Maria Or The Wrongs Of Woman Annotated U K Addition

Author : Mary Wollstonecraft
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781973103905
Total Pages : 87 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (39 download)

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Download or read book Maria: Or, the Wrongs of Woman Mary Wollstonecraft written by Mary Wollstonecraft and published by . This book was released on 2017-10-18 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman is the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished novelistic sequel to her revolutionary political treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The Wrongs of Woman was published posthumously in 1798 by her husband, William Godwin, and is often considered her most radical feminist work.[1]Wollstonecraft's philosophical and gothic novel revolves around the story of a woman imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband. It focuses on the societal rather than the individual "wrongs of woman" and criticizes what Wollstonecraft viewed as the patriarchal institution of marriage in eighteenth-century Britain and the legal system that protected it. However, the heroine's inability to relinquish her romantic fantasies also reveals women's collusion in their oppression through false and damaging sentimentalism. The novel pioneered the celebration of female sexuality and cross-class identification between women. Such themes, coupled with the publication of Godwin's scandalous Memoirs of Wollstonecraft's life, made the novel unpopular at the time it was published.Twentieth-century feminist critics embraced the work, integrating it into the history of the novel and feminist discourse. It is most often viewed as a fictionalized popularization of the Rights of Woman, as an extension of Wollstonecraft's feminist arguments in Rights of Woman, and as autobiographical.Drafts[edit]Wollstonecraft struggled to write The Wrongs of Woman for over a year; in contrast, she had dashed off A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), her reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in under a month and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) in six weeks. Godwin comments:She was sensible how arduous a task it is to produce a truly excellent novel; and she roused her faculties to grapple with it. All her other works were produced with a rapidity, that did not give her powers time fully to expand. But this was written slowly and with mature consideration. She began it in several forms, which she successively rejected, after they were considerably advanced. She wrote many parts of the work again and again, and, when she had finished what she intended for the first part, she felt herself more urgently stimulated to revise and improve what she had written, than to proceed, with constancy of application, in the parts that were to follow.[3]She also researched the book more than her others. By assuming the responsibilities of fiction editor and reviewing almost nothing but novels, she used her editorial position at Joseph Johnson's Analytical Review to educate herself regarding novelistic techniques. She even visited Bedlam Hospital in February 1797 to research insane asylums.[4]At Wollstonecraft's death in 1797, the manuscript was incomplete. Godwin published all of the pieces of the manuscript in the Posthumous Works, adding several sentences and paragraphs of his own to link disjunct sections.[5]