Bearing/Barren Life: The Conditions of Wollstonecraft’s Morbid Maternity

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay argues that Mary Wollstonecraft develops conditional terms around her maternity politics that anticipate and reshape our understanding of what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” By the 1790s, invoking care for the figurative mother is an established strategy for writers not only for contesting past and emergent political models of sovereignty, but also for securing flourishing visions of the state’s future (what Lee Edelman might call “reproductive futurism”). I argue that Wollstonecraft revises these political “fictions” of care by framing maternity not as a guarantee of bearing vigorous new life, political or otherwise, but rather as a “delicate condition” with the potential to render the state’s futurity barren. I read Wollstonecraft’s morbid accounts—of suicide, infanticide, widowhood, rape, imprisonment, ruin, apocalypse—to unpack how she understands women’s bared lives to be markers of the violence of current political conditions, as well as sites of haunting re-negotiations for the state’s futurity.