The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

George Eliot wrote, "My function is that of the aesthetic not the doctrinal teacher."

The largeness of vision through which Eliot enters into the consciousness of all her

characters makes the perspective of her novels on many issues a complex one, for it

is finally issues as they are refracted through the lens of human character that interest

her.

Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft1

The dearth of new books just now gives us time to recur to less recent ones which we have hitherto noticed but slightly; and among these we choose the late edition of Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century, because we think it has been unduly thrust into the background by less comprehensive and candid productions on the same subject. Notwithstanding certain defects of taste and a sort of vague spiritualism and grandiloquence which belong to all but the very best American writers, the book is a valuable one; it has the enthusiasm of a noble and sympathetic nature, with the moderation and breadth and large allowance of a vigorous and cultivated understanding. There is no exaggeration of woman's moral excellence or intellectual capabilities; no injudicious insistence on her fitness for this or that function hitherto engrossed by men; but a calm plea for the removal of unjust laws and artificial restrictions, so that the possibilities of her nature may have room for full development, a wisely stated demand to disencumber her of the

Parasitic forms

That seem to keep her up, but drag her down�

And leave her field to burgeon and to bloom

From all within her, make herself her own

To give or keep, to live and learn and be

All that not harms distinctive womanhood.2 It is interesting to compare this essay of Margaret Fuller's published in its

earliest form in 1843,3 with a work on the position of woman, written between

sixty and seventy years ago�we mean Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman.

The latter work was not continued beyond the first volume; but so far as this

carries the subject, the comparison, at least in relation to strong sense and

I. Published in The Leader in 1855, this essay is admitted to a common fund of ideas, to common a retrospective book review of two important fem-objects of interest with men; and this must ever inist publications�A Vindication of the Rights of be the essential condition at once of true wom- Woman (1792), by Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-anly culture and of true social well-being. . . . 1797), and Woman in the Nineteenth Century Let the whole field of reality be laid open to (1855; published originally as lite Great Lawsuit, woman as well as to man, and then that which 1843) by Margaret Fuller (1 810-1850), an Amer-is peculiar in the mental modification, instead of ican essayist and editor whom Eliot warmly being, as it is now, a source of discord and repuladmired. sion between the sexes, will be found to be a As Barbara Hardy notes, despite "her generous necessarv complement to the truth and beautv sympathy with Victorian feminism," George Eliot of life. "played no active part in the movement." Eliot

2. Tennyson's The Princess 7.253�58. As noted by seems to have shared the view of women's relation

Thomas Pinney, the quotation, slightly inaccurate,

to men expressed by the Prince in Alfred, Lord

is from the unrevised 1847 text of the poem. See

Tennyson's 77ie Princess (1847), whose speeches

the passage containing these lines ["The woman's

she cites in this essay. As she herself wrote in i 854

cause is man's"], p. 1136.

in another essay, "Women in France":

3. I.e., the original version published in The Dial; Women became superior in France by being it was revised and expanded in 1855.

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1 338 / GEORGE ELIOT

loftiness of moral tone, is not at all disadvantageous to the woman of the last

century. There is in some quarters a vague prejudice against the Rights of

Woman as in some way or other a reprehensible book, but readers who go to

it with this impression will be surprised to find it eminently serious, severely

moral, and withal rather heavy�the true reason, perhaps, that no edition has

been published since 1796, and that it is now rather scarce. There are several

points of resemblance, as well as of striking difference, between the two books.

A strong understanding is present in both; but Margaret Fuller's mind was like

some regions of her own American continent, where you are constantly step

ping from the sunny "clearings" into the mysterious twilight of the tangled

forest�she often passes in one breath from forcible reasoning to dreamy

vagueness; moreover, her unusually varied culture gives her great command

of illustration. Mary Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, is nothing if not

rational; she has no erudition, and her grave pages are lit up by no ray of fancy.

In both writers we discern, under the brave bearing of a strong and truthful

nature, the beating of a loving woman's heart, which teaches them not to

undervalue the smallest offices of domestic care or kindliness. But Margaret