The Great Lawsuit

An allusion is a literary device used to indirectly bring something to mind, without explicitly mentioning it. Fuller makes frequent allusions to historical figures (Queen Elizabeth, Isabella of Castile), characters from Greek mythology (Orpheus, Cassandra), fellow thinkers and writers (Schiller, Goethe), and pioneering women she admires (Mary Wollstonecraft, Angelina Grimke). She also uses Biblical lessons and imagery to illustrate important points and tie her arguments to spiritual concepts, in keeping with her identity as a transcendentalist thinker.

A dialogue is a literary device in which a writer employs two or more characters to be engaged in conversation with one another. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” is a famous example of this technique. In “The Great Lawsuit,” Fuller uses this strategy, in Paragraphs 23 through 30, by placing her own viewpoint in conversation with that of a character she calls the sorrowful trader. This opponent insists that he knows his wife well, so he should speak on her behalf. He adds that he is entitled to do so as the head of the house. Fuller counters that God has given the wife a mind of her own, and that the sorrowful trader is not her head.