Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman

When Maria finishes her retrospective narrative and the main narrative resumes, her priorities significantly shift. With her child dead, she no longer has a strong incentive to leave the asylum, and she bonds ever more closely with Darnford. Wollstonecraft’s decision to depict a married, female character freely choosing to begin a sexual relationship with a man who is not her husband was controversial and later led to many critics rejecting the novel for portraying adultery in a sympathetic light. Notably, however, Maria only enters into a sexual relationship with Darnford after she symbolically takes him as her new husband. According to the freedom that Wollstonecraft espouses for women, Maria should be able to separate from a husband who has mistreated and disappointed her and then freely choose a new partner. Maria makes this argument herself during the lawsuit, asking “if I am unfortunately united to an unprincipled man, am I for ever to be shut out from fulfilling the duties of a wife and mother?” (144). Notably, Maria here frames sexuality as the duty of a wife and connects it to the possibility of bearing children; by doing so, she tries to present her relationship with Darnford in a way that is as socially palatable as possible.

However, Maria chooses badly, and in a sense, her desire to unite herself with Darnford represents a lack of freedom: She is unable to picture a life outside of a conventional, romantic narrative. After Maria takes Darnford as her lover, the narrator interjects to muse that “we see what we wish, and make a world of our own” (138), highlighting that Maria’s happiness with Darnford is false and doomed to be short-lived. When Jemima finally signals her willingness to help Maria escape, Maria is hesitant to leave the asylum until she knows that Darnford is also going to be liberated; she comments that “liberty has lost its sweets” (139), revealing her regression from independence to subordination and romantic dependency. Whether for George or Darnford, Maria’s experience of romantic love is a form of insanity that keeps her confined and imprisoned.

The scene in which Maria and Jemima do leave the asylum together sets the stage for Jemima’s role as a hero in the final section of the novel. In Gothic literature, a young heroine would typically be liberated by a man, but here it is another woman who guides and leads her to safety. When Maria is threatened by another inmate, she “throw[s] her arms round Jemima, cried ‘save me!’” (139). In this interaction, Jemima functions as a substitute for the traditionally masculine figure rescuing a delicate heroine, implying that other women may be more trustworthy and useful. The relative ease of the escape scene (despite all of the delays and hesitations, the two women encounter very few obstacles) further reveals the symbolic function of the asylum as a representation of cultural expectations and social conditioning. If women can challenge social expectations, they can change their lives readily, but their desire to conform to models of femininity holds them back.

However, those social expectations can also shape the experiences of women once they break with conventions. Wollstonecraft wryly criticizes how elite society would often turn a blind eye to women’s extramarital affairs if they conformed, on the surface, to their expected roles. Maria complains that “had she remained with her husband, practising [sic] insincerity, and neglecting her child to manage an intrigue, she would still have been visited and respected” (140). By breaking with George and living openly with Darnford, Maria acts with more honesty and integrity than many women around her, but she is nonetheless shamed for it. Wollstonecraft’s investment in critiquing the social ostracism faced by women who violate social norms may stem from the isolation and unhappiness she faced after openly engaging in two romantic relationships with men to whom she was not married; before beginning a romantic relationship with William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft openly engaged in romantic relationships with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay. The latter relationship resulted in the birth of her first daughter, Fanny Imlay, and also culminated in Wollstonecraft’s attempted suicide after the relationship collapsed. Writing about extramarital relationships, illegitimate children, and suicide were not merely intellectual exercises for Wollstonecraft, although these plot events did allow her to further expound on her political and philosophical beliefs. She had first-hand knowledge, through her lived experiences and those of women close to her, of the emotional and psychological toll that these experiences could exact.

Some of this first-hand perspective is voiced assertively when Maria presents her viewpoint during the adultery lawsuit. In England, at the time Wollstonecraft was writing, husbands could petition for divorce on the grounds of adultery, although wives could not. The first step to initiate divorce proceedings was for the husband to sue the man with whom his wife had engaged in the extramarital affair. In the novel, the lawsuit reflects the idea of Maria’s non-personhood because the dispute becomes a contest between two men. Maria is essentially treated as a piece of property that has been illegitimately seized by someone lacking legal ownership.

By inserting herself into the trial, especially in light of Darnford’s absence, Maria insists that she has a right to a say in the narrative of her marriage and the events surrounding its dissolution. For example, it makes no legal difference that George was unfaithful to her long before she began her relationship with Darnford, but Maria brings her narrative of events to the trial in much the same way as she protected and preserved her narrative by writing it down in the asylum. She wants it clearly known and recorded that “I can prove repeated infidelities which I overlooked or pardoned” (142) since these facts reflect her suffering and the legitimacy of her decision to eventually end her marriage.

Maria also boldly and unashamedly asserts that she was not passively seduced by Darnford; rather, she chose a new partner for herself, based on her own desires, when her first partner proved unsuitable. She states that “I deemed, and ever shall deem, myself free” (144), invoking the somewhat radical defense that she had the agency to choose when her marriage was over, even if it had not legally been deemed to be so. Maria’s open defense of this course of action shows Wollstonecraft pushing her arguments about women’s agency and independence to some of the more socially extreme limits of her time: Not only should women not be subject to patriarchal control, she argues, but they should also have the freedom to choose and change partners should they desire to do so.

While Wollstonecraft was willing to represent this fairly radical argument in her novel, she does not seem to have been able to imagine a turn of events in which it could be realized. The judge, representing the forces of law, government, and the established order, refuses to countenance Maria’s argument; moreover, he specifically links her claims to seditious and politically radical demands for individual rights and freedoms. In his ruling, the judge sneers that “we did not want French principles in public or private life” (143), alluding to the demands for individual liberty that arose during the French Revolution and became linked, for proponents of the status quo, to chaos, violence, and the collapse of social order.

George’s victory in the lawsuit shows the unlikelihood of women gaining sympathy from the established political order. However, the personal betrayal that Wollstonecraft seems to have intended for Maria to encounter is perhaps more devastating. While the notes are fragmentary and limited, in all of the possible plot outlines that survive, Maria is eventually betrayed and abandoned by Darnford. This plot reflects the foreshadowing and the development of Darnford’s character as feckless and unreliable; it may also have biographical origins since Darnford shares some similarities with Gilbert Imlay, who abandoned Wollstonecraft.

In any event, this plot development serves to shift the novel’s focus from what initially seems like an argument for more equitable relationships between men and women to a scathing indictment of all romantic relationships. If we assume that however Wollstonecraft might have concluded the novel, she was going to depict the breakdown of the relationship between Maria and Darnford, we are faced with a plot in which not a single romantic relationship achieves any type of long-term success or happiness. A romantic relationship that begins in an asylum is, as its setting suggests, a delusion or a fancy, not something that can last or endure. More tragically, in many of the possible endings that Wollstonecraft noted, Maria seems to lack the resilience or fortitude to move past this second romantic disappointment, particularly since she has sacrificed all of her social credibility and reputation to pursue a new life with Darnford. Wollstonecraft describes Maria’s sentiments as she prepares to attempt suicide: “nothing remained but an eager longing to forget herself—to fly from the anguish she endured to escape from thought—from this hell of disappointment” (147), conjuring up a vivid sense of Maria’s pain, disappointment, and loneliness.

Notably, the more extended possible ending that does survive offers some hints of optimism, but that optimism is found in a vision of women working together in the absence of men. In this fragmentary ending, Maria’s loss of her romantic idealism does lead to her attempting suicide, but she is saved by Jemima, who once again reprises the heroic role that would more traditionally be assigned to a masculine character. Jemima shows her considerable intelligence and agency in tracking down Maria’s daughter, suggesting that as an independent and working-class woman, she is better equipped to navigate the world and achieve her goals than Maria. Maria may have tried to rebel by relying on more conventional systems that have failed her, whereas Jemima simply takes life into her own hands and achieved better results. Jemima recounts how she “snatched [the child] from misery” (147), highlighting her active and autonomous approach to solving problems, in contrast to Maria’s passivity and reliance on emotions and verbalizations.

Considering the weight placed on the mother and child, and particularly the mother-daughter bond throughout the novel, it is convincing that Maria’s reunion with her child would revive her. Her collapse into dependence on Darnford is triggered by the news that her baby was dead, and once she gets her child back, she once again becomes the strong-willed and assertive woman who was determined to find freedom at the start of the novel. Maria’s final words in this conclusion are “the conflict is over! I will live for my child!” (148), showing that she resolves the conflict that drives the plot: how to abandon her romantic fantasies and find a way to meaningfully live in the world.

Jemima’s rescue of the child might redeem or symbolically offset the loss of her own pregnancies. It also knits the two women together into a non-normative family unit that offers a genuine and innovative alternative to the patriarchal and heterosexual family unit. If Jemima and Maria are going to raise the child together, they are radically reimagining what types of communities and families might exist, particularly given the class divide between the two women. Yet, in this ending, Maria ends up achieving the goals she was longing for at the start of the text: She is free, independent, and reunited with her child. Notably, Wollstonecraft only seems able to imagine this resolution in the absence of romantic, heterosexual relationships.