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Margaret Fuller, women's health, and the body politic
While scholarship on American feminist writer Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) occasionally mentions her health, few critics have considered its role in her intellectual development and her impact on other women. This dissertation acknowledges Fuller's health as a major influence on her work and consequently on American women's social progress. In examining Fuller's work against nineteenth-century health issues, this study asserts that Fuller compensated for poor health by creating exceptional models of womanhood influenced by real, remarkable women. She later extended these models to other women as alternatives to views of women as physically and psychologically weak, and intended the most elevated model, the "Exaltada," to guide others toward psychological and eventually political self-reliance. After grounding Fuller's works in nineteenth-century health issues, the chapters analyze Fuller's creation of healthy models in these issues' contexts. The second chapter considers "moral health" (a balance of psychology, ethics, and passions) and depicts Fuller's attempts to manage it in her 1836-41 correspondence via invalid and religious identities. Chapter III examines Fuller's education as represented in "Autobiographical Romance" in light of existing views on the effects of "overeducation" on women's health. Fuller redirects her search for models of healthy womanhood as a response to her memory of this educational experience. The fourth chapter connects Fuller's search for ideal womanhood with mesmerism (originally a treatment for nervous diseases), which surfaces in her review in Summer on the Lakes of a case study on the mesmeric clairvoyant Frederica Hauffe. Chapter V examines women's widespread psychological dependence upon men for their identities and Fuller's attempt to cultivate self-reliance in these women through her feminist treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in which Fuller realizes women's need to mentor each other toward psychological self-reliance and proposes a future senate of women composed of Exaltadas. Finally, the concluding chapter examines Fuller's New-York Tribune articles and foreign dispatches against American and European sexual attitudes. As a result of her experiences with New York prostitutes and European revolutionaries, Fuller expands her quest for healthy models of womanhood from concern with individual self-reliance to concern for the self-determination of peoples and nations, or "political" self-reliance.
Issued also on microfiche from University Microfilm Inc.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 283-289).