Heart of Agitation: Mary Wollstonecraft, Emotion, and Legal

Subjectivity

Kathryn Temple

The Eighteenth Century, Volume 58, Number 3, Fall 2017, pp. 371-382 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ecy.2017.0031

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/671648

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
 Heart of Agitation: Mary Wollstonecraft, Emotion,
and Legal Subjectivity

Kathryn Temple
Georgetown University

The language of enthusiasm, and of all those passions that strongly agitate the
soul, is naturally incoherent, and may appear even extravagant to those, who can-
not enter into the views of the speaker, or form an idea of what is passing in his
mind. . . . ​The imagination of a critick must, in respect of vivacity, be able to keep
pace with that of the authors, whom he assumes the privilege of judging.
—​­James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783)1

Like James Beattie, Mary Wollstonecraft references agitation at key moments.

Agitation was a heavily weighted word with both personal and political con-
notations, a word essential to understanding Wollstonecraft’s contribution not
only to feminist thought, but also to theories of legal subjectivity.2 When writ-
ing to Gilbert Imlay, for instance, upset by his inattentiveness, Wollstonecraft
announces that she “shall not attempt to give bent to the different emotions
which agitate my heart,”3 while in the opening pages of A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman (1792), she promises her readers that she does not mean “vio-
lently to agitate the contested question respecting the equality and inferiority
of the sex.”4 These disavowals of agitation (“I shall not attempt” seems a favor-
ite construction) may strike us as disingenuous. Did she ­really refuse the op-
portunity to “give bent to the different emotions which agitate my heart” when
she wrote her highly emotional letters to Imlay? She certainly focused on these
in many of the letters she sent him. Was she ­really refusing “violently to agi-
tate” questions of women’s equality in the Vindication, a document obsessed
with such questions? Such “softeners” can, of course, be read as efforts to pro-
duce a more reader-​­friendly text, to seduce readers into a false sense of security,
and to secure those readers to her cause. But they also operate as formal repre-
sentations of the operations of agitation in themselves. These sentences move
between disavowal and avowal, between the “not” and the “yes,” as if in them-
selves they cannot settle on one position. Agitation is then not something Woll-

The Eighteenth Century, vol. 58, no. 3 Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.
372 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

stonecraft is avoiding; it resides, albeit restlessly, in the space between her

disavowals and her introduction of the word into the text.
When read in the context of over two hundred years of critical attention,
such disavowals should strike us as prescient, as early efforts to calm not only
her contemporary critics, but also the many who were to write about her only
after her death. The question of Wollstonecraft’s agitation has been central to the
body of critique around her work since William Godwin first published the
Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798. There he
opined that Wollstonecraft “reasons little” (a remark Barbara Taylor refutes in
her account of Wollstonecraft’s intellectual life5) and placed his own masculin-
ized rational faculties against Wollstonecraft’s supposedly feminine emotional-
ity, the aspects of her that led him to call her a “female Werter.”6 Ironically, given
Wollstonecraft’s feminist agenda, Godwin’s Memoir seemed to shape much of
the purportedly feminist criticism through the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.7 Critics were
quick to pounce on the contrast between Wollstonecraft’s allegiance to reason
and what seemed a personal inability to control the passions. On the one hand,
as Taylor points out, Wollstonecraft is “usually depicted as an uncompromising
rationalist, a stern advocate of Reason’s rule over human affairs.”8 This “ratio-
nalist agenda,” of course, figures strongly in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
where she celebrated reason as the force that would lead to “the perfection of
our nature.”9 Her emphasis on reason there suggested to some critics that Woll-
stonecraft saw emotion as almost “counter-​­revolutionary,”10 and at times, she
surely did. On the other hand, Wollstonecraft’s tendency ­towards agitated de-
pression leading to suicide attempts, her strong (and, to some, embarrassing)
expressions of sexual and romantic desire, even her more positively viewed but
still heated claims of wonder and awe, all have come under fire as inconsistent
with her vigorous espousal of rationality as a way for women to escape gender
oppression.11
Recently such criticism has given way not only to serious efforts to under-
stand Wollstonecraft’s intellectual prose, but also to a focus on her emotionality
not as weakness, but as signifier. These critics suggest that we have taken Woll-
stonecraft’s agitation too literally, reading her works as offering direct conduits
to the heart rather than as mediated, literary texts subject to interpretation. Their
arguments recognize, perhaps without always fully articulating it, that Woll-
stonecraft’s agitation is highly aestheticized. We never receive unmediated or
direct access to her inner life: instead, she (and later Godwin) narrates her agita-
tion, providing us with various representations of it. This recognition allows us
to understand how Wollstonecraft amplifies—​­perhaps even ­celebrates—​­her ag-
itation rather than resisting it, using it to mark herself as different, interesting,
and powerful. In fact, Wollstonecraft both seemed to capitalize on the associa-
tion of genius and agitation and to have been instrumental in constructing the
relation. Although it was not until her last novel, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman
(1798), that she made the famous claim “the sentiments I have embodied”12
TEMPLE—WOLLSTONECRAFT, EMOTION, AND LEGAL SUBJECTIVITY 373

(and there, does she refer to what she’s doing in the novel, or to herself, or
both?), as early as the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she claimed to be “one
of those extraordinary women who rush[ing] in eccentrical directions out of
the orbit prescribed to their sex” are perhaps “male spirits, confined by mistake
in female forms.”13 For Wollstonecraft, claims of agitation may or may not have
indicated an internal emotional state, but most certainly revealed a rhetorical
move, one that at times amounts to an aesthetics of agitation.
This more recent criticism also reveals a gradual sharpening of focus and a
growing discomfort with the dismissal of Wollstonecraft as hopelessly con-
flicted, hopelessly emotional, or even mentally ill.14 To offer only one example,
Mary Favret has helped us understand Wollstonecraft’s emotionality as criti-
cally interesting rather than a gendered sign of inadequacy. In her essay on Let-
ters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), she
focuses on Wollstonecraft’s restless movements, resituating restlessness in a cul-
ture that associated movement with progress. As Favret notes, we find in Woll-
stonecraft “a condensed history of an age of upheaval, registered by bodies
continuously displaced.”15 Other recent work also registers Wollstonecraft’s
emotionality as of critical interest. As Cora Kaplan sums it up, what is “most
enduring but also most troubling [is] the aura of unreconciled emotion that hov-
ers around her shifting reputation. . . . ​She remains a restive presence.”16 Inter-
estingly, in these essays, critics have remade Wollstonecraftian agitation into a
positive force while weaving in evidence of the way her agitation has infected
all of her readers. The words “hovers,” “shifting,” “restive” from Kaplan’s essay,
the emphasis on restless, sometimes pointless movement in Favret: these are
moments that signify the importance of agitation as more than simple over-​
­
emotionality. Wollstonecraft’s agitation is finally receiving the attention it
deserves.
Sara Ahmed tells us that certain objects “become sticky, or saturated with af-
fect, as sites of personal or social tension.”17 In Wollstonecraft’s case, this “stick-
iness” seems to result from the contradictions discussed above. As Michael
Edson points out in his essay in this special issue, we tend to become uncom-
fortable, to seek explanations when our understanding or explanation of feel-
ings does not explain affects. Thus, our fascination with Wollstonecraft’s
emotional life: Wollstonecraft’s expressions of agitation in a context celebrating
rational thought have made her a “sticky object,” one who draws others to her
and draws out emotions in others. Part of what Wollstonecraft transmitted then
was dissonance, the lack of coherence indicated by a supposed split between
intellect and emotion. To the extent that critics have been fascinated by this dis-
sonance, they have made of her a cultural icon for feminism, discussing her in a
seemingly endless series of attempts to reconcile personality with ideology and
ideology with behavior. This stickiness is, of course, also related to the revolu-
tionary changes her work promulgated: as Monique Scheer points out in her
explanation of William Reddy’s work, “dissonance between feelings and
374 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

thoughts is just the kind of clash of practices that can generate personal, social,
and historical change.”18 Rather than conflicting with her politics, Wollstone-
craft’s agitation can be understood to inform the aesthetic/political nexus that
made her work so engaging. And when we place Wollstonecraft’s agitation in a
more precise historical context, we can see that she engaged a discourse in
which agitation made a political (and critical) statement of its own, particularly
in the legal context of her final, unfinished novella, Maria, where emotional and
political agitation were bound together to create a new form of legal
subjectivity.19
Positioning agitation conceptually in the history of emotion and in affect
theory can be an agitating process, but one that helps us understand Wollstone-
craft’s use of it as a brilliant device. The word shimmers with associations, hov-
ering between “affect” and “emotion,” located somewhere in the arena of what
Scheer calls “emotional practice.” Neglected in studies of emotion, “agitation”
may have been the ur-​­emotion, evidenced by the history of the word “emo-
tion,” which originated in French and was not commonly used as we use it
today until the 1830s. Prior to that, people spoke of “the passions” and “the
affections.” To the extent that the word “emotion” came to us (apparently
through Michel de Montaigne), it was not used to indicate a feeling state as it
does today, but instead denoted a “physical disturbance and bodily move-
ment . . . ; it could mean a commotion among a group of people . . . ​or a physi-
cal agitation of anything at all.”20 From René Descartes to David Hume and
Adam Smith, the word “emotion” “functioned . . . ​as an undefined and general
term for any kind of mental feeling or agitation.”21 So “emotion” and “agita-
tion,” at least for a while, both meant “agitation” and agitation may have been
the original for the concept of emotion. Agitation itself refers to the act of being
stirred to motion and could reference the body, a natural element (such as
water), or an idea. In the political sense, agitation could refer to a desirable
form of political discourse as well as to the stirring up of radical unrest. Woll-
stonecraft’s use of “agitate” and “agitation” as verb and noun—​­as something
that she might actively do and as something she might experience acting upon
her—​­invoked all of these usages in a sort of Mobius strip of cause and effect.
As a concept, agitation is oddly positioned in affect studies and the field
known as “history of emotion.” It seems in some ways to fall under the cate-
gory of “affect,” in the sense that affect theorists use the word, as that which is
before language, the gut feeling that comes before any words can describe con-
tent. Affects are often imagined as ahistorical, as physicalized, “natural.” If so,
agitation may well be an “affect”: it often seems to occur prior to the language
an agitated person might rely on to describe it, to arise from inarticulable and
primitive causes. It can seem more “natural” than social, more primitive and
physical than the result of acculturation and learning. On the other hand, agita-
tion may seem more like an “emotion” or maybe “emotional practice,” as
Scheer would have it, a practice conditioned by social and cultural forces that
TEMPLE—WOLLSTONECRAFT, EMOTION, AND LEGAL SUBJECTIVITY 375

may or may not be consciously directed. Surely, at different times in history,

agitation has resulted from different causes. But where emotions are generally
viewed as rich with content (desire tends t­owards its objects; revenge cannot
exist without a precursory event), agitation often seems “empty”: Favret, for
instance, remarks that Wollstonecraft at times “recasts emotions as empty agi-
tations.”22 We might turn to Wollstonecraft to try to answer these questions,
investigating her language to attempt a categorization. But Wollstonecraft of-
fers few answers: in the examples I cited at the beginning of this piece, emo-
tions agitate her heart; a position can be agitated. In other instances, agitation
becomes a state of being: In Maria, Wollstonecraft describes her eponymous
character as being in “an agitation of spirit,”23 while to Imlay, she remarks that
commerce keeps him “in a continual state of agitation.”24 In A Short Residence,
she notes the need “to calm the agitated breast.”25 At times her emotions agitate
her “heart”;26 at other times, her “reveries and trains of thinking” agitate her
entire being.27 In other words, Wollstonecraft’s own words do not indicate that
agitation presages emotion or that emotion is always a precursor to agitation.
They reveal an agitated agitation, one that is constantly shifting positions, both
cause and effect, both prior and post cognition.
Jenefer Robinson is helpful here. In Deeper Than Reason, she argues for “a
continuum of affective and emotional states ranging from the primitive (such
as the startle response) . . . ​to the highly cognitive, such as compassion.”28 Agi-
tation seems to stand somewhere between “startle” and “compassion” in that it
can be both a reaction to outer stimuli and a highly cognitive state of being in-
fluenced by thought. Thus, agitation could be viewed as both a physical, auto-
nomic, and pre-​­conditioned condition and an emotional practice shaped by
social and cultural forces that may or may not be consciously directed. In being
both rather than either, agitation is itself agitated; it traverses the boundary be-
tween the natural and the cultural, between the personal, physical body and
the politicized and socialized body. Agitation is, in its essence, movement; that
we cannot locate its “restless presence” precisely seems inherent in its nature.
These examples and others reveal that the rhetoric of agitation was extremely
flexible in Wollstonecraft’s hands. At times Wollstonecraft rails against agita-
tion, for example, arguing that women with “uncultivated understandings”
were subject to “wild emotions that agitate a reed over which every passing
breeze has power.”29 These moments are consistent with the period’s many nov-
els that associate female agitation with sexual passion—​­as Wollstonecraft does
herself at times in her own novels. One of Wollstonecraft’s most interesting
commentaries on agitation appears in a piece that she wrote for the June 1788
Analytical Review on a novel called, appropriately enough, Agitation.30 Woll-
stonecraft (who wrote many scathing reviews) starts by attacking the title itself:
“The foolish titles prefixed to novels, can only be equaled by the nonsense they
lead to.” As to content, the book contains, she says, nothing to interest a “reader
who has one spark of sense” because its agitation is romantic and sexualized.31
376 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Could Wollstonecraft here be attempting to protect the term “agitation,” disas-

sociating it from romance (it is a “foolish” title for a book about overheated ro-
mance), and saving it for associations with genius? In another example of the
shifting uses of agitation, Wollstonecraft sometimes excoriates a lack of agita-
tion. In her novel, Mary, a Fiction (1788), she places agitation against “languor”
and assigns languor to aristocratic women who do nothing, produce nothing,
and, as Wollstonecraft puts it, “become a mere nothing.”32 Such an assessment
was as much political as personal: the anonymous author of “An Essay on Civil
Government,” published in 1793, notes that “you must be prepared for eternal
agitation, if you wish and determine for freedom” and finds agitation much
better than any of “the forms producing eternal quiet and stagnant tranquility
which breeds ignorance.”33 Agitation, then, was associated by radical thinkers
with resistance to tyranny, complacency with ignorance and passivity.
Wollstonecraft at times makes that association explicit: when writing about
the French Revolution, she uses “agitation” not only in its personal, embodied
emotional sense, but also in its political sense, recording her intense emotional
responses as “agitated,” but also remarking that a call for tithes was “agitated.”
She uses the word “agitated,” or a form of it, in “An Historical and Moral View
of the French Revolution” (1794) over 30 times, referencing both individual
emotional reactions, the emotions of the populace and arguments for various
causes.34 In short, we should regard Wollstonecraft’s agitation in the context of
a much larger conversation about agitation in which she sided with other radi-
cals who used agitation as a legal, political tool, notable in the major political
activities and the trials of the 1790s. And, as I shall show, her use of “agitation”
as both word and concept helped create or at least reinforce new and more in-
clusive ideas of legal subjectivity in the 1790s, ideas that William Blackstone
had hinted at in the 1760s.
In his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69), Blackstone had sug-
gested the possibility that emotion rather than reason could serve to understand
both law and justice. How do we determine just results, he asks? Must we have
a detailed knowledge of the law or a highly evolved intellect that allows us to
reason our way to justice? Answering these questions, Blackstone takes a re-
markably democratic stance on justice to suggest that we determine just results
not only through knowledge or intellect, but also emotionally. If the only way to
understand justice is through “the due exertion of right reason,” or what he also
calls “metaphysical disquisitions,” most people would spend their time in
“mental indolence” with “ignorance it’s inseparable companion.”35 Only the
highly educated would be able to recognize justice. Instead, Blackstone tells us,
God has given us the ability to recognize justice affectively:

[The Creator] has so intimately connected, so inseparably interwoven the laws of

eternal justice with the happiness of each individual, that the latter cannot be attained
but by observing the former; and, if the former be punctually obeyed, it cannot but
TEMPLE—WOLLSTONECRAFT, EMOTION, AND LEGAL SUBJECTIVITY 377

induce the latter. In consequence of which [God] . . . ​has graciously reduced the

rule of obedience to this one paternal precept, that man should “pursue his own
happiness.”36

Observing the just results of the law—​­in the sense of obeying it, but also in the
sense of seeing it, knowing it—​­will make us happy.37
Blackstone tells us then that we know justice when we feel it. Wollstone-
craft, of course, tells us that we know injustice when we feel it as well. Agita-
tion not only results from dissonance between the way things should be and
the way they are, it expresses that dissonance, exhibiting in body, in manner-
isms, and on the page that something is radically wrong. Wollstonecraft brings
agitation to bear on injustice most legibly in Maria, especially in the important
courtroom scene t­ oward the end of the novel. By then, she was ideally situated
to comment on legal subjectivity. As Lisa Crafton has pointed out, Wollstone-
craft had a special interest in and knowledge of legal proceedings. Her involve-
ment with Godwin would have exposed her to Horne Tooke’s trials, educating
her in the ways agitated language could challenge received norms.38 She was
implicated in a criminal trial for treason against William Stone, studied Trials
for Adultery to develop material for her novel, Maria, and corresponded with
Amelia Opie, a frequent observer of the courts.39 In short, she was deeply inter-
ested in the law, both personally and politically.
Maria as a whole is an agitated affair. As many have noted, it jumps from
scene to scene, has an uneven time frame, incorporates fragments, and was
unfinished due to Wollstonecraft’s death (although it is impossible to know if
she would have finished it, had she lived). This narrative agitation is reinforced
by the agitation of the main characters: Maria, Jemima, and Darnford are agi-
tated both emotionally and physically, always upset or in rapture, always on
the move or attempting to be so. Maria offered a prime example of the sort of
discourse and personality rejected by the British establishment: its gothic emo-
tionality and its melodramatic action and characters are set against the final
courtroom scene of cool, “rational” legal discourse.40
Wollstonecraft loads the pages immediately preceding the narration of the
trial with every possible extreme emotion from “all the sweet emotions of the
soul” to “the reveries of a feverish imagination.”41 Indeed, the trial scene fol-
lows an escape from the madhouse where Maria is described as “in an agita-
tion of spirit, not to be calmed.”42 Over the course of only a few pages, Maria
fights off “a being, with a visage that would have suited one possessed by a
devil,” seeks out her child (“she could not sit still—​­her child was ever before
her”) only to discover its grave, negotiates a settlement with her husband, and
then discovers that said husband has sued her lover for seduction. The first
words of the trial chapter (“Such was her state of mind when the dogs of law
were let loose on her”43) connect her ever-​­shifting emotional state with the legal
action against her lover, Darnford.44 What follows is a surprisingly airless ac-
378 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

count of a legal proceeding, located in neither time nor place, but the closest we
come to a scene of law in Wollstonecraft’s work. Some critics have found the
scene politically ineffective because Maria does not exercise an obvious form of
legal agency and because Wollstonecraft presents Maria in terms that allow the
court to dismiss her claim. 45 And it is true that although we can infer her pres-
ence in the courtroom from her emotional reactions to the defense counsel’s
opening and from Godwin’s bracketed comment that “she . . . ​eagerly put her-
self forward, instead of desiring to be absent,” she never speaks in the court-
room but instead submits a written document to be read by an unspecified
representative we can assume to be male.
But reading the scene as part and parcel of the larger novel allows us to see
it as a manifesto in support of a new, agitated and thus revolutionary form of
legal subjectivity. The narration of the trial is itself disjointed and agitated: we
are offered a description of the plaintiff’s counsel’s speech, only to be inter-
rupted by comments on Maria’s state of mind. “A strong sense of injustice had
silenced every emotion” is followed by a bracketed assertion that she “eagerly
put herself forward,” followed by a counter-​­statement that she “wrote a paper,
which she expressly desired might be read in court.”46 Wollstonecraft’s repre-
sentation of Maria’s shifting state of mind—​­ from silence to eagerness to
desire—​­
­ immediately prior to the presentation of this supposedly rational
“paper” presages the agitated shifting of physical location within the paper
where she recounts her escape from her husband and her being “hunted like a
criminal from place to place.” As Glynis Ridley points out, the “paper” is satu-
rated with emotion. Maria cites “miseries that a woman may be subject to,
which, though deeply felt, eating into the soul, elude description” and admits
herself to be “in the heart of misery” after being sent to the madhouse. 47 That
“paper” stands in for a new construction of legal subjectivity, one imagined
through the emotions, through the agitation of a victimized legal subject in
need of the court’s protection. Through representing a thinking, feeling woman
who is agitated, not so much over romantic loss, but over the loss of legal
rights—​­the right to move about freely, to earn and spend her own money, to
control access to her body—​­the paper offers a self-​­contained representation of
legal subjectivity.
Following the “paper,” and with hardly a break, a partial record of the
judge’s comments ensues. He begins by alluding to “the fallacy of letting
women plead their feelings, as an excuse for the violation of the marriage-​
­vow” and ends with a plea to that least emotional of moral theories, utilitarian-
ism and “the good of the whole.”48 Wollstonecraft does not leave us this as the
novel’s last word, however. Godwin appends a “Conclusion” which consists of
three pages of fragments that wander back and forth to scenes that must have
occurred before the “trial” and those that might have occurred after, from a
draft that hints at suicide to the protagonist’s recovery and assertion that “I will
live for my child” (a child we have been told earlier had died). As Godwin tells
TEMPLE—WOLLSTONECRAFT, EMOTION, AND LEGAL SUBJECTIVITY 379

us in his final note, these “hints . . . ​are pregnant with passion and distress.”49
Throughout, the novella traces a larger, agitated but progressive movement,
the evolution of Maria from legal object to subject. At the beginning of the no-
vella, she is all object: objectified by her family, then by her husband, then by
the law when she is incarcerated in a madhouse, the object of legal action. By
the end, she is a legal subject, a person in a legal sense, with a person’s right to
present a case and be heard. Although she acts upon the legal system through
writing rather than speech, that writing tellingly elicits commentary from a
representative of the law. In inserting this “paper” into the novella’s one scene
of law and having a judge recognize it as worthy of comment, Wollstonecraft
claims for herself a specifically agitated legal subjectivity, possible in fiction,
but unrecognized in the English law of her time.
As Jamie Boyle notes, legal subjectivity is about “who gets to be a subject. . . . ​
What qualities or attributes about them are included in the box of subjectivity
and what attributes are excluded?”50 To follow Boyle further is to recognize
that the supposedly empty vessel of the “legal subject” is “actually full; . . .  the
subject’s biases, motivations, and assumptions are the same ones honored in
the dominant culture.”51 Recent work on legal subjectivity has begun to at-
tempt to expand its boundaries to include animals and the environment; if
legal subjectivity can include humans without the capacity to reason, why not
include animals? If it can include corporations, why not the environment?
Wollstonecraft was attempting to expand the bounds of legal subjectivity. If
legal subjectivity could include men of ill morals and little rationality, why
could it not also include women, even emotional women? Most recently, Mar-
tha Fineman has suggested the recognition of vulnerability as a universal con-
dition in humans and thus a suitable way of defining legal subjectivity.
Rejecting the cool, rational, and autonomous subjectivity of liberal individual-
ism, Fineman argues for a system that recognizes vulnerability and nurtures
resilience.52 We could imagine Wollstonecraft’s construction of a complex and
outraged subject, vulnerable to oppression and eager to be granted the re-
sources necessary for resilience, as an early gesture ­towards this new under-
standing of legal subjectivity.
Wollstonecraft lived and wrote into being what Ahmed has articulated
over two hundred years later: “Emotion [is] a form of cultural politics or
world making.”53 Her agitation was related to her celebration of the imagina-
tion; it was rhetorical, and thus an aesthetic act. But it was equally related to
her political goals. Affect, politics, and aesthetics are deeply interrelated. An
aesthetics involves the distribution of the sensible; it frames what it is possi-
ble for us to see and hear and thus to feel. To bring this home to Wollstone-
craft, we might consider Ahmed’s recent argument that emotions are not so
much “in either the individual or the social body, but produce the very sur-
faces and boundaries that allow all kinds of objects to be delineated.”54 Woll-
stonecraft’s construction of an “agitation effect,” both in her self-​­representations
380 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

and in her fiction, made her legible to her contemporaries and to later critics
as a resistant and agitated force, someone who represented all who were un-
happy with the status quo. Her “agitated” response to Imlay’s abandonment,
her intense responses to nature, her concern for the agitating force of com-
merce, her political “agitations”—​­all reveal a woman in full command of the
larger value of agitation as an aesthetic/political statement, one deployed ef-
fectively in the crucial juridical scene written t­ owards the end of her life. Plac-
ing Wollstonecraft in this context allows us to see her agitation as a sort of gift
to us, an aesthetic embodied in her representation of the self and in her fic-
tion, one calculated to induce real change, to be made “sticky” and communi-
cated across generations.

NOTES
I would like to acknowledge the invaluable help of two research assistants: Rachel Mo-
rota, who recently graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown Univer-
sity, and Jacob Myers, Graduate Writing Associate in the MA in English program,
Georgetown University.

1. James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (London and Edinburgh, 1783), 167;
emphasis added.
2. I am indebted to Steven Goldsmith for his brilliant work on William Blake and agi-
tation (Blake’s Agitation: Criticism & the Emotions [Baltimore, 2013]) and for leading me in
this direction. Goldsmith argues for the importance of understanding “the work emotion
is called upon to perform in the practices and idioms of modern critical engagement” (7),
focusing on Blake, but extending his argument to contemporary academic critique. His
insights into agitation as critique have enriched my work.
3. Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay, 7 April [1795], in “Letters to Gilbert Imlay,”
The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 vols., ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London,
1989), 6:366–438, 404.
4. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792], in Works, 5:64–266, 74.
5. See Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge,
2003), 96.
6. William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Lon-
don, 1798), repr. Project Gutenberg (2005), available at www.gutenberg.org/files/
16199/16199-h/16199-​­h.htm, n.p.
7. See Cora Kaplan, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Reception and Legacies,” in The Cam-
bridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Cambridge, 2002), 246–
70. Kaplan sums up the biographies of the 1970s as representing Wollstonecraft as a
“paradox” of passion versus reason. Kaplan notes “a sense in which she seems to offer
the present too much—​­both an emotional and sexual history whose notoriety has inhib-
ited access to the writing” (247). For an interesting collection of critical responses to Woll-
stonecraft and her works, see Mary Wollstonecraft and the Critics, 1788–2001, ed. Harriet
Devine Jump, 2 vols. (London and New York, 2003).
8. Taylor, 58.
9. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 81.
10. See Kaplan, 258.
11. For one of many examples, see Harriet Martineau’s comments on Wollstonecraft:
“Women who would improve the condition . . . ​of their sex must, I am certain, be not
only affectionate and devoted, but rational and dispassionate. . . . ​But Mary Wollstone-
TEMPLE—WOLLSTONECRAFT, EMOTION, AND LEGAL SUBJECTIVITY 381

craft was, with all her powers, a poor victim of passion, with no control over her own
peace” (quoted in Taylor, 249).
12. Wollstonecraft, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman [1798], in Works, 1:76–185, 83.
13. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 103.
14. See Mary Wollstonecraft and the Critics for many examples. Note in particular Ferdi-
nand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham’s remark that “Mary Wollstonecraft’s life reads
like a psychiatric case history” (“Modern Woman: The Lost Sex,” 1:284–302, 288).
15. Mary Favret, “Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Den-
mark: Traveling with Mary Wollstonecraft,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wollstonecraft,
209–27, 212.
16. Kaplan, 246.
17. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York, 2004), 11.
18. Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them
Have a History)?: A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and The-
ory 51 (2012): 193–220, 208.
19. For an additional view on emotion and legality, see Katie Barclay’s essay in this
special issue.
20. See Thomas Dixon, “ ‘Emotion’: The History of a Keyword in Crisis,” Emotion Re-
view 4 (2012): 338–44, 339.
21. Dixon, 339.
22. Favret, 224.
23. Wollstonecraft, Maria, 174.
24. Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence [1796], in Works, 6:238–349, 341.
25. Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence, 252.
26. See Wollstonecraft to Imlay, 7 April [1795], where Wollstonecraft writes, “I write
now, only to tell you that you may expect me in the course of three or four days; for I
shall not attempt to give vent to the different emotions which agitate my heart” (404).
27. See Wollstonecraft to Imlay, 23–24 September [1794], where Wollstonecraft writes,
“I have got a habit of restlessness at night, which arises, I believe, from activity of mind;
for, when I am alone, that is, not near one to whom I can open my heart, I sink into rever-
ies and trains of thinking, which agitate and fatigue me” (in “Letters to Gilbert Imlay,”
388–89, 389).
28. Jenefer Robinson, Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music and
Art (Oxford, 2005), 151.
29. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 97.
30. Wollstonecraft, “Agitation” [June 1788], in Contributions to the Analytical Review, in
Works, 7:1–487, 19–20.
31. See Agitation: or, Memoirs of George Woodford and Lady Emma Melvill. By [the] Au-
thor of The Ring, 3 vols. (London, 1788), esp. vol. 1. Interestingly, this novel (though long
and silly) does open with a scene of agitation, not over romance or sexuality as Woll-
stonecraft’s review implies, but over reading and gender. In the opening scene, a young
boy defends a lady from the overly entitled Master Freemore who throws her book in a
ditch, because “he had always heard his papa say that reading was not for pretty girls”
(1:12–15, 13). Whereas Master Freemore goes unpunished, the young protector is sent to
his room to ponder how his “passion seemed to have gotten the better of his reason”
(1:15). The novel goes on to trouble reason and encourage passion in the romantic sense,
much to Wollstonecraft’s irritation. And yet it suggests that there are some moments
when agitation can be a positive, can lead to change. Even embedded in Wollstonecraft’s
critique we find evidence of the positive influence of agitation.
32. Wollstonecraft, Mary, a Fiction [1788], in Works, 1:1–74, 7.
33. Anon., An Essay on Civil Government, or Society Restored (London, 1793), 131.
34. Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution [1794], in
Works, 6:6–237.
382 notes on contributors

35. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (London, 1765–
69), 1:40, 40–41.
36. Blackstone, 1:41; emphasis added.
37. I have noted and analyzed this passage before in similar terms: see Kathryn Tem-
ple, “What’s Old Is New Again: William Blackstone Comes to America,” The Eighteenth
Century: Theory and Interpretation 55 (2014): 129–34.
38. See Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984).
39. See Lisa Plummer Crafton, Transgressive Theatricality, Romanticism, and Mary Woll-
stonecraft (Farnham, 2011).
40. See Glynis Ridley, “Injustice in the Works of Godwin and Wollstonecraft,” in
Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s, ed. Linda Lang-​­Peralta (East Lansing,
2000), 69–88, esp. 85–88.
41. Wollstonecraft, Maria, 176–77.
42. Wollstonecraft, Maria, 174.
43. Wollstonecraft, Maria, 178.
44. As is often the case in Maria, it is difficult to parse her precise emotional state. In
the last two paragraphs of the chapter immediately preceding the trial, she is “happier,”
“feel[s] most painfully alone,” and notes the legal action is “galling, as it roused bitter
reflections on the situation of women in society” (Wollstonecraft, Maria, 177).
45. See Ridley, 85.
46. Wollstonecraft, Maria, 178.
47. Wollstonecraft, Maria, 179, 180.
48. Wollstonecraft, Maria, 181.
49. Godwin, ed., Maria, 186n.
50. James Boyle, “Is Subjectivity Possible?: The Post-​­Modern Subject in Legal Theory,”
University of Colorado Law Review 62 (1991): 489–524, 511.
51. Boyle, 514.
52. See Martha Fineman, ed., Vulnerability: Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for
Law and Politics (Burlington, 2013).
53. Ahmed, 12.
54. Ahmed, 10.