We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Beyond Heterosexuality: Mary Wollstonecraft's Aesthetic Masculinity.
- Authors
Friedman, Dustin
- Abstract
This essay concerns itself with a reevaluation of Mary Wollstonecraft's attitudes towards sexuality, concentrating specifically on the treatment of non-heterosexual masculinity in her writings. While literary critics have read Wollstonecraft's critique of Edmund Burke's masculine cooptation of the discourse of sensibility as "homophobic," many moments in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) gesture towards a non-authoritarian, socially oriented type of masculine sensibility that concerns itself with aesthetic production rather than with heterosexual reproduction. This socially useful male sensibility finds its literary realization in the character of Maria's uncle in Wollstonecraft's novel The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798). Maria's uncle, though ostensibly heterosexual, exhibits non-normative gender and sexual behaviors that are positively valued because they allow for the sublimation of reproductive energies into an aesthetically productive and didactically useful type of masculine sensibility, one that allows sympathy to be directed outward, unselfishly, towards others. Such a reading of Righs of Woman and Wrongs of Woman allows one to recognize in Wollstonecraft's writing a theory of the political importance of nonheterosexual identities within an egalitarian society, as well as helping to inaugurate the character of the "benevolent uncle" as a crucial figure for nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature.
- Subjects
HETEROSEXUALITY; WOLLSTONECRAFT, Mary, 1759-1797; MASCULINITY; VINDICATION of the Rights of Woman, A (Book : Wollstonecraft); WRONGS of Woman: Or, Maria, The (Book)
- Publication
Dialogue (15749630), 2014, Vol 17, p203
- ISSN
1574-9630
- Publication type
Essay