Hermeneutic Keys for Reading Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark by Mary Wollstonecraft

Abstract

This article offers a hermeneutic reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, drawing extensively on Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of narrative identity. It moves beyond classifying the text as either pure recollection or fiction, arguing instead that it constitutes a profound process of narrative refiguration. This process continuously negotiates the tension between a fixed, sameness-based identity (idem) and a dynamic, self-making identity (ipse), thereby revealing the intricate interplay between the personal and the cultural in self-formation. The analysis situates Wollstonecraft’s journey within the dialectic of selfhood and otherness, demonstrating how her encounters with unfamiliar landscapes, languages, and social customs become essential occasions for hermeneutic self-understanding. The paper pays special attention to Ricoeur’s notions of attestation and distanciation (the productive gap between experience and telling), while also considering the reader’s role as a constitutive moment in the work’s truth-claims. Ultimately, it argues that by intertwining raw personal testimony with a performative self-presentation, Wollstonecraft transforms the epistolary form into a unique space of introspection and a projection toward future possibilities, offering a seminal exploration of the conditions under which the self is narrated, recognized, and transformed.

Keywords: narrative, hermeneutics, self-understanding, writting, travelogue, letters