(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer and philosopher.
Wollstonecraft’s passion for self-education ran through her life like a “red thread” (Pedersen 2010, 31). She read non-fiction widely, wrote about the education of women, and translated books in two languages—which she had also taught herself (Sireci 2018, 284). Having succeeded in her own education, she encouraged her peers to do likewise, demonstrating how they could use books more effectively (Pedersen 2010, 35).
Sireci sets the scene: “In eighteenth-century print culture, there was much talk of impressionable female readers and flocks of young female writers who imitated literary fads” (2018). Wollstonecraft argued that other, male, writers were also “swayed by impulse and emotion, and sometimes by powerful forebears, but unlike the naïve young female characters appearing everywhere, they have the power to impose their thinking upon others” (p. 259). They are “weak vessels”, “serving as passive channels through which linguistic and cultural codes flow without resistance” (pp. 259, 248 (quoted in)). Wollstonecraft suggested “that while a particular text might be a reflection of an author’s passions and weaknesses, these passions and weaknesses are in turn symptoms of cultural influences, which include other texts” (p. 245). We are what we read.
Wollstonecraft’s arguments for this point were themselves an example of how critical reading should be conducted. She succeeds in this by “developing a self-reflexive mode of reading that uncovers and exploits the ironies of its own critical foundations” (Palumbo 2011). In her work entitled Rights of Woman, for example, she (Sireci 2018, 245):
organized a large amount of material, which she calls “illustrations.” Upon a broad canvas of over 452 pages…Wollstonecraft closely reads and compares passages within and between books, inserts text of various lengths, places supporting material in footnotes, and creates lengthy parodies of well-known works. These techniques allow her to sustain debates with a number of authors simultaneously…
She assumed that the author’s state of mind was reflected in their work (ibid.). Through close, critical reading, analysis of author intent, and her own evaluative criteria, she conducted political and social literary criticism (p. 265). She demonstrated by example how rhetorical analysis could contribute to improving the political situation of women (p. 247).
Novels, on the other hand, often hindered women’s political self-realisation. Wollstonecraft frequently denounced imaginative literature as tending (Wollstonecraft 2009, 137):
to make women the creatures of sensation…their character is thus formed in the mould of folly during the time they are acquiring accomplishments, the only improvement they are excited, by their station in society, to acquire. This overstretched sensibility naturally relaxes the other powers of the mind, and prevents intellect from attaining that sovereignty which it ought to attain…
She urged women to reject the “stale tales … retailed in sentimental jargon”, and read to challenge the authority of conventional knowledge (Palumbo 2011). A clue that this criticism of novels was more nuanced than it may appear is that Wollstonecraft wrote and published novels herself. Her argument was that women’s lack of education combined with their restricted social roles left them particularly vulnerable to the sentimentalism popular fiction espoused, and naïvely accepting of what these books implied about the world. This sentimentality—a “romantic twist of the mind”—occurs when women, “subjected by ignorance to their sensations”, are only taught to look for happiness through love and refine their sensual feelings (Wollstonecraft 2009, 281). This tends to corrupt their taste (ibid.). The credulity of these women stemmed from their inability to read critically, rendering them unable to observe that popular fiction inculcated and strengthened harmful gender-stereotypes. Wollstonecraft intended her novels to avoid both of these risks, and provide progressive female exemplars.
Wollstonecraft cautioned against the reading of popular novels so that women would read something superior: books which both improve their understanding and regulate their imagination (pp. 282–3). This passionate belief that the lot of the disenfranchised can be improved in this way continues to resound. Wollstonecraft reminds us that unreflective reading can have significantly negative effects on our character without us necessarily being aware. At the least we should ask whether the stereotypes—the linguistic and cultural codes—popularised in the fiction we read are accurate or teaching us prejudice. We protect ourselves from these harmful influences and learn how to benefit from texts by practising critical analysis.