Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  Imlay expressed contempt for the military; when he planned to take over Louisiana, he had a mind to expansion and land, not the cut-throat acts of a coup. That he left to the generals like Wilkinson, who was promoted to lead the frontier wars of the 1790s. Imlay drew an uncritical portrait of Wilkinson (as General W—), ‘expatiating, in his usual way, upon what would be the brilliancy and extent of the empire which is forming in this part of the world [the American frontier]; which he said would eclipse the grandeur of the Roman dominion in the zenith of their glory’. Mary Wollstonecraft could not contemplate that glory game without loathing its violence. She deplored ‘the hard-hearted savage romans’ who sacrificed lives with a sang froid ‘from the bare idea of which the mind turns, disgusted with the whole empire’. The clarity of her intelligence saw through false fantasies of militarised omnipotence, which disempowers individual judgement–the alternative form of power open to our species, which education, she saw, must promote. If Imlay never saw the monster in his mentor, neither did Washington or Jefferson. Imlay’s duality as idealist-entrepreneur, a quasi-innocent who partakes in the underworld, makes him a precursor of Gatsby in certain ways–even to his taste in fine shirts.

  Many of Imlay’s shifts remain secret, but one fact is suggestive of his standing with both French and American authorities, and that is Mary Wollstonecraft’s change of status as soon as she lives with him. It’s remarkable that Imlay is able to pass Mary off as his wife with the collusion of Gouverneur Morris, the cautious, patrician American Minister who, incidentally or not, is well placed to spy (with Washington’s secret concurrence) for the British and Austrian Cabinets after their ambassadors leave Paris. It’s even more remarkable that Mary, whose name had been chalked on her host’s door to mark the presence of an enemy alien during the dangerous spring of 1793, is suddenly safe in Paris a few months later when the full Terror is unleashed.

  The most significant fact is often something that should have happened and didn’t. What should have happened–and what people back in England assumed must have happened–was for Mary Wollstonecraft to be arrested along with other British aliens in Paris. Yet she wasn’t. Neither she nor Imlay thought it unsafe for her to remain alone in Paris during the blood-soaked autumn of 1793, while Paine’s naturalisation and long years in America could not protect him from arrest on grounds of English birth. It did become clear that even the status of honorary French citizen was no protection when agents of the Terror came for Paine after Christmas.

  At dawn they banged on the door of the Maison Philadelphie (the new, more politic name for White’s Hotel) in the passage des Petits-Pères, where he had spent the night. Orders were to search for incriminating manuscripts. Paine, anxious about his manuscript of The Age of Reason, invited the party to sit down to breakfast. The demands of this meal lasted at least three hours. Commissioner Doilé’s wordy report explains how a ‘fatigue’ descending on the captors between seven and eight had obliged them to take a bit of nourishment and call off the search until eleven (‘exténués de fatigue nous nous sommes trouvés forcés de prendre quelque nourriture’). While they were champing, Paine secreted his manuscript on his person. It was vital to pass it on, so he directed the searchers to the Maison de Bretagne on the Left Bank, where Joel Barlow lived. While Barlow’s armoires were thrown open and policemen’s heads lost inside, Paine must have managed to slip Barlow his manuscript.

  All this time Paine pretended that he could not speak French (though he had made himself perfectly–dangerously–comprehensible in his speech at the Convention, a year before, when he had made a case for sparing the King’s life). Slowly, through the simulated fog of Paine’s English-French, it was borne in on Doilé that the Bretagne was not the home of his captive. Paine, he realised, had simply wanted to be with his countryman (‘ami natal’, says Doilé, a little put out, but respectful of sentiment). So the party, with the addition of Barlow, trundled back to the Right Bank and out beyond the city wall to the place Doilé triumphantly calls ‘the true domicile of the said “PEINE”’. The afternoon search yielded no incriminating matter. It’s like a comic scene from The Scarlet Pimpernel: the dimwit guard; the resourceful foreigners. But it is, in fact, a darker tale. For when the search ended eventually at four o’clock, Doilé reports, ‘we requested citizen Payne to come with us to be transferred to prison which request he obeyed without difficulty’. There, in the Luxembourg, Paine was to languish for almost a year.

  It seems extraordinary that Mary Wollstonecraft should have been protected by her far more dubious status as an American. Even to be a genuine American was no guarantee of safety: the papers of Gouverneur Morris are full of petitions from his countrymen for rescue. Yet Gilbert Imlay came and went as though he had a special immunity, and could extend it at will to shield Mary Wollstonecraft completely in a situation where no one else felt safe for very long. The arbitrariness of the Terror, particularly the ease of denunciations under the Law of Suspects, did make Paris a place of danger, especially for anyone who did not lie low–and Mary Wollstonecraft did not lie low. A Silesian count, Gustav von Schlabrendorf, who was betrothed for a while to Christie’s sister Jane, was arrested with the English and condemned to the guillotine, missing death narrowly by mislaying his boots when the guard came, and again the following day when the guard forgot to call his name. Later, he recalled how Mary ‘often’ visited him, Helen Maria Williams and other friends. There can’t have been many visitors to the Luxembourg, revealing a glimpse of the quality in Wollstonecraft some describe as rash, others fearless. She must have been the only Englishwoman not behind bars. In fact, the British press assumed her imprisonment, a news item relayed to Bess Wollstonecraft by ‘every brute’ in her vicinity. Bess instinctively knew the report was untrue, but it left her ‘haunted’ by the image of her sister. She regretted ‘having been too severe on a heart capable of all that commands respect and Love’. For a few weeks in November–December 1793 Bess reproached herself–so long as she feared Mary was ‘in greater danger than a more insignificant character’.

  This fear was justified. Mary Wollstonecraft was pressing on with her history of the French Revolution at a time when the Revolutionary Tribunal was obsessed with incriminating papers. Helen Maria Williams had burnt her own papers as well as those entrusted to her by Mme Roland and Mme de Genlis. Paine was currently imprisoned to stop him writing what he saw. Mary Wollstonecraft was likewise too honest not to write as an eyewitness to the Terror. ‘I am grieved–sorely grieved when I think of the blood that has stained the cause of freedom in Paris…Alas!’ she cries. ‘Justice had never been known in France. Retaliation and vengeance had been its fatal substitutes.’ It would have been simple for the Public Prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, to pick out such passages. Her opposition to bloodshed aligns her with those now judged traitors, so that to continue to set down what she saw risked death.

  When Mary was four and a half months pregnant, at the start of 1794, she noticed eyes on her belly. ‘Finding that I was observed, I told the good women…simply that I was with child: and let them stare! and–, and–, nay, all the world, may know it for aught I care!’

  Her words were defiant, but she did shrink from ‘coarse jokes’. It took some pluck to sustain nonchalance with people who questioned a pregnant woman on her own, and this may be one reason for her decision, a few days later, to leave Paris. During that first week of January she was visited by a member of the American network who (she reports to Imlay) ‘incautiously let fall’ something she hadn’t known–clearly, a secret matter, because she skirts it on paper.

  Mary accused Imlay of ‘a want of confidence, and consequently affection’.

  Given his long habit of secrecy, he took a risk when he involved himself with a celebrity, engaging in intensive correspondence with a woman whose voice proclaimed a morality of clarity and candour. Imlay acted swiftly. He asked her to respect his motives, and fastened their tie with an idyllic picture of domestic bliss with six children grouped about their
fireside. Best of all, he wished her to join him.

  Soothed and ‘lightsome’ (in her Yorkshire idiom), she agreed to leave as soon as she was fit to travel. This letter of 9 January 1794 is the first signed ‘Mary Imlay’. During the visible stage of her pregnancy, she was going to be ‘Madame Imlay’ living with her husband in Le Havre where her history was unknown. Body and mood healed at the prospect: ‘I look forward to a rational prospect of as much felicity as the earth affords–with a little dash of rapture into the bargain.’ A little shamefaced, she tries out the language of dependence–her ‘tendrils’ clinging to his ‘elm’ for support–but soon shifts to her own candid manner when she dreams of their reunion: ‘Knowing I am not a parasite-plant, I am willing to receive the proofs of affection, that every pulse replies to, when I think of being once more in the same house with you.’

  When she applied to leave Paris, she had none of the difficulty others experienced with officials of the Terror. A pass was hers for the asking, as though Imlay was either influential at the American Embassy or shielded by a link with the Terror itself–the much-needed supplies shipped through a British blockade. If Mary’s English identity were to present a problem, this would have surfaced over the pass (as it did before her association with Imlay, when she had failed to get a pass the previous spring). On Thursday 16 January 1794, she set off for Le Havre. As she produced her pass for the guards at the exit from Paris, her real danger lay in her luggage: her manuscript with its talk of ‘butchery’ and critique of cold eloquence–unmistakably Robespierre. To write ‘merde à la république’ was a crime and Mary had still not burnt this incriminating document. Shaken by all she had witnessed of ‘death and misery, in every shape of terrour’ for ‘the unfortunate beings cut off’ around her, she was not to be deterred. She carried that sheaf of paper out of Paris, though her life, she well knew, ‘would not have been worth much, had it been found’.

  Mary’s spirits rose as she journeyed towards Imlay. Her notes to him touch on her feelings from moment to moment: ‘I am driving towards you in person! My mind, unfettered, has flown to you long since, or rather has never left you.’ ‘I hope to tell you soon (on your lips) how glad I shall be to see you’ and to ‘bid you goodnight…in my new apartment where I am to meet you and love, in spite of care, to smile me to sleep’.

  Havre-Marat, at the mouth of the Seine, was then a port with a population of twenty-five thousand. A wall, fifteen feet wide at the top, held back the tide about a mile in front of the town with its tall, close-packed houses. Imlay had prepared good lodgings, rented from John Wheatcroft, on the rue de Corderie, Section des Sans-Culottes, near the harbour. They dined in a big room; a gigot smoked on the sideboard. Mary was given the means to hire a servant and buy fine linen for Imlay’s shirts. Though in the course of business he was troubled by sudden embargoes and ships that did not arrive, they lived well–as Imlay always did. Their second period together was like marriage in everything but law. After two months Mary reassured Everina, ‘I am safe, through the protection of an American…who joins to uncommon tenderness of heart and quickness of feeling, a soundness of understanding, and reasonableness of temper, rarely to be met with–having been brought up in the interiour parts of America, he is a most natural, unaffected creature.’ With Imlay she hid the ‘shades’ in their relationship, and contrived to dissolve these blots of ‘darkness’ in companionable squabbles over pillows.

  ‘I could not sleep.–I turned to your side of the bed,’ she wrote to him when he was away, ‘and tried to make the most of the comfort of a pillow, which you used to tell me I was churlish about; but all would not do.’

  Mary asked Ruth Barlow to send her Le Journal des débats et des décrets (the Debates and Decrees in the National Assembly) and, if possible, her books. When Richard Codman passed through Le Havre en route to London, she gave him a package for Johnson: part of her Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. A ‘View’ is what it is, not a full-scale history obedient to the institutional language of the dominant order. Soon after, Jane Austen likewise questions the supposed objectivity of institutional history (‘the quarrels of popes and kings, the men all so good for nothing and hardly any women at all’). More specifically, Wollstonecraft questions the spectator habit induced by court government. Monarchy is entertainment. It’s theatre for those it rules. Drama, the great cultural achievement of the reign of Louis XIV, was so pervasive that even the wars of that long reign seemed like spectacles. If the Terror, too, was theatre–and here Wollstonecraft concurs with Burke–this taste for theatre was carried over from the ancien régime.

  In her critique of theatricality as a mode of existence, Wollstonecraft authenticates a character who appeared ten years before she was born. Clarissa (in Richardson’s novel) resists the theatricality of Lord Lovelace, who expects to dazzle her with verbal flourishes, ingenious plots and amusing disguises. When these fail he rapes her. Clarissa’s vindication of her integrity made her the most popular heroine of the century. Her story exposes the stale props of a rake who looks back to plots of woman’s complicity, the lusty, conniving image of woman promoted by the Restoration comedies of the previous century. Lovelace proves an anachronism in 1748, beside the new independence of a literate woman. Clarissa’s pen confounds Lovelace; her rational language takes us to conclusions that close his show. For Wollstonecraft’s generation of the 1770s and ’80s, the anachronism was no longer the rake, but the theatre of royalty propped by the parade of courtiers. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Clarissa voice offers reason in place of stupid awe at the glamour of privilege, for reason is ‘the image of God planted in our nature’.

  A View discerns the workings of character at the heart of public events. ‘The lively effusions of mind’, characteristic of the French, provoke ‘sudden gusts of sympathy’ which evaporate as new impressions come from another quarter. It’s an English critique of susceptibility and brilliance in favour of solidity: ‘Freedom is a solid good, that requires to be treated with reverence and respect.’ Freedom is also female–a mother bird who had shown her ‘sober matron graces’ in America, promising ‘to shelter all mankind’ beneath her ‘maternal wing’. Wollstonecraft was not content to expound the history of the old order; she explores the psychology of servility ‘destroying the natural energy of man’ while it ‘stifles the noblest sentiments of the soul’. The result is ‘a set of cannibals [revolutionaries], who have gloried in their crimes; and tearing out the hearts that did not feel for them, have proved, that they themselves had iron bowels’. Her cool conclusion is that the retaliation of slaves is always terrible, and that the ferocity of Parisians–‘barbarous beyond the tiger’s cruelty’–was a consequence of bent laws, nothing but ‘cobwebs to catch small flies’.

  Wollstonecraft worked on this View throughout her pregnancy, and finished it during her ninth month. Soon after, the Grande Terreur set in, as Robespierre pushed through the Law of 22 Prairial, depriving the accused of counsel or witness, with verdicts limited to acquittal or death. The acknowledged aim was to encourage denunciation. For the next forty-seven days, citizens of Paris went to the guillotine at a rate of thirty a day; as Wordsworth put it: ‘never heads enough for those that bade them fall’. With daily raids on the Luxembourg, Paine fell into a semiconscious fever–jail fever or typhus–and was reduced to a skeleton unable to speak. It was only a matter of time for his name to appear on the list of the condemned; one dawn a turnkey chalked the door of his cell. Since Paine was perspiring with fever, the door had been allowed to remain open. It opened outwards, so that the chalk mark was on the inside of the door which Paine’s cellmates, claiming a change of temperature, got permission (from another turnkey) to close. The mark now faced inwards. At eleven that night they heard the guards with lanterns trained on each door, approach and stop, approach and pass, and the fading screams down the passage as others were hauled to execution. ‘My God, how many victims fall beneath the sword and Guillotine!’ Mary groaned to Ruth.
‘My blood runs cold, and I sicken at thoughts of a Revolution which costs so much blood and bitter tears.’

  As Mary expanded into her last month of pregnancy, she asked Ruth to send her dress fabric: white dimity or calico or printed cotton–the new simplicity in reaction against brocade and satin. Just after she turned thirty-five, Mary gave birth, on 10 May 1794. She was attended by a midwife, a sensible choice in France where midwives were properly trained. Mary had taken against the displacement of midwives by doctors plying their forceps (designed in the seventeenth century, lost sight of, then reintroduced in the 1730s). Doctors tended to treat women’s bodies like ill-designed machines that required their intervention. The danger of forceps to the foetus was satirised in Tristram Shandy, where Dr Slop sets a series of disasters in train when he manages to crush the nose of the emerging hero. Mary, by contrast, practised what we call ‘natural’ childbirth: an informed, matter-of-fact attitude; home surroundings; support from the father; and an experienced midwife. The pains, though fierce enough, were not prolonged; and, against the custom of ‘lying in’ for weeks, Mary was up the following day. The baby was registered as ‘Françoise’, born in the legitimate marriage of ‘Guilbert’ Imlay and ‘Marie’ Wollstonecraft his wife. She was to be known as Fanny, after Fanny Blood. Mary described her labour to Ruth: