Mocking the Mothers of the Novel: Mary Wollstonecraft, Maternal Metaphor, and the Reproduction of Sympathy

Abstract

When Mary Wollstonecraft began her work as a critic for Analytical Review in 1788, literary reviewers were still groping towards criteria of novel-writing (Tompkins 18). Their difficulties, argues J. M. S. Tompkins in The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800, stemmed from the vagueness of object for which they were to legislate, and by uncertainty ... as to how fiction could be reviewed (18). Explicitly noting critic's challenge in her first published review, Wollstonecraft observes of The Happy Recovery: a Sentimental Novel by a Lady that analysis of novels will seldom be expected, nor can of be tried by criterion of reason (Works 7: 19). Her demurral suggests another perceived obstacle for reviewers--the overwrought, sentimental language of majority of novels they encountered, and its association with women writers and readers. She summarily dismisses The Happy Recovery as of folly, affectation, and improbability, (7: 19) alluding in review's first line to novel's formlessness. While typical epistolary structure could conceivably undermine formal unity Wollstonecraft desires, heterogeneous mass she identifies has more to with unrestrained expression and fabulation reviewers expected of most women's fiction. Her only other specific comments about The Happy Recovery read as follows: Metaphors and vulgarisms abound. The countess, 'wrapt up in sable and all-encircling mantle of despair, is seized with a violent puking of blood' (7: 19). Like many of her peers, Wollstonecraft relies here, and elsewhere in her reviews, on direct quotation to give her readership a sense of prose style; she then moves quickly to a series of suggestive generalizations about emergent genre and its probable effects on uninformed, unformed female readers. Young women may be termed romantic, she writes, when they boast of being tremblingly alive all o'er, and faint and sigh as novelist informs them they (7: 19). More a quivering sensate than a being, female reader constructed by Wollstonecraft is said to act under direction of artificial (7: 19) transmitted through sentimental novel. The imagination of affected reader hunt[s] after shadows and is suffered to stray ... where no vestige of nature appears because it has been trained to respond only to false sentiment and vague fabricated feelings [that] supply place of (7: 19). It seeks no moderate enjoyments or duties and avoids rational books offering a semblance of reality and order, as they do not throw mind into an exquisite tumult (7: 19). The developing mind is thus a mirror of what it reads: romantic imagination strays and errs like plots of traditional romance; shapeless sentimental novel begets a similarly disordered consciousness. As a former governess, proprietor of a girls' school, and a writer of conduct books, Wollstonecraft clearly has ideas about impact of novel-writing, and if she cannot try The Happy Recovery by any criterion of reason, she is nonetheless anxious to defend its potentially corruptible, would-be readers. She argues: [R]idicule should direct its shafts against this fair game, and, if possible, deter from imbibing wildest notions, most pernicious prejudices; prejudices which influence conduct, and spread insipidity over social converse. (7: 19) Strong action is needed to protect thoughtless readers absorbed by cant of sensibility because they lack independence of mind supported by clear principles and a well-developed reasoning capacity. Unpracticed in self-control or containment, they cannot help but infect others with insipid discourse they have unconsciously imbibed. This impulse toward imitation is manifested variably and uncontrollably: through use of lofty, artificial language in everyday conversation; through narcissistic identification with hyper-sensitive heroines; and through adoption of false sentiments that threaten their sexual purity. …