The Memoir as Radical Critique: Re-Imagining Intimacy in Wollstonecraft’s Maria

• In Event: Women Inside and Outside

Abstract

This paper examines Wollstonecraft’s 18th century gothic novel, Maria: The Wrongs of Women, in order to re-evaluate and potentially re-situate her position on the emotions. Wollstonecraft’s most popular work, Vindications, famously advances a rationalist position, privileging reason over the emotions, or “the head than the heart”. In contrast to Wollstonecraft’s sharp critique of the emotions in Vindications, however, I argue that we can recover a more sympathetic view of the emotions—and intimate emotions in particular—in her fictional work, Maria. Whereas intimacy in Vindications is directly linked to women’s oppression, as it is expressed through relations of male domination over women, I argue that an alternative, positive account of intimacy can be recovered from Maria.

I suggest that Wollstonecraft’s positive view of intimacy is developed in two main ways. First, we gain a deeper context for Wollstonecraft’s dismissal of intimacy in Vindications, as Wollstonecraft outlines the social conditions under which intimacy ought to be considered oppressive rather than freeing. In other words, Wollstonecraft clarifies the grounds upon which intimacy (rather than intimacy itself) is critiqued in Vindications. Second, we gain a contrasting account of intimacy running throughout Maria. While Wollstonecraft continues to critique an existing state of intimacy she sees exemplified by Rousseau in Maria, she also discusses a positive, future intimacy, captured through conversations between the novel’s women: “voluntary” monologues detailing their lives, and a mother’s memoir for her daughter. In sum, I argue that there are two logics of intimacy at play in Wollstonecraft’s works—a negative logic of oppressive intimacy, and a positive logic of intimacy that is conducive to a freely lived life.

Author

• Erica Kunimoto