Fritz Fleischmann (Essay Date 1987)

SOURCE: Fleischmann, Fritz. "Margaret Fuller, the Eternal Feminine, and the 'Liberties of the Republic'." In Women's Studies and Literature, edited by Fritz Fleischmann and Deborah Lucas Schneider, pp. 39-57. Erlangen, Germany: Palm & Enke, 1987.¹

In the following excerpt, Fleischmann discusses some of the problems with Fuller's work that have frustrated literary scholars from Fuller's time to the present.

I.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) is one of the most fascinating, but also one of the most frustrating texts in the literature of feminist thought, as generation after generation of critics has demonstrated. The reasons for this frustration are not clear. Is it the lack of feminist bravado, or moral uplift? (Fuller's friend Caroline Sturgis thought that it was "not a book to take to heart, and that is what a book upon woman should be" (Houghton MS, quoted from Chevigny 233). Is it Fuller's...