Themes
At the end of the Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft promised her readers a second part to the work. Rather than giving them another philosophical treatise, however, she offered them a novel tinged with autobiography, appropriately titled The Wrongs of Woman. In her "Preface", she writes that the novel should be considered the story of "woman" and not the story of an "individual". Wollstonecraft attempts to detail, as the scholar Anne K. Mellor has phrased it, "the wrongs done to women and the wrongs done by women" (emphasis Mellor's). The wrongs done to women include stifling and sexually repressed marriages, which Wollstonecraft describes using the language of slavery, while the wrongs done by women include a false sense of self-worth generated through the language of sensibility. Unlike Wollstonecraft's first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788), The Wrongs of Woman offers solutions to these problems, namely an empowering female sexuality, a purpose-filled maternal role, and the possibility of a feminism that crosses class boundaries.
Read more about this topic: Maria: Or, The Wrongs Of Woman
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)