Theodicy versus Feminist Strategy in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Fiction
Daniel Robinson, Widener University
Volume 9, no. 2, January 1997
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ABSTRACT
Feminist critics have found it difficult to reconcile Mary Wollstonecraft’s religious faith with her feminist polemic. Nowhere is this difficulty more evident than in her fiction, which is seldom viewed as a means of gauging Wollstonecraft’s thought. Wollstonecraft took fiction seriously, however; and it is in her first novel, Mary, A Fiction (1788), and her last, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798), where she most vigorously addresses the opposite poles of her thought. Modern criticism tends to give the impression that The Wrongs of Woman is a superior revision of Mary — that Mary is little more than a rough draft — because the later novel is driven by a didacticism that is consistent with the familiar image of Wollstonecraft as a pioneering feminist. But Mary has ideas as well, though, because of their religious nature, they seem incongruous with the feminist strategy she employs in her last novel. Since the novels are superficially similar in plot and situation, juxtaposition highlights the major difference in philosophic tone: religious thinking abounds in Mary but is conspicuously absent in The Wrongs of Woman. Mary is not merely a work of religious devotion, but a philosophical work on the nature of evil and faith in adversity. Moreover, while The Wrongs of Woman is a feminist polemic that takes up in fiction some of the social issues Wollstonecraft had addressed earlier in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary is a literary theodicy, in which Wollstonecraft addresses contemporary and personal theological concerns.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Mary Wollstonecraft” include:
Rewriting Radicalism: Wollstonecraft in Burney’s The Wanderer
by TARA GHOSHAL WALLACE (ECF 24.3, Spring 2012)
Histories of Female Progress in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers
by JULIE MURRAY (ECF 22.4, Summer 2010)
The Body of Her Work, the Work of Her Body: Accounting for the Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft
by CYNTHIA RICHARDS (ECF 21.4, Summer 2009)
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