Parker’s psychoanalytical approach to understanding Mary Baker Eddy brings Twain’s ambition analysis and Fiedler’s sanctity of 19th-century female spirituality into tension. Parker sees Eddy’s desire to sublimate her willful personality through submission to the purity and safety of the feminine, while exploiting the culture of womanhood to fulfill her drive for success in leading a religious movement and hiding her ambition.
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Parker includes Mary Baker Eddy among ‘curists’ (healing oneself through right thinking) who struggled to gain more manlike worldly mastery and embraced their sexuality for domestic and spiritual uses. Her psychoanalytical conclusion (made before the Mary Baker Eddy Library archives were available) describes Eddy’s desire for mastery as of a Machiavellian sort and was purely about ambition, exploitation, and greed.
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