Critical analysis

Fuller was certainly on Hawthorne's mind not long before she published her tale a poisonous woman in December 1844. In July 1843 Fuller published her first feminist tract in the Dial: The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus Women lays out the foundations of modern feminism. At a time when women were almost as disenfranchised and enslaved as those owned in actual slavery, Fuller's protestations were revolutionary, and even today they have the awful ring of truth “Early I perceived that men, never in any extreme of despair, wished to be women,” she writes in a direct plea for the kinds of freedom in work and in life that were taken for granted by men. Although the turgid, quotation ridden prose certainly slowed the spread of her ideas, some of them would still be original today. Thus the basic analogy concluded is 'All men are horn free and equal”

The Great Lawsuit advocates a revision in male-female relationships that she would expand in the fall of 1844 into Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and she had toured the Midwest frontier and published her account of the trip in Summer on the Lakes, 1843 , Arriving at the Manse on 9 July 1844, Fuller spent the first ten to concord with the Hawthornes, whose household now included the four-month-old Una, and she visited frequently with them during the remainder of the summer and fall . Because of Julian's influence, scholars have speculated that, in addition to Fuller's increasing feminism drove a wedge between her and the Hawthornes. Just the opposite seems to have happened. Judging from Fuller's recently published journal of her stay with the Hawthornes take on boarders, fullers increasing feminism drove a wedge between her and Hawthornes.

Just the opposite seems to have happened. Judging from Fuller's recently published journal of the stay with the Hawthornes during the summer of 1844 one year after the publication of The Great Lawsuit their relationship became even more intimate. Infact editorial decisions made by Fuller or by her friend William Clarke during an apparent recopying of the original journal entries, together with mysteriously missing pages in the journal, suggest that her relationship with Hawthorne may have been even more intimate than the record that we do have.

They thought that every man and even some women harbored a divine spark every man including the poor and the rich, the hermit and the railroad worker and the landowner. They called this divine spark “reason”. Sometimes this was an inner light; sometimes it was the voice of God. For others it was more direct. There was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired: that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms, whatever belong to the class of intuitive thought is popularly called at the present day Transcendental” than they were worth. (Adams, 166)

For all the modernism of FuIler's ideas, the 1840s was another ...