Analysis Of Margaret Fuller's The Great Lawsuit

Phyllis Cole states that Margaret Fuller has not received nearly as much attention from early and modern feminist scholars for her integral role in the feminist movement’s history due her intellectually complex writing style. b) Cole sees herself as including Fuller in dialogue with her feminist precursors Mary Wollstonecraft and Sarah Grimke to show how Fuller drew on their writings to help make her own arguments in “The Great Lawsuit”, but to also go beyond both women by including Fuller’s application of Romanticism and Transcendentalist thought. c) Cole believes that Fuller’s contribution to feminist tradition through her writing was significant because it went beyond just thinking of the women’s civil rights, but appealing to the ‘divine
The paper touches on a lot of the same ideas that the other critics have, but as more of an overview of their ideas by touching on how Fuller’s Transcendentalist views informed her arguments for why women should be allowed to be self-realized by taking some of Wollstonecraft’s ideas and expanding on them. This paper will be useful for a basic analysis of some aspects of Fuller’s writing style and transcendental feminism.
4) Robinson, David M. "Margaret Fuller and The Transcendental Ethos: Woman in the Nineteenth Century." PMLA: Publications Of The Modern Language Association Of America 97.1 (1982): 83-98. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.
a) David Robinson argues that Woman is a key expression of American transcendentalism, which also serves as a major feminist document.
b) To Robinson, Woman is a “translation of idealism into the social and political realm”. He sees this work as key in moving Fuller away from her emphasis on the ‘self-culture’ of the Transcendentalist
Fuller’s commitment to the ideals of Transcendentalism, which included the emphasis on self-culture and the spiritual growth of the soul, allowed her to naturally extend these idea to not only include women, but “to diagnose and prescribe a remedy for the societal condition of women.”
5) Urbanski, Marie Mitchell Olesen. Margaret Fuller's Woman In The Nineteenth Century: A Literary Study Of Form And Content, Of Sources And Influence. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.
a) Urbanski through her study of Fuller’s Woman has argued that it’s "a literary work from the standpoint of form, tone, and use of rhetorical devices,” and not lacking a framework or style like some earlier critics have stated. b) That although from first impression Woman appears to lack structure, but in actuality its structure fits that of a sermon and its complexity as a literary work is due to its dual nature, which includes many characteristics of Transcendentalist literary art. Therefore, Urbanski argues that in order to understand Woman it is necessary to examine “The Great