Emozioni rivoluzionarie: Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft e il Terrore

Abstract

From its inception, the French Revolution was experienced as an unprecedented spectacle, received by many with overwhelming enthusiasm but also by waves of panic and terror. Among the supporters of the Revolution who rushed to Paris after 1789 were two women writers who have left an important mark in literary history: Helen Maria Williams (1762-1827), a poet, novelist and war correspondent ante litteram, author of the bestselling series of Letters Written in France, published in London between 1790 and 1796, which offered first-hand accounts and testimonies written in a captivating, personal style that contrasted with the anti-Jacobin sentiment of the leading English newspapers; and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), journalist and philosopher, author of the famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), now considered a foundational text of modern feminist thought, and of the historical work A Historical and Moral View of the Origins and Progress of the French Revolution (1795), which remained unfinished. This essay will assess the significance of both writers’ reflections on revolutionary violence, the reign of terror and personal fears, placing them in the wider context of the relation between sensibility and rationality, philosophical and political thought and literary writing which distinguishes the work of both writers. Wollstonecraft and Williams characterise the terror in multiple ways, not only as a negative emotion but also as a noble, energizing and even beneficial sentiment. In their pages, the aesthetics of sensibility and the taste for the sublime meet the extraordinary and gruesome events of the French Revolution, opening up daring new perspectives on gender relations and on the Revolution itself.