In her travel narrative Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) the revolutionary author of A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) turns her attention to natural history. Writing at a time when the close connection between travel writing and science was taken for granted, Mary Wollstonecraft explains her own engagement with natural history as an inevitable response to the Scandinavian landscapes: "Sweden appeared to me the country in the world most proper to form the botanist and natural historian: every object seemed to remind me of the creation of things, of the first efforts of sportive nature."
Partly a passing homage to the famous Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, this is primarily a statement of the author's textual identity. Like her male contemporaries, she uses natural history in order to provide an authoritative interpretation of particular landscapes and to incorporate them into a global vision. However, natural history is also a more personal imaginative resource. As my talk will attempt to demonstrate, and as Wollstonecraft's emphasis on the "creation of things" and "the first efforts of sportive nature" suggests, she endows her northern landscapes and organisms with an almost emancipatory potential that is analogous to her feminist vision of social change and personal empowerment. Hence her travel narrative involves her in a critical dialogue with the major, officially recognized, eighteenth-century "systems" and "oeconomies" of nature. Indeed, I want to argue that she aligns herself with certain male and metropolitan natural histories both to undercut their complacent assertions and to coopt them for her own purposes.
Ultimately, her observations of struggling--but undefeated--northern organisms provide the opportunity for a symbolical identification that recodes them in terms of social and individual rebellion. In other words, there is no contradiction in Wollstonecraft's book between the production of valid knowledge about a specific geographical area and the production of another "Vindication."
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