Theodicy versus Feminist Strategy in Mary Wollstonecraft's Fiction

Abstract

Theodicy versus Feminist Strategy in Mary Wollstonecraft's Fiction Daniel Robinson Feminist critics have found it difficult to reconcile Mary Wollstonecraft 's religious faith with her feminist polemic. Nowhere is this difficulty more evident than in her fiction, which is seldom viewed as a means of gauging Wollstonecraft's thought. Wollstonecraft took fiction seriously, however; and it is in her first novel, Mary, A Fiction (1788), and her last, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798), where she most vigorously addresses the opposite poles of her thought. Modern criticism tends to give the impression that The Wrongs of Woman is a superior revision of Mary—that Mary is little more than a rough draft—because the later novel is driven by a didacticism that is consistent with the familiar image of Wollstonecraft as a pioneering feminist. But Mary has ideas as well, though, because of their religious nature, they seem incongruous with the feminist strategy she employs in her last novel. Since the novels are superficially similar in plot and situation, juxtaposition highlights the major difference in philosophic tone: religious thinking abounds in Mary but is conspicuously absent in The Wrongs of Woman. Mary is not merely a work of religious devotion, but a philosophical work on the nature of evil and faith in adversity. Moreover, while The Wrongs of Woman is a feminist polemic that takes up in fiction some of the social issues Wollstonecraft had addressed earlier in A Vindication ofthe Rights ofWoman (1792), Mary is a literary theodicy, in EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 9, Number 2, January 1997 184 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION which Wollstonecraft addresses contemporary and personal theological concerns. Theodicy attempts to prove the consistency of the notion that (1) there is an omnipotent God (2) who is wholly good and (3) that there is evil and suffering in the world.1 The formula is not syllogistic, and the problem, then, is this: how could God, being omnipotent and wholly good, see and permit evil and suffering? Theodicy seeks a religious or philosophical solution to the problem of evil where Wollstonecraft's later brand of feminism seeks a political solution to problems of social evil. The seeming contradiction between Wollstonecraft's religious faith and her feminist principles is highlighted in the literary theodicy of her first novel. But her fiction also points to the ways in which she would ultimately attempt to resolve the occasional conflict and apparent incongruity in her thinking. The language of theodicy appears in much of Wollstonecraft's writing, and her association of theodicy with the providential themes in her fiction indicates the potential philosophical quandary she finds herself in and seeks to resolve. Wollstonecraft bases her theodicy on providence, her feminism on society, and she explores in her two major works of fiction two very different concerns— theodicy and feminism—that engage her thinking at crucial stages in her writing career. Wollstonecraft eventually abandoned theodicy in favour of a more political approach to social evil, but her early approach to literary theodicy in Mary is itself a proto-feminist move that directs her towards the feminist strategy she adopts in her later writing. Both forces, however, are at work in her novels: Mary reveals some feminist strains of thought in its critique of the condition of women in the late eighteenth century, although its feminism is not as pronounced as in Wollstonecraft's later novel. But what critics have failed to look at closely in the first novel is its providential theme and the difficult religious questions it raises for Wollstonecraft's heroine and for her own intellectual development. For Wollstonecraft, as for most people of her day, providence is a system of events which are perceived as occurring according to the will of God. The problem of evil occurs when the actual occurrence of adversity or suffering appears to conflict with our notions of a benevolent deity. As I will show, this conflict in Wollstonecraft's early writing is resolved through her resignation to providence, so, in this way, providence 1 Dennis Richard Danielson, Milton's Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 2. Danielson's book provides a clear definition of theodicy as...