Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  Again, she took on a well-tried genre, and again transformed it, blending episodes of travel with reverie, a new, Romantic voice, attuned to nature. As she dozed under a rock, she felt herself ‘sovereign of the waste’, lulled by the ‘prattling’ of the sea amongst the pebbles. Her soul seemed diffused through her senses until she felt a child again, resting–she liked to think–on the footstool of her Creator. Yet her allegiance to reason, and what she had seen of Parisian salons, led her to question a sentimental embrace of rural solitude. Even as it healed body and spirit, she derides Rousseau’s ideal state of nature as ‘a golden age of stupidity’. An intelligent being wants the arts and sciences of civilisation. She asked herself whether happiness lies in unconscious ignorance or the educated mind, and imagined Imlay with similar doubts in the wilds of America. Boldly, her Travels* concede that ‘nothing so soon wearies out the feelings as unmarked simplicity’. The woods of Norway taught her that she would be as much an exile on the American frontier as she had been at Mitchelstown Castle. For a while, she might bury herself in the woods, but she would ‘find it necessary to emerge again’.

  Wollstonecraft’s Travels take the form of twenty-five letters to a friend, Imlay himself, unnamed but identified as the father of the traveller’s child. Her private drama erupts through the lulling sea, like volcanic heaves as the traveller calls up a look in her correspondent’s eyes. Can she revive his flush of ardour–through words, loyalty and far-flung business on his behalf, unprecedented for a woman in the eighteenth century to undertake alone? The ‘Mary’ who signs publishable letters to her one-time lover has obvious links with the Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote more challenging private letters to Gilbert Imlay. The lifeline of her private journey was Imlay’s promise to meet in Hamburg. Its immediate effect was to aid her recovery, but it held some danger. For Imlay broke promises casually as new schemes opened up. Mary, in contrast, had the tenacity to carry through plans conceived at a higher level as plans for existence itself. Her Fuseli plan–to live with the painter and his wife–had been unworkable. But, soon after, Imlay’s novel in defence of women’s rights had seemed to present a viable narrative: a chance to integrate desire with domesticity without the destructive scenes of seduction or marriage. When Mary found herself trapped in a traditional plot after all, it had struck at the root of her existence. In his frontier character Imlay had presented himself as her natural mate, a man of high-minded simplicity, and though she soon discovered her mistake, she did not give up. There was this extraordinarily protracted effort to draw out the American promise he had seemed to embody and which seemed to her still concealed in his core. For she believed in the perfectibility of human nature. It was her form of faith.

  Norway was the high point of her journey: she felt kinship with the sturdy independence of its people, and their warmth towards a woman ‘dropping down from the clouds in a strange land’. She could not speak to them in Danish (the dominant language in Norway at the time), but they did manage to communicate sympathy for the French Revolution and reluctance to hear her call Robespierre ‘a monster’. At a Tønsberg party, yellow-haired women gathered round her, sang to her, pitied her singleness at thirty-six. They enquired after her needs, ‘as if they were afraid to hurt, and wished to protect’ her, perhaps sensing the melancholy that hung about her whenever she contemplated the fading promise of her union with Imlay and the lost bond with Fanny Blood whose soft voice she still could hear. She felt more than a mother’s anxiety for the future of Fanny her child. When she thought of ‘the dependent and oppressed state of her sex’, she feared to unfold Fanny’s mind ‘lest it should render her unfit for the world she is to inhabit–Hapless woman! What a fate is thine!’

  Fears for Fanny were the obverse of retrieved command of her own fate. There is a decided contrast between the pleading letters to Imlay and her purposeful travel book. Although the Travels are presented as flowing instantaneously from her experience, the first six episodes were, in fact, composed retrospectively–the art lay in apparent artlessness–‘my desultory manner’, as Wollstonecraft termed it. Impressions are to be tossed off ‘without…endeavouring to arrange them’.

  The best place to seek the character of a country is in its provinces, she thought, not its cities where the inhabitants tend to sameness. It was therefore an advantage that her travels so far had taken her from a Swedish pilot-house with fresh white curtains and fragrant with juniper berries, to the poor log-shelters in the ‘fields of rock’ near Strömstad, and then on to energetic towns along the greener Norwegian coast. Her comparisons of primitive with polished societies foreshadow anthropological travel, lending her intelligence to what she observes, for ‘the art of travelling is only a branch of the art of thinking’. She takes in women weaving and knitting to keep warm during the deep winter; the smell of children’s bodies seeping through layers of linen; the hospitable warmth of peasants; and the communicative smiles exchanged with women who share no language. She is detached enough to resist the vanity that might be excited by the attention she gets as an attractive woman travelling alone. Her glance at the rosy calm of her sleeping child, her wonder at the unextinguished shades of a summer night, and hints of unexplained estrangement from the man to whom she writes, give her a quickening presence, a traveller with a finger on her pulse at the very moment it beats.

  From her Tønsberg base, Mary made forays along the south coast of Norway. Her first business was with lawyers back in Larvik. Since she thought them corrupt, we can assume they represented the Ellefsens and resisted her claim for compensation. To the indignation of Judge Wulfsberg, one lawyer named Lars Lind was ‘not even ashamed to say that as long as he is offered the right amount of money, the case will never be solved’. From Larvik, Mary then pursued Ellefsen himself along a ‘wild coast’ to Risør, a westward journey by sea.

  Risør turned out to be two hundred houses, red and ochre, huddled together, with planks for passages from house to house, to be mounted like steps, under a high rock which looked to her like a Bastille, a place ‘shut out from all that opens the understanding, or enlarges the heart’. To be born here was to be ‘bastilled by nature’. This constriction had to do with commerce, men immured in contraband and trickery, infecting the whole town. Wollstonecraft pictures these tricksters drinking and smoking in rooms whose windows are never opened; by evening their breath, teeth and clothes are foul. The obvious subtext is distaste for Captain Ellefsen and his supporters, for the actual landscape of Risør is not as claustrophobic as Wollstonecraft imagined. There is a steep rise to be sure, but further inland were oak woods, with logs for export floating down the rivers to the town at the outlet of three fjords. At the time, it was the third-largest shipping centre in Norway, and it’s hard to believe Mary Wollstonecraft that all goods were contraband. She dined with the British Consul, who would hardly have been there were Risør merely a smugglers’ haven. She pictures herself writing in preference to pacing up and down her room, as though imprisoned, but she has come of her own accord.

  What she doesn’t tell us is that she’s at hand for another judicial hearing and that she herself confronted the accused, Peder Ellefsen.

  At first, Peder behaved humbly with Mary when she reproached him for the damage she had assessed during her visit to Strömstad, and demanded compensation.

  He said he would think it over.

  After discussing the matter with family and lawyers, he returned. His manner, at this second meeting, had changed. He refused her demand with the assurance of a man in the right.

  Mary, in turn, refused to accept this. She resolved to go to Copenhagen, and lay the case in person before the highest official to whom she could appeal, no less than the Prime Minister of Denmark, Andreas Peter Bernstorff. Wulfsberg immediately backed her with a letter of introduction. He presents her as a talented woman, well known for her writings as Mary Wollstonecraft, but now as ‘Madame Imlay’ seeking compensation for wrongs done to her husband. He presents Imlay as a Benefactor betrayed b
y a man he had tried to help. Wulfsberg’s letter recapitulates the case against Ellefsen, stressing his conviction that the Ellefsens had leaned on witnesses to produce false testimonies, so that the truth of the matter was impossible to prove. He complains that Peder Ellefsen had somehow managed to instigate a High Court appeal before a judgement had been made–‘which seems to be contrary to all laws’.

  Then, just as Mary won this gesture of support with a sense of ‘self-applause’, Imlay withdrew his lifeline. The change came in a letter he sent her on 20 August.

  Mary’s attempted suicide had affected his standing, he said. He suspected that she had not talked of him ‘with respect’.

  Her suicide note had been in his praise, she protested, ‘to prevent any odium being thrown on you’.

  For Mary what rankled was Imlay’s infidelity. ‘I will not torment you,’ she resolved, ‘I will not complain’, but she could not stop. Imlay had to hear that there ‘are wounds that can never be healed–but they may be allowed to fester in silence without wincing’. Hardly an inducement to live with her. At this moment, Mary exchanged her Hamlet drama of flatness for that of King Lear: ‘What is the war of the elements to the pangs of disappointed affection, and the horror arising from a discovery of a breach of confidence, that snaps every social tie!’ She declared to Imlay that to tame her feeling would wither what she has come to be. ‘Love is a want of my heart…To deaden is not to calm the mind–Aiming at tranquillity, I have almost destroyed all the energy of my soul…Despair, since the birth of my child, has rendered me stupid–soul and body seemed to be fading away before the withering touch of disappointment.’

  On her way south from Christiania to the Swedish border, she contemplated the torrential waterfall from the ‘dark cavities’ of Frederikstad. Her Romantic bravura lingered in Coleridge’s mind when he read Wollstonecraft’s Travels a year later: ‘Kubla Khan’, his most famous poem, has a waterfall that seems to fountain from a chasm in the earth and run toward ‘caverns measureless to man’. As Wollstonecraft gazed at the torrent, she asked herself ‘why I was chained to life and its misery’, and then her soul ‘rose with renewed dignity above its cares–grasping at immortality…I stretched out my hand to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come.’

  She reached Gothenburg on 25 August, and after a seven-week absence clasped her ‘Fannykin’, her ‘little frolicker’, delighted to find the child venting sounds on the brink of words. But three waiting letters from Imlay reversed her joy. Her reply next day is filled with the sound of his voice.

  ‘You tell me that my letters torture you…Certainly you are right; our minds are not congenial…You need not continually tell me that our fortune is inseparable, that you will try to cherish tenderness for me. Do no violence to yourself!’

  Mary’s next stop was Copenhagen. There, ‘fresh proofs’ of Imlay’s ‘indifference’ arrived on 6 September. A quarter of Copenhagen had been gutted by fire: amidst its ‘heaps of ruins’, she felt ‘strangely cast off’. From now on she moves, suicidal, through alien landscapes. Imlay’s evasion of her questions about the future–he was a master of the devout wish–leaves her panting.

  ‘I do not understand you. It is necessary for you to write more explicitly–and determine on some mode of conduct.–I cannot endure this suspense–Decide–Do you fear to strike another blow?’

  Stretched to the limits of endurance, she remained thoroughly professional. She wrote to Imlay, ‘I…only converse with people immersed in trade’; presumably, she was carrying out his instruction to dispose of ‘goods’ in the hands of the Danish traders Ryberg & Co. She also sent a statement on Imlay as the injured party to Prime Minister Bernstorff (together with supportive letters from Wulfsberg and other Norwegian and Danish public figures). Mary Wollstonecraft’s letter to the Prime Minister, buried for more than two centuries, is a new discovery by Gunnar Molden:

  Impressed with a respect for your character, I venture, Sir, to expostulate with you relative to an affair which Mr Wulfsberg has already in some measure explained to you, in the letter which accompanies this brief statement.

  Previously allow me to introduce myself to you by [my] own name, Mary Wollstonecraft, and I think I may be permitted, in a strange country, without any breach of modesty, to assert that my character as a moral writer is too well established for any one to suspect that I would condescend to gloss over the truth, or to anything like subterfuge, even in my own cause.

  Mr Imlay, my husband, being very much engaged in business could not, at this juncture, leave England to pursue, according to law, Peter Elefsen, who had fraudulently deprived him, and his Partner, of a considerable property. I, therefore, wishing to have an opportunity of writing an account of the present state of Sweden, Norway and Denmark, determined to undertake the business, being fully acquainted with all the circumstances.

  Will you, Sir, spare a moment to peruse the following narrative.

  In the spring of 94 Mr Imlay bought a ship of an American captain, who had previously engaged Peter Elefsen to be his flag master. The transfer of the vessel deprived him of his employment, and his distress introduced him to our notice. For some time, without having any first plan of rendering him useful, Mr Imlay let him have the money necessary to support him–and at last sent him to Paris, two or three times, to bring down some silver to Havre de Grace. During the intervals between these journeys Mr Elefsen pointed out a vessel that could be bought cheap and Mr Imlay purchased it; and giving the command to Elefsen[,] preparations were made for a voyage to Gothenburg. Mr Elefsen mean time lodged in the house of a merchant at Havre[,] Mr Imlay paying for it, as well as supplying his other wants. In his room the silver was deposited. I saw it there and the mate, Thomas Coleman, an American, assisted Elefsen to carry it on board the ship.

  Previous to his sailing he signed a bill of parcels, in which the articles he took were not specified, as well as a receipt for the silver, both of which Mr Wheatcroft and I read over, Mr Wheatcroft (a merchant at Havre) witnessing that Elefsen signed them. The receipt was enclosed in a letter to Mr Backman of Gothenburg with other instructions for clearing and loading the vessel. I, Sir, gave Elefsen his last orders[,] Mr Imlay having set out for Paris the day before.

  I have now to inform you that Elefsen took the silver privately on shore at Arendall, as the mate, Thos. Coleman, [h]as fully proved, and opened the letter addressed to Mr Backman, taking out the receipt. The cover of the letter has been brought into court. Many corroborating testimonies have supported the evidence of the mate to the conviction of the judges and every impartial person; still the atrocities carried on during the time the trial has been pending[,] to retard the march of justice[,] have even been more flagrant than the breach of trust. Many of the inhabitants, particularly the post master, who has but one character in the country, having shared in the spoil, bribery has produced prevarication and perjury. His [Ellefsen’s] father-in-law, a major in the army, offered five hundred dollars to the wife of the first judge. When I arrived at East Risoer[,]* Elefsen waited on me and, as we were alone, behaved in the humblest manner, wished that the affair had never happened, though he assured me that I never should be able to bring the proofs forward sufficient to convict him. He enlarged on the expense we must run into–appealed to my humanity and assured me that he could not now return the money. Willing to settle the business I desired him to inquire of his relations, who are people of property, what they would advance, and come to me in the evening when I would endeavour to compromise the matter.–He came and was almost impertinent. He had been spurred on by his attorneys, the pest of the country. Their plan, I plainly perceive, was to weary us out by procrastination. The suit has already been pending a twelvemonth, and the want of such a considerable sum in trade, as well as the expenses incurred by the detention of the vessel, which it has been proved he endeavoured to sink, is a very serious injury to us, not to dwell on the vexatious circumstances attending the failure of a commercial plan. I am very well convinced tha
t an English jury would long ago have decided in our favour[,] not suffering justice to be insulted in the manner it has been with impunity; but the judges are timid.

  To you, Sir, as a known lover of justice, I appeal, and I am supported by the most worthy Norwegians who wished by the respect they paid me to disavow the conduct of their countryman.

  I am Sir yours

  Respectfully

  Copenhagen Mary Wollstonecraft

  Sepr 5th 1795 femme Imlay

  Mary’s irritability with the Prime Minister’s polite caution tells us that neither her nor Wulfsberg’s letter succeeded in convincing Bernstorff to squeeze the Ellefsens on Imlay’s behalf.

  Mary pressed on in the face of depression. Why did she and Fanny make for Hamburg when, by now, she knew that Imlay had gone back on the plan to meet them? If the source of ‘knavery’ was not on the remote Norwegian coast but in the get-rich city of Hamburg, then it makes sense that Hamburg was always going to be her final stop on her business journey. And this would explain, too, the loathing she felt, as though Hamburg were to blame for what went wrong in her life. For the silver ship as bearer of her hope that Imlay would make his fortune and settle down was foiled, it would seem, at Hamburg. To Mary, the city stank of commerce. It seemed to contaminate the air she breathed.

  One of her contacts was Imlay’s acquaintance, the Franco-American writer St Jean de Crèvecoeur, who earlier in 1795 had moved to Altona, the Holstein town within walking distance of Hamburg. As a tolerant place–Danish, not German–Altona welcomed Jews, fleeing French émigrés (among them Mme de Lafayette), and many Americans including of course Joel and Ruth Barlow who had returned to Paris two months before Mary arrived. She too stayed in Altona, a little put out by the lack of paths and steps to ease Fanny’s climb down the bluffs to the beach on the edge of the Elbe. Mary’s only pleasure was to dine with Crèvecoeur daily, grateful for a companion who shared her distaste for commerce. She echoed what Dr Price had warned American leaders in 1784, that addiction to commerce could debase the new national character. ‘England and America owe their liberty to commerce,’ she said, ‘which created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system. But…the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank.’ Talk, in Hamburg, ran in ‘muddy channels’.