ABSTRACT
Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, however, use fiction self-consciously to interrupt itself, to make us aware of reality as a "text" or system of misrepresentation, but also of ideology as a form of textual desire. Godwin's own interest in a divinatory hermeneutics emerges in his essay "A Choice in Reading," where he distinguishes between the "m oral" and the "tendency" of a text. For by making writing the production rather than the reflection of an anterior meaning, Godwin also makes reading the production, through "experiment" or experience, of a text whose meaning is seen as still in process. The dangers of a merely passive reading are intimated by Wollstonecraft herself when she describes how Maria looks for "tale of fictitious woe" that bear a "resemblance to her own", and then allows herself to be coopted back into what she is trying to escape.
