Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her first novel, Mary: A Fiction, to express her most personal beliefs. An autobiographical work, Mary has been evaluated by later critics as too sentimental an expression to represent high-quality writing, and that inferiority in expression results in a work that contributes little toward an understanding of its author.
Twenty-first-century critics, however, differ in their approach to the novel, evaluating it based on its value, to borrow a phrase from critic Dale Spender, as a “consciousness raising activity.” In writing a fictional character based on herself, Wollstonecraft could investigate the events in her own life and attempt to answer a question that constantly plagued her: Why did her society consider women to possess weak characters?
The traditional answer to that question attributed their weakness and, therefore, lesser value than that of men, to their innate natures. Wollstonecraft sought a different answer, one supported by her belief in the tenets of Romanticism. Those tenets grew from Rousseau’s philosophy and stressed the possibility that one could change through experience in a continual re-creation of self. Such an idea proved especially attractive to writers who, in fiction, refashioned their experiences to achieve a new self-realization.
In Mary, Wollstonecraft focused on her own sensibilities through her protagonist. She remained fully aware of the prevailing attitude, which suggested that the female manner of interacting with the world using instincts or intuition marked them as incapable of intellectual activity. Even so, she chose to allow her protagonist’s emotions to play a prominent role in order to highlight important social issues in the novel in a nonpolemical way.
When Mary is forced into an arranged marriage that will result in improved economic conditions for her father, she “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.” Without becoming essayistic, Wollstonecraft reflects on the terrors of such unions for women; her emotional description allows her emphasis.
To balance Mary’s emotional bent, Wollstonecraft stressed throughout her novel the critical importance of education for women and their intellectual capacity to learn. Mary realizes that she lacks the learning she saw in others and seeks to correct that problem, hoping to escape her oppressive life. Thus, it is Mary’s emotion, her “anxiety,” that leads her to study physic, “this knowledge, literally speaking,” ending “in vanity and vexation of spirit, as it enabled her to foresee what she could not prevent.”
Wollstonecraft continues to tie intellect to emotion in a cause-and-effect relationship, continuing, “As her mind expanded, her marriage appeared a dreadful misfortune; she was sometimes reminded of the heavy yoke, and bitter was the recollection.” Mary does not find the escape she sought but will be disappointed not only by her loveless marriage but also by the deaths of her best friend and her lover. Even so, Mary’s experiences and studies allow her to metamorphose into a complex being well aware of her environment and its dangers, instead of remaining a simple organism that merely reacts to stimulus. That awareness allowed her ultimately to choose life over the suicide that might have concluded a more melodramatic and clichéd presentation.
Many critics feel Wollstonecraft’s attempts to write fiction failed. They accuse Wollstonecraft of filling Mary with too much emotion, while her second novel, The Wrongs of Women (1798) (left incomplete by Wollstonecraft’s death following the birth of her daughter, the future Mary Shelley), would be declared too polemic. A later readership would find her style in both novels unacceptable. The fault may have been due to her extreme autobiographical approach. While conventional wisdom holds that a reader should not confuse an author with the author’s protagonist, in the case of Wollstonecraft, the author actually invited the reader to do so.
She remained so true to the details of her own life, with, for instance, the death of Mary’s best friend imitating that of Fanny Blood, the author’s own soul mate, that she did not create the imaginative supportive framework of narrative and transition that readers centuries later desired. Still, Mary allowed Wollstonecraft to depict the personal sphere as a political realm, permitting the reader to understand the distressing effects of the oppression inflicted on women by a patriarchal society.
As critic Janet Todd suggests, the value of Mary Wollstonecraft’s novel may lay in its interest as a work illustrating the “literary beauties” of writing marked by sensibility. More likely, she adds, it should be appreciated for its depiction of the “alienated intellectual woman” in early form, a characterization that would reappear in the more refined “substantial heroines” created by Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853).
Bibliography
Kelly, Gary. Introduction to Mary and The Wrongs of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976, vii–xxi.
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Spender, Dale. “Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Autobiographical Fiction.” Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen. New York: Pandora, 1986, 246–269.
Todd, Janet. Introduction to Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, Maria, Mary Shelley, Matilda. New York: New York University Press, vii–xxviii.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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