Mary Shelly - Wollstonecraft

There is nothing I shrink from more fearfully than publicity—I have too much of it—& what is worse I am forced by my hard situation to meet it in a thousand ways—Could you write my husband's life, without naming me it were something—but even then I should be terrified at the rouzing the slumbering voice of the public—each critique, each mention of your work, might drag me forward . . . now that I am alone in the world, [I] have but the desire to wrap night and the obscurity of insignificance around me. This is weakness—but I cannot help it—to be in print—the subject of men's observations—of the bitter hard world's commentaries, to be attacked or defended!—this ill becomes one who knows how little she possesses worthy to attract attention—and whose chief merit—if it be one—is a love of that privacy, which no woman can emerge from without regret . . . But remember, I pray for omission—for it is not that you will not be too kind too eager to do me more than justice—But I only seek to be forgotten.

Mary Shelley

"what would it mean to read Shelley's refusal of recognition as a kind of radical negativity that takes loss as the condition of possibility (rather than failure) of subjectivity? Taken in this way, loss would be the expression of a dispossessed relation to the world, one that assumes the absent character of the "unmemorable" female melancholic as its rising yet recessive star, forfeiting identification." ((A Disappearance in the World:
Wollstonecraft and Melancholy Skepticism- Jacques Khalip - Criticism 47.1 (2005) 85-106 )

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter strives for anonymity - may the desire to be anonymous be the very possibility by which performance of the gendered body becomes possible - a site of agency through (ironically) invisibility
Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman outlines the longing for longing - the process of subject formation - becoming out of a melancholic desire to fulfill feminine lack - (me)


"She who can discern the dawn of immortality, in the streaks that shoot athwart the misty night of ignorance, promising a clearer day, will respect, as a sacred temple, the body that enshrines such an improvable soul. True love, likewise, spreads this kind of mysterious sanctity round the beloved object, making the lover most modest when in her presence. So reserved is affection that, receiving or returning personal endearments, it wishes, not only to shun the human eye, as a kind of profanation; but to diffuse an encircling cloudy obscurity to shut out even the saucy sparkling sunbeams. Yet, that affection does not deserve the epithet of chaste, which does not receive a sublime gloom of tender melancholy, that allows the mind for a moment to stand still and enjoy the present satisfaction, when a consciousness of the Divine presence is felt—for this must be the food of joy!" (Wollstonecraft 210)

"Wollstonecraft's epistolary cultivation of her anonymity intimates a subtle kind of hermeneutical identification for her readers: by refusing to define herself according to the terms of a historical progressivism that threatens to annul the desisting feminine self, Wollstonecraft provides an ethical meditation on the extent to which melancholic subjectivity expresses a being-in-the world that disengages from the status quo only to better conceptualize it, and finds itself rhetorically caught between social insertion and desertion." (A Disappearance in the World:
Wollstonecraft and Melancholy Skepticism- Jacques Khalip - Criticism 47.1 (2005) 85-106 )