SOURCE: "Ideology and Self: A Theoretical Discussion of the 'Self' in Mary Wollestonecraft's Fiction," English Studies in Canada, Vol. XII, No. 2, June 1986, pp. 163-77.

[In the following essay, Harasym examines the autobiographical novel The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, contending that Wollstonecraft's identification of herself with her protagonist complicated her portrayal of a utopian feminist ideology.]

She whose sense of her own existence was so intense, who had cried out even in her misery, "I cannot bear to think of being no more—of losing myself—nay, it appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist", died at the age of thirty-six.¹

As Virginia Woolf's comment and quotation from Wollstonecraft's letter suggests, Mary Wollstonecraft's oeuvre from Mary, A Fiction and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to Maria or The Wrongs of Woman may be read as a quest for a unified self and presence, to serve as a focal point for her, paradoxically, feminist, yet, monolithic ideology.² Indeed, presence is a necessary constituent of her attempt to write herself as the true voice of feeling into her fiction and, in so doing, provide a unified subject as a political representative for the emancipation of women.

Wollstonecraft's will to explain reinforces presuppositions of an explainable universe, a 'knowing' subject and a neutral medium of expression—language. Problems necessarily arise from this structural equation (world + subject + language) which are similar to problems written into both Hegel's and Lacan's theories of universal language, theories which assimilate feminine difference into masculine sameness.³ Since language consists of conventional structures which pre-exist and prohibit appeals for self-present intention, the writing process may be read as both an active and a passive process. In this configuration, then, as Wollstonecraft attempts to inscribe herself into her displaced, autobiographical, feminine characters, she, too, is written by the text. Held in the act of reading, ordering, and writing her life-narrative, she is not a masterful subject, but an object or an already written supplement.⁴

Structuralist and deconstructive practices read the self as a linguistically and socially constituted figure, a figure which operates independently of any individual or subjective intention.⁵ Emile Benveniste in Problèmes de linguistique générale notes that language is a discursive relation involving two figures in a structure of dialogue: "Two figures positioned as partners are alternately protagonists of the utterance."⁶ The concepts of self and I are merely figurative words chosen through syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of linguistic structures. For Lacan, the self is a mere symptom of the opposition of divisiveness and otherness.⁷ In contrast to viewing the subject as a linguistic intentional construct, Wollstonecraft's interpreters often conceive of the author's or character's self as an essence. The text is the intersection of self and literature.⁸ Yet, should we assume this phallogocentric⁹ unity of self and formal neutrality of language (unity and neutrality which exclude feminine difference and both suppress and repress women) when we read Maria or The Wrongs of Woman? Does not this assumption deconstruct the very tenets of Wollstonecraft's feminist ideology?

In the treatment of the self in Maria or The Wrongs of Woman, there is a sharp contrast between Maria's first-person autobiographical memories and the third-person narrative discourse which criticizes and censors Maria's actions, and draws social and political conclusions about the unjust treatment of women. Thus, the memoirs, far from portraying a unified subject and developing as an instruction text for the emancipation of women, dwell in fatalistic melodrama, and eventually usurp the objective discourse of the narrator. In so doing, the memoirs deconstruct the intentions of Wollstonecraft's radical idealism and rather than creating a work of fiction which offers a representation of the "new" emancipated woman, Maria or The Wrongs of Woman dismantles into a fragmented, fatalistic text. Therein, Wollstonecraft's political statements, such as the final line of Mary, an earlier version of The Wrongs of Woman, on the unjust treatment of women, and her prefactor intentions to write the "true picture" of women, fail. The failure of her intentions may be the result of her inability to establish ties between "self and society, private memoirs and political tracts, as well as ties between fact and fiction.

By reading Wollstonecraft's Maria or The Wrongs of Woman within the framework of Hegel's and Lacan's theories of the subject and language—two forms of understanding dependent upon resemblance and substitution rather than 'truth'—l hope to suggest what some of the problematic ramifications depicting the self as a linguistic construct might expose for feminist monolithic ideologies. Ultimately, it is my belief that Maria's melancholic, fatalistic memoirs usurp the political statements of the text and that this usurption, in turn, results in the failure of Wollstonecraft to re-construct herself in an autobiographical fiction which is itself a deferral of public political presence into private self-presence.

The preface to The Wrongs of Woman and Wollstonecraft's theories of self, writing, and idealistic feminist utopianism, are comparable to Hegel's theory of art and his master and slave dialectic.¹⁰ For Hegel, the work of art is "something made, produced by a man who has taken it into his imagination … and issued it by his own activity out of his imagination."¹¹ In addition, Hegel suggests that individuals cannot rest satisfied with a conquest that fails to secure the conscious acknowledgement of other men. Hence, there is a struggle for both power and recognition. In the struggle for identity those who risk the least become slaves of those who face death by risking their lives. In order to preserve his life, the slave submits to his master who regards the slave as nothing beyond the means to his end. The slave works to provide leisure for the master and to protect the master from experiencing nature's negativity. The master consumes and, thus, destroys while the slave creates through his work. Furthermore, Hegel suggests that the master's consumption is impermanent as it relies upon the slave's productivity, whereas the slave creates permanence and self-consciousness through his work in the finished product the slave identifies with himself. It follows then that Hegel posits awork of art as a unified form through which the creator establishes unity, recognition of self, and permanence.

Ultimately, Hegel conceives of the self as a product of self-consciousness and self-recognition. In art, this self or presence "has its source in that man is a thinking consciousness" and is wedded to creative power. For Hegel consciousness is obtained and realized by practical activity.¹² Similarly, Wollstonecraft suggests in the prefaces to Mary, a Fiction and Maria or The Wrongs of Woman that her writing or fictions are 'true' narration[s] and (in the Advertisement to Mary, a Fiction) "artless tale[s]" which are drawn from "original sources[s]." In so doing, she asks the reader to supplement her texts and to engage in a hermeneutic reading of her fictional subjects in order to perceive them as unified, autonomous constructs. For, it becomes evident upon reading the novels that the characters never attain the stage of Hegelian self-consciousness needed to constitute a unified subject. Self-consciousness and unified subjects remain as intentional and unattainable desires which are endlessly deferred and sutured between imaginary reconciliations and their symbolic representations.

For Hegel and Wollstonecraft, self-formation is created through the mediation of alienation and estrangement. Self-formation is not developed harmoniously as if by organic growth, but rather is constituted in the process of becoming opposed to oneself and discovering oneself through splitting and separation. It is appropriate, then, that Maria writes her memoirs in isolation and examines herself in solitude, as she attempts to escape the other (insubstantiality of self and patriarchal enslavement) in hope of finding herself. But her attempt to substantiate herself in her intransitive state is undermined by the narrator who tells us that she fell "prey" to "impetuous, varying emotions," and the "depth[s] of despair" (24, 49). The narrator suggests that Maria's pursuits are futile, for "what chance then had Maria of escaping, when pity, sorrow, and solitude all conspired to soften her mind, and nourish romantic wishes, and, from a natural progress, romantic expectations?" (48). And finally, the text suggests Maria's need to conceive of the other to gain presence and "'to fly from thought'" (91). The narrator describes Maria's loss of "self as a product of her alienation and estrangement from others as follows: "These thoughts [of her child] roused her sleeping spirit, and the self-possession returned, that seemed to have abandoned her in the infernal solitude into which she had been precipitated" (24). Furthermore, when the Other is absent, Maria realizes that writing or work is necessary for self-conception, as "Indulged sorrow, she perceived, must blunt or sharpen the faculties to the two opposite extremes; producing stupidity, the moping melancholy of indolence; or the restless activity of a disturbed imagination" (27). We can conclude, then, that in solitude and isolation from the world, Maria discovers that in the process of losing being-for-others she loses being-for-herself. Affirmations of autonomy in the text can, therefore, be real as meta-statements about the very impossibilityof autonomy and escape from otherness through writing. Consequently, the desire for purposiveness is no less than the desire for the Other.

As Anthony Wilden notes we may now reinterpret the confusion of the mind and self in the Hegelian dialectic of opposition and identity as a site of Lacanian desire. In other words, the Hegelian dialectic depends upon an "illusory reduction" of differences in the deferred Absolute Spirit.¹³ Hence, Hegelian desire may be likened to de Man's theory of intentionality and repetition in the romantic metaphor.¹⁴ Desire remains in both Hegel's and Wollstonecraft's texts as the presence of absence: it is a lacuna, a void or a mere nothingness sutured between the imaginary and real.¹⁵

Wollstonecraft's feminist project may be likened to Hegel's phenomenology of mind or spirit since both projects depend upon faith and suggest that the yet undiscovered telos of events will evolve into unity and reconciliation of opposition as Wollstonecraft does when she defers her project into the future.¹⁶ In A Vindication of the Rights of Women Wollstonecraft undermines her utopian trajectory for change by deferring emancipation to a future time:

But for this epoch we must wait—wait, perhaps, till kings and nobles, enlightened by reason, and, preferring the real dignity of man to childish state, throw off their gaudy hereditary trappings: and if then women do not resign the arbitrary power of beauty—they will prove that they have less mind than man. (22)

Or again:

Asserting the rights which women in common with men ought to contend for, I have not attempted to extenuate their faults; but to prove them to be the natural consequence of their education and station in society. If so, it is reasonable to suppose that they will change their character, and correct their vices and follies, when they are allowed to be free in a physical, moral, and civil sense. (194, emphasis mine)

It is obvious, then, that Wollstonecraft defers her emancipation of women to a future time and, in so doing, asks her readers to have faith in her ideology and excuse women's enslavement as being an obstacle and predicament of their time.

To compensate for the lack of presence, Wollstonecraft conceives of the self as acquiring presence through self-reflection and writing: the self becomes a (Derridean) supplement of the writing process. Thus, the narrator comments in Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, that, in order for Maria to gain presence of self in an age when women are not allowed to have a "self" because of "hereditary trappings," she begins to write memoirs:

The books she had obtained, were soon devoured, by one who had no other resource to escape from sorrow, and the feverish dreams of ideal wretchedness or felicity, which equally weaken the intoxicated sensibility. Writing was then the only alternative, and she wrote some rhapsodies descriptive of the state of her mind; but the events of her past life pressing on her, she resolved circumstantially to relate them, with the sentiments that experience, and more matured reason, would naturally suggest. They might perhaps instruct her daughter, and shield her from the misery, the tyranny, her mother knew not how to avoid (30-31, emphasis mine)

Yet ironically, in her written memoirs Maria describes not a unified subject constituted through mediation, but rather, a repetition of her earlier struggle and desire to find identity, recognition, and love through her interaction with other people.

Paradoxically, to be sociable involves self-contradiction and the loss of subjectivity, for in order to be social the subject must allow for the equality of others and provide room for their discourse and desires. Although Maria might be said to imaginatively seek equality with others, the relationships she describes with others are not those of equality but, instead, relationships in which the heroines must take maternal control. As a figure of authority, then, Maria retains her imaginary 'self' conceptions, and ironically never attains the recognition or love she desires. At other times, when a 'kindred spirit' is found, as for example, Danford, or, in the early novel Mary, Henry and Ann, the others are described as ill, dying, or imprisoned, the heroines bound to the servitude of a marriage contract, and, thus, relationships of equality are impossible.

Although relationships between characters are never those of equality or reciprocity, the selves they do construct may be interpreted as semiotic comparisons with others. In this process the self is defined as a void, a lack, to be filled by recognition of the Other which is endlessly deferred. Maria's attempt to create a unified subject, evident in the descriptions of her frustrated attempts to fill the void in her memoirs, and similarly, Wollstonecraft's prefatory assertions of a unified subject, may be interpreted as "intentional" constructs which are never realized. We may conclude, therefore, that, in the process of writing, the 'functional' author attempts to posit meaning and provide a unified conception of self in relation to others which remains as a linguistic intention of semiotic reconciliation.

The Romantic and Hegelian conception of the reconstruction of self through fiction is further undermined in Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman and Mary, a Fiction through the narrator's condemnation of literature as escapist fantasy. Mary's mother is condemned as negligent because she reads romantic melodramas, and Maria is described as fleeing from the insubstantiality of self throughreading and writing. Consequently, Wollstonecraft's intentions to write the true voice of fiction may be questioned. Ultimately, the Hegelian work of art she intends to write dismantles as Maria's first-person melodramatic memoirs usurp her authorial intentions. To recapitulate: one way in which we may view the subject as being constituted in Wollstonecraft's fiction is as the oscillating exploration of self in relation to others. The self is not constructed by reflexive and ritualistic sympathetic inspection and, therefore, does not gain unification through the writing process.

The Romantic conception of the self as analogically depicted in nature is also denied in Wollstonecraft's fiction. Indeed, women's enslavement is caused by man's imprisonment of women in a sensual and primitive state. Wollstonecraft posits eighteenth-century society's failure to provide women with a formal (logocentric) education as the cause of women's insubstantial selves, the cause of their enslavement, and the cause of women's over-developed sensualism and romanticism. Nature, then, becomes a backdrop against which the self must be distinguished and constructed through systems of education (reading and writing) as well as through semiotic relations with others. Maria obtains education from her beneficent uncle. He instructs her and brings her books, for which she "'had a passion, and they [the books] conspired with his conversation to … form an ideal picture of life'" (78). Similarly, education serves as a supplement for Maria's inability to be a loving parent to her child since Maria conceives of her memoirs as serving an educational purpose:

Addressing these memoirs to you, my child, uncertain whether I shall ever have an opportunity of instructing you, many observations will probably flow from my heart, which only a mother—a mother schooled in misery, could make.… From my narrative, my dear girl, you may gather the instruction, the counsel, which is meant rather to exercise than influence your mind. (74)

And finally, in A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft posits women's inadequate education as the source of their servitude:

Consequently the perfection of our nature and capability of happiness, must be estimated by the degree of reason, virtue, and knowledge, that distinguish the individual, and direct the laws which bind society: and that from the exercise of reason, knowledge and virtue naturally flow, is equally undeniable, if mankind be viewed collectively. (12)

Thus, the first step to constructing a unified self must be to acquire an alternative system of education to compensate for nature's inadequacies.

(Implicitly, Wollstonecraft's presuppositions of the inadequacy ofeighteenth-century society to provide an education system for women supports a theory of language as historically constituted. Since language is not an a-historical, universal construct, truth, then, is relative to historical, sociopolitical forces. Yet, an alternate historically constituted theory of feminine language fails to materialize in Wollstonecraft's text since she reduces her dualistic (feminine/masculine) presuppositions into a monolithic theory of language. Indeed, doesn't this reduction also point to the inadequacy, lack, of, both, Hegel's and Lacan's theories for feminist ideologies?)

If the alternative to nature is education and, therefore, language, as a part of a system of signs, it follows, then, that the self must be a linguistic structure. Furthermore, since the linguistic self is necessarily a sign constituted through paradigmatic and syntagmatic selection, it can only rely upon other linguistic signs for support. Again, we reach a blindspot in Wollstonecraft's search for a unified self, for if the self is only an intentional metaphor, it follows then that the essence of self is self-contradiction, displacement, and estrangement from/self—the transferral of the imaginary in Lacanian terms into symbolic or linguistic structures. Ultimately then, the self is an intentional construct which lacks substantiality. In other words, the divided self is a lack,¹⁷ void, or an empty intentional gesture which can never be expressed, conveyed, or constructed in autobiographical memoirs, for its structure like language is that of difference.

Ironically, Wollstonecraft's heroines confronting or wishing to avoid the self's emptiness attempt to lend the self support in and from their relationships with others. Mary is a lack or a void of desire, without any self, and her life story is a search for self as she attempts to borrow a self from outside. As she reads melodramas, has no formal education, and has an overdeveloped sensual romantic nature, she continually attempts to construct a self through love of and from others. Similarly, the narrator of Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman depicts Maria as romantic:

A magic lamp now seemed to be suspended in Maria's prison, and fairy landscapes flitted round the gloomy walls, late so blank. Rushing from the depth of despair, on the seraph wing of hope, she found herself happy.—She was beloved, [by Danford] and every emotion was rapturous. (49)

Yet, although women are depicted as victims of their time, time which does not allow them to have a "voice," presence, or formal education, they are not provided with an alternative system by which to construct conceptions of self. Maria realizes how easy it is for women to become romantic because of their lack of reason. She reflects "on the little objects which attract attention when there is nothing to divert the mind; and how difficult it was for women to avoid growing romantic, who have no active duties or pursuits" (36). Thus, the novels take on a fatalistic tone, caught within the phallogocentric discourse of their time and, furthermore, Wollstonecraft's ideology is bound within the patriarchal prison-house of language. Perhaps it is this failure to envision an alternative system which fissures and finally deconstructs Wollstonecraft's utopian hopes and leads to her inability to finish Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman?

In order to compensate for the self's emptiness, the subject attempts to fill the void from outside. The two predominant eighteenth-century doctrines which focus on how the self is constructed are religious tracts and moral philosophy. Maria attempts to resolve her dilemma of selflessness through her adherence to religion and negation of sensual experience. Her quest, therefore, becomes a phenomenological quest for a union with the Other. She seeks for platonic and spiritual love rather than for sensual relationships. The Other whom she seeks and hopes to find substantiality through is, therefore, the transcendental Other as God. It follows then that this union can only be endlessly deferred or gained through death of self.

In rewriting Mary into Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman Wollstonecraft replaces religion as a system for attaining self, a system which we have seen endlesly defers self acquisition into the future and posits the self as constituted in "desire," into another equally deferring system. In writing a political tract of her unjust treatment Maria hopes to attain her own sense of self and to free her child from being subjected to similar treatment. However, Wollstonecraft's 'self remains a desire beyond acquisition trapped within the patriarchal system, a system which represses women and reinforces self-destructive notions.

Paradoxically, Maria's longing for love and recognition by others, which will substantiate her "self," is fissured by her inability to give herself. For to love someone requires that the individual communicate with the other, a process which involves self-contradiction and annihilation of the self. Maria, a vulnerable victim of her own fears, is unable to carry through her attempts to escape from the other since she simultaneously longs for and backs away from relations with others. Consequently, when she finally escapes from her husband's home, she is unable to confront her lack of self, falls victim to illness and longs for a benefactor to save her; when she is imprisoned, she writes her memoirs in an attempt to create a self; and finally, when she falls in love with Danford, she refrains from telling him as she is afraid that he does not love her.

Desire, which has the practical aim of possessing an object, may be contrasted to love, which is not practical and does not have possession of an object as its goal.¹⁸ For although desire may fulfil and therein annihilate itself in obtaining its goal, love is an illusory state and, therefore, lacks substantiality. Wollstonecraft's heroines choose illusory love over desire as systems for attaining self-recognition. Thus, their pursuits are endlessly frustrated. When desire is evident, as for example whenMaria desires to constitute herself in her memoirs, when she attempts to escape from her husband, or when she pleads in court on Danford's behalf, she lacks the force to carry her desires through to completion and satisfaction. Thus, Maria continually deflects her desire for "self from one object or utopian hope to another and, in so doing, creates a system to sustain herself without commitment.

The imaginary may be considered as falsifying and unattainable, yet, paradoxically, it is necessary for existence. The narrator of Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman addresses the necessity for an imaginary supplement as follows:

… what are we, when the mind has, from reflection, a certain kind of elevation, which exalts the contemplation above the little concerns of prudence! We see what we wish, and make a world of our own—and, though reality may sometimes open a door to misery, yet the moments of happiness procured by the imagination, may, without a paradox, be reckoned among the solid comforts of life. Maria now, imagining that she had found a being of celestial mould—was happy,—nor was she deceived. (139)

The mixture of rhetorical codes evident in this passage, a mixture which also may be at work in Wollstonecraft's fiction, raises the question as to how the reader is to read the text. Are the stories meant to be the true portrayal of women in Wollstonecraft's historical period or are they fictions? Furthermore, we may ask, is Wollstonecraft suggesting that truth is fiction?

The only relationships Maria seems to be able to have with others is one of pity. The temptations and dangers of relationships constituted by pity are those of attaching one's heart and one's affection to the need of others and in the process identifying with the other. When Jessica narrates her story, Mary identifies with her and becomes overwhelmed with pity. Pity is also at work in Maria's victimization by her vulgar husband. The narrator designates pity as the cause of Maria's inability to escape, "what chance then had Maria of escaping, when pity, sorrow, and solitude all conspired to soften her mind, and nourish romantic wishes, and, from a natural progress, romantic expectations?" (48). Thus, self-love succumbs, for Maria, not to desire, but to pity.

Derrida argues that "Pity is neither the source itself nor a derived passionate flux, a passion acquired among others. It is the first derivation of "the love of self."¹⁹ In other words, pity is otherness within the self. Pity is therefore also self-sacrifice. Both pity and love of self are literary and fictional in their essence since the "self is merely a hypothesis that appears as a phenomenon only via reflection, imagination, and every-day life acts that allude to but do not prove its existence."²⁰ We may conclude from these various descriptions of how the self is constructed that in Wollstonecraft's fiction the self is alinguistic structure.

Implicit in this discussion of the self as a linguistic structure and of its relationship to others as part of a network of semiotic exchanges has been a Lacanian reading. For Lacan the symbolic father is neither real nor present, but a metaphor of paternity which founds and sustains the cultural orders into which subjects are born.²¹ The father is the founder of our cultural exchanges and discourses. The name of the father signifies culture itself, what, ironically, cannot be named—the system of signifiers. This system is independent of reality and a free floating autonomous symbolic construction. The name of the father symbolizes this freedom, the absence of present reality and the difference from the real. It follows, then, that social systems governed according to syntagmatic and paradigmatic laws which operate like signifiers of a language create roles and discourses into which the subject is introduced at birth. Thus, it is through the father's name and words that we acquire access to signifying system. As Kaja Silverman,²² Anthony Wilden²³ and various other people have pointed out, this universal, a-historical phallogocentric system leaves no place for women's language. Feminism becomes the repressed term by which discourse is acquired and, in so doing, involves submission to phallocentricism.

Lacan describes the child as discovering desire in its love for the mother at which time he/she knows no limits to need or satisfaction prior to his entry into the symbolic system. Eventually, this desire for the mother's love is frustrated in the child as the mother's desire turns to the father and the realm of the phallus.

At this point, the child learns the emptiness which the phallus names. Desire to be the object of the mother's desire evolves into the frustrated desire to have the object. "Castration" in Lacanian terms is the moment of the desire's emergence. This desire is neither the desire of need nor demand, but desire for signification by which the object chosen links to the chain of signifiers that, in turn, links it to the history of the subject's desire. Desire is systematic and satisfying. What is spoken in language must be interpreted within this configuration of language, self, and history.

Consequently, language not only calls up absences, it re-inscribes through the absence of a satisfactory object the fantasy of that satisfaction and disposes the subject in relation to an object in the linguistic structure itself. Language, for Lacan, is the condition for the constitution of the unconscious; hence, he posits the unconscious as a linguistic structure—a signifying system deploying ideas in chains of links, cross links, and interlinks of associations by reference to desired objects and by the deflections created through repression.

If we now turn to a reading of Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, we discover a difference emphasized in the contrasting voices in thetext, a difference which eventually grows into chasms or blindspots between the present tense and past tense; social tense and personal destiny; critical, rational intelligence and feeling hearts; objective observation and sympathetic response; judgement and sentiment; and finally, between anger and melancholy. As the narrative of Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman progresses, the removed, authoritative voice of social observation and deftly plotted coincidence becomes this negative difference, for the social voice lacks power. Eventually, the objective voice of the narrator, who in the early part of the novel is condemning and critical, is usurped by the melodramatic voice of the text. The voice of the social commentary is negated by the written supplement of Maria's memories, for Maria depicts women's repression as an unavoidable cause of their age. Social ideologies for the emancipation of women must, therefore, be deferred to a future, imaginary time.

Lacan developed a theory which locates the Psyche in a series of relations to the Other, which are described as the "Imaginary," and its relations to the "Symbolic," or the Law of the Name of the Father (social voice and language). From the originating totality of union with mother to the history of the separation and adoption of ideals, roles and models, the other exists for the self.²⁴

Mary's and Maria's infinite capacities for adopting needy characters illustrate this kind of relation. They nurture and help others as they wish to be nurtured and helped. Thus, their lives become lives of sacrifice and, in doing so, reveal their lack of self-love. The love they wish for is transferred onto the other, or the worthy one, and, paradoxically, the unattainable other.

For Lacan, the transformation of the imaginary makes the symbolic visible. With Maria's entry into the symbolic order (written memoirs) she reinvents her life in the discourse of the Other. Her narrative is important, for it provides the relation to the unconscious processes that the language of fiction explores. It also may be said to exist as a Derridean written language—the mark of repressed absence.²⁵ Through a chiastic reversal Maria's memoirs usurp the critical narrative voice and, in so doing, displace the objective narrative of prohibition into her life story. Her fiction does not lead back to ontological beginnings but to lack of a beginning, when the desire sought is already that of substitution.

Lacan's view of the metonymic operation of desire suggests that when fictional language describes desire we encounter in relation to the narrative consciousness another text whose language is visible in the words and deeds of the principal agent of the novel. Similarly, Maria's search for self and origins attaches the objective narrative to a psychic history and affirms an order which the other narrative must realize.

The subject is what appears in being subjected to language as a system of empty signifiers. It is what is signified and does not occur instantaneously with the history of the individual.²⁶

In language, where the other is again sought, the individual develops only in relation to its absence and its difference which the linguistic system makes evident. Early in the mirror stage, a conflictual stage, the individual imagines herself as a unity, but in language this unity is a desire.²⁷ The differences between these positions distinguish Lacan's imaginary and symbolic. In Maria's imaginary the relation to the other is of illusory unity; whereas, in the symbolic, the other separates her self from the object, and in language this term becomes the Other from which language develops. Hence, Maria, as subject, now is nothing but this representation.

Maria's life is a life of submission, domination, and oppression. Thus, Maria is in Lacanian terms "seduced" by the "father" into the symbolic patriarchal order. Seduction describes the structural, relational world of desire and development. If we now analyze the concluding section of Maria's story as a repetition of the first section, Maria's seduction becomes obvious. In this structural reversal Danford and the law replace Maria's father, while Maria repeats her search for the love and recognition of her father(s) and wishes her stepmother dead. If Danford fulfils her absent father's place, and Maria that of her mother's or stepmother's place, then, Maria's daughter becomes Maria. Maria, the centre of desire in the novel, takes her place in the displaced scene of incest and her dream of the women's emancipation is dismantled.

As for the evident narrative disunity of Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, the position of the narrative "subject" or the imagined speaker, also is a formal constituent of the novel and in this case a binary element of complementary and oppositional forces. The situation of a subject in the symbolic order follows upon the recognition of this difference that leads, in turn, to an attempt to articulate the difference and seek presence. The illusion of Hegelian unity becomes dismantled in difference.

Yet, paradoxically, in this subjective activity and relation to the desire of the Other, Mary and Maria continue to seek love and recognition from the patriarchal, phallogocentric order which condemns and imprisons them. Similarly, Wollstonecraft continues to write and long for the presence and identification of women in her society by seeking the aid, discourse, and difference of the patriarchal order of language which she hopes to usurp and reconstruct. Is perhaps this paradoxical desire and seduction by the Father or symbolic order why Wollstonecraft had difficulty in writing Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman and why it is left incomplete?²⁸ In describing and condemning the female characters of her fiction for being representations of the women of her time, did Wollstonecraft discover that she had, paradoxically, inscribed herself (as she too is written by the text and symbolic order of the other) into the symbolic discourse of the difference which dismantles her utopian feminist ideology?

I wish to conclude, therefore, by suggesting that perhaps thequestion Frederic Jameson asked and answered as to what was the relationship between the linguistic subject and political ideologies is an essential question to consider when discussing Wollstonecraft's texts. For as he suggests, the only way in which individual narratives of self can serve as focal points for social-ideologies is through the "indispensable mapping [of] fantasy or narrative by which the individual subject invents a 'lived' relationship with collective systems which otherwise by definition exclude him insofar as he or she is born into a pre-existent social form and its pre-existent language" (my emphasis).²⁹ In other words, utopian ideologies for social change must inevitably be deferred into an invented future and, thus, like the self are linguistic fissured structures.

Notes

¹A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Carol H. Poston (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1975), p. 224.

² The texts from Wollstonecraft's works to which I will refer include: Mary, a Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman, edited by Gary Kelly (London: Oxford University Press, 1976) and Maria or The Wrongs of Woman, edited by Moira Ferguson (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1975). Citations in the essay from Maria or The Wrongs of Woman will be from the Ferguson text whereas citations from Mary will be from the Kelly edition. All subsequent quotations to these works will appear in parentheses in the essay.

³ Throughout this essay I will use the term "difference" in the Derridean sense of différance, to defer and displace. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1974). For a discussion of biological and linguistic differences see Parveen Adams, "A Note on the Distinction between Sexual Division and Sexual Differences" m/f, 3 (1979), 51-57.

⁴ Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 269-316. Supplement consists of both adding to and differing from the 'original' text.

⁵ Paul de Man, "Theory of Metaphor in Rousseau's Second Discourse," Studies in Romanticism, 12 (1973), 475-98. See esp. p. 495.

⁶ Emile Benveniste, "L' Appareil formel de I'énonciation," Problems de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), II, 85.

⁷ Jacques Lacan, "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I," Ecrits (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1977), pp. 1-7.

⁸ See in particular Jacob Bouten, Mary Wollstonecraft and the beginnings of female emancipation in France and England, Amsterdam, 1922. Eleanor Flexner, Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Conrad, McCann and Geoghegan, 1972), and the Introduction by Kelly in his edition of Mary and The Wrongs of Woman. For an alternative contemporary reading, I recommend Mary Poovey's The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984) which has appeared subsequent to the writing of this paper.

⁹ Phallogocentric is used by various theorists to unite patriarchal authority and the tents of logocentricism (unity of meaning, origins, presence) into one term.

¹⁰ G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1835), trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974) and The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), trans. J. B. Baillie (revised ed. 1931; rpt. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1975), pp. 228-50.

¹¹ Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, I, 162.

¹² Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, pp. 210, 458, 704-08.

¹³ Anthony Wilden, System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange (London: Tavistock Publications Ltd., 1972), p. 65.

¹⁴ Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. C. S. Singleton (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), pp. 182-89.

¹⁵ For explication of Lacan's imaginary, symbolic and real, see Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 149-93. Or Anthony Wilden, System and Structure, pp. 1-30. I will suggest that the symbolic is structurally equivalent to the differential structure of language, the 'real' is what exists outside of signification, and the imaginary is a contradictory pre-symbolic phase of "illusory unity" (the world, the register, the dimension of images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or imagined).

¹⁶ Hegel, The Phenomoneology of Mind, p. 511.

¹⁷ 'Manque' is translated as lack. Lacan's theory of language is supported by primordial lack. Indeed, as Silverman notes, "one could say of the Lacanian subject that it is almost entirely defined by lack" (The Subject of Semiotics, p. 151). See esp. pp. 151-57. As Silverman points out, Lacan situates the first loss at birth. In this essay, references to narrative "lacks," "gaps," and "lapses" indicate the "other" scene of signification, the repressed scene of writing. They are not a part of the manifest narration but the text which subtends it—the unconscious. For Lacan, theunconscious is written like a language.

¹⁸ I am indebted to Juliet Flower MacCannell's essay, "Nature and Self-Love: A Reinterpretation of Rousseau's 'Passion primitive,'" PMLA, 92 (1977), 890-902 for this differentiation.

¹⁹ Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 194, 190.

²⁰ Ibid., pp. 180-94.

²¹ Jacques Lacan, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," Ecrits, pp. 148, 156-58.

²² Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, pp. 186-93.

²³ Wilden, System and Structure, pp. 485-87.

²⁴ Lacan, "The Mirror Stage," Ecrits, pp. 1-7.

²⁵ Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 141-57.

²⁶ Lacan, Ecrits, pp. 170-75.

²⁷ Ibid., pp. 1-7.

²⁸ For a delightful portrayal of contemporary psychoanalytic seduction read Jane Gallop's The Daughter's Seduction (Ithaca: Cornell, 1982).

²⁹ Fredric Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject," in Literature and Psychoanalysis, edited by Soshana Felman (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 394.