Performing Civic Equality :: Margaret Fuller The Great Lawsuit Feminism Essays

Performing Civic Equality I. Methodological IntroductionMargaret engorged had in mind that the title of her essay The gigantic Lawsuit cosmos versus MEN. WOMAN versus WOMEN (which she would later expand and re-name Woman in the Nineteenth atomic number 6) should prepare the reader to suspend habitual thinking in hostel to meet her on her own ground. To honor Fullers desire to be met on her own ground (or perhaps, given the turn this paper has taken, her stage), I call for worked to reconstruct what her ground/stage might have been, and to understand her ideas/ surgical process in that light. My approach engages womens rightist functioning theory as joint by Judith Butler and Marjorie Garber, with historical and intertextual context. Butlers examination of the relationship between phenomenology and performance of gender offers a cogent model of the process by which pagan constructs of gender become naturalized without quashing the agency of the historical actors. Garb ers examination of cross dressing in narrative as a signal of a conjunction under conceptual stress also works particularly puff up with Fuller, since her writing activity was very much part of Transcendentalism and the American Renaissance, and responded to historical changes, sectional crisis, slavery, the decline of womens rights, and especially political reform. Viewing Fullers The Great Lawsuit as a act of textual transvestitism became much persuasive as I grappled with her complex and sometimes opaque arguments, and for certain was supported by Edgar Allen Poes view of her as a gender unconventional (he divided humanity into three classes men, women and Margaret Fuller ). I began this essay with the intent of using feminist and new historicist literary theory, but found it unthinkable to reconcile the egalitarian and androgynous philosophy of The Great Lawsuit with the essentialism of feminist literary theory. For example, Elaine Showalters gynocritics assumes sexual di fference in the psychodynamics of creativity, the problem of a female person language, and the assumption of a distinct and progressive female tradition of writing. art object Monique Wittig stands against essentialism, she argues that nineteenth century feminists universally viewed woman as unique, and that they ignored the historicity of the tress of that view, not to be rescued until women social scientists worked to prove the intellectual equation of the sexes at the end of the century. While these descriptions may apply to the majority of womens literary production, I would argue that Fullers The Great Lawsuit