SOURCE: Wang, Orrin N. C. “The Other Reasons: Female Alterity and Enlightenment Discourse in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 5, no. 1 (fall 1991): 129-49.

In the following essay, Wang argues against readings of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as a text that represses female imagination in favor of male reason, seeing the work as a complex study about repression, reason, gender, and imagination.

It is uncannily fitting that Mary Shelley should dedicate her famous Romantic novel, Frankenstein, to her father, William Godwin, and not to her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. The literal—and literary—gap between mother and daughter is an appropriate emblem for the discontinuity between Wollstonecraft's theoretical writing and the work of contemporary feminist literary critics. This discontinuity is largely due to a public monumentalization and disfigurement of Wollstonecraft by her contemporaries that is similar, I would suggest...