Review by Rebekah Andrew
“Honoring” Mary Wollstonecraft (Review)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.18
Cite: Andrew, Rebekah. 2021. “Honoring” Mary Wollstonecraft (Review),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 57-57.
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Walking through Newington Green Park to get somewhere important to do something important, briefcase heavy with paperwork, one sees a bright silver sculpture glistening in the distance. There’s no time to move closer, examine it in any detail, or read the little plaque explaining its significance. The only fleeting impression is of a doll-size female form standing rigidly atop a seething mass of undulations. Before an opinion can be formed or any more thought given, the park is behind and the business of the day ahead.
This brief encounter is how most outdoor sculpture is viewed. It is not studied in detail; people do not read the little plaque. It is seen from afar, judged, and left behind. The sculpture supposedly honoring Mary Wollstonecraft will be no exception to this rule after the initial controversy has died down. Viewed in this way, would you know the sculpture was supposed to honor anyone? Without reading the artist’s statement, would you understand the significance of the piece? I doubt it. When I first saw the sculpture “honoring” Mary Wollstonecraft (but not depicting her), I voiced, “Are you kidding me?” to an empty room, only with an expletive inserted. I was unsurprised that within the hour, someone had thrown clothing over the tiny naked figure. I am half surprised that no one has dressed it in Barbie clothes (yet).
To clarify, I have nothing against the sculpture itself—I actually quite like it. However, “the irony of a figure erased from history being erased from her own statue,” in the words of my husband, is difficult to ignore. Designed to commemorate one of the founders of the feminist movement who demanded to be seen as more than a body, the statue seems to be more than a little offensive to both Wollstonecraft and all women who have campaigned to be treated with respect and dignity rather than valued only as a source of titillation for the gaze.
And what titillation that gaze gets. The figure at the top conforms to most of the twenty-first-century Western standards of beauty, aside from some unruly pubic hair, the hallmark of a feminist, apparently. Toned, pertly large-breasted, and slim, it is another representation of the idealized womanhood people are confronted with on a daily basis. The figure lacks wrinkles, cellulite, and all the other “imperfections” human bodies have. Wollstonecraft desired to be free from the prison of societally imposed standards of beauty, yet the first sculpture that commemorates her appears to buttress what society tells women they should look like and to suggest that they are only allowed to rebel in usually invisible ways.
“I really must go to the gym today,” thinks the woman passing back through the park after her meeting, walking close enough this time to see the figure. With more time, but without energy or inclination to consider the significance of the sculpture, she remains unaware of who the sculpture supposedly commemorates or what significance that person’s work, now two hundred years later, has had over her life.
