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Nature does promise Fuller’s needs to have her spiritual rebirth. From the sublime scenes of Niagara Falls to the unexceptional views of the prairie, we detect that Fuller’s emotions experience astonishment and tranquility. Her state of mind has sought some significant points with those of the natural scenes. As Matteson claims that “human beings could be redeemed by landscape” (220).
The beauty of the places that occurs to Fuller makes her see the hopeful new emergence of some lands. Fuller has taken pleasure in the nature, as Susan J.
Rosowski writes: “There was the West’s broad promise of individualism, free from restrictions imposed by society” (125). The dramatic feelings come to epitomize the effect of catharsis for Fuller, when she sees ‘the rapid waters” in the Niagara Falls and “the island groves” in the prairie. The land around the Falls that she fears in very beginning, noticeably overwhelms her, but the prairie she later visits leaves her in tranquility and peace. These natural scenes are seen as a certain means of relieving her complex of anxieties, which we can see that fear is satisfied by “the motherly smile” of nature. From the process of satisfaction, nature bestows a sense of childish joy to Fuller.
The Childish Joy in Nature
Fuller’s life is full of challenges. John Matteson points out: “Her life was a
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contest between the ideal and the real, a struggle between a mind forever striving toward more ethereal space and an ailing physical form that continually pulled her back toward confinement and limitation” (The Lives of Margaret Fuller 207). Fuller has been suffered from unequal opportunities23 and her headache; such an anxious woman must want to have an emotional outlet to let off pressure. Nature is a kind of Utopia for Fuller, and she retrieves her childish joy among those scenes. We detect that she gains the spiritual rebirth in nature from her collecting impressions in SL.
Engaging in bursts of woods and limpid water of the lakes are the ways to have Fuller gain an enlightenment in a turbulent life.
Fuller describes how she learns to love nature, and behind her narrative engenders “the childish joy,” which is also a positive side for Fuller. Fuller glimpses the diversities of nature, having exultation in wandering forests, rivers, and fields. Fuller has found childish joy among nature. As she writes: “Now, ye stand in the past day, grateful images of unshattered repose, simple in your tranquility, strong in your self-possession, yet ever musical and springing as the footsteps of child” (SL 46). Her portrayal of “the past day” displays her
impression of “the footsteps of child.” Fuller is as innocent as a child to have a
simple heart to enjoy the tranquil moment in the prairie. The profound insight
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of childish joy appears at the very end of her travelogue as her conclusion:
A find thunder shower came on in the afternoon. It cleared at sunset, just as we came in sight of beautiful Mackinaw, over which a
rainbow bent in promise peace. I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in places where there was everything new to occupy the attention. So childish, I thought, always to be longing for the new in the old, and the old in the new.
Yet just such sadness I felt, when I looked on the island, glittering in the sunset, canopied by the rainbow, and thought no friend would welcome me there; just such childish joy I felt, to see unexpectedly on the landing, the face of one whom I called friend. (152)
“The childish joy” that Fuller pinpoints here is a kind of pleasure that is excited by a sudden discover the fulfillment of one’s expectation in her encounter with others. In light of Fuller, the joy is understood as two fold by her concept of childishness. That is, one may feel joyful when she/he recalls her/his memories in meeting someone new or discovers something new in the encounter with her/his acquaintances.
The function of the rainbow is to reconstitute the grounds of hope in Fuller’s dark time of despair because the rainbow is the symbol of promise. Regarding her
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situation as solitary and her mood as thoughtful, Fuller makes the reflection
dramatic by her narration of “the childish joy.” The image of a rainbow also shows in Fuller’s description to bring her “in promise of peace,” and an arch of colors visible in the sky makes Fuller have childish joy. In retrospect, these lines look like Fuller’s interaction between nature and her mind and between excursion and her creative imagination of gaining “the childish joy.”
It would have been a delightful experience to grasp childish joy that is an answer to be done as a reaction what Fuller seeks in nature. Nature accelerates her spiritual growth. The spiritual growth is about to get the joy in nature, which can be seen as innocent even though she is an adult now. According to Robert H. Dunham, the innocence must be kept in adulthood: “A child’s first affections must be preserved in the adult” (Silas Marner and the Wordsworthian Child 650). Fuller wishes that the innocent mind has not faded away in her growth. Fuller’s uneasy life can be conquered by the beautiful secret of nature that summons forth her inclinations toward calmness and inventiveness. For example, Fuller uses her childish eyes to personify raining in the sky: “when nature seems ready to weep, not from grief but from an overfull heart” (33).
Fuller has her own interpretation to explain that weeping is not merely sad;
instead it means to prevail over emotions with tears. It can be deemed that