SOURCE: Ty, Eleanor. “Resisting the Phallic: A Return to Maternal Values in Julia.” In Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s, pp. 73-84. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.

In the following excerpt, Ty claims that Williams's novel Julia can be read as a challenge to patriarchal values.

In the previous chapters we have seen how a woman writer's connection with the pre-Oedipal world, or what Kristeva calls the semiotic, influences her use of language. The unsevered link with the maternal binds both Wollstonecraft and Hays in certain ways to literal meaning. In their fiction which actively engages in feminist politics, this attachment to the literal becomes a strength rather than a weakness as the realization of metaphors and the physical rendering of female fears serve to heighten what the authors saw as the power of the Law of the Father and to demonstrate the dangers of the...