Mary A Fiction Essay

There are relatively few texts written by canonical authors in which the author herself describes as “artless” and plotless. Indeed, in her book Mary: A Fiction, Mary Wollstonecraft does just this, and asks readers not to view the text as a narrative one, but instead to shift their focus on the thinking powers of its protagonist (Mary 8). Wollstonecraft states that her protagonist will be different from the type normally found in sentimental texts, and while we will see that this is accurate, she does create a narrative in which the protagonist succumbs to many of the same trials that one would expect in sentimental literature (Mary 8). By doing so, Wollstonecraft wishes to create a familiar, sentimental text while subverting this text with a distinctly unsentimental character. While Mary: A Fiction is a distinct disavowal of sentimentality, it utilizes

However, the text describes Eliza and her character in great detail for roughly a chapter and a half, to the point where it’s relatively easy to forget this novel will be about Mary were it not for the short snippet in the first line of the book, stating, “Mary, the heroine of this story, was the daughter of Edward, who married Eliza” (Wollstonecraft, Mary 13). Notably, the text does not introduce us to Mary until much later, but it does immediately emphasize one thing: Mary is distinctly a product of her mother. As Shawn Lisa Maurer states in his examination of the novel, “Eliza exemplifies the type of passive, shallow woman whom Wollstonecraft would later dissect in the Rights of Woman—her prominent place at the beginning of the text testifies to her initial, and lasting, psychological effect upon her daughter” (Maurer 41). In essence, the reader is introduced to Eliza not solely because of any kind of chronological storytelling style, but because the shadow of Eliza looming over Mary is supposed to be in the reader’s