Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman

Motherhood, and the bond between mothers and daughters in particular, is a very important theme in the novel. The presence of a loving mother is shown to be essential to a young woman’s development, and becoming a mother is presented as a transformative and empowering experience. At the start of the novel, what distresses Maria the most is the enforced separation from her infant daughter. She spends a lot of time worrying about what might happen to her daughter if the two of them don’t reunite, “dwel[ling] on the wretchedness of unprotected infancy” (92). Maria writes the narrative of her past because she wants her daughter to at least be able to read it and know something about her mother, in case she ends up spending the rest of her life in the asylum.

Maria’s strong sense that her daughter needs her, and her fears about what could happen if she isn’t present in her daughter’s life, are supported by both her own and Jemima’s past experiences, which show her “the oppressed state of woman, and to lament that she had given birth to a daughter” (92). Maria’s own mother was cold and distant, and later, the woman who began a relationship with Maria’s father mistreated Maria and her sisters. These problems left Maria very vulnerable and led directly to her rash decision to marry George, which caused her much suffering: “had my home been more comfortable […] I should not probably have been so eager to open my heart to new affections” (98). Jemima’s mother died during childbirth, and Jemima was neglected and mistreated by her stepmother; this also led to her having an unhappy life, with no loving care to fall back on. Jemima remains convinced that she has “been thrown into the world without the grand support of life — a mother’s affection” (82).

While these plotlines reveal how much infants and girls need a mother’s care, Maria’s history shows the transformative impact of motherhood in her own life. During the initial period of her imprisonment, Maria actively and intelligently looks for ways to secure her freedom because she is determined to get back to her daughter; she “did not allow any opportunity to slip” (66) that might be of help to her. Readers later learn that when she was pregnant and immediately after childbirth, she was quite active and assertive about avoiding George and refusing to reunite with him. As a mother or expectant mother, she emerges as more confident, intelligent, and assertive. However, when she is told that her baby has died, she regresses into the more passive and docile figure that she was during her courtship and the early phase of her marriage. She is much less interested in leaving the asylum and becomes quite dependent on Darnford and her plans for a future with him. When Jemima finally agrees to help Maria escape, Maria is actually disinterested in doing so, complaining that “I have no child to go to, and liberty has lost its sweets” (139). In the ending where Maria reunites with her child, the reestablishment of her role and identity as a mother gives her the strength to choose to build a new life for herself and decide to “live for my child” (148).

The presence of this theme in the novel may have biographical roots and also offers darkly ironic foreshadowing. Wollstonecraft gave birth to an illegitimate daughter in 1794; she was pregnant again when she wrote Maria, and she gave birth to a second daughter in 1797. Wollstonecraft died only days later, leaving behind two motherless daughters, both of whom did indeed struggle with the absence of a maternal figure throughout their lives. Wollstonecraft’s elder daughter, Fanny Imlay, died by suicide in 1816; her younger daughter, Mary Godwin Shelley, wrote the novel Frankenstein, in which the plot famously focuses on a neglected and abandoned Creature who longs for parental care and love, becoming monstrous as a result of this neglect.