Margaret Fuller Research Articles

“A Credo”: Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalists

“A Credo”: Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalists

Language, a Crucial Weapon of Patriarchy to Subjugate Women: Referencing from Ibsen's ‘A Doll's House'

This paper deals with the concept of ‘subjugation of women in patriarchal society' through the lense of ‘Feminist Literary Theory' and ‘Language Politics', referencing with Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll's House”. The main hypothesis of this paper is to demonstrate: how women’s identity use to be violated and constructed by patriarchy, how women are not treated as societal capital but are commodified and how their human psyche is being constructed by male dominated society. Margaret Fuller's concept of ‘Androgyny’, Virginia Woolf's notion of ‘women centric education', Simone De Beauvoir's concept of ‘second sex', Elaine Showalter's concept of ‘Gynocriticism’ are being depicted here in this paper to evaluate Ibsen’s strong feminist character Nora, protagonist of ‘A Doll's House'. But the nuclear task of this paper is to distinguish how Language plays a crucial role to make women as ‘second sex' or inferior sex to some extent. Through the Metamorphosis of Nora's character we will come to Know how she will break the chained convention of patriarchal society by dejecting her husband Mr. Helmer through the powerful language of ‘ silence'.

Activist Discourse and the Origins of Feminist Shakespeare Studies

This essay reconsiders interpretations of Shakespeare by Irish writer Anna Murphy Jameson and the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. Developing an informal method in which the voice of the female critic rallies in defence of Shakespeare’s heroines, they intervene in a male-dominated intellectual sphere to model alternative forms of women’s learning that take root outside of formalized institutional channels. Jameson, in Shakespeare’s Heroines, invokes the language of authentic Romantic selfhood and artistic freedom, recovering Shakespeare’s female characters from earlier critical aspersion as figures of exceptional female eloquence and resilience; she adopts a conversational critical voice to involve her female readers in the interpretative process itself. Fuller, in Woman in Nineteenth Century, speaks authoritatively as a kind of female prophet to argue that women’s creative reinterpretations of Shakespeare point the way to a revitalization of a sterile literary critical field. Both writers call for the reform of women’s education through revisionist interpretations of history attuned to the representation of female exceptionalism. In embryonic form, these nineteenth century feminist writings formulate a persistent strain of socially engaged, activist feminist criticism of Shakespeare.

The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s

From the Publisher: Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the early United States, TheForest imagines how a wide variety of Americans experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, and featuringboth real and invented characters, the book follows painters, poets, enslaved people, farmers, and artisansliving and working in a world still made largely of wood. Some of the historical characters—such as ThomasCole, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Kemble, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nat Turner—are wellknown,while others are not. But all are creators of private and grand designs. The Forest unfolds in brief stories. Each episode reveals an intricate lost world. Characters cross paths orgo their own ways, each striving for something different but together forming a pattern of life. For AlexanderNemerov, the forest is a description of American society, the dense and discontinuous woods of nation, thefoliating thoughts of different people, each with their separate shade and sun. Through vivid descriptions ofthe people, sights, smells, and sounds of Jacksonian America, illustrated with paintings, prints, and photographs,The Forest brings American history to life on a human scale.

Highlighting Ideas of Human Rights: A Review of American Intellectuals’ Classic Writings

This article intends to review the ideas of human rights appearing in several American intellectuals’ classic writings from the Puritan era up to the modern era. It is a descriptive qualitative writing whose focus is on a literature review. In so doing, close reading is applied as a method and interdisciplinary perspective as its framework It is found that the ideas of human rights have spread as a public issue from the Puritan era until the modern era when proposed by many intellectuals, i.e., Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, John Adams, James Madison, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, George Fitzhugh, Abraham Lincoln, Sarah Grimke, Louisa McCord, Margaret Fuller, Betty Friedan, William Lloyd Garrison, and so forth. In response to many inhumane social conditions in the United States, human rights ideas arose.The ideas certainly support the establishment of the United States as a country. Consequently, this fact indicates that human rights ideas have persisted in the veins of the American nation over time, preserving it as the most plural and multicultural one in which all entities are welcome and acknowledged.

American Romanticism and the Popularization of Literary Education

American Romanticism and the Popularization of Literary Education

ОБЩЕСТВЕННЫЕ ВЗГЛЯДЫ АМЕРИКАНСКОГО СОЦИУМА В ПРОИЗВЕДЕНИЯХ МАРГАРЕТ ФУЛЛЕР (ПОЛИПАРАДИГМАЛЬНЫЙ ПОДХОД)

The research deals with complex, multi-paradigmal analyses of reflection of social life and ideology of the American society of the 19th century in literary works of a feministic writer – Margaret Fuller. It is stressed the autobiographic fundamentals of

“To Mold in Clay and Carve in Stone”: Sculptural and Political Form in Margaret Fuller’s Italian Dispatches

“To Mold in Clay and Carve in Stone”: Sculptural and Political Form in Margaret Fuller’s Italian Dispatches

Margaret Fuller's Illegibilities: Afterlives of an Unreadable, Unrecoverable Manuscript

Margaret Fuller's Illegibilities: Afterlives of an Unreadable, Unrecoverable Manuscript

Androgyny and Desire: Margaret Fuller, Julia Ward Howe, and Fractured Trans Archives

Androgyny and Desire: Margaret Fuller, Julia Ward Howe, and Fractured Trans Archives

Little Women at 150

The 2018–2019 sesquicentennial of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women saw the release of an Oscar-nominated film adaptation directed by Greta Gerwig (2019) and a widely-reviewed indie bestseller by Anne Boyd Rioux titled Amy, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of “Little Women” and Why It Still Matters (2018). Clearly, the novel retains stature in the public consciousness; my own teaching of a course on Little Women in spring 2020 persuaded me that young women continue to find the novel moving and meaningful in their lives. Little Women at 150, a collection of eight original essays edited by Daniel Shealy, joins the discussion marking the novel's publication anniversary and includes a lead essay by Pulitzer-Prize winning author John Matteson, posthumous essays by Joel Myerson and Beverly Lyon Clark, and five additional essays by notable Alcott scholars. Noting that Little Women is judged to be “one of the first realistic novels for young people,” the collection addresses a constellation of questions prompted by the anniversary: How did the novel reach the status of a classic? What is its current relevance, and why does it remain popular? How did Alcott's earlier fiction influence it? What has been its global influence? What is the appeal of the character of Jo March, in particular? Does the novel still convey important ideas to readers?The topics in the volume range broadly, from the visual imagery of transportation in illustrated editions (Clark) to a reinterpretation of adulthood and marriage in the marriage plots (Anne K. Phillips), from the influence of Margaret Fuller (Christine Doyle), Emerson and Pilgrim's Progress on the novel (Roberta Seelinger Trites) to a comparative examination of Little Women in relation to a twentieth-century Australian novel, Ethel Turner's Seven Little Australians (Myerson). Matteson opens the volume by evaluating Alcott's depiction of the relation of social class and moral virtue against Friedrich Engel's and John Winthrop's theorizations. Matteson's ideas exist in conversation with Sandra Harbert Petrulionis’ essay on the character of Hannah Mullet, which painstakingly illuminates how the novel's depiction of the domestic servant makes possible and shores up the idealized femininity the March women display. In laying out how scholars have missed and ignored the importance of Hannah's character, Petrulionis shows how scholarly gaps are perhaps as shocking to recognize as Alcott's own blind spots. Greg Eiselein closes the volume with a rousing call to recognize Alcott as a canonical author, a recognition that is surely overdue. Eiselein presents five criteria for determining a “major author” that could be particularly useful in classroom settings to provoke discussion and debate on literary history's shifting and unreliable judgments. Indeed, all of the essays offer pedagogical opportunities, written as they are in an accessible and clear manner. Eschewing trendy or “cutting edge” approaches, the collection reminds us of the value of patient, solid, author-focused scholarship, especially in our teaching.

Redemption of Matter

Despite her biographical proximity to figures such as Emerson and Thoreau, the nineteenth-century writer and editor Margaret Fuller is not often considered an environmentalist. Indeed, she is more often remembered for her contributions to political feminism than to environmentalism. I argue that in Fuller’s writing, however, an environmental ethics emerges in conjunction with her questioning of the binary between ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’. In place of this binary, Fuller proposed fluidity. This is evidenced in her first book, Summer on the Lakes, a literary travelogue chronicling Fuller’s journey through the West. With recourse to theoretical concerns in feminist new materialisms, I first demonstrate how her understanding of fluidity was influenced by the nineteenth-century vitalist theory of animalmagnetism. I then turn to the ways that Fuller takes her encounters with the West’s watery sites—its waterfalls, rivers, and lakes—as occasions to articulate an anticolonial environmental ethics.

Bridging Gender Divides: Toward a Transcendentalist Feminism

AbstractHow can we build a path from the binary of gender to the unity of common humanity? What kind of difference can the “different voice” of feminism make as a human voice? In this article, Naoko Saito argues that the way we talk about the difference of a “different voice” needs to be radically transformed. To envision a route to such a transformation, she explores an alternative possibility of feminism in the American transcendentalism of Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson. First, Saito critically examines the politics of recognition and suggests a susceptibility to binary thinking in its approach. Second, as a way of transcending the binary mode of thinking, Saito introduces the humanist feminism of the nineteenth‐century American transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. Third, as a way of elucidating the radicality of Fuller's transcendentalist feminism, Saito introduces the feminine voice of two male philosophers — Ralph Waldo Emerson and Stanley Cavell — as her conversational partners. By radically converting the way we talk about difference of voice, the transcendentalist feminism of Fuller, Emerson, and Cavell provides a third way that lies beyond the politics of recognition and care ethics. In conclusion, Saito proposes that the cultivation of the feminine subject requires an alternative political education that resists assimilation into political realism. This would realize our common humanity and, in its crossing of divides between men and women, would create democracy from within.

Transcendentalist Women in Conversation: Margaret Fuller, Sophia Ripley, and “Woman”

This essay focuses on Sophia Ripley’s 1841 article “Woman,” which was published in the Dial two years before Margaret Fuller’s “The Great Lawsuit. Man Versus Men. Woman Versus Women” appeared in the same publication. Originally written as homework for one of Fuller’s Boston Conversations (1839–1844), Ripley’s plea in favor of women’s right to education perfectly epitomizes the polyphonic nature of feminist social advances in antebellum America. Inspired by Fuller’s feminist reinterpretation of William Ellery Channing’s concept of “self-culture,” viewing education as a means to improve woman’s condition, Ripley’s text debunks the concept of “separate spheres” and urges readers to consider women as intellectual beings rather than through the prism of the idealized, unrealistic “muse.” Inscribing Ripley’s article as part of the feminist stride of the Transcendental movement, I will illustrate the similarities between Ripley’s argument, Fuller’s, and that of other women Transcendentalists, while also confronting it with what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote on the subject.

Imprints of Indigenes and the Optics of Settlement: A Bifocal Reading of Summer on the Lakes and A Millimetre of Dust

This article is a comparative reading of Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844) and Julia Martin’s A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites (2008), travelogues that explore erstwhile frontier zones in view of a changing social landscape inflected with the rhetoric of democracy. The comparison is based on the thematic parallels between literature from the American Renaissance and post-apartheid South Africa in which the landscape is portrayed in metonymic relation to the nation. Drawing on the field of world literature and the notion that texts might undergo transformation in the way they are interpreted due to their movement across space and time, the article employs a ‘bifocal’ lens that produces a contrapuntal engagement between mid-nineteenth century America and post-apartheid South Africa.

Religion in the Twenty-First Century

Religion in the Twenty-First Century

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

“Water, Water Everywhere”: Flows, Fate, and Transcendental Settlerism in Margaret Fuller's “Summer on the Lakes, in 1843”

“Water, Water Everywhere”: Flows, Fate, and Transcendental Settlerism in Margaret Fuller's “Summer on the Lakes, in 1843”

In Memoriam

I first met Joel Myerson in an elevator at an American Literature Association Conference in Boston: he was wearing his famous Hawaiian shirt. Thereafter, I recognized his presence at various Alcott venues at ALA conferences: he always had something significant to remark upon after the talks were given. When I became more involved with the Alcott Society, I realized how sociable, warm, witty, and helpful he was at Alcott sessions and dinners. I remember an organized outing from an ALA meeting in Boston to the Alcott Orchard House in Concord, and he was clearly the life of the party.In terms of my scholarship on Louisa May Alcott, I could not have done as much without his co-edited collections (with Daniel Shealy) on Alcott’s letters and journals. This also holds true for his significant work on Margaret Fuller: I found his Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New York–Tribune, 1844–1846 (co-edited with Judith Mattson Bean) indispensable to several articles I wrote on Fuller. He knew and wrote so much about the Concord circle I admire, and he will forever be missed.Monika Elbert, Montclair State University One sheer delight of academic conferences was to come upon Joel Myerson, of course for conversation and commentary but to see what ghastly Hawaiian shirt he would be wearing. I think it actually glowed, but I may be wrong.Joel has done so much for so many. I recently came across Studies in the American Renaissance for 1994, which I believe he began to edit in 1983, and was staggered by the number of scholars within its pages. It is probably his monumental contribution to American Studies in all its many shapes and sizes and will remain a major repository of critical thinking. I gasped when I found an article I’d written, and he’d accepted, “The Romance of Mesmerism: Hawthorne’s Medium of Romance,” which helped launch me deeper into Hawthorne studies and beyond.Joel was a convivial and sharp-eyed mentor, good-humored and helpful. So many of us owe him so much. Here’s to you, Mr. Myerson. We couldn’t have done it without your thoughtfulness, patience, perspective and assistance. Thank you. You done real good!Sam Coale, Wheaton College Dr. Joel Myerson was an acclaimed editor and critic of nineteenth-century American literature. In Hawthorne Studies, Myerson edited an important work of Hawthorne’s collected writings, The Selected Letters of National Hawthorne (Ohio State UP, 2002). The titular collection he donated to the University of South Carolina Library includes early editions of Hawthorne’s works, as well as signed letters. Despite Myerson’s scholarly achievements, though, I most remember him because he helped solidify my career trajectory in American literature studies. As an MA student at the University of South Carolina, I signed up for his American Transcendentalism seminar one semester after doing poorly in a Renaissance Literature course. I wasn’t sure if graduate school was right for me. Myerson’s class only had doctoral students enrolled. This experience was the first time I had to collaborate and compete with them. From the moment the course started, I was transfixed. Everything he taught about Thoreau, Emerson, Alcott, and other nineteenth-centuryists spoke immediately to me—and I held my own in that course. After class, we would hold conversations on Thoreau’s theory of plant crystals or discuss how far south both Emerson and Thoreau had traveled. His compliments to me on my work were not liberally dispersed, but I hung on to every such word, including when he noted my “eloquence.” He had other acolytes in that class, several of whom, including myself, have gone on to become full-time English faculty. His guidance led to that success.Myerson eventually became my MA thesis advisor and provided general advice on that project, one that argues for Emerson’s unacknowledged influence on Proust, the latter whom Myerson seemed to dislike in the context I placed him. Later, he composed a letter of recommendation that ensured my admission to doctoral programs. I want to emphasize how powerful he was as a pedagogue and educator, at least immediately to us students, more so than his role as a scholarly editor. I had never known him to refuse a graduate student asking for mentoring or help. He left an indelible mark at the University of South Carolina; I can’t disassociate Myerson from my thoughts of that institution.Michael S. Martin, Nicholls State University

Editorial

Editorial