The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  Miss More's politics were thoroughly reactionary, and she proceeded from the narrowest of nonconformist assumptions about human nature, a world away from Mary's Unitarian friends. She believed in the innate wickedness of children and saw education as primarily concerned with crushing this wickedness and ferreting out the evil impulses of the human heart, male or female. Thus the prevalence of adultery caused her more concern than the starvation suffered by the poor as a result of the French wars, since starvation could be attributed to the will of God. Her point of view made her popular with the government; she was employed to write calming tracts for the rural poor and ridiculed quietly in London for her concern over the sinfulness of Society.20

  The link between feminism and radical ideas was also seized on by Elizabeth Hamilton, a popular novelist living in Edinburgh. In 1800 she published The Modern Philosophers, a satirical attack on any demand for rights in either sex, which went into several editions, including an Irish one renamed The London Philosophers. She made an attempt to exclude Mary Wollstonecraft from her satire, referring to her as ‘the very sensible authoréss’ and concentrating her fire instead on Mary Hays, with a sublime disregard of the essential similarity of the two women's views – perhaps she had not read Maria. Ugly, stupid and undomesticated Bridgetina Botherim was clearly meant for Miss Hays, with her perpetual quoting of Godwin and her unavailing pursuit of men. To her suggestion that unmarried women needed work and married ones were sometimes oppressed, a beautifully simple answer was provided: Christian faith was in itself enough to prevent single women from feeling unhappy or frustrated, and no true Christian husband would ever oppress his wife. A similar point of view was expressed by Wilberforce, who was pleased with the notion that unmarried women ‘may always find an object in attending to the poor’, rather as though God had thoughtfully provided them for one another's benefit.

  To this particular brand of optimism even Maria Edgeworth was clear-sighted enough to see possible objections, though she went no further than recommending that governesses should be paid well enough to ensure their dignity and ultimate independence. She suggested a salary of £300 a year, but nobody took her advice.21 Another woman writer, the north London Quaker Priscilla Wakefield, did plead for a greatly enlarged range of employments for women and made the truly revolutionary suggestion that there should be equal pay for male and female servants performing equal labours. Her Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex, with Suggestions for its Improvements (published by Johnson in 1798) was careful not to offend in any way against delicacy or rigid notions of the class structure: thus she called for female undertakers in order to preserve the modesty of female corpses, and women teachers in all subjects so that schoolgirls should not have to meet men at all, and she wished to protect girls of the lower classes from novels and indeed all beautiful works of art in case they should lead them to expect too much of life. But in her own way Mrs Wakefield was at least drawing attention again to the practical problems discussed by the Marys and casting about for a solution, even if there was no question of referring to their ideas or example.

  Another well-known novelist, Jane West, took up overtly didactic writing at the turn of the century, possibly under the influence of her friend Bishop Percy, the old man who was so fascinated by the gossip about Mary Wollstonecraft at the time of Robert King's trial. It may have been he who caused her to harp so insistently on Mary's vicious example:

  Among the writers whose extravagant doctrines have not only been published in this country, but circulated with uncommon avidity, loaded with extravagant praise, transfused into a thousand shapes, and insinuated into every recess, the name of Mary Wollstonecraft has obtained a lamentable distinction.

  This and several other similar references occurred in her Letters to a Young Man (published in 1801: it went into six editions before 1810). A few years later she produced Letters to a Young Lady: men were always men, but females were either ladies or women, and Jane West had nothing to say to the second category. By now she felt even more strongly about the influence of Mary and her fellow-radicals – the doctrine of human perfectibility was dangerous, moral revolution was the precursor of political revolution, and God had designed ladies especially to be ‘conservators of morals’.* Their work as conservators had to be carried on, however, entirely in the domestic sphere, and while it was acceptable enough that they should write as amateurs, they were guilty of a serious sin if they attempted to rival men and make a profession of literature: ‘Literature is with us an ornament, or an amusement, not a duty or profession; and when it is pursued with such avidity as to withdraw us from the especial purposes of our creation, it becomes a crime.’ The especial purposes of creation were domesticity, marriage and motherhood. Ladies must practise absolute obedience to their husbands, give up even their female friends if so required, cultivate the passive virtues, ‘humble resignation and cheerful content’, because ‘the lords of creation’ liked to find smiling faces awaiting them at home. It is tempting to discover some irony in Mrs West's phrases here, but she was speaking as unequivocally as the sans-culotte husbands of 1793.

  A true lady would avoid marrying a man with Whig principles, according to Mrs West, since they made notoriously bad husbands. She might show disapprobation of her husband's conduct on occasion, though she should do so quietly, but she should not expect much or feel too keenly. ‘If we wish our girls to be happy – we must try to make them docile, contented, prudent, and domestic’ – and, of course, chaste.

  Her views on what constituted the perfect lady were backed by extreme disapproval of the lying, rapacious and envious poor who, apart from their notorious sexual immorality (‘Bastardy is scarcely reckoned a disgrace, and criminality before marriage is too common even to excite surprise’), had been stirred up by Tom Paine and his crew to expect all the luxuries of life, which God had very properly denied them. It would be pleasant to believe her attitudes represented an extreme rather than a norm, but the fact is she was a popular and admired writer: Jane Austen's ‘good Mrs West’.22

  The most poignant and curious of the responses to Mary's views came from an unexpected voice: that of Fanny Burney, herself reared in the rationalism of the eighteenth century, but always somewhat subject to creeping attacks of perfect ladyship. Her last novel, The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties, appeared in 1813, though it had been planned and begun in the Nineties.23 Its principal theme was a conflict between the ladylike Juliet and Elinor, the anti-heroine, enthusiast for the Revolution and the rights of men and women alike. The book was not a success then and is undoubtedly too long and frequently absurd: Juliet is pushed about from difficulty to difficulty through no less than five volumes without for one instant losing the delicacy which makes a move in almost any direction other than flight an infringement of the moral ideals she sets herself. But although Fanny Burney clearly felt obliged to endorse Juliet officially, she could not help giving the better speeches to the opposition. When, for instance, Juliet refused pointblank to support herself by becoming an actress, Elinor points out:

  You only fear to alarm, or offend the men – who would keep us from every office, but making puddings and pies for their own precious palates! Oh woman! poor, subdued woman! thou art as dependent, mentally, upon the arbitrary customs of man, as man is, corporally, upon the established laws of his country!

  Elinor actually proposes marriage to the man she loves, in conformity with her principles, though she cannot help blushing as she does so. He rejects her and her ideas, but she continues to pursue him throughout the book, and makes repeated suicide attempts in order to capture his attention. Her behaviour is made ludicrous and unbelievable, but her words remain sensible:

  Why, for so many centuries, has man, alone, been supposed to possess, not only force and power for action and defence, but even all the rights of taste; all the fine sensibilities which impel our happiest sympathies, in the choice of our life's partners? Why… is woman to be excluded from the exertions of courage…
to be denied deliberating upon the safety of the state to which she is a member, and the utility of the laws by which she must be governed: – must even her heart be circumscribed by boundaries as narrow as her sphere of action in life? Must she be taught to subdue all its native emotions? To hide them as sin, and to deny them as shame? Must her affections be bestowed but as the recompence of flattery received; not of merit discriminated? Must everything that she does be prescribed by rule?

  Again,

  This Woman, whom they estimate thus below, they elevate above themselves. They require from her, in defiance of their examples! – in defiance of their lures! – angelical perfection. She must be mistress of her passions; she must never listen to her inclinations; she must not take a step of which the purport is not visible; she must not pursue a measure of which she cannot publish the motive; she must always be guided by reason, though they deny her understanding!

  And here, for the last time, Elinor addresses the man who prefers to marry Juliet on the subject

  which you have long since, in common with every man that breathes, wished exploded, the Rights of Woman; Rights, however, which all your sex, with all its arbitrary assumption of superiority, can never disprove, for they are the Rights of human nature; to which the two sexes equally and inalienably belong… But I must leave to abler casuists, and the slow, all-arranging ascendance of truth, to raise our oppressed half of the human species, to the equality and dignity for which equal nature, that gives us Birth and Death alike, designs us.

  In giving her formal blessing to the perfect lady, Fanny Burney made no real attempt to answer her own imperfect but articulate Elinor; she remains as a curious tribute to the feminism her creator was determined to disapprove of.

  One more female critic must be considered: Mary's mother-in-law, Mrs Godwin, whose remarks were kinder than most of her educated contemporaries:

  My dear Wm – I'm a poor letter writer at best, but now worse than ever. After thinking of yo. for yr. genteel present of the Memoirs of yr. wife. Excuse me saying Providence certainly knows best, the fountain of wisdom cannot err. He that gave life can take it away, and none can hinder, and tho we see not his reasons now, we shall see them hereafter. I hope yo. are taught by reflection your mistake concerning marriage, there might have been two children that had no lawful wright to anything yt. was their fathers, with a thousand other bad consequences, children and wives crying about ye streets without a protector. You wish, I dare say, to keep yr. own oppinion, therefore I shall say no more but wish you and dear babes happy. Dose little Mary thrive? or she weaned?24

  ‘Children and wives crying about ye streets without a protector’: this was the essential objection for Mrs Godwin and many other women too no doubt. The flaw in Mary's attitude to natural sexuality (as well as Godwin's theories of marriage) was the lack of effective birth-control, and as long as women could not protect themselves against conception, the ‘naturalness’ admired by Mary was too loaded with danger. Her emphasis on sexual freedom seemed likely, to most of the women of her day and for several generations afterwards, to produce the very conditions in which women were most helpless, most disadvantaged, least free.* She might make a prostitute into a heroine in Maria, and have herself fished out of the Thames by watermen and revived in a public house, but how could anyone want to follow her example and take her risks? And the idea that one false step was irretrievable was after all based on the fact that seduction, like marriage, led almost inevitably to the birth of a child. Mrs Opie made Adeline Mowbray's mother prepare to forgive her but give up the idea again when she found she was pregnant, causing a friend to ask naively, ‘Is it a greater crime to be in the family way, than to live with a man as his mistress?’ Society agreed with Adeline's mother. Mary King's baby had to be got rid of before she could be embarked on a new life, and Fanny Imlay's realization of her true parentage probably determined her (at least in part) to kill herself. ‘One whose birth was unfortunate' she called herself in her last note, from which she tore the signature. Given the prevailing ideas of the time, she was right.

  Instead of the perfectible woman, the perfect lady: instead of inaugurating an age of natural rights restored and equal partnership with enlightened men, Mary died just in time to avoid the ludicrous sight of her sex being hoisted on to a new and supremely uncomfortable pedestal (those members of her sex, that is, whose menfolk could afford so to elevate them). Ladies, though intellectually inferior, were henceforth to be morally superior, so that for them it was a privilege to make sacrifices, to submit to authority with good grace, and to deny themselves what they really wanted, if indeed they ever arrived at the point of knowing what there might be to want. A piece of chivalric nonsense was revived to do duty as a literal truth. Even the term ‘better half’, which had once applied to a spouse of either sex, was now applied exclusively to the wife, with the natural result that it soon acquired the jocular and contemptuous connotation it still bears.

  By the time Lecky came to publish his History of Morals in 1869, he was able to advance as an evident and generally accepted truth that:

  Morally, the general superiority of women over men, is I think, unquestionable… There are two great departments of virtue: the impulsive, or that which springs spontaneously from the emotions; and the deliberative, or that which is performed in obedience to the sense of duty; and in both of these I imagine women are superior to men.25

  In the same year, John Stuart Mill published a dissenting view:

  As for moral differences, considered as distinguished from intellectual, the distinction commonly drawn is to the advantage of women. They are declared to be better than men; an empty compliment, which must provoke a bitter smile from every woman of spirit, since there is no other situation in life in which it is the established order, that the better should obey the worse.26

  And where Lecky pointed to the smaller number of crimes committed by women, Mill answered:

  I doubt not that the same thing may be said, with the same truth, of negro slaves… I do not know a more signal instance of the blindness with which the world, including the herd of studious men, ignore and pass over all the influence of social circumstances, than their silly depreciation of the intellectual, and silly panegyrics on the moral nature of women.

  But Mill was speaking for the very few; Lecky's opinion was undoubtedly the standard one in England.* English fiction writers of the mid-nineteenth century made their own commentary on the situation. Thackeray polarized the female sex into the virtuous and stupid on the one hand, and the intelligent, ambitious and sexually developed on the other. Becky in Vanity Fair is driven to use her sexuality for advancement because brain alone does not give her the chance; a belief in women's rights is presented only as one of the quaint follies of the villainous Miss Crawley. Writing in 1847 about 1815, he made the point lightly, a stock joke that needed no further consideration.

  The women novelists, when they approached such questions at all, either drew back in dismay at the reception they received, as Mrs Gaskell did with Ruth, a plea for kindness to unmarried mothers that met with a very harsh response in 1853; or muffled their anger in Christian resignation: Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1849) contained some stirring but finally crushed feminism. George Eliot, deeply nervous of feminism, was unable to present a heroine who was not defeated, diverted from her ambitions and obliged to settle for much less than she had hoped and striven for, both sexually and intellectually. Maggie had to be drowned; Romola played husband to her own dead and faithless husband's childlike mistress and cared for her children. Dorothea's ‘full nature… spent itself in the channels which had no great name on earth’.27 And it is impossible to believe that Gwendolen Harleth would have done better had she, instead of marrying Grandcourt, become the governess of Mrs Momperts's daughters. There was no satisfactory way out of the trap for women in the mind of Marian Evans.

  Dickens, with the most far-ranging and finely tuned imagination of all the novelists of his time, devoted one of his b
est books, David Copperfield (1850), to exploring alternative ways of being for women: Rosa Dartle savagely refused to be treated as a doll by Steerforth, whereas little Em'ly, Dora, Annie Strong and David's mother knew no other possibility than that of dolls, child-wives, child-mistresses; and Betsy Trotwood embodied the deliberate masculinization of a woman who finds no scope for her talents and energy in the ordinary social pattern. The attempt to create something more satisfactory in Agnes foundered: Dickens saw the situation with perfect clarity, but he could not provide a solution in the shape of a convincingly mature and attractive woman.*

  In effect, women with Mary's breadth and experience and outspokenness were lacking in England throughout the hundred years that followed her death. She had presented an ideal, but it had been turned almost at once into a bogey, flanked by the spectres of revolution, irreligion and sexual anarchy. The women who began to fight over particular feminist issues – their legal position, questions of employment and education, birth control, the vote – did not often invoke her name. When at the very end of the century some began to take an open interest in her and write about her, they tended to adopt defensive tones and gloss over the aspects of her life and personality that might bring discredit or ridicule on their causes: the episode with Eliza was transformed into a heroic piece of rescue work, the Fuseli affair denied, the relationship with Godwin romanticized. Her awkwardness has persisted, and she has shrugged off calumny and whitewash and resisted some strenuous efforts at feminist canonization. She was often bitter in her lifetime, but she might have laughed if she had been able to foresee the vagaries of her reputation after death.