Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman
The Wrongs of Woman is the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novelistic sequel to her revolutionary political treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The novel revolves around the story of a woman imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband. It focuses on the societal rather than the individual “wrongs of woman” and criticizes the patriarchal institution of marriage in eighteenth-century Britain.
About Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman in brief
The Wrongs of Woman is the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novelistic sequel to her revolutionary political treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The novel revolves around the story of a woman imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband. It focuses on the societal rather than the individual “wrongs of woman” and criticizes the patriarchal institution of marriage in eighteenth-century Britain and the legal system that protected it. The heroine’s inability to relinquish her romantic fantasies also reveals women’s collusion in their oppression through false and damaging sentimentalism. The book pioneered the celebration of female sexuality and cross-class identification between women. It is most often viewed as a fictionalized popularization of the rights of Woman, as an extension of Wollstonescraft’s feminist arguments in Rights of woman, and as autobiographical. It was published posthumously in 1798 by the author’s husband, William Godwin, and is often considered her most radical feminist work. The manuscript was incomplete when she died in 1797, and Godwin published all of the pieces of the manuscript in the Posthumous Works. Twentieth-century feminist critics embraced the work, integrating it into the history of the novel and feminist discourse. Some of the book’s themes, coupled with the publication of Godwin’s scandalous Memoirs, made the novel unpopular at the time it was published. The author researched the book more than her others. By assuming the responsibilities of fiction editor and reviewing almost nothing but novels, she used her editorial position at Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review to educate herself regarding novelistic techniques.
She even visited Bedlam Hospital in February 1797 to research insane asylums. She began it in several forms, which she successively rejected, after they were considerably advanced. She wrote many parts of the work again and again, and, when she had finished what she intended for the first part, she felt herself more urgently stimulated to revise and improve what she had written, than to proceed, with constancy of application, in the parts that were to follow. She could not “suppose any situation more distressing” for a woman of “sensibility with an improving mind” to be bound to a husband like Maria’s. Maria falls in love with Henry Darnford, a man who has had a debauched life. He reveals that he has been unable to convince the doctors to release him. When Jemima tells her story to Maria and Maria, she explains that she was born a bastard, making her already precarious position worse. She was therefore forced to become a servant in her father’s house and later bound out as an apprentice to a master who beat her master, who starved her and later raped her. When Maria discovers that Jemima’s wife was already an infant, she tells her life to Jemima and Maria. She manages to befriend one of her attendants in the asylum, an impoverished, lower-class woman named Jemima, who agrees to bring her a books.
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