Be sure to finish Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman for Monday's class, and instead of questions, I'll give you a brief in-class response when you get to class. As long as you've finished the book (or gotten close) you'll easily be able to answer the question. Just make sure to bring your book!
ALSO, we'll be starting Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey soon, so make sure to secure a copy. Below is the handout I gave out in class in case you missed or lost it. It's just some supplementary material about Wollstonecraft from a very recent biography of Wollstonecraft and her daughter, Mary Shelley, that we have available to check out in our library!
Mary
Wollstonecraft (1757-1797)
Major Works: Mary (1787); A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792); Letters from Denmark Sweden Norway
“Women’s lack of book learning,
far from being a disadvantage, freed them to be closer to Nature. To Mary, a
female artist could aspire to bolder innovations than men like Godwin [her
husband]. Mary herself would rather be a
Greek poet than read a Greek Poet,
rather be a force of Nature than describe one.
This was a brilliant sleight of
hand: Mary had taken her lack of formal education and turned it into a
strength. Godwin, who had criticized her grammar and her lack of restraint,
needed to listen more closely to his heart to attain true greatness. All men
did. Spontaneity. Sincerity. These were as important as reason and learned
allusions, and were certainly more important than grammatical correctness.
The Wrongs of Woman is
unfinished and difficult to read, as Mary was still working on it when she died
and had not yet decided how it would end. She knew she was entering taboo
territory by discussing female sexual exploitation, but since she was intent on
exposing the evils that faced women, she never considered watering down her
heroines’ sufferings. For Mary, the asylum was the central image of the
book—its crumbling walls and dark passageways are her metaphor for the plight
of eighteenth-century women.
Indeed, by having both Maria and
Jemima tell their stories, Mary showed that it did not matter whether a woman
was rich or poor—either way, she faced the injustice encoded in the English
common law. Jemima could not prosecute her abusers. Her masters had the legal
right to rape her and victimize her. The same was true for upper-class Maria;
her husband has the right to tyrannize her despite her wealth and social
status. In fact, this is probably one reason why Mary had difficulty developing
the plot; female imprisonment is a necessarily static condition.”
--from Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of
Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter, Mary Shelley (in ECU’s library!)
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