MARGARET FULLER, THE GREAT LAWSUIT

Margaret Fuller advocates equal position of women in American society in her essay The Great Lawsuit. It is no surprise that she speaks, marginally, also in behalf of the rights of African Americans because the rhetoric of liberation of minorities – as James Baldwin aptly wrote the word minority does not refer to numbers – must be and is in principle always the same. Yet it bears some distinct features in the American literary context. It is possible to trace certain influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on Fuller.

Margaret Fuller adopts Emerson’s notion of one universal order, and claims that “there is but one law for all souls”. (1520) She also lists examples of men’s prejudices and mainly their fears of what they would lose if their wives went to the polls and were active in politics etc. Fuller patiently refutes their doubts but she also seems to yield to some of them when she writes: “What woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely ...” (1521) It is sure that the second half of this statement concerns more essential demands, those that are in accordance and harmony with the highest law, but Fuller’s own life proved that she claimed the right for women also to “to act or rule”, as she for example participated in Italian politics.

Another example of Emersonian thinking in Fuller’s work is her demand addressed to women to “leave off asking them [men] and being influenced by them, but retire within themselves...” (1530) Emerson also considered one’s own soul as the most relevant and revealing source of knowledge. His encouraging America to look forward, into the future, and cut off the ties with the past is here also relevant bacause women cannot look much into the past when their rights are concerned. They can find some praise (as Fuller quoted several times) but they do not have any ‘Golden Age‘ to which they could make reference to.

Thirdly, there is a great formal similarity between Fuller’s chapter Four Kinds of Equality and Emerson’s Nature. Both the authors gradually reveal the levels of relationship of man to nature or husband and wife. They begin with the coarsest possible relationship, that of Commodity or Household partnership – that is the material level and end with the world of ideas.

The argumentative strategy Fuller uses is the one of giving representative examples. Fuller comments on them thus:

These are all instances of marriage as intellectual companionship. The parties meet

mind to mind, and a mutual trust is excited which can buckler them against a million.

They work together for a common purpose, and, in all these instances, with the same

implement, the pen. (1526)

The question now arises: are these examples really representative? Is literary activity the only sphere man and woman can complement and enrich each other? Or is it meant to be the ideal of such companionship? If so, is Margaret Fuller pleading for all women or just for female writers or those women for whose qualities do Minerva and Muse stand for?

The discussion about woman’s position and role in the society, and all those stereotypes related to it – as to the stereotypes Fuller herself adds some stereotypical ideas, e.g. that woman is not so good at analytic thinking etc. – are just the surface or a peak of a more profound debate of whether the essence, or the soul, is the same in man and woman. Margaret Fuller gives the explanation that there is one human soul which is revealed to us through our concrete realization, that is through individual people. And the medium, through which the soul is emanated, is either man or woman. Consequently, women might tend to be better in different spheres than men and vice versa. Therefore Fuller speaks about what is “more native” (1528) to woman and what not.

The third part of the essay is named The Great Radical Dualism. This fact is also important because dualism refers to the theory based on the existence of two opposite principles in all things and Fuller means female and male principles. But these two principles are not identical with woman and man – they partly overlap:

“Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact,

they are perpetually passing into one another. ...There is no wholly masculine man, no

purely feminine woman.” (1528)

That implies that those two principles are again only sets of attributes or qualities we usually associate with men and women and therefore it would not be correct to say that Fuller distinguishes between male and female soul. These two principles create together a unity and by suppressing one of them, one suppresses the whole Divinity. Fuller claims that if female energy was given the space male principle has got, “the Divine would ascend into nature to a height unknown in the history of past ages”. (1520) Thus to advance the society it is necessary to improve the position of women.

What is special about the American way of pleading for women’s rights in Margaret Fuller’s essay is that she is not calling only for the right to vote, or equal pay or other prerogatives which women were at that time deprived of, she is also anxious to gain her duties, her self-dependence or self-reliance through which her soul can materialize itself. And it may be said that her soul is not a different entity than a male soul. Soul is something deep, essential and common to all humans.

Bibliography.

Margaret Fuller, The Great Lawsuit. In Norton Anthology, 3rd Ed., Vol. 1, Norton&Comp., New York, 1979. pp. 1515 - 1531