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 spacious Lawsuit domain versus MEN. WOMAN versus WOMEN (which she would later expand and re-name Woman in the Nineteenth coulomb) should prepare the reader to suspend habitual thinking in coordinate 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 shit worked to reconstruct what her ground/stage might have been, and to understand her ideas/ slaying in that light. My approach engages womens liberationist surgical procedure theory as articulated 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 cultural constructs of gender become naturalized without quashing the agency of the historical actors. Ga rbers examination of transvestitism in narrative as a signal of a ordination under conceptual stress also works particularly swell 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 more than persuasive as I grappled with her complex and sometimes opaque arguments, and for sure 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 goal of using feminist and new historicist literary theory, but found it unsurmountable to reconcile the egalitarian and androgynous philosophy of The Great Lawsuit with the essentialism of feminist literary theory. For example, Elaine Showalters gynocritics assumes sex ual difference in the psychodynamics of creativity, the problem of a pistillate language, and the assumption of a distinct and progressive female tradition of writing. part Monique Wittig stands against essentialism, she argues that nineteenth century feminists universally viewed woman as unique, and that they ignored the historicity of the eddy of that view, not to be rescued until women social scientists worked to prove the intellectual comparison 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