2006 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Mary Wollstonecraft Represented in English Novels of the Romantic Period
| Project/Area Number |
15520193
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
ヨーロッパ語系文学
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| Research Institution | Tohoku University |
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Principal Investigator |
SUZUKI Mitsuko Tohoku University, Graduate School, Professor, 大学院・国際文化研究科, 教授 (60073318)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2003 – 2006
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| Keywords | Mary Wollstonecraft / Jean-Jacques Rousseau / William Godwin / Jacobin Novels / English Novels of the Romantic Period / Wrongs of Woman / Edmund Burke / A Vindication of the Rights of Woman |
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| Research Abstract |
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), who is a dauntless advocate of political reform and a champion of the women's rights, argued in favour of the political, economic, and social equality of women in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a work--revolutionary for its time. After her death, William Godwin, her husband published Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights 6f Woman (1798, hereafter Memoirs) which depicted fruitless passion for Fuseli, her sexual appetite, her affair with and pregnancy by Imlay, followed by her abandonment and two attempts at suicide. Anti-Jacobins seized evidence of what they saw to be a scandalous and' immoral life. Memoirs provided English novelists in the late 1790s and the early 1800s with the materials for their novels and with the site of the war of ideas. Thus, the novels in this period were shot through with explicit references and allusions to her works such as The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1797) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as well as to herself and her conduct. In order to pursue my research, I ordered the books which were out of print, for example, Isaac D'Israeri's Vaurien (1797), Sophia King's Wardorf (1798), George Walker's The Vagabond (1799), Charles Lucus's Infernal Quixote (1800), and E.S. Barrett's The Heroine (1813) from the British Library in the form of microfish. I illustrated first how above-mentioned novelists reacted to Mary Wollstonecrat, and then I proved that her works provided the novels in the Romantic Age with the underlying structures, themes, situations, and catch-words. And I also suggested that novels in the late 1790s and early 1800s were characteristically linked by what might broadly be termed 'an intertextual relationship' mediated through Mary Wollstonecraft.
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