Who is at the helm? Mary Wollstonecraft’s contribution to the romantic construct of the imagination

Abstract

In my essay I pursue the line of inquiry which has recently been proposed by scholars who have reconstructed the historical context of Wollstonecraft’s feminism to bring into sharper focus what can be seen as consistent motives of her thought. Starting out from the thesis of Barbara Taylor that Wollstonecraft’s feminism was deeply rooted in the egalitarian theology of Radical Protestantism (Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the feminist imagination Cambridge University Press, 2003) I will argue that her brief career shows how, in her analysis of the hierarchy of the cognitive faculties, first she redefined reason by ascribing to it the power of intuitive apprehension, and eventually she replaced reason with imagination as the distinctive attribute of the human mind. Positioning herself—through Price’s theology and moral philosophy—in the Platonic and pagan as well as Christian Neo-Platonic traditions, she arrived several years before Wordsworth or Coleridge not only at an intuition of the creativity of human thinking but at a definition of the imagination as the supreme mental faculty. As a result, in some emotionally highly charged passages of her Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), she constructed her own version of early Romanticism in England. These passages can be read side by side with passages of epiphany in Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude as the most powerful examples of the imagination leading through an investment in the quotidian to an apprehension of immortality.