{"id":987,"date":"2020-07-30T20:00:28","date_gmt":"2020-07-30T19:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/feministssoa.group.shef.ac.uk\/?p=987"},"modified":"2025-06-15T23:10:58","modified_gmt":"2025-06-15T22:10:58","slug":"between-landscape-and-confinement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/feminist.ssoa.info\/?p=987","title":{"rendered":"Between Landscape and Confinement"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p style=\"font-size:15px\"><strong style=\"user-select: auto;\">Title:<\/strong> <strong style=\"user-select: auto;\">Between Landscape and Confinement: <\/strong>Situating the Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p style=\"font-size:15px\"><strong style=\"user-select: auto;\">Author: <\/strong>Emma Cheatle<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p style=\"font-size:15px\"><strong style=\"user-select: auto;\">In:<\/strong> Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, ed. by H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson and Helen Runting (London: Routledge, 2018), Chapter 5. ISBN: 9780203729717 (ebk.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p style=\"font-size:15px\"><strong style=\"user-select: auto;\">Year:<\/strong> 2018<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p style=\"font-size:15px\"><strong style=\"user-select: auto;\">Abstract:<\/strong> This piece of writing is an excerpt from an essay that speculates on the importance of spatial and material references to the eighteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. The essay uses critical and creative writing to present the way in which Wollstonecraft\u2019s feminism developed through references to landscape, domestic objects, and interior space. There are two sections. \u2018Landscape\u2019 (reproduced here) sets out the way that Wollstonecraft used the material motifs of place, air, and built structure to repudiate Edmund Burke\u2019s condemnation of the French Revolution. Her subsequent book, on the natural landscape of Scandinavia, dwells on the detailed materiality of place to argue that Burke\u2019s gendered tropes of \u2018sublime\u2019 and \u2018beautiful\u2019 are interdependent and grounding rather than in terrifying opposition. \u2018Confinement\u2019 draws out Wollstonecraft\u2019s seemingly contradictory positions towards domesticity: though she was known for her caustic rejection of the conventions of Georgian marriage, domesticity, and property, and their ensuing confinement of women, she carefully positioned the objects of domesticity at the centre of family life. Her own maternal \u2018confinement\u2019 at home in the Polygon, Somers Town, London, resulted in the birth of her second child \u2013 the future Mary Shelley \u2013 and her own death eleven days later.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p style=\"font-size:15px\">In the essay, the critical text is punctuated with \u2018found\u2019 postcards (figures 1\u20135) \u2013 creative texts composed whilst walking through Somers Town in search of the signs of the long-vanished Polygon. Written to Mary as \u2018love letters\u2019, these provide an alternative literary thread, drawing out imagined, personal detail. Written now into the past, and both intimate and public, the postcards recall Jacques Derrida\u2019s&nbsp;The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond&nbsp;(1980) where the \u2018post card\u2019 operates as a material and metaphorical \u2018lever\u2019, a switch-point or gear, to reconnect time, place, and people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:30px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-layout-flex wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link no-border-radius\" href=\"https:\/\/site-writing.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/Cheatle_Between-Landscape-and-Confinement.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">DOWNLOAD<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:80px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Book Chapter. Emma Cheatle, in Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, ed. by H. Frichot, C. Gabrielsson and H. Runting, 2018. This piece of writing is an excerpt from an essay that speculates on the importance of spatial and material references [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":990,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[61,49,55,57],"class_list":["post-987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-publications","tag-history","tag-methodology","tag-practice","tag-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/feminist.ssoa.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/feminist.ssoa.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/feminist.ssoa.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feminist.ssoa.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feminist.ssoa.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=987"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/feminist.ssoa.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2267,"href":"https:\/\/feminist.ssoa.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions\/2267"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feminist.ssoa.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/feminist.ssoa.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feminist.ssoa.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/feminist.ssoa.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}