Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman

During the pivotal time in which she begins to be fascinated by Darnford, Maria is reading the 1761 novel Julie, or the New Heloise by the French writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This choice of text is a significant symbolic choice. Rousseau’s novel was extremely successful; it featured a sentimental plot in which a young woman falls in love with her tutor, even though the two of them are doomed to never be together. Rousseau’s title and plot allude to the famous medieval lovers, Heloise (or Eloise) and Abelard, who likewise pursued an illicit love affair that ended in tragedy and separation. Rousseau’s novel is an epistolary novel (recounted through letters), which functions as a further allusion to Eloise and Abelard, some of whose letters have survived, and provides a thematic connection, as Maria and Darnford get to know one another by initially writing notes back and forth.

Rousseau’s novel symbolizes how cultural norms and expectations shape individual behavior, and how gendered constructions of romance and femininity left women vulnerable to making poor choices and relying on emotion rather than reason. In Rousseau’s novel, the heroine is governed by sentiment and passion, and many subsequent works of literature likewise explored themes of sentiment and sensibility (deep emotions).