Wollstonecraft’s Gothic Violence

• In Event: Duty and Care in Human Development

Abstract

This paper argues for the recognition of “gothic violence” in Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, ‘The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria.’ I argue that the novel’s engagement with the gothic genre is more significant than has been recognized and that ‘Maria’ develops an account of unfreedom through its deployment of gothic conventions. Generally speaking, the gothic novel terrorizes its heroine along three dimensions: material, physical, and psychological. ‘Maria’ invokes these tropes in order to critique the condition of women under coverture, the legal fiction of English common law by which wives were subsumed under the legal persona of their husbands. Building on scholarship by Alan Coffee and Lena Halldenius, among others, that positions Wollstonecraft as a republican feminist, I show how coverture constitutes a kind of unfreedom and I call her depiction of the harm coverture can do to women gothic violence. I conclude by suggesting that attending to gothic violence in Wollstonecraft’s thought allows us to further see the continuity between her political and fictional writings. The paper would be especially suited for panels on eighteenth-century thought, feminist political thought, freedom, politics and literature, and republicanism.

Author

• Megan Gallagher, University of Alabama