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Authors
Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)
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There are substantial recent collections: Bell Gale Chevigny’s The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings (1976, 1994), “These Sad but Glorious Days”: Dispatches from Europe 1846–1850 (1992), edited by Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith; The Essential Margaret Fuller (1992), edited by Jeffrey Steele; The Portable Margaret Fuller (1994), edited by Mary Kelley; and Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings for the New-York Tribune, 1844–1846 (2000), edited by Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson. Robert N. Hudspeth’s edition of Fuller’s Letters is complete in six volumes (1983–94). Susan Belasco Smith edited Summer on the Lakes in 1843 (1990), and Larry J. Reynolds edited a Norton Critical Edition of Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1997). Madeleine B. Stern’s pioneering The Life of Margaret Fuller (1942, 1991) is supplemented by Joseph J. Deiss’s The Roman Years of Margaret Fuller (1969) and Eve Kornfeld’s Margaret Fuller: A Brief Biography with Documents (1997). The standard biography is now Charles Capper’s, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, vol. 1: The Private Years (1994) and vol. 2: The Public Years (2002). Joel Myerson edited Margaret Fuller: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1983– 1995 (1998). Important recent criticism includes Christina Zwarg’s Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading (1995), Jeffrey Steele’s Transfiguring America: Myth, Ideology, Mourning in Margaret Fuller’s Writing (2001), Cheryl J. Fish’s Black and White Women’s Travel Narratives: Antebellum Explorations (2004), and Bruce Mills’s Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts (2006).
Fuller was a child prodigy, rigorously trained in the classics and modern languages and literatures by her father, who was associated with the Transcendentalist circle of Concord, Massachusetts. She edited Emerson's magazine, The Dial, from 1840 to 1842 and later, working as a literary critic for the New York Tribune, became one of America's first self-supporting woman journalists. Her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) made the argument that both men and women were confined by the expectations of society; it remains a seminal work on American feminism and sexual liberation. Fuller traveled to Europe in 1846 as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune; in Italy she became involved with revolutionaries and with a nobleman, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. When she became pregnant in 1848, she attempted to hide her situation from friends at home, but when Rome fell to France in 1849, she fled to Florence with Ossoli, whom she married, and their child. The family set sail for the United States in 1850. All three died when their ship sank in sight of Fire Island, New York.
The complete text of The Great Lawsuit
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
Fuller's The Great Lawsuit (1843) is not only a landmark in the history of American feminist thought but also a chance to see certain Emersonian premises develop in directions which Emerson himself may have not anticipated. It also shows us an important experiment in political and philosophical discourse, a radical break from forms that Emerson and other nineteenth-century male essayists had championed, forms that they had inherited and developed from New England Calvinist models.
1. In The Great Lawsuit, Fuller asks: "And will not she soon appear? The woman who shall vindicate their birthright for all women; who shall teach them what to claim, and how to use what they obtain?" How had the literary culture of Fuller's time made her hope more plausible? Had Emersonian Transcendentalism created new obstacles for Fuller's "new woman"?
2. Why does Fuller create Miranda and "the sorrowful Trader" to dialogue with in The Great Lawsuit? What literary and cultural echoes does Fuller evoke with this strategy?
3. Compare Fuller's prose style to Emerson's or Thoreau's. How does her kind of argumentation vary from theirs? Evaluate its effectiveness in advancing her particular intentions.
