Read the excerpts from Woman in the 19th C (anthology, p. 84-97), and then "The Declaration of Sentiments" (anthology p. 98), and answer one or more.
1. Imaginative / creative exercise: Margaret Fuller was in Italy, caught up with the events of the 1848 revolution, at the time of the Seneca Falls Convention, so she did not attend. Imagine what additional clauses or turns of phrase she would have added to the document if she participated in its redaction?
2. What similar tropes - that is, either figurative expressions (for instance, "veil" for lack of address of a rightful question) or recurrent themes or constructions (for intance, a character that might be the alter-ego of the author) - do you find between Ellen Watkins, Frances Sargent Osgood, and Margaret Fuller.
3. Or what to you was the more striking in each author?
1 comment:
While Watkins has two major female characters who couldn’t have more distant endings, Osgood writes a poem about a restrained woman and Fuller discusses the lives of women.
Ellen Watkins lost her husband just four years after marrying just like one of her main characters, Janette, lost her great love to “the stillness of death” (page 75). Osgood may have been responding to the way society treated and treats women. As if a woman, who also has a soul, should be confined to the role of sentimental poet. Instead of putting the woman at the altar or in a pedestal let her write whatever she wants. In page 88, Fuller also has an autobiographical moment when she inserts Miranda, a woman with an eerily similar life to her own. It makes the reader doubt if this part of the story is about her or someone else.
One can also talk about the trope “woman at the altar”. Like I mentioned previously it is present in Osgood. Likewise in Fuller but in the sense of the sacred marriage.
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