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?
3 comments:
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.
3) What I find most striking in the “Declaration of Sentiments” is Stanton’s powerful reversal of “The Declaration of Independence”. The author echoes the beginning of Thomas Jefferson’s text (“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal […]”). This parallel is strategically brilliant, as it evokes a nation supposedly built on principles of equality, justice and liberty, yet that hypocritically denies these very “inalienable rights” to half its population. Stanton starting with this line—so rooted in American identity—immediately exposes to the reader the glaring contradiction between the nation's ideals and its practices. This beginning also seamlessly positions women’s rights to be discussed impartially, in an unapologetic critique of the oppression they face. Her listing of the “repeated injuries and the part of man toward woman” is proof of this very interesting absolute directness.
Matias Castiel
2. Ellen Watkins Harper, Frances Sargent Osgood, and Margaret Fuller share common themes and imagery in their works: they all critique the societal restrictions on women. All three use metaphors like veils, walls, or shadows to represent barriers that obscure women’s potential or silence their voices. On one hand, Fuller describes these obstructions as societal forces that prevent women’s growth. One the other hand, Harper and Osgood use similar imagery in their poetry to depict women’s struggles for justice and creative freedom. Following that, they also create characters that are like alter-egos in their writings to reflect their own experiences and ideals, which makes their personal struggles feel like a lens for exploring broader societal issues.
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