Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman is the 18th century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft's

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...

unfinished novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

istic sequel to her revolutionary political treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects , written by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the 18th...

(1792). The Wrongs of Woman was published posthumously in 1798

1798 in literature

-New books:*Charles Brockden Brown**Alcuin: a Dialogue**Wieland: or, The Transformation; an American Tale*Emily Clark - Ianthé, or the Flower of Caernarvon*William Godwin - Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman...

by her husband, William Godwin

William Godwin

William Godwin was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and the first modern proponent of anarchism...

, and is often considered her most radical feminist work.

Wollstonecraft's philosophical

Philosophical novel

Philosophical fiction refers to works of fiction in which a significant proportion of the work is devoted to a discussion of the sort of questions normally addressed in discursive philosophy. These might include the function and role of society, the purpose of life, ethics or morals, the role of...

and gothic

Gothic fiction

Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story"...

novel revolves around the story of a woman imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband. It focuses on the societal rather than the individual "wrongs of woman" and criticizes what Wollstonecraft viewed as the patriarchal

Patriarchy

Patriarchy is a social system in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization, and where fathers hold authority over women, children, and property. It implies the institutions of male rule and privilege, and entails female subordination...

institution of marriage in eighteenth-century Britain and the legal system that protected it. However, the heroine's inability to relinquish her romantic fantasies also reveals women's collusion in their oppression through false and damaging sentimentalism

Sensibility

Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness toward something, such as the emotions of another. This concept emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, and was closely associated with studies of sense perception as the means through which knowledge is gathered...

. The novel pioneered the celebration of female sexuality and cross-class identification between women. Such themes, coupled with the publication of Godwin's scandalous Memoirs

Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is William Godwin's biography of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ....

of Wollstonecraft's life, made the novel unpopular at the time it was published.

Twentieth-century feminist critics

Feminist literary criticism

Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or by the politics of feminism more broadly. Its history has been broad and varied, from classic works of nineteenth-century women authors such as George Eliot and Margaret Fuller to cutting-edge theoretical work in...

embraced the work, integrating it into the history of the novel and feminist discourse. It is most often viewed as a fictionalized popularization of the Rights of Woman, as an extension of Wollstonecraft's feminist arguments in Rights of Woman, and as autobiographical.

Drafts

Wollstonecraft struggled to write The Wrongs of Woman for over a year; in contrast, she had dashed off A Vindication of the Rights of Men

A Vindication of the Rights of Men

A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France is a political pamphlet, written by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, which attacks aristocracy and advocates republicanism...

(1790), her reply to Edmund Burke's

Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke PC was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party....

Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France , by Edmund Burke, is one of the best-known intellectual attacks against the French Revolution...

(1790), in under a month and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

(1792) in six weeks. Godwin comments:

She was sensible how arduous a task it is to produce a truly excellent novel; and she roused her faculties to grapple with it. All her other works were produced with a rapidity, that did not give her powers time fully to expand. But this was written slowly and with mature consideration. She began it in several forms, which she successively rejected, after they were considerably advanced. She wrote many parts of the work again and again, and, when she had finished what she intended for the first part, she felt herself more urgently stimulated to revise and improve what she had written, than to proceed, with constancy of application, in the parts that were to follow.

She also researched the book more than her others. By assuming the responsibilities of fiction editor and reviewing almost nothing but novels, she used her editorial position at Joseph Johnson's

Joseph Johnson (publisher)

Joseph Johnson was an influential 18th-century London bookseller and publisher. His publications covered a wide variety of genres and a broad spectrum of opinions on important issues...

Analytical Review

The Analytical Review was a periodical established in London in 1788 by the publisher Joseph Johnson and the writer Thomas Christie. Part of the Republic of Letters, it was a gadfly publication, which offered readers summaries and analyses of the many new publications issued at the end of the...

to educate herself regarding novelistic techniques. She even visited Bedlam Hospital

Bethlem Royal Hospital

The Bethlem Royal Hospital is a psychiatric hospital located in London, United Kingdom and part of the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Although no longer based at its original location, it is recognised as the world's first and oldest institution to specialise in mental illnesses....

in February 1797 to research insane asylums.

At Wollstonecraft's death in 1797, the manuscript was incomplete. Godwin published all of the pieces of the manuscript in the Posthumous Works, adding several sentences and paragraphs of his own to link disjunct sections.

Plot summary

The Wrongs of Woman begins in medias res

In medias res

In medias res or medias in res is a Latin phrase denoting the literary and artistic narrative technique wherein the relation of a story begins either at the mid-point or at the conclusion, rather than at the beginning In medias res or medias in res (into the middle of things) is a Latin phrase...

with the upper-class Maria's unjust imprisonment by her husband, George Venables. Not only has he condemned Maria to live in an insane asylum, but he has also taken their child away from her. She manages to befriend one of her attendants in the asylum, an impoverished, lower-class woman named Jemima, who, after realizing that Maria is not mad, agrees to bring her a few books. Some of these have notes scribbled in them by Henry Darnford, another inmate, and Maria falls in love with him via his marginalia

Marginalia

Marginalia are scribbles, comments, and illuminations in the margins of a book.- Biblical manuscripts :Biblical manuscripts have liturgical notes at the margin, for liturgical use. Numbers of texts' divisions are given at the margin...

. The two begin to communicate and eventually meet. Darnford reveals that he has had a debauched life; waking up in the asylum after a night of heavy drinking, he has been unable to convince the doctors to release him.

Jemima tells her life story to Maria and Darnford, explaining that she was born a bastard. Jemima's mother died while she was still an infant, making her already precarious social position worse. She was therefore forced to become a servant in her father's house and later bound out as an apprentice

Indentured servant

Indentured servitude refers to the historical practice of contracting to work for a fixed period of time, typically three to seven years, in exchange for transportation, food, clothing, lodging and other necessities during the term of indenture. Usually the father made the arrangements and signed...

to a master who beat her, starved her, and raped her. When the man's wife discovers that Jemima is pregnant with his child, she is thrown out of the house. Unable to support herself, she aborts her child and becomes a prostitute. After the death of the gentleman keeping her, she becomes an attendant at the asylum where Maria is imprisoned.

In chapters seven through fourteen (about half of the completed manuscript), Maria relates her own life story in a narrative she has written for her daughter. She explains how her mother and father loved their eldest son, Robert, more than their other children and how he ruled "despotically" over his siblings. To escape her unhappy home, Maria visited that of a neighbour and fell in love with his son, George Venables. Venables presented himself to everyone as a respectable and honourable young man; in actuality, he was a libertine

Libertine

A libertine is one devoid of most moral restraints, which are seen as unnecessary or undesirable, especially one who ignores or even spurns accepted morals and forms of behavior sanctified by the larger society. Libertines, also known as rakes, placed value on physical pleasures, meaning those...

. Maria's family life became untenable when her mother died and her father took the housekeeper as his mistress. A rich uncle who was fond of Maria, unaware of Venables' true character, arranged a marriage for her and gave her a dowry

Dowry

A dowry is the money, goods, or estate that a woman brings forth to the marriage. It contrasts with bride price, which is paid to the bride's parents, and dower, which is property settled on the bride herself by the groom at the time of marriage. The same culture may simultaneously practice both...

of £

Pound sterling

The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...

5,000.

Maria quickly learned of her husband's true character. She tried to ignore him by cultivating a greater appreciation for literature and the arts, but he became increasingly dissolute: he whored, gambled, and bankrupted the couple. Maria soon became pregnant after unwanted sexual encounters with her husband. As Maria's uncle is leaving for the continent, he tells her that women have the right to separate from their husbands. After Venables attempts to sell Maria to one of his friends, a Mr. S—, Maria tries to leave him, but she fails. She initially escapes and manages to live in several different locations, often with other women who have also been wronged by their husbands, but he always finds her. When she tries to leave England with her newborn child and the fortune her now deceased uncle has left them, her husband seizes the child and imprisons Maria in the asylum. At this point the completed manuscript breaks off.

Fragmentary endings

The fragmentary notes for the remainder of the novel indicate two different trajectories for the plot and five separate conclusions. In both major plot arcs, George Venables wins a lawsuit against Darnford for seducing his wife; Darnford then abandons Maria, flees England, and takes another mistress. When she discovers this treachery, Maria loses the child she was carrying by Darnford (either through an abortion or a miscarriage). In one ending, Maria commits suicide. In another, more complete ending, Maria is saved from suicide by Jemima who has found her first daughter. Maria agrees to live for her child (as Wollstonecraft herself had done after her second suicide attempt). Jemima, Maria, and Maria's daughter form a new family.

Style

In her pieces for the Analytical Review

Analytical Review

, Wollstonecraft developed a set of criteria for what constitutes a good novel:

A good tragedy or novel, if the criterion be the effect which it has on the reader, is not always the most moral work, for it is not the reveries of sentiment, but the struggles of passion — of those human passions, that too frequently cloud the reason, and lead mortals into dangerous errors ... which raise the most lively emotions, and leave the most lasting impression on the memory; an impression rather made by the heart than the understanding: for our affections are not quite voluntary as the suffrages of reason. (emphasis Wollstonecraft's)

Wollstonecraft believed that novels should be "probable" and depict "moderation, reason, and contentment". Thus it is surprising that The Wrongs of Woman draws inspiration from works such as Ann Radcliffe's

Ann Radcliffe

Anne Radcliffe was an English author, and considered the pioneer of the gothic novel . Her style is romantic in its vivid descriptions of landscapes, and long travel scenes, yet the Gothic element is obvious through her use of the supernatural...

A Sicilian Romance

A Sicilian Romance is a gothic novel by Ann Radcliffe. It was her second published work, and was first published anonymously in 1790.The plot concerns the turbulent history of the fallen aristocrats of the house of Mazzini, on the northern shore of Sicily, as related by a tourist who becomes...

(1790) and relies on gothic

Gothic fiction

conventions such as the literal and figurative "mansion of despair" to which Maria is consigned. But it does so to demonstrate that gothic horrors are a reality for the average Englishwoman. Using elements of the gothic, Wollstonecraft can, for example, portray Maria's husband as tyrannical and married life as wretched. As Wollstonecraft herself writes in the "Preface" to The Wrongs of Woman:

In many instances I could have made the incidents more dramatic, would I have sacrificed my main object, the desire of exhibiting the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society.

One model for Wollstonecraft's novel was Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), which demonstrated how an adventurous and gothic novel could offer a social critique.

Narrator

The Wrongs of Woman usually uses third-person narration, although large sections of Maria's and Jemima's tales are in first person. The narrator often relates Maria's feelings to the reader through the new technique of free indirect discourse, which blurs the line between the third-person narrator and the first-person dialogue of a text. Wollstonecraft juxtaposes the events of the novel with both Maria's own retelling of them and her innermost feelings. The first-person stories allow Maria and Jemima to address each other as equals: their stories of suffering, while still allowing each character to retain an individualized sense of self, are a levelling and bonding force between the two.

Jacobin novel

The Wrongs of Woman is what in the late eighteenth century was called a Jacobin novel

Jacobin novel

Jacobin novels were written between 1780 and 1805 by British radicals who supported the ideals of the French revolution. The term was coined by literary scholar Gary Kelly in The English Jacobin Novel 1780-1805 but drawn from the title of the Anti-Jacobin: or, Weekly Examiner, a conservative...

, a philosophical novel

Philosophical novel

that advocated the ideals of the French Revolution

French Revolution

The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...

. Wollstonecraft's novel argues along with others, such as Mary Hays's

Mary Hays

Mary Hays was an English novelist and feminist.- Early years :Mary Hays was born in Southwark, London on Oct. 13, 1759. Almost nothing is known of her first 17 years. In 1779 she fell in love with John Eccles who lived on Gainsford Street, where she also lived. Their parents opposed the match but...

Memoirs of Emma Courtney

Memoirs of Emma Courtney is an epistolary novel by Mary Hays, first published in 1796. The novel is partly autobiographical and based on the author's own unrequited love for William Frend . Mary Hay's relationship with William Godwin is reflected through her eponymous heroine's philosophical...

(1796), that women are the victims of constant and systematic injustice. Wollstonecraft uses the philosophical dialogues in her novel to demonstrate women's powerlessness.

Like other Jacobin novels, The Wrongs of Woman relies on a web of suggestive character names to convey its message: Jemima is named for Job's daughter; Henry Darnford's name resembles that of Henry Darnley

Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley

Henry Stewart or Stuart, 1st Duke of Albany , styled Lord Darnley before 1565, was king consort of Scotland and murdered at Kirk o'Field...

, the second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots; and George Venables shares a name with the notorious womanizer George, Prince of Wales

George IV of the United Kingdom

George IV was the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and also of Hanover from the death of his father, George III, on 29 January 1820 until his own death ten years later...

. Wollstonecraft added to the reality of her philosophical text by quoting from familiar literature, such as Shakespeare

Shakespeare's plays

William Shakespeare's plays have the reputation of being among the greatest in the English language and in Western literature. Traditionally, the 37 plays are divided into the genres of tragedy, history, and comedy; they have been translated into every major living language, in addition to being...

, alluding to important historical events, and referencing relevant facts. The Wrongs of Woman comments on the state of women in society by rewriting earlier texts with a feminist slant, such as Henry Fielding's

Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding was an English novelist and dramatist known for his rich earthy humour and satirical prowess, and as the author of the novel Tom Jones....

Tom Jones

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, often known simply as Tom Jones, is a comic novel by the English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding. First published on 28 February 1749, Tom Jones is among the earliest English prose works describable as a novel...

; Fielding's Mrs. Fitzpatrick becomes Wollstonecraft's Maria. These rhetorical strategies made the philosophical elements of the novel more palatable to the public.

Themes

At the end of the Rights of Woman

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Wollstonecraft promised her readers a second part to the work. Rather than giving them another philosophical treatise, however, she offered them a novel tinged with autobiography, appropriately titled The Wrongs of Woman. In her "Preface", she writes that the novel should be considered the story of "woman" and not the story of an "individual". Wollstonecraft attempts to detail, as the scholar Anne K. Mellor

Anne K. Mellor

Anne Kostelanetz Mellor is a Distinguished Professor of English Literature and Women's Studies at UCLA; she specializes in Romantic literature, British cultural history, feminist theory, philosophy, art history and gender studies...

has phrased it, "the wrongs done to women and the wrongs done by women" (emphasis Mellor's). The wrongs done to women include stifling and sexually repressed marriages, which Wollstonecraft describes using the language of slavery, while the wrongs done by women include a false sense of self-worth generated through the language of sensibility

Sensibility

. Unlike Wollstonecraft's first novel, Mary: A Fiction

Mary: A Fiction

Mary: A Fiction is the only complete novel by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. It tells the tragic story of a heroine's successive "romantic friendships" with a woman and a man...

(1788), The Wrongs of Woman offers solutions to these problems, namely an empowering female sexuality, a purpose-filled maternal role, and the possibility of a feminism that crosses class boundaries.

Marriage and slavery

In metaphors carried over from the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft describes marriage as a prison and women as slaves within it in The Wrongs of Woman. In the first chapter Maria laments, "[is] not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?" and later she makes a politically charged allusion to the French prison, the Bastille

Bastille

The Bastille was a fortress in Paris, known formally as the Bastille Saint-Antoine. It played an important role in the internal conflicts of France and for most of its history was used as a state prison by the kings of France. The Bastille was built in response to the English threat to the city of...

: "marriage had bastilled me for life". Moreover, Maria's body is bought and sold like a slave's: she is worth £

Pound sterling

5,000 on the open marriage market and her new husband attempts to sell her into prostitution. Commenting on her condition, Maria states: "a wife being as much a man's property as his horse, or his ass, she has nothing she can call her own". In the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft had used the metaphor of slavery not only to describe the horrors of marriage as it currently existed but also to offer a juxtaposition to the possibility of a new kind of marriage, one which assumed equality between affectionate and rational partners. In The Wrongs of Woman, this option is never presented; instead, the reader is shown a series of disastrous marriages in which women are abused, robbed, and abandoned.

"Wollstonecraft's fundamental insight in Maria", according to scholar Mary Poovey, "concerns the way in which female sexuality is defined or interpreted—and, by extension, controlled—by bourgeois institutions. The primary agent of this control is marriage". Wollstonecraft deconstructs the ideology of marriage, by which women are exchangeable commodities, are objectified, and are denied their natural rights.

Sensibility and sentimentalism

Sensibility

in the second half of the eighteenth century was considered both a physical and a moral phenomenon. Physicians and anatomists believed that the more sensitive people's nerves, the more emotionally affected they would be by their surroundings. Since women were thought to have keener nerves than men, it was also believed that women were more emotional than men. The emotional excess associated with sensibility also theoretically produced an ethic of compassion: those with sensibility could easily sympathize with people in pain. Thus historians have credited the discourse of sensibility and those who promoted it with the increased humanitarian efforts, such as the movement to abolish the slave trade, of the eighteenth century. But sensibility was also thought to paralyze those who had too much of it; they were weakened by constant vicarious suffering.

By the time Wollstonecraft was writing The Wrongs of Woman, sensibility had already been under sustained attack for a number of years. Sensibility, which had initially promised to draw individuals together through sympathy, was now viewed as "profoundly separatist"; novels, plays, and poems that employed the language of sensibility asserted individual rights, sexual freedom, and unconventional familial relationships based only upon feeling. Sensibility seemed to many, particularly during a time of political reaction, to offer too much political power to women and to emasculate British men needed for fighting France

French Revolutionary Wars

The French Revolutionary Wars were a series of major conflicts, from 1792 until 1802, fought between the French Revolutionary government and several European states...

.

All of Wollstonecraft's writings betray a tortured relationship with the language of sensibility and The Wrongs of Woman is no exception. As feminist scholar

Feminist literary criticism

Mitzi Myers has observed, Wollstonecraft is usually described as an "enlightened philosopher strenuously advocating the cultivation of reason as the guide to both self-realization and social progress", but her works do not unambiguously support such a model of selfhood. Her emphasis on "feeling, imagination, and interiority" mark her as a Romantic

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

, particularly in Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is a personal travel narrative by the eighteenth-century British feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. The twenty-five letters cover a wide range of topics, from sociological reflections on Scandinavia and its peoples to...

(1796). Repeatedly, in both her fiction and non-fiction, Wollstonecraft argues that the proper understanding of one's emotions leads to a transcendent virtue.

However, because Wollstonecraft herself is contradictory and vague in the unfinished Wrongs of Woman, there is no real scholarly consensus on what exactly the novel says about sensibility. Wollstonecraft is intentionally breaking the conventions of sentimental fiction

Sentimental novel

The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility...

, but exactly what her goals are in doing so is unclear. For example, Maria and Jemima can seemingly be identified with the traditional categories of "reason" (Jemima) and "sensibility" (Maria), but since such couples were usually male and female, Wollstonecraft's characterization challenges conventional definitions of gender.

Some critics interpret Maria's story ironically, arguing that the juxtaposition of Maria's sentimental and romantic narrative with Jemima's harsh and bleak narrative encourages such a reading. In this interpretation, Maria's narrative is read as a parody

Parody

A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...

of sentimental fiction that aims to demonstrate the "wrongs" that women inflict upon themselves when they overindulge in sensibility. Although Wollstonecraft promotes sensibility in this text, it is not the same kind that she condemns in the Rights of Woman; proper sensibility, she contends, rests on sympathy

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

The Theory of Moral Sentiments was written by Adam Smith in 1759. It provided the ethical, philosophical, psychological, and methodological underpinnings to Smith's later works, including The Wealth of Nations , A Treatise on Public Opulence , Essays on Philosophical Subjects , and Lectures on...

and, most importantly, is controlled by reason. A woman with this kind of sensibility would not be "blown about by every gust of momentary feeling". Other critics see The Wrongs of Woman as a "negation" of the anti-sentimental arguments offered in the Rights of Woman. Citing Jemima's infrequent appearances in the narrative and the narrator's own use of the language of sensibility, they have difficulty in accepting the claim that the novel is undercutting or questioning the rhetoric of sensibility.

Female desire

One of the key differences between Wollstonecraft's novels and her philosophical treatises, as feminist critic Cora Kaplan has argued, is that her fiction values female emotion while her treatises present it as "reactionary and regressive, almost counter-revolutionary". The Rights of Woman portrays sexuality as a masculine characteristic, and while Wollstonecraft argues that some masculine characteristics are universal, this is not one of them. In The Wrongs of Woman, however, she accepts, relishes, and uses the sexualized female body as a medium of communication: Maria embraces her lust for Darnford and establishes a relationship with him. While in the Rights of Woman she had emphasized companioniate relationships, arguing that passions should cool between lovers, in The Wrongs of Woman, she celebrates those passions. Challenging contemporary moralists such as John Gregory

John Gregory (moralist)

John Gregory , a.k.a. John Gregorie, was an eighteenth-century Scottish physician, medical writer and moralist....

and Rousseau, Wollstonecraft claimed that women could be fully sexualized beings.

Initially, Maria wants to marry Venables because of his charitable nature; she believes him to be the romantic hero that she has read about in novels. However, she later realizes his duplicity:

[George] continued to single me out at the dance, press my hand at parting, and utter expressions of unmeaning passion, to which I gave a meaning naturally suggested by the romantic turn of my thoughts. ... When he left us, the colouring of my picture became more vivid—Whither did not my imagination lead me? In short, I fancied myself in love—in love with the disinterestedness, fortitude, generosity, dignity, and humanity, with which I had invested the hero I dubbed.

One of the important questions raised by the novel is whether Maria is deluded in her relationship with Darnford. Maria writes an autobiography for her daughter in which she admits that she was misled by Venables, but critics disagree over the extent to which she is also misled by Darnford. Some suggest that Maria repeats her mistake and imagines Darnford as a hero, citing as evidence Maria's refusal to leave the madhouse, when she is free to do so, because she wants to remain with him, as well as her infatuation with Rousseau's novel Julie, or the New Heloise. She imagines Darnford as its "hero", St. Preux, the sometime lover but not husband of Julie. Maria's reading and the plots she conjures in her imagination as a result of that reading are the cause of her downfall in this interpretation: unable or unwilling to separate fiction from reality, she incorporates Darnford into her romantic fantasies. Other critics, while agreeing that Maria is led astray by Darnford, argue that it is not her sexuality and eroticism that are the problem, but her choice of partner. They argue that Wollstonecraft is not portraying female sexuality as inherently detrimental, as she had in Mary and the Rights of Woman, rather she is criticizing the directions it often takes.

Class and feminism

The structure of The Wrongs of Woman, with its interwoven tales of the similarly abused upper-middle-class Maria, the lower-middle-class sailor's wife Peggy, the working-class shopkeeper, the boarding-house owner, and the working-class domestic servant Jemima, is an "unprecedented" representation of the shared concerns of women in a patriarchal society. Wollstonecraft wrote in a letter, published as part of the preface to The Wrongs of Woman, that she aimed "to show the wrongs of different classes of women, equally oppressive, though, from the difference of education, necessarily various". Her novel is newly inclusive and one of the first works in the history of feminist literature that hints at a cross-class argument that women of different economic positions have the same interests because they are women. In her narration, Jemima asks "who ever risked anything for me?—Who ever acknowledged me to be a fellow-creature?" It is not until Maria grasps her hand in sympathy that she feels this; furthermore, it is Jemima's story that first prods Maria's own "thoughts [to] take a wider range" and "thinking of Jemima's peculiar fate and her own, she was led to consider the oppressed state of women, and to lament that she had given birth to a daughter".

Jemima is the most fleshed out of the lower-class women in the novel; through her Wollstonecraft refuses to accept the submissiveness traditionally associated with femininity and expresses a frustrated anger that would have been viewed as unseemly in Maria. Jemima's tale also challenges assumptions regarding prostitutes. Wollstonecraft rewrites the traditional narrative of the redeemed prostitute (e.g., Daniel Defoe's

Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe , born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain and along with others such as Richardson,...

Some Considerations on Streetwalkers (1726)). The novel presents prostitutes as "an exploited class", akin to wives who are dependent on men, and demonstrates how they are a product of their environment. By making both Jemima and Maria prostitutes, Wollstonecraft rejects two contemporary stereotypes of the prostitute: the image of the woman who takes pleasure in her actions and is in love with her keeper and the image of the victim desirous of pity. Thus, rather than simply repulsing or eliciting the compassion of the reader, Jemima and Maria presumably forge a stronger, more lasting bond with the female reader who shares their plight.

Nevertheless, Jemima's tale still retains elements of Wollstonecraft's bourgeois ethos; Jemima and the other working-class women are only presented as Maria's equal in suffering; "women are linked across class, then, but less in solidarity than in hopelessness." As Wollstonecraft scholar Barbara Taylor comments, "Maria's relationship with Jemima displays something of the class fissures and prejudices that have marked organised feminist politics from their inception." Jemima is taught to appreciate the finer things in life when she is a kept mistress and Maria later promises to care for her. Importantly, though, in one version of the ending, it is Jemima who rescues Maria and finds her child.

Motherhood and the feminine self

While some scholars emphasize The Wrongs of Womans criticism of the institution of marriage and the laws restricting women in the eighteenth century, others focus on the work's description of "the experience of being female, with the emotional violence and intellectual debilitation" that accompanies it (emphasis in original). It is in Wollstonecraft's depiction of a female mind educating itself and creating a specifically feminine sense of self that she "breaks new ground". Maria's role as mother allows her to instruct herself, thereby creating her own sense of self; in advising her daughter through the manuscript she is writing, Maria learns about herself and realizes her past errors. Her ability to formulate her own selfhood can be contrasted to the heroine of Wollstonecraft's first novel, Mary: A Fiction

Mary: A Fiction

, who transfers her maternal cravings from character to character.

Furthermore, while patriarchal marriages are one of the great wrongs perpetrated upon women, Wollstonecraft argues that a greater wrong is women's lack of independence. Because they are unable to find respectable, well-paid work, they are reliant upon men. Women such as Jemima are reduced to hard physical labor, stealing, begging, or prostituting themselves in order to survive; they are demeaned by this work and think meanly of themselves because of it.

Because male-female relationships are inherently unequal in her society, Wollstonecraft endeavours to formulate a new kind of friendship in The Wrongs of Woman: motherhood and sisterhood. It is Maria's pathetic

Pathos

Pathos represents an appeal to the audience's emotions. Pathos is a communication technique used most often in rhetoric , and in literature, film and other narrative art....

story regarding the kidnapping of her child that first interests Jemima in her plight. The novel fragments also suggest that the tale might not end with a marriage, but rather with the creation of a new kind of family, one constituted by two mothers for Maria's child. With Jemima's rescue of Maria, Wollstonecraft appears to reject the traditional romantic plot and invent a new one, necessitated by the failure of society to grant women their natural rights

Natural rights

Natural and legal rights are two types of rights theoretically distinct according to philosophers and political scientists. Natural rights are rights not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs of any particular culture or government, and therefore universal and inalienable...

.

While more recent critics have emphasized the revolutionary aspects of the cross-class friendship between Jemima and Maria, others have questioned the extent of that radicalism, arguing that Jemima's story occupies a small section of the novel and is abruptly truncated. Mary Poovey also maintains that Wollstonecraft fails to extend her critique of marriage and society from the individual to the systemic level.

Autobiographical elements

Like Wollstonecraft's first novel, Mary: A Fiction

Mary: A Fiction

, The Wrongs of Woman is heavily autobiographical; the two novels even repeat many of the same biographical details. After being abandoned by her lover and the father of her child, Gilbert Imlay

Gilbert Imlay

Gilbert Imlay was an American businessman, author, and diplomat. Imlay was known in his day as a shrewd but unscrupulous businessman involved in land speculation in Kentucky. He later served in the U.S...

(the model for Darnford), Wollstonecraft attempted to commit suicide. Her despair over these events is written into the book as well as many other experiences from the mid-1790s. Moreover, Maria Venables's family history shows clear similarities to Wollstonecraft's own. Like Maria, Wollstonecraft had a mother who favored an elder brother and she also devotedly cared for that mother during her dying days, only to be pushed away during the final moments of her life. Wollstonecraft also looked after her sisters like Maria does, albeit without the help of a wealthy uncle. Perhaps most strikingly, Wollstonecraft's sister Eliza left her husband, at Wollstonecraft's prodding, much as Maria leaves hers. As Kelly explains, autobiography is common in Jacobin novel

Jacobin novel

s. Philosophical novels were expected to be autobiographical; audiences believed that the philosophizing novelists would draw on their own experiences in order to illustrate their abstract principles.

Reception and legacy

The Posthumous Works, of which The Wrongs of Woman was the largest part, had a "reasonably wide audience" when it was published in 1798, but it "was received by critics with almost universal disfavor". This was in large part because the simultaneous release of Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is William Godwin's biography of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ....

revealed Wollstonecraft's illegitimate child and her love affairs. Most reviewers and readers transferred the unconventional and unorthodox life Wollstonecraft herself had lived onto Maria and much that Maria had said and done onto Wollstonecraft, thereby realizing Wollstonecraft's fears that her books would be read only as a mirror of her life. The eighteenth-century moralist Hannah More

Hannah More

Hannah More was an English religious writer, and philanthropist. She can be said to have made three reputations in the course of her long life: as a poet and playwright in the circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick, as a writer on moral and religious subjects, and as a practical...

, for example, called The Wrongs of Woman a "vindication of adultery".

Many critics and even personal acquaintances failed to grasp Wollstonecraft's fundamental point, that Maria's "wrongs" are political, not personal. She wrote to one friend who had criticized it:

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 – For my part I cannot suppose any situation more distressing than for a woman of sensibility with an improving mind to be bound, to such a man as I have described, for life – obliged to renounce all the humanizing affections, and to avoid cultivating her taste lest her perception of grace, and refinement of sentiment should sharpen to agony the pangs of disappointment.

Even Godwin, her husband, complained, "I do not want a common-place story of a brutal, insensible husband." Both the Anti-Jacobin Review

Anti-Jacobin Review

The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, or, Monthly Political and Literary Censor , a conservative British political periodical, was founded by John Gifford [pseud. of John Richards Green] after the demise of William Gifford's The Anti-Jacobin, or, Weekly Examiner...

and the Monthly Review reviewed the novel harshly. The Anti-Jacobin Review, attacking both Wollstonecraft and her book as well as Godwin's Political Justice

Political Justice

Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Modern Morals and Manners outlines the political philosophy of the 18th-century philosopher William Godwin....

and Memoirs

Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is William Godwin's biography of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ....

, wrote:

The restrictions upon adultery constitute, in Maria's opinion, A MOST FLAGRANT WRONG TO WOMEN. Such is the moral tendency of this work, such are the lessons which may be learned from the writings of Mrs. Wollstonecraft; such the advantages which the public may derive from this performance given to the world by Godwin, celebrated by him, and perfectly consonant to the principles of his Political Justice.—But as there have been writers, who have in theory promulgated opinions subversive of morality, yet in their conduct have not been immoral, Godwin has laboured to inform the world, that the theory of Mrs. Wollstonecraft was reduced to practice; that she lived and acted, as she wrote and taught.[Footnote in original: We could point out some of this lady's pupils, who have so far profited by the instructions received from her, as to imitate her conduct, and reduce her principles to practice.] (emphasis in original)

Under the heading "Prostitution" in the index to the magazine, the editors listed only one entry: Mary Wollstonecraft. Partially because of these reactions, female sexuality would not be celebrated so overtly in Britain for another century.

While Wollstonecraft's arguments in The Wrongs of Woman may appear commonplace in light of modern feminism, they were "breathtakingly audacious" during the late eighteenth century: "Wollstonecraft's final novel made explosively plain what the Rights of Woman had only partially intimated: that women's entitlements — as citizens, mothers, and sexual beings — are incompatible with a patriarchal marriage system." However, while The Wrongs of Woman is now read as the progenitor of many feminist texts and the inspiration for many feminist arguments and rhetorical styles (e.g., the personal confession), Wollstonecraft herself was not part of a feminist movement

Feminist movement

The feminist movement refers to a series of campaigns for reforms on issues such as reproductive rights, domestic violence, maternity leave, equal pay, women's suffrage, sexual harassment and sexual violence...

nor did she ever argue for one. Although The Wrongs of Woman presents "woman" as "wronged", neither Wollstonecraft nor any other British woman who highlighted the inequalities suffered by women at the time (such as Mary Hays

Mary Hays

or Mary Robinson

Mary Robinson

Mary Therese Winifred Robinson served as the seventh, and first female, President of Ireland from 1990 to 1997, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, from 1997 to 2002. She first rose to prominence as an academic, barrister, campaigner and member of the Irish Senate...

) ever put forth a collective solution. As part of the Enlightenment

Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...

, they were dedicated to individualistic solutions.

Modern reprints

Wollstonecraft, Mary
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...

. The Complete Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. 7 vols. London: William Pickering, 1989. ISBN 0-8147-9225-1.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Mary and The Wrongs of Woman. Ed. Gary Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-283536-X.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. Ed. Moira Ferguson. New York: Norton, 1975. ISBN 0-393-08713-1.

Primary sources

—. "Review". Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine
Anti-Jacobin Review
The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, or, Monthly Political and Literary Censor , a conservative British political periodical, was founded by John Gifford [pseud. of John Richards Green] after the demise of William Gifford's The Anti-Jacobin, or, Weekly Examiner...

1 (1798): 91–93.
—. "Review". British Critic 12 (1798): 234–235.
—. "Review". Monthly Review 27 (November 1798): 325–27.
Godwin, William
William Godwin
William Godwin was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and the first modern proponent of anarchism...

. Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is William Godwin's biography of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ....

. Eds. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001. ISBN 1-55111-259-0.
Wollstonecraft, Mary
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...

. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects , written by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the 18th...

. The Vindications. Eds. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Toronto: Broadview Literary Texts, 1997. ISBN 1-55111-088-1.

Secondary sources

Barker-Benfield, G.J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ISBN 0-226-03714-2.
Cañadas, Ivan. “The Influence of Ben Jonson’s Volpone on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman”, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, 19.3 (2006): 6-10.
Gubar, Susan
Susan Gubar
Dr. Susan D. Gubar is an American academic and Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies at Indiana University. She is co-author with Dr. Sandra M. Gilbert of the standard feminist text, The Madwoman in the Attic and a trilogy on women's writing in the twentieth century.Her book...

. "Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of 'It Takes One to Know One'". Feminist Studies 20 (1994): 453–473.
Johnson, Claudia
Claudia L. Johnson (scholar)
Claudia L. Johnson is the Murray Professor of English Literature at Princeton University; she is also currently chairperson of the English department. Johnson specializes in Restoration and 18th-century British literature, with an especial focus on the novel. She is also interested in feminist...

. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s, Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-226-40184-7.
Jones, Vivien. "Placing Jemima: Women Writers of the 1790s and the Eighteenth-Century Prostitution Narrative". Women's Writing 4.2 (1997): 201–220.
Kaplan, Cora. "Pandora's Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism". Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism. London: Verso, 1986. ISBN 0-86091-151-9.
Kaplan, Cora. “Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism". Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism. London: Verso, 1986. ISBN 0-86091-151-9.
Kelly, Gary. English Fiction of the Romantic Period. London: Longman, 1989. ISBN 0-582-49261-0.
Kelly, Gary. Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. ISBN 0-312-12904-1.
Langbauer, Laurie. "An Early Romance: Motherhood and Women's Writing in Mary Wollstonecraft's Novels". Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne K. Mellor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. ISBN 0-253-35083-2.
Maurer, Lisa Shawn. "The Female (As) Reader: Sex, Sensibility, and the Maternal in Wollstonecraft's Fictions". Essays in Literature 19 (1992): 36–54.
Mellor, Anne K
Anne K. Mellor
Anne Kostelanetz Mellor is a Distinguished Professor of English Literature and Women's Studies at UCLA; she specializes in Romantic literature, British cultural history, feminist theory, philosophy, art history and gender studies...

. "Righting the Wrongs of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria". Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19 (1996): 413–24.
Myers, Mitzi. "Mary Wollstonecraft's literary reviews". The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Claudia Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-521-78952-4.
Myers, Mitzi. "Unfinished Business: Wollstonecraft's Maria". Wordsworth Circle 11.2 (1980): 107–114.
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ISBN 0-226-67528-9.
Sapiro, Virginia. A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ISBN 0-226-73491-9.
Sunstein, Emily W. A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. ISBN 0-06-014201-4.
Taylor, Barbara. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-521-66144-7.
Todd, Janet
Janet Todd
Janet Margaret Todd is a Welsh-born academic and a well-respected author of many books on women in literature. Todd was educated at Cambridge University and the University of Florida, where she undertook a doctorate on the poet John Clare...

. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000. ISBN 0-231-12184-9.
Todd, Janet. Sensibility: An introduction. London: Methuen, 1986. ISBN 0-416-37720-3.
Todd, Janet. Women's Friendship in Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. ISBN 0-231-04562-X.
Ty, Eleanor. Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. ISBN 0-8020-7774-9.
Wardle, Ralph M. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1951.

External links

Full text of Maria at Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...
Full text of Maria at fiction.eserver.org
Full text of Maria at etext.lib.virginia.edu
Audiobook of Maria at LibriVox
LibriVox
LibriVox is an online digital library of free public domain audiobooks, read by volunteers and is probably, since 2007, the world's most prolific audiobook publisher...
Concordance to Maria
Mary Wollstonecraft: A 'Speculative and Dissenting Spirit' by Janet Todd
Janet Todd
Janet Margaret Todd is a Welsh-born academic and a well-respected author of many books on women in literature. Todd was educated at Cambridge University and the University of Florida, where she undertook a doctorate on the poet John Clare...

at www.bbc.co.uk

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