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‘Imaginary circles round the human mind’: Bias and Openness in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)

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Romantic Norths

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Abstract

Christoph Bode offers a fresh reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), one of the most celebrated and best-known British romantic-period engagements with Scandinavia. Bode focuses on the generic tension in Letters between an attempt to provide credible witness to Scandinavia and the attempt to forge a ‘romantic’ persona. Wollstonecraft’s narrative, Bode concludes, involves less a description than an aesthetics of appropriation, an aesthetics which marks Wollstonecraft’s Letters as surprisingly and distinctly unrepresentative of the larger cultural patterns of exchange which we discern in this volume.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Per Nyström, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian Journey, Acts of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences of Gothenburg, Humaniora No. 17 (1980); Gunnar Molden, ‘Sølvbriggen Maria Margrete: ud av historiens mørke’, Norsk Sojfartsmuseum: Årsberetning, 1995 (Oslo, 1996), pp. 139–154.

  2. 2.

    The biographical information here is taken from Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Penguin, 2012); Diane Jacobs, Her Own Women: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001); Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2001); Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Virago, 2005, 2006); and Richard Holmes’s Introduction to A Short Residence [and] Memoirs of the Author the Rights of Woman (London: Penguin, 1987).

  3. 3.

    Margot Beard, ‘“Whither am I wandering?”: a Journey into the self – Mary Wollstonecraft’s travels in Scandinavia, 1795’, Literator: Tydskrif vir Besondere en Vergelykende Taal – en Literatuurstudie 25 (2004), pp. 73–89 (74); Luisa Pontrandolfo, ‘Through female eyes: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from [sic] a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark’, in Michele Bottalico, Maria Teresa Chialant, and Eleonora Rao (eds.), Literary Landscapes, Landscapes in Literature (Rome: Carocci editore, 2007), pp. 190–198 (190).

  4. 4.

    Anka Ryall and Catherine Sandback-Dahlström (eds.), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Journey to Scandinavia: Essays (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2003), p. 1.

  5. 5.

    Todd, Wollstonecraft, p. 315; Gordon, Vindication, pp. 255, 236.

  6. 6.

    Holmes (ed.), Short Residence, p. 17.

  7. 7.

    Ibid., p. 18.

  8. 8.

    Quoted in Holmes (ed.), Short Residence, p. 17.

  9. 9.

    Mary Wollstonecraft, The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Allen Lane, 2003), p. 304.

  10. 10.

    All quotations from Letters Wriiten during a Short Residence are from Holmes (ed.), p. 62.

  11. 11.

    Wollstonecraft, Short Residence, p. 62.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., p. 64.

  13. 13.

    Ibid., p. 65.

  14. 14.

    Ibid.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., p. 82.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., p. 92.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., p. 65.

  18. 18.

    Ibid., p. 155.

  19. 19.

    Ibid., p. 156.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., pp. 121, 122.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., p. 165.

  22. 22.

    Cf. Ibid., p. 82.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., p. 131.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., p. 66.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., p. 73.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., p. 116; cf. pp. 83–84.

  27. 27.

    Ibid., p. 73.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., pp. 132, 79–80 (emphasis added).

  29. 29.

    Ibid., pp. 91, 99.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., p. 113. Norway was then part of the kingdom of Denmark, but the language spoken there was, of course, Norwegian. Her double inability to communicate in the official language and in the language spoken by the people does not seem to have worried her in the least.

  31. 31.

    Martin Åberg, ‘Modernity and Traditionalism: Wollstonecraft’s Letters and other representations of Bohuslän’, in Ryall and Sandbach-Dahlström (eds.), pp. 53–76.

  32. 32.

    Wollstonecraft, Short Residence, p. 85. This is one of the few passages in Wollstonecraft’s Letters which indicate that she had business to pursue during her trip.

  33. 33.

    Cf. ibid., pp. 171–2.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., p. 82.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., pp. 82–3.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., pp. 83, 157.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., p. 171.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., p. 78.

  39. 39.

    Cf. ibid., pp. 140–1.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., p. 103.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., p. 105.

  42. 42.

    Ibid.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., p. 179.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., p. 105.

  45. 45.

    Raoul Granqvist, ‘Her imperial eyes: a reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark’, Moderna Sprak 91 (1997), pp. 16–24 (12).

  46. 46.

    Wollstonecraft, Short Residence, p. 92.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., pp. 92–3.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., p. 93.

  49. 49.

    Cf. ibid., p. 172.

  50. 50.

    Ibid., p. 165.

  51. 51.

    For an extended discussion of her arguments, see Christoph Bode, Fremd-Erfahrungen: Diskursive Konstruktion von Identität in der britischen Romantik II: Identität auf Reisen (WVT: Trier, 2009), pp. 237–46.

  52. 52.

    Wollstonecraft, Short Residence, pp. 190–191. Wollstonecraft quotes John Dryden,‘Alexander’s Feast; or, The Power of Music: An Ode in Honour of St. Cecilia’s Day’ (1697), ll. 77–8.

  53. 53.

    Gordon, Vindication, pp. 281, 287

  54. 54.

    Wollstonecraft, Short Residence, p. 173.

  55. 55.

    Holmes (ed.), Short Residence, p. 19.

  56. 56.

    Wollstonecraft, Short Residence, pp. 67–8.

  57. 57.

    Cf. ibid., p. 99.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., p. 135.

  59. 59.

    Ibid., p. 119.

  60. 60.

    Ibid., pp. 128–9.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., p. 178.

  62. 62.

    Holmes (ed.), Short Residence, p. ix.

  63. 63.

    Wollstonecraft, Short Residence, pp. 165, 178.

Bibliography

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  1. Modern English Literature, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany

    Christoph Bode

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Correspondence to Christoph Bode .

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  1. Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Cian Duffy

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Bode, C. (2017). ‘Imaginary circles round the human mind’: Bias and Openness in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). In: Duffy, C. (eds) Romantic Norths. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51246-4_2

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