from Unfolding Female Minds

*** Such insights regarding the interactivity of melancholy and writing are scripted into
The Wrongs of Women; or; Maria from the start. That book is devoted to delineating the wrongs
suffered by women who love and is composed almost entirely of scenes of reading, writing, or
storytelling. It would be hard to miss the texts emphasis on the first dimension, already
highlighted in the title. The first page depicts Maria both lamenting that her baby is a daughter
and anticipating the aggravated ills of life that her sex rendered almost inevitable, anticipations
that are actualized in all subsequent female stories in the text (by Jemima, the lovely maniac,
the landlady, Maria)(85). On these grounds, too, Wrongs of Women equates marriage with
slavery and imprisonment, implying that major social institutions are invested in female
confinement. But the text is similarly relentless in its focus on narration and the interrelation it
establishes between loving and narrating ones story. Chapter 1 ends with Jemima procuring for
Maria some books and implements for writing, which are instrumental in the attainment and
redirection of her love (89). The only bright spots in any of the womens personal stories involve
moments of reading or literary converse. This is especially true for the working-class Jemima,
whose status as mistress to a literary libertine provides the only respite in her tale of misery and
her only means of rising above it. The answer to your often-repeated question, Why my
sentiments and language were superior to my station? is that I now began to read (113). This
linkage-emphasized in the libertine profiting from the criticism of unsophisticated feeling by
reading to Jemima his productions, previous to their publication suggests that womens fates
are tied to their ability to shape stories, especially regarding the misery that their reduction to
objects of love consigns them (114). But the connection works both ways: articulating this
misery is key to changing it through publicizing new stories by women. Without this emphasis,
the text sounds defeatist about the prospects for women who love. Instead Wrongs presents
reading and writing as highly erotic activities and the best hopes for social reform.
*** In this regard, Wrongs of Women is profitably read as a treatise on sex education that
treats each term as important to educing the other. Its basic message is that society needs to be
re-educated about the practices and meanings of sex so that sexual activity does not dehumanize
individuals, especially women. The text does not argue against sex or its pleasures but against
sexual practices that rigorously oppose body to mind or male to female in the degree of pleasure
to which either body is entitled. [Women] cannot, without depraving our minds, endeavour to
please a lover or husband, but in proportion as he pleases us (145). Passion and intellect must be
equally satisfied in physical acts of love, for the culture of the heart ever, I believe, keeps pace
with that of the mind (116). These are strikingly emancipated claims, which, by linking equality
to womens share in sexual pleasure, should qualify assertions of the chasteness, even
prudishness, that characterizes the Wollstonecraftian heroine. Equally forward-looking is this
texts efforts to promote the pleasures of mental arousal and to instruct persons about the benefits
and dangers of loving by the book. As we will see, even if the genre of book (the novel of
sentiment) is ultimately censured for mischaracterizing love, the notion that books play a
stimulating role in love is never retracted. Nor does that stimulation remain on a cerebral plane.
Maria and Henry not only fall in love through marginal textual exchanges but the passion of
those exchanges anticipates, by at once postponing and preparing for, their sexual union. When
the two finally meet in person, the reserve that makes their conversation appropriate for all
the world to have listened in on is only broken when, in discussing some literary subject,
flashes of sentiment, inforced by each relaxing feature, seemed to remind them that their minds
were already acquainted (100). This activation of a former meeting of the minds, an accord
strengthened by Darnfords intervening acquaintance with the written narrative of Marias life,
triggers the physical union to which both parties consent. In fact, it is the grounds of consent.
It is true that, once triggered Wrongs of Woman then falls silent on the physical pleasure
of sex. Comments on the scene instead focus on the effects on Marias imagination, perhaps to
suggest that the pleasures of sex are never simply physical, as suggested in the definition of
voluptuous. By way of contrast, Wrongs is graphic in its portrayal of the prospect of
unsatisfactory sex, treating the reader to disgusting visions of Marias libertine husband. I now
see him-the same him whose tainted breath, pimpled face, and bloodshot eyes formerly
nauseated Maria-lolling in an arm-chair, in a dirty powdering gown, soiled linen, ungartered
stockings, and tangled hair, yawning and stretching himself (139-140). It is as if Maria forces
her readers to feel-and thus share-her revulsion as part of a visceral campaign to support the
moral necessity of divorce. The moral case rests on exposing the violence done to a womans
sensibilities in forcing her to continue to have sex with such a man. The more sensitive the
woman, the more damaging is the mandate that she fulfill her wifely duty. When I recollected
that I was bound to live with such a being for ever-my heart died within me; my desire of
improvement became languid, and baleful, corroding melancholy took possession of my soul
(145-46). No wonder those who deny women recourse to divorce are termed cold-blooded
moralists. Not content to bastille women for life, they entomb women by forcing them to
turn their hearts to stone, and in so doing extinguish that fire of the imagination, which
produces active sensibility, and positive virtue (144, original emphasis).
Whether depicted through positive or negative means, then, Wrongs of Woman wants sex
to retain (actually, find or regain) its mental and imaginative features. Sex without mind, her
definition of libertinism, is brutish precisely in robbing persons of their recourse to fantasy.
Indeed, the prospect of being enchained to a brute turns a woman to stone. On the other hand,
good sex, according to this text, both fosters and necessitates imaginative activity. There was
one peculiarity in Marias mind: she...had rather trust without sufficient reason, than be for ever
the prey of doubt (173). But affirming such visions of sex confronts several obstacles, one of
the most basic being novelistic portrayals of women as mindless, though this with an added
twist. The mindlessness that this text confronts concerns mindless reading, the passive absorption
of sentimental fiction. In Wollstonerafts eyes, such passivity not only keeps women stupefied
and therefore acquiescent in their unhappiness as wives but also focuses their erotic desires on
romance heroes whose unrealistic features are the product of limited male fantasy. Wrongs aims
to redress both situations. In the details of its plot and the interlocking structure of its narration, it
transforms the reading of fiction into an activity that forces women both to think and to
reconsider their options.
The texts seriousness about the need to alter practices and notions of sex is underscored
by its series of framing devices-especially that of Maria writing her life story to her infant
daughter in the event that she might be unable to parent her in person. That the instruction
concerns the susceptibility of erotic attraction to redirection is clear from the amatory education
that her memoir plots. Maria aims to teach her daughter how to make more satisfying choices in
love by relating not only how a different partner (first George, then Henry) affects the daily
features of her existence but also what caused her to be attracted to George in the first place: an
overactive fancy, which, schooled on books and her uncles unworldly conversations, ma[d]e
me form an ideal picture of life (126; see 131,137). Maria writes against this idealizing of
reality, even if what she narrates is caused by repeated errors of the sort. By admitting and
learning from her mistakes and then relating them to her daughter, Maria seeks to improve the
next generations happiness in love. Such improvement requires that women first break through
the secrecy surrounding sex, a secrecy that is fundamental to making sex appear sacred and too
intimate for public discourse. For this habit of viewing sex as the most private or personal
aspect of a couples relationship strengthens the marital despotism from which the wrongs of
woman stem. It keeps women from admitting to themselves, let alone to others, that their sex
lives are less than ideal and thus prevents them from banding together to change things-including
pursuing their erotic desires for each other. As the scene with her landlady shows, the sexual tie,
precisely when it is the only palpable demonstration of a husbands connection to his wife, is the
primary threat to female solidarity. It impedes womens desires to view themselves as thinking
individuals because it is not in their interest to do so.
At the same time, Wrongs of Woman retracts the contention advanced in Rights of
Woman that those wives who are unhappy as lovers make the best mothers. This mother writes to
her daughter to vindicate and broadcast her status as adulterous lover in order to safeguard her
daughters right to a sexually satisfying marriage. In the domain of marriage at least, her
message is basically never to forego desire. Acquire sufficient fortitude to pursue your own
happiness. Do not waste years in deliberating, after you cease to doubt. To fly from
pleasure is not to avoid pain (123). The protestant vocabulary should not overshadow the
underlying message regarding a wifes right to sexual happiness. Truly immoral because it is
weak-minded and therefore demeaning is retaining the cloke of matrimony on a body that has
gone elsewhere (157).
We do not have to wait for the conclusion to this text, or its lack of a conclusion, to worry
about the rationality or plausibility of these reformulations of love. The fragments of possible
endings that Godwin appends to his edition of this text suggest that Henry will prove
disappointing in any number of ways. They also suggest that lessons, like lives, have no assured
or predictable ends. But here, too, the novel anticipates our skepticism, by situation these scenes
of instruction in a madhouse. This admission, I contend, rather than any lessening of
Wollstonecrafts feminist convictions, constitutes the major difference between Rights of Woman
and Wrongs of Woman, a difference that is consistent with the implications of the shift in titles
from rights to wrongs and the latter texts narrowing of focus to marital despotism as the
chief problem obstructing womens attainment of rights. Not that Rights of Woman is ever
sanguine about the ease with which cultures alter their foundations, but it is enlightened in
assuming the efficacy of demonstrating the necessity and benefits of change. This aspect of
Enlightenment dogma is what Wrongs of Woman recants. By losing what is presented as an
irrefutable case for the rational, moral, and sensible benefits of divorce to both parties, Wrongs
exposes societys investment in the repression of women. More than ignorance or indifference
perpetuates female retardation; the most cherished social institutions of the West are established
to ensure that women do not advance. But even this degree of pessimism (i.e., realism) is
tempered by the texts understanding of the power of truth, a power that depends on redefining
the nature of truth. The best hope for positive change lies in telling less idealized or saccharine
stories above love. ***


Carlson, Julie A. Englands First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin,
Mary Shelley. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2007. 30-40. Print.