Aesthetic Economies of Immasculation: Capitalism and Gender in Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden

Abstract

Though commonly relegated to the category of personal memoir, Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden belong among her most socially and politically engaged texts. Indeed, the Letters mark a major turning point in the development of Wollstonecraft's gender theory: her experiences working in Scandinavia as a legal proxy for Gilbert Imlay lead her away from the idealization of republican masculinity which characterizes the two Vindications . By inhabiting Imlay's subject-position, Wollstonecraft confronts the ways in which even the most apparently liberating forms of immasculation are conditioned by the discourses of the sublime and the practices of mercantile appropriation, with irretrievably damaging effects.

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