The Feminist Papers by Mary Wollstonecraft

Men are vain about their wealth, power and status women about their appearance. Commercial society encourages inequality, Smith argues, and Wollstonecraft points out that this inequality is particularly obvious in the relationships between men and women.

) way of what Smith and Wollstonecraft regard as the deep human connection they variously describe as love, sympathy, and esteem. But a vain person is preoccupied with appearance, status, and flattery-things that get in the (. As the new middle class continues to grow along with commerce, vanity becomes an ever more common vice among its members. Though the two major 18th century thinkers are not traditionally brought into conversation with each other, Wollstonecraft and Smith share deep moral concerns about the emerging commercial society. This article shows the philosophical kinship between Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft on the subject of love. I conclude by suggesting that attending to gothic violence in Wollstonecraft’s thought allows us to further see the continuity between her political and fictional writings. I show how gothic violence results in the unfreedom of women through its reliance on domestic settings and intimate relationships, and with the support of law and custom, of which coverture is a central example.

Building on scholarship that positions Wollstonecraft as a republican feminist, I show how Maria articulates what I call gothic violence, a form of psychic domination that places the other in a condition of unfreedom by denying their status as an autonomous being and holding them in subordination through a variety of techniques, such as denial of legal and social status and testimonial quieting. ) are subsumed under the legal persona of their fathers or husbands. I argue that Maria’s ultimate lack of freedom is directly attributable to coverture, the patriarchal legal fiction whereby wives (. The fictive companion to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Maria is an account of the titular character’s struggle for self-determination in all aspects of her life, including her desire for a companionate partnership. This paper introduces the concept of gothic violence in order to better theorize how domination operates in Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria.

The Feminist Papers by Mary Wollstonecraft