AN UNEASY BURDEN: MATERNITY, PEDAGOGY AND AUTHORITY IN THE TRAVEL
LETTERS OF MONTAGU, WOLLSTONECRAFT AND SANSAY
By
Melissa McCoul

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
English
2011

ABSTRACT
AN UNEASY BURDEN: MATERNITY, PEDAGOGY AND AUTHORITY IN THE TRAVEL
LETTERS OF MONTAGU, WOLLSTONECRAFT AND SANSAY
By
Melissa McCoul
Taking as its primary texts Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's 1716 Turkish Embassy Letters, Mary
Wollstonecraft's 1796 Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
and Leonara Sansay's 1808 Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo, this thesis explores
how each female-authored travelogue imbricates pedagogy with maternal embodiment. I argue
that each author takes on a pedagogical perspective towards both the residents of the countries
through which they travel, as well as their correspondents at home, training both groups to
reconsider their conceptions of their own bodies and their capacity for child-rearing. Both
Montagu and Wollstonecraft base their pedagogical potential in their maternal embodiment,
while Sansay, in a novel with two childless sisters as protagonists, grants the two women quasimaternal relations to one another based on their confident, pedagogical attempts on both local
women and on each other. Montagu and Wollstonecraft, despite carefully constructed pedagogies
directed at other women, find that pedagogy breaking down at the boundaries of their own
bodies, as Montagu anxiously finds herself pregnant while training the Turkish women and her
readers on the dangers of viewing pregnancy as an aesthetic necessity, while Wollstonecraft can
only construct the sympathy with readers that drives her own pedagogical project distance from
her own daughter. Sansay, by splitting herself across two fictionalized narrative personae, grants
her protagonists a homosocial relationship based in maternal and filial affection.

Copyright by
MELISSA MCCOUL
2011

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Ned Watts for his flexibility, direction, and helpful feedback throughout
the many drafts of this project. Also, thanks to Jackie Campbell for her technical and
organizational wizardry, and perennial good cheer. Thank you to all of my MSU colleagues
(particularly Kalyan Nadiminti, Erin Beard, Ji-yun Sul and Nada Shawish) for the friendship,
commiseration, study groups, and support you so often provided. Many thanks to Krista McCoy,
Stephanie Thomas, and Lindsay Williams for their invaluable friendship, patience and
willingness to listen. I would also like to thank my parents and grandparents for always being
there when I needed them. Finally, a very special thank you to Jared Mahler, without whose
incredible patience, good humor, and unfailing support this project might never have been
finished at all.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
CHAPTER 1: The Uneasy Burden: Maternal Anxiety and Bodily Rhetoric in Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters...............................................................................................13
CHAPTER 2: Maternal Vision and Structures of Affection in Wollstonecraft's Letters Written
During a Short Journey................................................................................................................. 30
CHAPTER 3: Solving the Two-Body Problem: Maternal Relations and Split Authorship in
Leonara Sansay's Secret History....................................................................................................46
WORKS CITED...........................................................................................................................64

v

Introduction
On January 4, 1718, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu penned a letter to her friend Anne
Thistlethwayte from the town of Pera, Constantinople. Laid up in preparation for the birth of her
daughter, and unsettled from her usual round of diverting letters, Lady Mary admits to being
“wholly taken up with the preparations necessary for the increase of my family,” (107)
comforted that Anne will understand the nature of the “uneasy” burden under which she labors.
This intimate concern reasserts itself throughout the letter, embedded among reports of the
Turkish women's norms of pregnancy. The women there, as she expounds for Anne's benefit,
believe that fertility is a sign of beauty, and the pregnant female body the visible expression of
that beauty. Although Lady Mary disapproves of this reduction of the maternal form to an
aesthetic object, she is unable to avoid writing her own body into the subject matter of her letter.
As Lady Mary textualizes her own maternal body, she situates herself against the more
1

traditional, masculinist mode of writing within Enlightenment travelogues which privileged
impartial observation and the absenting of the body from the text. Rather, Lady Mary, and the
other authors in this study, make their feminine and maternal bodies the centerpieces of their
writings, as well as the common experience on which to base the pedagogy which arises out of
those writings.
After a series of gloomy reflections on the pain of childbirth, Lady Mary tries to
forcefully cheer herself by providing Anne with vivid images of the beautiful summer-like
1

Although detailed attention to the masculinist and objectivist traditions of writing within the
Enlightenment are outside the scope of this project, for some contextualization of this historical
trend, see: Scott Black. Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain. New York: Palgrave
Macmillian, 2006, esp. introduction; Toni Bowers. The Politics of Motherhood. New York:
Cambridge UP, 1996, esp. “Introduction: Historicizing Motherhood;” and David S. Shields Civil
Tongues and Polite Letters in British America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997.
1

weather, her lush off-season garden, and her approval of the Turkish legal practice by which liars
are branded on the forehead, making their crimes perpetually visible. Exactly at this moment of
promoting bodily visibility, Lady Mary abruptly writes herself out of her own narrative by
writing her pregnancy back in. Eschewing a traditional concluding remark, Lady Mary hastily
apologizes for the shortness of these ethnographic sketches, gasping out, “I must send for my
midwife” (108). This remarkable instance of writing to the moment of her own delivery serves to
fixate attention on her maternal body precisely at the moment of that body's anxious absence.
By reading and writing her parturient body as text, Lady Mary steps aside from
Enlightenment norms of bodiless rationality, unwilling, in the moment when her body is most
central to her experiences, to keep up the pretense of fitting into a register which does not take
those experiences fully into account. Rather, by sharing her bodily and maternal anxieties, in
written form, with trustworthy female readers, Lady Mary, as well as the other authors of this
study, construct an alternate set of norms, where their ability to serve as pedagogues to their
correspondents are based on understanding and expression of bodily affects. For example,
Wollstonecraft will establish an affection with her readers on the basis of her distant and
contested relationship with her daughter, and Sansay will split herself across two authorial
personae in order to allow for a self-reflexive maternal relationship between those protagonists,
based on each sister's affection and respect for the other's body and mind.
This moment of Lady Mary's delivery of her daughter, represented textually, serves as a
fitting introduction for this study, which will explore the place of maternal responsibility and
anxiety which functions as a central but under explored aspect of each text. I will be considering

2

2

Lady Mary Montagu's 1718 Turkish Embassy Letters , Mary Wollstonecraft's 1796 Letters
written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and Leonara Sansay's 1808
Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo. All three texts share an epistolary format, a
series of exotic (to European women) locales, and a central educated female traveler who records
and publishes her experiences. In each, female travelers are depicted as maternal and
pedagogical figures, a pair of terms that become productively conflated. As Toni Bowers argues,
motherhood and authority can serve as fruitful paradigms to unite these texts, as the
representations of the maternal body in each is “ambidextrous and multiple, irreducibly public
because it is so intensely intimate....undermin[ing] the cultural systems that would delimit it”
(26).
The three female travel writers of this study take on this kind of ambidextrous
pedagogical perspective towards both their correspondents and the subordinate women of the
countries through which they travel. Overtly, the letters recount the travelers' attempts to train
female subordinates to reconsider how they tend to their children or conceptualize their own
bodies, as Wollstonecraft tells of her attempts to convince the Swedish women that their habits of
overdressing their children are ineffective and harmful. On the level of narrative, the published
2

The Turkish Embassy Letters, although carefully prepared and edited by Lady Mary and widely
familiar to a coterie audience, were not published until after her death. After returning from her
journey in Turkey, Lady Mary established a close friendship with Alexander Pope that eventually
deteriorated into a vituperative battle, lending her a scandalous reputation. She left England,
travelling in Europe and writing to her husband and daughter. On her husband's death in 1761,
Lady Mary returned to England, leaving a copy of the Turkish Embassy Letters in the hands of
the Reverend Benjamin Sowden, with a note in her will that he was to dispose of the text as he
thought proper. Her daughter, Lady Bute was incensed at the thought of publication, going so far
as to burn her own copy of Lady Mary's writing and buy back the Reverend Sowden's.
Nevertheless, the text appeared in print in 1763, a year after Lady Mary's own death, thanks to a
pair of young Englishmen whom Sowden alleged had borrowed the letters, copied them, and
smuggled them to a printer (Montagu xxiv-xxv).
3

letters serve to educate both the specific correspondents and the larger public readership, casting
the letter writers as teachers with a large class of eager students. These women are enacting a
form of what Mary Kelley calls “gendered republicanism...the discourse that took as its subject
the role of women in the nation's public life,” a notion that Kelley in turn modifies from the
concept of republican womanhood from the work of historians Linda Kerber and Jan Lewis.
Under this latter model, proponents of republican womanhood called for a female education that
went beyond the rudiments of reading, writing, and ciphering...claiming that wives and mothers
once educated would school their families in republican virtue” (25). These female travel writers
are granted their sanction for educating through their position as educated wives and, in
Montagu's and Wollstonecraft's cases, mothers.
While this translation of travel experience into written record does grant these women a
power—and a responsibility—to educate, the most compelling aspect of this pedagogical power
is its recursivity and fragility. Each of the women writers is engaged in educating her
subordinates, yet those others tend to return the pedagogy back on the sender, complicating the
teacher-student dynamic. Furthermore, the pedagogy which each woman tries to transmit is
finally undermined by and broken down at the limits of their own bodies. For example, Lady
Mary's visible pregnancy, written into the text of her letters to the Abbe Conti as well as to her
friend Anne Thistlethwayte, complicates her own pedagogy against the Turkish women's
propensity for viewing pregnancy as a symbol of feminine beauty.
Later, Wollstonecraft will construct a pedagogical relationship with her readers through a
narrative sympathy that encourages those readers to affix their own emotional affect in her
romantic solitude. This narrative sympathy encourages her readers to reconsider their own bodily

4

relations by focusing their attention on the objects in Wollstonecraft's own line of sight. This
maternal vision often takes as its objects the bodies of the local children, as when she focuses on
the grotesquely overdressed Swedish children or on the unearthly boy balanced on the side of the
Gothenburg waterfall, who requires maternal attention to bring him out of the shadows. Yet
while this narrative affection is directed towards instances of ineffective child-rearing, and the
bodies of the children hence undervalued by this maternal perspective, the affection itself is
situated in Wollstonecraft's own contested, complicated and often quite distant relationship to her
own daughter. If both Wollstonecraft and Montagu demonstrate a split between their wonted
pedagogical project and their own maternal embodiment, Sansay suggests a partial solution to
this division by, paradoxically, splitting her fictionalized self across two protagonists and
developing satisfying quasi-maternal relations between them, based on their mutual ability to
educate one another.
On a narrative level, by writing letters to readers at home in England (or Philadelphia, in
Sansay's case), these female travel writers are directing their pedagogical focus towards their
sophisticated correspondents. To this end, they use irony, Gothic horror, or the construction of a
sympathetic narrative persona to attract readers' attention to the aspects of female subjectivity
that are, in the writers' opinion, most troubling and most in need of change, using the examples
of Turkey, Northern Europe, or Haiti, respectively, subtly to change conceptions of female power
at home. In communicating their pleasure (or displeasure) with their surroundings, these letterwriters developed “novel ways of associating,” creating through their letters what David Shields
refers to as “discursive institutions—social entities bound to linguistic formations” (xiv). In his
book, Shields demonstrates how belles letters brought into being a new world of public arenas,

5

such as coffeehouses, tea-tables, taverns, card clubs, fraternities and salons, which both
flourished and were transformed with the advent of print. Instead of the pleasures of urbane
conversation, these spaces organized around texts “offered a middling readership the opportunity
to participate imaginatively in a discursive analogue of genteel company” (12). These female
letter writers construct similar institutions founded on shared literary texts, but unlike the
coffeehouse or tea-table, these discursive arenas take place in an imaginative register, by
situating both reader and writer textually. By encouraging their readers to sympathize with
themselves as authors, and through that sympathy to feel themselves, as readers, into the
situations the writers depict, these writers use that narrative sympathy to pedagogically unsettle
the ways women have of relating to their own bodies and roles.
These three epistolary texts function similarly to how Scott Black sees early modern
essays working, as “registering [a] kind of adaptive reading.” Here, writing “takes the shape of
reading, offering first thoughts instead of final words...follow[ing] the twists of interest and the
by-ways of imagination rather than the rigors of system or scholarship” (2). Through the appeal
of their letters on the imagination of their readers, these women explicitly make public their
“power of independent judgment” to construct “ 'communities of conscience'” and hence sway
public opinion from inside their self-constructed “constituent territories of the 'republic of
letters'” (Shields xv). In this way, these letters unsettle the boundaries between public and private
writings, by suggesting ways in which private correspondence can be harnessed for a broader
pedagogical aim.
In this study, I explore how these three texts imbricate pedagogy with female
embodiment, particularly maternal embodiment, arguing that, although education offers women

6

an option for possessing and wielding power within a patriarchal system, that power is finally
patriarchally-lent, and as such is contingent, partial, and anxiety-ridden. Deirdre Raftery's study
historically situates the “unprecedented interest in the female condition and in female education”
in England during this period, inspired by both rising cultural interest in rationalism and
changing political and economic structures “which had brought home to women the limited roles
they might expect to fill” (43). The rise of the merchant trading class in this period meant more
households were maintained by servants, so that “the improvement in standard of
living...resulted in women, who were more moneyed and marginal than before, needing
occupation and seeking education.” As Toni Bowers demonstrates, this complication over
positions of authority was part of a larger attempt to construct “models for legitimate power and
allegiance in Augustan England, a society where relations of authority on all levels were
undergoing revision.” This upheaval necessitated both the definition of “maternal virtue,
authority, and responsibility” as well as the “containment of matriarchal authority at a time when
patriarchal authority was undergoing radical reconception and was therefore particularly
vulnerable” (14).
These possibilities were always deeply contested, coming with their own complications
and potential pit-falls. As Toni Bowers exemplifies, the anxiety over the act of giving birth is
inflected by the physical difficulties of child-rearing in the eighteenth century, with infant
3

mortality rates appallingly high (although not universally agreed upon) . This was a period in
which conduct books schooled mothers to prepare for their own deaths along with their babies'
births, as “puerperal fever, milk fever, and long, agonizing deliveries” were ever-present threats.
3

For a more detailed treatment of infant mortality rates in the period, and further sources, see
Toni Bowers, Politics of Motherhood, pg. 27-32.
7

Yet against this physical anxiety written into the frailties of the maternal body stood the anxiety
which maternity itself produced in “more cerebral realm of (male) intellectual discourse,” as a
site where “legitimacy and authority were routinely contested” (27). As such, the maternal was
gradually divested of power over the course of the eighteenth century, culminating in the “radical
withdrawal of the domestic woman” into a series of codified maternal behaviors that could be
more easily controlled. Of these, particularly important for my study is the expectation for
women to demonstrate “all-engrossing tenderness” for their children as well as “personal
supervision and education” (28) over those children.
This “exemplar of republican virtue” also served a purpose in distinguishing relations
among classes. The upper-middle-class women authors in this study were “positioned between
an already established elite and a large population of commoners,” functioning as implicit
pedagogical “rebuke[s] to the practices of aristocratic luxury and the vulgarity of the lower
orders. While granted this pedagogical power, however, gendered republicanism also “limited in
scope,” restricting the “influence of the republican wife and mother...to the members of her
household” (25). In this way, pedagogical impulses are gendered as feminine and specifically
maternal, so that the authors of letters who engage in attempts to educate their readerships are
cast as a sort of surrogate mother to those readers, while also taking their authority from their
physically female, maternal bodies.
The writers of the three texts I study work to assert their own authority through letterwriting by casting themselves as both mothers and pedagogues. In this sense, they are able to
“undercut, subvert[] and reappl[y] what might be understood as a limited female intellectual
capacity” in a period when, as Susan Stabile demonstrates, men were still “equated with the

8

mind and reason and women with the body and the material world” (16). While knowledge
might have been traditionally separated from the female body, women were credited with a
“specifically feminine way of knowing” in their “superior memory and affinity for detail.” In this
study, I am interested in exploring the ways these three female travel writers thus conflate their
female, maternal bodies with their pedagogical projects, towards the subordinate women in
Turkey, Sweden, or Haiti, but also towards their readerships at home in England and America.
This pedagogy is, however, complicated by the women's anxious relation to their own body
under a patriarchal system which both privileges and minimizes the maternal role. This pedagogy
is further contested by its return to the women by those around them who serve as educators in
their own right, as for example Montagu is educated on inoculation at the hands of the Turkish
women, or Clara in Secret History returns Mary's pedagogy to her in the form of lessons on
Clara's own abusive marriage.
In chapter one, I begin with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters,
which trace her trajectory through Germany and Austria, culminating in an extended journey
through Turkey. The most famous episode of this journey, and the one that has received the most
critical attention, is Lady Mary's visit to a Turkish bathhouse, where she notes the female bathers'
remarkable confidence and ease in one another's presence, likening the bathhouse to a female
coffee shop. I begin the chapter with an attention to this moment, particularly with regards to the
way Lady Mary's clothed figure is read as an outlier within the feminine dynamics of the naked
bathers. From there, I consider how pregnant bodies are read as symbols of beauty or fertility,
constructions against whose adoption Lady Mary pedagogically argues, despite her own pregnant
body's visible counter-argument. I compare this to her fascination with the Turkish inoculation

9

practices, and the ways Lady Mary, both intentionally and unavoidably, imbricates herself in
these bodily discourses as pedagogue and reader. Lady Mary's pedagogy is undermined by her
own conflicted responses to her own naked or pregnant body, but her maternal role grants her the
possible agency to enact a self-reflexive bodily rhetoric on her children, a successive
approximation of the rhetoric she is unable to inscribe on her own body.
In chapter two, I consider Mary Wollstonecraft's 1796 Letters written during a short
4

residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark , a text that follows Mary, accompanied by her
small daughter and a nurse, on a journey through Northern Europe taken to complete business at
the behest of her former lover—and father of her infant daughter—Gilbert Imlay. In places the
letters read as direct addresses to him, pleading with him to recognize, support, and care for
herself and their daughter, upon Mary's discovery of Imlay's infidelity. Despite the intensely
personal genesis, and the mournful sensibility the tone of the letters often display, the text was
always intended for publication, and as such is more than a series of desperate love letters. In
particular, I focus on Mary's maternal and pedagogical gaze towards her daughter Fanny, who is
both central to the text's purpose and liminal within her mother's structures of vision. Fanny
infrequently appears in her mother's accounts, and when she does, an intensity of maternal
4

A note on the provenance of this text, and Mary Wollstonecraft's personal circumstances
surrounding it: Mary met Gilbert Imlay in 1793, quickly falling in love. The two engaged in a
secret relationship before setting up house together when Mary became pregnant. Imlay soon
began to take longer and more frequent business trips, eventually setting up Mary in a separate
house shortly after the birth of their daughter, Fanny, in 1794. Desperate at this separation, Mary
attempted suicide but was thwarted. In May 1795 Imlay officially appointed Mary as his business
representative in Gothenburg and Copenhagen. Mary undertook the journey accompanied by a
fourteen-month-old Fanny and a nursemaid. Upon discovering Imlay living with a mistress when
she returned to England, Mary again attempted suicide by jumping into the Thames, but was
rescued by a passer-by. The letters that make up Short Residence, despite an intensely personal
tone and frequent evocation of these circumstances, are distinct from Mary's private letters to
Imlay, and were always intended for publication.
10

affection is counterbalanced by an inability to remain considering the child for very long,
creating a gap in their maternal relations which is conserved across either distance or emotional
space. Mary's gaze towards Fanny is pedagogical, in that through gazing at her child she can
attempt to learn how best to approach Fanny's contested education as a woman in the system of
republican womanhood. This gaze also serves as a pedagogical project to the outside readers of
the text, as Mary constructs a sympathetically solitary narrative persona that encourages readers
to attend to those objects within the author's line of sight. The very emotional power of the letters
serves to construct this emotional connection in the reader, but with the text's constant shuttling
away from the vision of Fanny, this narrative affection is produced through the tension within the
text of Wollstonecraft's ambivalent relationship to her daughter.
In chapter three, I consider Leonara Sansay's 1808 epistolary novel, Secret History; or,
The Horrors of St. Domingo. As do Wollstonecraft's and Montagu's, Sansay's text expresses an
anxiety over maternal embodiment and women's pedagogical roles, expressed in part through the
narrator's ironic educational attempts on the maternal mores of the local residents. Also as in the
previous two chapters, this pedagogy becomes complicated, returning to the ostensible educators
and recasting them as students, creating dynamic educational networks rather than simplistic unidirectional systems of transmission. Yet, as the only novel in the group, Sansay's text allows her
to go a bit further, positing a partial way out of the maternal anxieties the others bemoan. To
relay her real-life experiences in the days of the Haitian Revolution, Sansay splits her authorial
persona into a pair of fictionalized sisters, Mary and Clara, with Mary writing to a fictionalized
version of Aaron Burr concerning her sister and their mutual education. Late in the novel, Clara
flees her abusive husband, sending three letters back to Mary in her own voice and thereby

11

further complicating the teacher-student dynamic that had been privileging Mary prior to this
shift in voice. Each of the protagonists are childless, making their rich and complex relationship
to one another—as sisters, mothers, educators, and lovers—the centerpiece of the text. By
fictionalizing her account and splitting herself across two characters, Sansay can relate to herself
as to an other, thereby offering a venue to productively destabilize the dynamics of maternity and
pedagogy, and construct a deeply self-reflexive and mutually affectionate homosocial
arrangement.
Throughout this project, I explore how these three female travel writers each express their
own bodily relations and the anxiety that comes with motherhood in a culture of contested
authorial relations. Each author constructs a kind of secondary family with their letter-reading
public, casting themselves as educators, responsible for training their female correspondents in
self-reflexive ways to relate to their own bodies, a training project that is both complicated and
sanctioned by this maternal anxiety. While Wollstonecraft and Montagu construct their
pedagogical potential on the basis of their own maternal bodies and maternal authority, Leonara
Sansay, in a novel with two childless protagonists, reverses this direction by granting the two
sisters maternal relations to one another as based on their confident, pedagogical attempts on
both subordinate local women and on one another.

12

Chapter One: The Uneasy Burden: Maternal Anxiety and Bodily Rhetoric in Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters
When, in the anecdote which began this study, Lady Mary concludes one of the letters in
5

her 1716 travelogue The Turkish Embassy Letters with an announcement of her need for a
midwife, she textualizes her own maternal body. This maternal text takes on a pedagogical
function, with both Lady Mary and the Turkish women reading one another's bodies as a form of
cultural exchange and education. Although Lady Mary's education of the Turkish women and her
English contemporaries on healthful ways to relate to their own maternity is undermined by her
own inability to control her pregnancies in line with her pedagogy, she does find a way to
exercise control over the bodies of her children through inoculation. In this way, a fascination
with feminine and maternal bodily rhetoric structures the text, although relatively little critical
attention has been focused on this aspect of Montagu's exceptionally rich text.
The most remarked-upon episode of Lady Mary Montagu's travel diaries is that of her
visit to a Turkish bath, and her ethnographically sensitive portrayal of the women within the

5

In 1715 Lady Mary and her husband Edward Wortley Montagu lived in London, where Wortley
had a seat in Parliament (for which Lady Mary helped him lobby) while Lady Mary herself
collaborated with literary lights like John Gay, Abbe Conti and Alexander Pope. Shortly after
Lady Mary contracted smallpox, Wortley was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court
of Turkey. Turkey being at war with the Venetian Empire, Wortley's assignment was to bring
about a peace treaty through the offer of British mediation. For this end, the family left for
Holland on 2 August 1716, traveling through Holland, Austria, and then Turkey, accompanied on
the last leg of the journey by an escort of grenadiers, musketeers, hussars, horsemen and
scholars. While Wortley negotiated, Lady Mary befriended the French Ambassadress, went
sightseeing, and studied Arabic history and poetry with the effendis. The Turkish Embassy
Letters trace these experiences, in a series of letters to a wide variety of correspondents, from 3
August 1716 to 1 November 1718 (Montagu xv-xvii). For biographical information, please see:
Isobel Grundy. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford UP,
1999.
13

6

bath. In this moment , Lady Mary is pleasantly astounded by the grace and confidence of the
naked bathers, while the bathers in turn are mystified by Lady Mary's restrictive wardrobe. This
moment has been read from a variety of perspectives. Elizabeth Bohls observes Lady Mary's
attempt to “challenge the male Orientalists of her day” (180). In a similar vein, Teresa Heffernan
sees Lady Mary's letters as unsettling the Orientalist narrative of a reason/religion binary, by
“releas[ing] the (un)veiled woman from her role as placeholder in the East/West divide” and
performing Spivak's “model of 'speaking to the other'” (203). Mary Jo Kietzman sees Montagu's
writing as an ethnography which resists representing culture as fixed and Other in favor of
“convey[ing] the fluidity of a culture whose women seem remarkably able to accommodate a
multiplicity of alterities into their social fabric” (537).
More recently, Kader Konuk saw Lady Mary as engaged in an “ethnomasquerade,” or the
“performance of an ethnic identity through the mimicking of clothes, gestures, appearance,
language, cultural codes, or other components of identity formation” (393), exploring the
historically specific ways this ethnomasquerade articulated changing attitudes towards the Other
in exchanges between the Ottoman Empire and the West. Srinivas Aravamudan performs a
psychoanalytic reading, in which she sees Lady Mary's reading of the Turkish women as a form
of what she terms utopic levantinization, a gesture of “intellectual wagering without
accountability,” (70) paired with her reading of masquerade as a “model of female
subjectivity...that will come to be structurally related to a kind of freedom that suspends truth”

6

The letter containing the anecdote of the Turkish bath, easily the most critically considered
episode of the Turkish Embassy Letters, was written from Adrianopole on the first of April,
1717. The recipient is unidentified in the edition of the letters edited by Halsband, although
Wharncliffe identifies the recipient as Lady Rich. In this edition, Malcolm Jack follows
Halsband's lead, denoting the recipient only as Lady -----. (Turkish Embassy Letters 174).
14

(78). In a similarly psychoanalytical vein, Inge Boer claims Lady Mary explores the ways
“surveillance also provides possibilities for resistance” against the patriarchal system which
mimimizes these women into aesthetic objects, by demonstrating how, in the baths, the
“monolithical and unidirectional character of relations among despotism” (45) are subverted and
redirected.
While I concur with the near-universal valuation of the Turkish bath scene, I am more
particularly interested in how the vision of the female body shown there interacts with depictions
of the maternal body. I would like to read this moment as one of both cultural and intellectual
exchange, where the terms of freedom and restriction are written on the bodies of the female
participants. Lady Mary is granted access to the bathhouse due to her gender, but is unable fully
to enter into the social exchange there due to her identification with her garments. Meanwhile,
the Turkish women, although apparently free to circulate and converse within their gendered
space, are hierarchically structured within it. Lady Mary's account of these bodily relations both
serves to educate her English correspondents, and to demonstrate her own education at the hands
of the Turkish women, constructing a two-way pedagogy. In this, Lady Mary exhibits a similarly
productive, maternal pedagogy, as well as an anxiety over the place and direction of that
pedagogical power, as Mary Wollstonecraft and Leonara Sansay will do. While Wollstonecraft
will address this anxiety by producing narrative sympathy through a necessary distance from her
daughter, and Sansay by textually splitting her persona into a pair of protagonists who then
develop quasi-maternal relations to one another, Montagu finds a partial solution to the anxiety
by transposing the bodily rhetoric which is problematic in her own case onto the less-contested
bodies of her children.

15

To this end, I will examine those moments of Lady Mary's reflections on Turkish
pregnancy and inoculation practices, and her own involvement in these bodily discourses as both
pedagogue and reader. This doubled pedagogical relationship, functioning around a rhetoric of
the readable body, is undercut by Lady Mary's own conflicted responses to her naked or pregnant
body, but her maternal role grants her the agency to enact a successive approximation of the
bodily rhetoric which she tries to write onto the bodies of her children, enabling them to move a
degree or so further in their education than she can in her own.
Within the celebrated bathing scene, Lady Mary's bodily reality is immediately present as
a private subtext, underlying her rationalist, ethnographic descriptions of the building and the
ceremonies of entering. She describes the second room of the bath as being “so hot with the
streams of sulfur...'twas impossible to stay there with one's clothes on.” (58) Yet despite the heat,
Lady Mary remained “in [her] travelling habit, which was a riding dress:” not only dressed, but
dressed in a heavy and constricting costume intended to withstand the vagaries of travel. In this
way, Lady Mary moves through the rooms of the bathhouse without engaging the norms of that
space fully, remaining divided from the gracious nudity of the local women by cloaking herself
in the tactile sign of traveling. The Turkish bathers can read in her dress signs of her gender, her
ethnicity, and her class, allowing them to grant her a degree of respect and trust, and hence allow
her to view their private ritual, a privilege that would be denied to men, and perhaps to women
who came weighted without social and governmental approval.
Lady Mary, appreciatively struck by the lack of hierarchy on the score of her fashion,
nonetheless constructs a hierarchy herself, taking pride in her place within it by expressing
pleasure when addressed by the most considerable woman of the group. While “considerable”

16

casts the woman as an implicit leader, classifying her as such also promotes her intellectual
prowess, as both worthy to be considered and capable of considering. Referring to this moment,
Weitzman suggests that, despite her class consciousness, Lady Mary is working against a strictly
Orientalist view by avoiding the “implication that these women are from some exotic world,
distant from and alien to Europe, but instead discovers a link of commonality and sororal
camaraderie” (351). While Lady Mary's social commentary is admirably willing to take the
Turkish women on their own terms, with aesthetic readings of their persons that take their
intellect, rather than simply their objectivity into account, far from a link of sororal camaraderie,
this connection is constructed through the Turkish women reading Lady Mary's own body as an
exotically mechanical object. By neglecting, at the expected time, to remove this clothing despite
local custom and her own obvious discomfort in the heat, Lady Mary makes her clothes a literal
second skin, an irreducible part of her body and herself. By remaining constrained within her
clothes, Lady Mary makes of herself a translation error: while she views the clothing, and
particularly the corset beneath them, as a requisite and immediately readable marker of her
femininity and her status as an upper-class Englishwoman, the Turkish ladies see the garments as
a barrier to reading which prevent them from divining Lady Mary's true shape.
Meanwhile, in trying to read the Turkish women's bodies under her own paradigm, Lady
Mary examines the women's naked bodies as aesthetic and artistic values, such as those she finds
in her own clothing. She attends to the women's “majestic grace” (59) of movement, famously
paralleling them with Milton's vision of Eve, and also notices how, in absence of external
ornaments, the women's hair becomes their most carefully manipulated beauty. By turning her
own gaze away from the face, Lady Mary's attention to the most visible and explicit markers of

17

embodied female sexuality can be read as minimizing the women to the role of unthinking
statues. By beginning with an implicit focus on the external, constructed markers of her own
femininity, however, and then attending to the ways the bathers express their own version
thereof, Lady Mary turns this scene into one, not of gazing, but of reading. Immediately after
cataloging the women's bodily engagements, Lady Mary remarks that, “in short, 'tis the women's
coffee house.” Within the containment of the bathing house, the women are granted a temporary
bodily freedom, which extends to their freedom of expression. Excluded from the spaces of male
discourse, such as the coffeehouse, the women here have constructed a space for their own
knowledge circulation, a pattern of movement both bodily and intellectual.
When Lady Mary is finally persuaded to unfasten her shirt, she does so solely to persuade
the gathered women of the impossibility of their request: underneath the clothing is not skin, but
stays. Lady Mary and the women, seemingly sharing a gendered, biological common ground,
actually share a miscommunication. When requested to exhibit her body, in order to join the
social exchange, Lady Mary instead exhibits the cage of stays and corsets that contains her, and
which she has internalized as her own body. The other women read this hesitancy as physical
inability, assuming that Lady Mary must be “locked up in that machine” (60) by her vengeful,
key-possessing husband. While Lady Mary is “charmed” by what she reads as creative naivete,
the next sentence suggests that the key, while not tangible, is very much extant. Lady Mary,
although desirous of spending more time conversing in this female coffeehouse, must hurry away
at the behest of her husband, resolved to “pursue his journey the next morning.” The journey is
singular, with Lady Mary being treated much like a child, required to commence, halt, or modify
travel plans regardless of her own desires or convenience. In this, she exemplifies the position of

18

the mother within the patriarchal familial system of the Augustan period. While, as a mother, her
physical body grants her an authority over the education of her children, that sphere of power is
delimited by her own position under the authority of her husband. Lady Mary's accession to his
power marks Mr. Wortley himself as the mechanistic force which motivates his wife against her
will, the less-literal version of the key the bathers seek. Despite her initial moment of
defamiliarization in the beginning of the bathing scene, Lady Mary fails to defamiliarize her own
bodily relations, in which she has superimposed her garments, with their external patriarchal
control, over her physical body figuratively as well as literally.
If the Turkish bath serves as a paradoxical gesture of freedom for Mary and the Turkish
women, this contrasts with the need for Turkish women to write their own productivity in their
bodies by remaining perennially pregnant, a bodily control mechanism which Mary ironically
and contemptuously refuses. Here, the visibly maternal body serves as a writing surface to
express tensions over freedom and constriction surrounding the body and particularly the
reproductive organs. In a letter to the Abbe Conti dated February 1718, Lady Mary, while
seeming to take a student's position, actually works subversively to educate him, and through
him her wider audience of female readers, on the Turkish religious values for pregnancy and
childbirth. She opens the letter with a school-girl's assurance that she intends to give the Abbe
“punctual answers to all [his] questions,” (109) in the style of a model student responding to a
schoolmaster's queries. Playing up her humility, she proffers a prettily-worded apology for her
lack of fluency in French, the literal lingua franca which itself serves as a specialized conceit to
impress the Abbe Conti with her scholastic seriousness and linguistic grace.
Yet the remainder of the letter serves to educate the Abbe from within the structured

19

genre of the foreign-language writing exercise, in which the instructor is assumed to know the
answers the student performs. Here, Lady Mary complicates the role of teacher and student,
casting Abbe Conti as her pupil of Turkish habits. In a classic psychological move, she begins by
encouraging her student to further effort by remarking on what he does well, here confirming his
suppositions about Koranic law. After this comforting assurance, however, she sharply reproves
him on his misconception that Islam rejects women from Paradise, on the ground that
Muhammad “was too much a gentleman and loved the fair sex too well to use them so
barbarously” (109). To complicate his simplistic view of Islamic morals, Lady Mary tells him the
virtue which Muhammad demands of women in order to enter Paradise: they are “not to live in
such a manner as to become useless to the world, but to employ themselves as much as possible
in making little musulmans” (110). Here, the pregnant female body enters the discourse as an
abstraction, one embedded in a discourse of civil and religious responsibility, a discourse
purposely tangential from that of Lady Mary's own female body.
Despite this visceral distance, Lady Mary uses the female form as a pedagogical tool to
pointedly address the Abbe's own misconceptions in ways that will be most immediately
effective for educating him. Demonstrating that, as the Muslims believe God entrusted the
women with an important and honorable office, those who “out of malice or laziness do not
make it their business to bear or to breed children...rebel against the commands of God,” (110),
Lady Mary bitingly remarks, “Here are maxims prodigiously contrary to those of your
convents!” Lady Mary brings a discourse that had been philosophically distant and ruminative
directly to bear on the Abbe's personal beliefs, demanding that he reflect on what will become of
the “whole bead roll of your holy virgins and widows” who, if judged by the Muslim system,

20

“will be found to have been infamous creatures that passed their whole lives in a most
abominable libertinism.” Rhetorically, Lady Mary has embedded the bitter pill of cultural selfreflection within the more palatable backdrop of herself as a humble language student. To dispel
the Abbe's misconceptions fully, however, Lady Mary must resort to a shift in vocal register,
adopting a more-obviously tutorial variant on her narrative persona to drive home the role of the
generative female body.
This lesson is continued in a second letter directed to Abbe Conti, dated 29 May 1717, in
which she lightly mentions that Turkish women who die unmarried are mourned as reprobates,
since the woman's role is to increase and multiply, and “she is only properly employed in the
works of her calling when she is bringing forth children or caring for them.” (100). Here, Lady
Mary grants the work of bringing forth children the respect of a “calling,” while praising the
women's resilience and sense of purpose within the restriction of the Turkish ways of life “which
shuts them out of all public commerce.” Following this with an ironic observation on
superstitious women who rush into marriages immediately following the loss of a husband, Lady
Mary seems to take comfort in the religious progressiveness of others who “like their liberty and
are not slaves to their religion, content[ing] themselves with marrying when they are afraid of
dying” (100). Here, if the women's acceptance of their place within a restrictive society is
laudable, even more so is their intellectual and religious flexibility in relation to that role. These
women who “like their liberty” express that liberty through their control of their own bodies in
balance with their submission to their religion. Their submission then becomes an educated
choice , one which Lady Mary applauds by omission as she archly leaves the Abbe to determine
which divinity is more rational, the Turkish listed above or his own Catholic system which

21

privileges perpetual and enforced virginity.
The Abbe's choice might predictably fall on the Christian side, but Lady Mary's rhetorical
move to abruptly conclude the topic with this wryly polarized decision serves to leave the matter
open for outside readers. While the letter is ostensibly addressed to Abbe Conti, the publication
of this personal epistle allows for Lady Mary to address a diverse readership, and pedagogically
encourage female readers to look between the lines and see themselves in this image of the
liberated Turkish woman who is capable of both attending to the dictates of society and those of
her own body. In this way, Lady Mary enacts her pedagogical project on the bodies of her
English readers, encouraging them to take responsibility for the use of their own bodies, and
relate to both those bodies and the belief systems constructed around them with a similar degree
of rational flexibility. Here, the Turkish women are not the object of pedagogical pressures, but
are rather held up as models for her European readership on the basis of their intimately personal
relations to their own maternity.
Yet, while Lady Mary lauds the Turkish women's flexible bodily rhetoric in the bathhouse
and in their understanding of remarriage, she advises her readership against espousing the
Turkish women's concept of their maternity. The two letters addressed to Abbe Conti frame the
7

remarkable Letter 39 , addressed to Anne Thistlethwayte. Here, Lady Mary enacts a bidirectional pedagogy, working to rectify both the Turkish women's and her own contemporaries'
7

The letter to Anne Thistlethwayte, dated 4 January 1718, ends with the announcement of her
daughter's forthcoming birth. A letter addressed to Lady Mary's sister, Lady Mar, dated at 10
March 1718 lists the child as five weeks old, making her actual birth date in late January or early
February. The first of the Abbe Conti letters is dated 29 May 1717. Working backwards, (and
assuming that her daughter was not born substantially premature) Lady Mary was likely four to
six weeks pregnant when writing the first Abbe Conti letter, a consideration that is ironic in light
of her heralding the Turkish women's reasonable choice to prolong a hiatus in marriage and
pregnancy that she has been unable to sustain herself.
22

maternal self-conceptions, through a much more personal and evocative tone than either of the
letters to Abbe Conti. Once again, in order to enact her pedagogical project, and come to terms
with the anxieties inherent to that position, Lady Mary must switch between separate vocal
registers, taking on different voices for different roles as pedagogue, student, and reader. As we
will see, Mary Wollstonecraft takes a similar approach, shunting frequently between a strictly
rational and a deeply sentimental tone in order to affix readers' sympathy, while Sansay takes the
more extreme approach of literally splitting herself into a pair of fictionalized representations,
multiplying the possibilities for pedagogical relations. In Montagu's case, Lady Mary seems
compelled to discuss her own pregnant state, with varying levels of directness and personal
invocation. In both the letters to the Abbe and to Anne, however, her response to child-bearing is
ambiguous, charged with anxiety, and reflective of a conflicted attraction to the Turkish women's
relative unconcern with the process.
While the Abbe, as a clergyman and a male, is provided with a pair of increasingly
exhortative sociological lessons on childbirth trends, Anne, as an understanding female
correspondent, is privileged to a warmly intimate confession of Lady Mary's pregnant state: “my
head [is] wholly filled with the preparations necessary for the increase of my family, which I
expect every day. You may easily guess at my uneasy situation....” (107). Here, Lady Mary's
wonted vivacity is dropped, revealing a tone of mental and bodily exhaustion peering through the
time-worn euphemisms. This forthcoming birth seems to provide little anticipatory pleasure for
Mary, waiting to be relieved of her “uneasy” load, overfilled in both head and belly with
potentialities which require a force of responsibility great enough to press out the concerns of
other letters. Remarking ironically that she ought to be comforted in her travail by the “glory that

23

accrues to [her] from it,” Lady Mary takes the opportunity of Anne's unfamiliarity with this trope
to educate her on the Turkish maternal customs, a lesson that remains much more proximate to
her own bodily experiences than do the letter to Abbe Conti. She announces to Anne that the
women of this country have “a notion that whenever a woman leaves off bringing children, 'tis
because she is too old for that business, whatever her face says to the contrary.” The diminutive
“notion,” the casual tone of “leaves off,” and the dismissive summation of “that business,”
promptly followed by the rational visual evidence that, perhaps, Lady Mary herself would
follow, suggest a light-hearted ironization of the Turkish women's naivete.
This satirical irony takes on a darker tone as the paragraph progresses, however, and Lady
Mary tells Anne that the women “fly to all sort of quackeries” (107) to avoid the ignominy of
seeming too old, at the frequent result of poisoning themselves. She recounts women of her
acquaintance who have given birth a dozen or more times, with old women taking pride in
broods of twenty-five or thirty. Uneasy with her own load, she contemplates its repetition with
horrified irony as she queries what happens if the women are delivered of “such a flock as they
desire” to which the women blithely answer that “the plague will certainly kill half of them.” The
objectifying “flock” and the casual self-reflexivity of the “vanity” the women feel for “having
brought forth so plentifully” makes the children appear as a sort of fashionable—and disposable
—accessory, allowing their mothers, through their prenatal visibility, to write their own youth,
beauty, and fruitfulness into their flesh, while mattering very little in their persons once separated
from that of their mother.
While Lady Mary dryly satirizes these women's desire for large broods, the object of her
pedagogical intent is again complicated. In a later letter to Madame de Bonnac on the same

24

subject, Lady Mary once again switches into the vocal register most conducive to her reader's
education. In a lightly satirical style, she reiterates the Turkish women's desire for many
offspring, claiming with exhausted irony that she can “hardly convince them that [she had] a
legitimate excuse for being three months without pregnancy because my husband is a hundred
leagues away from me” (132). Here, Lady Mary explicitly positions herself as a wise and rueful
pedagogue, complaining to a colleague about her difficulty in transmitting lessons to recalcitrant
pupils, although she leaves unclear the content of her student's misconceptions: do the Turkish
women expect her to magically become pregnant despite her husband's absence, or, more
practically, to commit adultery? Yet this Lady Mary's teacherly viewpoint is undermined by her
sudden school-girl apology on her own inability to resist being normalized by her Turkish
companions: “Idleness is the mother of vices, as you know, and having nothing better to do, I
have produced a daughter. I know you will tell me that I have done very badly....” Here, the
rhetoric of the letter shifts Madame de Bonnac into the position of pedagogue to whom Lady
Mary must address her apology and recite her lesson, as a schoolchild who promises harder work
in the future to make up for an unaccustomed misdemeanor today.
To further complicate the direction of this pedagogical transfer, the Turkish women
themselves are cast as powerful, if not always salutary, pedagogues, whose fashionable passion
for child-bearing has molded Lady Mary's behavior—and her body—in line with their own
almost against her will. In the letter to Anne Thistlethwayte, Lady Mary displaces her
dissatisfaction onto the body of the unfortunate French Ambassadress, who is pregnant with her
second child in the space of a year. Here, her friend's assumption of the Turkish women's
predominant maternal rhetoric stands in for Lady Mary's own, a surrender which Lady Mary

25

recognizes as problematically compulsory. The French Ambassadress' visible pregnancy serves
as the marker not only of her fertility and beauty, but also of her coercion into a foreign register,
a state which seems to distress Lady Mary considerably more than it does the Ambassadress
herself. While Lady Mary does not share the Turkish women's fervent desire for constant
pregnancy and large families, her current pregnancy nonetheless writes her body into that
discourse, re-establishing her as commensurate with a maternity that she sought to both exempt
herself from and pedagogically modify.
The Turkish women's discourse on pregnancy and child-bearing disrupts Lady Mary's
pedagogical attempts, much as the pregnancy itself short-circuits her role as an educator of Anne
Thistlethwayte. Lady Mary provides Anne with a lesson on the Turkish judicial system,
particularly a punishment for liars which she finds delightfully fitting: “they are burnt in the
forehead with a hot iron, being proved the author of any notorious falsehood” (108). Just as she
wistfully considers the pedagogical usefulness of considering the body as text, displaying a
subjective grammar, Lady Mary makes her own parturient body textual by writing it into the
space of her letter. Lady Mary interrupts her own pedagogical narrative on Turkish law to
exclaim that she “should go on to tell you many other parts of justice, but I must send for my
midwife.” As an intrusion which sets a temporal limit to her discourse, the imminent delivery of
her daughter demonstrates Lady Mary's inability to control the ways in which her own body is
read, while working to modify the bodily grammars of her readers, both Turkish and English,
through a satirical account of the former's maternal conceptions. Yet by being unable to avoid
falling into line, at least in appearance, with the very practices she seeks to adjust, Lady Mary's
bodily pedagogy stops short of her own person.

26

If Lady Mary is unable to exercise the control she preaches on her own body, she is able
to practice a more actively agential pedagogy in relation to the bodies of her children. Her
fascination with, and dissemination of, the process of smallpox inoculation displaces this bodily
rhetoric from the site of Lady Mary's own maternal body, where the constrictions of her own
gender and class undermine her pedagogical aims, to her children, where she is able to write her
own knowledge onto their physical bodies in the form of inoculation. Here, the role of teacher
and student are again productively conflated. She is able to receive education on the practice of
inoculation at the hands of the wise old village women, and then prove her mastery of the topic
by reproducing the beneficial effects in a text of her own, bypassing her own complicated and
contingent body in favor of those of her children. Thus graduated, Lady Mary is able to serve as
a pedagogue herself, transmitting the benefits of inoculation to correspondents back home in the
8

form of both written letters and the healthy, treated bodies of her children .
Lady Mary's account of her introduction to inoculation starts with a story-book
exclamation that the wonders she is about to unfold to her correspondent, Sarah Chiswell, are so
fantastic as to “make you wish yourself here,” (81) a framing narrative which already
pedagogically serves to draw attention to the emotional, as well as scientific, import of the
following passage. Her own first introduction to the process likewise has a school-room
8

Lady Mary inoculated her son in Turkey. Rationalizing this decision to Sarah Chiswell, she
called herself a “patriot” for her desire to “take pains to bring this useful invention into
fashion in England” (83) and even to fight with doctors who might limit the technique's
spread from mercenary motives. In 1721, Lady Mary had her chance to act the patriot,
inoculating her then three-year-old daughter against smallpox in London as a public
exhibition. In 1722, Princess Caroline followed Lady Mary's example, inoculating her own
two children, and Addison Steele applauded Lady Mary's civic mindedness in The Plain
Dealer. A cenotaph memorializing her introduction of inoculation to Englad was erected in
Lichfield Cathedral after her death.
27

structure, as she describes groups of wise women who, in the autumn, gather classes of fifteen or
sixteen youths to begin their education, arriving with the comfortingly quotidian “nutshells” full
of the “best sort of smallpox,” with the pleasantry of asking “what veins you please to have
opened,” granting the students a sense of personal responsibility and immediacy in the bodily
grammar she is soon to inscribe upon them. In this, Lady Mary is most a mother when she is
most a scientist, experimenting on her children's bodies for their own betterment.
If this bodily grammar is quite physically written upon the body of the children, its
viscerality is then transmitted textually to a group of readers which includes Lady Mary, Sarah
Chiswell, and future readers of the letter. All of these readers are brought into the class of
students through a second-person address that locates these operations directly on the reader's
own body, in a graphic dialogue of ripping open proffered veins, inserting venom, and tying off
wounds with sharpened shells. The location of these wounds is then offered up as a code for
reading the belief systems of the patient, with visible wounds speaking to a superstition of
stigmata, while those placed where clothing will hide them suggest a more rationalist
dispensation. After this moment which locates the discourse so intimately on the readers' bodies,
Lady Mary shifts the narration to an attention to the bodies of the smallest patients inoculated in
this manner, from the time the virus takes to travel through their bloodstream, which the children
occupy in democratically playing together, to the “running sores” which mark the body of the
little sufferers while simultaneously providing relief, to the facial pockmarks which do not
persist in marking their bodies, unlike the full form of the disease more common in Europe.
Here, Lady Mary once more undertakes a shift in role from student to pedagogue, transmitting
the details of the practice to Sarah Chiswell, and through her, to the medical establishment of

28

Europe. So well “satisfied with the safety of the experiment,” is she, in fact, that she is willing to
tear open the body of her “dear little son” to protect his health, so that the boy's body, and
eventually that of her daughter as well, serve as living, textual proofs of Lady Mary's
achievement in this bodily rhetoric.
In this way, Lady Mary is seemingly free to act upon and modify her children's bodies,
and in fact does so despite considerable social and personal pressure to the contrary in the
interests of their bodily health, as well as the efficacy of her own knowledge. However, this
knowledge and freedom is denied her in response to her own body. In the bathhouse scene, she
unreflectingly accepts her clothing and its patriarchal connotations as part of her body, despite
their being a series of mechanical constraints that both impede health and restrict her entrance
into the social sphere of her travels. Also, although she attempts through satire to modify the
relations women, both Turkish and English, have to their maternal bodies and roles, her own
pregnancy undermines her pedagogical authority. In sustaining a pregnancy and delivering a
daughter, her body is acting at cross-purposes to her own implicit rhetoric of healthful bodily
expressions, a dissociation she expresses through her uneasily rueful melancholy. If her
pedagogy breaks down at the borders of her own maternal body, however, this very maternal
function grants her the space for a more productive pedagogical engagement, acting upon her
children's bodies in the ways she is unable to work upon her own.

29

Chapter Two: Maternal Vision and Structures of Affection in Wollstonecraft's Letters Written
During a Short Journey
Mary Wollstonecraft seems to have been a remarkably beloved woman. The Westminster
Review quotes William J. Fox's effusive plea for a closer reading of Mary's writing and life story:
“How long will it be before we shall have read to better purpose the eloquent lessons and the yet
more eloquent history of that gifted and glorious being, Mary Wollstonecraft?” (quoted in
Chaney 277). Her contemporary, novelist Mary Hays, reported feeling as though she had forged
a personal friendship with Wollstonecraft, while Robert Southey exuberantly demanded of a
publisher friend whether if had read Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written During a Short
Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Despite the fact that the letters are surrounded by a
group of affectionate and excited readers who are placing themselves in relationship with both
the text and its author, the text itself revolves around the ambivalent, tangential position of
intimate personal relationships. Conflating the woman and the book she authored, the perhaps
over-excited Southey claims “ 'She has made me in love with a cold climate, with frost and snow,
with a northern moonlight'” (quoted in Chaney 278), apparently disregarding the fact that, as the
letters describe a summer's journey, they contain not a single tangible snowflake, despite
Wollstonecraft's occasionally anxious reflections on the presumed winter experience in these
northern expanses.
Southey's affection for the author is such that he is willing to gloss over substantial details
of her actual travel experiences, leaving one to wonder on what basis his intense affection for the
author's person, as well as her text, is founded. In effect, Southey has relocated the physical body
of Mary Wollstonecraft into a doubly-imaginary landscape, so that it becomes unclear with
whom or what Southey is in love. Mary Wollstonecraft may have made him in love with a cold
30

climate, but Mary herself in this affection is both instrumental and oddly elided. Southey is not
alone in taking for granted the text's direct emotional appeal to members of its readership, but is
one of a cluster of readers, most notably men, who surround the text with an affection bordering
on passion for the author's person. In perhaps the most famous example of this narrative
investment from outside, William Godwin, her future husband, wrote in his Memoirs concerning
Short Residence that “if ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author,
9

this appears to me to be the book” (Wollstonecraft x) . Here, Godwin conflates the text with the
author: by writing in the margins, he brings the physicality of the text to the forefront in the same
gesture as he proclaims his affection for the woman who produced it.
Traveling through the northern countries with her child but without that child's father,
Mary can be perceived as a sort of free agent, temporarily dissociated from the patriarchal
household where she would hold a position as second-in-command under the authority of a
husband. In recognizing and sympathizing with her solitude, these men present Mary as someone
who needs to be rescued, and themselves as potential knights, casting her often anxious sorrow at
her own solitude and her daughter's paternal abandonment as cause to rehabilitate her through
their own emotional intensity. She is someone, they seem to consider, who would benefit by
being loved, a rhetorical effect which I argue is purposefully constructed on Mary's part, and
based on the contested, circumspect relationships of characters within the text, most notably
9

In Godwin's case, this affection becomes quite literal. When the two met socially their relations
were at first cool, but reading Short Residence converted Godwin to an active admirer. They
began a romantic relationship, living together for some time before marrying in March 1797, in
order to insure their daughter would be born legitimate. Mary Wollstonecraft died in August of
that year, giving birth to the daughter who would become Mary Shelley. While Mary Shelley,
notably, grew up to be a famous author in her own right, Mary Wollstonecraft's elder daughter,
Fanny, instead inherited her mother's melancholia, committing suicide in 1816 by overdose of
laudanum.
31

Mary's to her daughter Fanny. In particular, Mary's maternal and pedagogical gaze becomes a
central tenet of the text, while her daughter Fanny holds a liminal position as the object of that
maternal gaze. I argue that the outside affection solicited by Wollstonecraft's text is produced
through the tension within that text of Wollstonecraft's melancholic relationship to solitude and
ambivalent relationship to her daughter.
The text of the Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and
Denmark develops a narrative persona on whose emotional intensities Wollstonecraft can base
rhetorical authority for her writing. As Christine Chaney suggests in her article, Wollstonecraft's
self-portrait “invit[es] readers to an 'intimacy' with her that simultaneously prompts the personal
and affectionate responses noted above while also grounding her rhetorical authority in the
trustworthy and admirable characteristics she exhibits along the way” (Chaney 279). By
constructing an, at times, pathetically solitary narrative persona, Wollstonecraft invites sympathy
and identification from her readers, so that her very quality of romantic solitude cements their
attention to her own person, and thereby directs that attention to the objects within Mary's line of
sight.
As Wollstonecraft herself notes her novel reviews, narrative sympathy, as an “emulative
passion, one prompted by the imagination of the bystander as he or she witnesses another's
feelings” is potentially dangerous (Teagan 362). Since readers can and do imbibe sensibility
through their reading, there is always the chance of them taking away “empty, trivial, and
unrealizable” structures of feeling from feebly-written fiction. Through sentimental novels,
“novel readers are taught to want, but they are taught to want wildly, wrongly, investing in
objects and ideas beyond their grasp” (Teagan 363). Teagan suggests that, for Wollstonecraft, a

32

proper novelistic pedagogy would instead be directed towards encouraging readers to espouse
pure, bold and rational attitudes, and to be simultaneously contented with “domestic duties and
'moderate, rational prospects.'” By presenting herself as a solitary wanderer, traditionally an
eighteenth-century masculine identity, Wollstonecraft constructs both a sentimentally intense
heroine, onto whose impressions a reader can superimpose their own affective responses, and
also an “appropriate model of behavior,” (Teagan 364) centered in the pedagogical observations
which counterbalance her sentimentality.
As Nancy Yousef notes in her article, many current and contemporary readers reduce
Mary as a narrator to “ the isolate self, aloof, removed, and at peace in its autonomy” (Yousef
537) a position most typically associated with the romanticism of Wordsworth's or Rousseau's
first-person narrators. Yet Mary actually uses readers' expectations of this sort of sentimentally
solitary wanderer to direct those readers' gazes pedagogically, subverting the ideal of solitude
while seeming to most conform to an expectation for it. Mary's seemingly solitary persona is
actually a carefully constructed “subjectivity explicitly wrested from fantasies of solitary selffashioning, one shaped by vulnerability and acknowledged dependence on others.” This
interpersonal dependence grants readers a place to affix their narrative sympathy: in the pathos
appeal of the complicated, situational solitude that constitutes her relationship to her daughter.
On the first night of her journey, Mary lies awake soliloquizing on the beauties of the
northern summer evening, granting to the natural features the peaceful unity in each other's
presence that she herself lacks: “the rocks, even grown darker in their appearance, looked as if
they partook of the general repose, and reclined more heavily on their foundations” (8). In
contrast to the collegiate peace of the mountains, Mary is forced into solitary communion with

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herself, exclaiming in frustration, “Why fly my thoughts abroad when everything around me
appears at home?” If, as Barbara Taylor phrases it, Wollstonecraft is playing up her state as a
“companionless voyager in a loveless world” (640), it is remarkable that this is a moment in
which Mary does, in fact, have a companion, albeit a sleeping one: her fourteen-month-old
daughter, Fanny. Far from serving as a companionate comfort, however, Fanny's sleeping state
makes her as “innocent and sweet as the closing flowers.” Here, Mary's equation of Fanny with
the peacefully unified natural world makes her daughter a radical other, who, in the same degree
as the rocks and flowers, cannot be counted on to provide emotional support.
It is, however, through this very moment of sentimentally intense solitude that Mary is
able to reach out for her daughter physically and emotionally. This moment is one of the few
where we see Wollstonecraft physically holding or touching her daughter, as the contemplations
of home and society that had occupied Mary's thoughts are expressed in the “tear drop[ped] on
the rosy cheek [she] had just kissed” (Wollstonecraft 9). Mary's gesture combines a close bodily
proximity along the register of an affectionate response with the the actualization of Mary's
downward gaze onto her sleeping daughter, who in this state is incapable of returning the gaze.
The combined contemplation of the distant natural scenery and her unresponsive daughter
provoke “emotions that trembled on the brink of ecstasy and agony...which made me feel more
alive than usual.” While Mary physically takes up her child to comfort herself in the face of the
night's distance, she also mentally turns away from the equivalent distance represented by the
sleeping child herself.
In this, Mary's relation to her child exhibits a similar tension over distance as does Lady
Mary Montagu's own relation to maternity. Montagu, in order to drive home her pedagogy on the

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Turkish women's habits of maternity, must distance herself from her own parturient body, but is
unable to avoid her self-reflexive maternal discourse. Here, Mary's affectionate physical gesture
towards her insensate daughter likewise demonstrates this anxiety over her own position relative
to her child, as she simultaneously reaches out for and draws away from the intensity of solitude
represented by the infant. As Barbara Taylor suggests, this “image of the lone woman, shorn of
all intimate ties, was... a startling contrast to the familial, male-oriented feminine ideal of the late
eighteenth century” (640). Here, Mary is indeed moving away from the maternal ideal of a
woman caring for her child, but the alarm is Mary's own at her daughter's radical independence
and unsuitability, at this moment, for caring for her own mother rather than the reverse.
In the oft-quoted passage immediately following this moment of maternal solitude, Mary
exclaims rhetorically, “What are these imperious sympathies? How frequently has melancholy
and even misanthropy taken possession of me, when the world has disgusted me, and friends
have proved unkind. I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass
of mankind; --I was alone, till some involuntary sympathetic emotion, like the attraction of
adhesion, made me feel that I was still a part of a mighty whole, from which I could not sever
myself” (9). The passage begins with an imploring question, addressed in the second person to an
unseen interlocutor, as to the nature of “these imperious sympathies” which her daughter's
unresponsive body provokes in Mary but cannot satisfy. Here, Mary breaks open the familial
solipsism of the perfectly paired mother and daughter, to create a space where outside readers of
her text can feel themselves into her solitude. Narrative sympathy is constructed through this
imagined reader's ability to empathize with Mary's plight as a stranger in a strange land, but that
very constitutive solitude is itself mitigated by the promise of the eventual chemical reaction

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which will re-affix sentimental attachments. The character within the narrative and the reader
outside it are thereby united around the empty center of a solitude which forms the necessary
catalyst for the construction of affective sympathy.
Even when Mary and Fanny are sharing the same daylight experiences, during their most
seemingly salutary interactions, a similar emotional distance obtains between them. In the first
letter of the collection, while waiting for a boat, Mary picks some heart's-ease, reading the
blossoms as a good omen and momentarily considering pressing them as a keepsake within the
pages of a letter. This connection to the flower instantiates both an emotional connection to the
pain of her lost romantic relationship and a reference to Shakespeare, in which she recalls that
the flower is appropriately called love-in-idleness. On making this observation, she turns to bring
her child into her line of sight, noticing that, “the gaiety of my babe was unmixed; regardless of
omens or sentiments, she found a few wild strawberries more grateful than flowers or fancies”
(Wollstonecraft 6). Here, Fanny seems to serve as a comforting contrast for Mary, a reminder to
appreciate the simple wildflowers, like the strawberries, for their innate attraction. Yet
simultaneously Fanny is again cast as a radical other, a non-linguistic being who cannot
understand her mother's emotional state, and whose own mental processes Mary can only
extrapolate. Despite their immediate proximity, Mary's relationship to her daughter is constructed
around a necessary distance of emotion that is conserved in the form of an intensity of emotional
investment but a distance of physical space when they are parted by the contingencies of their
journey. This constituent distance again echoes the similar distance in Montagu's conception of
maternity, when she emotionally disengages herself from her pregnancy so as to avoid reading
her own swelling belly as a symbol of beauty as do the Turkish women. In both women's cases,

36

their children are central to their position and self-conception as pedagogues, but also necessarily
liminal to their educational projects, even as those projects focus on other children and cast the
writers as pedagogues on the very basis of their credentials as mothers. Both children thereby
serve as paradoxically prominent and necessarily liminal blind spots within their mothers'
pedagogies.
As Mary travels north through Sweden, Fanny is literally marginalized, left behind in the
care of the maid Marguerite, classified as excess baggage which, if expelled, will allow for
smoother travels. Yet, this externalizing impulse is counteracted by Mary's attenuated yet
emotionally powerful relationship to her daughter when physically distant from her. While absent
from Fanny in Sweden, Mary is privy to the image of a
“little car loaded with rye, that presented, for the pencil and heart, the sweetest picture of
a harvest home that I had ever beheld. A little girl was mounted astraddle on a shaggy
horse, brandishing a stick over its head; the father was walking at the side of the car with
a child in his arms, who must have come to meet him with tottering steps, the little
creature was stretching out its arms to cling round his neck; and a boy, just out of
petticoats, was laboring hard, with a fork, behind, to keep the sheaves from falling” (90).
The picture of the three children on the hay cart emerges with vibrant and sentimental clarity,
with each separate image of the unknown children uniting to represent Fanny to her mother, as
through a play of mirrors, which projects Fanny through the very quality of her absence. Mary
follows the visual of these unknown children, and, in seeing their mother preparing their dinner,
experienced an “involuntary sigh” of envy. By equating her daughter with the peasant's children,
Mary looks forward to the time when she will be able to provide similarly for her own daughter's
physical needs. In this way, her daughter's body momentarily appears by implication, as Mary
bemoans the poor fortune of her “babe, who may never experience a father's care or tenderness”
and currently lacks a mother's as well. Reflecting on her daughter's double abandonment, Mary
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briefly achieves a sort of union-in-absentia with her daughter, as the “bosom that nurtured her
heaved with a pang” (91) of physically intensive maternal passion. Yet this moment of
metaphorical connection fails to drive Mary into a desire for a closer personal connection with
her daughter. Rather, directly after this emotional tie the text turns to Mary's plans to prolong her
trip to see the famous Gothenberg waterfall, hence suggesting both the intensive affective
response she is able to construct with her daughter, and the necessity of that connection to be
extended over time and space.
This conservation of distance is most apparent in Mary's relationship with her own
daughter, but her relations to other children encountered throughout her travels exhibit a similar
emotional distance, as well as a more overt pedagogical effect. In this, she forms an apt
connection between Lady Mary's education at the hands of the Turkish women on the process of
inoculation, and Sansay's satirical descriptions of Creole mothers, intended to serve as warning
tales to readers at home. For Mary Wollstonecraft, the local children she encounters are radically
separate from Mary herself, bearing the same unearthly similarities with the natural world as
does Fanny. The scene of the children on the hayrick suggested first the absent body and
distraught, parent-less condition of her own daughter, but also, and more effectively, the natural
appeal of the cascade at Gothenberg. Before the sublime view of this waterfall, calculated to
impress its small human observers with a sense of its majesty, Mary stands gazing “stunned with
the noise....and scarcely conscious of where she was” (91), taken for a moment from the intensity
of her own emotional responses which the image of the hayrick children had so recently aroused.
The waterfall then serves as a secondary site of attachment for Mary, when the images of her
distant daughter are impressed too painfully upon her. Rather than actualizing this image by

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returning to her daughter, however, or even explicitly holding that daughter's image in mind,
Mary extends this sensation of distant, intimate longing by keeping the waterfall in her view as a
substitute, intended to overwhelm the maternal affections in its overpowering rush of sublimity.
The moment of Mary's overwhelming attachment to the cascade is interrupted when she
“observed a boy, half obscured by the sparkling foam, fishing under the impending rock” (91).
The boy appears as an unearthly apparition, hidden by mist and placidly fishing, from an
impossible and nearly invisible perch where “nothing like human footsteps appeared, and the
horrific crags seemed to bid defiance even to the goat's activity” (Wollstonecraft 92). Here, the
reader, already attuned to following Mary's lines of sight during her moments of greatest
solitude, has been taking in the overwhelming majesty of the cascade along with her, when,
through her eyes, the scene coalesces around the image of this lost boy who doesn't seem to
realize he is lost. Despite his recognizable child's form, he leaves no footsteps that resemble a
human's, and is in fact even more animalistic than the hardy goat, which dare not venture to such
an improbable seat. The crags are “horrific,” the rocks “impending,” and even the pines which
manage to cling to the sides of the cliffs furtively “dart[] up their spiral heads” as if afraid of
retribution, while the boy fishes on unperturbed. Mary's horrified adjectives place the boy in a
world apart from her own, a mythological universe where it is only the boy's innocence of his
position, his quasi-human state, that prevents his quite literal and always imminent fall.
By directing readerly attention towards this boy through Mary's aghast gaze, a pedagogy
of viewing is constructed that focuses responsibility on the viewer rather than the viewed, while
simultaneously complicating the direction of that pedagogy, similarly to how Montagu's text
complicates the direction of vision in the famous bathhouse scene. While standing near the

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cascade, Mary is watching the boy on the cliff side with horrified concern. Yet the boy himself is
unaware of his plight, and, like a mythological creature, might lose his confidence and hence his
animalistic grip on his perch were he to be made aware. Rather, the reader themselves, through
their identification with Mary's literal and figurative viewpoint, are made aware of this boy's
liminal existence, and directed to do something about it. As Thomas Ford suggests, “different
practices of reading produce different kinds of reader. A shift in textual apprehension makes
different kinds of acting possible. Reading, then, can be understood as a kind of midwifery”
(198). Here, Mary uses her readers' narrative affection for her own person as a springboard for
metaphorical midwifery, encouraging readers to approach the boy with a forgiving, supportive
gaze that might draw attention to his improbable perch. If the reader is encouraged to take on the
role of midwife, Mary herself seems to claim the boy as her own, through the second-degree
kinship to the natural world which Fanny also shares. By spotting the boy hovering implausibly
on the side of the cliff, and subordinating all the natural visual elements of the cascade to his
presence, Mary directs her readers' vision along with hers to bring the boy to a fuller life out of
the shadows, thereby providing her readers a pedagogy of vision that instructs them on how to
interact with the world, through the object lesson of the unearthly boy on the cliff which even the
animals won't frequent.
This implicit placement of the reader in the role of pedagogue is complemented by
passages of more explicit pedagogical reference, when Mary takes on the judgmental role of
educator in reference to the native women's child-rearing practices. When traveling in the
Swedish countryside, for example, Mary observes that men and women must spend the summer
making cloth for warm clothes to ward off the always-impending winter chill. This surplus of

40

cloth, however, combined with a “mistaken tenderness...for their children, makes them, even in
summer, load them with flannels” (19), a care-taking tendency which Mary argues has the
opposite effect. Rather than protecting the children against wintry weather, this untimely
overdressing weakens them, granting them a “squalid appearance” and a “noxious smell.” In
fact, the tendency to overdress seems to Mary so detrimental that she ominously wonders why
she “did not see more children in the villages.”Unlike the boy on the cliff, the village children are
not unnaturally prominent, but rather are nearly completely invisible. When they do appear, as in
this moment, they are withering, wilting creatures, grotesquely wrapped in their own perspiration
and decaying from the outside in before they have a chance to grow up. Rather than growing
luxuriantly and free, a state Fanny exemplifies as she enjoys the wild strawberries with childish
abandon, these children are “nipped in the bud.” In short, the children, like flowers out of season,
are dead or dying without having blossomed, a doleful state of affairs which Mary blames solely
on their mothers' collective ineptitude.
Here, the reader's eye is directed towards the bodies of these unfortunate children,
depicted piecemeal for the most viscerally grotesque effect. Through the language of this
passage, packed with reference to “continual perspiration,” “unwholesome moisture” and
mother's breasts which seemingly exude salt fish and brandy, Wollstonecraft depicts these
mothers as ridiculous, even monstrous figures who should not be trusted with their own children,
while the children themselves emerge as pathetic sites for pity. This ridicule, with its pedagogical
purpose of instructing Western European mothers to avoid the Swedish women's negative
example, is directly opposed to Montagu's enthusiastic praise of the Turkish women's practices
of inoculation. In the latter case, Montagu is recast as a student of this new, persuasive bodily

41

rhetoric, and subsequently incorporates the practice into her own pedagogy, giving herself a
method of granting greater security and health to her children's bodies than she is able to do for
her own. In contrast, Mary Wollstonecraft encourages her readers to rethink their own and their
children's embodiment by directing attention to the baneful effects of a poorly-considered bodily
pedagogy.
While admitting that the Danish women's habits of frugality might enable them to “save
something in their kitchens,” Mary bewails the effect this ignorance has on their children,
rendering them spoiled and unruly under “the care of weak, indulgent mothers,” who themselves,
without strength of mind, “become the slaves of infants, enfeebling both body and mind by false
tenderness” (97). Here, Wollstonecraft spells out her own philosophy of child-rearing through
opposition to this disdainful picture, privileging a pedagogy that allows children free rein to
exercise their bodies, without the enclosure of unseasonable clothing to enfeeble them. The
mind, in contrast, ought to run within guidelines, with the mother exercising control over her
child, yet allowing flexibility within those limits, thereby granting the child a strength of mind
from being exercised against a stronger outside force. In contrast, the weak-willed northern
mothers, in Wollstonecraft's eyes, do a disservice both to their offspring and to themselves,
enfeebling their own minds as much as those of the children whom they grant too much license.
In contrast to this troubling approach, Wollstonecraft depicts the Danish Princess
Matilda's praiseworthy methods with her son, with Matilda functioning as a mouthpiece of
appropriate pedagogy: “she “bathe[d] him herself every morning, insisted on his being loosely
clad; and would not permit his attendants to injure his digestion, by humoring his appetite” (98).
If the boy's body and its appetites are carefully controlled, so too are his emotional appetites,

42

with his tendency for haughtiness being carefully managed lest the boy become a “tyrant in
leading strings.” Here, Matilda serves as an example of a strong-willed mother who, thanks to
her privileged class status, is able to rear her child in the methods Wollstonecraft herself
vociferously recommends, a practice the lower-class women of Sweden seem to be incapable of
accessing.
Although Wollstonecraft is privileging her own pedagogical practices over those of the
locals, her own child-rearing practices are far from secure, and are based in the contingent,
difficult work of familial sympathy. Upon arriving in the Norwegian town of Laurvig, Mary, due
to her appearance of exhausted delicacy, is given particularly kind and attentive care, a show of
sympathy that overwhelms her reserves, “more than it would have done, had [her] spirits not
been harassed by various causes,” most specifically the “weak melancholy that hung about [her]
heart at parting with [her] daughter for the first time” (33). Defending her emotional response,
Mary produces an apologia of her “weakness” that recasts her melancholia as a pedagogical
concern on her daughter’s behalf: “you know that as a female I am particularly attached to her—I
feel more than a mother's fondness and anxiety when I reflect on the dependent and oppressed
state of her sex.” If Fanny's state is dependent and oppressed, then Mary's presence close to
Fanny is necessary to teach her how to comport herself within that state.
Mary is more than a natural mother, then: she is a teacher who, as a woman, will be able
to shape Fanny's expanding world view in line with her expectations. Yet, as Thomas Ford points
out, the “syntactical ambiguity of the phrase 'as a female'--it can refer to both 'I' and 'her'-establishes a female solidarity that exceeds maternal, biological rectitude” (203). Fanny, at
fourteen months old, is too small to join her mother in reflecting on the “dependent and

43

oppressed state of her sex,” so that her mother's ostensible lessons would be wasted.
Furthermore, these lessons are so ambivalent as to cancel each other out: while anxiously
attached to Fanny and concerned for the chance that she might have to “sacrifice her heart to her
principles” (33) or the reverse, Mary simultaneously plans lessons which will “cultivate
sensibility” and “cherish delicacy of feeling” in her daughter, lest she unfit that daughter for the
trials her sex is heir to. While in other places celebrating her own pedagogical practices in
contrast to those of monstrous local women, when the focus of the pedagogy is her own
daughter, her radical uncertainty becomes such that no action can be conclusively taken.
Furthermore, between the ambiguity of “as a female” and the generality of “hapless woman!
What fate is thine,” Fanny herself drops out of the rhetoric. The passage is addressed
apostrophically to an absent other which could categorically encompass all women, although the
very word “woman” excludes Fanny in her present state, in favor of Mary's imagined
representation of her in the future.
Throughout the Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and
Denmark, Wollstonecraft constructs a rhetoric of affection and personal attachment within her
readership, a process of investment which goes so far that more than a few contemporary readers
professed a veritable love for her. Yet this affection is in tension with the way relationships to
children and pedagogy are portrayed within the body of the text itself. In particular, Mary's
relationship to Fanny, and that daughter's liminal position within her mother's world, is an
intensively affective relationship which can only be constructed through a certain narrative
distance. This is certainly not to say that all relationships within the text are doomed to failure, or
even that Mary's relationship with her daughter is not as affectionate as perhaps it should be.

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More importantly, noticing the solitude at the heart of this relationship raises “questions about
forming and sustaining human relations” through “the necessary epistemological limits of
knowing and being known by others” (Yousef 541). Wollstonecraft is an intensely sentimental
writer engaged deeply in a process of self-building and relation-building with her readers, but if
this self-fashioning is “shaped by vulnerability and acknowledged dependence on others”
(Yousef 537), that very dependence is tangential, qualified by a necessary distance.

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Chapter Three: Solving the Two-Body Problem: Maternal Relations and Split Authorship in
Leonara Sansay's Secret History
Thus far, I have engaged in exploring how Mary Wollstonecraft and Lady Mary Montagu,
as female travel writers of the eighteenth century, experienced their maternity as a pedagogical
tool, a standpoint from which to educate their traveling companions, the residents of the areas
through which they travel, their readerships, and themselves. Through their descriptions of their
own maternity, these women have tried to convince those around them to use and relate to their
own bodies, and their own role as women and as mothers, in more thoughtful, positive, and selfreflective ways. However, through Wollstonecraft's fears for her daughter's future, and her own
inability to relate to that daughter without a necessary interpersonal distance, as well as
Montagu's uneasy pregnancy which undermines her satire of the Turkish women's passion for
child-bearing, both previous studies have uncovered an anxiety about women's maternal and
pedagogical potential. While women's position within the household, second only to the
husband, ostensibly allowed them power over educating their children, this pedagogical
possibility, dependent on the maternal body, broke down at that body's very boundaries. Despite
sophisticated rhetorical ploys including the construction of narrative sympathy, and satirical
letters carefully modulated on their recipients' prejudices and understandings, the maternal
embodiment expressed in these letters which gave the women their pedagogical sanction also
complicated their own roles in relation to that pedagogy.

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10

In Leonara Sansay's Secret History, or, The Horrors of St. Domingo , amid the rhetoric
of violent revolutions, both political and personal, women likewise assert a pedagogical function
based on their own maternal, and sexualized, bodies, a function which is undergirded by anxiety
on the extent of this female power. Also like Wollstonecraft's and Montagu's, Sansay's Secret
History is an epistolary text, whose letters construct a teacher-student dynamic both between the
writer and the letter's specific recipient, and between the writer and the larger readership which
can be reached through the publication of ostensibly private correspondence. As in
Wollstonecraft and Montagu, the “classrooms” created by these letters are not simplistically

10

Secret History, as I will refer to the text, follows the story of sisters Mary and Clara, shortly
after their reunion on the event of the latter's marriage to St. Louis. The story is expressed
through a series of letters written by Mary to her friend (and likely lover) in Philadelphia, Aaron
Burr, and relate the sisters' stay in Cape Francois on St. Domingue, the amusements and fashion
of the residents, Mary's anxieties on behalf of her unhappily-married sister, and her second-hand
accounts of the racialized violence under Dessaline's reign. After tensions between Clara and her
husband escalate, he threatens to disfigure her, at which threat she plots escape, running away
into the nearby mountain town of Cobre and writing a series of three letters to Mary during her
absence. Mary herself, meanwhile, leaves for Cuba in the evacuation which precedes Dessaline's
racial cleansing of the new island nation. At the end of the novel, the sisters are reunited in
Jamaica. The final letter ends with Mary apprising Burr of her plans to return with Philadelphia
with Clara and set up housekeeping.
The plot takes many of its thematics from Sansay's own life, and particularly from her
relationship with Aaron Burr. The two were friends from as early as 1796. In 1800, Leonara,
seemingly at Burr's suggestion, married Louis Sansay, a refugee from St. Domingue who had
sold his plantation to the revolutionary Toussaint Louverture. Leonara set up housekeeping with
Louis, but maintained a romantic relationship with Burr. She was apparently staying with Burr in
Washington in 1802, when, upon hearing of the French re-invasion of Haiti, Louis decided to
reclaim his plantation, pleading with Burr to send Leonara to join him in Haiti (Drexler 28-9).
Burr seems to have convinced Leonara on the safety and prudence of joining her husband,
playing the role of interested friend to her as the fictionalized Burr does for Mary and Clara.
Sansay continued to correspond with Burr throughout her tenure in St. Domingue, concerning
the events of the revolution, her own boredom and frustration on the island, and her relationship
with Burr himself.
For detailed historical and textual background, see Michael Drexler's Introduction. Secret
History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo. By Leonara Sansay. Ed. Michael Drexler. Buffalo:
Broadview, 2007. Print.
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didactic environments. Rather, the pedagogy constructed by these female writers doubles back
upon them, recasting the readers as teachers and the writers as students, and thereby creating a
recursive dynamic of educational exchange rather than a one-way transmission of knowledge.
However, Sansay's text differs dramatically from Montagu's and Wollstonecraft's in two
important respects: it is the only novel of the group I am considering, and as such it has two
protagonists who bear a maternal and sororal relationship to one another. If Wollstonecraft and
Montagu are relaying their travel experiences directly through their correspondence, albeit
modifying their rhetoric to appeal to varied audiences for varied educational purposes, Sansay's
novelistic format allows her to go a step further, bifurcating herself and her experiences into two
11

separate fictional characters: her own doppelganger, Mary, and her fictional sister Clara . Her
more overtly fictional format allows her to diffuse the anxiety of feminine embodiment over two
selves, amplifying the possibilities for education through their interactions. No longer limited to
a two-way process of educating a single reader or a group of them, and being educated by them
in return, Sansay's doubling strategy allows for a whole network of pedagogical relationships:
Mary to Clara, and Clara to Mary; Mary to Aaron Burr, the fictionalized recipient of her letter;
Leonara Sansay to the historical Aaron Burr, and, through that mouthpiece; Sansay to the wider
readership drawn to her text's appeal as both novel and history.
Current scholarly articles on Sansay often discuss her text's structural and potentially
novelistic aspects through a postcolonial lens, turning to women's roles as supporting details,
11

Clara makes her first appearance in a private letter from Leonara Sansay to the real-life Aaron
Burr, in which Sansay complained of her frustration at being cooped up in Cape Francois,
surrounded by soldiers. She takes on Clara as a flirtatious alter ego, asking Burr if he remembers
“that Clara you once loved?” (Secret History 29). From there, the rest of the letter presents the
plot of Secret History in condensed form, with Clara serving as a lens through which to view
Leonara. Clara's invention marks Sansay's entrance into literary circles.
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while often minimizing the sisters' mutual relationship. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard
Tennenhouse note how early American novels, including Sansay's, map the New World in line
with the Gothic novel, arguing that through their similarity to captivity narratives and their
attention to the “problem of population,” such novels imagine a cosmopolitan community rather
than the national one of British fiction during the same period (668). Gretchen Woertendyke
attends to the tension between the Secret History's simultaneous generic classifications as private
correspondence and roman à clef intended for public consumption, arguing that the novel's
power lies in its interplay of genres as well as its “spectacle[s] of horror” of both Clara's abusive
marriage and the racial violence of the revolution (258).
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon argues that Sansay's apparent focus on “elite, white domestic
relations against the backdrop of warfare over colonial race slavery” serves as an “astute analysis
of the relations of production and social reproduction that stand at the core of colonial politics”
(78). Matt Clavin attends to the didactic purposes behind narratives of the Haitian revolution,
with both pro- and anti-slavery writers “engaged in blurring the line between nonfiction and
popular novelistic genres, in order to “startle, titillate, and frighten readers” while also
“inform[ing] them of either the benefits or the horrors likely to accompany abolition” (3).
Michael Drexler historically situates Secret History, arguing that the text reflects the violently
redefined categories of freedom which emerged in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. He also
provides extensive historical background on Leonara Sansay's friendship and romance with
Aaron Burr, and details how Secret History both grew out of and complicated Sansay's real-life

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12

correspondence and experiences in revolutionary Haiti .
Like Wollstonecraft and Montagu's, Sansay's letters both serve as pedagogical tools for
educating her readership and as an expression of the anxieties inherent in the pedagogical project
that relies so heavily on the rhetoric of the readable female body and its implication in a
patriarchal system for its authority. With the construction of Clara, Sansay overtly splits her
authorial voice over two distinct characters. This device allows each of Sansay's personae to
relate to each other pedagogically, reflecting roles as teacher and student onto one another.
Neither of these personae are mothers within the plot of the novel, yet Mary takes on a maternal
role towards Clara, through their sororal one, educating her to the proper decorum of married
life. If Mary takes on a maternal role as pedagogue to Clara, then Clara herself, through the three
letters in her own voice, complicates Mary's attempted pedagogy, returning it to Mary in a
revised form and once again casting the latter as the student, in a educational revision akin to that
Mary Montagu undertakes when she recasts the Abbe Conti as her student. In the process, Clara's
reversal uncovers both women's anxiety as powerful educators and powerless victims within the
domestic sphere. In this, Sansay's text fits into the same paradigm as Montagu's and
Wollstonecraft's. However, in the protagonists' complicated maternal/sororal relationship lies the
important difference. By making both of her protagonists childless, Sansay de-emphasizes their
maternal embodiment in favor of their pedagogical relationship to each other. Each sister is
periodically cast as a child and a student of the other, creating a mutual, metaphorical kind of
12

For more extensive background and context on the Haitian Revolution, as well as British and
American female travel writers' responses to slavery, see Michael Drexler's “Brigands and Nuns:
The Vernacular Sociology of Collectivity after the Haitian Revolution;” Moira Ferguson's
Subject to Others, pg. 3-26 and 209-248; Robert Blair St. George's Possible Pasts, esp. Peter
Hulme's “Postcolonial Theory and Early America: An Approach from the Caribbean.” pg 33-48;
and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's This Violent Empire, pg. 1-46, 250-290, and 365-412.
50

motherhood that is constructed through their sororal relationship rather than their embodied
maternity.
Yet this metaphorical motherhood is not created by completely devaluing the female
body. On the contrary, especially after Mary learns of the horrific domestic abuse Clara suffered
at St. Louis' hands, the sisters become progressively closer, both physically and emotionally.
Mary professes fervent admiration for Clara's intelligence, her beauty, and her physical form,
crying out in her relief at their reunion after the latter's escape from her husband that she “had
held that truant girl to [her] heart and ha[d] forgotten whilst embracing her all the reproaches
[she] intended to make” (152). This homosocial affection is offered as an antidote to the
damaging male attentions of St. Louis, granting a romantic connotation to the sister's already
complex relation. If the first two texts of this study exhibited the tensions of maternity and
pedagogy as played out on the female body, so that the pedagogy each author was able to express
to others was undermined by her contested relations to her own body, Leonara Sansay offers a
two-body solution to this maternal anxiety by splitting herself into two narrative personae.
Rather than remaining a self-contained and self-identical narrative presence, Leonara Sansay,
through the narrative device of splitting herself into two bodies, interrogates what it means to be
a pedagogue, a mother and finally, a woman. At the level of plot, she grants Mary and Clara an
alternate domestic arrangement between women, one which invokes sisterly, maternal,
pedagogical, and, finally, romantic models. On a meta-narrative level, Sansay's self-duplication
serves as a pedagogical lesson to her readership, providing an example of the development of
satisfying personal relations between women that extend beyond the bounds of maternity,
suggesting the self-reflexivity and flexibility possible when viewing oneself through the lens of a

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fictional other.
The very first letter of the novel begins by uniting the sisters through a maternal
metaphor, in the opening description of the sisters' arrival by ship, which privileges Mary's
bodily reactions, as she suffers “horribly from sea-sickness, heat and confinement” (61). When
she feels well enough to venture on deck, she glories in the “profound tranquillity of the ocean,
the uninterrupted view, the beautiful horizon,” and wishes to unite herself with these assorted
beauties by “build[ing] a dwelling on the bosom of the waters, where, sheltered from the storms
that agitate mankind, [she] should be exposed to those of heaven only.” Woertendyke notes the
unsettling maternal connotations of this opening image, which works to “animate[] the violence
of totalizing forms of history” (9) by depicting the contested site of a ship carrying returning
slave owners to the very place of the slave revolt through a “metaphor of maternal warmth and
comfort.” Elizabeth Maddock Dillon likewise makes note of this passage as setting up an
“incongruity of experiential registers” which expands hyperbolically from this opening moment
until asserting itself in “scenes of bayoneted bodies interspersed with accounts of blushing
glances exchanged at balls” (28).
While the maternal metaphor is undercut by the unsettling relationship to colonial power
it overlooks, it is also bolstered by the responsibilities of the sororal relationship. Mary
introduces us to the fortune of her sister, who “repents every day having so precipitately chosen a
husband...and I foresee that she will be wretched” (61). In light of this likelihood, Mary is
obliged to follow her sister's fortunes, effectively turning away from the maternal promise the
ocean holds out for her, and instead taking up the maternal role towards her sister herself. If
Clara will be “wretched,” Mary promises to be there for her, sacrificing her own friends, fortune,

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and possibly happiness for her betterment.
If Sansay begins by casting Mary in a maternal role, that maternity in the absence of
children is sanctioned throughout the text by her self-confident pedagogical attempts on other
mothers. Like Wollstonecraft and Montagu, Mary's satirical, and at times horrified, depictions of
local mothering practices are written to a single correspondent, but, in being published, serve as a
wider social warning against mothering one's own children ineffectively. Yet unlike those
authors, Mary is not empowered to speak out against local practices by virtue of her own
maternity. Quite the reverse, as her confidence in making these judgments grants her efficacy as
a pedagogue, allowing Sansay to construct the figure of the pedagogue as a childless mother, and
implying that there could be more than one way to accrue power over education. In a passage on
the Creole women's sexual mores, Mary casts the baneful effect on young women in specifically
educational terms, bemoaning how “female virtue is blasted in the bud by the contagious
influence of example” (96), with every young girl eager to throw off the social shackles imposed
on her in a single state, and take up the licentiousness she sees represented in her mother's
behavior.
Here, she sounds very like Mary Wollstonecraft in her indictment of the Swedish women
who nip their children in the bud through overdressing. Both authors suggest that the residents of
Haiti and Sweden, respectively, share a similarly inappropriate fixation on the bodies of their
children, which serves to enfeeble both their own and their children's minds. However, unlike
Wollstonecraft, Mary places the blame for this state of affairs not only on the mothers who abuse
their own educational prerogative, but even more so on the husbands who do not allow their
wives proper dignity, and hence obviate their possibility to serve as positive behavioral models.

53

The Creole men, she contends, “seek only the gratification of their sensual appetites” and hence
minimize the women into mere “enchanting...ministers of pleasure,” (96) a diminishment which,
while privileging the body, evacuates the heart from both the lustful man and the coquettish
woman. A thinking, feeling man, in distinction, would “view[] in woman the beneficent creature
who nourished him with her milk, and watched over his helpless infancy.” While the right sort of
man would be able to see the woman's function as a nurturing educator informing her body,
rather than allowing that body to overwhelm the educational possibility, Sansay, through Mary,
warns female readers of the dangers of men willfully misreading their bodies, casting them
simply as objects to satisfy male desires. Once again the relationship between the protagonists
stands in relief against this danger, as Sansay sets up the sisters to educate each other on their
concepts of embodiment, sexuality, and responsibility while avoiding the potential violence of
the male gaze.
The tale of Madame C provides an example of this male violence within the supposedlysafe confines of the heterosexual home. As Clavin points out, the rise of the Gothic novel
coincided with publication of historical and biographical documents about the Haitian revolution,
with many authors taking advantage of this temporal connection to turn Gothic conventions to
task in attracting readers. In this tradition, Sansay “borrowed and mimicked these conventions
not only 'to furnish an awful, yet practical lesson,' but also 'to excite and gratify a laudable
curiosity'” (Clavin 5). Through this borrowing, Sansay, as in the tale of Madame C,
pedagogically builds on her readers' pre-existing knowledge while playing on their emotions in
order to reward curiosity as it is created, directing attention to the particular ills of female
embodiment and power. The story is thus: Madame C discovers her husband, in her absence, has

54

turned over his property to his new Creole mistress. He then sets up housekeeping with the
mistress, retracting his financial support from his family and hence leaving Madame C and her
daughter, Clarissa, to starve. Despite embarrassment and physical want, Madame C remains
stoic, unwilling to ask her friends for assistance, only “seeking consolation in the bosom of her
daughter” (114). Eventually, a Frenchman falls in love with Clarissa and presents his case to her
mother, who, though sympathetic, is unwilling to expose her daughter to further poverty. The
man addresses himself to Clarissa's father, who despite lavishing riches on his mistress, refuses
to provide Clarissa with a dowry. The mother, moved by Clarissa's “tears, her sighs, and the
ardent prayers of her lover” (115) finally consents to their marriage. In true Gothic style,
however, Clarissa is struck by a fever only ten days after the ceremony, and although her new
groom rushes to her father's house for succor, he is turned away with indifference. The mother
and son-in-law between them lack the money to pay a physician, and can only “h[a]ng over her
in all the bitterness of anguish” (115) until she dies.
At the moment of this mother's greatest distress, and greatest helplessness, Mary
reemerges, directing her readers' attention through her own emotional intensity and bodily
immediacy, dwelling on how she's “held this disconsolate mother to my breast; my tears have
mingled with hers....she wishes only for the moment that will put a period to her existence, when
she fondly hopes she may be again united to her daughter” (115). Here, the only possible
expression of maternity left Madame C is her own death, which would allow her renewed
communication with her daughter through a reenactment of the violence visited upon that
daughter. In a moment of intensely personal, politically charged exhortation, Mary urges her
readers to consider the rule behind this unfortunate woman's example: “How terrible is the fate

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of a woman thus dependent on a man who has lost all sense of justice, reason, or humanity; who,
regardless of his duties, or the respect he owes society, leaves his wife to contend with all the
pains of want, and sees his child sink to an untimely grave, without stretching forth a hand to
assist the one or save the other!” Since there can be no guarantee against anyone losing their
sense of “justice, reason, or humanity,” the danger of being thus terribly dependent is always
extant. One could just as easily drop the latter half of the sentence: “How terrible is the fate of a
woman thus dependent on a man.” While Wollstonecraft and Montagu express their anxiety over
their implication within such a patriarchal system in their letters, Leonara Sansay attacks this
terrible dependency directly through fiction, by splitting herself into parallel narrative personae
and hence obviating, through their more-salutary relations to one another, the need for a
patriarchal marriage structure.
The letters of Secret History are addressed to Aaron Burr, who in real life had been
Leonara Sansay's former lover, and in the world of the novel seems to have been Mary's,
although the conditions of the latter relationship are never graced with any name more specific
than that of “friend.” Indeed, Clara also has her “special friend” who recommended her marriage
to St. Louis, as the real-life Aaron Burr recommended Sansay's marriage, suggesting that Aaron
Burr, as a bridge between the fictional world and the historical one, has also been doubled to
match Sansay's own self-duplication. Despite this romantic attachment on the part of each sister,
the most structurally remarkable, and seemingly satisfying, marriage plot is that between the
sisters themselves. When writing to Aaron Burr, Mary reminds him of the gratitude she bears
him for rescuing her from painful circumstances, when, “an orphan without friends, without
support,” she had been “separated from [her] sister from [her] infancy” (79). Instead of the love

56

of that sister, Mary had been “cast on the world without an asylum,” in the depths of which
despair, she met Burr who, as Mary sentimentally exclaims, “raised [her]--soothed [her] and
“whispered peace to [her] lacerated breast!” Furthermore, his intervention reunited the sisters at
the moment of Clara's marriage, and in so doing “procured for [Mary] a home not only
respectable, but in which all the charms of fashionable elegance, all the attractions of pleasure
are united.” Here, Mary fervently thanks Burr for granting her with a home in which she can see
no fault, quite like a lovestruck bride overjoyed at the security with which her new groom
provides her. However, Burr does not take the role of the groom in this arrangement. Rather, he
serves as a placeholder which unites the sisters in a domestic arrangement, superimposing Clara
over the place of the groom, in a pattern which structurally echoes marriage.Through Burr's
activity, Clara is put into a position of pedagogical power over Mary, able to grant her the
security of a stable home and a loving partner.
While Clara's pedagogical potential over Mary is latent, based on her structural role
relative both to Burr and to her own husband, Mary's attempts to educate Clara are overt and
specific, often obscuring Clara's alternate pedagogy while also giving it its sanction, in happily
accepting the proffered home. Yet despite the “intoxicating scenes of ever-varying amusement”
and the “incense of adulation,” which Mary experiences in her new home, Clara is as wretched
as Mary had predicted. This prevents Mary's own happiness, but also provides her the
opportunity for a pedagogical remonstrance. Since Clara has been “accustomed from her infancy
to enjoy the sweets of opulence,” Mary bemoans the expectations thus created, giving Clara “a
bosom to which peace is a stranger” (79). As Mary remarks in an earlier letter, “nothing amuses
her,” and she “seems to exist only in the recollection of past happiness” (63). Here, Mary sounds

57

like a concerned teacher or parent summing up the psychological blocks to a student's progress.
Though Clara remains silent and dissatisfied, Mary recognizes this petulance to arise from the
depth of Clara's aversion to her husband, speculating on “how painful her intercourse with him”
must be, since “her elegant mind, stored with literary acquirement, is lost to him” (64). Mary
recognizes Clara's intellectual potential, which is currently rendered impotent by St. Louis'
disinterest. Despite these potential gifts, Mary blames the previous pedagogical attempts on
Clara, by her unnamed friend, for leaving her without self-sufficiency, requiring Mary’s own
guidance to support Clara's spirits and bring her latent intellectual talents to the fore. Here, Mary
asserts herself as a pedagogical authority over Clara, thereby placing herself in a maternal role
relative to her.
If this pedagogical project seeks to make apparent the anxiety underlining women's roles
as mothers and teachers, true to form Mary's own pedagogy is anxiously returned upon her
through the text of Clara's letters. While the grand majority of the letters comprising Secret
History are written in Mary's voice, three remarkable letters from Clara, written while in hiding
after her escape from her husband, serve to reverse the pedagogical direction which has
predominated. In the first, and most extended, of these letters, Clara provides a lesson of the
particular circumstances of her escape as well as the generalized conditions of violence which
ensured its necessity. Clara recognizes that Mary must have misread her hopeless dissatisfaction
with her marriage as petulance, since she now admits she presented an edited version of her
sorrows, in order to “spare you [Mary] the anguish of lamenting sorrows which you could not
alleviate” (137). Here, Clara reveals that all along she has been training Mary by redirecting her
vision, unwilling to provide her with information that would be beyond her capacity. Now,

58

deciding that the time is ripe for further education, Clara tells the whole story, including the
places where she protected Mary from unpropitious secrets. St. Louis, Clara reveals, “has treated
[her] with the most brutal violence—this you never knew, nor many things which passed in the
loneliness of my chamber, where, wholly in his power, I could only oppose to his brutality my
tears and my sighs.” Like Madame C, Clara is dependent, and can do nothing but bemoan her
fate, although, unlike Madame C's overburdened stoicism, she promptly places the blame on St.
Louis' unconquerable jealousy and unreasonable demands. Clara recasts her lassitude in light of
this secret violence as frustrated resignation, rather than childish petulance or incomplete
education, as she had been taught to consider the marriage-bond as sacred, and “recoiled with
horror from the idea of breaking it.”
She goes on to trace for Mary the specifics of her shift in understanding, and the rationale
by which her decision was not only logically consistent, but necessary and responsible. The night
before her departure, she asserts, St. Louis “came home in a transport of fury, dragged [her] from
[her] bed, said it was his intention to destroy [her], and swore that he would render [her] horrible
by rubbing aqua-fortis in [her] face” (138). Clara is struck insensible with the violence of this
threat, able to do nothing but consider how best to escape this “monster.” Her cognitive process,
however, is disrupted by a vivid scene of sexual abuse painted in intimately painful detail for
Mary's education: “I was roused by his caresses, or rather by his brutal approaches, for he always
finds my person provoking, and often, whilst pouring on my head abuse which would seem
dictated by the most violent hatred, he has sought in my arms gratification which should be
solicited with affection, and granted to love alone” (139). While Clara is willing to tolerate
emotional incompatibility and even mental abuse in order to maintain her belief in the sanctity of

59

marriage, she is unwilling to allow St. Louis free rein over her body. Rather, she asserts her
power over her own bodily affects as well as her own pedagogical power by choosing, on
rational consideration, to leave St. Louis the moment he trespasses on those boundaries, as well
as providing Mary with the logical progression of her decision. Clara then involves Mary in the
production of this knowledge, urging her to “recollect my unusual sadness that day; for well do I
remember the kind efforts you made to divert me.” Here, she plays on their shared memory to
encourage Mary to recast her own indifference, explaining why Mary's pedagogical attempts
couldn't succeed without full knowledge. Furthermore, she recognizes and rewards Mary's
emotional investment in her happiness, assuring her that “my heart was breaking at the idea of
being separated from you,” but confident that, with the full spectrum of facts before her, Mary
can't help but approve her choice to get out from the terrible condition of dependence exacted on
her sex.
Clara's pedagogy, reversing Mary's earlier authority, is in fact effective. Even with Mary's
self-defined “fine sentiments of correctness and propriety, and the duty of content and
resignation,” she agrees with Clara upon rational, if painful, reflection, that “never was there
anything more directly opposite than the soul of Clara, and that of the man to whom she was
united. Their tempers, their dispositions, were absolutely incompatible” (136). The final
consideration to convince her of the need to support Clara, however, is her own affection. Unable
to think of Clara, abandoned and pining among strangers, Mary exclaims sentimentally, “Ah!
No, she is twined round my heart, and I love her with more than a sister's affection.” This
romantic declaration echoes the earlier classification of the marriage-like structure of the
respectable home Mary is overjoyed to build with Clara, albeit in a higher emotional key. If the

60

women were originally reunited through the men's double imposition, in the persons of Burr and
St. Louis, Mary's exclamation suggests a possibility for a deeper emotional connection on the
basis of their shared escape from those men.
Writing to her sister to plead for more information, Mary demands of Clara whether her
“heart require[s] the affectionate sympathy it has been accustomed to receive from mine[.] Can
you live without me? Without me who have followed you, and love you with an affection so
tender? Dearest Clara, speak and I will fly to you!” (137). Here, sororal affection is nearly
overtaken by a sympathy that sounds much more romantic than filial, with Mary closing her
letter as “more than a sister” but a “friend, who loves you, who adores your virtues, and who
pardons...your faults.” If St. Louis has invalidated his claims on his wife's affections by abusing
her body, then Mary advertises her own suitability to fill his role by her adoration of that very
body, as well as, inseparably, the mind that belongs to it. By now understanding and
complementing one another's pedagogical projects, Mary suggests that she and Clara, as women,
can be better insurers of one another's comfort, affection, and peace than any man could be to
either.
In the final letter of the text, Mary tells Burr the touching tale of the sisters' reunion, and
their plans to remain in one another's society, in terms that privilege both their complicated
sororal/romantic relations, and the educational prerogative on which that relationship is based. In
describing the moment of their meeting, Mary touchingly says she has “held that truant girl to
my heart, and have forgotten while embracing her all the reproaches I intended to make” (152).
She notes her physical attraction to Clara by rhetorically wondering “who can behold her and not
believe that she is all goodness,” yet that subtle physical cue is quickly inundated by a panegyric

61

on Clara's astonishing mental characteristics: “Whatever subject may engage her attention, she
seizes intuitively on what is true.....her memory, surer than records, perpetuates every
occurrence. She accumulates knowledge while she laughs and plays.” Mary continues to wax
poetic in this strain for nearly a paragraph longer, overcome by an attraction that privileges the
superior efforts of a star pupil while simultaneously recognizing her own indebtedness.
Clara is here cast as both a beautiful and desirable woman, and as a winsome child,
complicating, yet again, Mary's relationship to her. When Mary assures Clara that she bears her
“more than a sister's love,” the excess of the humble “more” denotes a complex of relations from
sororal to homosocial which collectively offer the potential for a new kind of relationship
altogether. In the final paragraphs of the text, Mary assures Burr that, although when Clara fled
her husband's house she was “alone and friendless,” with Mary's endeavors she can now “enjoy[]
a delightful tranquillity” (154). Rather than asserting power over Clara, as her heterosexual
marriage had done to such baneful effect, Mary now claims her own usefulness to Clara in a way
that simultaneously humbles Mary, deepens her emotional attachment to her sister, and grants her
a sense of purpose. Concluding the letters with the sisters' plans to return to Philadelphia and set
up housekeeping together, the text offers up their homosocial domestic union as a possible
alternative to the gendered violence, both racial and domestic, which plagues women.
The novel privileges the role of women as educators by dint of their biological capacity
for mothering, yet the novel's central characters relate to each other in pedagogical terms in the
absence of children of their own. While a unidirectional pedagogy might risk categorizing the
receiving sister as a child, granting sole power to the pedagogue, the eruption of Clara's own
voice in her letters addressed to Mary serves instead to make the power relations recursive.

62

Furthermore, the sentimental and instructional language often directed toward children is
intensified by exclamations of emotional reliance, self-sacrifice, and physical attraction which is
imbued with a romantic model. Taken together, Secret History, through Sansay's doubling in the
characters of Mary and Clara, productively destabilizes the power dynamics of that relation to
open the more conducive possibility of homosocial domestic arrangements between women
which privilege both their affection and their mutual potential for educating one another.

63

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