Abstract
In December 1788 the Analytical Review published a review of the work of the American-born moral philosopher Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. To Which Are Added, Strictures on Lord Kames’s Discourse on the Original Diversity of Mankind (1787).1 Although the reviewer’s identity is marked merely with the initial ‘M’, its authorship can be attributed to the radical and feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft.2 The review is significant because it provides an example of a woman writing in the capacity of a critic, whose anonymity allows her to divert public censure from her employment while simultaneously permitting her knowingly to subvert the public/private dichotomy of eighteenth-century gender codes. For Wollstonecraft, the act of writing enables her to penetrate the public realm, to participate in the creation of standards of taste and influence the formation of public opinion. It also allows her, in this particular instance, to engage directly with Smith’s Essay and a philosophical enquiry into the sensitive issue of race or ‘human variety’.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler’s Prefatory Note’, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989), VII, p. 14.
Moira Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 9.
Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000);
Felicity Nussbaum’s The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Mitzi Myers, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Literary Reviews’, in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 82.
Londa Schiebinger, The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23 (1989), p. 388.
Scott Juengel, ‘Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science’, ELH, 68 (2001), 897–929.
Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) p. 4.
Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy; for the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind, trans. and ed. Thomas Holcroft, 3 vols (London: G. G. … J. Robinson, 1789), p. 19.
Robert Bernasconi, ‘Editor’s Note’, Concepts of Race in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Robert Bernasconi, 8 vols (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001), VI, p. v.
Hannah Augstein, Race, The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850 (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), p. 56.
See Norris Saakwa-Mante, ‘Western Medicine and Racial Constitutions’, in Race, Science and Medicine, 1700–1960, ed. Waltraud Ernst and Bernard Harris (London: Routledge, 1999).
Wokler’s ‘Apes and Races in the Scottish Enlightenment: Monboddo and Kames on the Nature of Man’, in Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Peter Jones (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), p. 153.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Review, 2 (1788), in Works, VII, p. 50.
Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 3.
Ann Jessie Van Sant Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 14.
F. Price, ‘Imagining Faces: The Later Eighteenth-Century Sentimental Heroine and the Legible, Universal Language of Physiognomy’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 6 (1983), 7.
Ludmilla Jordanova, The Art and Science of Seeing in Medicine: Physiognomy 1780–1820’, Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 124.
Christopher Rivers, Face Value (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 79.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), ed. Carol H. Poston (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1988), p. 117.
Nancy Leys Stepan, ‘Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science’, in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2005 Moi Rickman
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rickman, M. (2005). ‘Tied To Their Species By The Strongest Of All Relations’: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rewriting of Race as Sensibility. In: Batchelor, J., Kaplan, C. (eds) British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595972_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595972_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52556-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-59597-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)