Beyond the sphere of Wollstonecraft studies, Mary, A Fiction (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798) typically receive scant attention. As if her novels had little intrinsic interest, most histories of the novel do not mention Wollstonecraft’s contributions to the genre, and until relatively recently Wollstonecraft scholars in a way have seemed to concur, largely ignoring the first and reading the last either as an extension of her biography or as a fictionalization of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. At first glance, some skepticism about Wollstonecraft’s contributions to the English novel seems only too reasonable. Although she became a woman of letters – “moralist” would probably have been the eighteenth-century term for her – Wollstonecraft’s career did not develop around a single genre. All of her works are of a piece in their very diversity, blending overlapping discourses of education, political commentary, travel literature, autobiography, moral philosophy, and fiction by turns, and while this makes for challenging and often bracing reading, it is also probably a little dizzying to audiences whose generic expectations are more straightforward, who expect novels to execute a well-managed plot or to unfold incrementally developing character. Moreover, like most women writers of the time, Wollstonecraft had little in the way of formal education and is not a remarkably deft writer, lacking the ease and fluency of novelists like Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, the dramatic flair of Elizabeth Inchbald, let alone the comprehensive mastery of narration, dialogue, and pacing of someone like Jane Austen. She mostly wrote topically and in haste, rarely polishing what she had done, and she did not even finish such major works as Rights of Woman, Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, and, of course, Wrongs of Woman. When we add to this the fact that Wollstonecraft’s articles for the Analytical Review and her arguments in Vindication of the Rights of Woman frequently decry the trashiness of novels, especially by women, and the fact that her own novel Mary characterizes them more or less as soft porn – “delightful substitutes for bodily dissipation” (M 1:8) – the case against a separate treatment of her work as a novelist seems sound.
But during the eighteenth century – and well beyond – novelists routinely decry their craft; indeed it is almost a matter of convention to do so (Jane Austen makes a serious and extended joke about this “ungenerous and impolitic custom” in the fifth chapter of Northanger Abbey), and accordingly we should not be put off. The fact is that novels are the very bookends of Wollstonecraft’s life as a writer, both pre- and post-dating her attempts at direct political intervention. She turns to the novel when she attempts to inaugurate her career in 1787, the year Mary was written,1 and to the novel again, after the disappointment of her political hopes in 1796, when she started Wrongs of Woman, dying a year later from complications resulting from childbirth before it was completed. The novel’s accessibility to authors lacking a classical education, its relatively wide public, and its formal suppleness made it a natural choice for an aspiring writer interested in treating the subjects of virtue, desire, education, genius, sociability, sensibility, and justice.
Although Godwin believed that Mary, A Fiction was enough “to establish the eminence of her genius” with “persons of true taste and sensibility”,2 late in her life Wollstonecraft seems to have felt less than proud of it. “As for my Mary,” she wrote her sister Everina in 1797, “I consider it as a crude production, and do not very willingly put it in the way of people whose good opinion, as a writer, I wish for; but you may have it to make up the sum of laughter” (Letters, 385). But the same “crudeness” that embarrassed the older Wollstonecraft evidently struck the younger author – who also wanted people’s good opinion as a writer – as a sort of proof of its merits as a ruggedly original work that bravely dared to depart from common practice. Mary, A Fiction is indeed a bold and suggestive novel that addresses the fundamental relationship of gender to the novel as a genre. In the Advertisement Wollstonecraft proposes to do something that had never been done before in novels, and her claim is stunning both in its simplicity and its ambition: to represent “the mind of a woman who has thinking powers” (M 1:8). Wollstonecraft’s audacity deserves some attention. She differentiates her (let’s face it) decidedly fledgling accomplishment in Mary not from that of forgettable and forgotten novels of her time, novels she would almost routinely deride in The Analytical Review, as Mitzi Myers shows here. Instead, she is saying that her achievement is better than what then were and still are the eighteenth century’s best most compelling novels, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison. The implication hardly needs spelling out: despite the memorable heroines of these novels and their enormous appeal to women and men alike, these novels somehow feature women who do not have “thinking powers” of their own, but rather (presumably) only feeling powers, sensibilities that bind them closely to approval and disapproval of their communities and thus circumscribe them as independent moral agents.
Mary, A Fiction is a daring and difficult novel, and I suspect many readers share my sense that it is often hard to figure out exactly what on earth the narrator and heroine are talking about. Why is this so? In 1787 Wollstonecraft herself stated that Mary “is a tale, to illustrate an opinion of mine, that a genius will educate itself.” Disdaining false modesty, she bluntly continued: “I have drawn from Nature” (Letters, p. 162). In this autobiographical novel, then, Wollstonecraft undertakes to show how an unusual and gifted woman learns to think and act for herself – through the solitary contemplation of the works of God in nature, through reading works of religious philosophy and later even medicine, through travel and through sociable intercourse with her two particular “friends” – and in the process she becomes one of “the chosen few” who “wish to speak for themselves, and not to be an echo” (M 1:5). The sometime high-blown, portentous quality of the prose shows us an author wishing to say what has never been said and so achieve a true grandeur. The epigraph printed on the title page of the novel — “L’exercise des plus sublime vertus éleve et nourrit le génie” [The exercise of her various virtues gave vigor to her genius3] – comes from Rousseau’s Lettres de deux amants (1761) and many have seen Rousseau’s novel about a hero’s education into personal as well as civic maturity, Emile, as the fictional prototype for Mary. But while Wollstonecraft’s debts to Rousseau are many, Wollstonecraft’s Advertisement disputes it. Here – and for the rest of her career – she is painfully aware that Rousseau himself would recoil from a woman like her heroine Mary, a woman who is indifferent to the cultivation of feminine charms and personal attractions, particularly as these are to be deployed in eliciting, taming, and socializing the erotic sentiments of men; a woman who is clearly idiosyncratic, intense, and autonomous rather than obliging, soft and softening, or domesticated; a woman who spends her time indulging in vatic utterances about complex subjects such as God, duty, sublimity, sensibility, and the afterlife. To be sure, Rousseau would not only disapprove of such a woman; he would also in all probability run away from her as fast as he could.
One important prototype for Mary was Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), a formative influence generally overlooked by scholars who read Wollstonecraft exclusively as a Jacobin writer and in the process confine her literary horizons solely to the period of the 1790s.4 Wollstonecraft met Samuel Johnson in 1784, the year he died, and she demonstrably had his quasi-oriental tale on her mind during this period, for she engaged and reworked it in her fragment “The Cave of Fancy,” begun and abandoned in 1787: “Ye who expect constancy where every thing is changing, and peace in the midst of tumult, attend to the voice of experience, and mark in time the footsteps of disappointment” (CF 1:191). Likewise beginning with an admonitory “Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and persue with eagerness the phantoms of hope,” Rasselas features a group of male and female protagonists impelled by their desire for happiness to escape from the prison of their coddled community in the Happy Valley, and together to survey and discuss the modes of life best able to promote durable happiness – the life of philosophy, of pleasure, of retirement, of marriage, of celibacy, of religious devotion, etc. – only to terminate in “A Conclusion in which nothing is concluded,” human desire being fundamentally incommensurate with the possibilities for satisfaction. Describing her novel as an “artless tale, without episodes,” Wollstonecraft similarly takes her heroine from her sheltered life into the wide world without much attention to conventional plotting, along the way endowing her with grave Rasselasian reflections galore (e.g., “only an infinite being could fill the human soul, and that when other objects were followed as a means of happiness, the delusion led to misery, the consequence of disappointment” [M 1:16]. Yet in neither Johnson’s tale nor Wollstonecraft’s is this abstruse but conventional-sounding moral used as a club to beat down the desire for happiness and teach stoic resignation instead. Written within a Lockean tradition of liberal psychology which stresses how we are actuated by the desire for happiness, Rasselas licenses the restlessness of desire that sends its thoughtful protagonists roaming beyond the confines of what has been proscribed for them, even as it acknowledges that happiness is not available here below, and the gender neutrality of this account of human motivation appealed to Wollstonecraft. Eschewing the marriage plot, Rasselas represents women and men similarly impelled by the desire for happiness and as equally capable of reflection upon it. Mary taps into Rasselas, then, to support the philosophic voice of its narrator and heroine, and to authorize the dignity Wollstonecraft solicits for her thwarted thinking heroine.
In de-orientalizing Rasselas, and transforming it into a work with greater claims to realism, Wollstonecraft is attempting something highly experimental, and this shows in the unusualness of her subtitle: a fiction. “Novel,” “romance,” “tale,” or “history” would be likelier generic terms than “fiction” to designate prose narrative of this length. But Wollstonecraft refuses them, because their conventions implicate women in desires she resists. But as we shall see, the promise of gender neutrality Wollstonecraft gets from Rasselas is not fully sustainable. Throughout this text, the heroine appears superior in part because the objects of her desires are not fully intelligible and namable, and not readily conformable to the plots that typically describe women and literally inscribe them into narrative. Disentangling the relation of gender and genre is thus one of the central objectives of Mary, A Fiction. No sooner does the “fiction” open than it launches into a stinging attack on Mary’s novel-reading mother Eliza, an attack which foregrounds the problem of desire for women in particular. As Mary Poovey has put it in a critique that bears as much on Wrongs of Woman, or Maria as it does on Mary, Wollstonecraft sets out to challenge the delusoriness of “romantic expectations” that trivialize women and invite them to desire the wrong things, only herself to be seduced by versions of those expectations which her own writing reproduces.5 Mary, A Fiction does indeed begin with an effort of dissociation that it cannot keep up indefinitely, but the “romantic expectations” the novel eventually indulges aren’t exactly identical to those it initially assails, but have been somewhat recast and transformed.
Eliza is Wollstonecraft’s typical romantic heroine familiar to any reader of the period’s sentimental fiction: fatuous, insipid, and unthinking. Along with her unreflective acceptance of the ways of the world, Eliza’s asthenia is marked out for particular abuse. What with her “sickly die-away languor,” it is no wonder her earthy husband prefers the “ruddy glow” of his female tenants to his wife’s pallor, “which even rouge could not enliven” (M 1:7). Like her mind, her voice is “but the shadow of a sound” and her body so delicate “that she became a mere nothing” (M 1:7). While Eliza may think of herself as sensitive and elevated, her sentiments have actually debased and denaturalized her desires – which we see in her inappropriate attachment to her lapdog, her indifference to maternal responsibilities, and above all in her fondness for novels such as The Platonic Marriage (1787) and Eliza Warwick (1777), which in idealizing romance, lead her peevishly to blame her admittedly coarse husband because he does “not love her, sit by her side, squeeze her hand, and look unutterable things” (M 1:9) the way heroes do in novels.
Mary, A Fiction, we are to understand by implication, will not be the kind of novel that caters to the thwarted sexual desires of female readers such as the heroine’s mother, Eliza. At first glance, however, Wollstonecraft does not appear to make good on this claim. Like her mother, Mary too searches “for an object to love” (M 1:11) in a heartless world that affords her little affective sustenance; she too is forced to marry a man to whom she is indifferent, and she too has a yearning for an illicit love. And the “die-away languor” that is supposed to be contemptible when it characterizes the mother somehow appears “interesting” and attractive when it characterizes other characters whom Mary adores. And finally, like her mother, Mary attempts to satisfy frustrated desire through fantasy – “tales of woe” (M 1:11) in Mary’s case, and through sentimental novels in Eliza’s. And yet, despite these close similarities to her mother, Mary finds herself in the grip of desire which, far from being the wearisomely hackneyed stuff of popular fiction, is unable to speak its name at all. Mary first turns to Ann “to experience the pleasure of being beloved” (M 1:13). This is no ordinary friendship, we gather. In their relationship Mary is coded as masculine (agentive, sublime) while Ann is stereotypically feminine in the “die-away” delicacy she shares with Eliza. True, Mary is disappointed to discover that Ann does not reciprocate the fullness and intensity of her passion: Ann feels only “gratitude” in return. But this disappointment does not quell Mary’s love. She still “loved Ann better than any one in the world” and dreams: “To have this friend constantly with her . . . would it not be superlative bliss?” (M 1:20).
The eighteenth century of course did have a term for women’s passionate attachment to each other. The boy to whom Mary is yoked in marriage uses it when he refers to it as “romantic friendship” (M 1:25). This licit category grants passionate attachments between women some visibility, to be sure, but at the same time nervously divests them of significance. Young Charles’s reliance upon it demonstrates his vulgarity. He tolerates Mary’s “romantic friendship” because he cannot imagine that could possibly rival Mary’s sentiments towards himself. For her own part, Mary does not describe her relation to Ann as a “romantic friendship,” and part of the real interest of the novel derives from the fact that the prose seems to dissolve under the stress of having to describe this relation at all. The narrator frequently and explicitly denies that Mary’s love for Ann is the sort of passion a woman might feel for a man. But denial often implies the presence of something to be denied, and sometimes the very gaps in Wollstonecraft’s prose seem to open up and afford space to the unspeakable, and as such have an uncanny brilliance all their own. For example, when Ann’s mother urges Mary to care for her daughter, Mary’s father intrudes to carry her home to marry a boy-groom in order to solve a property dispute and to please her dying mother in one swoop. As Mary emerges from the state of shock in which this sudden news throws her,
a thousand [thoughts] darted into her mind, – her dying mother, – her friend’s miserable situation, – and an extreme horror at taking – at being forced to take, such a hasty step; but she did not feel the disgust, the reluctance, which arises from a prior attachment.
She loved Ann better than any one in the world – to snatch her from the very jaws of destruction – she would have encountered a lion.
(M 1:20)
Notice that in this relatively early effort of free indirect discourse, Mary does not register that her love for Ann, imperfect and not even fully reciprocated though it is, has something to do with her aversion to marriage: the dashes elide this connection as well as advertise it as something repressed, unrealized. Her love for Ann can not be understood as a “prior attachment” because only men are signified by that phrase. After Mary willy-nilly gets written into a marriage plot, pronouncing “the awful [marriage] vow without thinking of it” (M 1:20), Ann is not merely tolerated but actively sought as a companion by Mary’s father precisely because she has no official status as a significant attachment.
As Mary, A Fiction continues, the impossibility of articulating Mary’s attachment becomes more conspicuous. The friendship of Ann and Mary is repeatedly distinguished from the sexual – “I mentioned before,” the narrator writes, “that Mary had never had any particular attachment, to give rise to the disgust [for her husband] that daily gained ground” (M 1:25). Mary herself concedes that her devotion to Ann needs to be accounted for, so she asks that her husband permit her to travel to Portugal with Ann on the grounds that she takes a “maternal” interest in her health (M 1:25). Yet as if, on the one hand, these disclaimers had never been made, and because, on the other, they have, the unaccountability slips out in unguarded moments. In one of the few truly dramatic passages in the novel, Mary, distraught about Ann’s imminent death, rushes to her traveling companions for help:
The ladies . . . began to administer some common-place comfort, as, that it was our duty to submit to the will of Heaven, and the like trite consolations, which Mary did not answer; but waving her hand, with an air of impatience, she exclaimed, “I cannot live without her! – I have no other friend; if I lose her, what a desart will the world be to me.” “No other friend,” re-echoed they, “have you not a husband?”
Mary shrunk back, and was alternately pale and red. A delicate sense of propriety prevented her from replying; and recalled her bewildered reason.
(M 1:32)
The precise cause of the embarrassment that makes Mary blanch and blush by turns is hard to fathom: is it the impropriety of her indifference to her husband, or is it the impropriety of her desperate attachment to her dying friend? The silly ladies dismayed by Mary’s grief are linked to her silly husband through their allegiance to the “common-place” (the worst insult in Wollstonecraft’s lexicon), for it was he who indulged in dismissive and “commonplace remarks on [Mary’s] romantic friendship” (M 1:20) to begin with.
As Ann wanes into death, Henry waxes into Mary’s affections, and this tale of forbidden and unnarratable passionate friendship becomes a tale of forbidden but narratable adulterous love. Yet Mary’s desire for Henry also resists articulation in conventional terms. First of all, despite the fact that Henry’s certifiably masculine and expansive mind expands Mary’s smaller one, his manners and sensitivity are feminine, and (as is the case with Ann) have the effect of immasculating Mary by comparison,: his “voice” is “musical” and his expression “elegant” (M 1:28); his disposition “gentle, and easily to be intreated” (M 1:33). Styling himself a “die-away swain” (M 1:41), he has all the earmarks of the decaying sentimental heroine “disappointed” (M 1:41) in love that litter the pages of eighteenth-century novels – heroines such as Maria’s own mother, Eliza (whose “die-away” languor the narrator scorns, however [M 1:7]), and, of course, Ann. Like Ann, he has given his heart to a lover “not worthy of my regard” (M 1:40), only to become so crushed that he is “dead to the world,” now awaiting his “dissolution” (M 1:40). Like Ann again, he offers Mary “friendship” (M 1:41) which is something more than a friendship, lives with his mother, and becomes intimate with Mary through the license permitted by the sick-bed.
If Henry’s gender-ambiguity complicates the nature of Mary’s desire for him, so too do the terms in which he describes and she responds to it, which are hardly straightforward. Looking at Mary, Henry asks “in the most insinuating accents,”
. . . if he might hope for her friendship? If she would rely on him as if he was her father; and that the tenderest father could not more anxiously interest himself in the fate of a darling child, than he did in her’s.
(M 1:41)
The narrator very subtly but unmistakably makes it clear that Henry is attempting to seduce Mary: “He had exerted himself to turn her thoughts into a new channel, and had succeeded” (M 1:41). He succeeds in part because for Mary “friendship” is an ecstatically if obscurely charged word. The narrator steps in to observe that Mary did not “know that love and friendship are very distinct” (M 1:42); indeed, for Mary, though evidently not for Henry it appears, love and friendship are not distinct at all. The desire Mary finds herself feeling for Henry is striking and powerful precisely because it blurs so many distinctions at once:
she thought of him till she began to chide herself for defrauding the dead, and, determining to grieve for Ann, she dwelt on Henry’s misfortunes and ill health . . . she thought with rapture that there was one person in the world who had an affection for her, and that person she admired – had a friendship for.
He had called her his dear girl . . . My child! His child, what an association of ideas! If I had a father, such a father! – She could not dwell on the thoughts, the wishes which obtruded themselves. Her mind was unhinged, and passion unperceived filled her whole soul.
(M 1:41–2)
What makes Wollstonecraft’s prose throughout Mary so difficult is that her subjects seem so unbounded, so beyond the pale of the ordinary that they are buried in multiple references that are as haunting and nebulous to the character as they are to the reader. Who precisely is the “dead” person Mary fears she is defrauding, for instance? On one hand it is the beloved Ann, whom Mary guiltily feels she is betraying when she responds so powerfully to Henry’s erotic allure. But just as Mary herself had earlier described her own interest in Ann as “maternal” (M 1:25), Henry (ingenuously or disingenuously) describes his sentiment for Mary as paternal – and as a result the “dead” person Mary fears she is defrauding also refers to Mary’s own miserable father. And finally, of course, since Mary also expresses a rapturous relation to her heavenly “Father” (M 1:26) and “Almighty Friend” (M 1:27), God Himself gets mixed up in the nexus of overlapping and not fully distinguishable desires Mary experiences here. The point is not that Mary is confused, or that she is deceiving herself or being deceived. She comes to us as a rare woman with thinking powers after all, and this means that she is impelled by yearnings that are extraordinary, expansive, tinged with the sublime and therefore not fully speakable or intelligible. Indeed, as in other classics of sentimental fiction such as Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768) and Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771), here sensitive characters again and again forebear to speak, and it is assumed that the most authentic and deeply felt sentiments shrink from the publicity of speech or print, and are therefore to be sought in the dashes or asterisks or silences. Only common – and therefore unworthy – things can be said starkly, and only shallow worldings chatter.
After Ann’s death, as she decides whether to return to the husband she loathes or take up with the man she loves, Mary contemplates being inscribed onto conventional, if illicit or tormented, plots: “One moment she was a heroine, half-determined to bear whatever fate should inflict; the next, her mind would recoil–and tenderness possessed her whole soul” (M 1:64). One minute, in other words, Mary is a character in a novel that has already been written, a “Clarissa, a Lady G–, or a Sophie,” an exemplary woman whose body has been disciplined in the sentimental tradition, and the next she is a woman who possesses a “mind” with “thinking powers” and who dares to think for herself and choose uncommon, transgressive desire. But Mary resists the pull of all plots. Her ministrations to a poor, sick, and ungrateful woman follow the trajectory of the friendship narrative, and when we see Mary recoil from drunken prostitutes – “the manner of those who attacked the sailors, made her shrink into herself, and exclaim, are these my fellow creatures” (M 1:48) – she is thinking about the grossness of the primal scene toward which the romantic narrative with Henry leads her. Eventually, Mary seems to become a romantic novel rather than a successful experimental fiction, for Mary sinks into hyper-femininity at the end after all. One letter from Henry makes her a lovesick girl: just as Ann had been monomaniacal in the recollection of the man she loved – playing the “tunes her lover admired, and handl[ing] the pencil he taught her to hold” (M 1:18) – Mary too turns obsessive: “To beguile the tedious time, Henry’s favorite tunes were sung; the books they read together turned over; and the short epistle read at least a hundred times” (M 1:62).
Thus by novel’s end, the singular, uncommon Mary appears to become absorbed into utterly commonplace narrative about blasted romantic love as experienced by sensitive souls; she seems, in other words, to become divested of her thinking powers. But the very same conventions that seem to coopt her also save her. Sentimental heroines typically die for their love, but Wollstonecraft delivers this commonplace of sentimental narrative with a twist. After Henry’s death, Mary honors his wish that she fulfill her “destined course” as Charles’s wife. But her body revolts: Mary faints when her husband approaches, and whenever he mentions “anything like love, she would instantly feel a sickness, a faintness in her heart, and wish, involuntarily, that the earth would open and swallow her” (M 1:72). Mary is a wife at last, but ordinary domesticity is entirely forestalled. In becoming the heroine of a love story, Mary gets a “die-away” body, but her death becomes an exit from an intolerable narrative. Mary, A Fiction, its heroine, and its plot finally give way to the categories of gender and genre without really giving into them. For like the conclusion of Rasselas, which looks forward to eternity as the only venue for durable happiness, Mary concludes by looking forward to another, better world where a woman’s desire is not trammeled by the compulsory love plot, a world “where there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage” (M 1:73, emphasis Wollstonecraft’s). In a gesture both visionary and proto-radical, the last words of Wollstonecraft’s first novel yearn for the annihilation of the marriage plot, where that plot is understood both as a sort of conspiracy that seduces and traps women, and as a literary structure that can mis-describe and mis-shape their desires in the novels women read.
While the preface to Mary, A Fiction introduces Mary as a “mind” with “thinking powers” and who therefore requires a different kind of literary work, in the preface to The Wrongs of Woman, or, Maria Wollstonecraft seems to have no problem in referring to her text as a “novel,” and she links it to the female body while refusing to consider this as a pathology or defect: this novel originates in the specificity of womanhood, and it is not an “abortion of distempered fancy” or the ravings of a “wounded heart” (WWM 1:83). We first encounter Maria as a female body – abused in its uniquely female sentiments (Maria is “tortured by maternal apprehension” for the child wrested from her), and hindered in its uniquely female physical functions (Maria’s breasts are “bursting with the nutriment for which this cherished child might now be pining in vain” [WWM 85]). The change in genre – from experimental “fiction” to novel pure and simple – corresponds to a change of heart and mind about gender, and to understand this change we need to consider the intervening polemical writings. Predating Wollstonecraft’s political coming-to-consciousness; Mary is a hermetic novel in part because it has no politics, no wish to or grounds for generalizing her extraordinary heroine’s experience, no access to solutions in the public sphere that might apply to women as a whole. Given the aversion to debilitated sentimental femininity evinced in Mary, it is easy to see why the liberal feminism of Rights of Woman seemed promising and necessary. There, she would insist, virtue had no sex. But the subject of liberalism is always implicitly masculine, even when it touts its neutrality. For Wollstonecraft too at this stage, women should be encouraged to be manly – sturdy, rational, independent, and self-responsible. In the ideal republic, men and women would not be frivolous or purely private (as they are in Mary) but civic minded and purposive; they would be active citizens and busy parents. But however hopeful, the Rights of Woman was always fighting something of a lost cause, addressed not to reactionaries after all, but to political allies who, even before the Revolution degenerated into Terror, had already disappointed her by clinging to demeaning notions of sexual difference. When we consider the failure of the French Revolution as well as the crushing derelictions of her fellow radical and lover Gilbert Imlay, who abandoned her and their child, we can imagine in what frame of mind Wollstonecraft reconsidered the question of femaleness and its relation to virtue. If Mary, A Fiction treats the female body and its desires as the problem to be overcome, and if the Rights of Woman assumes that it can be subsumed under masculinity, The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria begins to wonder whether the female body can be treated as a solution.
The plot of Wrongs of Woman retrospectively narrates Maria’s struggles with a typical unreclaimed male, in the person of her monstrous yet also banal husband, George Venables, and also prospectively narrates Maria’s fragile and incomplete disenchantment with republican masculinity, in the person of Darnford. In the process, the plot also adumbrates hopes specific to women and their fellowship. This fellowship is important. While Mary came to us as a passionately if tragically sociable creature, one who lives for love, she is paradoxically isolated as well, for uncommonness is the absolute condition of her genius. One of the central rhetorical gestures of that novel, therefore, is invidious distinction, or contrast: time after time the narrator intervenes with defensive asides, telling us how her novel is different from and better than common sentimental novels, how Mary is different from, and better than, the common sort. The structure of The Wrongs of Woman, on the other hand, is incorporative and inclusive. Not only does it everywhere absorb and transform texts by Dryden, Rowe, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Johnson, Burney, Godwin, to name only a few – indeed its opening gestures is an extended, one-upping allusion to Radcliffean gothic – but its characteristic gesture is comparison. Here, we have not a heroine who is different, but one who is (alas) like all the other women we meet, “caught in a trap, and caged for life” (WWM 1:138).
Bringing the conventions of gothic fiction to bear on present-day England, The Wrongs of Woman opens with disorienting power in medias res. Maria has been immured in a decaying mansion which is at once a prison and a madhouse. As a prison, this mansion literalizes the condition of women across the kingdom: “Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?” (WWM 1:88). Maria herself avers, “Marriage had bastilled me for life . . . fettered by the partial laws of society, this fair globe was to me an universal blank” (WWM 1:146), and women have the same experience all the way the down the social ladder. At the first house where Maria seeks refuge from her husband, she discovers a haggard landlady who timorously avers, “when a woman was once married, she must bear every thing” (WWM 1:158), for her own drunken husband “would beat her if she chanced to offend him, though she had a child at the breast” (WWM 1:158). Maria’s second landlady bores and irks Maria with a story that follows the same outline, also foreshadowing Maria’s later experience before the court of law: having had no choice but to suffer the depredations of a husband who, under the protection of the law, pawns her clothes for whores and drink, she observes, “women always have the worst of it, when law is to decide” (WWM 1:165). Although these tales expose myths about domesticity, the case of Jemima is even worse. Having been raped and debauched of character and reputation since childhood, she is excluded from domestic service, and can only subsist through prostitution.
These episodes of The Wrongs of Woman, or, Maria, which construct a web of carceral imagery, flesh out the intention Wollstonecraft formulated in the letter Godwin made into the Preface of the novel: “to show the wrongs of different classes of women, equally oppressive, though, from the difference of education, necessarily various” (WWM 1:84). But Maria’s prison is also an insane asylum, and as such calls our attention to the complex issue of madness and delusion in the novel. Maria, after all, is a prisoner to her marriage but is also in a larger sense a prisoner to the delusoriness of love that chained her to Venables in marriage to begin with, a love that enchains her to Darnford as well. This enthralling delusion is conveyed through the pervasive allusions to Hamlet. Like Hamlet, Maria meditates upon the rottenness of the kingdom as she looks out her window upon a “desolate garden” gone to seed, at “a huge pile of buildings” fallen “to decay” and “left in heaps in the disordered court” (WWM 1:86). Recasting Hamlet’s famously misogynist “Frailty, thy name is woman,” Maria soliloquizes, “Woman, fragile flower! why were you suffered to adorn a world exposed to the inroad of such stormy elements?” (WWM 1:95), and the fragility she refers to is not women’s susceptibility to carnal appetite, but their lack of the material, legal, and personal resources necessary to withstand brutality: the Ophelia she contemplates is a fellow inmate–“a lovely maniac,” yet another womanly “warbler” singing in her cage – driven out of her mind by the brutish and “rich old man” to whom she was forcibly married “against her inclination” (WWM 1:95). And finally, like Hamlet Maria seems doomed to painful lucidity that makes her look like the crazy one in the corrupted and corrupting world she lives in. To the stern judge presiding not only over Maria’s case at the end of the novel – someone who represents and enforces the rules of established power, as distinct from genuine social justice – a woman’s refusal of her husband’s conjugal rights on the grounds that her erotic feelings are equally legitimate smacks of insurrectionary “French principles,” of “new-fangled notions” inimical to the “good old rules of conduct,” and at the same time that refusal marks her as someone who is not “of sane mind” (WWM 1:181) and therefore not entitled to the autonomy she claims as her right.
The “narrative” (WWM 1:145) which Maria writes for her daughter’s edification is calculated to prove just the opposite: to show that Maria was insane when she fell in love with her husband, not when she fell out of love with him. Maria describes her initial attraction to George Venables as a projection onto him of the virile qualities she herself possesses in greater abundance. He effectively “buys” Maria, when he contributes a guinea (the currency not coincidentally minted with the gold mined from Africa and linked to the slave trade) to Maria’s charitable projects on behalf of an old woman, she believes him the soul of excellence: “I fancied myself in love–in love with the disinterestedness, fortitude, generosity, dignity, and humanity, with which I had invested the hero I dubbed” (WWM 1:127). Wollstonecraft’s hostile reader at The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine maintained that since Maria had erroneously “fancied him a miracle of goodness” in the first place, she should be reproaching her own silliness rather than carrying on about the “wrongs of woman.”6 And there is troubling evidence that Wollstonecraft’s own friends, like the stern judge, did not “get” the political point of Maria’s delusions. In a letter of 1797 to George Dyson, Wollstonecraft acknowledges the rawness of her sketch, but expresses dismay at Dyson’s opinion that Maria’s domestic unhappiness is not moving, and Wollstonecraft attributes this insensitivity to the fact that he is a male:
“I have been reading your remarks and I find them a little discouraging. . . . I was perfectly aware that some of the incidents ought to be transpossed [sic] and heightened by more harmonious shading; and I wished to avail myself of yours and Mr G’s criticism before I began to adjust my events into a story . . . yet I am vexed and surprised at your not thinking the situation of Maria sufficiently important, and can only account for this want of – shall I say it? delicacy of feeling by recollecting that you are a man”
(Letters: 391–2).
It is unfortunate but quite telling, given his tendency to cast his wife as a woman of feeling, that Godwin, who used much of the rest of this letter as a Preface to his edition of The Wrongs of Woman, or, Maria, published after Wollstonecraft’s death, actually omitted the contextualizing section quoted here. Wollstonecraft apologizes for Maria’s “sensibility” not because she is committed to fine feeling, but because even a well-disposed male reader failed “to be disgusted with him [Venables]!!!” and thus failed to understand why Maria gets upset. Such failure undermines the premise of the entire novel, that women as a class of persons are systematically “wronged.” Wollstonecraft’s entire point in protesting Maria’s situation as a political rather than merely personal wrong is that her delusion is hardly self-induced. In sentimental culture, no one considers it suspect to find the “beauty of a young girl . . . much more interesting than the distress of an old one” (WWM 1:130). Maria, of course, eventually sees that she was deluded to consider “that heart as devoted to virtue, which had only obeyed a virtuous impulse” (WWM 1:131) inspired by her erotic presence: he behaved well only because he wanted to get the girl.
Maria’s critique of what the world regards sane or insane about love continues as she defends the reasonableness of her revulsion from her husband. Refuting popular moralizers such as Dr. Gregory, author of the popular conduct book A Father’s Legacy to His Daughter (1774), as well as heterodox and controversial figures like Rousseau, she rejects the maxim that women should cultivate a “coldness of constitution,” and yield to the “ardour” of their husbands only occasionally and out of duty: both would concur with the judge at Maria’s trial: “What virtuous woman thought of her feelings? – It was her duty to love and obey the man chosen by her parents and relations” (WWM 1:131). Countering the position that sensible women anaesthetize their feelings, Wollstonecraft asserts women’s legitimacy as affective and erotic subjects. Mary’s revulsion from her husband in Mary emanates from a disgust so visceral as to appear pathological; but in Wrongs Maria’s revulsion seems an altogether rational, enlightened response to a man whose libertine habits she had been too benighted to recognize at first, and whose “tainted breath, pimpled face, and blood-shot eyes” (WWM 1:145) now appear as they in fact are: disgusting.
In a complex structural decision on Wollstonecraft’s part, the memoirs Maria writes for her daughter are withheld from the reader until chapters seven through ten, when Darnford reads them. By encountering the memoirs so late, by reading them just as the Darnford–Maria relationship develops, we are placed in a position to recognize how Maria’s love for him recapitulates the error she made with Venables, although here it is not the “happy credulity of youth” (WWM 1:131) that carries her forward but the urgency of sexual desire itself. In Rights of Woman, “voluptuousness” is a pejorative, particularly when denoting the culpable sensuality of male vice. But in Wrongs of Woman Wollstonecraft accepts Maria’s “voluptuousness” and claims that “it inspired the idea of strength of mind, rather than of body” (WWM 1:104), as if the manifestly (female) sexed substantiality of Maria’s body could heighten rather than detract from her dignity. Here, when the “air swept across her face with a voluptuous freshness that thrilled to her heart” (WWM 1:95) after Maria has been reading Rousseau’s sentimental novel, La Nouvelle Héloïse, in her cell, we side with the body and the instincts that seek to expand beyond the constraints that fetter them. And these instincts are decidedly heteroerotic. Mary finds a man as etiolated as Ann, but Maria fantasizes masculine virtues embodied in an almost hyper-virile man. Darnford’s doughty insistence – “I will have an answer” (WWM 1:98) – contrasts to Henry’s intense reserve, just as the force potency of his presence – “His steady step, and the whole air of his person, bursting as it were from a cloud” (WWM 1:96)” – contrasts with Henry’s retiring, die-away languor.
There is considerable disagreement among scholars and critics about the degree to which Wollstonecraft is consciously critiquing the Maria/Darnford relationship, some contending that the novel itself is unwittingly seduced by romance yet again, and others maintaining that it opens out a new space for critical distance.7 To a large extent, one’s interpretation depends on the kind and degree of narrative control one is willing to extend to Wollstonecraft as a novelist. To me, Wollstonecraft’s irony seems clear. When the narrator asks, “what chance had Maria of escaping” (WWM 1:104, emphasis added), we are being told that this love is yet another form of incarceration from which escape is as necessary as it is unlikely. What deludes Maria this time into casting her lover as “a statue in which she might enshrine” all “the qualities of a hero’s mind” (WWM 1:105)? The menace turns out to be republican ideology itself, something that was supposed to lead the entire world out of its prison of darkness. Maria reads Darnford’s composition about “the present state of society and government, with a comparative view of the politics of Europe in America” (WWM 1:93), and she is convinced that because his politics are progressive, his love will be different. Yet, while a man like Venables practices active deceit, Darnford’s narrative really says it all: it is a self-mystifying tale of intrepid, republican manhood, part self-pity (“I never knew the sweets of domestic affection” [WWM 1:100]) and part braggadocio (“with my usual impetuosity, [I] sold my commission, and travelled . . .” [WWM 1:101]). But the fact that Maria shares his political views makes her fatally deaf to Darnford’s ludicrously obnoxious account of himself. Maria was ignorant of Venable’s “habits of libertinism” (WWM 1:127), but Darnford makes it a point to brag about them: “And woman, lovely woman!” he boasts, “– they charm every where” (WWM 1:101). Worse, he brandishes his fancy for prostitutes: “the women of the town (again I must beg pardon for my habitual frankness) appeared to me like angels” [WWM 1:102]. But republican discourse having clothed what might formerly be damned as “libertine” grossness in the new garb fashioned of frankness, Maria sees his selfishness as admirable inservility, sees his impulsiveness as manly resoluteness and sees his gallantry as liberality, and as a result the ardent Maria is completely taken in, her judgment clouded. Obviously a rendering of Wollstonecraft’s experience with Imlay, the Darnford/ Maria episodes finally judge male culture to be so corrupt as to make reciprocity between the sexes impossible. Indeed, even before the concluding hints inform us that Darnford deserts Maria, the narrator unequivocally damns him: “A fondness of the sex often gives an appearance of humanity to the behaviour of men, who have small pretensions to the reality; and they seem to love others, when they are only pursuing their own gratification” (WWM 1:176).
The most disturbing proof that Maria’s love for Darnford is a form of derangement is her apathy upon learning that she is free to leave her prison: “[L]iberty has lost its sweets.” Maria imagines that in Darnford “she had found a being of celestial mould” (WWM 1:173) and feels too happy with her madhouse to leave. Significantly, it is Jemima rather than a lover who takes Maria out of her bedlam, and brings her back from death in the final provisional fragment. Maria’s attachment to Jemima is new in the history of the novel, and in representing a turn towards solidarity and affective community even with the most despised and unlovely of women, it suggests an alternative to the disastrousness of heterosocial relations.8 Here again Wollstonecraft’s manipulation of pacing and sequence is brilliant, repaying close attention. Just when we think we are going to get an idealized, even corny, love scene between Maria and Darnford, Jemima barges in, clearly unwanted, interrupting the panting lovers, and she commences a very long and brutal story that could chill anybody’s ardor. The conclusion of Jemima’s narrative binds her to Maria and pointedly leaves Darnford out. When Jemima accounts for her hard-heartedness by retorting, “Who ever risked any thing for me? – Who ever acknowledged me to be a fellow creature?” (WWM 1:119), Maria answers by taking her hand, and on the basis of this connection, Jemima proves the deliverer Maria insanely hoped Darnford would be.
This novel uses the common narrative device of inset tales which correct and broaden the heroine’s and the reader’s vision and which reflect on each other in illuminating ways. In narrating his tale, Darnford, for example, blunders when bragging/confessing, “I was taught to love by a creature I am ashamed to mention; and the other women with whom I afterwards became intimate, were of a class of which you can have no knowledge” (WWM 1:100–1). Had Darnford paid attention to Maria’s memoirs, which we know he has read, he would have learned as we have that he is quite wrong on this score, of course: Maria does know this “class” of “creature” – first as the “wantons of the lowest class” whose “vulgar, indecent mirth” roused the “sluggish spirits” (WWM 1:139) of her husband. Moreover, undercutting Darnford (who adores “women of the town” [WWM 1:102]) as well as Venables, Jemima’s story gives us a truer view about being, precisely, such a “creature.” Challenging tales about prostitutes as Maria, Venables, and Darnford have told them, Jemima’s experience exposes the truths concealed by ideologically loaded assumptions about and practices of female propriety and respectability,9 showing that prostitutes neither enjoy their work, nor pine for their heartless seducers, but are, like wives, an exploited class, despising the men on whom they are dependent. Similarly, when Maria herself heaps scorn upon “the savage female,” the “hag” (WWM 1:121) who takes over when Jemima temporarily leaves the asylum, we can see – even if Maria yet cannot – that this woman may simply be another Jemima, who has not yet been reached by human affection, and that Maria’s harsh epithets withhold them from emancipatory fellowship.10
As mothers and as daughters, Maria and Jemima share a blighted story, and their bond is based in a kindred warmth which they associate with motherhood. Representing romantic love as warped beyond the possibility of correction, Wrongs of Woman locates the “humanizing affections” in maternal nurturance instead.11 Permeated with images of nursing, the novel feminizes the imagery of natural blossoming Tom Paine used to characterize revolution as a natural and life-affirming process, the giving way of the wintery and withering old regime to the warmth and vitality of the new. In Wollstonecraft’s novel, this sort of revolution is in turn linked to the redemptive emergence of the mother – daughter relation: “The spring was melting into summer, and you, my little companion, began to smile – that smile made hope bud out afresh, assuring me the world was not a desert” (WWM 1:167). But it is not subjected and generic men, then, but hounded women with infant daughters at their nursing breasts who are the “tender blossoms” which ought to burst from their cells into the fullness of life. The radical Darnford is accessible to authentic moral feeling only to the extent that he mimics the maternal, as when “he respectfully pressed [Maria] to his bosom” (WWM 1:172). Conversely, “‘the killing frost’” (WWM 1:167, another allusion to Shakespeare) is not repressiveness with which privileged men of the old regime repress other men in general, but the very particular brutality with which patriarchal culture in post-revolutionary England severs women from each other: the frost that blasts Maria’s daughter, kidnapped from her mother by a father determined to get his hands on the property to which she is heir, has also already injured Maria (whose mother favored sons) as well as Jemima, whose “humanity had rather been benumbed than killed, by the keen frost she had to brave at her entrance into life” (WWM 1:120), in turn cutting her off from fellow feeling by making her unwilling in turn to “succour an unfortunate” like Maria (WWM 1:88).
Jemima and Maria repair their injuries in their relations to one another and in their joint relation to Maria’s daughter. Maria first dreams about Darnford partly because she wants her daughter to have “a father whom her mother could respect and love” (WWM 1:97). But as this fantasy of domesticity vanishes, Maria turns to Jemima not to take the father’s place but rather to double in the mother’s: “I will teach her to consider you as a second mother” (WWM 1:120). Allured by this promise, Jemima persuades Maria to leave the madhouse/prison with her because of the primary affective duty they owe each other. “[O]n you it depends to reconcile me to the human race” (WWM 1:174), she admonishes, as if the offer of co-mothering were a marriage vow binding even when they believe “their” daughter is dead. The household they set up is, as Gary Kelly has so aptly put it, “prefigurative” of a feminist solidarity it would take later generations to realize fully.12 It does not conceal the difficulty of class difference or entirely reinscribe gender as class: although Maria promises Jemima a position equal to her own – she is to be a “second mother” rather than a nurse or mammy – Jemima insists on the wages that insure her independence even as she would appear to collaborate as a co-mother. In the last fragment, when Maria is in agony, Jemima reappears with the lost daughter, whom she has tutored to say the magic word, “mamma!” (WWM 1:203). The word gives Maria something to live for beyond the romantic plot which has been inscribed for her. That child is treasured not because she is the progeny of a fickle but still-beloved male like Darnford, but, on the contrary, despite its relationship to the loathsome Venables. The daughter’s word “mamma” gives Jemima, her “second mother,” something to live for too, an arena for kindred affection not determined by biological kinship.
This is not a story which The Wrongs of Woman fully tells. The novel is in fragments. The dissolution of Maria’s relation with Darnford is hardly depicted at all, and her eventual independence does not appear to be voluntary. Clearly, Maria’s despondency is hardly overcome. Still, as Janet Todd has aptly put it, Maria’s history is thus marked by two movements, “one circular and repetitive, and the other linear and developmental. The circular binds her to male relationships . . . the linear tends towards freedom and maturity.”13 To the extent that freedom is achieved at all in this fractured and unfinished work, it is in the cooperative and mutually respecting partnership Jemima and Maria seem to verge on achieving.
Wollstonecraft’s novels may not be masterpieces in the old-fashioned, traditional sense. They are brave attempts, not polished performances. But as such they evince qualities that typify Wollstonecraft’s best work. They are startlingly innovative in their methods and their subjects, sometimes clumsy and sometimes breathtakingly brilliant, and in close dialogue with the forms of fiction they are attempting to supersede. Both novels are written either about or for those “who will dare to advance before the improvement of the age” (WWM 1:83), to exceptional minds in other words, who are not confined by ideology, but who can peer just above or ahead of it, and who because they are relatively unblinkered, will pass over the novels’ imperfection and comprehend both their despair of the present and their hope in the future.
1. Wollstonecraft’s first publication was actually Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), educational tracts being, like novels, good sellers. This relatively modest and conventional work does not attempt the boldness to which Wollstonecraft aspires in Mary, A Fiction.
2. Memoirs of the Author of “The Rights of Woman,” ed Richard Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), 223–4. This edition appears with Wollstonecraft’s A Short Residence. Godwin goes on: “The story is nothing. He that looks into the book only for incident, will probably lay it down with disgust. But the feelings are of the truest and most exquisite class; every circumstance is adorned with that species of imagination, which enlists itself under the banners of delicacy and sentiment.” (Memoirs, 223–4). Godwin here recalls Johnson’s remarks on Clarissa.
3. This is the very approximate translation Wollstonecraft herself offers in Chapter 13 of Mary.
4. For a corrective discussion, see James Basker “Radical Affinities: Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Johnson,” Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, eds. Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 51–5.
5. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 98.
6. See Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine (1798), 92–93, 92.
7. For an impressive reading of The Wrongs of Woman as recapitulating romantic error, see Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Gary Kelly takes the a more emancipatory view in Revolutionary Feminism: the Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).
8. See Anne K. Mellor, “Righting the Wrongs of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19 (1996), 413–24.
9. Jemima’s story also corrects Wollstonecraft’s own highly sentimentalized representation of “ruined” women in Rights of Woman, where she imagines them worthy of respect only insofar as they carry a torch for their first seducer.
10. Employing a deconstructive rather than historicist approach, Tilottama Rajan similarly argues that the inset tales together with the rest of the novel constitute an assemblage of texts calling for readings which invite and make possible large and accommodating perspectives. See The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
11. In path-breaking essays, Cora Kaplan maintained that Jemima is a working-class heroine compromised by the middle-class romantic sentimentality of Maria and Wollstonecraft alike. See “Pandora’s Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist-Feminist Criticism,” Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, eds. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), 146–76. I am most indebted to this essay, as to Kaplan’s other discussion of Wollstonecraft in “Wild nights: pleasure/sexuality/feminism,” The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality, eds. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (London: Methuen, 1987), 160–84. For a discussion of masculine appropriations of maternity of the sort I see Wollstonecraft trying to resist in Wrongs of Woman, see Ruth Perry’s fine “Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2 (1991), 204–34.
12. Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period (London; New York: Longman, 1989) 4.
13. Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 211–12.