Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

by Charlotte Gordon

  Even here, across the water, they were not safe from prying eyes. Monsieur Dejean set up a telescope so his guests could scrutinize the little party. Byron later said, “There was no story so absurd that they did not invent at my cost. I believe they looked on me as a man monster.” When Byron’s servants draped white cloths out to dry on the Diodati’s porch, the hotel guests assumed that these were petticoats and debated whether they belonged to Mary or Claire. They would, perhaps, have been titillated to learn that the white drapes were actually Byron’s bedsheets.

  From Shelley’s chalet, a hillside path ran up to the Villa Diodati, an easy climb even when one was encumbered by long skirts. Byron and Shelley, it turned out, shared a passion for sailing and split the cost of leasing a small sailboat, which they moored in the little harbor below Shelley’s house. Whenever they could, they went onto the lake, though this was not as often as they would have liked, as the weather was becoming increasingly stormy. Ash-colored clouds poured over the mountains from Chamonix. The lake churned; lightning shot across the sky. Everything on the opposite shore—the cottages with their red roofs and the terraced vineyards, the Hôtel d’Angleterre with its scandalized guests—disappeared behind a curtain of gray sleet, leaving the little party with what initially was a delicious sense of being cut off from the rest of the world but gradually turned worrisome to those who tended to worry and tedious to those who were prone to boredom, trapped as they were indoors, day after day.

  The Villa Diodati in Geneva. (illustration ill.18)

  Of the group, it was only Mary who was contented. She devoted herself to William and her studies, thriving on the opportunity to work. Shelley, on the other hand, grew increasingly restless; he wanted to take their boat onto the lake and go for long walks; he hated being cooped up. Byron, too, felt impatient. Without being able to exercise his broad-backed mare, go shooting, or sail, he quickly became agitated—dangerously so, since he was famous for stirring up trouble when he had nothing to do. Claire interrupted him when he was writing and annoyed him by gazing at him during the long evenings the two households spent together. Polidori was no better off; he yearned for Mary, a condition made more miserable by Byron, who teased him mercilessly about his “lady love.” It was clear that problems were brewing. Tempers were short. It was difficult to dream up activities. They desperately needed something to break the dullness, the stultifying deadness of each day.

  CHAPTER 14

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “A REVOLUTION IN FEMALE MANNERS”

  [ 1791–1792 ]

  survived the outcry over her identity as the female author of A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft was ready to write a new book. She had been under time constraints with Rights of Men, and now she wanted to develop her ideas more fully. This fresh project would be a book where “I myself…shall certainly appear.” It would explore the theme most calculated to infuriate her critics: the rights of women. And so, in October 1791, Mary shut the door of her study and put her pen to paper again. This time she did not break down halfway. Nor did she need Johnson’s encouragement. Although sometimes the writing process was a struggle, mostly she was gloriously happy, reveling in “the glowing colours” of her imagination as well as “the gleams of sunshine” and “tranquility” that she experienced while at her desk. She was so certain of where she was heading that she produced over four hundred pages in just six weeks. By January 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was delivered to bookshops and lending libraries.

  When one opens Rights of Woman, Mary strides right on the stage, her voice clear and sharp. She is funny, quick, and irritable—as she must have been in person—but also rigorously logical, giving Rights of Woman the virtuoso flair of a Socratic dialogue.

  Mary still appealed to readers’ emotions as she had in her first Vindication, but she also intentionally wrote “as a philosopher.” She declared that her book was essential for the future of humanity because it outlined the evils of the present state of society, and introduced solutions that would redeem men as well as women.

  Yes, men.

  From first page to last, Mary emphasized that women’s liberty should matter to everyone. In fact, she wrote Rights of Woman for readers who were learned and well versed in political theory—and in 1791 that usually meant men, not women. Using what she called “strength of mind,” supposedly only a masculine attribute, Mary promised to reveal the “axioms on which reasoning is built by going back to first principles”—precisely what Locke, Rousseau, and Adam Smith had tried to do. Who are human beings without the trappings of civilization, she asked? What laws do we need to govern ourselves? Are men and women intrinsically different?

  To this last question, every male thinker (with the exception of Locke, who believed that the minds of both men and women were blank slates at birth, which is why his writings had so thrilled sixteen-year-old Mary) gave a resounding yes: women were inferior in all areas of human development. Whereas men were capable of self-discipline, possessing the capacity for ethical rectitude and formidable reasoning powers, women were luxury-loving, fickle, selfish, lacking in passion—or sometimes, depending on the critic, too full of passion—gullible, susceptible to seduction, coquettish, sly, untrustworthy, and childish.

  To all this, Mary declared, “What nonsense.” But hers was a lone voice. Feminine deficiency was an assumption most people did not think to question: fire was hot, water was wet, and women were foolish and weak. Even more pernicious, as Mary saw it, women bragged about such frailty, regarding weakness as an asset. If a female fainted easily, could not abide spiders, feared thunderstorms, ghosts, and highwaymen, ate only tiny portions, collapsed after a brief walk, and wept when she had to add a column of numbers, she was considered the feminine ideal.

  Mary scorned the idea that being “delicate” made a woman more attractive. Women had been trained to be empty-headed, she declared; they were not intrinsically less reasonable than men, nor were they lacking in moral fiber. After all, if a woman is told over and over again that she does not have the ability to reason her way through a philosophical problem, that she does not have the strength to climb a hill, that she is incapable of making the right choices, of course she will doubt her own abilities. If she is deprived of all “reasonable” education and instead taught to tinkle a few songs on the pianoforte, dance a minuet, and say enchantée—if her sole occupations are to study fashion plates, read silly novels, and gossip—then of course she will lack discernment and depth. The real problem, said Mary, was not women, but how men wanted women to be. Here, she cited Rousseau, whose theories on natural law and the importance of emotions she still admired, but whose ideas about women continued to annoy her. His teaching methods struck her as particularly noxious:

  The education of the women [Rousseau says] should be always relative to men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them, to educate us when young, and take care of us when grown up, to advise, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable: these are the duties of women at all times, and what they should be taught in their infancy.

  That the great champion of liberty refused to endorse freedom for women was an irony not lost on Mary, and she was determined to prove him wrong, just as she had tried to do in her novel. Why should women have to please men? Are men gods? The degradation of women that he held up as ideal, she argued, had negative consequences for men, too. When husbands, fathers, and brothers are granted absolute power, their morality vanishes; they become tyrants. If men are allowed to act on their impulses without any checks on their behavior, they will be no better than animals. If women are trained to measure their worth solely by their ability to be attractive to men, then being loved will be the extent of their ambition. For a society to flourish, both men and women must have higher aspirations than these; they must also be governed by reason.

  In addition, it was sacrilegious to teach females that their only responsibility was to be useful to men—that notion directly contradicted scrip
ture. God did not create women “to be the toy of man, his rattle.” Besides, souls do not have gender, and so men and women must both strive to be virtuous. This was a favorite point of Mary’s, and she often noted alongside it that the word “virtue” came from the Latin word for “strength.”

  Women must learn to imagine themselves as more than the heroines of grand love affairs, Mary argued:

  Love, in [women’s] bosoms, taking place of every nobler passion, their sole ambition is to be fair [pretty], to raise emotion instead of inspiring respect; and this ignoble desire, like the servility in absolute monarchies, destroys all strength of character. Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature.

  To Mary, the greatest tragedy of all was that neither men nor women saw anything wrong with their culture’s assumptions about femininity. Progress required a dramatic change in how both sexes imagined themselves and their relationships. Liberty, true liberty, blew down walls, tore open gates, and destroyed the fences of enclosure. Women needed to learn there was more to life than romance and men needed to aspire to more than sexual conquest, not just for their own sakes, but for the sake of a more just world. And in the same way that women should not surrender their rights to men, humankind should not sacrifice their rights to tyrants. “A revolution in female manners,” cried Mary, gathering steam, “[would] reform the world.”

  Mary knew that the link she made between the tyranny of governments and the tyranny of men over women would enrage many of her readers, but she did not care. “I here throw down my gauntlet,” she declared. Like her male contemporaries, Mary had dedicated herself to creating a new political vision. Both jeremiad and prophecy, Rights of Woman reveals her as a teacher, a hellfire preacher, a satirist, and a utopian dreamer. Some write of what was; others of what is, she said, but I write of what will be.

  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was just as successful as her Rights of Men, selling approximately the same number of copies. Mary had succeeded in making a name for herself not only as a liberal opponent of Burke, but as an original philosopher in her own right, at least to her admirers. To her detractors, she had confirmed her identity as a dangerous radical, trespassing in realms that properly belonged to men. Of course the irony is that Mary’s “trespass”—her insistence that women’s rights be included in a society founded on the basis of personal liberties—was one of her most important contributions to political philosophy and what would come to be known as feminism. Ultimately, her work would reshape the contours of the discipline and extend the boundaries of political discourse. She argued that the distribution of wealth and the genesis of tyranny, as well as issues relating to sex, including contraception, marital law, rape, sexually transmitted diseases, and prostitution—topics considered outside the precincts of eighteenth-century femininity—were linked directly to the oppression of women and vice versa. In other words, the “woman question” was a linchpin, a crucial touchstone in the overall battle for social justice.

  At the time, however, not everyone understood the far-reaching consequences of Mary’s arguments. Those who did thought they seemed dangerous—even her admirers did not fully support how she had enlarged the discussion. Indeed, by daring to connect the condition of women to the distribution of wealth and power, she became the target of brutal attacks. Thomas Taylor, one of her family’s former landlords, wrote a vicious pamphlet called A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes. If women were equal in nature to men, he sneered, then so were beasts. Other critics claimed that she had violated all standards of decency and propriety, and that her blunt style was a poor substitute for the “pleasing qualities” of the truly feminine writer. A reviewer for the stodgy Critical Review laughed at “the absurdity of many of her conclusions” and leered at Mary’s unwed status:

  As this is the first female combatant in the new field of the Rights of Woman, if we smile only, we shall be accused of wishing to decline the contest.…We must contend with this new Atalanta; and who knows whether, in this modern instance, we may not gain two victories by the contest? There is more than one batchelor in our corps; and if we should succeed, [M]iss Wollstonecraft may take her choice.

  One critic, unaware that his remarks would prove ironic, harped on the weakness of Mary’s logic, declaring that she had wholly failed as a writer and ending his review by saying, “We…shall leave [M]iss Wollstonecraft…to oblivion: her best friends can never wish that her work should be remembered.”

  Mary had touched a nerve. By daring to challenge Rousseau, she had lost the support of many liberals who might otherwise have listened to her. For conservatives, she was already a lost cause: “a whore” and a wild woman out to dethrone the king, dismantle the family, and ruin England. She had waved a red cape at John Bull. But having toiled for many years against the prejudices she faced as a single woman, she had reached the limits of her patience. In Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, she had addressed her concerns in a more tepid fashion; her collection of children’s stories was also intended to promote her educational ideals—gently. Now she had taken a different, more ferocious tack. She knew that in many ways, her critics were not so far off the mark. She did want to overturn the world: shake the rich out of their golden chairs, bring down bullies, and raise up the poor. The people needed to have a voice, she believed, and she would be their mouthpiece.

  The criticisms that did nettle her were the comments directed at her writing style—her work was sprawling, disorganized, and uneven, hostile reviewers said, criticisms that are still repeated today. It took her five years to respond to these critiques, but at last, in 1797, she defended her aesthetic choices, in an essay she called “On Taste.” A good piece of writing should be spontaneous and honest, she said. The mind and heart should appear on the page. Writers should not try to seduce their readers with a “mist of words.” The point of a good book was to provoke both ideas and emotion in the reader, not to engage in a battle of wits with a straw opponent. But these were Romantic ideals in an era still governed by the Enlightenment values of reason, order, and formality, despite the inroads of Rousseau and the French Revolution.

  On November 13, just as Mary was finishing Rights of Woman, Johnson hosted a dinner party to honor the fifty-four-year-old Thomas Paine. Fresh from America, Paine had published his own Rights of Man earlier that year and had already sold fifty thousand copies. He was in the midst of putting the last touches on his Rights of Man, Part the Second, in which he would make his most decisive statement on behalf of liberty. Johnson invited Mary because Paine had expressed admiration for her work. He also invited William Godwin, then a journalist without any books to his name, largely because he had pestered Johnson for an invitation.

  Like Mary, Godwin was in the middle of writing the work that would make him famous. Both arrived at the party fresh from their desks: Mary had been composing moody phrases such as “the most melancholy emotions of sorrowful indignation have depressed my spirits,” while Godwin, proud of his formal paragraphs, had been steadfastly penning sentences in which he referred to himself in the third person: “Another argument in favour of the utility of such a work was frequently in the author’s mind, and therefore ought to be mentioned. He conceived politics to be the proper vehicle of a liberal morality.”

  Two more opposite approaches and two more opposite people can scarcely be imagined; Mary’s “melancholy emotions” had no place in Godwin’s philosophical constructions, because he did not usually express emotion, either on the page or in person. He was certainly capable of strong feelings, however, and he fervently wanted to meet Paine, although he had no interest in meeting Mary, whose Rights of Man he had found messy and poorly written.

  Mary, too, was focused exclusively on Paine. Born in England, this son of a Quaker corset maker had devoted his life to the fight for liberty. He had immigrated to America at B
enjamin Franklin’s suggestion and served in the Continental army, bringing his notebook with him to the battlefield and writing dispatches by the light of the campfire. In December 1776, when Washington’s war-weary troops ground to a halt on the wrong side of the frozen Delaware, the general ordered his officers to read Paine’s words aloud to the exhausted soldiers:

  These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

  After they heard this stirring call to arms, the troops rallied and made their famous crossing, despite the fact that it was almost midnight and the snow was driving down. In the early morning light, they stormed Trenton, catching the British by surprise, and claimed the victory that would turn the tide of the war. To Benjamin Franklin, who had famously said, “Where liberty is, there is my country,” Paine replied, “Where liberty is not, there is my country.”