ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that notions of theatricality, spectatorial relationships, and performative speech pervade Wollstonecraft's historical writings, both her political utopianism and her analyses of the French Revolution's failure. It explores the Wollstonecraft's immersion in French Revolutionary political discourse from her earliest defense of Richard Price and her rebuttal to Burke in Vindication of the Rights of Men to her writings on the French Revolution, all in terms of Wollstonecraft's multivocal renderings of theatricality and performative politics. The semiotic body of Marie Antoinette is a compelling part of author broader study of Mary Wollstonecraft and theatricality. Wollstonecraft sets up what will be her complex and, at first glance, contradictory discussion of the French state theater of which she and her generation were keen spectators, the French Revolutionary stage of Louix XVI and Marie Antoinette. The complex route by which Marie Antoinette came to personify excess and perversity must be understood through her performative identity. She became, in effect the court's supermodel.
