Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman Mary Wollstonecraft

At the end 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.[14] In her "Preface", she writes that the novel should be considered the story of "woman" and not the story of an "individual".[10] Wollstonecraft attempts to detail, as the scholar Anne K. Mellor has phrased it, "the wrongs done to women and the wrongs done by women" (emphasis Mellor's).[15] 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. Unlike Wollstonecraft's first novel, Mary: A Fiction (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 first chapter of Maria, Maria laments, "[is] not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?"[16] and later she makes a politically charged allusion to the French prison, the Bastille: "marriage had bastilled me for life".[17] Moreover, Maria's body is bought and sold like a slave's: she is worth £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".[18] 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.[19] 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.[19]

"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".[20] Wollstonecraft deconstructs the ideology of marriage, by which women are exchangeable commodities, are objectified, and are denied their natural rights.[21]

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.[22] 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.[23] But sensibility was also thought to paralyze those who had too much of it; they were weakened by constant vicarious suffering.[22]

By the time Wollstonecraft was writing The Wrongs of Woman, sensibility had already been under sustained attack for a number of years.[24] 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.[25] 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.[26]

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 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, particularly in Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). Repeatedly, in both her fiction and non-fiction, Wollstonecraft argues that the proper understanding of one's emotions leads to a transcendent virtue.[27]

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, 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.[28]

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 of sentimental fiction that aims to demonstrate the "wrongs" that women inflict upon themselves when they overindulge in sensibility.[29] 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 and, most importantly, is controlled by reason.[30] A woman with this kind of sensibility would not be "blown about by every gust of momentary feeling".[31] Other critics see The Wrongs of Woman as a "negation" of the anti-sentimental arguments offered in the Rights of Woman.[14] 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.[32]

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".[33] 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.[34] Challenging contemporary moralists such as John Gregory and Rousseau, Wollstonecraft claimed that women could be fully sexualized beings.[35]

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.[36] 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.[37]

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.[38] 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.[39]

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.[40] 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".[41] 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.[42] 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".[43]

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 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.[44]

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."[45] 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."[46] 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.[47]

Motherhood and the feminine self

While some scholars emphasize The Wrongs of Woman's 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).[48] 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".[49] 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, who transfers her maternal cravings from character to character.[50]

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.[51]

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 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.[52]

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.[53] Mary Poovey also maintains that Wollstonecraft fails to extend her critique of marriage and society from the individual to the systemic level.[54]

Autobiographical elements

Like Wollstonecraft's first novel, Mary: A Fiction, The Wrongs of Woman is heavily autobiographical; the two novels even repeat many of the same biographical details.[55] After being abandoned by her lover and the father of her child, Gilbert Imlay (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.[56] As Kelly explains, autobiography is common in Jacobin novels. 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.[57]