A key difference between Martineau’s Society in America and Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present is that while Martineau’s piece calls for progressive reforms, Carlyle instead advocates for the return to medieval values and practices. In Martineau’s essay, she uses modern examples to argue for women’s suffrage. She begins her essay, for example, with the argument that the Declaration of Independence cannot really derive its powers from the consent of the governed if women do not have the power to vote or create laws. In addition, she alludes to the works of her contemporaries such as Thomas Jefferson and James Mills, figures who had become the faces of democracy, to imply that a democracy without women is not a democracy at all.

On the other hand, Thomas Carlyle bases his piece on illusions to medieval concepts of nobility, and romanticized images of struggles between the rich and the poor that almost seem out of a picture book. For example, in his opening, he speaks of “serene highnesses and majesties” which make his own anti-democratic stance more bent on the past than the future. In his piece, he is advocating for an aristocracy that does not include women or the working class. While he wishes for prosperity for the working class, he also believes that they are not capable of controlling their own futures and success. In his piece, he says, “But oppression by your Mock-Superiors well shaken off, the grand problem yet remains to solve: That of finding government by your Real-Superiors!” Here, Carlyle is not proposing an equal society like Martineau is, but is advocating for a society run by what he perceives to be noble heroes.

George Eliot’s essay, “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft,” provides an interesting account on how we define the word “nature.” She uses this term in a descriptive sense. For instance, she depicts how Fuller’s appeal for the removal of unjust laws forced upon women makes it so that “her nature may have room for full development.” In this regard, nature is referring to her state of being. By removing these unjust laws, she can begin to reform who she is and gain a stronger will. Additionally, she praises both authors for their “strong and truthful nature.” Thus, she is commending their strength as people for writing their ideas on womanhood and how they are being treated unequally in society, even though many people may criticize them for it. She also admires Fuller’s redefining of “woman’s nature.” Again, this use of the term is attributing to what makes up a woman and her sense of self. Overall, Eliot’s use of nature is a term for illustrating the character of the individual and who he or she is as a person.

In contrast, Thomas Carlyle uses the term “nature” in a different sense within Past and Present. He has a more abstract definition when mentioning the term. For example, when describing Willelmus Conquestor he recounts that he was “provided by nature” and that he “by no means felt himself doing nature’s work.” Noticeably, the term isn’t referencing the nature of who someone is or describing their character, which is how Eliot writes of nature. Carlyle presents the term as more of an abstract idea that allows nature to stand more on its own and doesn’t pertain to a particular person. Along with this, one interpretation of his use of nature is that Carlyle is suggesting that nature is almost like a higher power; when comparing people and nature, people are more like pawns who work to perfect society by the orders of nature. Notably, he also specifies that it is necessary for nature to bring in her people of a higher social standing to lead the rest of society. Again, he is indicating that nature is a being itself when referring to it as “her.”

Therefore, these authors have a contrasting view on what nature is and how to use the term. Eliot uses it to pertain to the character of a person, while Carlyle portrays it to be separate from the person and makes it its own being. As a result, this provides an enlightening discussion on the various interpretations of the word.

George Eliot, in his writing “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft,” poses a quandary that was debated in his time: “On one side we hear that woman’s position can never be improved until women themselves are better; and, on the other, that women can never become better until their position is improved.” Advocates against women’s rights claimed that women had not showcased enough worth to be given a more influential position in society. Women’s rights advocates claimed that this potential could hardly be reached within the current structure of society, which shoved women into narrow, often dismissed roles. Martineau calls this construct imposed upon women “the sphere of a woman” and states that in its current understanding and implementation into society, it is a set of rules created by men to bind women into what they deem as “proper.” Ideally, Martineau thinks that “the sphere of a woman” should be redefined to be not a distinction of man, but one of God. According to him, men should not decide the potential of any human being; that is the domain of God and thus cannot be restricted by any cultural or political constraint. That said, Martineau would likely agree with Eliot that women should be given the same rights as men, in order that they can fulfill their potential to the greatest extent.

In Thomas Carlyle’s Captains of Industry, government is brought up a lot in the first few paragraphs. In summary, it states how government can help but cannot do it all, and how government is a direct symbol of the people. My first thoughts while reading the assigned passages for Tuesday were woman and gender roles. I tied this to Carlyle’s excerpt because of the connecting aspect “government”. Specifically in this weeks readings, how women were treated under the government, as Marineau speaks a lot about. The governments actions were unfair and unjust towards women. It is clear that the principle of equal rights stemmed from the governmental authority and people the women didn’t have much influence over it. Harriet Marineau’s voice in this piece discusses discriminatory ways women were treated and emphasizes that freedom was her right that she was not collecting on. Mill speaks on government in Martineau’s piece when he sates, “one thing is pretty clear; that all those individuals, whose interests are involved in those of other individuals, may be struck off without inconvenience…In this light, women may be regarded, the interest of almost all of whom is involved, either in that of their fathers or in that of their husbands.” Gender roles is something we talked about discussing early on in class with Victorian Literature, so it is interesting to start to see the small pattern between pieces come to light. Here, women representation is being dictated be men. I am interested to see the themes of equality overall, not just with regard to women of this time, but also race, as we spoke about race aspects in Thomas Carlyles Democracy reading.

While consuming and considering the assigned readings for this past weekend, my mind was constantly searching for connections between last week’s readings and the texts before me. While I observed many glimmers of possible connections I could make between the two sets of texts, I was most struck by George Eliot’s discussion of how best to mend the position of women in society, and, more generally, how to mend society as a whole. Eliot writes that “there is a perpetual action and reaction between individuals and institutions; we must try and mend both little by little” (Eliot, 7) and goes on to state that this is the only definitive way in which human beings and their creations can be mended.

This idea of mending immediately made me think back to Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, a work whose title translates to “the tailor retailored.” Thanks to the research that Group 6 completed last week, I have a better understanding of the significance of Carlyle’s title and his stance on the idea of mending society. Through their insightful unpacking of Carlyle’s clothing metaphor, I came to interpret Sartor Resartus as a work that urges individuals and institutions to make new clothing and that rejects the notion of “mending.” However, upon reading further works of Carlyle’s, I began to doubt the legitimacy of his radical belief, and now align his views with Eliot’s, who seems to use the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller as platforms upon which he bolsters his own views. Indeed, through my reading of Carlyle’s Past and Present, I realized that Carlyle, like Eliot, advocates for steady, small changes that will more or less preserve the existing social order by preserving the presence of arguably damaging hierarchies within society.

I look forward to discussing in class whether or not Fuller and Wollstonecraft actually argued for the “little by little” mending which Eliot and Carlyle both seem to adamantly support. Being that I have not read either Fuller or Wollstonecraft’s works, I think it will be interesting to see if their ideas were, in fact, more radical than Eliot perceives and manipulates them to be within his review. Should their views be accurately represented by Eliot, I am lead to wonder: was this a mechanism by which each respective author was able to garner any support at all, due to the way in which women were viewed and treated during the Victorian period?

At a first glance, Martineau’s discussion on the lack of political power for women appears very different from Carlyle’s revelations in finding euphoric closure after a long conversion. But, both Carlyle and Martineau’s ideas can be linked together through John Locke. The “consent of the governed” that Martineau discusses, comes directly from Locke’s Second Treatsie where Locke tries to argue against the divine right of kings, the belief that the king’s bloodline and right to rule comes directly from God. Carlyle babbles on about “the beginning of Creation being Light” and “the Son of Man” and other religious references. One might assume here that Locke and Martineau are on one side supporting government and Carlyle favoring religion on the other. However, an argument for a strict dichotomy between Locke and Martineau’s discussions on government and Carlyle’s narrative involving religion, is simply inaccurate. Locke was not anti-God or anti-Christian, he simply wanted to reframe the mindset on where political power derives from, he still believed in God. Locke argues for a “better government,” but doesn’t specifically endorse equality between all genders, just all property-owning men. The ideas that Martineau grew her argument off of, were created by a man whose beliefs about religion and the role of men align far closer to Carlyle than Martineau. So while Carlyle and Martineau’s discussions on the surface seem different, where they are grown from is a similar source.

While reading the assigned works for Tuesday, I was particularly drawn to Harriet Martineau’s Society in America as she discusses the role of women in a democratic society. As Martineau notes, women did not have a role. Women did not have a say in how the government was run because they were not recognized as people who could have a say in anything, only men did. Martineau talks about how the Declaration of Independence says that the government gets its’ powers from the consent of the governed yet women do not even have the ability to give their consent to be governed. She then brings up what James Mill says in regard to representation in which he says, “In this light, women may be regarded, the interest of almost all of whom is involved, either in that of their fathers or in that of their husbands” meaning that men can say what women can and cannot do.

A connection can be made to what Thomas Carlyle says in Past and Present. Carlyle says, “…every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government”. When Carlyle says this, he is saying that the government is a reflection of the people they serve and that it will only be as good as the people who the government is serving want it to be. When connecting this back to what Mill says, Mill was certainly not the only person who thought that women did not need the right to vote and could be represented by their male relations. This is reflected in the government that was put in place that Martineau is speaking out against. If people who had a voice in what the government did(men) were not speaking up for women to gain the right to vote, then why should the government do anything about it? It is because of these ideas that women in the United States were unable to vote until 1920.

In SOCIETY IN AMERICA, Harriet Martineau brought some issues that dealt with women’s rights and lack of freedom in government laws, policies, and their own freedom. This passage mostly referred to the government vs. all women. However, this is a social construct between men and women as Thomas Carlyle describes the differences in social class and its order in society within his excerpts Sartor Resartus. These two themes are connected because it displays the rules of the world and society to have a dominant group and a subordinate group. The dominant group being the more ‘normalized’ or ‘superior’ to other groups. Leaving the subordinate group to fend for themselves or be treated as less equal and important.