ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
"The Nineteenth-Century Women's Rights Movement and the Canonization of Margaret Fuller"
This article traces the cultural memory of Margaret Fuller as conveyed by proponents of women's rights in the United
ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
"The Nineteenth-Century Women's Rights Movement and the Canonization of Margaret Fuller"
This article traces the cultural memory of Margaret Fuller as conveyed by proponents of women's rights in the United States over the half-century following her death in 1850. Early death opened her life and message to symbolic appropriation in the long, internally divided history of women's rights advocacy. The memorialists, whose words are recoverable at least in part from their origins in oral speech and print journalism, found a usable past in Fuller; and in so doing they contested her significance with better-known male mythologizers like Emerson and Hawthorne. If disparagement by the latter contributed to Fuller's exclusion from the literary canon, these activists "canonized" Fuller in another sense, as an ongoing influence and feminist saint.
The antebellum decade of women's rights conventi