Five Long Winters by Bugg John;

Author:Bugg, John; [Bugg, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 9. “Wollstonecraft.” Detail, letter from Horace Walpole to Hannah More, 24 January 1795. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Narrating the emergence of female resistance to such consensus, The Wrongs of Woman is as concerned with the perils faced by those who come to political awareness as it is with celebrating achieved liberation. The problems encountered by women who resisted “things as they are” were often overlooked in politically progressive discourse, a myopia that Wollstonecraft devastatingly satirizes in her portrayal of a man whom Jemima contacts at one of the most desperate moments of her life. After the sudden death of the “worn-out votary of voluptuousness” with whom she had been living, Jemima wrote to one of his friends for assistance (113). This friend, she explains, “was an advocate for universal sincerity; and had often, in my presence, descanted on the evils which arise in society from the despotism of rank and riches” (115). Understandably anticipating help, Jemima instead receives a “long essay on the energy of the human mind,” complete with “continual allusions to his own force of character” (115). More than just a satire of the hypocrisy of some “friends of humanity” (in the vein of More’s The History of Mr. Fantom), Wollstonecraft here depicts a specific kind of obliviousness, as the man’s “allusions” indicate his inability to understand the social conditions and prospects that Jemima faces. His next words, related by Jemima, are particularly self-damning: “[T]he woman who could write such a letter as I had sent him, could never be in want of resources, were she to look into herself, and exert her powers; misery was the consequence of indolence” (115).55

The account of this man’s insensitive response to Jemima’s plea triggers a crucial exchange between her and Maria, in which, as Peritz points out, we see Maria’s political education advancing: listening to Jemima “gives rise,” Maria says, “to the most painful reflections on the present state of society” (116).56 Mark Philp has argued that in her political tracts More sought “a bridge between respectable and vulgar culture, through which the latter might be transformed.”57 Noting a similar pattern of alliance, Colley has suggested that the war effort helped generate cross-class loyalist female networks, as “[w]omen from different social backgrounds would take part in pro-war activism.”58 In the growing relationship between Jemima and Maria, however, Wollstonecraft radically revises this idea, as Jemima’s narrative forwards Maria’s own developing political understanding, showing that “respectable” and “vulgar” women could come together not only in loyalism but also in resistance.

It is in tracing the formation of this resistance that Wollstonecraft works a complex turn on felix carcer discourse. The scene of confinement in The Wrongs of Woman is not the space of Christian salvation imagined in the Cheap Repository Tracts but the setting for a revolutionary secular conversion narrative. As a social compact comes nervously into focus inside the madhouse, Wollstonecraft documents the difficulty that her characters have in entirely believing that they can now speak safely. Jemima, for

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