Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility

Wollstonecraft's public attitudes toward sensibility underwent the familiar shifts of a discipline during her lifetime: naive acceptance, critical rejection, mature return. In her youth she demonstrated a willingness to believe many of its myths, and she used its metaphors and discourses without much self-consciousness. The ethical discourse of sensibility dominated her early fictions. Midcareer Wollstonecraft turned a new critical, self-consciously feminist eye on sensibility. She then deployed the medical discourse of sensibility against the notion itself by insisting that the cultivation of sensibility created women who might be attractive to men but who were intellectual, psychological, and physical cripples. The last active years before her death marked a measured return to the creed of sensibility; she rehabilitated it in a form compatible to her own mature political beliefs. Yet Wollstonecraft's public documents reveal only half of the truth about her romance with the language of sensibility. They rightly suggest that it was tempestuous; they wrongly suggest that it was an on-again, off-again affair, an impression given by her flamboyant renunciation of sensibility in the Rights of Woman. In private correspondence Wollstonecraft never strayed too far from her lexicon of sensibility, presumably because she found no alternative way to describe herself and others. For twenty years her private vocabulary of self-assessment remained steadily affective, curiously repetitive, even oracular. This was not a discourse of analysis but of cultic participation; even when she did, very seldom, find fault with sensibility, it was from inside the belief system and was generally directed at an abuser of that system.