Unfashioned creatures, but half made up: Beginning with Mary Shelley's Spectre

Abstract

This paper uses Derrida’s work Politics of Friendship to interrogate the concept of the “friend” in the educational and fictional writings of Mary Shelley, William Godwin and Mary Wiollstonecraft. It concludes with a reading of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which argues that a certain wager on the possibility friendship rhetorically structures Wollstonecraft’s text. The argument about friendship and education mounted in this paper leads on to my account of what elsewhere I have called otogogy.