메어리 울스턴크래프트의 『마리아』에 나타난 공감의 정치적 함의와 그 한계

Abstract

This paper explores the political implications and limitations of sympathy in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, focusing on the relationship between Maria, a middle-class woman, and Jemima, a working-class woman. It begins with the examination of gender and class differences around the place of home and the issue of independence, and the examination of the process through which the feeling of sympathy is produced between Maria and Jemima. In their sympathetic relationship, they experience the mutual edification: Jemima’s narrative of her own experiences of sexual abuse and labor exploitation leads Maria to reflect on women’s miserable realities, and Maria’s sympathetic response rekindles Jemima’s benumbed humanity. Moreover, Jemima’s turn from Maria’s prison keeper into her helper suggests the possibility that women can bond with each other regardless of class and with no male mediation. This paper then looks at the limitations of sympathy, which is well demonstrated in Jemima’s being a ‘stranger within’ who occupies a place at the border that divides inside from outside. Jemima’s stranger-ness in Maria’s circle brings again to the light their class differences made invisible when sympathy overwhelms them. This paper argues that negative sentiments such as blame, hatred, and anger, seen in Jemima’s feeling against mankind as a whole and in Maria’s feeling against her husband, have the potential to turn into a political force that compensates for the limitations of sympathy. It is because while sympathy tends to disregard differences in particular contexts by subsuming them under a generality like “Woman,” those negative but politically-charged sentiments arise from particular contexts.