RT Article
T1 The Redemption of Matter: Margaret Fuller’s Fluid Ethics
JF Journal for the study of religion, nature and culture
VO 16
IS 3
SP 350
OP 369
A1 Putnam, Michael C. J. 1933-
LA English
PB Equinox Publ.
YR 2022
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1837134693
AB Despite her biographical proximity to figures such as Emerson and Thoreau, the nineteenth-century writer and editor Margaret Fuller is not often considered an environmentalist. Indeed, she is more often remembered for her contributions to political feminism than to environmentalism. I argue that in Fuller’s writing, however, an environmental ethics emerges in conjunction with her questioning of the binary between ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’. In place of this binary, Fuller proposed fluidity. This is evidenced in her first book, Summer on the Lakes, a literary travelogue chronicling Fuller’s journey through the West. With recourse to theoretical concerns in feminist new materialisms, I first demonstrate how her understanding of fluidity was influenced by the nineteenth-century vitalist theory of animalmagnetism. I then turn to the ways that Fuller takes her encounters with the West’s watery sites—its waterfalls, rivers, and lakes—as occasions to articulate an anticolonial environmental ethics.
K1 Margaret Fuller
K1 Ecofeminism
K1 New Materialism
K1 Nineteenth Century
K1 Religion and literature
K1 Transcendentalism
DO 10.1558/jsrnc.23069