Vindication
Page 53
When William Godwin died, aged eighty, in 1836, he asked to be buried with Mary Wollstonecraft. So Mary Shelley stood once more at her mother’s tomb as the gravediggers dug twelve feet down. ‘Her coffin was found uninjured,’ she wrote to her mother’s old friend Hays, ‘the cloth still over it–and the plate tarnished but legible.’ By the time she herself came to die in 1851, the railway had broken through St Pancras churchyard. Her son Percy Florence moved the bodies of Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin to Bournemouth where he lived. Mary Shelley was buried between her parents.
Independent, existing by her own skills and wits, Claire Clairmont lived on and on into the age of Henry James. He heard her story, and recreated her as the secret survivor–the beloved of a long-gone Romantic poet–in The Aspern Papers (1887). The artist John Singer Sargent remembered her in her seventies playing the piano for his dancing class in Florence. She ended there a Catholic, as she had begun, and at the age of eighty-one was buried with Shelley’s shawl. She would have preferred to lie with Allegra in her unmarked grave, in unconsecrated ground near the entrance to the chapel at Harrow, Byron’s old school.
Buried with these lives are stories of promise: counter-narratives to the cut-off plot of Wollstonecraft’s death. Biography is ceasing to make death more final than it is. Continuities turn the focus from deaths, disasters and slanders to heirs in the next generation who manifest the staying power of her self-making. Three managed to survive through mutual support. Ever since reading Mary Wollstonecraft in 1814, Claire had been gripped by an idea of ‘the subterraneous community of women’. ‘The party of free women is augmenting considerably,’ she remarked to Wollstonecraft’s daughter in 1834. ‘Why do not they form a club and make a society of their own.’
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GENERATIONS
There’s no end to the reverberations of far-reaching lives. Mary Wollstonecraft can’t be dissociated from her daughters–her biological daughters and those who come under her influence, her political descendants over subsequent centuries. A past experience revived for its meaning is ‘not the experience of one life only/ But of many generations’. Present-day generations, in the choices and opportunities open to us, are Wollstonecraft’s heirs.
Women and men of the first generation after her death–mostly workers during the first half of the nineteenth century–took up the socialism of Robert Owen, a follower of Wollstonecraft, as he told Fanny Imlay in 1816. One of the earliest claims for women’s enfranchisement was made by an Irish supporter of Owen, William Thompson, in his Appeal of One Half of the Human Race. Thompson’s aim was to ‘raise from the dust that neglected banner which [Wollstonecraft’s] hand nearly thirty years ago unfolded boldly, in the face of prejudices of thousands of years’. A practical outcome was that women could join a trade union. Owenite tracts and newspapers, followed by the Chartist Circular, regularly reprinted passages from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. A new translation also came out in France in 1826 (as part of the run-up to the 1830 revolution).
Whilst this was going on in England and France, a daughter of a New England clergyman published her thoughts on ‘The Natural Rights of Woman’ in the Boston Monthly Magazine in 1825. The Great Creator, she argues, crowned his labours by giving being to the most intelligent of his creatures:
Male and female created he them; but declared them of ‘one bone–one flesh’-one mind. To them he directed his divine commands–and gave them rule over all he had made…
But it seems that man soon became wiser than his Maker, and discovered that the Almighty was mistaken, or had made a mistake, and that all the mind, or the greatest part of it, had been bestowed on himself, and that woman had received only…the mere leavings, and scrapings that could be gathered after his own wise brain was furnished.
This sermon examines small-mindedness from an American perspective. Ten years before Mount Holyoke, the first women’s college, the author is hopeful of the schoolhouse with its custom of equal education, and fewer inducements to phoniness. To be sure, girls still leave with nothing more than ‘a smattering of terms’, but ‘we feel the influence of the female character’ in some shift from modish sensibility towards ‘sympathy for real distress’.
Curiously, this author’s name was Mary Wollstonecraft. It was not an invention or coincidence. This American Wollstonecraft, a botanist, was in fact the widow of Mary’s youngest brother, Charles. A dictionary of Distinguished Women, published by the owner of the Boston Monthly, finds the second Mary Wollstonecraft as eloquent and bent on domestic values as the first.
Her impression of the better-educated American girl was borne out by Alexis de Tocqueville. During his stay in 1832, he was ‘surprised and almost frightened’ by the distance of the American girl from her European counterpart: an extraordinary absence of shyness and ignorance. Instead of training a girl to distrust herself, education was drawing forth her voice. Tocqueville finds a ‘singular skill’ and ‘happy audacity’ (happier than a philosopher stumbling along a narrow path) as this girl steers her thoughts and language through the traps of conversation.
While these voices carried Wollstonecraft’s ideas further into the public arena, certain writers tried out the character she had brought into being. The future poet Elizabeth Barrett was only twelve in 1818 when she read the Vindication. At fourteen she declares her ‘natural’ independence of mind and ‘spurns’ the triviality of women’s lives. Her outsider heroine Aurora Leigh, displaced from Italy to England, sees that the fatal lesson is imitation. She holds to ‘the inner life with all its ample room’, aware that ‘feebler souls/ Go out’, fading in the glare of obligatory artifice. This narrative poem of 1857 revives Wollstonecraft’s unwavering focus on education, on the soft soul of a girl as she takes the imprint of what she and her speech are to be–be it the gush of affected sensibility in Wollstonecraft’s time, or the docile ‘so be it’ of Victorian womanhood.
Copies of the Vindication were scarce in Victorian England, George Eliot observed. She read it with surprise to find Wollstonecraft ‘eminently serious, severely moral’ in her impatience with silly women. In Daniel Deronda, when the despairing singer Mirah dips her cloak in the river, George Eliot looks back to Mary Wollstonecraft soaking her clothes that rainy October night on the brink of the Thames. Mirah, like Mary, is restored to life; each lives to know a good man and unfold what she has to offer. George Eliot wrote an admiring leader for the Westminster Review on the common ground between Wollstonecraft and the New England reformer Margaret Fuller, with her ‘calm plea’ in Woman in the Nineteenth Century ‘that the possibilities of her nature may have room for full development’.
The nineteenth century pressed the issue of women’s education; the twentieth century, that of professional advance; but the subtler question of our nature is still to be resolved. In 1869 John Stuart Mill says, ‘what is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing’. In 1915 Virginia Woolf predicts it will take six generations for women to come into their own–if so, we’re not there yet. ‘The great problem is the true nature of woman,’ she alerts students at Cambridge. If this century is to solve it, the ‘new genus’ of Mary Wollstonecraft offers a start. What is this genus? What will it contribute to civilisation?
A new-found creature–‘almost unclassified’–has been crawling out from under the stone of history. ‘I am a rising character’ is the reply of Charlotte Brontë’s Lucy Snowe when people ask ‘Who are you?’ ‘“Nature” is what we know–/ Yet have no art to say,’ says Emily Dickinson as poems pour from her pen during her annus mirabilis, 1863. In the late 1870s Olive Schreiner, a young governess in a lean-to room on a rocky stretch of the veld, wrote a novel about a New Woman. Though she appears an oddity on a backward colonial farm, she does not yield her conviction of who she is in order to pursue the mediocre plots open to her sex. An authentic self seems to speak out of a stark and timeless landscape. The Story of an African Farm won over the intelligentsia when Schreiner brought it to London. Her eloquence bro
ke in on the earnest deliberations of the Men and Women’s Club as they sifted the nature of the sexes. Her manner was visionary, her gestures emphatic, her dark eyes glowed as she spoke. Mary Wollstonecraft, she says, is ‘one of ourselves’. So she puts it in an unfinished introduction for a centenary edition of the Vindication. Wollstonecraft ‘knew’. She had foreseen a transformation of gender, ‘the mighty sexual change that is coming upon us’. In the 1880s the two sexes seemed to Schreiner still a mystery: ‘what in their inmost nature they are…Future ages will have to solve it.’
Henry James approached this mystery through his vibrant cousin, Minny Temple. He looked on her as ‘an experiment of nature’, surrounded by a circle of gifted Harvard men who were drawn to her honesty and hunger for life. ‘Let us fearlessly trust our whole nature,’ Minny urged before her early death. She became the model for The Portrait of a Lady, where James tests the ‘grande nature’ of an American girl who turns down marriage to an English lord. As she does this, she senses some undefined destiny: ‘Who was she, what was she, that she should hold herself superior?…If she would not do this, then she must do great things, she must do something greater.’ A century before, when Wollstonecraft’s ‘Mary’ rejects the practice of ‘giving’ a bride in marriage, the author herself was germinating the new character.
As we trace her experiments, above all ‘that most fruitful experiment’, her relation with Godwin, we see everywhere a single purpose: to centre the domestic affections as a counter to violence. Miseducation undoes those ties: the iron jargon of sacrifice fed to a female terrorist, sealing her off from the beating heart of the baby she holds; invaders of other countries who ‘are the real savages’, proving ‘how unfit half-civilized men are to be entrusted with unlimited power’; and bombarding images of bodies decked with prostitute-chic dispatched down the catwalks of the present. The traits Wollstonecraft outlaws threaten us as never before: the terror of violence too close to home, and the more insidious callousness of unregulated greed. She herself had to pierce through mask after mask, not just to observe but to experience in the most jarringly intimate way her father’s violence, the blood on the cobblestones of Paris, and habits of fraud in the free port of Hamburg.
Her protest, when she heard the lash resound on slaves’ naked sides, came fifty years ahead of the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840 where ‘the woman question’–a question of their wish to speak in so public a forum–took up the opening day. A group portrait of that London event includes Wollstonecraft’s friend Amelia Opie in a towering black bonnet, seated beside Lady Byron, with Lucretia Mott from America, a leader of the silenced women delegates, just visible at the back.
Wollstonecraft is nearby, in the next room of the National Portrait Gallery. She ‘saved her soul alive’, mused pioneering anthropologist Ruth Benedict in 1913, as she came face to face with her.
‘She is alive and active,’ Virginia Woolf agreed, ‘she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now amongst the living.’ That was 1929, the year Woolf wrote her essay ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’. She republished it in 1932, the year she planned to speak out for the untried possibilities of women–‘a great season of liberation’, her diary says. Her own boldest move was to walk away from the edifice of power by calling on an ‘Outsider Society’, heirs of that ‘party of free women’ that Claire Clairmont proposed to Mary Shelley. This line of inheritance leads less to the limited suffrage movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries–the joiners of the dominant parties–than to the Virginia Woolf who refused heroes, honours, medals and war, and strode more freely, ‘enfranchised till death, & quit of all humbug’.
For all that, Mary Wollstonecraft does not terminate in disciples. Her ‘new plan of life’ is growth, not fixity of form. Though she speaks an eighteenth-century language of ‘rights’, she looks beyond rights as an end in themselves, beyond the feminist goals of the last two centuries, towards an evolving intelligence–listening, sensitivity, tenderness–still untapped in public life.
Women who imitate men lack ambition, goes the old phrase. Though Mary Wollstonecraft came into contact with an array of able men, not least her husband, she held to a course of her own. Tugged off-course by an Adam of the American frontier, she came back from the brink of extinction, once, twice, with inventive renewals. ‘I am not born to tread in the beaten track,’ she said, ‘the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.’ Active, articulate, she takes the lead, takes it still, as she cuts her way to the quick of life.
ABBREVIATIONS
Used in the ‘Sources, Contents, Questions’ section and in the Bibliography
Abinger
Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Mount Cashell and Shelley manuscripts, on loan from Lord Abinger to the Bodleian Library, Oxford
AR
Analytical Review (MW was a reviewer and editor)
Beinecke
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Bodleian
The Bodleian Library, Oxford
BW
Elizabeth (Eliza/Bess) Wollstonecraft (sister of MW)
CC
Clara Mary Jane (‘Claire’) Clairmont (stepsister of MW’s two daughters, FI and MWS)
CCJ
The Journals of Claire Clairmont 1814–1827, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968)
Cini–Dazzi
The Cini–Dazzi archive in the private library of Andrea and Cristina Dazzi in San Marcello Pistoiese, Italy
ClCor
The Clairmont Correspondence, i–ii, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)
EB
Elias Backman
Education
MW, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct, in the more important Duties of Life, in MWCW, iv
EW
Everina Wollstonecraft (sometimes Averina, sister of MW)
FI
Fanny Imlay
FR
MW, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe, in MWCW, vi
GI
Gilbert Imlay (MW’s American partner)
HF
Henry Fuseli (artist)
HMW
Helen Maria Williams (English friend of MW in France)
Houghton
The Houghton Library, Harvard University: the main repository for the Barlow Papers and those of Joel Barlow’s wife, Ruth Baldwin Barlow
JB
Joel Barlow (American poet and diplomat)
JJ
Joseph Johnson (publisher)
KP
Charles Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols (1876). Includes a revisionist biography of MW, the first since WG’s Memoirs and the subsequent scandal.
Mary
MW, Mary; A Fiction
Memoirs
WG, Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’, in Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, ed. Richard Holmes (Penguin, 1987)
MM
Margaret King, later Lady Mount Cashell (‘Mrs Mason’)
MW
Mary Wollstonecraft
MWCW
The Collected Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, i–viii, ed. Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989)
MWL
The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979)
MWletters
The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd (London: Allen Lane, 2003; repr. Penguin, 2004) MWS Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, younger daughter of MW, who became Mary Shelley
MWSJ
The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (repr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, Softshell Books, 1995)
MWSL
The Letters of Mary Shelley, i–iii, ed. Betty T. Bennett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkin
s University Press, 1980–8) PBS Percy Bysshe Shelley (husband of MWS)
Pf
The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, papers of Shelley and his circle; letters of Mary Hays and Jane Williams; Cini Papers. New York Public Library
RB
Ruth Barlow (American friend of MW’s, wife of JB)
Real Life
MW, Original Stories from Real Life; with conversations, calculated to regulate the affections, and form the mind to truth and goodness, in MWCW, iv
RM
MW, A Vindication of the Rights of Men
RW
MW, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
SC
Shelley and his Circle, 1773–1822, 10 vols, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron, Donald H. Reiman and Doucet Devin Fischer (Harvard University Press, 1961–2003)
SPP
Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: 2nd Norton Critical Edition, 2002)
Travels
MW, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, in Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, ed. Richard Holmes (Penguin, 1987)
WG
William Godwin (MW’s husband)
WW
MW, Maria; or The Wrongs of Woman
SOURCES, CONTEXTS, QUESTIONS
1 VIOLENCE AT HOME