Abstract
Wollstonecraft is not a writer who figures prominently in discussions of the eighteenth-century novel. Her literary productions do not conform to the ideals of the realistic novel which, until recently, have defined the masculine canon of the eighteenth century.1 Nor has she fared much better in feminist revisions.2 She is accorded at best a passing mention in recent critical attempts to move away from an emphasis on realism and towards the different directions taken by the Johnsonian philosophical novel,3 fictions of sensibility4 as well as the polemical fictions of the 1790s.5 Accepting that Wollstonecraft’s radical and feminist politics make her diametrically opposed to Samuel Johnson’s apparently more conservative vision, the critical tradition has failed to read her fictional production in light of his theories of romance and in relation to his moral tales.6 Yet her uncompleted novel Cave of Fancy adopts the model of personal development present in Johnson’s tales. Moreover, as I hope to argue, her theories of the reading experience resonate with his.
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Notes
For instance, Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman is indexed only once in J. Richetti, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
J. Spencer, ‘Women Writers and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. J. Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). This article is a condensation of Spencer’s book-length study, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Unlike the shorter piece, this one offers significant treatment of Wollstonecraft’s work by charting its revolutionary relationship with the novel of seduction and its appropriation of utopian romance. It thereby provides a useful backdrop against which to measure Wollstonecraft’s achievements.
See, for instance, F.M. Keener, The Chain of Becoming: The Philosophical Tale, the Novel, and a Neglected Realism of the Enlightenment: Swift, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Johnson, and Austen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Many of Wollstonecraft’s concerns for the development of the female mind could be discussed in this context. For an interesting exception, see J.G. Basker, ‘Radical Affinities: Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Johnson’, in Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, ed. A. Ribeiro and J.G. Basker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
See C. Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993), 85–107; J. Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Metheun, 1986), 110–28; J. Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 236–52.
Wollstonecraft receives only passing mention in G. Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel: 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); M. Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). For recent attempts to reassess this failure, see C.L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); G.E. Haggerty, Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 103–22.
See L. Langbauer, Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Although this study doesn’t invoke the comparison with Johnson, turning instead to the theories of Julie Kristeva, it discusses romance-like elements in Wollstonecraft’s works.
See N.J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 23–68, which discusses Wollstonecraft’s use of the retrospective confession. A recent exception to this tendency is Haggerty, Unnatural Affections, 103–22, which looks at how Wollstonecraft problematises closure in her revision of the patriarchal plot.
For a discussion of the female reader in eighteenth-century England, see the recent J. Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835, a Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 87–121. For a discussion of the anxieties produced by this figure in relation to the discourse on the sublime, see P. De Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 230–78.
For three different treatments of the relation between Wrongs of Woman and the tradition of the novel, see Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 47–69; G. Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 196–228; Watson, Revolution and Form, 23–68.
The authorship of many of the reviews published in Johnson’s periodical remains disputed. For a discussion of the implications for Wollstonecraft, see the introduction to volume 7 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. My discussion is based on the reviews anthologised in this edition. Wollstonecraft’s involvement in Analytical Review is also discussed in G.P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979), 104–6; S.N. Stewart, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Contributions to the Analytical Review’, Essays in English Literature 11 (1984): 187–99.
See D. Roper, Reviewing before the Edinburgh (London: Metheun & Co., 1978).
For a collection of some early commentary on the novel, see I. Williams, ed., Novel and Romance, 1700–1800: a Documentary Record (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). For a study of literary reviews of the pre-Romantic period, see Roper, Reviewing. For discussions of the relation between this discourse and the emerging institutions of English literature, see F.E. Court, Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750–1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 17–38; I. Duncan, ‘Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson and the Institutions of English’, in The Scottish Invention of English Literature, ed. R. Crawford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); P.G. Bator, ‘The Entrance of the Novel into the Scottish Universities’, in The Scottish Invention of English Literature, ed. R. Crawford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); P.G. Bator, ‘Rhetoric and the Novel in the Eighteenth Century British University Curricula’, Eighteenth Century Studies 30 (1996–7): 173–96. For an attempt to think of these issues in relation to women readers and writers, see S.S. Lanser, Women Critics, 1660–1820 (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1995); K.M. Rogers, ‘Anna Barbauld’s Criticism of Fiction — Johnsonian Mode, Female Vision’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 21 (1991): 27–41.
For a more extensive discussion of the problems, see Bator, ‘Rhetoric and the Novel’; Bator, ‘Entrance of the Novel’; M. McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 25–64.
E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L.G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 [1790]), 76.
For succinct accounts of these theories, see G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); M. Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Todd, Sensibility; J. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
On the relation between these theories and the study of literature in Scotland, see Court, Institutionalizing English, 17–38. This relation is pursued and examined in R. Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 16–110.
C. Kay, ‘Canon, Ideology and Gender: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Critique of Adam Smith’, New Political Science (1986): 63–76. For discussions of A Theory of Moral Sentiment in relation to Smith’s work and to the Scottish Enlightenment, see the essays in I. Hont and M. Igantieff, Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See also S. Copley and K. Sutherland, eds., Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Although more concerned with Smith’s Wealth of Nation, the essays provide new ways of thinking about his work in general.
The importance of this model is examined in detail in D. Marshall, The Figure of the Theatre: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
For discussions of Smith’s innovation in the field of rhetoric, see W.S. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 536–77. Duncan, ‘Smith, Johnson’. See also D. Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 9–49, which establishes this analogy in other eighteenth-century texts.
A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, vol. 1 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974 [1790]), 23; emphasis added. All further references to this work appear in the text.
Although they focus less on Smith and more on the Scottish school, see Crawford, Devolving English Literature; R. Crawford, ‘Introduction’, in The Scottish Invention of English Literature, ed. R. Crawford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); N. Rhodes, ‘From Rhetoric to Criticism’, in The Scottish Invention of English Literature, ed. R. Crawford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For a more complex account of Smith’s theory of how literature fashions subjects, see Duncan, ‘Smith, Johnson’.
See also the discussion on ‘objects of pity’ in A.J. Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 16–45, that relates this philosophical construction to the philanthropic industry.
For a discussion of restrictions in the field of chemistry, see J. Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 11–50. For the legal profession, see R.S. Dosanjh, ‘The “Eloquence of the Bar”: Hugh Blair’s Lectures, Professionalism and Scottish Legal Education’, in The Scottish Invention of English Literature, ed. R. Crawford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. J.T. Boulton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987 [1759]), 57 and 136.
Ibid., 116.
See F. Ferguson, ‘Wollstonecraft Our Contemporary’, in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. L. Kauffman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Discussing Vindication of the Rights of Men, it invokes the difference between two forms of identification, reason (what I call respect) that addresses a superior, and pity (tenderness) an inferior. As I do here, Ferguson suggests that Wollstonecraft is striving to undermine the sexual division of these forms of identification.
M. Fawcett, ‘Introduction to the New Edition’, in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891), 8.
H. Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 89. I will compare the two women philosophers’ preoccupation with pity in the next chapter.
On this parallel as it pertains specifically to Wollstonecraft, see D. Coleman, ‘Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English Women’s Protest Writing in the 1790s’, English Literary History 61 (1994): 341–62; M. Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 8–33; F. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 73–95. For a very convincing reading of this passage, see M. Nyquist, ‘Wanting Protection: Fair Ladies, Sensibility and Romance’, in Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminisms, ed. E.J. Yeo (London: River Oram Press, 1996).
C. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
See, for instance, J. Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. R.R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997 [1778]), 42. For a feminist ‘archeology’ of the gender-implications of the disapproval for details, see N. Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), 11–22.
See J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 37–50 and the discussion in chapter 1.
For a discussion of Wollstonecraft’s reviews, see M. Myers, ‘Sensibility and “the Walk of Reason”: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Literary Reviews as Cultural Critique’, in Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics, ed. S.M. Conger (London: Associated University Press, 1990). Myers lucidly demonstrates how Wollstonecraft favours a reading experience structured around the interaction between sentiment and reason. See also S.M. Conger, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility (London: Associated University Press, 1994), 85–96.
A. Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J.C. Bryce, vol. 4 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983 [1762–3]), 110.
J. Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (London: J. Johnson, 1777), 145; emphasis in the original.
S. Johnson, The Rambler, ed. W.J. Bate and A.B. Strauss, vol. 3 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 8 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969), 22.
Ibid., 24.
For a comparison between Richardson and the Marquis de Sade, see R.F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sterne (London: Macmillan, 1974). For a discussion of the ‘tortured’ logic of Richardson, see Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility, 60–82.
See A. Browne, The Eighteenth-Century Feminist Mind (London: Harvester Press, 1987), 57–78; Pearson, Women’s Reading, 22–41. For appropriations of his novel by women, see R. Perry, ‘Clarissa’s Daughter’s, or the History of Innocence Betrayed: How Women Writers Rewrote Richardson’, Women’s Writing 1 (1994): 5–24. For a more general discussion of the novel of seduction and betrayal, see Spencer, Rise of the Woman Novelist, 107–32.
D. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974 [1777]), 239.
See Rogers, ‘Anna Barbauld’s Criticism’; C.E. Moore, ‘“Ladies … Taking the Pen in Hand”: Mrs Barbauld’s Criticism of Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists’, in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. M.A. Schofield and C. Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986). For a discussion of the relation between Johnson and women writers more generally, see Pearson, Women’s Reading, 29–32. On the more surprising relationship between Wollstonecraft and Johnson, see Basker, ‘Radical Affinities’; S. Sherman, ‘Wollstonecraft and Johnson’, Johnsonian News Letter LI and LII (1992): 11–15.
‘An Enquiry … Agreeable Sensations’ in J. Aiken and A.L. Aiken, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, second edn (London: J. Johnson, 1775), 213. Subsequently attributed to Anna Laetitia Barbauld.
In the course of Barbauld’s long intellectual career, she repeatedly turns to the exemplary status of Clarissa. As editor of both Richardson’s correspondence and of a series on novelists, she invokes the relevance of this moral fiction. See her A.L. Barbauld, ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing’, in The British Novelists; with an Essay, and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, vol. 1 of 50 vols. (London: F.C. and J. Rivington, etc., 1820); A.L. Barbauld, ‘Life of Samuel Richardson with Remarks on His Writings’, in The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, Author of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison. Selected from the Original Manuscripts, vol. 1 of 6 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1804).
S. Johnson, ‘Life of Milton’, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G.B. Hill, vol. 1 of 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905 [1779–81]), 180.
Ibid., 181.
J. Milton, ‘Areopagitica’, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. E. Sirluck, vol. 2 of 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959 [1644]), 515.
Ironically, subsequent Romantic readers articulate a very different reading of Paradise Lost than Johnson does by underplaying the author’s intentional design and by recognising that the reader ‘like Adam and Eve is fortunately free to fall’, as Lucy Newlyn puts it. See L. Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 89. Significantly, although Wollstonecraft articulates through the example of Julia her own reticence respecting Milton’s Paradise Lost, in more than one way her comments on the reading experience — specially where sin and vice are concerned — echo Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’. In this sense, as implied in ‘“An Eve to Please Me”’, she may well be turning Milton against Milton to demonstrate how — especially where Eve is concerned — he does not always live up to his promise.
H. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, fourth edn, vol. 1 of 3 vols. (London: Printed for A. Strahan; T. Cadell, in the Strand; and W. Creech, in Edinburgh, 1790), 66–67; emphasis added.
For a discussion of this revision as it pertains to her historical narrative see V. Jones, ‘Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in Wollstonecraft and Williams’, in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780–1832, ed. S. Copley and J. Whale (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991).
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© 2002 Saba Bahar
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Bahar, S. (2002). Making Novel Creatures. In: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403907035_4
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