Deconstructing the Boundaries: Gender and Genre in Mary Wollstonecraft’s LettersWrittenDuring aShortResidencein Sweden, Norway and Denmark

ABSTRACT

In her 1796 travelogue, Wollstonecraft combines the main elements of many different genres, blending together the physical-geographical account of the countries she was visiting with her own feelings, producing a Romantic conception of the human being overwhelmed by and subsumed into the natural elements. The journey through the Scandinavian countries turns out to be more than a business travel. It takes the shape of an inner route, a rediscovery of herself and of her experiences, including motherhood. The ability to dismantle the boundaries of the travel writing genre in such an innovative way is the same ability she shows when subverting the literary gender stereotypes that saw women marginalized inside the domestic sphere. What emerges from this extraordinary epistolary collection is a woman capable of the greatest sentimentality and, at the same time, of the smartest rationality, an active woman who does not deny her femininity but who strongly refuses the passivity society has always attributed to the female.

KEYWORDS:

• Mary Wollstonecraft
• travel literature
• women’s studies
• women’s literature
• Romanticism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. French aristocrat Charles Maurice Talleyrand-Périgord presented to the French National Assembly his above-mentioned Rapport sur l’instruction publique fait au nom du comité de constitution a l’assemblée nationale, which included a chapter on female education, where he stated the necessity for girls to receive a domestic education that was appropriate for their own sex and that prepared them for their social role as wives and mothers (1791, pp. 211–12).

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Valentina Pramaggiore

Valentina Pramaggiore was awarded a BA Degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Bologna in 2013. In 2014, she began the GEMMA Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies, which she successfully completed in 2016, when she received an MA Degree in Modern, Comparative and Post-Colonial Literatures from the University of Bologna, and an MA Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Hull. She is currently a PhD Candidate in European Literatures – Curriculum EDGES in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Bologna, that has awarded her a PhD Scholarship.