In the winter of 2023, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein shared with me a drawing by Rukeyser that would be featured on the cover of The Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose, published later that year. The drawing depicts four massive figures surrounded by a wall of red. In the front, dwarfed by the gigantic figures, is a miniature version of Rukeyser herself, clad in a blue dress. In the lower right, if you look closely, you see the penciled words in Rukeyser’s distinctive handwriting, “The Four Fears, March 1955.”
Rukeyser, The Four Fears. Drawing. Library of Congress. Shown with permission of the Rukeyser Estate.
Strangely, as soon as I looked at the drawing, I felt that I knew it, even though I had never seen it before. How could that be?
At the time, I was deep into researching Rukeyser’s analysis with Frances G. Wickes, a Jungian analyst whom she began to consult after the death of her mother Myra in 1953. Wickes was by then a well-known analyst, renowned for helping artists work through creative blocks and release new creative energies. The analysis fell into a period that Kate Daniels described as the years of interception—a fallow period, when Rukeyser, preoccupied with raising a young child, her son Bill (as well as cancelled by publishers and hounded by the FBI), published significantly less than she had before. As I sorted through the rich archive of materials Rukeyser had assembled about Wickes and read Wickes’s three books[1] focusing particularly on her last, The Inner World of Choice, I sensed that her analyst played a crucial role in helping Rukeyser through these years of creative impasse, which culminated in the publication of Body of Waking in 1958, dedicated to Frances Wickes.
Reading Body of Waking and The Inner World of Choice side by side, I began to notice intertextual links. These were especially conspicuous in one chapter, entitled “The X in the Calculation,” which follows the case of an unnamed woman, “almost forty years old,” who suffered from debilitating childhood fears that threatened her adult life with exhausting alternations of rebellion and inertia. Aspects of this woman immediately reminded me of Rukeyser—her wealthy upbringing, her creativity and rebelliousness—while other things, like her preoccupation with sacrifice personified in the figure of Jesus and a “victim complex,” did not tally easily with my image of Rukeyser. The drawing, however, confirmed beyond a doubt that the chapter concerned Rukeyser herself. Wickes, like C. G. Jung, prompted her patients to draw the images they encountered in their dreams. Using their “active imagination,” they were asked to reengage with such images creatively, in a wakeful state, by drawing them. After I saw Rukeyser’s drawing of The Four Fears, it dawned on me that I had first encountered it, vividly captured in words, in precisely that chapter of The Inner World of Choice, when the patient describes a dream of hers:
Before me is a wall of molten stones that glow with a sullen orange light. Four giants, born of this same molten stone, tower up from the center of the wall where the stone reddens into a gateway of wicked sullen flame. As I look at the giants, a voice says, “Challenge them!” I shout aloud. At the sound of my voice, the wall, the four giants who are the towers and pillars of the wall, fall as ash that dissolves into air. (143)
As the patient revisits her dream upon awaking, she associates the giants with the obverse of Roosevelt’s four freedoms and names them “Fear of Speech, Fear of Worship, Fear of Want, Fear of Fear” (144).
The patient’s subsequent discussion of these fears is most instructive and opens much room for biographical speculation. I embark on some of that in my recent essay “Muriel Rukeyser in Analysis: Body of Waking.”[2] Reading the giants personifying the four fears from left to right, I associate the first with Rukeyser’s mother Myra, whose closed eyes and open mouth convey a fearful passivity and, it occurred to me later, the mask of death. The two figures in the middle, training their gaze on the diminutive figure of Rukeyser, could be those of her father (fear of worship), endowed with a scepter of authority, and her once favorite aunt Flora (fear of want), elegant and emaciated looking, whom Rukeyser’s father married shortly after the death of her mother.
I read the fourth giant as a personification of Rukeyser herself and her complicated fear of fear. She had, of course, much to fear at the time; she was an anti-fascist activist, a radical democrat, an unmarried “deviant” mother raising a young child and involved in an intimate relationship with another woman, her literary agent Monica McCall. And she was Jewish. Fearing such fears points to the ways in which an oppressive political climate can make us participants in our own oppression—fear of being exposed as homosexual induces or reinforces internalized homophobia; fears of shaming are not relieved when we fear such fears but multiplied. The analysis with Wickes, I argue in my essay, helped Rukeyser to reclaim the power of the erotic while freeing her from fears and inhibitions that, as she mourns in a group of poems in Body of Waking, had stunted her mother’s life and led to the suicide of three male friends (F. O. Matthiessen, Charles Naginski, and Reeves McCullers) hounded by heteronormative social and sexual pressures.
As I spent more time making sense of the Wickes archive, I became convinced that Rukeyser herself was the author of this chapter focused on her analysis. In one of several proposals for a book on Wickes, Rukeyser wrote:
One chapter of this book is on the author’s work with Frances Wickes, what happened to poetry and to people—to Frances Wickes—through it. For the first time, I think, a story is told of how part of the therapy turned out to be the painful and victorious work of re-writing with Mrs. Wickes the chapter on my own therapy, six times, understanding the work more fully each time, and seeing it through the press.
Is this case study of Rukeyser, hidden in plain sight in The Inner World of Choice, “the painful and victorious work of re-writing with Mrs. Wickes the chapter on my own therapy”? I believe so. It’s unfortunate that Rukeyser did not get around to composing the additional story of how writing and revision became part of the therapy and affected patient, analyst, and poetry. There is certainly a lot in this chapter that begs for explanation: Rukeyser wove the case study of her analysis seamlessly into The Inner World of Choice, never indicating that the chapter was written by anyone but Wickes. Instead, assuming her analyst’s perspective, she excoriates her “victim complex,” her rages, her fears. Could it be that Wickes had encouraged such pitiless distancing as a kind of depersonalization designed to help Rukeyser see clearly the part she played in the psychodramas that plagued her life?
None of these questions would have occurred to me had it not been for the fortuitous conversation with Rowena and her willingness to share with me a stunning find that she knew I would be interested in. This has not been the first time that a Rukeyser cohort shared with me a hunch or archival discovery that fundamentally affected my understanding of Rukeyser, enriching my inquiry or opening entirely new lines of thought. Such spontaneous acts of scholarly generosity create a climate favoring the sort of coincidental discoveries that might be called synchronicities, C. G. Jung’s term for meaningful coincidences that are not logically or causally connected–chance happenings, fortuitous insights that can flourish among freely communicating human beings.
[1] The Inner World of Childhood (1927, rev. ed. 1966); The Inner World of Man (1938); The Inner World of Choice (1963).
[2] Published on Digital Commons@EMU 2025: https://commons.emich.edu/rukeyser_essays/1/
Cite this essay in MLA, 8th edition: Elisabeth Däumer, “From the Archives: The Four Fears.” The Muriel Rukeyser Living Archive, https://murielrukeyser.org/2025/07/02/elisabeth-daumer-from-the-archives-the-four-fears/.
Bio: Elisabeth Däumer is Professor Emeritus of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Eastern Michigan University where she taught courses in twentieth-century literature, poetry, literary theory, women’s writing, and environmental studies. She was editor of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory (2015-20) and co-edited, with Shyamal Bagchee, The International Reception of T. S. Eliot (Continuum 2007). She also edited a special issue of JNT on Muriel Rukeyser (43.4 Fall 2013). As the creator and administrator of Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, she maintains and develops the website, produces the RUKEYSER BIANNUAL, and organizes multiple Rukeyser related events.
