Wollstonecraft criticism and class notes Flashcards
Who wrote Mary Wollstonecraft and the Sexuality of Genius?
Andrew Elfenbein
How did writers understand sexual roles when sexuality had no language of its own? (In 18th century).
Through the vocabulary of gender, with certain modes of sexual behaviour owned by masculinity and some by femininity.
Why does a simple homo/hetero binary not do justice to eighteenth-century writing?
- Because gender definitions were disputed and varied between discourses, and suggested differing possibilities for relationships between and among sexes.
- Definitions from different discourses could be set against each other.
- Wollstonecraft used civic humanist political discourse gender definitions against those of female conduct books.
- She judged women by manly quality of ‘virtue’; criticised James Fordyce comparison of women to angels because it was their ‘persons’ not their ‘virtues’ “that procure them this homage”
How does Wollstonecraft’s work link sexuality to genius?
- It helps to explain her principal thoughts about sexuality, being her mistrust of conventional erotic relationships and her profound doubt about love in a world that victimises women who show any form of sensitivity.
- Her project was less to be homosexual or heterosexual but to link the category of genius to the category of women.
- Results were daring and unconventional 18th century treatments of sexuality.
What is the biographical counter narrative of Wollstonecraft’s sexuality?
-That she matured from lesbianism to heterosexuality.
“vaguely distasteful”
- That her marriage to Godwin was the goal of her life, which ignores her expansive and unconventional and precarious explorations of heterosexuality, with Fuseli, Imlay, and Godwin.
- “The tidying up of Wollstonecraft’s sexuality” - dates back to Godwin’s biography.
Why was Godwin uncomfortable about ‘Vindication’?
Because it showed Wollstonecraft to be masculine, which leads to violence (2-3)
How does Godwin’s discomfort over masculinity reveal how deeply sexuality determined the female character?
Female masculinity meant either lesbianism or asexuality.
The possibility of a woman who either was not interested in sex or was not interested in men was threat- ening because she forced relations between men and women to assume an entirely new footing
How else did Wollstonecraft exhibit masculinity according to Godwin?
Her relationship with Fanny Blood.
“She contracted a friendship so fervent, as for years to have constituted the ruling pas- sion of her mind”
“The situation in which Mary was introduced to [Blood], bore a resemblance to the first inter- view of Werter with Charlotte” (omitted in second edition).
How does Godwin neutralise Wollstonecraft’s masculinity?
It vanished after Blood’s death in childbirth. Instead of turning to other women, Wollstonecraft fell in love with a series of men.
According to Godwin, the affair with Imlay was so powerful that it eradicated her masculinity altogether:
Godwin on Mary’s character change from knowing Imlay.
“Her whole character seemed to change with a change of fortune . . . She was playful, full of confidence, kindness and sympathy. Her eyes assumed new lustre, and her cheeks new colour and smoothness. Her voice became chearful; her temper overflowing with universal kindness; and that smile of bewitching tenderness from day to day illuminated her countenance.” (Memoirs, 242)
Loving him makes her a real woman. Masculine Amazon to ideal heterosexual partner.
Interesting because he was not there but still lavishes attention on this fantasy; and that it had such dire outcomes for Wollstonecraft - still he treats it as marvellously beneficial to love a man.
How does Elfenbein think Wollstonecraft used the role of genius?
She used the language of genius and its consequence for sexual roles as an alternative to increasingly restrictive roles put on women by novels, conduct books, medical tracts, and religious sermons; as a means of reinventing possibilities for the woman writer and her sexuality.
Why was ‘genius’ exciting in 18th century?
It could shatter the traditional hierarchies of artistic achievement because anybody could potentially be a genius, not just the upper-class, university-educated men who ruled the literary establishment.
(Shakespeare)
What was ‘natural genius’ and why did it fascinate?
Authors like Robert Burns and Ann Yearsley who seemed to have miraculously overcome their supposed lack of education to become distinguished poets. For writers who came from classes or groups that tra- ditionally had no place in the English literary market, genius was a wedge into a hitherto closed system.
Thus, those who moved in Wollstonecraft’s radical circles were invested in category of genius.
William Godwin and William Blake on genius.
William Godwin devoted the first several issues of The Enquirer to an inquiry about its roots; and William Blake repeatedly hailed it as the only source of great poetry.
How did Wollstonecraft alter Blair’s definition of genius?
He writes that it “does not rest in mere sensibility to beauty where it is perceived, but [can] produce new beauties”.
For Wollstonecraft it is unproductive, because if geniuses were expected to always be creating, women would not be able to demonstrate genius.
If writing for a living they needed to write what would make money rather than exhibit originality.
How did genius liberate Wollstonecraft when she first read about it?
It allowed her to think of herself as rising above the mediocre masses. "The genius that sprouts from a dunghil [sic] soon shakes off the heterogeneous mass." (The Cave of Fancy). - She was subjected to a class system and hierarchy but knew her employer, Lady Kingsborough, had a mediocre understanding, one that “could never have been made to rise above mediocrity.”
What good was women’s genius if its wasn’t productive?
It distinguishes a woman in potentially dangerous and unhelpful ways by making her discontent with ordinary femininity, but leaving her powerless to realize her distinctiveness. The result for the female genius is the danger of perpetual solitude, given the difficulty of finding any outlet for her abilities.
However, it was empowering in that it was potentially free from restrictive gender associations.
What does Christine Battersby say on genius and gender deviance?
Although eighteenth-century writers assumed that geniuses were men, they tended to describe them as feminized ones: “Before the eighteenth century there had been a direct link between the word ‘genius’ and male fertility; now ‘genius’ was presented as both an expression of, and a threat to, maleness. Genius was seen to feminise the male body and mind.”
How does William Duff express the threat of genius to masculinity?
In ‘An Essay on Original Genius’ he describes the poetic genius as metaphorically female: “A glowing ardor of Imagination is indeed . . . the very soul of Poetry. It is the principal source of inspiration; and the Poet who is possessed of it, like the Delphian Priestess, is animated with a kind of divine fury.”
He thus draws on a long tradition associating femininity with loss of self-possession and control, and compares the genius to the inspired priestess at Delphi. Duff’s genius inherits a mode of femininity that the proper bourgeois femininity of the eighteenth century strove to erase: monstrous, uncontrolled, undisciplined, and excessive. - Yet it belonged to biological men.
What was proof for the gender deviance of a genius?
That they were unsuited to marriage. Duff wrote that geniuses should not be tied down to any convention and that “blemishes” on “some of our great compositions may reasonably be attributed to … domestic infelicities”
How did Wollstonecraft match the eighteenth century theory of the male genius as feminised?
She wrote a female genius who was masculinised, in ‘Mary, a Fiction’.
Mary possesses originality; her grandeur is “drawn by the individual from the original source”, and she is loud, energetic and decisive so as not to be dismissed as the “nothing” of her mother whose “voice was but the shadow of a sound”
What does Wollstonecraft subvert in ‘Mary’?
The long satirical tradition of mocking female masculinity and same sex desire in the figure of the virago; lesbian, asexual, or hyper sexual.
How does Wollstonecraft reinvent female masculinity as a positive trait?
By contrasting her en- ergy and decisiveness with the passivity and sickliness of her love objects, Ann and Henry, who are both invalids.
What was Wollstonecraft’s message about marriage and genius?
The same as other theorists, that marriage enchained genius, but also that a female genius is more interested in loving another woman than in settling down to a bourgeois marriage.
