SUGRUE. Fuller and Alcott

Margaret Fuller is one of the earliest writers who is associated with feminism, born in 1810. She is also associated with the Transcendental current that was active at the same time. Though her prophetic work The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women is a call for gender equality, the modern reader can identify various ways in which it caters primarily to a male audience. This is understandable, as has been stated prior, that the primary audience was male, and they were the ones who needed to be convinced in order to affect a change. The modern feminist reader may assert that the stipulations presented in Fuller's arguments address only periphery issues and not core ones. For example, Fuller argues that should the man's social and public convictions be carried out in his own home, where the mother-son, brother-sister, husband-wife, dichotomy of American family life is played out, "the beauty of home would be destroyed, the delicacy of the sex be violated, the dignity of halls of legislation destroyed". While this seems to be a valid argument, it too places dogmatic importance on those relationships themselves. These relationships present the woman with a position in society, and the family, that is defined by the existence of the male counterpart. In other words, should the man disappear, she would too. Yet modern feminism refutes this. A world without men: GOODIE! Alcott's "Behind A Mask" presents an oppositional situation. A woman who embodies all the prescribed roles of a 19th century woman, yet transcends their behaviors. We can, however, take one more step. "Behind a Mask" is surely a Gothic story, yet why? The very presence of a woman who transcends her quasi-enslaved role, a woman with agency, a woman who needs not the systemic structuralism of society, ques a confrontation with the Lacanian Real: wherein societies most rudimentary structures are undermined by an obliteration of the signifier. In this case, the signified becomes the monster: free of association with the world of man and his language.