Escaping Discussion: Liminality and the Female-Embodied Couple in Mary Wollstonecraft's Mary, A Fiction

Claudia Johnson describes the 'proto-lesbian sub-plot' of Mary Wollstonecraft's first novel, Mary, A Fiction (1788), as 'indiscursible', but we might understand this indiscursibility in turn as symptomatic of a more general eclipsing of female subjectivity under patriarchy: 'Love and desire between women and in women are still without signifiers that can be articulated in language'. The markers of this radical indiscursibility—what Terry Castle calls 'ghosting'—occur in women's writing as a textual disavowal displacing and dispersing female-embodied same-sex desire and exchange into culturally available encodings that preserve and deflect their significance. Lillian Faderman notes figures of displacement for female-embodied same-sex desire in twentieth-century women's writing prior to the liberatory movements of the 1970s, including use of male personae, encoding of desire, or de-gendering of the narrative. But while Faderman assumes that pre-twentieth-century women writers should be expected to have been more open in describing and owning same-sex desire prior to the sexological association of lesbianism with degenerate diseases, Wollstonecraft's Fiction suggests that female-embodied same-sex desire in the 1780s circulates as an 'open secret'; acknowledged, but dismissed as an impossibility (culturally disavowed). Wollstonecraft's Fiction, then, can be read for its delineation of this indiscursibility embodied by the writing subject in her identificatory character, Mary. In this essay I will read Wollstonecraft's Fiction for modalities of female-embodied same-sex desire expressed through figures of disavowal. I will argue that what this Fiction offers is a female-embodied character whose desire is encoded as masculine. Following Teresa de Lauretis I suggest that this masculine encoding is, in turn, one of the disavowed signs of female-embodied same-sex desire. While Wollstonecraft's novel has been claimed by lesbian literary history, it resists delimiting to that tradition as much as it claims inclusion in spite of the narrative's apparently heterosexual dyadic resolution. The narrative is careful to indicate the degree to which Mary loves both Ann and Henry in very similar ways and is structured around a narrative parallelism drawing attention to the bi-conditional desire located in its heroine. The narrative is strikingly two staged, with a central transitional section based in Lisbon: it begins as a story of Mary's development from birth, the death of her parents, and her relationship with Ann up until Ann's death (chapters I-XV); it ends as a story of her relationship with Henry until his death and the expectation of Mary's death as the only possible resolution to her impossible desire (chapters XI-XXXI). The two-stages of the narrative are carefully paralleled: both are centred on the heroine's developing relationship with Ann and then with Henry, and in both cases the object of Mary's affection is an 'invalid' (p. 25 and p. 27). Both Ann and Henry die in Mary's arms, offering her an opportunity to reflect on grave subjects, and both deaths seem to recall and refer back to the early scene in which Mary 'ran to support her mother, who expired the same night in her arms' (p. 20). This is not, then, a novel of the repudiation of heterosexual (or same-sex) passion; but rather a novel of the collapse of female-embodied same-sex desire into a transgressive heterosexual dyad, and the breaching of the lesbian and heterosexual narratives available here by a heroine whose desire remains unclassifiable. Leila Rupp reminds us that the problem with lesbian literary history is 'less one of sources than of definition: who, among the women whose stories we can find, can be called a "lesbian"?' Rupp identifies 'romantic love between women' and 'transgendered behaviour' as two modes for the expression of female-embodied same-sex desire in women's writing. Both figures occur in Wollstonecraft's novel, as well as a …