ABSTRACT
Mary Wollstonecraft's travelogue Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) does not cover the very beginning and ending of her journey delineated in her private Letters to Imlay (1798), a fact that most critics have neglected. Bernhard Waldenfels's postmodern Phenomenology of the Alien offers a sophisticated account of the embodied process of experiencing and understanding encounters with alien individuals and cultures, which provides concepts to analyze the complexity and complication of Wollstonecraft's Scandinavian journey. Her private letters to Imlay establish the framework of the published journey and reveal that the embodied traveler suffers from the most severe alienation at the outset of and the return from her travel, that is to say, on the threshold between home and abroad. Despite suffering from multiple forms of loss, it is ironic and paradoxical that the traveler profits from the foreign societies by reconfiguring her impaired self as superior in bodily health and taste primarily in contrast to women, and intellect and morals in contrast to men. This form of empowerment is only possible, as Michael Meyer demonstrates, because Wollstonecraft complements her embodied alienation by subjecting the other to her preconceived notions in the framework of enlightened perfectibility.
