Mary Wollstonecraft, Pedagogy, and the Practice of Feminism

Kirstin Hanley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136753039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria femminista

This study examines Mary Wollstonecraft—generally recognized as the founder of the early feminist movement—by shedding light on her contributions to eighteenth-century instructional literature, and feminist pedagogy in particular. While contemporary scholars have extensively theorized Wollstonecraft's philosophical and polemic work, little attention has been given to her understanding and representation of feminist practice, most clearly exemplified in her instructional writing. This study makes a significant contribution to the fields of both eighteenth-century and Romantic Era literature by looking at how early feminism influenced didactic traditions from the late-eighteenth century to today. Hanley argues that Wollstonecraft constructs a paradigm of feminist pedagogy both in the texts' representations of teaching and learning, and her own authorial approach in re-appropriating earlier texts and textual traditions. Wollstonecraft's appropriations of Locke, Rousseau, and other educationists allow her to develop reading and writing pedagogies that promote critical thinking and gesture toward contemporary composition theories and practices. Hanley underscores the significance of Wollstonecraft as teacher and mentor by revisiting texts that are generally assigned a short space in the context of a larger discussion about her life and/or writing, re-presenting her works of instruction as meaningful both in their revisionist approaches to tradition and their normative didactic features.

1 Original Stories and Thoughts on the Education of Daughters

Revising the Rules of Conduct

Those productions which give a wrong account of the human passions, and the various accidents of life, ought not to be read before the judgment is formed, or at least exercised. Such accounts are one great cause of the affectation of young women. Sensibility is described and praised, and the effects of it represented in a way so different from nature, that those who imitate it must make themselves very ridiculous. A false taste is acquired, and sensible books appear dull and insipid after those superficial performances, which obtain their full end if they can keep the mind in a continual ferment.

—Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters

The moon rose in cloudless majesty, and a number of stars twinkled near her. The softened landscape inspired tranquility, while the strain of rustic melody gave a pleasing melancholy to the whole, and made the tear start, whose source could scarcely be traced. The pleasure the sight of harmless mirth gave rise to in Mrs. Mason’s bosom roused every tender feeling, and set in motion her spirits. She laughed with the poor whom she had made happy, and wept when she recollected her own sorrows; the illusions of youth—the gay expectations that had formerly clipped the wings of time.

—Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories

At first glance, no two texts could seem more dissimilar: genre, style, and imagined audience suggest two very different textual traditions, and the pronounced didactic tone of the first excerpt starkly contrasts the Wordsworthian portrayal of “low and rustic” life in the second. The arguments that seem to posit “human passions” and “sensible books” as mutually exclusive categories would suggest that the lyrical prose, like other “wrong accounts,” might promote “false taste” as well. Reading on, however, we find that the first text is addressing the “subject[s]” of novelists—the “gallantry” that “will often cooperate to make his fair admirers insignificant” (TED 20), whereas the romantic fiction transitions into an equally moralizing strain, as Mrs. Mason judiciously offers her religious sentiments to her two charges, who have been enjoying this “rustic melody” as well: “I have been very unfortunate, my young friends; but my griefs are now of a placid kind. … early attachments have been broken; beams of prosperity, nor even those of benevolence, can dissipate the gloom; but I am not lost in a thick fog … Beyond the night of death, I hail the dawn of an eternal day!” (OS 422). These obvious distinctions—between the “judicious” instruction and moralizing of “sensible books” on the one hand and the affective yet imitative quality of “superficial performances” on the other—were a central and ongoing undercurrent of Wollstonecraft’s literary and cultural critique that prompted her to experiment throughout her career with genre and discursive forms, striving to compose texts that neither “cop[ied] the originals of great masters” nor conformed to the “beaten track” or “prescribed rules of art” (advertisement to Mary 5). Yet, as these examples demonstrate, her own work poses particular challenges to those attempting to make similar distinctions based on modern expectations of literary production, between education and entertainment, for example, or in eighteenth-century terms, instruction and delight. Her adept approach to genre crossover and adaptation is, as I will discuss here and in subsequent chapters, a major distinguishing feature of Wollstonecraft’s career, and also calls attention to the one aspect of her work that—from genre to genre, literary lady to radical philosophe—maintained a consistent and formative role: As she writes to her sister Everina on the cusp of her transition into the fast-paced life of London literati, “I live only to be useful—benevolence must fill every void in my heart” (141). Though she was not always as successful in her endeavors as her assertion suggests (and sisters were alternatively supported and snubbed), the desire to be useful, whether in terms of making groundbreaking arguments, intervening in matters of significant political debate, offering advice about children’s education, or exposing the factitious gallantry of the “reveries of … stupid novelists” (ROW 192), constituted a primary impetus for all of her writing. As she later writes to Godwin in consequence of a critical “remark” about her writing style, “In short, I must reckon on doing some good, and getting the money I want, by my writings, or go to sleep for ever” (CL 358). This rhetorical and pragmatic sense of purpose, or of “doing good” through work she will be compensated for, has contributed to a devaluation of Wollstonecraft’s instructional literature that, in launching her career, was most instrumental in allowing her to “exert my understanding to procure an independence, and render myself useful” (CL 159). However, as her riposte to Godwin suggests, Wollstonecraft also saw in this utilitarian conception of purpose the foundation for her more philosophical Kantian sense of “purposiveness” (Mallinick 8): “I am compelled to think that there is something in my writings more valuable … I mean more mind—denominate it as you will—more of the observations of my own senses, more of the combining of my own imagination—the effusions of my own feelings and passions than the cold workings of the brain on the materials procured by the senses and imagination of other writers” (358). Thus, even an advice book with obvious profit motive like Thoughts on the Education of Daughters might be recognized as “valuable” in its sublime portrayal of female rationality and agency, the purposiveness of which is also embodied in the thinking, feeling “human passions” of the paragon of feminine virtue, Mrs. Mason.

As (post)modern readers of Wollstonecraft’s work, we too assign value to works based on their “purpose” or categorization along the continuum of literary and academic production, and texts devoted to instruction—textbooks, advice manuals, religious guides—do not carry the same edifying clout as they did in the late eighteenth century. Wollstonecraft’s advice on “reading” as “the most rational employment” from Thoughts on the Education of Daughters closely resembles the homiletics of one of those “modern publications on the female character and education” that Wollstonecraft herself takes to task in Chapter 5 of the second Vindication. And, texts represented as “reflections” on “judicious” subjects, or that “endeavor to point out some important things” for the purposes of “proving useful” (Preface to TED) would most likely fall under the “self-help” designation of contemporary publications, which may often top the bestsellers lists but don’t carry the same cultural and academic prestige as a weighty philosophical or political argument. Hence, modern assumptions about genre and what counts as “real” work in academic departments, even after postmodern theory’s gradual re-formation of the traditional canons of literature over the last half-century, have fostered what I refer to in the Introduction as a Godwinian analysis of Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre—one that posits her literary achievement within a narrative of intellectual development, featuring A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as the apex of her career as a political reformist and, most often, A Short Residence as her most mature and complex aesthetic contribution. Although this (now commonplace) narrative is well established and clearly documented in both biographical evidence of her own self-education and growth as a writer and extensive analyses of her works within their social and political contexts, such a reading disallows the possibility of examining how that development is simultaneously defined by and redefines her notion of pedagogical practice, which—given renewed interest in the complex and troubled relationship between pedagogy and power—warrants a closer reading. And, a more sustained analysis of Wollstonecraft’s instructional literature within the didactic and religious traditions that shaped it can help us to better understand the “revolution in female manners” she calls for in Vindication, both in terms of that all-important arena of late eighteenth-century self-improvement and our own contemporary pedagogical theories and practices.

Recently, scholars such as Alan Richardson, Vivien Jones, and Norma Clarke have been reading against this narrative of intellectual development, and Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and Original Stories have received more critical attention from both social historians examining the many debates about education in late eighteenth-century England and feminist critics exploring the ways in which advice literature shaped the bourgeois ideology of domestic womanhood (Jones, “Seductions” 110–12). Late-twentieth-century analyses of Wollstonecraft’s instructional texts through the lens of children’s literary traditions, inspired by the groundbreaking work of Mitzi Myers, have offered new and interesting ways of thinking about Original Stories as paradigmatic within the Georgian tradition of “mother-teachers” who “show how girls should be educated in a new mode of female heroism—in rationality, self-command, and moral autonomy” (“Mothers” 34). Building on and adapting these excellent studies, this book seeks to re-affirm and recontextualize Wollstonecraft’s corpus of instructional literature, to read these texts, in Wollstonecraft’s terms, as “more valuable” than derivative hack work, and as illuminating guidebooks for how Wollstonecraft understood what we now refer to as her “feminism” as a set of practices for the development of critical literacy, self-reflexive action, and female-centered pedagogies. In conjunction with this analysis, I will examine the second Vindication and her two novels within and through the discourse of pedagogy in order to demonstrate how different didactic traditions both shaped—and help us to better understand—her commitment to social awareness and reform. This study will begin with analyses of how Wollstonecraft’s first two contributions to the bourgeoning market for “improving books” enact significant feminist practices that underwrite her entire corpus: revision, critical reading, and female-centered pedagogy.

THOUGHTS ON THE RE-EDUCATION OF DAUGHTERS

In a letter to Joseph Johnson in late 1786, as she was getting acclimated (with “extreme regret”) to her new servitude as governess to the Kingsborough family after the financial collapse of her Newington Green school, Wollstonecraft writes,

“I should be much obliged to you, if you would inform me directly, if Mrs. Barbauld, or Mr. Hewlett, have actually carried their plans [to start a school] into execution—and I should be very glad if you would, as soon as convenient, send me a dozen or Mr. Hewlett’s spelling-books, for Lady K., His Sermons, and Charlotte Smith’s poems, and a few copies of my little book, if it is published” (CL 95–96).

Wollstonecraft explains that her request is part of a larger conversation about the education of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s son, whose “temper is violent and his mind not cultivated” (CL 95). His mother wishes to establish a “method … for his education” that avoids the vice and folly of public schools while ensuring that “sentiments of religion should be fixed in his mind” (CL 95). Though bemoaning her “state of dependance” (CL 96) and remarking previously (in a letter to her sister, Everina) that “much more is expected from me than I am equal to” (CL 85), her reference to her own “little book” in the context of this all-too-familiar, and profoundly important, discussion about the education of an uncultivated and idle aristocratic son signals Wollstonecraft’s newfound sense of authority and agency within her professional milieu. And, her request for her Thoughts (which would be published early the next year) along with titles like Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (the 4th “corrected” edition out in 1786) and Hewlett’s Sermons on Different Subjects (J. Johnson, 1786) demonstrates the extent to which her identity as a writer, and, as a writer in that ever-expanding yet controversial realm of instruction for the young associated with the highly respected poet and essayist Anna Barbauld, both expands her sphere of influence within the Kingsborough household and affirms her sense, in Myers’ terms, of “rationality, self-command, and moral autonomy.” Later, she sends a copy of the “promised little book” to one of her acquaintances in Dublin, and chidingly reminds her sister Eliza that “I hope you have not forgot that I am an Author” (CL 103, 129). Her first publication was perhaps a “little book” indeed, but certainly one that Wollstonecraft recognized as effectively establishing her newfound authorial identity in conjunction with her thoughts on the education of daughters.

Though frequently characterized as a “conventional conduct book” in the typical advice-to-daughters mode, most recently by Kathryn Sutherland in an otherwise illuminating article on “Writings on Education and Conduct: Arguments for Female Improvement,”¹ Wollstonecraft’s “little book” pioneers a set of feminist practices that will enable this onetime schoolteacher turned professional author to later make a persuasive case for the rights of woman. The proto-feminist arguments featured in Thoughts, such as the section devoted to the “unfortunate situation” of “fashionably educated” women who must subsist, as she does, in the “very humiliating” occupations of the “humble companion,” the schoolteacher, and the “governess to young ladies,” have been effectively explored (see Richardson, Jones, Myers) as gestures toward later arguments about women’s professional and civic roles in Rights of Woman. The more compelling feminist approach foregrounded in the text involves its appropriation and redefinition of the discursive codes that perpetuate female docility and submission to the conduct book mode. Refusing the seductive (to borrow Jones’ term) strategy of direct address from the parent/mentor figure to receptive daughter, Wollstonecraft rewrites conduct as a series of “grave” reflections that simultaneously call attention to the problematic nature of Gregory, for example, writing his “genuine sentiments” to the readerly daughter and offer an alternative discursive space through which she might “almost run into a sermon” about remote metaphysical subjects of much greater import than “the theatre” (TED 35, 46). It is the use of direct address, what I will refer to hereafter as the rhetoric of paternal solicitude that she singles out for special rebuke in Rights of Woman’s critique of Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1766). Though written as a series of sermons, Fordyce’s advice frequently lapses into “lullaby strains of condescending endearment,” as Wollstonecraft avers, in which he “address[es] the British fair, the fairest of the fair,” contributing to the stock of “loverlike phrases of pumped up passion” “interspersed” throughout the work (ROW 100–1). Her later acknowledgment of the invidious function of direct address to “endear” young women to advice that “enervate[s] the understanding” (ROW 103) is anticipated in the practice of her advice book, which prevents the possibility for women to tacitly assume the daughter’s role as passive consumer of authoritative “sentiments.” In a gesture that subdues “yielding softness and gentle compliance” (ROW 102) in a manner comparable to Jemima’s entrance during the Darnford-Maria love scene in the unfinished Maria,² the educative voice of Thoughts, characterized in the Preface as both potentially “grave” and “insipid,” jars the readerly daughter out of the submissive posture of compliance and into the active role of assessing the text’s “usefulness.” Completely sidestepping the parental solicitude that suggests, as Sarah Pennington does in her widely circulating An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to Her Absent Daughters (1761), that the author is an “affectionate mother” figure, “anxious for your welfare, and desirous of giving you some advice with regard to your conduct in life” (60), the pedagogic persona of Thoughts situates herself as a critical reader of “treatises [that] have been already written” who has assessed what “still remained to be said” (5). By establishing this stance in the Preface, Thoughts models both an active resistance to the pedagogy of submission and suggests that women are capable of making general observations and synthesizing them based on an entire corpus of extant “advice to daughters.” In this sense, Thoughts’ educative voice enacts the kind of reasoned reflection that daughters should be developing as critical readers, and the active, engaged reading posture of a cultivated mind.³

Thoughts’ modeling of critical feminist practice is reinforced by the “reflections on female conduct, in the more important duties of life” that follow, which quite frequently resound more so with the moral and philosophical authority of John Locke’s educational precepts in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) or Dissenting educator and writer James Burgh’s Thoughts on Education (1747) than the sentimental “world full of deceit and falsehood” (Pennington 60) conduct book discourse that gestures toward what Hoeveler has identified as “victim” or “gothic feminism” (220–21).⁴ Both Jones and Richardson have commented on the influence of Lockean philosophy in Thoughts (Jones, “Literature of Advice” 26–27, 125) and Jones first called attention to the text’s indebtedness to Burgh and the discourses associated with Rational Dissent (“Literature of Advice” 125–26). While Wollstonecraft’s adaptations of Lockean and Dissenting educational theory testify to the range of her reading of “judicious books,” her indebtedness to and participation in the Lockean tradition of writing for children/young adults, and also function to underwrite Thoughts in “the language of spiritual aspiration, self-discipline, and equality” (Jones, “Literature of Advice” 126), her revisions exceed these markers of intellectual aptitude and philosophical influence. Gary Kelly first and effectively noted that “[t]he language, style and form of Thoughts aim to show the kind of ‘mind’ that it calls for women to acquire … that rare being: a woman professional, independent of domesticity” (Revolutionary 34). As an adaptation of conduct book conventions, however, Thoughts enacts an appropriation and recodifying of appropriate discourse for women that opens up possibilities for self re-invention and critical thought. It does so through careful revision of staple conduct book topics like “Love,” “Accomplishments,” “Matrimony,” “Card Playing,” and “The Theatre” which, in the direct address mode, take on a significantly limited range that reflects, in Jones’ terms, women’s “gendered, rather than their shared human, identity” (“Literature of Advice” 137). In the context of the reflective Thoughts, discourses that conventionally function to construct the implied “you” as dutiful daughter are expanded and diversified to descant more philosophically and collectively on “the marriage state” or what “children” rather than “you” “should be permitted to” do, (9–10) or “how many people”—not “you dear girls”—“ … are careful only about appearances” or how “few peopl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Mary Wollstonecraft, Pedagogy, and the Practice of Feminism
• 1 Original Stories and Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: Revising the Rules of Conduct
• 2 Re-educating The Female Reader
• 3 Maternal Solicitude, Misogyny, and Mincing No Words in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• 4 Rationalizing Domesticity through Letters and Early Lessons
• 5 Mary and Maria: Women without Teachers
• 6 A Troubling Legacy: Wollstonecraft’s Female-Centered Pedagogy and the Sacrifice of Irrational Womanhood
• Conclusions: Educating Eliza and Wollstonecraftian Pedagogy in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• References
• Index