SOURCE: "The Female (As) Reader: Sex, Sensibility, and the Maternal in Wollstonecraft's Fictions," Essays in Literature, Vol. XIX, No. 1, Spring 1992, pp. 36-54.

[In the following essay, Maurer contends that, in her fiction, Wollstonecraft attempts to develop an active subjectivity for women "that is constituted in direct relation to a woman's role as mother."

The weakness of the mother will be visited on the children.

—Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Wollstonecraft would educate woman to subjugate herself

—Gillian Brown, "Anorexia, Humanism, and Feminism"

In the "Author's Preface" to her unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (edited and published posthumously by William Godwin in 1798), Mary Wollstonecraft declares her intention to exhibit "the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society."¹ In writing the history "of woman," rather than "of an individual," Wollstonecraft subjects all of the novel's female characters to similar experiences of victimization by specific male characters—masters, fellow servants, husbands, lovers—and by the political, social, and economic systems these characters control. Since in this novel women often serve to inculcate tyrannical values or administer masculine (in)justice, they are seldom beyond reproach. Yet Wollstonecraft ascribes their failings to a lack of sufficient nurturance and education, most frequently on the part of their own mothers. By placing at least some of the responsibility for moral development on women themselves, Wollstonecraft endows women with a subjectivity, a subjectivity, moreover, that is constituted in direct relation to a woman's role as mother.

It seems no accident, therefore, that Wollstonecraft chooses the motherless Minerva as the antitype of her own protagonist. In the "Author's Preface," she writes that in "many works of this species,² the hero is allowed to be mortal, and to become wise and virtuous as well as happy, by a train of events and circumstances. The heroines, on the contrary, are to be born immaculate; and to act like goddesses of wisdom, just come forth highly finished Minervas from the head of Jove." In contrast to this traditional story of patriarchal birth in which motherhood is denied, or at least suppressed,³ Wollstonecraft's history of women's wrongs not only includes, but also revolves around, the relationship between mothers and daughters, just as her earlier novel, Mary, A Fiction (1787), is driven, yet riven by the eponymous heroine's repetition of her mother's sins.

The two novels differ, however, in each heroine's enactment of the maternal role. Whereas in the earlier novel, Mary lavishes the maternal care she never received onto a series of inappropriate surrogates, beginning with her own mother, Maria, the protagonist of the later novel, uses her desperate situation to instruct and discipline herself in the process of educating her daughter. From earliest childhood, Mary's autodidactic education—achieved almost entirely through reading—substitutes for the maternal affection she never received. Mary reads because her mother doesn't love her, and that reading in turn promotes a sensibility that expresses itself in relentlessly sentimental, as well as familial, terms. Like her reading, Mary's affections operate only as displacement, as substitute satisfactions. Maria, on the other hand, learns through her position as mother to read herself Separated from her infant daughter and imprisoned in a madhouse by her libertine husband, she both reenacts a dangerous romanticism through the act of reading and learns to criticize her own fanciful propensities through the process of writing, for her daughter, a "memoir" that will, she hopes, prevent the latter from falling prey to her own mistakes.

By formulating her past as a text to be read—by others, especially her daughter, as well as by herself—the heroine of Wollstonecraft's unfinished novel⁴ can then create an educated maternal self, one that encompasses the dichotomies of emotion and intellect, heart and head. In contrast to her earlier conduct book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (17 88), this simultaneously didactic and sentimental novel stresses the education of a mother, albeit through the process of writing to her daughter. Wollstonecraft's emphasis on the integral, and integrative, maternal role is, however, less a glorification of a biological function than a recognition of that function's sociocultural impact—upon both mother and child. An important precursor of object-relations theorists such as Nancy Chodorow, Wollstonecraft recognized that mothering does, indeed, reproduce itself.⁵ Yet cognizant of the limited possibilities available to women in her day, Wollstonecraft also understood that motherhood, precisely because of its near-universal classification as "female," provided the sole existing arena in which woman could, to appropriate Foucault's language,⁶ construct herself as an "ethical subject." Wollstonecraft's discussion of breastfeeding in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters acknowledges that "maternal tenderness arises quite as much from habit as instinct" and thus that "it is necessary … for a mother to perform the office of one, in order to produce in herself a rational affection for her offspring" (4-5). Here I agree with Gillian Brown, who in her recent essay, "Anorexia, Humanism, and Feminism," writes that for Wollstonecraft, "maternal nature can transmit cultural values only because it is habitual, attuned to given cultural values and thus subject to the reformation of those norms" (199), as well as potentially reforming them. By separating nature from nurture, Wollstonecraft "can then contend that it is precisely because women in their 'natural' functions perform crucial tasks of socialization that they require-access to the same education men receive" (199).

The insistent demand for women's education as a necessary prerequisite to women's ability to carry out their duties as wives and mothers becomes a constant theme of Wollstonecraft's later and most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792); indeed this necessary connection between education and motherhood provides the foundation upon which her project stands. While her political writings have become so assimilated into our contemporary thinking that, as Virginia Woolf said over fifty years ago, "their originality has become our commonplace" (98), The Rights of Woman nevertheless contains many of the tensions that color the novels that preceded and followed it. As an overtly polemical discourse rather than a fictionally veiled one, the text expresses perhaps more clearly than either of the novels Wollstonecraft's arguments for, and ambivalence about, the process of educating women to be "proper" mothers.

In her introduction, as well as throughout the text, Wollstonecraft stresses the importance of education as both potentially perpetuating, yet possibly ameliorating, women's subservient social position. For women, education is intricately bound up with reading, and from the start, Wollstonecraft draws connections between textuality and sexuality, which she then modulates into a relationship between education and maternity. Women, she claims, are prey to "a false system of education, gathered from the books written on the subject by men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers" (79). In contrast to an educational process that would train women to be critical thinkers and thus judicious readers of any texts, including the text that is themselves, this false system exacerbates women's propensity for outward display and serves only to make them "insignificant objects of desire" (83). By following the prescriptions of those male authors "who have written on the subject of female education and manners, from Rousseau to Dr. Gregory," women have become "more artificial, weak characters, than they would otherwise have been; and consequently, more useless members of society" (103). Coopted and corrupted by a libertine system that situates them solely within the realms of sensibility and sexuality, women are rendered intellectually barren and physically weak, unfit, ironically, for the very work for which they are supposedly being trained, motherhood. Wollstonecraft perceives the path to women's liberation as the development of a "strength, both of mind and body" (81) that would allow women to shun the "false sentiments and overstretched feelings" (82) usually defined as the feminine realm. Sensibility, Wollstonecraft argues, is not "natural" to women, but is rather cultivated by masculine norms and expectations. When that sensibility is abused, as is so often the case with undereducated women, the "dangerous" imaginative capacity associated with sexuality dissipates into unproductive personal fantasy instead of being channeled into the socially sanctioned role of motherhood.

Didactic treatises are not the only thing inimical to women's development: "Novels, music, poetry, and gallantry, all tend to make women the creatures of sensation" (152). Reinforcing the connection between textuality and sexuality, novels are particularly dangerous because they promote overheated imagination over action: "I own it frequently happens that women who have fostered a romantic unnatural delicacy of feeling, waste their lives in imagining how happy they should have been with a husband who could love them with a fervid increasing affection every day, and all day" (116). In her now-classic essay, "Ev'ry Woman is at Heart a Rake," Patricia Meyer Spacks writes that in the eighteenth century, imagination was perceived as the source of sexual feeling, and thus the imaginative aspects of literature could both record and stimulate sexual fantasy (38). Spacks takes the title of her article from Pope's "On the Characters of Women," and Wollstonecraft herself refers to this poem when she traces women's delight in libertines to their deficiency in reason: "till women are led to exercise their understandings, they should not be satarised for their attachment to rakes; or even for being rakes at heart, when it appears to be the inevitable consequence of their education. They who live to please—must find their enjoyments, their happiness, in pleasure!" (223).

Wollstonecraft's solution to both male and female libertinism defies the double standard by preaching the virtues of modesty and chastity for men as well as women. Marriage, she claims, must become desexualized, an expression of friendship rather than of passion; women must be educated to become men's "companions, rather than their mistresses" (283). Numerous critics have challenged this move as reactionary; Mary Poovey, for example, writes that so "intent is Wollstonecraft to reject the prevalent stereotype of women as all sexuality that she comes close to arguing that women have no innate sexual desires at all" (74). Yet this seeming negation of desire can also be read as Wollstonecraft's attempt to challenge a libertine system in which desire itself becomes reified, divorced from its implications, both social and biological.

Gillian Brown has perceptively argued that the companionship Wollstonecraft advocates does not constitute a retreat from sexuality but rather is "fundamental to making a case for female subjectivity" (200). Brown's reading of Wollstonecraft as an important feminist proponent of rational self-control provides a useful counterpoint to those "present day readers of Wollstonecraft [who] find her valuation of reason an embarrassment to feminism" (200). In response to those who see in Wollstonecraft's strategy the denial of femaleness, pleasure, or passion, Brown claims that the "sexuality that is denied in this movement is a condition of androcentrism; the selfhood that is asserted is a claim to the system of rights which that tradition monopolizes" (200, n. 35). Drawing upon Brown's argument, I wish to stress that for Wollstonecraft, motherhood serves literally to dis-place, in the sense of seeking a different place for, female desire that couldfind no room in the oppressive system she so cogently analyzed. As a culturally sanctioned biological function, motherhood could thus provide for the fullest, because the only available, development of women's capacities, both emotional and intellectual. And conversely, the maternal role could itself furnish the most powerful grounds for women's education. In a crucial passage from the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft states: "As the care of children in their infancy is one of the grand duties annexed to the female character by nature, this duty would afford many forcible arguments for strengthening the feminine understanding, if it were properly considered" (265).

Wollstonecraft promotes the expression of female subjectivity through and within motherhood because she recognizes that the very conditions of her society mitigate the possibility of rational and reciprocal relations between women and men. Trained to believe that the "mighty business of female life is to please" (306), and thus educated only in the superficial accomplishments designed to delight and captivate men, the majority of middle- and upper-class women lack, according to Wollstonecraft, the thinking capacity necessary for the "friendship" that must underpin any rational relations between the sexes. While women are by no means solely to blame for their exaggerated emotional lives, Wollstonecraft nonetheless acknowledges that for women who are "restrained from entering into more important concerns by political and civil oppression, sentiments become events, and reflection deepens what it should, and would have effaced, if the understanding had been allowed to take a wider ranger" (306). As a result, the "strong sexual attachment" of which women are indeed capable becomes the product not of mutual affection and esteem, but rather of "a little sensibility and great weakness" (312).

All generations and both sexes suffer under circumstances in which "the person of a woman is … preferred to her mind" (315), for the romantic obsession fostered by this superficial education leads women "shamefully to neglect the duties of life" (306), be they those of wife or mother, not to mention author, philosopher, doctor, or trader. Wollstonecraft recognizes the complementary connections between private virtue, as achieved through education, and public good when she writes that "private duties are never properly fulfilled unless the understanding enlarges the heart; and … public virtue is only an aggregate of private" (316). In an earlier passage, she explicates the direct relationship between women's economic dependence on men and their truncated emotional and psychological development. Such limitations, she argues, must necessarily preclude any equality between men and women:

If marriage be the cement of society, all mankind should be educated after the same model, or the intercourse of the sexes will never deserve the name of fellowship, nor will women ever fulfill the peculiar duties of their sex, till they become enlightened citizens, till they become free by being enabled to earn their own subsistence, independent of men; in the same manner, I mean, toprevent misconstruction, as one man is independent of another. Nay, marriage will never be held sacred till women, by being brought up with men, are prepared to be their companions, rather than their mistresses; for the mean doublings of cunning will ever render them contemptible, whilst oppression renders them timid. (283)

Pace Chodorow, Wollstonecraft argues throughout her works that the sympathetic attention to an other so essential to proper mothering is one of the few means through which women can counteract the incessant self-absorption inherent in women's construction as desirable objects by transforming the very sphere of desirability. Through an education that would produce a critical and active mind rather than a passive and ornamental body, women could exercise their emotions without being overtaken by them. "True sensibility," she writes in The Wrongs of Woman, "the sensibility which is the auxiliary of virtue, and the soul of genius, is in society so occupied with the feelings of others, as scarcely to regard its own sensations" (76). In nurturing and educating a child, a mother must learn to read, and often to deny, her own feelings and needs in order to fulfill those of the child. Moreover, the mother's ability to provide her child with a sense of self, both connected to and separate from her own emotional and physical body, furthers the mother's construction of herself as an ethical subject. Throughout her writings, Wollstonecraft advocates an educated and rational motherhood as the way to acknowledge and simultaneously to challenge the limitations her society placed upon women. Thus she concludes The Rights of Woman by stating that her intent was not to "extenuate [women's] faults; but to prove them to be the natural consequence of their education and station in society" (319). In the two fictions that serve as bookends to her more celebrated non-fictional essay, Wollstonecraft's representations of maternal relations provide a crucial means through which to analyze the intersections of the personal and the political, as her female characters internalize, confront, and, ultimately, attempt to revise the discursive space in and through which they, as women, can articulate their subjectivity.

Tellingly, Wollstonecraft's first novel, Mary, A Fiction, begins by describing not the character of the protagonist, but that of her mother: "Mary, the heroine of this fiction, was the daughter of Edward, who married Eliza, a gentle, fashionable girl, with a kind of indolence in her temper, which might be termed negative good nature: her virtues, indeed, were all of that stamp" (1). While the portrait that follows is certainly familiar—Eliza exemplifies the type of passive, shallow woman whom Wollstonecraft would later dissect in the Rights of Woman—her prominent place at the beginning of the text testifies to her initial, and lasting, psychological effect upon her daughter. In these introductory pages, Wollstonecraft describes the superficial education, unhappy marriage, and compensatory reading habits that later repeat themselves in the life of her daughter; Mary, we soon learn, is condemned to repeat her mother's faults.

Eliza's inability adequately to perform the duties of motherhood is largely conditioned by her own faulty upbringing. Trained to attend only "to the shews of things," and with no opinions except "such as the generality approved of," Eliza spent her youth "acquiring a few superficial accomplishments, without having any taste for them" (1). Her social status only exacerbates her indolence, for "educated with the expectation of a large fortune" and indulged by servants, she receives no sense of the "relative duties" that might counterbalance "notions of her own consequence" (1). Raised with no standard of judgment other than the most frivolous and transitory, Eliza falls "faintly" in love with a soldier,7 but she is easily persuaded to give up her own will in submission to that of her father; she promises "to love, honour, and obey, (a vicious fool), as in duty bound" (1).

A glutton and a "gourmand," this man attacks women, alcohol, and food with the same bestial appetite. Yet in contrast to her licentious husband, Eliza turns to sentimental fiction in order to indulge her own senses while remaining chaste physically, at least "according to the vulgar acceptation of the word, that is, she did not make any actual faux pas; she feared the world, and was indolent" (3). While Mary's mother finds seemingly acceptable textual substitutes for the sensual desires that her husband indulges directly, Wollstonecraft's description of her artificially induced physical languor belies the actual success of her strategy. The body that has too much "delicacy" to bear and nurse vigorous children' is obsessed with its own adornment; moreover, Eliza's narcissistic creation of herself as object is in turn associated with her position as reading subject: "As she was sometimes obliged to be alone, or only with her French waiting-maid, she sent to the metropolis for all the new publications, and while she was dressing her hair, and she could turn her eyes from the glass, she ran over those most delightful substitutes for bodily dissipation, novels" (2). In this passage, the mirror in which she finds her own adorned reflection and the novel in which she seeks sensual satisfaction are interchangeable, as her gaze shifts seamlessly from one to the other. Eliza's lack of critical judgment transforms the act of reading, an act she perceives as a form of "self-denial," into a dangerous imaginative process mediated only by her lack of intellect: "she read all the sentimental novels, dwelt on the love scenes, and, had she thought while she read, her mind would have been contaminated; as she accompanied the lovers to the lonely arbors, and would walk with them by the clear light of the moon" (3).⁹

But Mary's mother is not the only woman whose reading habits this work monitors. After a paragraph in which the narrator describes Eliza's inappropriate identification with the novels she reads, the narrative is interrupted by a direct address to the reader. A passage parodying the conventions of sentimental fiction places the reader, however uncomfortably, into the same position as Mary's mother, who had earlier wept with unhappy lovers and devoured novels while preparing her toilet: "If my readers would excuse thesportiveness of fancy, and give me credit for genius, I would go on and tell them such tales as would force the sweet tears of sensibility to flow in copious showers down beautiful cheeks, to the discomposure of rouge, &c. &c. Nay, I would make it so interesting, that the fair peruser should beg the hair-dresser to settle the curls himself, and not interrupt her" (3). By calling attention to the reading process, and baring, as it were, its own device, this passage attempts to prevent the decidedly female reader from reading the text of Mary's mother the way Mary's mother herself reads texts.

Such consciousness is, however, impossible for the novel's protagonist, who, like her mother before her, turns to reading as compensation—in Mary's case, as compensation for the attention her mother is too ill, lethargic, or jealous¹⁰ to provide. Eliza, ironically, is too sickly even to teach her daughter to read, or to provide her with a governess (she does, however, offer her waiting-maid to instruct her daughter in French!); Mary's introduction to literature comes via an "old house-keeper," who "told her stories, read to her, and, at last, taught her to read" (4). While Wollstonecraft seems to juxtapose Mary's reading habits to those of her mother, for Mary, unlike Eliza, is "a woman who has thinking powers" ("Advertisement" n.pg.), I agree with Janet Todd's assertion that the two are more similar than either Mary or the narrator would have us believe: "Certainly both are alone, and both are great readers" (Women's Friendship 195). Indeed Mary "perused with avidity every book that came in her way," and her admirable ability to use the books she reads as a way to "learn[] to think" (4) is mitigated by her mother's combined neglect and partiality (to an older brother who later dies, leaving Mary an heiress) that occasioned the immersion into literature in the first place. Mary's unhappy family situation, like her mother's unfulfilling marital one, drives her into "a kind of habitual melancholy," which "led her into a fondness for reading tales of woe, and made her almost realize the fictitious distress" (6). Indeed "she entered with such spirit into whatever she read, and the emotions thereby raised were so strong, that it soon became part of her mind" (10).

Yet in contrast to her mother, whose pleasures are only a form of sanctioned self-indulgence, Mary's exceptional receptivity to what she reads is directly linked to her ability to sympathize with others. Just as reading functions as a dangerous substitute for lived emotion, so too does Mary's unceasing nurturance operate as an equally destructive barrier to the fulfillment of her own desires. From an early age, Mary's psychic life is shaped by the demands placed upon her by her own mother, whose physical weakness is exacerbated by the passionate outbursts of her abusive husband. Mary takes care of her invalid mother, and thus projects her own need to be mothered onto her mother. Through her displaced tending to her mother, Mary can gain control of a potentially destructive situation.… This strategy, however, is not without its flaws. The maternal sickness that "called forth all Mary's tenderness, and exercised her compassion so continually, that it became more thana match for self-love, and was the guiding propensity of her heart through her life" (5) may protect Mary from her mother's selfishness; but the compassion that overpowers her "self-love" also precludes her from developing a sense of self independent of her care for others. Thus the very process through which she copes with her own needs becomes obsessive; as a substitute for the maternal love she never received, Mary's own affections can express themselves only through an all-consuming, and thus to an extent irrational, nurturance. Indeed, rather than augment her sense of self, Mary's emotions serve to dehumanize her: she is "too much the creature of impulse" (7). Moreover, just as reading makes one a slave to passion, Mary's displaced nurturing makes her "the slave of compassion" (7).

The maternal abandonment and consequent daughterly distress that so powerfully shape Mary's life are figured by the accidental death of a "little girl who attended [Mary] in the nursery" (6). This death leaves an "indelible" impression upon Mary, for not only does the situation remind her, if only unconsciously, of the abandonment she herself suffered, but, more importantly, she is also powerless to protect the young girl from self-destruction. Although Mary paid the girl, who had fallen sick, "great attention," the girl is nonetheless sent, against Mary's wishes, "out of the house to her mother, a poor woman, whom necessity obliged to leave her sick child while she earned her daily bread." The poor wretch, in a fit of delirium stabbed herself …" (6). Mary's response is so powerful as to cause lifelong trauma: "she saw the dead body, and heard the dismal account, and so strongly did it impress her imagination, that every night of her life the bleeding corpse presented itself to her when she first began to slumber" (6). In attempt to exorcise her nightmare, Mary "made a vow, that if she was ever mistress of a family she would herself watch over every part of it" (6).

The desire to exercise maternal control as a way to prevent inevitable loss thus becomes the guiding principle of Mary's life. Abandoning herself to relationships the way she earlier did to books, Mary constitutes her adult life as a relentless, yet futile, attempt to gain emotional satisfaction by mothering others. Mary's affectional life centers not around the husband whom she marries at age seventeen in order to resolve a property dispute and to gratify her mother's dying wish, but, rather, around those "passionate friends" who are, like her mother, physically weak and emotionally destitute. The two main objects of her attention, Ann, her neighbor, and Henry, the invalid she meets while traveling for Ann's health, are themselves bereft of maternal affection, but Mary is no more capable of saving them than she was the little girl of her childhood. Both die in her arms, just as her own mother did.

Ann, the eldest daughter of a genteel but impoverished widow, has returned to Mary's neighborhood after having been disappointed in love; her resultant melancholy excites Mary's interest: Ann "grew fond of solitude, and her character appeared similar to Mary's although her natural disposition was very different" (7). While Mary seeks in Ann the reciprocal affection not attained in the relationship with her mother, the very circumstances that render Ann "interesting" to Mary render her incapable of reciprocating affection: "Ann felt only gratitude; her heart was entirely engrossed by one object, and friendship could not serve as a substitute" (8). Although Mary recognizes and is indeed hurt by Ann's "involuntary indifference," she uses her well-developed capacity for sympathetic sensibility, a capacity manifested most directly in maternal terms, to turn that hurt into compassion: "She would then imagine that [Ann] looked sickly or unhappy, and then all her tenderness would return like a torrent, and bear away all reflection" (9). Here, as throughout the novel, Wollstonecraft posits maternal feeling and rational thought as mutually exclusive for Mary. As earlier with her mother, Mary resorts to a nurturing tenderness as a means both to control her own disappointment and to fulfill—through displacement—her own desperate need to be loved.¹² Thus it is less "maternal sensibility" itself that is problematic here than Mary's own tendency toward emotional excess, a tendency, moreover, born from the obsessive need to compensate for her own maternal neglect and intensified by the reading that attempted to substitute for it.

Moreover, Mary's immoderate cultivation of a maternal sensibility as a response to the mothering she never received precludes her ability to experience heterosexual desire or, even more important, to nurture the children whom that desire might produce. That is not to say that Mary denies sexual feelings altogether; rather, she is unable to feel strong emotion not based on the need to nurture and protect. Thus for Mary, sexual feelings acquire a distinctly maternal cast, albeit in a displaced form. Mary's relationship to Ann certainly contains hints of the sexual: "Her friendship for Ann occupied her heart, and resembled a passion" (19); indeed the husband Mary married out of obligation and for whom she feels nothing but a growing disgust terms it a "romantic friendship" (20).¹³

When Mary does eventually find in Henry, the invalid she meets in Lisbon, someone capable and desirous of returning her affections, psychological as well as moral factors combine equally to prevent her from consummating that relationship; Mary's "marriage vows" are no more of an impediment to sexual intimacy than is her desire to be both Henry's daughter and his mother. On the one hand, Henry's feelings toward Mary seem more sexual than critics often acknowledge. Near the end of Mary's stay in Lisbon, someone enters the room and prevents Henry from saying "what in a cooler moment he had determined to conceal" (41)-—namely his ardor; a page later, the narrator writes that "Henry was afraid to discover his passion, or give any other name to his regard but friendship" (42). Yet, those sexual feelings are mitigated both by Mary's own previous engagement to her husband and by Henry's invalidism, itself partly a product of an unhappy love affair.

Henry's ill health seems an escape from his own frustrated sexual desire, just as Mary's choice of him seems an escape from her own. Thus while Mary uses her substantial thinking powers to articulate a powerful plea for women's freedom to choose the objects of their affection, she herself opts for an object who is very much safe, one who will not act upon his desire for her. The cultivation of Mary's sensibility, tempered as it is by her thinking ability, serves only to enable her to separate sexuality from sensibility. Mary's self-protective attempt to cull sexual desire from sensibility must become, in fact, self-destructive, for her sensibility, which she terms "the most exquisite feeling of which the human soul is susceptible … [and] the foundation of all our happiness" (53-54), is itself intricately bound up with imagination and desire. I disagree, then, with Spacks's assertion that "in friendship with another woman, in Platonic alliance with a man, a woman can assert her equality and maintain her freedom" (Imagining a Self 71), for in Mary, A Fiction these relationships lead instead to unhappiness and early death.

In her last, unfinished work, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, Wollstonecraft creates a character, Maria (the name links her both to the earlier character Mary and to Wollstonecraft herself) whose sexuality is more overtly represented as connected to her sensibility. While the fragmentary nature of the work and its posthumous publication by Godwin leave room for speculation about its final outcome, one can see clearly within the text the explication of a liberation strategy Wollstonecraft had begun to explore in the Rights of Woman: sensibility allied with sexuality in the context of motherhood.

Once again, it is Maria's capacity as a reader that most clearly delineates the workings of her sensibility. Separated from her infant daughter and imprisoned in a madhouse by the licentious and profligate husband from whom, we later learn, she has fled, the despondent Maria fluctuates between "the moping melancholy of indolence" and "the restless activity of a disturbed imagination" (79). Yet by appealing to the long dornqant "feminine emotions" (80) of Jemima, her keeper, Mary obtains writing paper and books. The books "were soon devoured, by one who had no other resource to escape from sorrow," and Maria then turns to writing down her experiences, in order that they "might perhaps instruct her daughter, and shield her from the misery, the tyranny, her mother knew not how to avoid" (82). Yet even the process of writing cannot eliminate fully Maria's depression, which Jemima then tries to alleviate through "a fresh parcel of books" borrowed from another prisoner.

From the first moment, Maria endows these texts with emotion: "she turned over the leaves with awe, as if they had become sacred from passing through the hands of an unfortunate being, oppressed by a similar fate" (85). Initially, the books themselves bring pleasure; she terms "Dryden's Fables, Milton's Paradise Lost, with several modern productions … a mine of treasure" (85). Soon, however, her attention turns from the texts themselves to the marginal notes penned by the unhappy prisoner. These notes, in which Maria finds"a generous degree of warmth" as well as remarks "perfectly in unison" with her own mode of thinking (85-86), serve as an index to the prisoner's level of refinement and sensibility. He thus becomes a safe outlet for her own desires, which are both sparked by and channeled into the texts he provides. Maria falls in love with this prisoner, Henry Danford, through his words, allowing her own "affectionate heart," in its state of isolation and despair, to fabricate from his "refinement of sentiment" (86) the hope of escape, first emotional, and then physical.

At one point, Maria puts aside "a book on the powers of the human mind" to read Dryden's story of "Guiscard and Sigismunda [sic]" (86). Sigismonda defies the dictates of her father by choosing for herself a man to whom she is attracted, although he is below her in social class. Maria uses this story, as she will later employ Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise, to embellish her own romantic longings; indeed the parallels between Sigismonda's story and Maria's own predicament are striking. Both are in captivity, Sigismonda in her father's palace, Maria in the madhouse, "the mansion of despair" (75) that resembles a Gothic castle. Sigismonda's tyrannical father, who nevertheless loves her deeply—"She was his hope, his care, and his delight" (line II)—corresponds both to Maria's father, a retired ship's captain who exercised paternal authority by treating his family like his crew (125), and to her uncle, who, despite misanthropic tendencies, provides his niece with instruction, protection, and even money. Moreover, both women are attractive, and intelligent: Dryden writes that Sigismonda "Did all her sex in every grace exceed, / And had more wit beside than women need" (lines 32-33); most importantly, both are passionate.¹⁴ No wonder, then, that Maria finds an emotional outlet in the Dryden fable at the point where she has yet to see or meet with the man whom she has assembled her romantic web. Dryden's rendering of the meeting between the two lovers thus provides Maria both with a representation of love triumphing against adversity and with an explicit sexual encounter that she can enjoy vicariously.

Although Wollstonecraft's novel remains unfinished, the unhappy outcome of Dryden's fable suggests at least one aspect of Maria's life, once she has escaped from prison and has been united with her fellow prisoner, who has subsequently become her lover. Sigismond's final speech to her father argues for a woman's ability, or more strongly, her right, to express and satisfy her sexual and emotional desire with the mate of her choice. After her escape, Maria chooses not to hide her relationship with Danford but to live openly with him, thereby inciting the opprobrium of those "honourable women" who carry on their own affairs under the cover of marriage; she is soon brought to court on charges of adultery and must speak before the judge as Sigismonda did before her father. In a "paper, which she expressly desired might be read in court" (195), Maria exposes the sexual double standard, giving repeated evidence of her husband's own adulterous behavior and his abusive actions towards her, and "claim[s] then a divorce" (198).The judge, as expected, defeats her claim, challenging the feelings upon which she based her sense of ethical selfhood: "What virtuous woman thought of her feelings?—It was her duty to love and obey the man chosen by her parents and relations, who were qualified by their experience to judge better for her, than she could for herself (199). Thus he grants that while the "restrictions" that act to maintain "the sanctity of marriage … might bear a little hard on a few, very few individuals, it was evidently for the good of the whole" (199).

Rational as they might be, Maria's "feelings" can find no place in a legal system that classifies a wife as her husband's property. Wollstonecraft's criticism of marriage, as an institution she shunned for most of her life and whose scandalous vicissitudes she chronicled in her work, is directly related to her ambivalent feelings about sentimental fiction. In a social system in which women's sexual desire must be subsumed into a marriage contract that treats women solely as property, the desire that is stimulated by reading can become an important instrument of female liberation. Yet by acting as a way to sublimate the desire that can remain unfulfilled within marriage, sentimental literature can act to reinforce rather than to challenge the institution (Poovey 101-02). Thus while Maria might be cognizant of her own imaginative and creative processes, of the "fancy, treacherous fancy [that] began to sketch a character, congenial with her own, from the[] shadowy outlines" of Danford's words, she is nonetheless imprisoned by them. As she begins to become obsessive about this as yet unseen man, and to grill her keeper for details of his person and his sanity, her thoughts explicitly parallel Wollstonecraft's earlier pronouncement in the Rights of Woman that women fall in love (usually with the wrong men) because they have nothing else with which to occupy themselves: Maria "reflects, as an excuse to herself, 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" (87).

Soon afterwards, Jemima brings her Rousseau's epistolary novel La Nouvelle Héloïse, which she reads "with her eyes and her heart" (88). Wollstonecraft's own novel focuses most explicitly on the character of "St. Preux," who conceives of himself as a more passionate and sensible version of Abelard (Book I, letter 24), as Maria endows the prisoner "with all of St. Preux's sentiments and feelings, culled to gratify her own" (89). Unlike Pygmalion, who "formed an ivory maid, and longed for an informing soul" (99), Maria projects an ideal male character, gleaned from her reading of sentimental fiction, onto the warm body of the prisoner she has yet to meet in the flesh; her literary imagination overshadows, indeed often precludes, her engagement with the world. In a telling incident, Maria falls asleep over Rousseau's novel and just misses catching a glimpse of the prisoner as he walks outside her window: "Five minutes sooner, and she should have seen his face, and been out of suspense—was ever anything so unlucky!" (89). To assuage herdisappointment, "she flew to Rousseau, as her only refuge from the idea of him, who might prove a friend, could she but find a way to interest him in her fate" (89). While fiction can provide Maria with an outlet for her emotions, it also fosters a dangerous process of imaginative projection. To the chagrin of most of the novel's contemporary readers, Maria fails to perceive that her romantic "reading" of Danford is directly parallel to the process whereby she "invested" her previous "hero"-the mercenary and vicious George Venables, who would soon become her husband—"with more than mortal beauty" (135). Thus while Maria's retrospective account of her life can cogently analyze the dangerous workings of her imagination, in her relationship with Danford she seems blissfully ignorant, an ignorance that hardly bodes well for her future happiness. Indeed, in most of the fragmentary "hints" for the novel's ending, Danford does indeed become a villain, thus reprising the situation with her husband.

And yet, while Wollstonecraft's text makes no mention of Rousseau's heroine, Julie, the "new Eloisa," is in some ways even more important to Wollstonecraft's novel than Julie's lover, Saint-Preux. Just as Rousseau rewrites the story of Eloisa and Abelard by creating in Saint-Preux a hero who, like his lover, has a heart "formed for love," so too does Wollstonecraft rewrite Rousseau's character Julie in her Wrongs of Woman, by creating a protagonist who does not have to renounce sexual desire in order to achieve a sense of self. While Wollstonecraft retains Rousseau's emphasis on the maternal as a prime locus for female subjectivity, she discards the heroine's necessary capitulation to masculine authority.¹⁵ In Rousseau's novel Julie relinquishes the impassioned lover whom her father will not approve and, as penance for her "sin," marries and bears two sons to a "rational" man old enough to be her father; indeed Monsieur de Wolmar controls her existence quite as effectively as her father earlier had done.¹⁶ Maria, by contrast, pleads eloquently for the right to express and experience the full range of emotional, intellectual, and sexual satisfaction with the man she chooses, but recognizes that in her fallen world such satisfactions might be impossible to achieve. Like Rousseau's heroine, then, Maria turns to motherhood for her most powerful source of fulfillment, but for different reasons. In that it prevents her from succumbing to a renewed passion for her lover, Julie's death seals her position as the dutiful daughter, virtuous wife, and (literally) self-sacrificing mother; she remains firmly entrenched in the patriarchal order that necessitated the death of both her desire and her physical body. Maria, on the other hand, chooses motherhood as the most effective way to overturn that order; in the name of her daughter, she can analyze, and thus refine, the sensibility that damaged her own life.¹⁷

Because Maria's history, unlike that of Mary, is related retrospectively, so that the actual narrative commences not with her childhood but with her imprisonment, Maria's feelings and actions are determined less by her experience of having been mothered than by her situation as a mother. While Maria's ownmother had been in no way exemplary—Maria later describes her as having "an indolence of character, which prevented her from paying much attention to [her] education" (126)—everything that Maria does while in the madhouse, including her reading and her "fanciful" love for Danford, is presented in the context of frustrated maternal feelings for the daughter who has, it seems, been literally ripped from her breast by her venal husband, Venables: "Her infant's image was continually floating on Maria's sight, … and [she] felt the little twinkling fingers on her burning bosom—a bosom bursting with the nutriment for which this cherished child might now be pining in vain" (75). Whereas Maria realizes that another woman could certainly provide her child with milk—indeed the upper- and middle-class women of Wollstonecraft's day commonly employed wet nurses—she questions "who would watch her with a mother's tenderness, a mother's self-denial?" (75). Moreover, Maria wins the sympathy and aid of her hardened keeper by expressing her grief at having been separated from her daughter: "the woman awoke in a bosom long estranged from feminine emotions, and Jemima determined to alleviate all in her power, without hazarding the loss of her place, the sufferings of a wretched mother, apparently injured, and certainly unhappy" (80).¹⁸ Later, in supplicating Jemima to search for her child, she again stresses her own capacity as instructor: "Let me but give her an education—let me but prepare her body and mind to encounter the ills which await her sex" (121).

Maria's desperate wish "to instruct her daughter, and shield her from the misery, the tyranny, her mother knew not how to avoid" (82) precipitates what is arguably her most important act—composing the memoir that occupies half of the unfinished novel. Thus while on the one hand, Maria "lamented" that her child "was a daughter, and anticipated the aggravated ills of life that her sex rendered almost inevitable" (75-76), it is precisely her understanding of those ills, particularly as experienced in her own life, that demands and vindicates her active role as her daughter's educator. The first-person voice Maria assumes in her memoirs is that of "a mother schooled in misery," a misery that, common to all women, inspires her to "break through all restraint" and "voluntarily brave censure" in order to provide for her daughter's "happiness" (124). Although Maria does indeed brave censure to escape the husband whose vicious behavior¹⁹ she believes will prevent her from performing her maternal duties, her attempted flight to Italy results only in capture, imprisonment, and loss of the child she had tried to safeguard. From prison, however, she endeavors to protect her daughter in a different way, by writing a narrative that will provide her with "the instruction, the counsel, that is meant rather to exercise than influence [her] mind" (124). By teaching her daughter, and by extension, all female readers, actively to consider, rather than passively to absorb, the text of her own life, Maria can endow her with a "grand principle of action" (124) that will empower her to experience the pleasures of sensibility without falling prey to them.²⁰

Only after Jemima has returned from her search to inform Maria thather child is indeed dead does Maria turn the memoirs over to Danford. He is given the text in place of her daughter, just as her romantic longings for him are in part a displacement of the maternal duties she has been prevented from fulfilling.²¹ Yet as Maria's (as well as Wollstonecrafts) extradiegetical readers, we can become that daughter as we read over his shoulder. Following Maria's instruction, although not her example, we can read her history with the judgment she herself must struggle throughout the novel to obtain. The excessive sensibility that Maria, like Mary before her, develops in childhood as an escape from, and compensation for, paternal tyranny and maternal neglect propels her toward early marriage with a man whose vices she is incapable of discerning; once married, her considerable talents are wasted upon one to whom, she soon realizes, she could be neither "friend [n]or confidant" (145). The "self-denial" that Maria must subsequently practice is not merely a repression but rather an acknowledgment of her sexual desire, for unlike her husband, whose neglect of a child he had fathered by a maidservant demonstrates that "the heart of a libertine is dead to all natural affection; and … that the being who has appeared all tenderness, to gratify a selfish passion, is as regardless of the innocent fruit of it, as of the object, when the fit is over" (149), Maria refuses to separate the principles of pleasure and procreation. Thus she terms the sexual act that resulted in the conception of her daughter a "cruel act of self-denial, when I wished the earth to open up and swallow me" (153); she denies not sexual pleasure itself, but her repugnance vis-à-vis sex without love.

It seems no accident, then, that in one of the existing versions of the novel's ending, Maria is saved from a self-imposed death by Jemima's discovery of the daughter both had believed dead. While the ending might appear highly "sentimental," it seems also in keeping with Wollstonecraft's emphasis throughout her work upon the regenerative powers associated with women's maternal role. For Wollstonecraft, such active love has the potential to challenge, and even to obviate, the passive response to masculine desire promoted by the excessive cultivation of feminine sensibility. Mary Wollstonecraft's second foray into motherhood took her life, but like her character Maria, she also endowed her daughter, not surprisingly named Mary, with a kind of memoir. In this novel, the female reader's passive relationship to reading—a self-destructive escape into imagination—is radically transformed. By learning to read and to recognize the mother as author, the daughter is authorized to write herself.²²

Notes

¹ The "Author's Preface," compiled by Godwin from scraps of Wollstonecraft's writing, is unpaginated.

² Wollstonecraft refers here to the novel genre, or to what she, in her earlier work, terms a "fiction." In the Advertisement to Mary, A Fiction, published in 1787. Wollstonecraft differentiates herprotagonist from those female characters created by Richardson and Rousseau: "In delineating the Heroine of this Fiction, the Author attempts to develop a character different from those generally portrayed. This woman is neither a Clarissa, a Lady G—, nor a Sophie" (n.pg.). Thus while in both novels Wollstonecraft rebels against the passive and virtuous heroine of sentimental fiction, her first, and highly autobiographical novel is concerned with exhibiting "the soul of an author" in the process of producing "an artless tale, without episodes, [in which] the mind of a woman, who has thinking powers is displayed." The narcissistic relationship between author and character—it is, after all, Wollstonecraft's own "thinking powers" that provide the "original source" from which the character Mary is drawn—is perhaps mirrored by the character's own self-involved search for a seemingly unattainable reciprocal affection. While Wollstonecraft's later novel shares with its predecessor both an autobiographical basis and a similarity in the names of author and character, The Wrongs of Woman transforms the narcissistic cycle by presenting a daughter who serves not as an extension of the mother but rather as a catalyst for self-understanding.

³ Hesoid's Theogony reveals that Athena is really the daughter of Metis, whom Zeus had swallowed.

⁴ While such critics as Mary Poovey have acknowledged both the novel's labored prose and the laborious writing process that hindered its completion (95-96), it was in fact the complications arising from maternal labor, complications resulting in Wollstonecraft's death at the age of thirty eight, that prevented her from finishing it.

⁵ See Chodorow for a fuller discussion of this matter.

⁶ While I have appropriated Foucault's language, I hope to avoid his gender bias. See Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, particularly Volume 3: The Care of the Self: "We need instead to think in terms of a crisis of the subject, or rather a crisis of subjectivation—that is, in terms of a difficulty in the manner in which the individual could form himself as the ethical subject of his actions, and efforts to find in devotion to that self that which could enable him to submit to rules and give a purpose to his existence" (95).

⁷ In the second chapter of the Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft argues that soldiers share with the majority of women a superficial education, love of gallantry, and a constant desire to please. "Why," she then asks, "should women be censured with petulant acrimony because they seem to have a passion for a scarlet coat? Has not education placed them more on a level with soldiers than with any other class of men?" (105-06). Lydia Bennet in Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) seems a case in point.

⁸ Eliza gives birth to a son, who is described as "a feeble babe," and to a daughter, Mary; her other children "all died in their infancy" (4).

⁹ Spacks writes that the novel "begins with a denunciation of the heroine's mother for a kind of inner self-indulgence which the author appears to think equivalent to sexual looseness.… Sentimental novels and romances encouraged female irresponsibility" ("Ev'ry Woman" 39).

¹⁰ The narrator writes that Mary's mother "had besides another reason [for ignoring her daughter], she did not wish to have a fine tall girl brought forward into notice as her daughter; she still expected to recover, and figure away in the gay world" (5). For a more elaborate narrative of a mother's excessive competition with her daughter, see Samuel Johnson's "history of miss Maypole" in Rambler No. 55 (Tues. Sept. 25, 1750), in which the unhappy daughter writes: "Thus I live in a state of continual persecution, only because I was born ten years too soon, and cannot stop the course of nature or of time, but am unhappily a woman before my mother can willingly cease to be a girl. I believe you would contribute to the happiness of many families, if, by any arguments or persuasions, you could make mothers ashamed of rivalling their children; if you could show them, that though they may refuse to grow wise, they must inevitably grow old; and that the proper solaces of age are not musick and compliments, but wisdom and devotion." The "Trifler" sections of Charlotte Lennox's monthly publication, The Lady's Museum (1760), also describe the periodical eidolon's own unhappy childhood at the hands of a jealous mother. Both texts provide examples of the competition over outward attributes—namely youth and beauty—that would be unnecessary under the system Wollstonecraft proposes in which mothers, themselves trained to value intellectual and moral accomplishments, would pass those attributes onto their own daughters.

¹¹" Although she focuses primarily on women of the middle classes, Wollstonecraft nonetheless also concerns herself with depicting the parallels between women's material destitution and their spiritual and intellectual impoverishment, particularly as they hinder women's ability to mother. In this novel, see also the siustion with Ann's mother; yet Wollstonecraft's most haunting, as well as damning, history is that of Jemima, the working-class heroine of The Wrongs of Woman.

¹² In a letter to her husband describing her intent, upon the advice of a physician, to take Ann to a warmer climate, Mary explicitly recognizes, and indeed plays upon, her motherly feelings for her friend and that friend's exclusive dependence upon her: "Continual attention to [Ann's] health, and the tender office of a nurse, have created an affection very much like a maternal one—I am her only support, she leans on me—could I forsake the forsaken, and break the bruised reed—No—I would die first! I must—I will go" (19-20).

¹³ At the novel's end, we learn of Mary's seemingly excessive response to that husband when she sees him, for the first time since their marriage ceremony (he had been traveling abroad), in person: "Mary fainted when he approached her unexpectedly. Her disgust returned with additional force, in spite of previous reasonings, whenever he appeared" (67). Indeed her emotions remain wholly negative, for although "time mellowed her grief, and mitigated her torments … when her husband would take her hand, or mention any thing like love, she would instantly feel a sickness, a faintness at heart, and wish, involuntarily, that the earth would open up and swallow her" (67). In comparison with Maria Venables' aversion to her alcoholic and libertine husband in The Wrongs of Woman, Mary's initial revulsion to a man she hardly knows seems difficult to comprehend. Yet perhaps Mary's disgust is more a reaction to her past than to her husband. In the marriage ceremony itself, Mary's concern for her dying mother enables her successfully to numb any sexual feelings she might have: "Mary stood like a statue of Despair, and pronounced the awful vow without thinking of it; and then ran to support her mother, who expired the same night in her arms" (15). This conflation of her mother's death, the result, at least in part, of her unfulfilling arranged marriage, and Mary's own marriage vows serves to underscore what Patricia Meyer Spacks has described as the "harsh divergence between the sentimental vision of love inculcated by romantic fiction and the horrible actuality of sexual alliance [that] forms much of the novel's action" (Imagining a Self 69). Janet Todd further describes Mary's sexual withdrawal: "For the child Mary, the sexual act was aggressive, perpetrated by her father on the body of the female. Nothing in her short life has severed sex from the fear of male aggression, or associated it with love" (Women's Friendship 206).

¹⁴ In Sex and Sensibility, Jean Hagstrum uses Sigismonda to typify the erotic use of the word "sense," as he quotes her own words: "I pleas'd myself, I shunn'd Incontinence, / And urg'd by strong Desires, indulg'd my Sense" (Dryden lines 454-45; Hagstrum 8-9). Hagstrum writes that "Dryden has presented in English dress a heroine with 'an amorous Mind' whose blood burns like a 'raging Fire.' … Sigismonda is a Woman of Feeling whose sensibility is exquisite and refined—and also prophetic of the age to come. Above all, she is unashamedly erotic" (54).

¹⁵ My intention in this essay is simply to point out what I believe to be an important relationship between Rousseau's novel and Wollstonecraft's own, rather than to provide a detailed reading of particular aspects of his text. For such a reading, see Ruth Ohayon's "Rousseau's Julie; Or, the Maternal Odyssey."

¹⁶ Ohayon writes that "Julie commits herself to a passionless life, devoid of happiness and fulfillment for herself—a symbolic death" (74).

¹⁷ In one of the fragments ending Wollstonecraft's novel, Mariaattempts suicide after Danford has abandoned her; Jemima's discovery of her daughter, whom both had believed dead, prompts Maria to exclaim "I will live for my child!" (203). Julie, on the other hand, chooses to die for hers: an effort to rescue her son from drowning brings on a fever that results in her death, a death, moreover, that she acknowledges to be an escape from the passion for Saint-Preux that she had only deluded herself into believing she had stifled: "I dare pride myself in the past, but who might have been able to answer for my future? One day more, perhaps, and I might be guilty!" (Vol. VI, letter 12).

¹⁸ See Chapter Five for Jemima's account of her own unhappy life, a life whose manifold miseries she ascribes to the loss, in infancy, of her own mother: "Now I look back, I cannot help attributing the greater part of my misery, to the misfortune of having been thrown into the world without the grand support of life—a mother's affection. I had no one to love me; or to make me respected, to enable me to require respect. I was an egg dropped on the sand; a pauper by nature, hunted from family to family, who belonged to nobody—and nobody cared for me. I was despised from my birth, and denied the chance of obtaining a footing for myself in society. Yes; I had not even the chance of being considered as a fellow creature—yet all the people with whom I lived, brutalized as they were by the low cunning of trade, and the despicable shifts of poverty, were not without bowels, though they never yearned for me. I was, in fact, born a slave, and chained by infamy to slavery during the whole of existence, without having any companions to alleviate it by sympathy, or to teach me how to rise above it by their example" (106).

¹⁹ Not only does Venables constantly attempt to extort money from his wife, but he also attempts to pander her to one of his companions, ostensibly in payment for a debt. This final evidence of her husband's utter lack of scruples causes Maria to plot her escape; she is pregnant at the time.

²⁰ The following passage from the Rights of Woman further explicates Wollstonecraft's use of the term "exercise," as well as her point: "the most perfect education, in my opinion, is such an exercise of the understanding, as is best calculated to strengthen the body and mind and form the heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual woman to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent. In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason" (103).

²¹ While this formulation seems to establish maternal and sexual love as conflictual, I nevertheless disagree with the polarization articulated by Mitzi Myers, who writes that 'Wollstonecraft links romantic love with subjectivity and transcendence and maternal love with social duty" (112). Thus while Myers claims that "Maria's uneasy oscillation between Danford and her daughter epitomizes the conflict between the yearning to soar and the claim of her earthly duties" (112). I argue that maternity does not detract from personal fulfillment, but rather offers a means through which to achieve subjectivity in the context of social duty. Maria's relationship to Danford and to her daughter is thus dialectical rather than oppositional.

²² For their comments and suggestions, I would like to thank James G. Turner, Carol Barash, Julie Ellison, Susan Egenolf, and, especially, Brittain Smith.

Works Cited

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Dryden, John. "Sigismonda and Guiscardo." The Poetical Works of John Dryden. Vol. 4. Ed. Rev. Richard Hooper. London, 1891. 46-72.

Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self. New York: Vintage, 1986.

Hagstrum, Jean H. Sex and Sensibility. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.

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Ohayon, Ruth. "Rousseau's Julie; Or, the Maternal Odyssey." College Language Association Journal 30. 1 (Sept. 1986): 69-82.

Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. La Nouvelle Héloïse. 1761. Trans. and abridged by Judith H. McDowell. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1968.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. "Ev'ry Woman is at Heart a Rake." Eighteenth-Century Studies 8 (1974-75): 27-46.

——. Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976.

Todd, Janet. Women's Friendship in Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1980.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Female Reader. 1789. Delmar, New York: Scholars' Reprints and Fascimiles, 1980.

——. Mary and The Wrongs of Woman. Ed. James Kinsley and Gary Kelly. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980.

——. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. 1787. Clifton, New Jersey: Augustus M. Kelley Reprints, 1972.

——. Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

Woolf, Virginia. "Mary Wollstonecraft." 1929. Women and Writing. Ed. Michèle Barrett. London: The Women's Press, 1979. 96-103.