Mary Wollstonecraft's Notion of Progress of Nation and Women

2013 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 23520278
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Literature in English
• Research Institution: Tohoku University
• Principal Investigator: ISHIHATA Naoki 東北大学, 国際文化研究科, 教授 (30125497)
• Project Period (FY): 2011 – 2013
• Keywords: ウルストンクラフト / 進歩 / 国家 / 女性

Research Abstract

When we turn to Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden as an reflection of her former literary works, mainly of The Rights of Woman, it appears that her self-emphasis in the former is caused by an urge to discover and recover her authentic self and to express it fully and creatively, which we might call the embryotic Romantic subjectivity. Then the comparison of these two is likely to lead us to go through Wollstoncraft's transition or evolution from the education of woman to the self-education, from the vindication of woman to the vindication of herself, and finally from reason to imagination. Wollstonecraft's self, thus divided between reason and imagination, attained both the inward and outward to absorb everything into itself and to dissolve itself into everything, which is the bliss of her solitary self-education through journeying far away from home. Her individual mind grows by revealing and attempting to fix its own contradictory characteristics.