From Sensibility to Critical Engagement: Sympathy, Animality, and Subjecthood in Wollstonecraft’s Maria and Vindication

Authors

Yingnan Shang, University of CambridgeFollow

Author Bio

Yingnan Shang is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. She studies eighteenth-century British travel narratives with a focus on perception and aesthetics, and her work more broadly examines how women’s writing negotiates sensibility, cognition, and forms of subjectivity.

Abstract

This paper examines Mary Wollstonecraft’s strategic use of sentimental animal tropes alongside rationalist critique in Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), arguing that she mobilizes sensibility not as an end in itself, but as a pedagogical instrument within a broader project of aesthetic education—one intended to move readers from affective sympathy toward political and philosophical judgment. Focusing in particular on animal metaphors—especially in the character of Jemima, who repeatedly figures herself as a domesticated and brutalized creature—I trace how Wollstonecraft employs tropes of animality to illuminate the processes by which women are rendered less than human. At the same time, she insists that the very faculty denied to women by patriarchal society—rational reflection—is what marks the boundary between the human and the nonhuman. In this light, animal metaphors function paradoxically: they expose women’s dehumanization while simultaneously staging the reassertion of their moral and intellectual agency. Wollstonecraft’s appeal to sympathy, therefore, is intentionally unstable. It elicits emotional identification with suffering women only to disrupt that identification, urging readers to critique the social and epistemological structures that produce such suffering in the first place.

Keywords

Mary Wollstonecraft, sensibility, animality, reason, aesthetic education

Recommended Citation

Shang, Yingnan (2025) "From Sensibility to Critical Engagement: Sympathy, Animality, and Subjecthood in Wollstonecraft’s Maria and Vindication," Comparative Woman: Vol. 4: Iss. 1, Article 1.
Available at: https://repository.lsu.edu/comparativewoman/vol4/iss1/1