Summer on the Lakes

Michaela Bruckner Cooper (Essay Date 2000)

SOURCE: Cooper, Michaela Bruckner. "Textual Wandering and Anxiety in Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes. "In Margaret Fuller's Cultural Critique: Her Age and Legacy, edited by Fritz Fleischmann, pp. 171-87. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.

In the following excerpt, Cooper contends that Fuller's writing in Summer on the Lakes demonstrates anxiety and a lack of confidence in herself as a writer.

The history of female reading and writing is a continuous effort to overcome the anxiety attendant upon the limitations of gender roles and narrative forms; but female readers and writers are working to alter history, first by articulating the sources of ambivalence.

(Singley 8)

In "Female Language, Body, and Self," a chapter in the anthology Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, Carol Singley examines women's ambiguous relationship with language, one...