Mary: A Fiction
This is the first and only complete novel written by the eighteenth-century British feminist Mary
Wollstonecraft. It tells the tragic story of a
heroine's successive "romantic
friendships" with a woman and a man.
Composed while Wollstonecraft was a governess in Ireland, the novel was published in 1788 shortly after her summary dismissal and her momentous decision to
embark on a writing career, a precarious and disreputable profession for women
in eighteenth-century Britain.
Inspired by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau's idea that geniuses are
self-taught, Wollstonecraft chose a rational, self-taught heroine, Mary, as the
central character of her novel. Helping to redefine genius (a word which at the end of the eighteenth century was only beginning
to take on its modern meaning of exceptional or brilliant), Wollstonecraft
describes Mary as independent and capable of defining femininity and marriage
for herself. It is Mary's "strong, original opinions" and her
resistance to "conventional wisdom" that mark her as a genius. Making
her heroine a genius allowed Wollstonecraft to criticize marriage as well:
geniuses were "enchained" rather than enriched by marriage. Through
this heroine Wollstonecraft also critiques eighteenth-century sensibility and its damaging effects on women. Mary rewrites the traditional
romance plot through its reimagination of gender
relations and female sexuality. Yet, because Wollstonecraft employs the genre
of sentimentalism to critique sentimentalism
itself, her "fiction", as she labels it, sometimes reflects the same
flaws of sentimentalism that she is attempting to expose.
Wollstonecraft later repudiated Mary, writing that it was
laughable. However, scholars have argued that, despite its faults, the novel's
representation of an energetic, unconventional, opinionated, rational, female
genius (the first of its kind in English literature) within a new kind of
romance is an important development in the history of the novel because it
helped shape an emerging feminist discourse.
URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary:_A_Fiction