Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
Encyclopedia
1796 in literature
-Events:*Samuel Taylor Coleridge publishes his periodical The Watchman*Samuel Ireland publishes a collection of Shakespearean forgeries in his Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments Under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare. Amid a growing controversy, Edmond Malone exposes the forgeries...
) is a personal travel narrative
Travel literature
Travel literature is travel writing of literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or...
by the eighteenth-century British feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...
. The twenty-five letters cover a wide range of topics, from sociological reflections on Scandinavia
Scandinavia
Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...
and its peoples to philosophical questions regarding identity. Published by Wollstonecraft's career-long publisher, Joseph Johnson
Joseph Johnson (publisher)
Joseph Johnson was an influential 18th-century London bookseller and publisher. His publications covered a wide variety of genres and a broad spectrum of opinions on important issues...
, it was the last work issued during her lifetime.
Wollstonecraft undertook her tour of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in order to retrieve a stolen treasure ship for her lover, Gilbert Imlay
Gilbert Imlay
Gilbert Imlay was an American businessman, author, and diplomat. Imlay was known in his day as a shrewd but unscrupulous businessman involved in land speculation in Kentucky. He later served in the U.S...
. Believing that the journey would restore their strained relationship, she eagerly set off. However, over the course of the three months she spent in Scandinavia, she realized that Imlay had no intention of renewing the relationship. The letters, which constitute the text, drawn from her journal and from missives she sent to Imlay, reflect her anger and melancholy over his repeated betrayals. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is therefore both a travel narrative and an autobiographical memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
.
Using the rhetoric of the sublime
Sublime (philosophy)
In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic...
, Wollstonecraft explores the relationship between self and society in the text. She values subjective experience, particularly in relation to nature; champions the liberation and education of women; and illustrates the detrimental effects of commerce on society.
Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark was Wollstonecraft's most popular book in the 1790s—it sold well and was reviewed favorably by most critics. Wollstonecraft's future husband, philosopher William Godwin
William Godwin
William Godwin was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and the first modern proponent of anarchism...
, wrote: "If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book." It influenced Romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
poets such as William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
, who drew on its themes and its aesthetic. While the book initially inspired readers to travel to Scandinavia, it failed to retain its popularity after the publication of Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is William Godwin's biography of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ....
in 1798, which revealed Wollstonecraft's unorthodox private life.
Biographical background
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France is a political pamphlet, written by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, which attacks aristocracy and advocates republicanism...
, a work that helped propel the British pamphlet war over the French revolution
Revolution Controversy
The Revolution Controversy was a British debate over the French Revolution, lasting from 1789 through 1795. A pamphlet war began in earnest after the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France , which surprisingly supported the French aristocracy...
. Two years later she published what has become her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects , written by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the 18th...
. Anxious to see the revolution firsthand, she moved to France for about two years, but returned in 1795 after revolutionary violence increased and the lover she met there, American adventurer Gilbert Imlay
Gilbert Imlay
Gilbert Imlay was an American businessman, author, and diplomat. Imlay was known in his day as a shrewd but unscrupulous businessman involved in land speculation in Kentucky. He later served in the U.S...
, abandoned her and their illegitimate daughter, Fanny Imlay
Fanny Imlay
Frances "Fanny" Imlay , also known as Fanny Godwin, was the illegitimate daughter of the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the American commercial speculator Gilbert Imlay.Although Mary Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay lived together happily for brief periods before and after the birth...
. Shortly after her return to Britain, Wollstonecraft attempted suicide in May; Imlay, however, managed to save her.
One month after her attempted suicide, Wollstonecraft agreed to undertake the long and treacherous journey to Scandinavia in order to resolve Imlay's business difficulties. Not only was her journey to Scandinavia fraught with peril (she was a woman travelling alone during a time of war
French Revolutionary Wars
The French Revolutionary Wars were a series of major conflicts, from 1792 until 1802, fought between the French Revolutionary government and several European states...
), it was also laced with sorrow and anger. While Wollstonecraft initially believed that the trip might resurrect their relationship, she eventually recognized that it was doomed, particularly after Imlay failed to meet her in Hamburg
Hamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
. Wollstonecraft's despair increased as her journey progressed.
On her return to Britain in September, Wollstonecraft tried to commit suicide a second time: she attempted to drown herself in the River Thames
River Thames
The River Thames flows through southern England. It is the longest river entirely in England and the second longest in the United Kingdom. While it is best known because its lower reaches flow through central London, the river flows alongside several other towns and cities, including Oxford,...
but was rescued by passersby. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, which draws its material from her journal and the letters she sent Imlay during the three-month tour, was published in by Wollstonecraft's close friend and career-long publisher, Joseph Johnson
Joseph Johnson (publisher)
Joseph Johnson was an influential 18th-century London bookseller and publisher. His publications covered a wide variety of genres and a broad spectrum of opinions on important issues...
. Written after her two suicide attempts, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark frequently returns to the topic of death; it recreates Wollstonecraft's mental state while she was in Scandinavia and has been described as a suicide note addressed to Imlay, although he is never referred to by name in the published text. It is the last work by Wollstonecraft published within her lifetime: she died in childbirth just one year later.
Scandinavian journey and Imlay's business interests
Although Wollstonecraft appears as only a tourist in Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, during her travels she was actually conducting delicate business negotiations on behalf of Imlay. For almost two hundred years, it was unclear why she had travelled to Scandinavia, but in the 1980s historian Per NyströmPer Nyström
Per Nyström , Swedish historian, publicist, Social Democrat and governor of the counties of Bohuslän and Gothenburg....
uncovered documents in local Swedish and Norwegian archives that shed light on the purpose of her trip. He revealed that Wollstonecraft was searching for a ship and cargo that had been stolen from Imlay. Imlay had authorized her to conduct his business dealings, referring to her in legal documents as "Mrs. Mary Imlay, my best friend and wife", although the two were not married.
Pro forma
The term pro forma is a term applied to practices or documents that are done as a pure formality, perfunctory, or seek to satisfy the minimum requirements or to conform to a convention or doctrine...
sale on behalf of Imlay. He renamed the ship the Maria and Margaretha (presumably after Mary and her maid Marguerite) and had the Danish Consulate in Le Havre certify it so that the ship could pass through the British blockade of France
French Revolutionary Wars
The French Revolutionary Wars were a series of major conflicts, from 1792 until 1802, fought between the French Revolutionary government and several European states...
(Imlay was a blockade runner
Blockade runner
A blockade runner is usually a lighter weight ship used for evading a naval blockade of a port or strait, as opposed to confronting the blockaders to break the blockade. Very often blockade running is done in order to transport cargo, for example to bring food or arms to a blockaded city...
). Carrying silver and gold Bourbon plate, the ship sailed from France under a Danish flag and arrived at Copenhagen
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
on 1794. Although Ellefsen supposedly ordered the ship to continue on to Gothenburg
Gothenburg
Gothenburg is the second-largest city in Sweden and the fifth-largest in the Nordic countries. Situated on the west coast of Sweden, the city proper has a population of 519,399, with 549,839 in the urban area and total of 937,015 inhabitants in the metropolitan area...
, it never reached its destination. Imlay engaged in several fruitless attempts to locate the ship and its valuable cargo and then dispatched Wollstonecraft to negotiate an agreement with Ellefsen, who had subsequently been arrested for stealing the ship and its contents. Wollstonecraft's success or failure in the negotiations is unknown as is the ultimate fate of the ship and its treasure.
To engage in these negotiations, Wollstonecraft travelled first to Gothenburg, where she remained for two weeks. Leaving Fanny and her nurse Marguerite behind, she embarked for Strömstad
Strömstad
Strömstad is a locality and the seat of Strömstad Municipality, Västra Götaland County, Sweden with 6,110 inhabitants in 2005.Strömstad is, despite its small population, for historical reasons normally still referred to as a city.- History :...
, Sweden, where she took a short detour to visit the fortress of Fredriksten
Fredriksten
-History:This Fortresses was constructed ny Denmark-Norway in the 17th century as a replacement for the border fortress at Bohus, which had been lost when the province of Bohuslän was ceded to Sweden by the terms of the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658...
, and then proceeded to Larvik
Larvik
is a city and municipality in Vestfold county, Norway. The administrative centre of the municipality is the city of Larvik. Larvik kommune - has about 41 364 inhabitants and covers 530 km2....
, Norway. From there she travelled to Tønsberg
Tønsberg
is a city and municipality in Vestfold county, southern Norway, located around north-east of Sandefjord. The administrative centre of the municipality is the city of Tønsberg....
, Norway, where she spent three weeks. She also visited Helgeroa
Helgeroa
Helgeroa is a village in Larvik municipality, Norway. Before 1988 it was a part of Brunlanes municipality.Helgeroa has grown together with the adjacent village Nevlunghavn. The two villages have a combined population of 1,573.-References:...
, Risør
Risør
is a city and municipality in Aust-Agder county, Norway. The city belongs to the traditional region of Sørlandet. It is a popular tourist place. The surrounding area includes many small lakes and hills, and is known for its beautiful coastline as well....
, and Kristiania
Oslo
Oslo is a municipality, as well as the capital and most populous city in Norway. As a municipality , it was established on 1 January 1838. Founded around 1048 by King Harald III of Norway, the city was largely destroyed by fire in 1624. The city was moved under the reign of Denmark–Norway's King...
(now Oslo) and returned by way of Strömstad and Gothenburg, where she picked up Fanny and Marguerite again. She returned to England by way of Copenhagen and Hamburg, finally landing at Dover
Dover
Dover is a town and major ferry port in the home county of Kent, in South East England. It faces France across the narrowest part of the English Channel, and lies south-east of Canterbury; east of Kent's administrative capital Maidstone; and north-east along the coastline from Dungeness and Hastings...
in September 1795, three months after she had left her home country.
Structure, genre, and style
Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark consists of twenty-five letters that address an extensive range of contentious political topics, such as prison reform, land rights, and divorce laws, as well as less controversial subjects, such as gardening, salt worksHistory of salt
Salt's ability to preserve food was a foundation of civilization. It eliminated the dependence on the seasonal availability of food and it allowed travel over long distances. However, salt was difficult to obtain, and so it was a highly valued trade item...
, and sublime
Sublime (philosophy)
In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic...
vistas. Wollstonecraft's political commentary extends the ideas she had presented in An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794); her discussion of prison reform, for example, is informed by her own experiences in revolutionary France
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
and those of her friends, many of whom were jailed.
While at first glance Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark appears to be a travel narrative
Travel literature
Travel literature is travel writing of literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or...
, it is actually a "generic hybrid". The nature of this hybridity, however, is not altogether agreed upon by scholars. Some emphasize Wollstonecraft's fusion of the travelogue with the autobiography
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
or memoir
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
(a word used by Wollstonecraft in the book's advertisement), while others see it as a travelogue cum epistolary novel
Epistolary novel
An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use...
. The text, which reveals Wollstonecraft's thought processes, flows seamlessly from autobiographical reflections to musings on nature to political theories. However, it is unified by two threads: the first is Wollstonecraft's argument regarding the nature and progress of society; the second is her increasing melancholy. Although Wollstonecraft aims to write as a philosopher, the image of the suffering woman dominates the book.
Travel narrative: "the art of thinking"
One-half of the "generic hybridity" of Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is the epistolary travel narrative. Wollstonecraft's conception of this genre was shaped by eighteenth-century empirical and moral travel narratives, particularly Oliver Goldsmith'sOliver Goldsmith
Oliver Goldsmith was an Irish writer, poet and physician known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield , his pastoral poem The Deserted Village , and his plays The Good-Natur'd Man and She Stoops to Conquer...
The Traveller, or a Prospect of Society (1764), Laurence Sterne's
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne was an Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics...
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy is a novel by the Irish-born English author Laurence Sterne, written and first published in 1768, as Sterne was facing death. In 1765, Sterne travelled through France and Italy as far south as Naples, and after returning determined to describe his...
(1768), Samuel Johnson's
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson , often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer...
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland is a travel narrative by Samuel Johnson about an eighty-three day journey through Scotland, in particular the islands of the Hebrides, in the late summer and autumn of 1773...
(1775), James Boswell's
James Boswell
James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland; he is best known for the biography he wrote of one of his contemporaries, the English literary figure Samuel Johnson....
Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. is a travel journal by Scotsman James Boswell first published in 1785. In 1773, Boswell enticed his English friend Samuel Johnson to accompany him on a tour through the highlands and western islands of Scotland. Johnson was then in...
(1785), and Arthur Young's travel books.
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Joseph Johnson (publisher)
Joseph Johnson was an influential 18th-century London bookseller and publisher. His publications covered a wide variety of genres and a broad spectrum of opinions on important issues...
periodical, the Analytical Review
Analytical Review
The Analytical Review was a periodical established in London in 1788 by the publisher Joseph Johnson and the writer Thomas Christie. Part of the Republic of Letters, it was a gadfly publication, which offered readers summaries and analyses of the many new publications issued at the end of the...
, Wollstonecraft was well-versed in the genre. This extensive reading solidified her ideas of what constituted a good travel book; in one review, she maintained that travel writers should have "some decided point in view, a grand object of pursuit to concentrate their thoughts, and connect their reflections" and that their books should not be "detached observations, which no running interest, or prevailing bent in the mind of the writer rounds into a whole". Her reviews praised detailed and engaging descriptions of people and places, musings on history, and an insatiable curiosity in the traveller.
"The art of travel is only a branch of the art of thinking", Wollstonecraft wrote. Her journey and her comments on it are, therefore, not only sentimental but also philosophical. She uses the two modes to continue the critique of the roles afforded women and the progress of civilization that she had outlined in A Vindication of the Rights of Men
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France is a political pamphlet, written by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, which attacks aristocracy and advocates republicanism...
(1790), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects , written by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the 18th...
(1792), and An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution. After overturning the conventions of political and historical writing, Wollstonecraft brought what scholar Gary Kelly calls "Revolutionary feminism" to yet another genre that had typically been considered the purview of male writers, transforming the travel narrative's "blend of objective facts and individual impressions ... into a rationale for autobiographical revelation". As one editor of the Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark writes, the book is "nothing less than a revolution in literary genres"; its sublimity, expressed through scenes of intense feeling, made "a new wildness and richness of emotional rhetoric" desirable in travel literature.
One scholar has called Wollstonecraft the "complete passionate traveler". Her desire to delve into and fully experience each moment in time was fostered by the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
, particularly his Reveries of a Solitary Walker
Reveries of a Solitary Walker
Reveries of a Solitary Walker is an unfinished book by Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, written between 1776 and 1778. It was the last of a number of works composed toward the end of his life which were deeply autobiographical in nature...
(1782). Several of Rousseau's themes appear in the Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, such as "the search for the source of human happiness, the stoic rejection of material goods, the ecstatic embrace of nature, and the essential role of sentiment in understanding". However, while Rousseau ultimately rejects society, Wollstonecraft celebrates both domesticity and industrial progress.
Letter
In one of the most influential interpretations of Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Mary Favret has argued that Wollstonecraft's letters must not only be viewed as personal correspondence but also as business correspondence, a genre that would have been ideologically ambiguous for her. According to Favret, Wollstonecraft attempts to reclaim the impersonal genre of the business letter and imbue it with personal meaning. One way she does this is through extensive use of "imaginative" writing that forces the reader to become a participant in the events narrated.Favret points out that Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is quite different from the despondent and plaintive love letters she actually sent to Imlay; the travel narrative much more closely resembles the personal journal in which she recorded her thoughts regarding the people she encountered and the places she visited. While her letters to Imlay contain long passages focused almost exclusively on herself, the Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark offers social commentary and sympathizes with the victims of disaster and injustice. To Imlay, Wollstonecraft represents herself as laid low by doubts, but to the world she depicts herself as overcoming all of these fears. She ruminates on them and transforms them into the basis of a letter akin to the open political letter popular during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, using her personal experience as the foundation for a discussion of national political reform.
Autobiography
Heavily influenced by Rousseau's frank and revealing Confessions (1782), Wollstonecraft lays bare her soul in Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, detailing not only her physical but also her psychological journey. Her personal disclosures, like those of other female autobiographers, are presented as "unpremeditated self-revelations" and often appear to be "circuitous". However, as Wollstonecraft scholar Mitzi Myers has made clear, Wollstonecraft manages to use this style of writing to articulate a stable and comprehensible self for the reader. Increasingly confident in her ability as a writer, she controls the narrative and its effect on readers to a degree not matched in her other works. She transforms the individual sorrows of her trip, such as the dissolution of her relationship with Imlay, into the stuff of gripping literature.Sublimity
Sublime (philosophy)
In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic...
in Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. She draws on and redefines Edmund Burke's
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke PC was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party....
central terms in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is a 1757 treatise on aesthetics written by Edmund Burke. It attracted the attention of prominent Continental thinkers such as Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant....
(1757). Burke privileges the sublime (which he associates with masculinity, terror, awe, and strength) over the beautiful (which he associates with femininity, passivity, delicacy, and weakness), while Wollstonecraft ties the sublime to sterility and the beautiful to fertility. For her, the beautiful is connected to the maternal; this aesthetic shift is evident, for example, in the many passages focusing on the affectionate tie between Wollstonecraft and little Fanny, her daughter. She thus claims the feminine category of the "beautiful" for the most virtuous and useful of women: mothers.
Wollstonecraft also revises the conventional negative associations between the sublime and death; thoughts of death, prompted by a waterfall, for example, lead her to contemplate rebirth and immortality as well:
Reaching the cascade, or rather cataract, the roaring of which had a long time announced its vicinity, my soul was hurried by the falls into a new train of reflections. The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent from the dark cavities which mocked the exploring eye, produced an equal activity in my mind: my thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery? Still the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited, were pleasurable; and, viewing it, my soul rose, with renewed dignity, above its cares – grasping at immortality – it seemed as impossible to stop the current of my thoughts, as of the always varying, still the same, torrent before me – I stretched out my hand to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come.
Like her other manipulations of the language of the sublime, this passage is also heavily inflected by gender. As one scholar puts it, "because Wollstonecraft is a woman, and is therefore bound by the legal and social restrictions placed on her sex in the eighteenth century, she can only envisage autonomy of any form after death".
Reason, feeling, and imagination
Original Stories from Real Life
Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness is the only complete work of children's literature by 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Original Stories begins with a frame story, which sketches out...
(1788)—but also an understanding of when and how to trust one's emotions.
Wollstonecraft's theories regarding reason, emotion, and the imagination are closely tied together. Some scholars contend that Wollstonecraft uses the imagination to liberate the self, especially the feminine self; it allows her to envision roles for women outside the traditional bounds of eighteenth-century thought and offers her a way to articulate those new ideas. In contrast, others view Wollstonecraft's emphasis on the power of the imagination as detrimental, imprisoning her in an "individualized, bourgeois desire" which can never truly embrace sociality.
Favret has argued that Wollstonecraft uses the imagination to reconcile "masculine understanding" and "female sensibility". Readers must imaginatively "work" while reading: their efforts will save them from descending into sentimentality as well as from being lured into commercial speculation. Even more importantly, readers become invested in the story of the narrator. Wollstonecraft's language demands that they participate in the "plot":
'they' rescue the writer from the villain; 'they' accompany her on her flight from sorrow ... With the readers' cooperation, the writer reverses the standard epistolary plot: here the heroine liberates herself by rejecting her correspondent and by embracing the 'world' outside of the domestic circle.
In giving the imagination the power to reshape society (a power suggested through numerous allusions to Shakespeare's The Tempest
The Tempest
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...
), Wollstonecraft reveals that she has become a Romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
.
Individual and society
Throughout Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Wollstonecraft ponders the relationship between society and the individual. While her earlier works largely focus on society's failings and responsibilities, in this work she turns inward, explicitly arguing for the value of personal experience. In the advertisement for the work, also published as a preface, she explains her role as the "hero" of the text:
In writing these desultory letters, I found I could not avoid being continually the first person – 'the little hero of each tale.' I tried to correct this fault, if it be one, for they were designed for publication; but in proportion as I arranged my thoughts, my letter, I found, became stiff and affected: I, therefore, determined to let my remarks and reflections flow unrestrained, as I perceived that I could not give a just description of what I saw, but by relating the effect different objects had produced on my mind and feelings, whilst the impression was still fresh.
Throughout the book, Wollstonecraft ties her own psychic journey and maturation to the progress of civilizations. Nations, like individuals, she maintains have, as Wollstonecraft scholar Mary Poovey describes it, "a collective 'understanding' that evolves organically, 'ripening' gradually to fruition". However, Wollstonecraft still views civilization's tragedies as worthier of concern than individual or fictional tragedies, suggesting that, for her, sympathy is at the core of social relations:
I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind; — I was alone, till some involuntary sympathetic emotion, like the attraction of adhesion, made me feel that I was still a part of a mighty whole, from which I could not sever myself—not, perhaps, for the reflection has been carried very far, by snapping the thread of an existence which loses its charms in proportion as the cruel experience of life stops or poisons the current of the heart.
Nature
Wollstonecraft dedicates significant portions of Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to descriptions of nature and her emotional responses to it. One of her most effective tactics is to associate a set of thoughts and feelings with a specific natural formation, such as the waterfall passage quoted above. Nature, Wollstonecraft assumes, is "a common reference point" between readers and herself, therefore her letters should generate a sense of social sympathy with them. Many of the letters contain these "miniature Romantic excursus" which illustrate Wollstonecraft's ideas regarding the connections between nature, God, and the self. The natural world becomes "the necessary ground of speculation and the crucial field of experience".Gender: "Hapless woman! what a fate is thine!"
Polemic
A polemic is a variety of arguments or controversies made against one opinion, doctrine, or person. Other variations of argument are debate and discussion...
al books such as Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
Thoughts on the education of daughters: with reflections on female conduct, in the more important duties of life is the first published work of the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Published in 1787 by her friend Joseph Johnson, Thoughts is a conduct book that offers advice on female education...
(1787) or the Rights of Woman, this text emphasizes her emotional reactions to nature and maternity. Yet she does not depart from her interest in promoting women's education and rights. In Letter 19, the most explicitly feminist letter, Wollstonecraft anticipates readers' criticisms: "still harping on the same subject, you will exclaim – How can I avoid it, when most of the struggles of an eventful life have been occasioned by the oppressed state of my sex: we reason deeply, when we forcibly feel." Wollstonecraft comes to the realization that she has always been forced to experience the world as a woman—it is the defining feature of her sense of self.
Throughout Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Wollstonecraft comments on the precarious position women occupy in society. She defends and sympathizes with Queen Caroline of Denmark
Caroline Matilda of Wales
Caroline Matilda of Great Britain was Queen of Denmark and Norway from 1766 to 1772 and a member of the British Royal Family.-Early life:...
, for example, who had been accused of "licentiousness" for her extra-marital affair during her marriage to the insane Christian VII
Christian VII of Denmark
Christian VII was King of Denmark and Norway and Duke of Schleswig and Holstein from 1766 until his death. He was the son of Danish King Frederick V and his first consort Louisa, daughter of King George II of Great Britain....
. (Wollstonecraft herself had had unorthodox love affairs and an illegitimate child.) Wollstonecraft describes this royal, who was also a progressive social reformer, as a woman of courage who tried to revolutionize her country before it was prepared. Such examples fuel Wollstonecraft's increasing despair and melancholy. At one point, she laments the fate of her daughter:
You know that as a female I am particularly attached to her – I feel more than a mother's fondness and anxiety, when I reflect on the dependent and oppressed state of her sex. I dread lest she should be forced to sacrifice her heart to her principles, or principles to her heart. With trembling hand I shall cultivate sensibility, and cherish delicacy of sentiment, lest, whilst I lend fresh blushes to the rose, I sharpen the thorns that will wound the breast I would fain guard – I dread to unfold her mind, lest it should render her unfit for the world she is to inhabit – Hapless woman! what a fate is thine!
Wollstonecraft's anger and frustration over the secondary status afforded women compels her to define herself in antithesis to conventional images of femininity. In the first letter she proudly announces "at supper my host told me bluntly that I was a woman of observation, for I asked him men's questions" (emphasis Wollstonecraft's).
Wollstonecraft casts the female imagination as the productive counterpoint to destructive masculine commerce, a feat she achieves primarily through her use of the genre of the letter. While the Rights of Woman argued that women should be "useful" and "productive", importing the language of the market into the home, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark adopts the values of the domestic space for the larger social and political world.
Commercialism
Although Wollstonecraft spends much of Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark musing on nature and its connection to the self, a great deal of the text is actually about the debasing effects of commerce on culture. She argues, for example, that the damage done to Hamburg and France by mercenaries and an increasingly commercial culture is far greater than the damage caused by the violence of the French revolutionFrench Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
, writing that "the sword has been merciful, compared with the depredations made on human life by contractors, and by the swarm of locusts who have battened on the pestilence they spread abroad". Wollstonecraft believed that commerce "embruted" the mind and fostered a selfish disposition in its practitioners. Commerce should be, she thought, "regulated by ideas of justice and fairness and directed toward the ideals of independence and benevolence".
Wollstonecraft had become disenchanted with Imlay not only because of his dismissive attitude towards her but also because of his greed. Throughout Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, she attaches criticisms of commerce to the anonymous lover who has betrayed her:
A man ceases to love humanity, and then individuals, as he advances in the chase after wealth; as one clashes with his interest, the other with his pleasures: to business, as it is termed, every thing must give way; nay, is sacrificed; and all the endearing charities of citizen, husband, father, brother, become empty names.
Throughout the text, she contrasts the constructive, creative imagination with destructive commerce. By associating commercialism with the anonymous lover in the text, Wollstonecraft was also directly censuring Imlay, who she believed cared more for his business speculations than for her and their child.
Revolution and progress
Wollstonecraft spends several large sections of Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark speculating about the possibilities of social and political revolution and outlining a trajectory for the progress of civilization. In comparing Norway with Britain and France, for example, she argues that the Norwegians are more progressive because they have a free pressFreedom of the press
Freedom of the press or freedom of the media is the freedom of communication and expression through vehicles including various electronic media and published materials...
, embrace religious toleration
Religious toleration
Toleration is "the practice of deliberately allowing or permitting a thing of which one disapproves. One can meaningfully speak of tolerating, ie of allowing or permitting, only if one is in a position to disallow”. It has also been defined as "to bear or endure" or "to nourish, sustain or preserve"...
, distribute their land fairly, and have a politically active populace. However, her description of Norway's "golden age" becomes less rhapsodic after she discovers that the country has no universities or scientists.
In many ways Norwegian society embodied the British radical ideal of "a small-producer society, its wealth sufficiently dispersed to ensure rough equality", similar to what Wollstonecraft had outlined in A Vindication of the Rights of Men
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France is a political pamphlet, written by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, which attacks aristocracy and advocates republicanism...
(1790). After careful consideration of how to improve the social and political problems in the places she visited, Wollstonecraft came to the conclusion that social progress must occur at a measured and "natural" rate. She argues that each country has to find its own way to improve, that democratic revolution cannot be foisted upon a people. She believed that the lower classes and the yeomen were the most promising "potential source of revolutionary social transformation". Implicit in her assessment, however, was a bourgeois condescension; she viewed the lower classes as a group separate from herself, at one point describing their behavior as "picturesque".
Reception and legacy
Wollstonecraft was prompted to publish Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark because she was heavily in debt. The successful sales of this, her most popular book in the 1790s, came at an opportune moment. Well-received by reviewers, the work was translated into German, Dutch, Swedish, and Portuguese; published in America; and reissued in a second edition in 1802.
Amelia Opie
Amelia Opie, née Alderson , was an English author who published numerous novels in the Romantic Period of the early 19th century, through 1828.-Life and work:...
praised the work, separating the philosopher from the woman: "As soon as I read your Letters from Norway, the cold awe which the philosopher had excited was lost in the tender sympathy call'd forth by the woman." William Godwin
William Godwin
William Godwin was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and the first modern proponent of anarchism...
, Wollstonecraft's future husband, wrote in his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is William Godwin's biography of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ....
that reading Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark caused him to fall in love with Wollstonecraft:
If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration. Affliction had tempered her heart to a softness almost more than human; and the gentleness of her spirit seems precisely to accord with all the romance of unbounded attachment.
Connecting the work to Wollstonecraft's first novel, Mary: A Fiction
Mary: A Fiction
Mary: A Fiction is the only complete novel by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. It tells the tragic story of a heroine's successive "romantic friendships" with a woman and a man...
(1788), he celebrates its sensibility
Sensibility
Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness toward something, such as the emotions of another. This concept emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, and was closely associated with studies of sense perception as the means through which knowledge is gathered...
and "eroticizes the condition of feminine sorrow"; for Godwin, the work was an epistolary romance, not a work of political commentary. After Wollstonecraft's death in 1797, Godwin published her original letters to Imlay (destroying the originals in the process). He deleted all references to contemporary political events and her business negotiations, emphasizing the romantic connection between the two sets of letters. Favret contends that Godwin wanted the public to see Wollstonecraft's affair as a sentimental romance akin to that between Charlotte and Werther in Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).
For a woman, a one-year-old child, and a maid to travel to Scandinavia without the protection of a man was unprecedented in the eighteenth century. The book resulting from the trip also seemed highly unusual to readers at the time: details of Wollstonecraft's travels to a rarely visited area of the world, what one editor of the Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark describes as "a boreal wilderness", intrigued and even shocked contemporary readers. The unorthodox theology of the book also alienated some readers. The Monthly Magazine and American Review wrote:
[She] discarded all faith in christianity. [sic] ... From this period she adored [God] ... not as one whose interposing power is ever silently at work on the grand theatre of human affairs, causing eventual good to spring from present evil, and permitting nothing but for wise and benevolent purposes; but merely as the first great cause and vital spring of existence.
Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark retreated from Wollstonecraft's earlier focus on God as judge to God as mere creator, shocking some conservative readers who were not prepared to accept anything akin to deism
Deism
Deism in religious philosophy is the belief that reason and observation of the natural world, without the need for organized religion, can determine that the universe is the product of an all-powerful creator. According to deists, the creator does not intervene in human affairs or suspend the...
. Worried more about Wollstonecraft's promotion of sensibility, fellow feminist and author Mary Hays
Mary Hays
Mary Hays was an English novelist and feminist.- Early years :Mary Hays was born in Southwark, London on Oct. 13, 1759. Almost nothing is known of her first 17 years. In 1779 she fell in love with John Eccles who lived on Gainsford Street, where she also lived. Their parents opposed the match but...
criticized the book's mawkishness. A professor of moral philosophy, Thomas Brown, published a poetic response to the book, The Wanderer in Norway (1816). Rather than rejoicing in the freedom that Wollstonecraft argued the connection between nature and emotion offered, however, Brown represented her work as a failure and Wollstonecraft as a tragic victim. He read the book as a cautionary tale
Cautionary tale
A cautionary tale is a tale told in folklore, to warn its hearer of a danger. There are three essential parts to a cautionary tale, though they can be introduced in a large variety of ways. First, a taboo or prohibition is stated: some act, location, or thing is said to be dangerous. Then, the...
, whereas Wollstonecraft had intended it as a description of the possibilities of social and personal reform. As Favret argues, almost all of the responses to Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark placed the narrator/Mary in the position of a sentimental heroine
Sentimental novel
The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility...
, while the text itself, with its fusion of sensibility and politics, actually does much to challenge that image.
After the publication of Godwin's Memoirs, which revealed and endorsed Wollstonecraft's love affairs and illegitimate child, her works were scorned by the majority of the public. Nevertheless, "the book was to arouse a passion for travel among cultivated people in Europe". Intrepid nineteenth-century British female travel writers such as Isabella Bird
Isabella Bird
Isabella Lucy Bird was a nineteenth-century English explorer, writer, and a natural historian.-Early life:Bird was born in Boroughbridge in 1831 and grew up in Tattenhall, Cheshire...
and Mary Kingsley
Mary Kingsley
Mary Henrietta Kingsley was an English writer and explorer who greatly influenced European ideas about Africa and African people.-Early life:Kingsley was born in Islington, London on 13 October 1862...
still read it and were inspired by Wollstonecraft's pioneering efforts. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark was republished at the end of the nineteenth century and Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....
, the author of Treasure Island
Treasure Island
Treasure Island is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, narrating a tale of "pirates and buried gold". First published as a book on May 23, 1883, it was originally serialized in the children's magazine Young Folks between 1881–82 under the title Treasure Island; or, the...
, took a copy on his trip to Samoa
Samoa
Samoa , officially the Independent State of Samoa, formerly known as Western Samoa is a country encompassing the western part of the Samoan Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. It became independent from New Zealand in 1962. The two main islands of Samoa are Upolu and one of the biggest islands in...
in 1890.
Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark was a powerful influence on Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus . She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley...
. In 1817, Shelley would publish History of a Six Weeks' Tour
History of a Six Weeks' Tour
History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland; with Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva and of the Glaciers of Chamouni is a travel narrative by the British Romantic authors Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley...
, a narrative of her travels through Europe and to Lake Geneva
Lake Geneva
Lake Geneva or Lake Léman is a lake in Switzerland and France. It is one of the largest lakes in Western Europe. 59.53 % of it comes under the jurisdiction of Switzerland , and 40.47 % under France...
which was modeled after her mother's work.
Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
poets were more profoundly affected by Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark than anyone, except perhaps Godwin. The poet Robert Southey
Robert Southey
Robert Southey was an English poet of the Romantic school, one of the so-called "Lake Poets", and Poet Laureate for 30 years from 1813 to his death in 1843...
, for example, wrote to his publisher: "Have you met with Mary Wollstonecraft's [travel book]? She has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow, with a northern moonlight." The book's combination of progressive social views with the advocacy of individual subjective experience influenced writers such as William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
. Wollstonecraft's "incarnational theory of the creative imagination" paved the way for Wordsworth's thorough treatment of the imagination and its relation to the self in Book V of The Prelude
The Prelude
The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind is an autobiographical, "philosophical" poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth wrote the first version of the poem when he was 28, and worked over the rest of it for his long life without publishing it...
(1805; 1850). Her book also had a significant influence on Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797–99) and Percy Shelley's
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...
Alastor
Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude
Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written from September 10 to December 14 in 1815 in Bishopsgate, London and first published in 1816. The poem was without a title when Shelley passed it along to his contemporary and friend, Thomas Love Peacock. The poem is 720...
(1815); their depictions of "quest[s] for a settled home" strongly resemble Wollstonecraft's. The most striking homage to Wollstonecraft's work, however, is in Coleridge's famous poem "Kubla Khan
Kubla Khan
Kubla Khan is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep in 1816...
" (1797; 1816). Not only does much of his style descend from the book, but at one point he alludes to Wollstonecraft as he is describing a cold wasteland:
- A savage place! as holy and enchanted
- As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
- By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
Modern editions
- Wollstonecraft, MaryMary WollstonecraftMary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...
. The Complete Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. 7 vols. London: William Pickering, 1989. ISBN 0-8147-9225-1. - Wollstonecraft, Mary and Godwin, WilliamWilliam GodwinWilliam Godwin was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and the first modern proponent of anarchism...
. A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of 'The Rights of Woman. Ed. Richard Holmes. London: Penguin Books, 1987. ISBN 0-14-043269-8. - Wollstonecraft, Mary. Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Ed. Carol H. Poston. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976. ISBN 0-8032-0862-6
External links
- Full text of Letters from Sweden at Project GutenbergProject GutenbergProject Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...
- Full text of Letters from Sweden at etext.library.adelaide.edu.au
- Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark at Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
(scanned books original editions) - Mary Wollstonecraft: A 'Speculative and Dissenting Spirit' by Janet ToddJanet ToddJanet Margaret Todd is a Welsh-born academic and a well-respected author of many books on women in literature. Todd was educated at Cambridge University and the University of Florida, where she undertook a doctorate on the poet John Clare...
at www.bbc.co.uk