Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  Some have marvelled at Lady Kingsborough’s graciousness and Mary’s ingratitude. Mary did not take kindly to condescension–she was not to be appropriated as another pet in her ladyship’s possession. This antagonism blinded her to a vein of benevolence in Lady Kingsborough: what Mary experienced as demands could have been a conscientious effort on the part of her employer to carry out whatever the physician had suggested to cure the ‘nervous fever’ of the governess. The uncommon interest the Kings, FitzGeralds and Ogles all showed in Mary Wollstonecraft suggests that her character roused their curiosity. This was no ordinary governess, and Lady Kingsborough was no ordinary employer in having the sense to make the most of Mary’s merits. After their first interview in her ladyship’s bedroom at the castle, there’s no sign Mary was held to account for her lack of genteel accomplishments. Where a lesser employer might have carped, this one simply hired an array of extras–masters in singing, dance and modern languages–as soon as her daughters arrived in Dublin. Then, too, Lady Kingsborough would not have taken Mary about had she not been proud of her. Mary’s advanced educational ideas served as a foil to the vanity that Mary thought she detected in Lady Kingsborough. Privately, she thanked heaven that she ‘was not so unfortunate as to be born a Lady of quality’, as she went along to theatres and concerts.

  What she did enjoy was Handel: in the spring of 1787 there were Handel concerts at St Werburgh’s Church where the Lord Lieutenant had his private pew beside the organ. Swift, the great Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral and author of Gulliver’ s Travels, had been baptised in this church in 1667. Its interior dates from 1759 when it was rebuilt after a fire, with black and white paving extending down the centre aisle and across the front of the chancel. The main Anglican church, St Patrick’s, was built outside the city walls; St Werburgh’s was built inside, in the old part of Dublin, amongst the tenements south of the Liffey. This did not deter fashion from attending concerts, enhanced by the exceptional acoustics. There, on 2 and 3 May, they heard a group of amateur musicians commemorate the recitals Handel had given in Dublin in 1741–2. Caroline Stuart Dawson, talented granddaughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, sang. Mary admired her voice–and pitied her marriage to Lord Portarlington: a ‘nonentity’.

  When it came to theatre, Mary found Dublin inferior to London, with touring English actors in undistinguished plays. She disliked contrived plots and false emotion, preferring the ‘almost imperceptible progress of the passions, which Shakespeare has so finely delineated’. In London she had ridiculed Calista, who retires to a cave until ‘her Tears have wash’d her stains away’. Mary had heard this ‘unmoved’, while thrilling ‘beyond measure’ when Lear says, ‘I think this lady/ To be my child Cordelia’, and Cordelia answers, ‘And so I am, I am.’ Cordelia’s tormented fidelity may be found in Mary herself, as well as the purity of statement in one who is ‘true’ in a distorted world.

  When a masquerade was announced, Mary at first wished to go; then changed her mind when Lady Kingsborough took this up as a scheme of her own and produced tickets for Mary and Betty. When Mary refused, saying she could not afford a costume, Lady K lent her a black domino: a loose cloak with a half-mask for the upper part of the face. She planned to take Mary and Betty to the houses of several ‘people of fashion’. They proved ‘a much admired group’, Mary reported afterwards to Everina. Betty went as a forsaken shepherdess, Lady Kingsborough wore a domino with a smart cockade, and George Ogle’s sister-in-law Miss Moore was in the guise of a female savage recently arrived in high society from one of the newly discovered islands in the North Pacific. As it was taken for granted that this stranger could not speak the language, the black domino was appointed her interpreter. This gave Mary ‘an ample field for satire’, as she put it: ‘–this night the lights[,] the novelty of the scene, and every thing together contributed to make me more than half mad–I gave full scope to a satirical vein–.’ Words flew, unstifled, from her lips as, masked, she took on the Ascendancy–and the Ascendancy, masked, allowed her to do so, even warmed to it as a kind of theatre. It was impossible not to be aware that she was something of a star in the citadel of the enemy.

  That spring, the balance of power shifted somewhat in Mary’s favour. Lady K continued to be diverted by her conversation, and became, Mary noticed, ‘afraid of me’. Rivalry came into play when George Ogle lent Mary a batch of his ‘pretty stanzas’. She thought they had ‘really great merit’. On the evening of 23 March she supped with Mrs Ogle and her sister till midnight, and two mornings after, called on them again. That evening, 25 March, the Earl of Kingston came to dine with his son, and expressed a wish to see Miss Wollstonecraft. Lady Kingsborough sent up repeated invitations, which Miss Wollstonecraft declined. She was in low spirits, unfit for the drawing-room. Eventually, Lady Kingsborough came up herself, bringing Mrs Ogle and Miss Moore to add their pleas. Mary had finally to make herself ready.

  When the gentlemen joined the ladies after dinner, Ogle at once crossed the room to sit with Mary, and paid her some ‘fanciful compliments’. His latest offering was a definition of genius–their favourite subject:

  Genius! ’tis th’etherial Beam,–

  ’Tis sweet Willy Shakespear’s dream,–

  ’Tis the muse upon the wing,–

  ’Tis wild Fancy’s magic ring,–

  ’Tis the Phrenzy of the mind,–

  ’Tis the eye that ne’er is blind,–

  ’Tis the Prophet’s holy fire,

  ’Tis music of the lyre

  ’Tis th’enthusiast’s frantic bliss–

  ’Tis anything–alas–but this.

  Mary could be sad no longer. Kingsborough came near and caught her eye–a look that made her blush, as it brought back her own night-time reflections on her single state: ‘Is it not a sad pity that so sweet a flower should waste its sweetness on the Dublin air, or that the Grave should receive its untouched charms…an Old Maid–“’Tis true a pity and ’tis pity ’tis true”–Alas!!!!!!!!’ Kingsborough’s look told her that she was young, unattached; and though not pretty in the dressy style of his wife, she stood out with her healthy, unrouged cheeks and hastily piled locks, amongst rows of dressed and powdered heads. And was she not holding forth to a man widely regarded as the epitome of all that was civilised in the Ascendancy, who encouraged her vivacity of mind and displayed his pleasure in her company for all to see?

  At this moment Lady Kingsborough signalled Mary to go. Mary ignored the signal, refusing to be forced to appear and then dismissed in so peremptory a way. The reason was not far to seek: Lady K had chosen Ogle for her ‘flirt’.

  Ogle’s renewed attentions to Mary were no longer the uncomplicated cordialities of the castle. Some move he made cast her into a ‘painful quietness which arises from reason clouded by disgust’. She saw a ‘sensualist’–not the ‘purest’ man of his time, as his epitaph declares. Ogle had ‘serious faults’, Mary confided to Everina. Disturbed by this shift yet convinced of his goodness, her eyes followed flights of virtue ‘on the brink of vice’, observing a comet-like figure shooting off-course into confusion.

  One day in May 1787, when Mary was again with the Ogles, her ‘starts’ broke through her clamp. This was about the time that she had to give up any hope that her brother would part with the portion due to her from the lawsuit. Could Mary’s starts have to do with this disappointment? Or her disillusion with Ogle, or needs of her own? To the alarmed Ogles, she ascribed her starts to her mortification on discovering weaknesses in herself like those of people she despised. If she confessed this to the Ogles, it’s likely she confided other problems: her brother’s unscrupulous greed, the prospect of continued servitude, and her craving a more purposeful life. She hinted to Everina of ‘schemes which are only in embryo’. Until she was free of debt, she could take no ‘active step’.

  Meanwhile, as Mary went about with Lady Kingsborough, she stored impressions for her novel, shunned her employers when she could and shut the door of her room in order to read. Sol
itary reading for women was seen as antisocial and selfish, a sign of self-indulgence bordering on the moral dangers of discontent and excess. Letters reveal that Wollstonecraft did suffer as an intellectual (reading Rousseau’s Émile), surrounded as she was with the emptiness of aristocratic occupations (five hours preparing for balls) and idle conversation (‘Lady K’s animal passion fills up the hours which are not spent dressing’). Though treated far better than Charlotte Brontë was to be as governess to middle-class manufacturers, they felt a similar contempt and frustration. Both were sensitive to slights and alert to nuances of manners. The difference was that where Brontë longed to be a lady, Wollstonecraft, impervious to class, managed to intimidate Lady Kingsborough, who had the wit to recognise superior endowment in a social inferior.

  Wollstonecraft had already formulated her ideas about education before she began reading Émile in March 1787. Its proposal to let a child loose on mountain crags had been published to a furore of resistance in 1762. (The book was burnt by public executioners in France and Switzerland, and Rousseau went into exile, partly in England.) In the seventeenth century Locke had defined a child as a blank slate on which education inscribed the formula for the man. Rousseau granted the child the right to discover its own nature. Education should come from within and move outwards towards the social contract. But this did not apply to girls, and Rousseau did not extend Émile’s liberties to Sophie, his ideal mate. When he comes to Sophie, Rousseau begins to sound like an old pimp: his Sophie is a coquette formed to please men. Wollstonecraft termed his style libertine, training women to be the devious playthings Rousseau believes them to be. In contrast, Wollstonecraft’s authenticity is manifest in a style disdaining the shifty language of insinuation. Her crucial advance over Rousseau is to plant reason in growing girls. It’s not an arid exercise; it germinates in a soil fertilised with affection. Where the theoretic Rousseau (who abandoned his own children to institutions) believed it futile to reason with a child, Wollstonecraft taught through reason. A rational girl in the process of discovering her own nature is going to call into question the established model of femininity. This was the basis of the ideological conflict between Mary Wollstonecraft and Lady Kingsborough, trained in the old way and in Mary’s eyes a woman whose brains had been irretrievably trivialised. It became Mary’s mission to rescue Margaret King from this fate.

  ‘A fine girl,’ Mary pronounced with pride. ‘I govern her completely.’

  This was not entirely true. She could not control Margaret’s outbursts against her mother. What Mary was actually saying was that Margaret never turned her temper against her governess, for Margaret was now a disciple. Lurking in the walled enclosure of Anglo-Irish aristocracy, a young volcano was firing up, ready to erupt.

  As summer approached, Mary encouraged Lady Kingsborough to go abroad. A consolation for the loss of her inheritance, and for continuing a governess, would be to travel: to contemplate new scenes as a release from the narrowness of the female life. Plans for a Grand Tour with Mary and the children began to go forward. Their first stop, on crossing the Irish Sea, was a spa in Bristol.

  At Bristol Hot Wells, from June to August, the gulf between Lady Kingsborough and Mary deepened. After taking unusual pains to draw Mary into the pastimes of high society, Lady K finally lost patience with a governess who cast a cold eye on these efforts. She took to introducing Mary in a manner that put her in her place. Her tone warned society not to be deceived: this dignified and articulate young woman of twenty-eight, who was travelling with the family, should not be mistaken for a friend; this was a dependant who worked for a living. Mary was stung repeatedly, yet she was indeed no friend to the Ascendancy–with the exceptions of Mrs FitzGerald, the Ogles and, above all, her favourite pupil whom she called fondly ‘my little Margaret’.

  It’s at this moment that we catch Mary Wollstonecraft in the act of greatness. She was not a born genius; she became one. Here is someone with ordinary abilities transgressing the limits of ordinariness. Throughout her period as governess, and moving behind the constraints of that position, are hints of enterprise: the sea of ideas at Eton which she can’t set in order; her studies at night; and the ‘schemes’ that she cannot reveal to Everina. In Bristol, the purpose sounds again when she reminds Everina of her identity as an Author, and hints of some ‘writing’. To be great, neither innate ability, nor ideas, nor ready words, nor shafts of criticism were enough: there had to be the character to press on. She had the will to rise again when prospects appeared to fade and life felt untenable. She can confess a death wish (‘I long to go to sleep–with my friend [Fanny] in the house appointed for all living’) at the very time that a new form of life bursts its chrysalis: ‘to make any great advance in morality genius is necessary,’ she writes, ‘–a peculiar kind of genius which is not to be described, and cannot be conceived by those who do not possess it’.

  The advancing genius; the fading nerve: we might say the contradiction is the character, or we might see a woman strung out between extremes. Her letters do vent the extremes, but letters can be misleading, especially those like Wollstonecraft’s which appear so confessional. They have suggested a pattern of collapse and failure, but to read them collectively in the context of her actions indicates the reverse: a pattern of renewed purpose. The letters do state once more how ‘flat, stale and unprofitable’ the things of this world appeared, and her impatience to leave its ‘unweeded garden’. Yet Hamlet’s intellectual melancholy, alienation and almost suicidal inability to take action, join with Wollstonecraft’s sense of purpose. We see energy interfused with melancholy, and in some way, the one depended on the other. Her sister Bess acted out the melancholy without the counterforce. This is the difference: on Mary’s lips, Hamlet’s words laid claim to heroic possibilities, even as they proclaimed her powerlessness as a temporary, even necessary, phase. To see this merely as self-dramatisation for its own sake is to lose sight of latent powers that Mary Wollstonecraft had to bring to bear in ways she had not yet determined.

  There was a daily balance to her Hamlet role in the steady occupations of teaching and reading. In June, she was studying a very sober book, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy. Its author William Paley asks how ‘adventitious’ rights (the rule of one over another in a manmade system) might be distinguished from ‘natural rights’ (what people who found themselves on a desert island would be entitled to claim, the right to life and liberty, to air, light and water). Though a manmade system may be capricious and absurd, it would be a ‘sin’ to oppose it, Paley argues, because God wills civil society to exist for the happiness of mankind. Paley takes his reader to the border of revolution, then leads him away, and likewise with issues of gender: ‘Nature may have made and left the sexes of the human species nearly equal in their faculties, and perfectly so in their rights’; but, he goes on, to guard against competition with men, which women’s equality would produce, Christianity rightly enjoined obedience on the wife in a marriage. Mary’s unqualified respect for Paley in June 1787 should not surprise us. She was still faithful to the Anglican Church, and this fits her loyal Cordelia aspect. Yet her prime trait of compassion, the visibility for her of suffering individuals, drew her at the same time to a Dissenter like Dr Price, who brought religion and revolution together.

  Christianity preached resignation to the earthly lot, and in 1786–7 Wollstonecraft was repeating this, albeit with difficulty. Since resignation reinforced the status quo, some radicals like Godwin lost their faith during the revolutionary course of the 1780s. The radicalism of Mary Wollstonecraft differed from theirs in that her politics did not lose sight of the soul. In remaining a Christian, she was tugged between the claims of human rights and those of an otherworldly faith that emphasised the virtue of suffering.

  Suffering seems to be the only course open to the heroine of Mary Wollstonecraft’s first novel, which she was writing in Bristol that June. She draws on herself in a way so close to actual event as to leave us uncertain what
is fiction. Title and subtitle, Mary, A Fiction, appear a contradiction. An ‘Advertisement’ owns at the outset that ‘the soul of the author is exhibited and animates the hidden springs’. Using the author’s own name and those of her parents (‘Edward, who married Eliza’), Mary starts with parents and childhood, and continues in the measure of biographic record. ‘Mary’s’ mother is untender and sickly. She favours her son and ignores her daughter, who learns to seal off her real life as a thing apart. Wollstonecraft blends her own mother with Lady Kingsborough as an heiress who ‘carefully attended to the shews of things’. ‘Mary’s’ correspondence with a friend called Ann trains her in taste and correctness, but Ann is indifferent to ‘Mary’s’ attachment because she pines for a lost love. In Lisbon, ‘Mary’ cares for this friend who is dying of consumption in a sanatorium, and can’t articulate her fears because it would be like pronouncing a sentence of death.

  The plot of Mary is designed to expose the futile plots of women’s lives, drawing on lives the author could validate and distilling their pathos to make this point: Fanny’s decline as a result of the dowry system, Mrs Blood’s squandered patrimony, and the weak position of Bess in a damaging marriage. The novel makes a case against marriage, from which the only escape is death: the closing words tell us that ‘Mary’ was ‘hastening to that world where there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage’. In 1748 the protracted death of Richardson’s Clarissa, refusing to paper over her rape with the legality of marriage, had vindicated the independence of a virtuous woman for a generation of readers across Europe and America. A callous father marries ‘Mary’ to a man who repels her. The one ‘Mary’ could have loved, Henry–a man who values her intelligence–is a dying, dim figure. No established form of life can answer ‘Mary’s’ need for learning, philosophy and a meaningful existence, expressed in soliloquies that mark the growth of her ‘original’ mind.