Fuller scholars have begun to see that travel provided the impetus for much of her most important cultural criticism. In the nineteenth century many easterners saw frontier settlers, American Indians, and the urban poor as separate, as beings whose lives and interests were detached from their own. Highlighting the aestheticism of those who admired the "picturesque" beauty of the racially other or the poor, Fuller challenged her readers to become conscious of the ideological and social privileges that invested cultural otherness with such an allure.
Just as Fuller's feminist essays analyze the forces that had led to the objectification of women in American society, her travel writing examines the ways in which the objects of tourist attention were viewed as sources of pleasure or entertainment. At their root Fuller's travel texts dramatize a process of democratic acceptance in which many of the forgotten inhabitants of the United States make demands upon her readers' sympathy as individuals who cannot be easily pigeonholed or pushed away. When she traveled to Europe, Fuller extended her commitment to democracy to include French and Italian citizens laboring to overthrow forms of government that had deprived them of basic human rights.
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