Mary Wollstonecraft and the feminist imagination is the most original, astute, and thoroughly researched work of Wollstonecraft criticism to appear in recent years. Since the 1960s the vast majority of scholars have read Wollstonecraft's corpus in feminist or gender-theoretical terms. Such studies have often been instructive, but Barbara Taylor's literary historicist approach is nonetheless a refreshing intervention at a time of methodological stalemate. Rightly insisting on the importance both of Rational Dissent and of the French Revolution in the development of Wollstonecraft's thought, she offers a fascinating re-conceptualization of the reason–feeling dichotomy that so often features in debates about women writers. She argues, instead, that we see in Wollstonecraft's work an alliance of reason and imagination. That alliance can only be understood when Wollstonecraft is properly situated in relation to the politico-philosophical framework of the late eighteenth century.
Following a detailed introduction, Taylor divides her book into two parts. The first, ‘Imagining women’, consists of three chapters. Taylor differentiates between ‘fantasy’, understood in eighteenth-century terms as pure irrationality, and ‘imagination’, which was seen as the essence of aesthetic genius, a means of creatively transforming sense impressions into visionary philosophy and works of art. With these new categories, Taylor eludes the gender stereotypes usually invoked by the reason–feeling dichotomy to offer keen insights into Wollstonecraft's intellectual relationship with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, alternately her source of inspiration and her bête noire. Using the idea of ‘imagination’ to reconcile seeming contradictions in notoriously ambiguous texts, she explains Wollstonecraft's imperfectly realized critique of Rousseau as a rejection of the male fantasy of ontological control. The final chapter in this section contends that Wollstonecraft's call for a ‘revolution in female manners’ is inseparable from her religious faith. Taylor argues that her egalitarian political principles and her ambivalent attitude to sensibility, both of which have received considerable critical attention, are best understood in terms of the democratic availability of divine grace and the attempt to define an authentic religious subjectivity respectively. She goes on to suggest that the erotic imagination is an essential component in Wollstonecraft's theology and can be usefully distinguished from the indiscriminate sensuality criticized in the Rights of woman. All of these arguments are cogent, persuasive, and meticulously researched.
The second much longer section, ‘Feminism and revolution’, considers Wollstonecraft's works in the contexts of British radicalism and Revolutionary Republicanism. Taylor shows how Wollstonecraft's perfectibilist expectations were curtailed by Robespierre's Terror and argues that contemporary images of an effeminate French aristocracy explain, to a large extent, the gender biases in her political writing. She develops the theme of a divided Wollstonecraftian self struggling with desires and fantasies which, depending on how they are directed, may lead to bliss or destruction. In this section, however, she considers that theme in terms of the gendered rhetoric of political radicalism, in which both personal and political demons are feminized, while good citizens and impulses are ‘manly’ or androgynous. She also assesses Wollstonecraft's evolving attitude to sexuality in terms of the French Enlightenment antagonism to Catholic sexual mores. She argues convincingly that Wollstonecraft's experience of revolutionary Paris results in claims for women's rights as citizens and sexual beings that are both more radical and more practical than those found in her Vindications. The epilogue, entitled ‘The fantasy of Mary Wollstonecraft’, charts her influence on the Owenite socialists of the nineteenth century, as well as famous feminists like George Eliot, Flora Tristan, and Olive Schreiner. Though Taylor's assumption that Wollstonecraft was generally vilified after her death until her rehabilitation by Second Wave feminists is somewhat debatable, the sense of Wollstonecraft as one of the foremothers of modern feminism (albeit a contentious one) is appropriately never far away.
Impressively, Taylor's historicist approach does not prevent her from taking a coherent feminist position in her analysis. On the contrary, she evinces comprehensive knowledge of constructionist and psychoanalytic theories of gender, which she brings to bear on her historicist methodology to define Wollstonecraft's particular brand of feminism. She takes the bold step of regarding history as a window into universal psychology. Historians opposed to theory may object to this psychoanalytic dimension, but Taylor is clearly aware that she occasionally steps into a methodological minefield and she navigates her way through it with aplomb. Her claims can verge on the sensational, but are never ill-founded. For example, the idea that the Vindication of the rights of woman is ‘so erotically preoccupied, so charged with sexual imagery, that at times it verges on the pornographic’, is certainly dramatic, but by no means out of keeping with Wollstonecraft's preoccupation with female sexual mores. The overall result is impressive. On the one hand, the reader accesses a rich seam of historical detail about the position of women in eighteenth-century Europe. On the other hand, as Taylor vividly re-constructs the forging of one woman's identity within that context, she makes a convincing case for the idea of gender as a social and cultural construct. Mary Wollstonecraft and the feminist imagination combines a pithy, engaging style with rigorous scholarship and sensitive textual analysis. Wollstonecraft's works spring to life in context and her feminist imagination, illuminated against Taylor's vibrant historical backdrop, emerges as a source of contemporary controversy and continuing inspiration.
