“Necessarily various”: Body Politics and Discursive Ethics in Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman

Abstract

Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria is a generic hybrid, a multivocal fiction delivered in a highly condensed, almost allegorical manner that occasionally verges on the uncanny. Although the relevance of Wrongs to the issue of women’s rights has long been recognized, its engagement with the political debates of 1796 has not. In this essay, I argue that to understand the feminist politics of Wrongs, we need to attend to the text’s historicity – its commitment to a radical politics of communication that in the end, constitutes not just an historical but an ethical alternative to the bellicose, anti‐democratic polemics of Burke’s Two Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796).