Introduction to Narrative: Reading Questions and Information

Reading Questions and Background

Week 4

Location: [Reed College] [Department of English] [Laura Arnold][ Nation and Narration]Daily Readings

Margaret Fuller

1. There is a very good introduction to Fuller and her works at the beginning of our text, so I will not repeat that information here, but instead direct you towards it. I am interested, though, in how you see Fuller responding to issues that Hawthorne and Emerson have raised regarding travel, the sublime, nature, and the nation. I would like you to consider what difference Fuller implies it makes to be a women viewing (and writing about) these sights. For Tuesday please read the following:

1. Summer on the Lakes, chapters 1-4

2. Woman in the Nineteenth Century: pp. 247- 258 (up until "But to return to the historical); pp. 309 ("There are two aspects of women") to 313 (up until but not including the paragraph that begins "AMONG THE THRONG"); and pp. 341 ("And now I have designated this outline")-end. In The Essential Margaret Fuller, ed. Jeffrey Steele

3. Elaine Showalter's "Towards a Feminist Poetics" (Essentials of the Theory of Fiction **1988 Edition**, pp. 380-402)

 

2. What is a Female Narrative Style? In "Towards a Feminist Poetics" (Essentials of the Theory of Fiction 380-402), Elaine Showalter identifies three stages of women's writing: feminine, feminist, and female. In which category does Fuller belong? How does Fuller herself define "woman's nature" and its relationship to creativity? In the introduction The Essential Margaret Fuller, Jeffrey Steele suggests that Fuller writes in a female poetics when she

1.advocates ideals for friendship and community

2.presents mythological images of the female realm (e.g. gardens, flowers)

3.shows that women embody an "electricity" that frightens men and draws individuals together.

Do you agree? What parts of Summer on the Lakes support such a reading? Would you add anything to this list?

 

3. Engendering the Sublime. In Women Poets and the American Sublime, Joanne Diehl suggests that the sublime meant different things for women and men. She argues

  1. Transformed by the universe flowing through him, the new man experiences the apotheosis of the Emersonian Sublime--one with the world, he assumes its authority, his speech achieving the clarity of cosmic law. Implicit in this wondrous transformation is Emerson's faith in the self's ability to open doors, experience the flood, and speak with a voice of thunder in language bold as it is clear, a language where sign and signification are one. Yet Emerson's assertion presents difficulties not easily overcome by poets of lesser confidence or by those who lack support of a tradition....Women poets experience the burden of these difficulties in ways that bar their free access to the Sublime, for gender blocks the identification Emerson so fluently assumes (Diehl 3).

How does Fuller's experience of the sublime differ from Emerson, Hawthorne, and Shelley's? Is gender the only factor here?

4. Characterization. For Thursday please finish reading Fuller's Summer on the Lakes (Chapters 5-7) and read pp. ix-xx and 226-235 of Werner Sollors' The Invention of Ethnicity. What sort of identity does Fuller "invent" for American Indians? What is their role within the nation's invented identity? Do American Indians help Fuller invent a white space and identity as well? How so? How do her portraits of American Indians compare to the portraits of American Indians made by George Catlin? What is the relationship between American Indians as characters and the Landscape as setting?

5. Why Travel? In class Wed. we discussed reasons why people travel. Click here for more information on pilgrimages, captivity narratives, Jeremiads.

Other useful hotlinks:

  1. Paintings of Niagara Falls
  2. A mid-nineteenth-century tour of New York City
  3. Artwork on American Indians
  4. Native American Artists on the Internet
  5. Nineteenth-Century Portraits of Chippewa Indians
  6. The Sublime (Exhibition Essay which Includes paintings of the White Mountains, Niagra Falls, and Other Sublime Locales)

     

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    url of this page -- Revised: 2/13/2000
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    Laura.Arnold@Reed.edu