Reading ideological silence in late eighteenth-century English fiction: Pierre Macherey's Theory of Literary Production and the novel of Mary Wollstonecraft

Abstract

English novels by women of the late eighteenth century rarely if ever reflect the improvements for women’s lives that contemporary radical ideas promised. Using Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production (1966) as a research lens, author and feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft’s political ideas in her famously bold works of non-fiction are read against her novels Mary, A Fiction (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798). Macherey’s critique is used to trace the gap between philosophical and fictional imaginations of the late eighteenth century where it becomes clear that ruling modes of ideology are determining the representation and fate of Wollstonecraft’s heroines. Wollstonecraft’s use of sensibility and the gothic shows us that there is not language to delineate a successful feminist heroine. The findings of this study question imagined authorial freedom in the process of literary production and challenge readers to produce new knowledge through literary criticism