her traumatic encounter with him on 11 April that she has long suspected she “was not really good at all.” The “feeling” of being mentally out of control, of being “alienated from myself,” she wrote him, was “dreadfully unnatural to me.”1 In projecting her childhood feelings onto Nathan, Fuller felt “alienated” from her vital “I” as an agent for social change and a spokeswoman for the living God in her soul—a “god,” as we know, that she tended at this time to fuse and confuse with her father, an ideal being she defensively sought to find in Nathan. Thus in her 19 April letter she expresses her thanks not only to Nathan for pardoning her for her sins, but also to “our father for making thee [Nathan] the instrument of good to me.” The way to “repose,” she wrote this worldly man whom she is attempting to turn into a savior, is to be “God[’]s good children,” to be childlike in ways other than in expressing “impulses and childish longings.”2 Nathan, however, was no god; in his needs he was, as she herself noted, “manly.” And this manly man was baffled by a woman who wrote him letters hinting she wanted to consummate their relationship, yet who, when he actually tried it, accused him of letting a demon defile her. Not long after Fuller’s traumatic midApril 1845 encounter with him, Nathan lost romantic interest in her even as he continued to send her notes and, in some ways, to encourage her, perhaps because he still wanted her help in his career. When he, then, failed to give Fuller the “reverent love” she said she was seeking, she panicked. The thought of the loss of this man she mentally linked with her father caused her “unspeakable” pain.3 Fuller in New York had intended to give up childish illusions. But that was not easy, for the intense emotions stirred in her by Nathan’s sexual assertiveness toward her had suffused her body with feeling like water through a gully after rain. These emotions were so strong that when he was near...

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