ABSTRACT

Mary Wollstonecraft's primary concern in her second Vindication therefore lies with the "ensouling" of women. Wollstonecraft's working knowledge of the term "Mahometan" may have been unwittingly tainted by precisely her own research, and certainly would have been shaped by the many notions circulating in European society at the time. The chapter focuses on a popular source for knowledge of the Mohammedans in Wollstonecraft's lifetime: the East India Company. As Elfenbein supports, Wollstonecraft repeatedly throughout her writings connects the soul and genius through liberation. Wollstonecraft's "Mahometan strain" complicates the field of Romantic orientalism by presenting a discourse that at once operates within, and yet challenges, Said's concept of orientalism as presenting distinct gendered notions of the "other." For Wollstonecraft, the text is a metempsychosal template, which is inhabited by the soul of the author. It then follows that the author must cultivate a worthy soul, if what is to be written should bear any worth.