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Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was as famous as a writer as her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, would become, but today it is clear that the daughter is much the better known of the two largely because of her marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley and because of her creation of the story embodied in her novel Frankenstein. Both mother and daughter were important proponents of the rights of women both in their writings and in the way they lived and served as role models for other women of their time. Much of their work as writers and political thinkers developed from and represented the spirit of the Romantic era in which they lived.

Mary Wollstonecraft's best-known work is her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a work in which she expounded in the ills facing women and on the need for justice for women. Her stand was considered radical, and as a result she had to portray her heroine in a special way:

The exaltation of feeling prized by Romantics posed severe problems for women. However liberating, female desire was singularly hard to express. women had to survive in a culture in which the search for personal fulfillment had no ready place. Small wonder then that Mary Wollstonecraft placed her heroine Maria in a prison for the insane, the better to cast into relief the terrible tension in a woman's mind resulting directly from her powerlessness (Alexander 10).

Alexander sees a clear distinction between mother and daughter in terms of their analysis of the lot of women in the world, and he notes that though Mary Shelley was aware of her mother's radical approach, she herself took a different route:

Haunted by ways in which genius had to accommodate itself to the demands of a culturally prescribed femininity, she presented a series of female figures, lovely and compliant, their powerlessness serving to clarify the limitless ambition of their men (Alexander 11).

Wollstonecraft's book on women's rights does not mak...

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Mary Wollstonecraft. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 15:09, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690716.html