How to Think with Animals in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories and The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria

How to Think with Animals in Mary Wollstonecraft’sOriginal Stories and The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria

Heather Klemann

The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 39, Number 1, January 2015, pp.1-22 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/uni.2015.0004

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The Lion and the Unicorn 39 (2015) 1–22 © 2015 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

How to Think with Animals in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories and The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria

Heather Klemann

For as long as there have been books written for children, animals have been featured as major figures—and most often as anthropomorphized, speaking characters—within these works.1 In his pedagogical treatise, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), John Locke extols narratives about animals such as Aesop’s Fables and Reynard the Fox as the only books in English “fit to engage the liking of Children, and tempt them to read” (260). Mindful of the tremendous influence of this treatise on the emerging children’s book publishing industry and on both religious and secular writers who targeted juvenile audiences, historians of eighteenth-century works for children have treated animal stories as a popular literary subcategory.2 Sarah Trimmer, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Dorothy and Mary Anne Kilner, for example, commonly used animal figures not only to “tempt” children into reading, but also to instruct children in benevo-lence toward lesser beings or to impart to them the variety and wonder of God’s creation. An admirer and contemporary of these writers, Mary Wollstonecraft appropriates—but more interestingly departs from—their conventional uses of children’s book creatures in her work of didactic fic-tion for juvenile audiences, Original Stories from Real Life (OS; 1788).3 Although they are playful inclusions in most children’s books, the birds, insects, and dogs featured in Original Stories register distinctions that made animals a touchstone of serious Enlightenment debates over the limits of human rationality and the naturalness of maternal sensibility. Through the lens of seemingly simple animal tropes Wollstonecraft focuses complex issues of gender and reason, extending a common children’s literature feature beyond its Lockean pedagogical ends and foregrounding some of

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her most significant ideas from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (VRW; 1792) and The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (WW; 1798).4

In the first three chapters of Original Stories Mrs. Mason, the tutoress to two girls, Mary and Caroline, introduces her young pupils not to anthropo-morphized, talking creatures, but to language-less animals in nature. Mrs. Mason highlights how these animals form familial relationships of mother, father, and sibling within their species, pointing out the behaviors of animals in which humans share. While recent scholars have emphasized the fantastic verbal capabilities of fictional animals in eighteenth-century creatures, it is the lack of linguistic communication in Wollstonecraft’s fictional animal kingdom that makes the animal figures in Original Stories and their domestic roles interesting: her animals are meant to appear more natural than their precedents in juvenile fiction. They do not speak, and yet Mrs. Mason observes in them recognizable human motives and family responsibilities. These lessons prompt young females to receive an education in conduct through reflection on their individual experience with nature rather than through the maxims that filled popular conduct books of the day.5 And the subtext of these lessons suggests that since the civilization of man, innate animal tendencies have become so unnatural in humans that they must be explicitly taught to Mary and Caroline.6

In this way, Original Stories not only responds to Rousseau’s pedagogi-cal masterpiece, Emile (1762), as many scholars have acknowledged, but it considers as well what man “unlearns” in the process of civilization, of differentiating himself from animals, which Rousseau examines in his Dis-course on the Origins of Inequality (1755). Mrs. Mason’s teachings imply that well-guided, “natural” observations overturn artificial refinements instilled in young women, foreshadowing both the language and the claims in Rights of Woman leveled against “a false system of education gathered from the books written on this subject by men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers” (71). As animals model the naturalness of maternal roles in particular, they focalize some of the most controversial issues surrounding gender equality and biological difference between females and males.

Mining Wollstonecraft’s earlier works for traces of her most influential ideas about womanhood, recent scholars have identified contradictory shifts in Wollstonecraft’s arguments that problematize the contribution of her work to feminist ideas (see Jones, “Literature of Advice”; Gubar; Kelly; Maurer; Myers, “Impeccable Governesses”; Richardson, “Wollstonecraft on Educa-tion”; and Tegan). These scholars highlight the challenges Wollstonecraft faces in building a case for gender equality and improved female education while following an Enlightenment tendency to categorize and differentiate (Jones

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133) and from within a masculinist “discursive order” (Reiss 46).7 Vivien Jones, for example, notes how Wollstonecraft’s “rationalist inquiries into categorization and definition and the responsibilities incurred by difference” (133) in her anthology The Female Reader (1789) betoken Wollstonecraft’s “implicit approval of a gendered division of social responsibility,” which is at odds with her “concern that women have allowed difference to render their minds ‘despicable’” (133). Wollstonecraft faces similar issues in Original Stories when she uses animal tropes, a staple of children’s fiction of the time, to underscore and to question the feminine and maternal traits that lie within or outside of the category of human. The simultaneous identification with and differentiation from animals, I argue, provides for a surprisingly rich introduction for children—and for young girls in particular—to the complexities of rational womanhood.

Animal tropes, too, allow Wollstonecraft to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis Timothy Reiss identifies as the “dominant discourse,” which “depict[ed] women as naturally subordinate,” and “a nostalgic return to some vague concept of a kind of ‘wholeness’ with nature” (Reiss 46). Para-phrasing Mary Poovey, Reiss describes this “nostalgic return” as a kind of “true sensibility” with “romantic expectations [that] were agents of the very institutions she was trying to criticize” (Poovey 108, qtd. in Reiss 46). The familial patterns Mrs. Mason romantically traces in the animal families she describes in Original Stories reinforce the naturalness of divided domestic responsibilities for males and females. Yet Wollstonecraft’s celebration of this romantic idea that humans share parental sensibility with animals in nature is circumscribed by the notion that animals lack human rationality. Wollstonecraft also uses animals to compare despicably dumb, brutish be-havior in humans, and especially in women, who act without virtue when they act without reason.8

Animal examples embody the “uneasy disjuncture . . . between the psycho-logical quietism celebrated by the ethic of feeling and a degenerate society . . . increasingly calling for social activist reform through education reform” that Syndy Conger identifies in the figure of Mrs. Mason (80). On the one hand, the animals invite sympathetic engagement in Original Stories as they do throughout the literature of sensibility. Within the same text, however, Mrs. Mason identifies animals as imperfect recipients of human sympathy due to their lack of reason, encouraging Mary and Caroline to engage their sensibilities more productively and elsewhere. As I explore in both Original Stories and The Wrongs of Woman, it is likewise the “uneasiness” in these animal figures that goads fictional characters and reading audiences to action.

Wollstonecraft grapples with these disjunctures in The Wrongs of Woman as well when the servant character Jemima narrates the story of her unfortunate

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youth. Jemima uses animal metaphors both to illustrate the naturalness of the maternal tenderness she has been denied and to point out the unnatural and inhuman tendencies that precipitated from such a motherless upbringing. By comparing herself to beasts, Jemima makes the causes of her misfortune intelligible to her listening audience, whose middle-class childhoods distance them from Jemima’s servile and impoverished youth. Jemima’s animality deflects her culpability for her own destructive behavior, illustrating the extent to which her unfavorable upbringing has excluded her from legal protec-tion and communal support. At the same time, Jemima’s ability to narrate in metaphorical terms reveals her potential for rational human thought and separates Jemima, in effect, from the creatures with which she identifies. Through the performance of telling her story, animal-like Jemima proves her capacity for human improvability and rational womanhood. In this way, Wollstonecraft’s animal tropes provide means for women to reason their way beyond the contradictions such tropes also represent.

In both of these fictional works animal tropes at once reinforce and rede-fine gender roles: Wollstonecraft does not depart rapidly from the milieu of masculinist Enlightenment ideas in which she writes, but rather leverages it to enable a deliberate pedagogical progression through and beyond the male and female types it codifies. Her animal tropes embody and at the same time educate readers on the seemingly irresolvable contradictions of gender equality. This turn toward the reader for a possible resolution to ideological paradox is figured gradually in her work: her animal tropes may be read on different, scaling levels of pedagogical sophistication by readers of different developmental maturities or by the same reader at different stages of devel-opment. Progress, then, is not just a theme, but also a formal element of her work. The contradictions in her ideas about femininity may be the unexpected locus of resolution for the way in which Wollstonecraft puts these discrepan-cies to her readers, situating them in and representing them through animals.

The Comenian Wollstonecraft

Early modern children were not just compared to animals; they were ef-fectively immersed in them. In the anthropocentric age of Enlightenment, writers and publishers felt that animals held a special fascination for children in their surprising similarities to and radical differences from humans. On a practical level, animals were also the fanciful spoonful of sugar that could help educational medicine go down whether the instructional topic was lan-guage and grammar, benevolence, or the revelation of divine creation. Long before Wollstonecraft, children’s book authors encouraged young people to learn language, for example, by listening to nature’s cries. The first picture


book for children, John Amos Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus (1658; translated into English in 1659), links letters to animal sounds, setting up a correspondence between “linguistic elements and the natural order of things” (Cohen 20–21). Comenius’s pictorial alphabet suggests that children pick up phonetics from the sounds of animals and hence the illustrated alphabet begins “The Crow cryeth, A a” and “The Lamb blatteth, B b” (4). As Jayne Lewis has noted, animals helped education reformers, writers, and philosophers from the late seventeenth century onward to think through the development language in humans and to prepare children to enter into linguistic life (6). Animal tropes were providing a standard for the naturalness of language and the social need for communication over a century before Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries used them to model the naturalness of divisions of domestic responsibility.

Early modern writers for children found great educational value in animal interlocutors. After Comenius, one of the most significant contributions to the promotion of animals in children’s literature came from Locke, whose pedagogical treatise acknowledges the juvenile appeal of talking animals, and who even composes his own collection of Aesop’s fables. Since Caxton’s English translation in 1484, Aesop’s Fables had been considered appropri-ate reading material for children because animals were thought to entertain and delight the young reader while presenting a protagonist he or she could recognize easily in nature. Not only did fables serve as vehicles for moral instruction, but Locke also used them to teach Latin grammar and published his own 1703 edition of Aesop’s Fables, in English & Latin, Interlineary for the Benefit of Those Who Not Having a Master, Would Learn Either of These Tongues. Heavily influenced by Locke and writing roughly a century later, Sarah Trimmer, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Lucy and John Aikin, and Dorothy and Mary Ann Kilner incorporated talking creatures in their children’s books, hoping to inculcate moral virtue through the pleasure of stories about animals. The improbability of conversational critters was most likely accepted among these rationalist writers because such imaginary creatures endorsed a key element of Locke’s pedagogy: they instruct children to be kind to animals, a practice that many believed to be essential to the making of a benevolent adult.

Like her contemporaries, Wollstonecraft recognized the pedagogical poten-tial of animals. She openly praises Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories, Designed for the Instruction of Children, Respecting Their Treatment of Animals (1786) in Original Stories and in her pedagogical essay, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787; see p. 16). Echoing Comenius, Wollstonecraft asserts in Thoughts that children may be led to understand the wonders of God’s creation through animals (143) and promotes sense-based examples over the teaching of maxims.9 And her major works endorse Locke’s pedagogical connection

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between a child’s treatment of animals and his or her moral makeup later in life. In Rights of Woman, for example, she argues that “humanity to animals should be particularly inculcated as a part of national education,” noting that “habitual cruelty [toward animals] is first caught at school, where it is one of the rare sports of the boys to torment the miserable brutes that fall in their way” (256, 258). She warns that such behavior easily devolves into “domestic tyranny over wives, children, and servants” (VRW 258). Wollstonecraft reit-erates this theme in The Wrongs of Woman when the heroine, Maria, in her memoirs to her daughter explains how her eldest brother learned to become “the despot of his brothers” and sisters from “tormenting insects and animals” (WW 95). Across her writings, both fictional and nonfictional, and targeting both child and adult audiences, Wollstonecraft adopts the most common uses for animal tropes in didactic literature.

In keeping with her earlier pedagogical writing and other Lockean animal stories of the period, Original Stories enacts a progressive curriculum to curtail tyrannical behavior toward all walks of life throughout the text and explicitly in the first three chapters titled “The Treatment of Animals.” Yet there are notable differences between the animals in Wollstonecraft’s children’s book and those in the works of her contemporaries. Despite the thematic similari-ties with late eighteenth-century children’s tales about talking animals, the abundant creatures in Original Stories do not possess human speech. This lack of human language is remarkable given the otherwise exaggerated expressive-ness of the animals in Original Stories: although they do not converse, these creatures convey a notably human sensibility with their “natural” nonverbal cries and meaningful looks.10 The language-less animals in Original Stories are unique for the way in which they push against without fully crossing the limits of the probable. As Comenian animals express and, in doing so, originate the phonetic sounds of the alphabet (but not actual language), so Wollstonecraft’s creatures point to a pedagogical origin for humans while remaining nonhuman.

Significantly, Wollstonecraft characterizes many of the animals in Original Stories as maternal or parental figures. Birds are not simply birds, but rather mama, papa, and baby birds, with maternal, paternal, and child-like roles to perform. But unlike other fictional talking animals, these wordless animals assert not the imaginativeness of the author, but rather the “naturalness” of the parent-child frameworks they enact by hovering between what is observ-able in nature and total didactic anthropomorphization. Like Comenius who uses natural animal sounds to instruct human tongues while revealing the awesomeness of God’s manifold creation, Wollstonecraft imprints familial roles on dogs, birds, and flies, underscoring the pervasive divine hand in such relational bonds.11


Even when discussing creatures as lowly as snails, spiders, and caterpil-lars, Mrs. Mason cannot help pointing out their parental instincts. Like other religious writers who encourage readers to extend benevolence to the tiniest and most undesirable critters, Wollstonecraft argues that crawling insects must not be killed willy-nilly because “God created the world, and every inhabitant of it” (OS 3). But what seems to begin as a lesson on the awesome creational power of the divine and the vastness and variety of his work, concludes with a narrow account of the parental instincts God has given even to caterpillars. Mrs. Mason explains, “[snails, spiders, and caterpillars] do not live long, but their Father, as well as your’s [sic], directs them to deposit their eggs on the plants that are fit to support the young, when they are not able to get food for themselves” (OS 3). These insects, though at the bottom of the food chain, illustrate a larger pattern of parental behavior that Mrs. Mason repeatedly identifies for her pupils.

Likewise, Mary and Caroline interpret parental sensibility to birds in the song of larks nearby and imagine the suffering of a mother lark after a naughty, idle boy steals her nest (OS 6, 9). This episode, though inspired by the redbreasts in Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories, differs strikingly in the degree of anthropomorphization. Trimmer’s birds are avian paragons of domestic human happiness and, in a particularly anthropomorphic fashion, nestlings are named Robin, Dicky, Flapsy, and Pecksy. They develop personalities, and they commit wrongs and are punished. They even narrate their own histories: the father redbreast, for example, tells the story of how he lost his first mate to the ill-dealing of some young boys. In contrast, in Original Stories Mrs. Mason encourages the girls to consider a similarly human “pleasure that the parent-bird would feel” in being reunited with her brood without suggesting any form of fantastic vocalization (OS 9). Mrs. Mason invokes this parental sensibility as well in a vignette from the second chapter about a dog whose master cruelly drowns her litter, noting “a she cat or dog have [sic] such strong parental affection, that if you take away all their young, it almost kills them; some have actually died of grief; though they do not seem to miss the greatest part” (OS 16).12

Mrs. Mason’s animal examples negotiate between terms that define child-hood and terms that define adulthood. On one hand, the creatures in Original Stories belong to the playful didactic tradition of instructing youth through animals beginning with Aesop and Comenius and endorsed by Locke. Woll-stonecraft features dependent creatures designed for a child readership because they appeal to a culturally dictated, adult-approved purview of childhood. On the other hand, Wollstonecraft’s animal examples of powerful maternal instinct gently illuminate mature emotions and physical sufferings of motherhood for young girls, for whom such experiences are as yet biologically inaccessible.

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These animals become receptacles for culturally—and biologically—deter-mined adult experiences, allowing children to imagine them safely, removed from human reality, and reassuringly, as a part of nature. Wollstonecraft views girlhood as a significant period of preparation for motherhood; like other progressive writers, Wollstonecraft creates a world that “features the interassimilation of adulthood and childhood” instead of “represent[ing] the Child as different in kind from the adult” (Plotz xv). Thus, the animal vignettes in Original Stories are not simply authoritarian examples designed to scare young Mary and Caroline into good behavior, but rather they provide touchstones for the child’s present and potential future selves.

While discussing the dangers of instructing girls in false modesty in Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft asserts the utility of such animal examples in teaching gender roles and sexuality (204). She argues that children should be told “the truth,” albeit in a form that is intelligible and apparent to them, namely, through examples in the nature of animals: “Children very early see cats with their kittens, birds with their young ones, etc. Why then are they not to be told that their mothers carry and nourish them in the same way? As there would then be no appearance of mystery they would never think of the subject more” (VRW 204n1). Here, Wollstonecraft explicates the maternal coding of her animal stories in her earlier children’s book: Mary and Caroline’s lessons extend beyond kindness to animals for a new gendered pedagogical opportunity that Locke had never envisioned for fictional birds and beasts. Even exemplary human mothers are compared to maternal animals in Origi-nal Stories. Mrs. Mason describes Mrs. B., the curate’s wife, for example, in comparison with a hen, underscoring the naturalness of Mrs. B’s maternal affection: “She walks to visit me, and her little ones hang on her hands, and cling to her clothes, they are so fond of her. If any thing terrifies them, they run under her apron, and she looks like the hen taking care of her young brood” (OS 43). While a girl may be incapable of fully grasping the maternal delight, she may readily identify with the image through animal analogy.

Even Mrs. Mason’s lessons that only indirectly teach benevolence toward animals emphasize the power of maternal bonds. For example, Mrs. Mason warns Mary and Caroline about the importance of learning to control one’s temper in the story of spoiled Jane B. The ostensible moral of this vignette, as outlined by Mrs. Mason prior to the story, is to learn to “bear with slight inconveniences . . . without complaining or contesting them” and that “trivial disputes slowly corrode domestic peace, and insensibly destroy what a great misfortune could not sweep away” (OS 29). In Jane B.’s history, however, the cause and effect of her naughty behavior are maternal. It is Jane’s “fond weak mother,” who by not “allow[ing] her to be contradicted on any oc-casion,” permitted her child, who had “some tenderness of heart,” to be


governed by continual ill-humor when everything does not go Jane’s way (OS 29–30). Because Jane learns to love “none but herself” she is pitied and disliked by all. When a friend of her mother’s gives Jane a delightful little dog, she admires it until it snatches a cake that Jane had wished to eat and, even though there are many other available cakes, she throws a stool at the dog in a violent passion. To make matters more melodramatic, the dog turns out to have been pregnant at the time she received the blow, as Mrs. Mason narrates with a sentimental flourish: “[the dog] fell down; I can scarce tell the rest; it received so severe a blow, all the young were killed, and the poor wretch languished two days, suffering the most excruciating torture” (OS 31–32). The severity of Jane’s crime intensifies not only with the number of deaths but with the period of maternal suffering that precedes the passing of the pregnant dog. The destruction of the unborn pups that leads to the death of their mother foreshadows the death of Jane’s own mother, whose heart is broken and death is hastened by Jane’s “want of duty, and . . . many other faults all proceeding from violent unrestrained anger” (OS 33). Thus, Mrs. Mason not only illustrates the straightforward chapbook lesson that violent tempers in girls lead to misery, ill-repute, and death, but she also points to the delicacy of a maternal cycle: mothers may effect the destruction of their daughters through a bad upbringing and daughters may in turn blight their parents’ existence through their disgraceful behavior.

As the nearly humanized animals in Original Stories’ vignettes serve as positive maternal and parental examples, Mrs. Mason also notes the limitations of instinctual animal behavior. For example, although the hen represents an exemplary mother figure in both Original Stories and The Wrongs of Woman, Mrs. Mason points out the shortcomings of animal maternal nature driven by instinct rather than reason:

You saw the hen tear the down from her breast to make a nest for her eggs; you saw her beat the grain with her bill, and not swallow a bit, till the young ones were satisfied; and afterwards she covered them with her wings and seemed perfectly happy; if any one approached, she was ready to defend them, to the hazard of her life: yet, a fortnight after, you may see the same hen drive them from the corn, and forget the fondness that seemed to be stronger than the first impulse of nature. (OS 13–14)

Mrs. Mason’s stories often suggest the presence of human-like emotions found in animals, yet her observations of nature remind her young pupils that “animals have not the affections which arise from reason, nor can they do good, or acquire virtue” (OS 14). In another example, Mrs. Mason explains that the birds Mary and Caroline watch “do not improve—or their improve-ment only tends to self-preservation” (OS 13). Instinct without reason, she implies, comes to an educational halt. Despite their seemingly natural anthro-

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pomorphic traits, the cognitive limits of animals in Original Stories provide a sharp contrast to the narrative of blossoming human rationality.

Mrs. Mason asserts that animals, like children, sit on a developmental threshold, which, unlike children, they are not expected ever fully to cross. As she tells her young pupils, “Every affection, and impulse, I have observed in [animals], are like our inferior ones (which do not depend entirely on our will, but are involuntary); they preserve the species, and make them grateful for actual kindness.” She notes that “if you caress and feed them, they will love you, as children do, without knowing why” (OS 14). In this explana-tion, Wollstonecraft borrows from Rousseau, who designates animal feeling as the first stage of human development in Emile (Rousseau 62). From this animal-like state, however, parents must develop their child’s reason and form a “most sacred friendship,” as Wollstonecraft explains in Rights of Woman (236). Mrs. Mason, too, distinguishes humans from animals on the basis of friendship, of which animals “seem incapable of forming any conception” (OS 14). As Mrs. Mason observes, animals are inferior beings because they are subject to ungovernable instincts and passions.

Mrs. Mason encourages her pupils both to embrace and to distance them-selves from the animal behaviors they observe, and in doing so, she negotiates a feminist paradox common to eighteenth-century conduct literature between “an asexual feminine ideal” and “a belief in ‘natural’ sexual difference” (Jones, “Literature of Advice” 119–20). Thomas Ford puts this dilemma another way: “as mothers, women risk being defined primarily in terms of sexual reproduction in a cultural dynamic that overwhelms the possibility of female autonomy and self-determination” (189). While animals model maternal sensibility, they also exemplify the lack of rational thought. Women, in contrast, possess both. Remarkably and surprisingly, Original Stories is an early proto-feminist children’s book for the way in which its animal tropes provide a juvenile heuristic for the demarcation of rational womanhood.

In this way, animal tropes form part of the overall pedagogical program Wollstonecraft designs in Original Stories that takes seriously the improv-ability of the juvenile reader. At the conclusion of the book, Mrs. Mason bequeaths to Mary and Caroline a collection of the stories that they have just lived through. She bids them to “recur frequently to it, the stories will illustrate the instruction it contains, and you will not feel the want of my personal advice. Some of the reasoning you may not thoroughly comprehend, but, as your understandings ripen, you will feel its full force” (OS 173). Chil-dren are not expected to grasp all of the lessons in Original Stories at first; rather, they are to learn through iterations of reading and as they develop understanding. Animal tropes as well invite scalable readings in Original Stories: within the same text they can serve as a simple, playful means of


grabbing juvenile attention or as examples of biological reproduction and models of maternal love.

Jemima’s Creaturehood

In her posthumously published novel for adults, The Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft delineates the character of Jemima, a prison guard with a difficult past who is not a biological mother, along the precarious lines of animal instinct and uncultivated human sensibility. In Jemima’s oral history, the first of two tragic biographical narratives that unfold within the text, Wollstonecraft again uses animal tropes to expose the tension between the naturalness of maternal sensibility and female rationality raised in Original Stories. Jemima’s story, nested alongside Maria’s didactic narrative, extends Wollstonecraft’s didactic project for middle-class women by showing how maternal traits still shape the vocation and the plight of women who do not reproduce.

In this novel, whose title comes from that of her earlier treatise, A Vindica-tion of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft aims “to show the wrongs of the different classes of women, equally oppressive, though, from the difference of education necessarily various,” as she explains in a letter to a friend (WW 60). The work plots the struggle of Maria, an unfortunate woman from a landed family who has been robbed of her infant child and imprisoned in a madhouse by her tyrannical husband. During her confinement, she befriends a poor servant, her guard, Jemima, and falls in love with Henry Darnford, a fellow prisoner. Touched by the human affection between Maria and Darnford, Jemima shares the story of her troubled past. After pondering “Jemima’s peculiar fate and her own,” Maria is “led to consider the oppressed state of woman” more broadly and gathers the courage to appeal to Jemima to help locate and rescue her daughter (WW 92). Upon Jemima’s discovery that the child has died, Maria shares the memoirs she had been composing for her daughter with Darnford and Jemima. Jemima assists Maria in escaping from the madhouse, and Maria and Darnford take lodging together with Jemima as the housekeeper until George Venables, Maria’s husband, commences legal action against Darnford. Darnford leaves England and Maria pleads her case in court. William Godwin, the editor of the unfinished manuscript, includes various potential endings for the novel as sketched out by Wollstonecraft, the longest of which involves the discovery of Maria’s still-living child and her resolution to live and care for the babe with Jemima by her side.

Critics tend to focus more on Maria’s embedded memoirs written for her daughter because they are significantly longer than Jemima’s history and they perform the Romantic-period trope of “maternal transmission,” which

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serves as “a means to extend the implications of novelistic narrative beyond the individual case” (Campbell 164). Yet it is Jemima’s story that leads Maria’s thoughts to “take a wider range” and to “consider the oppressed state of woman” (WW 92). Here as in the titles of her Rights of Woman and the novel itself, Wollstonecraft inserts the singular noun “woman” to generalize issues not for one group but for all members of the female sex. Although Jemima volunteers her story with a seemingly less deliberate instructional agenda than that of Maria’s memoirs, Jemima’s history suggests to Maria the possibility of what her daughter may be suffering in her “unprotected infancy” and goads her to take action to locate her daughter (WW 92). Jemima’s his-tory extends the implications of her individual case not merely to another generation, but across the divisions of class between her and Maria. At the same time, Maria’s response to Jemima’s narrative models for the reader the kind of reflection and active concern for fellow women—not simply fellow women of a particular station—in which a reader should engage upon read-ing The Wrongs of Woman.

Jemima employs animal metaphors repeatedly to explain her miserable upbringing and criminal youth to her prisoners. She identifies with beasts to illustrate her negative example of a a motherless childhood, sharing, for example, how as a worker in slop-shop she was often kicked about, “like the dog or cat.” When she steals bread out of “absolute necessity,” her mistress and fellow workers accuse her of stealing “whatever else was taken” even that which she “had it not in [her] power to take.” She becomes—in her own words—“the filching cat, the ravenous dog, the dumb brute, who must bear all” (WW 82). Like the birds that Mrs. Mason observes in Original Stories, Jemima does “not improve—or [her] improvement only tends to self-preservation” (OS 13).

Mrs. Mason’s animal lessons in Original Stories help to explicate Jemima’s past vicious behavior in no simple way. Both works underscore the impor-tance of a mother to nurture a child into mature adulthood, and it is no mere coincidence that Mary, Caroline, and Jemima all lose their mothers at a young age. Jemima attributes the greater part of misery in her youth “to the misfortune of having been thrown in to the world without the grand support of life—a mother’s affection,” noting that she “had not even the chance of being considered as a fellow-creature” (WW 82). Jemima laments that she “was an egg dropped on the sand” (WW 82), a statement that echoes Mrs. Mason’s observation in Original Stories of parental support among even the lowest species—the snails, spiders, and caterpillars, whom “their Father, as well as your’s [sic], directs . . . to deposit their eggs on the plants that are fit to support the young, when they are not able to get food for themselves” (OS 3). Thus, relegated to the basest instincts of the animal kingdom, Jemima’s


anger later prevents her from fulfilling the role of mother to a human being. When Jemima’s master rapes her at age sixteen and she finds herself with child, no one suspects her to be the recipient of her master’s advances because, as she explains, all “had been accustomed to view [her] as a creature of another species” (WW 83). Though her master offers to assist her in finding a nurse for the unborn child, Jemima, in a fit, hurries “back to [her] hole” and drinks a potion to procure an abortion (WW 84). The consequence of the improper nurture of girls is so dire that it impedes biological reproduction, literally in Jane B.’s pregnant pet dog and in Jemima’s infanticide.

Though Jemima ultimately devotes herself to helping Maria, her miserable childhood has “sophisticated [Jemima’s mind] into misanthropy.” Wollstone-craft makes the causality apparent: “A deadly blight had met [Jemima] at the very threshold of existence; and the wretchedness of her mother seemed a heavy weight fastened on her innocent neck, to drag her down to perdition” (WW 64). In society, Jemima drowns metaphorically, not unlike the literal drowning of the poor puppies Mrs. Mason describes in Original Stories. Having “been hunted from hole to hole, as if she had been a beast of prey, or infected with a moral plague,” Jemima is not generous with her wages or solicitous toward others in need. Wollstonecraft reiterates the relation-ship between Jemima’s misfortune and her sinfulness several pages later, underscoring the unfulfilled role of parental affection in her self-formation:

An insulated being, from the misfortune of her birth, [Jemima] despised and preyed on the society by which she had been oppressed, and loved not her fellow-creatures, because she had never been beloved. No mother had ever fondled her, no father or brother had protected her from outrage; and the man who had plunged her into infamy, and deserted her when she stood in greatest need of support, deigned not to smooth with kindness the road to ruin. Thus degraded, was she let loose on the world; and virtue, never nurtured by affec-tion, assumed the stern aspect of selfish independence. (WW 66)

Jemima’s humanity has been limited by a metaphorical animal instinct for preservation instilled in her not by Mother Nature, but by the hard-knock life of a motherless child.13 Through animal comparisons, Wollstonecraft is able to causally connect and attribute responsibility for Jemima’s “instinctual” behavior to the circumstances of her childhood that are beyond Jemima’s control and insists upon the inevitability of the unfortunate outcome that follows from them.

The simultaneous identification with and differentiation from the category of animal in Original Stories that help girls understand the complexity of their impending womanhood, in The Wrongs of Woman help to sort out cul-pability for women who have been wronged and to extend the significance of Jemima’s case to a larger audience. Though Jemima narrates her child-

Heather Klemann14

hood as an adult, the animal references to dogs, cats, and birds reveal a hint of childishness in her own speech. As her history repeatedly acknowledges, Jemima never identifies with fellow humans as a child, and in recounting her childhood she must portray it in relationship to the only creatures with which she could sympathize. The speech by Jemima the adult still carries traces of Jemima the child. The innocence and helplessness in the tone of her animal comparisons facilitate a shift in blame for her sinful capabilities to lie, steal, and, at her worst, convince a gentleman to throw a poor woman whom he had impregnated out of his house.

Furthermore, the abundant animal references in Jemima’s story express the severity of Jemima’s misfortune, but in a form that Maria and Darnford, Jemima’s audience members who have had quite different upbringings, can comprehend. Just as Mrs. Mason illustrates maternal instincts to Mary and Caroline through animals because the young girls are unable to know the experience of motherhood first-hand, so Jemima codes her suffering in the mistreatment of animals, allowing Maria and Darnford to sympathize with her. Jemima is at once animal-like and thus child-like, yet she, like Mrs. Mason, is also the means of instructing her middle-class audience.

Finally, Jemima’s animal tropes escalate her narrative from a simple sen-timental one that exercises and affirms the sympathies of her auditors to an incrimination of cultural forces far greater and more subversive than any one character in her story. Maria models the appropriate reader response, taking a broader view on how these metaphors mediate between cause and effect in Jemima’s biography and ultimately implicating “the society by which [Jemima] had been oppressed” (WW 66).14 The text does not merely assert that Jemima was poorly treated throughout her childhood and that these experiences led directly to her moral degradation. By suggesting that a lack of nurture turned Jemima into a metaphorical animal, Wollstonecraft draws Jemima’s narrative into brutal abstraction. In this animalization, the culpability for Jemima’s behavior rests not solely on the shoulders of those who have wronged her, such as her father, her step-mother, her half-sister, and her mistress. Rather, the illustrative animal metaphor absorbs a portion of the blame. Instead of Jemima offering the explanation, “I was mistreated by my step-mother and I became a bad person,” she inserts a step into the causal equation, namely: “because I was mistreated by my step-mother, I became an animal; because I became an animal, I acted inhumanely.” Through animals, Wollstonecraft opens up the possibility to suspend links in the chain of cause and effect, to open up a space—albeit a tenuous, metaphorical one—to reveal the need for social change across a broader population. As Vivien Jones has explained, the prostitute is “a disturbingly liminal figure, inhabiting the carefully po-liced, but largely spurious ideological boundaries between the public world


of commerce and the private sphere of sexuality and domesticity” (“Placing Jemima” 204). Animal tropes, I argue, underscore Jemimia’s liminality and unsettle what Jones identifies as a “comforting cultural myth” of the “penitent, suffering and redeemable prostitute” found throughout eighteenth-century fiction (204) as Wollstonecraft’s prismatic animal metaphors do not contain but rather refract moral responsibility across a societal spectrum. Through tropes, Wollstonecraft illustrates prostitution as the symptom of a systematic ill. As she describes in Rights of Woman, the necessity that leads women into prostitution, “arises in a great degree from the state of in which women are educated” (VRW 143).15 Jemima’s audience may have only the particulars of her narrative through which to understand her dire situation, yet animal references extend the events of Jemima’s childhood into universal wrongs. Maria reflects upon Jemima’s narrative in this way, moving from its particu-lar to its general significance: at once, she thinks “of Jemima’s peculiar fate and her own,” is “led to consider the oppressed state of woman” (WW 92). The animal tropes that characterize Jemima’s childhood enable a scalable, periscopic reading.

The Wrongs of Woman proclaims the hopelessness of the female condition while setting up the opportunity for redemption through narrative. Society may be culpable for Jemima’s animal-like arrested development, but narra-tive ferries Jemima’s passage across the divide of reason that sets humans and animals apart. In her autobiography, Jemima performatively contradicts herself: her ability to compare herself and her situation to animals indicates a level of human rationality above that of animals.16 Maria recognizes this incongruence and considers that “Jemima’s humanity had rather been be-numbed than killed” (WW 92). Jemima is not animal-like but child-like: she can and does cross the developmental threshold of rationality and sensibility impassable to nonhumans. As Jemima identifies the causes of her suffering, she empowers herself to take more responsibility for her actions and to determine her future.

Significantly, in The Wrongs of Woman it is not just the child that embod-ies hope as a stand-in for the adult of the future (in all but one of the one of the potential endings of the novel, Maria’s child remains deceased).17 Here, a children’s literature trope offers a means of expansive, metaphorical thinking and brings societal problems into focus in an unexpectedly productive way. What is more, animal tropes across Wollstonecraft’s work do not illustrate maternal roles as simple, natural, and personal—it is not enough to cultivate sensibility toward animals and merely to feel what they represent. Rather these tropes introduce motherhood as a problematic, societal concern in need of gradual contemplation, which may require the delay of pedagogical explanation. Wollstonecraft suggests in Rights of Woman that girls be taught

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about biological motherhood through animals not because it will allow them to understand all, but because “as there would be no appearance of mystery [girls] would never think of the subject more” (204n1). Wollstonecraft at-tends to the timing of female education throughout her work, tuning trope to what she sees as the natural “unfolding” of the understanding so that girls never “set their little minds to work, respecting subjects, which nature never intended they should think of till the body arrived at some degree of maturity” (204). Despite the melancholy reflections throughout The Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft models animal tropes on her optimistic view of the naturalness of blossoming female reason.

Heather Klemann teaches in the Department of English at Yale Univer-sity. Her research spans eighteenth-century and Romantic-era literature in Britain, children’s literature, and the history of the book. She is currently completing a manuscript on performance and material culture in didactic fiction for children and the novel during the long eighteenth century. Her previous work on these topics has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies and Studies in Romanticism.

Notes

I warmly thank Jill Campbell, Janice Carlisle, Lissa Paul, and Katie Trumpener for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this essay.

1 For the ease of the reader, I refer to all nonhuman animals as “animals” through-out this essay.

2 See Cosslett; Keenleyside, ch. 4; Pickering, ch. 1; Thwaite, 185–94. As fables were widely read by adults and children in the eighteenth century, studies of the genre often provide insights into juvenile reading as well; see Lewis. Circulation narratives or “it-narrratives” have recently received much critical attention. Stories told not only by anthropomorphized objects, but also by peripatetic, talking animals are often included in studies of this subgenre; see Blackwell.

3 Wollstonecraft praises specifically Dorothy Kilner’s The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1784) and Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children (1781) in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (16–17).

4 Bonnie Latimer (182–83) and Jones (“Literature of Advice” 119–21) underscore how rarely critics consider Wollstonecraft’s children’s books and pedagogy alongside her works for mature audiences. Mitzi Myers agrees, noting that Wollstonecraft “was meticulously revising the 1788” edition of Original Stories at the same time the “Rights of Woman was gestating in her head” (“Impeccable Governesses” 40).


5 Wollstonecraft does in Original Stories as well what Gary Kelly observes in her conduct book Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: she often uses “analogies to natural processes. . . . to persuade through repetition rather than argument.” As Kelly notes, Wollstonecraft resists the basis that young women should read collections of maxims “because they were thought to need guiding principles but could not them-selves reason out such principles” (33–34).

6 My examination of Original Stories shifts focus onto Mrs. Mason’s lesson material, specifically the lessons of the work’s early chapters centered on animals. Often to its disadvantage, Original Stories has been judged largely on the merits of the fictional tutoress figure, Mrs. Mason. Although the adult pedagogue character was a popular staple of didactic fiction for children, including Thomas Day’s Sandford and Merton (1783–89) and Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories, Designed for the Instruction of Children (1786), Mrs. Mason’s reputation has fared poorly with critics over the last two centuries, to the detriment of critique of the work as a whole (Richardson, “Wollstonecraft on Education” 30; Summerfield, 229; Thwaite, 71).

7 Syndy Conger helpfully explores in the figure of Mrs. Mason the “uneasy disjunc-ture . . . between the psychological quietism celebrated by the ethic of feeling and a degenerate society (one where ‘vice’ prevails) increasingly calling for social activist reform through education reform” (80). I trace the effects of a similar disconnect in the animal examples Mrs. Mason provides in Original Stories as they serve as both models to emulate and examples of the lack of rationality that girls are warned to avoid.

8 “In what respect are we superior to the brute creation, if intellect is not allowed to be the guide of passion? Brutes hope and fear, love and hate; but, without a capacity to improve, a power of turning these passions to good or evil, they neither acquire virtue nor wisdom.—Why? Because the Creator has not given them reason” (“Rights of Man” 3). Richardson (“Wordsworth” 34–53) and Myers (“Romancing the Moral Tale” 96–128) draw attention to debates over the ideologies espoused in children’s literature, which often reflected authors’ political leanings and engagements with current events. For a discussion of the complexity of children’s book publishing in the political maelstrom of the Romantic era, see Janet Bottoms, 214.

9 Wollstonecraft writes in Original Stories that “knowledge should be gradually imparted, and flow more from example than teaching: example directly addresses the senses, the first inlet to the hear” (vii).

10 Although animals make far fewer appearances in Thomas Day’s The History of Sanford and Merton, vol. 1 (London, 1784–89), the narrator asserts the nonverbal but human-like expressiveness of animals in this work as well, noting that they “are as capable of feeling as we [humans] ourselves, though they have not words to express their sufferings” (15).

Heather Klemann18

11 Eileen M. Hunt helpfully outlines the evolution of Wollstonecraft’s perspective on the egalitarian family in three chronological stages, arguing that in the middle stage of her writing (1789–92), Wollstonecraft shares with Burke the notion of family as a “little platoon,” or a “social group . . . which defines the identity, character and social relationships of an individual” (83). My reading of the familial frameworks performed by animals in Original Stories suggests that this understanding of the egalitarian family is figured in Wollstonecraft’s earlier works as well.

12 Wollstonecraft borrows from Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 158; quoted in Anne Chandler, 332n16: “[T]hose animals, which have a numerous brood of young at once, appear not to have any knowledge of their number; for though they are mightily concerned for any of their Young, that are taken from them whilst they are in sight or hearing, yet if one or two of them be stollen [sic] from them in their absence, or without noise, they appear not to miss them; or to have any sense that their number is lessen’d.” Chandler identifies the origin of this passage in Locke’s chapter on “Of Discerning, and other Operations of the Mind,” in which he distinguishes man from beast by the former’s greater ability to compare distinct ideas. Mrs. Mason, however, follows her explanation with the story of a dog who, as she explains, “once had all her litter taken from her, and drowned in a neighbouring brook” and who “sought them out, and brought them one by one, and laid them at the feet of her cruel master;—and looking wistfully at them for some time, in dumb anguish, she turned her eyes on the destroyer—and expired!” (OS 16–17). As Chan-dler helpfully notes, Wollstonecraft revises Locke’s account, suggesting that maternal instinct prevails over the cognitive shortcomings of certain animals. Indeed, the dog has not lost count of her litter, but rather retrieves them “one by one.” What I want to emphasize in this passage, however, is that in this episode Wollstonecraft does not simply admonish animal cruelty through a sympathetic portrayal, but layers familial relations into its protest against the harsh treatment of animals.

13 Erica Fudge examines how the tenuous philosophical relationship of animals as “other” to humans changes when humans are described as becoming animal-like in early modern literature. She explains, “If an animal is the thing that a human is not, and yet a human can cease to be (or never become) the thing it is, then an animal is something much more than other: it becomes kin” (60). Her larger argument critiques the discourse of reason, which was designed to distinguish humans from animals on the basis of reason. She shows how this discourse becomes the vehicle through which animals and humans are easily confused in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In Original Stories, Wollstonecraft likewise argues that animals are inferior to humans because they do not have reason (OS 14), leveraging ambiguities between humans and animals for pedagogical purposes.

14 William Godwin, as the editor of Wollstonecraft’s Posthumous Works in which The Wrongs of Woman was published, made Maria’s model even more emulable by appending Wollstonecraft’s primer young children, Lessons, to the novel. He explains, “the circumstance which determined me in annexing [Lessons] to [The Wrongs of


Woman], was the slight association . . . between the affectionate and pathetic man-ner in which Maria Venables addresses her infant in The Wrongs of Woman; and the agonizing and painful sentiment with which the author originally bequeathed these papers, as a legacy for the benefit of her child” (467). In this way, Godwin replicates the design of Original Stories that encourages readers to take on a pedagogical project themselves after identifying with the characters in the fictional narrative.

15 Reiss suggests that this stance on prostitution is “unique in Wollstonecraft’s writing” (26) and that she otherwise took a much more severe and disapproving tone when describing “the shameless behavior of the prostitutes, who infest the streets of this metropolis” (VRW 27). Yet this more sympathetic treatment identified by Reiss in Rights of Woman, I argue, appears through animal tropes in the Wrongs of Woman as well as by the way in which such tropes distribute blame beyond the individual case of the prostitute. At the same time the tropes echo the sharp condemnation, depicting such women as brutal and barbarous, as in the use of the word “infest.”

16 The performative contradiction is a powerful rhetorical tool wielded by Woll-stonecraft throughout her works. Ford notes how in Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft, a woman, “makes the general argument that under patriarchy women cannot make general arguments” (201).

17 Much has been written by Myers in particular on the pivotal role of the child figure in literature for literature of the Romantic period for both children and adults (“Canonical ‘Orphans,’” “Socializing Rosamond”). Here, I echo Myers’s assertion of the impact of children and literature for children on writing for adult audiences.

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How to Think with Animals in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories and The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria

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