“I Could Almost Wish for the Madman’s Happiness”: Escape, Escapism, and Madness in Wollstonecraft’s Novels

ABSTRACT

In Mary Wollstonecraft’s two novels, Mary, A Fiction (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798), women are continually on the run, moving from one form of imprisonment to another whether it be physical, mental, or symbolic. In this article, I examine this perpetual motion in both novels, focusing on the futility, cyclicity, and social implications of the characters’ movements. In Mary and Maria, Wollstonecraft presents only two options for women in contemporary society—subjugation or perpetual attempts at escape—neither of which grant them freedom or true mobility. During instances of Mary’s and Maria’s greatest distress, both characters express a longing for one provocative form of release: madness. Wollstonecraft shows how a movement away from reason is the only option for total mental liberation afforded to the heroines in the cultural moment in which she is writing. Ultimately, I propose a feminist perspective on women’s insanity as a form of escape and a reading of this madness as an assertion of agency.

Notes

1 When a teenager, Wollstonecraft’s move to Hoxton—a place “synonymous with lunacy”—might have also affected her personal sympathy for the mad, especially as some biographers have theorized that her brother Henry was possibly interned in one of its private asylums (Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft 21). Anne Mellor also suggests that, if true, this could explain the surprising accuracy of the descriptions of the madhouse in Maria (407). Additionally, Wollstonecraft’s sister Eliza was thought to be mad just after the birth of her daughter. Wollstonecraft later discovered that the cruelty of Eliza’s husband was at least in part to blame for her sister’s unusual demeanor. Fearing an ending like that of Maria, Wollstonecraft helped Eliza abscond from her husband, though this forced Eliza to leave her daughter behind, something that further drove her into fits of frenzy.

2 See, for example, Whitehead; Ingram and Faubert; Woodman and Faflak; and Melville.

3 Subtle but meaningful references to the idea of madness as a desirable escape from oppressive societies permeate women’s writing and can be found in the works of authors from Emily Dickinson to Virginia Woolf to Toni Morrison to Ottessa Moshfegh. This is particularly true in the emerging genre Jess Bergman calls “denuded realism,” where “unhinged” women and anhedonic anti-heroines often seek out the sensation of unreality through drastic methods.

4 For example, see William Wordsworth’s Martha Ray in “The Thorn” and the vagrant woman in his “Salisbury Plain” poems, Laurence Sterne’s Maria in A Sentimental Journey, the maniac woman in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, and Charlotte Brontë’s famous “madwoman in the attic,” Bertha Mason, in Jane Eyre.

5 Undercurrents of this view of madness are also prominent in the writing of David Cooper, in Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and throughout the works of other theorists of the anti-psychiatry movement. Additionally, many modern feminist psychologists and literary scholars writing on madness have recognized it as a reaction to the social situation forced upon women. See, for example, Jane Ussher’s The Madness of Women, Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady, the work of Heather Meek, as well as longstanding fictional works such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. However, literary scholars have been slow to view madness as a possible assertion of women’s agency since the theory took root in a few works of second-wave feminism.

6 Though those mentioned here are the primary forms of systemic confinement I discuss throughout this article, Wollstonecraft’s writing, including her two novels, covers various other forms of female confinement. Most prominently, Wollstonecraft discusses “the imprisoning cultural construction of female sensibility” scrupulously explored elsewhere in Wollstonecraftian scholarship (Todd, Angellica 237). Even the female body can be considered a source of women’s confinement, with Diane Long Hoeveler noting of Maria that “to say that she lives uncomfortably in her flesh, is to deal in understatement” (399).

7 Daniel Robinson observes that “[m]odern criticism tends to give the impression … that Mary is little more than a rough draft” of Maria (183). As such, much of the conversation surrounding Mary occurs within articles written on Maria or the Vindications, such as Susan Gubar’s “Feminist Misogyny” and Hoeveler’s “Reading the Wound.” Yet more balanced discussions of the two novels can be found in Claudia Johnson’s chapter on the novels in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, Faubert’s “The Fictional Suicides of Mary Wollstonecraft,” and Hoeveler’s other work on Wollstonecraft.

8 The idea of travel as confining is also apparent in Wollstonecraft’s own travel writing in her Short Residence. In a letter to Imlay, she also writes: “I am weary of travelling—yet seem to have no home—no resting place to look to.—I am strangely cast off” (Collected Letters 320).

9 The first law in England that allowed mothers to petition for custody of their children was The Custody of Infants Act of 1839. Although Maria’s decision would reinforce her confinement, almost all of Wollstonecraft’s works very strongly advocate for mothers’ attentiveness to their children, while drawing a line between motherhood and reproduction. Wollstonecraft also does not present motherhood itself as confining in Maria, but it is notable that Venables is physically absent the entirety of the time Maria spends with her daughter.

10 Also note the public reaction to Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman published with Maria in which he details Wollstonecraft’s suicide attempts and conception of two children out of wedlock (Faubert, Introduction 29–33).

11 Mary is able to obtain money from her husband and travels to various picturesque cities and quaint villages while Maria flees in anonymity from a madhouse and to numerous urban lodgings. As Mary’s and Maria’s class appears to be similar once they are married, this distinction shows how Maria’s intentional and direct separation from her husband—rather than Mary’s somewhat passive and deflective separation—affects her financially and socially, while also highlighting the higher stakes of destitution conventional of the Gothic.

12 Horrocks also proposes that this wandering can be formal and allows characters to briefly stray from their circumstances by the use of formal features like punctuation and the insertion of quotations—a concept I will address in my discussion of the heroines’ attempts at formal mobility and escape.

13 Reading and writing in both novels are shown as having great use and not only for the purpose of alleviating the heroines’ sadness. Maria also writes her defense of Darnford for his adultery trial and Mary reads medical books to help nurse friends to health. Reading and writing are often used to show characters’ affection for others, highlighting their true emotions rather than the false sentiment that other portrayals of reading and writing in Wollstonecraft’s works usually represent.

14 In both novels, Mary and Maria do turn to death as a form of escape, and although suicide offers a clear removal from the confinement of their lives, I do not address this as a method of escape as it does not offer escape during life and it does not create a movement from the systemic oppression women face like—as I will shortly argue—Wollstonecraft depicts madness as doing. Wollstonecraft additionally presents madness and suicidality as inassimilable experiences, describing suicide as a rational action while madness is represented as a movement beyond reason. Faubert argues that Wollstonecraft’s letters show how she thinks of her own attempts at suicide as “one of the calmest acts of reason” and also “further explores the concept of rational suicide by presenting it as an act of protest in her fictional works” (Collected Letters 327; Faubert, “Fictional” 652).

15 It is notable that a part of this repeated quotation also appears in Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (1788). In the tragic short story of Charles Townley, a man who has indirectly caused the misfortunes and spiral into madness of Fanny, a “poor lunatic,” Charles wishes that he “could lose like her a sense of woe” to escape from his guilt (87). This phrasing implies that madness, not the imagination of a mad person, has brought about Fanny’s loss of “a sense of woe,” an even more direct link between happiness and madness than those I discuss in Mary and Maria.

16 It is possible this madwoman could be the same one mentioned in her Original Stories. Fanny is also driven to madness by an unwanted marriage to a wealthy “old rake” and imprisoned by him in a madhouse (85). Like the “lovely maniac” in Maria, Fanny also “sung several verses of different songs” and is described as “wild” and “animated” (86–87). Her madness is similarly enough to drive one “even to the very confines of madness,” as it is said “the fight of her would almost have unhinged a sound mind” (Maria 176; Original Stories 87). Like the heroines’ perception of madness, the madness of both madwomen might also be seen as an attempt to escape from their desperate situations.