Coda. ‘Out-Laws of the World’: Cosmopolitanism in The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria

Summary

When her ship docked in Dover, Wollstonecraft knew she had returned to an island nation literally at war with her political ideals and hostile to her feminism. Shortly afterwards, she discovered Imlay's continued infidelity and made a second, more determined suicide attempt. Rescued from drowning in the Thames, she resolved to live for her daughter, but her long expatriation had entrenched her sense – apparent from her earliest extant letters – of being ‘an exile’, ‘a sojourner in a strange land’ and a ‘Solitary Walker’, and her final semi-autobiographical persona, Maria Venables, explicitly rejects national allegiances. Her transnational perspective had also given her insight into the ways different political and social systems and gender norms can strengthen or snuff out human benevolence. In Wrongs of Woman, she depicts British society as a corrupt and iniquitous patriarchy that turns women and the poor into second-class citizens liable to turn on their compatriots. Railing against the laws that have ‘bastilled’ her in marriage (I, 146), Maria complains that ‘the laws of her country – if women have a country – afford her no protection or redress from the oppressor’ (149). Women are ‘the out-laws of the world’, grappling even in their homelands with the legal invisibility and personal vulnerability that typically afflict outsiders (146). It should be clear by now, however, that Wollstonecraft's cosmopolitanism cannot be defined simply in negative terms as a rejection of her mother country, although her disgust with Pitt's government and the biases written into English law inoculated her against the rising nationalism of her war-torn era. As we saw in the quotation from Woolf's Three Guineas in the opening pages of this book, emancipation from national loyalties can enable a different sense of belonging to an imagined global community.

When Wollstonecraft died in September 1797 from complications following childbirth, she had been struggling to draft her final novel, constantly rewriting it as her physical discomfort increased. The notes and fragments that Godwin assembled offer only an imperfect insight into the ethical framework she was seeking to construct, but many critics see in the text a total disillusionment with politics in the wake of the Terror and consequent reorientation towards the private sphere.