{"id":1345,"date":"2016-09-07T17:53:48","date_gmt":"2016-09-07T17:53:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1345"},"modified":"2016-09-08T11:46:48","modified_gmt":"2016-09-08T11:46:48","slug":"1345","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1345","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: Andrew McInnes on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Ghost"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Andrew<\/a><\/p>\n

Andrew McInnes is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Edge Hill University<\/a>.\u00a0 His work focuses on Romantic-period women’s writing across a wide range of modes and genres; he has published articles and book chapters on authors including Amelia Opie, Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Dacre and Jane Austen.\u00a0 At the centre of his research, though, is Mary Wollstonecraft, who takes a starring role in his first monograph, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period<\/a><\/em>, which was recently published by Routledge and which we discuss below.<\/p>\n

1) How did you first become interested in the figure of the female philosopher?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I first became interested in the figure of the female philosopher whilst researching Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft\u2019s friend and sometime prot\u00e9g\u00e9e, who received both praise and censure as a female philosopher, especially after the publication of her radical novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney<\/em> (1796).\u00a0 Hays drew on Wollstonecraft\u2019s example throughout her writing career, developing her own philosophy about the importance of balancing reason and passion by synthesizing aspects of Wollstonecraft\u2019s feminism with William Godwin\u2019s political philosophy in her own idiosyncratic manner.\u00a0 Reviews of Hays\u2019 work positioned her as a female philosopher in the mould of Wollstonecraft.\u00a0 Wollstonecraft herself sends Hays a teasing note after the publication of Emma Courtney<\/em>, warning her that she has been \u2018stygmatized<\/em> as a Philosophess \u2013 a Godwinian\u2019 by the Barbaulds.\u00a0 I became really interested in both women\u2019s wariness about the term \u2013 that emphasis on stigma \u2013 when critics at the time and after have been happy to label them \u2018female philosophers\u2019.<\/p>\n

2) To what extent do you see the female philosopher in the Romantic period as being synonymous with Mary Wollstonecraft, and to what extent is she ‘always already partly figurative’, as you contend in your introduction?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mary Wollstonecraft is celebrated today as the<\/em> female philosopher of the Romantic period, but I\u2019m convinced that she refused to use the term in relation to herself throughout her writing career.\u00a0 In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman<\/em>, for example, she prefers the gender neutral \u2018philosopher\u2019 and sympathetic reviewers like William Enfield followed her lead by avoiding the term.\u00a0 After her death, counter-revolutionary writers, led by the Anti-Jacobin Review<\/em>, positively delighted in labelling her as a female philosopher and in attacking the term and through it, Wollstonecraft\u2019s life and writing.\u00a0 Women writers seeking to engage with Wollstonecraft\u2019s work had to disentangle her from the figure of the female philosopher, treated as an oxymoron in the conservative press.<\/p>\n

Throughout the eighteenth century, the term \u2018female philosopher\u2019 shifts from referring to real women such as Elizabeths Carter and Montagu, and others in the Bluestocking circle, to representing an avatar of thinking womanhood, embodying Enlightenment ideals of the progress of civilization.\u00a0 Shadowing this celebratory version of the figure is a negative vision of the female philosopher, representing male anxieties about domineering, highly sexed, politically and religiously heterodox women.\u00a0 By the 1790s, this divided figure \u2013 both Enlightenment avatar and reactionary nightmare \u2013 splits further in revolutionary and counter-revolutionary discourse, with Anti-Jacobin writers adopting the figure as a term of abuse, explaining Hays and Wollstonecraft\u2019s hesitancy in using the term in relation to themselves.\u00a0 So, \u2018female philosopher\u2019 is used to refer to real women but, at the same time, accrues a set of mostly literary conventions associated with reason, reading, political engagement, and sexuality.\u00a0 As a literary critic, I am fascinated by how the female philosopher as literary archetype gets used by women writers before and after Wollstonecraft\u2019s death in order to think about the thinking woman.<\/p>\n

3) What do you see as being the main gender-specific lines of attack directed at female philosophers in the period?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Counter-revolutionary reviewers of works by Hays, Wollstonecraft, and others poured scorn on the term \u2018female philosopher\u2019 itself, questioning the ability of women to think philosophically (or, sometimes, at all) and representing female philosophy as rote-learned pedantry.\u00a0 These attacks mask gender-specific anxieties about women engaging in political debate, which was increasingly viewed as stepping outside of their private, domestic sphere, and female sexuality.\u00a0 In my introduction, I engage with J\u00fcrgen Habermas\u2019 work on the eighteenth-century public sphere (split between literary and political aspects but imagined as one and indivisible) to argue that women were able to access the literary side of the public sphere, especially by writing novels, but when their work started to encroach on political discourse they triggered anxieties in male readers and reviewers.\u00a0 In France, female philosophers were linked to the philosopher whore in French pornography \u2013 which you can see reflected in the Anti-Jacobin Review<\/em>\u2019s notorious decision to index Wollstonecraft under Prostitute in their first volume.\u00a0 Wollstonecraft also leads Rev. Richard Polwhele\u2019s crew of \u2018unsex\u2019d females\u2019 in his similarly infamous poem, viewing Wollstonecraft, Hays, and others as both disconcertingly unfeminine and dangerously sexy.<\/p>\n

4) How do you see attitudes to female thinkers changing over the chronological span that separates the 1790s texts that you examine in your first chapter and the novels of the 1820s and 1830s that you consider in your fourth?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the 1790s, attitudes to female thinkers shift from an initially celebratory tone, linking female philosophy to the ideals of the French Revolution, to an increasingly angry discourse, denouncing female philosophers along with French revolutionaries as threatening to the fabric of British society.\u00a0 In the early nineteenth century, women writers seeking to celebrate female thinkers have to disentangle counter-revolutionary representations of female philosophers as dubious, dangerous, and dogmatic from the positive aspects they wish to recuperate for their post-revolutionary moment.\u00a0 In the 1800s and 1810s, this often involved including a character explicitly labelled a female philosopher who tends to meet a sticky end: seduced by malevolent French philosophers, unmarried, pregnant, suicidal, or otherwise mortally sick.\u00a0 Other female characters in their novels could then take on some of the positive elements of female philosophy, whilst avoiding the opprobrium ostentatiously piled on the erring and often dying woman.\u00a0 By the 1820s and 30s, some of the radical sting of the female philosopher had worn off, and elements of the figure find their way into representations of the female artist.\u00a0 My fourth chapter analyses the work of Wollstonecraft\u2019s daughter, Mary Shelley, in relation to several popular genres of the time: the Gothic, the historical novel, and silver fork fiction.\u00a0 Shelley manages to work tropes relating to the female philosopher into Frankenstein<\/em> and her later novels Valperga<\/em>, Perkin Warbeck<\/em>, and Lodore<\/em>, exploring the figures continuing relevance reshaped across several genres.\u00a0 So, by casting the female philosopher back into history in her historical novels, Shelley provides a genealogy for the figure, previous to eighteenth-century and revolutionary debates about her abilities, imagining a historic lineage of female philosophers from Renaissance Italy to her present day.<\/p>\n

5) What new work are you planning on moving forward with now that the book’s complete?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m currently working on two distinct but related research projects, both more or less Gothic.\u00a0 They sometimes feel quite unrelated to Wollstonecraft\u2019s Ghost<\/em>, but then I think my choice of title for the book is appropriately spooky.\u00a0 My first project explores Jane Austen\u2019s continuing interest in the Gothic, beyond Northanger Abbey<\/em>, arguing that Austen continues to make use of Gothic tropes and situations but positions them at a geographic distance from the central concerns of her plots.\u00a0 I\u2019ve recently published an article in Gothic Studies<\/em> on Emma<\/em> as a Radcliffean Gothic novel in disguise<\/a> and have another forthcoming in Romantic Textualities<\/em> on how Ireland functions as a Gothic space in the novel.\u00a0 My second project analyses twentieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations of Frankenstein<\/em> in children\u2019s literature and Young Adult fiction, arguing that modern authors use Shelley\u2019s novel to explore the monstrosity inherent in adolescence (and adolescents).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew McInnes is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Edge Hill University.\u00a0 His work focuses on Romantic-period women’s writing across a wide range of modes and genres; he has… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1345"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1345"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1349,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1345\/revisions\/1349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}