ABSTRACT
Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is more pragmatic and interested in hypothesis than Mary Wollstonecraft's previous works. Its generic plurality leads to a more flexible, seemingly less rigid and restricted configuration of discourses which produce and situate Wollstonecraft's versions of the self. The complex relationship between subjectivity and 'nature' in Wollstonecraft's Scandinavian letters is captured in the following passage from the seventh letter. It is apparent that 'nature' alludes to the larger creational system as well as the discrete phenomena of the world of objects. Letters articulates the relationship between the individuated body and the social body in a variety of ways. The body is considered, as a healthy resource, the tremulous surface of an authentic sensibility, a site of emotional vulnerability, and, ultimately, as the dust of decomposition. One of the most daring speculations in Letters arises, out of the invigoration exertions of physical exercise, as Wollstonecraft recounts rowing a boat on the sea near Tonsberg.
