7 - ‘The Growth of Each Particular Soil’: Authenticity and Diversity in Wollstonecraft's Narrative of Progress

Summary

In the Advertisement to Short Residence, Wollstonecraft acknowledges the effects of her shifting emotions and acute sensual responsiveness on her view of the Nordic societies she encounters. This subjectivity is offset, however, by the measured reflections of the paratextual ‘Wollstonecraft’. In the Advertisement, she comments retrospectively on the emotions excited by her voyage, while her Appendix offers a sanguine prospect of human progress entirely at odds with the final letters. There are also times when the letter-writer echoes her paratextual counterpart, as in Letter XIX where she explains that her philosophical goals are to ‘trace the progress of the world's improvement’ and to ‘take such a dispassionate view of men as will lead [her] to form a just idea of the nature of man’ (VI, 326). From this totalising perspective, her observations on Scandinavia bring new dimensions to an ever-evolving but fundamentally universalist portrait of humankind which, in many passages, underpins a teleology of progress to universal rights. Yet Wollstonecraft's travels also make her question how these rights should manifest in specific national and cultural contexts. Moreover, her affective responses emphasise that every ‘universal’ is articulated from a particular and contingent subject position. Neither the emotive ‘Mary’ nor the paratextual philosopher can be reconciled entirely with the authorial signature on the title page, but their juxtaposition presents the reader with a dual perspective on Wollstonecraft's epistemological project and its relationship to her cosmopolitan ethic.

Short Residence is shaped by two discrete – and distinctively cosmopolitan – models of progress. One is a universalist model in which general ‘truths’ transcend national and cultural boundaries. Claiming that all human subjects have developmental potential, Wollstonecraft regards ‘national character’ as a political and social construction, a product of external factors susceptible to change. From this constructivist perspective, there is no such thing as an inferior people, only underdeveloped socio-political institutions. And yet whole races, she complains, ‘have been characterized as stupid by nature’, and others ‘brought forward as brutes, having no aptitude for the arts and sciences, only because the progress of improvement had not reached the stage which produces them’ (266). With this argument, which recalls the (often prejudiced) abolitionist rhetoric circulating in the period, Wollstonecraft defends the right of all races, nations and cultures to be counted as part of the same global community.