Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, and: The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, and: The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (review)

294 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION17:2 nuanced readings of a wide range of texts. Readers inclined towards die discussions ofdie novel and narratologywill find Clingham fruitful, while diose seeking a rich rendering of die historical particulars that defined die Age of Johnson and its impact will find much ofinterest in Hudson. For diose who simply wonder why so much fuss continues to be made, bodi books provide eloquent testimony to die perennial endurance of SamuelJohnson. Steven Scherwatzky Merrimack College Ashley Tauchert. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of tL· Feminine. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. ix+169pp. US52. ISBN 0333 -96346-6. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia L. Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xxi+284pp. US22. ISBN 0-521-78952-4. TL· Collected Letters ofMary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd. New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2003. xxxiii+478pp. US49.50. ISBN 0-23113142 -9. The appearance of these three books within a short period suggests a resurgent or perhaps an ongoing high interest in MaryWollstonecraft since die women's movements ofdie 1970s. Wollstonecraft, ofcourse, is read today not simply for her feminist views but also for her comments on education, on politics, and on die French Revolution. And she is studied notjust as a philosopher but also as an essayist and reviewer, a letter and travel writer, and a novelist. It is virtually impossible to teach a course in late eighteendi-century British or Romantic literature today widiout including a work by die famous vindicator of the rights of woman. Since the nineteenth century, her biography has captivated readers because such notable literary and artistic figures intersected her life atvarious points—William Blake, William Godwin, Henry Fuseli, publisherJosephJohnson, and Mary Hays—and because she gave birth to Mary Shelley. These diree books are, in many ways, responding to the continuing appeal and market for scholarship on Wollstonecraft's life and works. These books all attempt to capture the energy, vitality, and range of Wollstonecraft as an intellectual and as a writer. But they are very different in terms ofgenre, intended audience, and scholarly approach. Ashley Tauchert's monograph is an academic study that approaches Wollstonecraft's life and REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS295 works dirough die lens offeministpsycholinguistic and philosophical dieories. The book is strongly influenced by die dieories ofLuce Irigaray,Judidi Buder, and odier feminist philosophers. ClaudiaJohnson's collection ofessays, published in die "Cambridge Companions to Literature" series, covers almost all the genres in which Wollstonecraft wrote and the important issues in Wollstonecraft scholarship. Like many ofdie odier companions published in die series, it has an impressive list ofcontributors and well-chosen topics. For a bibliophile,Janet Todd's collected letters is die handsomest of die diree, a comprehensive gadieringwidi painstaking annotations to historical personages and events, literary allusions, and Wollstonecraft's personal references. Tauchert's book is based on die premise that males and females have different relationships to language and discourse. Following Irigaray's argument diat, in Western culture, die speaking subject is male, Tauchert argues diat, in order to speak, women "are forced to adopt one of three diminished routes: silence, irrationality, or imitation ofmasculinist forms (hysteria)" (5). For women to write intelligibly, they must write as "imperfect, defected, 'castrated' men" or as hysterics (5, 6). What cannot be articulated in masculine discourse comes out as excess, lack, or what Tauchert calls an "accent of femininity" (6). Tauchert is interested in finding traces of this femaleembodied writing in Wollstonecraft, and her book follows Wollstonecraft's career from her early writings, to her political Vindications, to her later historical writing, travelogue, and novel. For Tauchert, Wollstonecraft manifests a movement from "Adienic (marked by die 'violent foreclosure' of the castrated maternal body) to Matrilineal (marked by an attempt at intersubjective exchange through a recognition of shared morphology with die potent and creative maternal body)" (15). Though Tauchert uses recent books by feminist philosophers such as Christine Battersby, Tamsin Lorraine, Margrit Schildrick, and Michelle Boulous Walker to back up her claim diat women enter symbolic space differendy because ofdie shared morphology between daughter and modier, I did feel a sense ofdéjà vu when I read her argument about the suppressed maternal in Wollstonecraft's writing. It seems to me diat diis...