Self-Reliant Women? Challenging and Adapting Emerson in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing

Abstract

This dissertation examines how three nineteenth-century women writers—Margaret Fuller, Fanny Fern, and Harriet Jacobs challenged, adapted, and expanded Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideal of self-reliance. While scholars have long recognized the gendered limitations of Emersonian Transcendentalism, existing criticism has not fully explored how each author’s version of religious skepticism enabled their particular revision of self-reliance. Through close textual analysis and historical contextualization, I argue that Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Fern’s Ruth Hall (1854), and Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) collectively transform self-reliance from an abstract, male-centered ideal into one that is lived, embodied, and relational. Fuller insists on removing structural barriers that obstruct women’s intellectual development; Fern demonstrates that economic independence is prerequisite to women’s autonomy; and Jacobs redefines self-reliance as communal, bodily and race-conscious. Reading these three texts together reveals how foundational American ideals can be reinterpreted to include marginalized voices, offering a more inclusive and intersectional perspective on individualism that expands beyond Emerson’s original framework. This dissertation will, I hope, contribute to the ongoing conversations about autonomy, identity, and systemic inequality by demonstrating that the revised self-reliance these women forged remains vital to contemporary debates on intersectionality and freedom.