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

Performing Civic Equality I. Methodological IntroductionMargaret Fuller had in mind that the title of her essay The Great Lawsuit cosmos versus MEN. WOMAN versus WOMEN (which she would later expand and re-name Woman in the Nineteenth Century) should prepare the reader to suspend habitual thinking in order to assume her on her own grime. To honor Fullers desire to be met on her own ground (or perhaps, given the turn this paper has taken, her stage), I have worked to reconstruct what her ground/stage might have been, and to understand her ideas/performance in that light. My approach engages feminist performance 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 situation of the historical actors. Garbers examination of tran svestitism in narrative as a signal of a society under conceptual stress also whole kit and caboodle particularly well 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. showing Fullers The Great Lawsuit as a act of textual transvestitism became more persuasive as I grappled with her complex and sometimes opaque arguments, and surely was supported by Edgar Allen Poes view of her as a gender maverick (he divided humanity into three classes men, women and Margaret Fuller ). I began this essay with the intention of employ feminist and new historicist literary theory, but found it impossible 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 difference in the psychod ynamics of creativity, the problem of a female language, and the assumption of a distinct and progressive female tradition of writing. While Monique Wittig stands against essentialism, she argues that nineteenth century feminists universally viewed woman as unique, and that they ignored the historicity of the construction of that view, not to be rescued until women social scientists worked to prove the intellectual equality of the sexes at the end of the century. While these descriptions whitethorn apply to the majority of womens literary production, I would argue that Fullers The Great Lawsuit