Onto-Politics in Summer on the Lakes

Noble:The digressions in Margaret Fuller’s 1843 travelogue have often led readers to conclude that Summer on the Lakes disbelieves in its own genre. Fuller begins with the Thoreauvian premise that exposure to a “middle... [ view full abstract ]

Noble:

The digressions in Margaret Fuller’s 1843 travelogue have often led readers to conclude that Summer on the Lakes disbelieves in its own genre. Fuller begins with the Thoreauvian premise that exposure to a “middle landscape” could revitalize one’s perspective. But she repeatedly discovers that landscape already consumed and colonized—by her own expectations, by prose conventions that suture sublimity to the picturesque, and by white settlers stuck in familiar patterns of subjugation. In its later chapters, Summer turns to allegories for Fuller’s electric feminism, defenses of her affinity for mesmerism, and striking analogies between the conditions faced by frontier women and displaced native Americans. This paper tracks such shifts in Fuller’s prose experiment, which converts attempts at eco-mimesis to accounts of biopolitics. When her rivers and prairies arrive at the magnetism underlying an explicitly feminine genius, or when her speculative reveries contend with the everyday violence of settler colonialism, Fuller sketches a materialism that refuses transcendentalist obfuscations of particularity. Summer on the Lakes is noteworthy for traversing a gap thought to separate the mid-century adventures in ontology from reflections on the political situation of every embodied experience.