Abstract
The heroine of Mary Wollstonecraft’s last, unfinished work Maria or the Wrongs of Woman, addresses her memoirs to her young child ‘uncertain whether I shall ever have an opportunity of instructing you… ’ Writing might overcome the distance that cuts the mother from her daughter, permitting the expression of truth garnered from a painful life. ‘For my sake, warned by my example,’ writes Maria, ‘always appear what you are, and you will not pass through existence without enjoying its genuine blessings, love and respect.’ (MWW.124) What does Maria mean when she counsels her child to appear as she is?
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Jane Roland Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation, The Ideal of the Educated Woman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) p. 7.
John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (London and Edinburgh: Strahan Cadell and Creech, 1788) p. 106. Hereafter cited as FL.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct in the More Important Duties of Life (1787), (Clifton: Augustus Kelley, 1972) p. 34. Hereafter cited as T.
Quoted by Ralph M. Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1951) p. 136.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, transl. Hazel Barnes, (New York: Pocket Books, 1966) p. 350.
I borrow the phrase from Judith Fetterly who argues at length that the ‘first act of the feminist critic must be to become a resisting rather than an assenting reader’ subjecting what is read to fierce scrutiny. Wollstonecraft, if one is to use Fetterly’s phrase, stands as one of the earliest of such Romantic readers. Judith Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. xxii.
William Godwin, Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft (London, 1798). This edition with preface by John Middleton Murray (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1930) p. 51. Hereafter cited as Mem.
Mary Wollstonecraft, 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 (London: Joseph Johnson, 1790) p. 9. Hereafter cited as VRM.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) (New York: Anchor Press, 1973), p. 89. Yet it is by no means clear that Wollstonecraft herself was free of the faults she saw so prominently displayed in Burke.
See Florence Boos, ‘Catherine Macaulay’s Letters on Education: An Early Feminist Polemic,’ University of Michigan Papers in Women’s Studies 2.2 (1976) pp. 64–78. Boos points out that Letters XXI-XXIV are the most striking sources for Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman p. 71.
Catherine Macaulay, Letters on Education with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (1790), (New York: Garland Publishing, 1974) p. 214. Hereafter cited as LE.
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, transl. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1971) pp. 85–6.
See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Sex and History in The Prelude (1805): Books Nine to Thirteen’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature 23.3 (1981) pp. 324–59.
Claire Tomalin sets out the details of what is known of the friendship between Wollstonecraft and Mme Roland. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) pp. 134–8.
Janet Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) pp. 208–26.
Copyright information
© 1989 Meena Alexander
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Alexander, M. (1989). True Appearances. In: Women in Romanticism. Women Writers. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20257-7_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20257-7_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-39170-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-20257-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)