Overcoming Fragmentation in Summer on the Lakes

Abstract

In narrating her journey westward in Summer on the Lakes, Margaret Fuller confronted fragmentation on a variety of levels, from the anxiety of writing to the unstable nature of individual consciousness to shattering effects that Anglo-American settlers were producing upon the native societies on the frontier. Fuller responded to these disjunctures, not by trying to impose an artificial unity, but by weaving the theme of fragmentation and incompleteness into her book. In Summer on the Lakes, Fuller deliberately resists the expectations of form, presenting self, society, and the text itself as fragments and thus confirming that consciousness, country, and narrated experience can be accurately understood only in terms of their innate contradictions.