ABSTRACT
This chapter situates Wollstonecraft within philosophical debates circulating in the late eighteenth century on the issue of the moral utility of public spectacle and the effects of sympathy. While philosophers like Smith and Mandeville ponder the potential for theatrical simulation of sympathy, and Burke argues for his own brand of the moral utility of theater, Rousseau, in his Letter to D'Alembert on Theatre, resoundingly denies the capacity of spectacle to engage compassion, arguing that theatrical spectacle weakens one's commitment to active social duty outside the theater. In the chapter on theater, she begins with repeating the common maxim that theater can breed affectation saying that one who is not formed in a healthy manner of mind/heart may learn affectation at the theater. Finally, Wollstonecraft's travel narrative, which has both censured the coercive or simply vapid forms of theatricality and acknowledged the potentially positive ones, includes a final philosophical reflection about the incontrovertibly dramatic nature of human existence.
