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COPYRIGHT 2006 Boston University
We reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.
--Letters Written During, a Short Residence in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark
THE MELANCHOLY TONE OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT'S LETTERS WRITTEN During a Short Residence in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark attracted many admirers when it was published in 1796. (1) Among these was the rationalist philosopher William Godwin, her future husband, whose response to the travel narrative--he claimed in retrospect--was enthusiastic to the point of rapture. For him, the emotionality of Short Residence indicated a significant change of character for Wollstonecraft, whose analytic and anti-sentimental Vindication of the Rights of Woman had earned her a reputation as a "masculine" writer. In his Memoirs of the Author of the 'Vindication of the Rights of Woman,' Godwin implies that Wollstonecraft's Short Residence represented the transformation of an unattractive and masculine authorial persona into an appealingly feminine one.
The occasional harshness and ruggedness of character, that diversify her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, here totally disappear. If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration. (249) (2)
This response to the Short Residence, which was the last work Wollstonecraft published in her lifetime, exemplifies the dilemma Godwin faced after her death. Concerned about her legacy, he felt he had to make Wollstonecraft intelligible and acceptable to an increasingly conservative British audience both by softening what contemporaries saw as the masculinity of her intellect and by effacing her disdain for the protocols that governed female behavior. His solution was to attempt to write Wollstonecraft's life into the familiar script of the sentimental narrative, to reconstruct her according to a model of sentimental femininity that was based on extreme emotionality and an intense experience of pain. (3) According to Godwin's sentimental retelling of the story, his relationship with Wollstonecraft was not born of a meeting of philosophic minds; rather it originated in the familiar sentimental moment in which the man of feeling pities the suffering victim of sexual abandonment.
The sentimental narrative Godwin draws upon to explain and excuse his wife's unorthodox life had for decades relied upon female suffering for both the movement of the plot and for the demonstration of the male protagonist's sensitivity. As Claudia Johnson, Adela Pinch, and others have demonstrated, in the sentimental literature that dominated the period, female suffering was a condition necessary to draw forth the pity of the male protagonist, that ubiquitous man of feeling who populated English fiction during the last third of the eighteenth century. (4) At the same time, fictional female suffering played a larger role in the culture as a whole. Its fundamental function was to demonstrate not just the superior humanity of the observing male protagonist, but also to allow the readers to share in his emotional responses. In this way, by pitying female suffering en masse, the national audience was able to participate in a process that ultimately served to reinforce a sense of English cultural advancement. (5) In contrast to citizens of other nations who did not look at female suffering and drop humane tears, Britain's men of feeling could be seen by the reading public as the very incarnation of English civility. The female suffering at the foundation of sentimental culture was, then, essential to the British understanding of what made a nation and its people civilized.
Wollstonecraft, as Godwin implies in his Memoirs, was known for her opposition to the melting femininity so fundamental to sentimental culture. And yet, as Godwin rapturously notes, she creates an authorial persona in Short Residence that seems designed to attract sympathetic readers by moving them to tears. While these approaches may seem contradictory, if we use Godwin's reactions as our guide, we can begin to see the complexity of Wollstonecraft's use of sentimentalism. (6) Reading her story, Godwin wants to stand in relation to Wollstonecraft as would a man of feeling--pitying her suffering and enjoying the sensations of observing her sorrows. But despite his best efforts, Godwin is consistently waylaid by an admiration for her genius, by a sense of wonder at the distinctive power of her intellect that, ultimately, cannot be accommodated within the model of sentimental femininity he wishes to employ. Indeed, in his efforts to use sentimentalism to establish Wollstonecraft's femininity Godwin dramatically misrepresents the intellectual aspects of both Vindication and Short Residence. The "harshness" and "ruggedness" he mentions as an occasional feature of her previous work is rather a dominant characteristic of Vindication, in which Wollstonecraft vigorously attacked the very constructions (and constructors) of the sentimental femininity Godwin employs in the Memoirs to explain her life. And this harsh and rugged spirit, this tendency for bold and energetic social and political critique, certainly does not disappear, as Godwin wishes it would, in Short Residence. Rather, it exists alongside the melancholy character he exalts, the philosophic inseparable from the feminine.
What Godwin chooses not to discuss is that, despite its use of sentimental structures, Short Residence is as much about politics and economics as it is about suffering femininity. (7) It is a text that restages stock elements of the sentimental narrative--the suffering of the abandoned woman and the pity of the male observer--in order to critique and revise the exploitive economic and political relationships embedded within the tradition of sentimental literature. In this way, Wollstonecraft shows sentimental culture to be composed of an alluring set of stock scenarios that disguise the society's dependence on the abuse of women to establish its sense of morality and civility. Over the course of her protagonist's travels, Wollstonecraft disrupts generic conventions to such an extent that she creates a new Sentimental .Journey, one in which passive women in pain are no longer the lynchpin of the society's narrative of civilization. Instead, in Wollstonecraft's reconstructed sentimental narrative, women's pain becomes a source of intellectual accomplishment; and women who both feel and think are transformed into agents of progress.
To alter the characterization of women within sentimental culture, Wollstonecraft manipulates gender roles to create a sexually hybridized protagonist. Cast in both of the conventionally gendered roles of the sentimental narrative, the letter writer is at once the sorrowful woman whose alluring pain invites the observing reader's sympathy and the masculine observer who pities suffering women. Traditionally, critics of this novel have focused on either the masculine or feminine aspect of the protagonist's character. (8) But the result of Wollstonecraft's manipulations in this text is not a prioritization of one role, but rather the melding of the two. As Wollstonecraft's letter writer alternates between observer and sufferer, between subject and object, the distinctions between these gendered sentimental positions lose their clarity, and their constitutive natures are modified. When playing the role of feminine sufferer the protagonist does provoke sympathy, but she everywhere resists the exploitation embedded in the sentimental spectacle of female pain. In the position of masculine observer, she is drawn to the scene of female suffering, but refuses to profit or benefit from the distress she observes. As the traditionally gendered boundaries become blurred and less distinct, Wollstonecraft effects a shift of the sentimental narrative, reworking the female pain that underlies the genre, transforming it from a debilitating emotional misfortune to a creative intellectual experience.
The first letter establishes the hybridity of the protagonist's character, clearly delineating her as a figure who blends traditional male and female traits. She appears stereotypically manly in her activity and fearlessness--frustrated by calm winds, she convinces a reluctant sea captain to drop her in the middle of nowhere. And she seems masculine as well in her relentless tendency to analyze the social and economic structures of the nations she visits. For example, even as she argues with the captain about providing a rowboat to take her to shore, she contemplates the influence of despotism on human industry. And once on land, she asks so many pointed questions of one acquaintance that he raises the issue of her ambiguous relationship to contemporary gender roles. "At supper my host told me bluntly that I was a woman of observation, for I asked him men's questions" (68). From the very beginning of her travel narrative, then, Wollstonecraft shows her protagonist to be an individual who thinks like a man, and who, in social interactions, aligns herself with the sex whose mental processes she most respects. Indeed, the political and economic analyses the letter writer makes throughout this text would have been interpreted by Wollstonecraft's original readers as "masculine" in nature--a practice dominated by and intrinsically suited to male intellectual abilities. (9)
But while she moves with agency and independence and makes such "masculine" observations, the protagonist's pervasive and mysterious suffering ensures that her character retains its sentimental womanliness through the entire journey. Although the specific reason for the letter writer's pain is never overtly delineated, it is obvious that her melancholy emotional state is caused by her separation from a lover--the unnamed "you" of the narrative to whom the letters are addressed and toward whom the protagonist grows increasingly bitter. And while the exact nature of the relationship between the "friend" and the letter writer is left vague, it is clear that this man is the father of the baby girl who accompanies her on the voyage. It is a scenario Wollstonecraft encourages her readers to interpret from within the conventions of sentimental literature, a genre that repeatedly replayed scenes of women abandoned by lovers and mothers separated from the fathers of their children. The protagonist, then, alone, unmarried, and with a small child, shares many characteristics with the traditional sentimental heroine. (10) Indeed, Wollstonecraft uses the letter writer's sadness and her deep emotional bond to her baby daughter to augment the sense that she is suffering both as a woman and because...
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