어머니의 유산: 마담 롤랑의 『회상록』과 울스튼크래프트의 『머라이어』 (Mother’s Legacy to Her Daughter: Mme Roland’s Mémoires and Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria)

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초록

An autobiographical memoir in French and a fictional memoir in English respectively, Mme Roland’s Mémoires(1795) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria(1798) are not likely to have much in common at a first glance. In order to evaluate their common achievement properly, however, this paper offers a comparative reading of the two works under the theme of mother’s legacy to her daughter. I assess the intrinsic value of these two mothers’ legacies in the form of writing against the backdrop of the social arrangements for women in respective societies and show how they represent the authors’ struggle to achieve female citizenship in a society that worked against it. During the Revolution period, French women, divested of rights to citizenship and public engagement, were excluded from the category of citizen. England in the second half of the eighteenth-century witnessed the degeneration and deterioration of Sensibility, which lost its original ideal agenda, and was gendered often under the name of “father’s legacy to his daughters.” At the end of her memoir, Mme Roland, ensuring her property goes to her daughter, also bequeaths “virtue” to her daughter as the source of female citizenship, instead of “rights” that has belonged more or less exclusively to male citizens. Maria, eponymous heroine of Wollstonecraft’s fiction, leaves a memoir addressed to her daughter as the mother’s essential inheritance for her daughter’s proper education in sensibility. At the conclusion of the paper, I give emphasis to the role of sympathetic readers as the true inheritors of these mothers’ legacies.

영어초록

An autobiographical memoir in French and a fictional memoir in English respectively, Mme Roland’s Mémoires(1795) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria(1798) are not likely to have much in common at a first glance. In order to evaluate their common achievement properly, however, this paper offers a comparative reading of the two works under the theme of mother’s legacy to her daughter. I assess the intrinsic value of these two mothers’ legacies in the form of writing against the backdrop of the social arrangements for women in respective societies and show how they represent the authors’ struggle to achieve female citizenship in a society that worked against it. During the Revolution period, French women, divested of rights to citizenship and public engagement, were excluded from the category of citizen. England in the second half of the eighteenth-century witnessed the degeneration and deterioration of Sensibility, which lost its original ideal agenda, and was gendered often under the name of “father’s legacy to his daughters.” At the end of her memoir, Mme Roland, ensuring her property goes to her daughter, also bequeaths “virtue” to her daughter as the source of female citizenship, instead of “rights” that has belonged more or less exclusively to male citizens. Maria, eponymous heroine of Wollstonecraft’s fiction, leaves a memoir addressed to her daughter as the mother’s essential inheritance for her daughter’s proper education in sensibility. At the conclusion of the paper, I give emphasis to the role of sympathetic readers as the true inheritors of these mothers’ legacies.

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