Margaret Fuller 4/24/11

I have not been very successful over the past couple of days in getting a whole lot done, especially in class. I still have a good bit of The Great Lawsuit to read in the Anthology, and I am planning on doing that in study hall tomorrow. Then hopefully I will be able to competently talk to you about my project. Also, tonight (Sunday) I have been reading an article that I looked briefly at about a week ago. It is on JSTOR and is titled Margaret Fuller and the Transcendental Ethos: Women in the Nineteenth Century.  It is actually a very good synopsis of the book once you get into chapter 4, and I picked out a couple of quotes that I thought were especially significant.I have them listed at the end of this blog. Those that contain a number in parenthses are straight from The Great Lawsuit. If you find any of them that you like or think I should write about when you read over this, just let me know. Also, I was a bit frustrated because I would have really liked to use Diigo in my reading, but it won't let me do it in JSTOR because it is not actually hi-lightable text. If there is a way around this problem, I would really like to know. 

• "'We must have units before we can have union' (150). The development as woman as individuals--that is, their cultivation of self--therefore takes on primary importance."
• "Fuller understood, intuitively at the beginning, that the emancipation of women depended on a redefinition of the terms 'female' and 'male' and a reevaluation that the bearing that both these terms had on the culture of the self."
• "'The especial genius of woman I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency'" (161).
• "'Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens into solid, solid rushes into fluid.There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman'" (161).
• "She [Fuller] thus attempts to preserve the ultimate primacy of intuition over rationalism and to face the immediate need to stress the intellectual potential of women."