The woman that Godwin painted in Memoirs was an odd duck. From the start, she was a girl who, when beaten by her father, refused to submit. “The blows of her father . . . instead of humbling her, roused her indignation. Upon such occasions she . . . was apt to betray marks of contempt.” A young woman who will not yield to her father?
“Dolls and the other amusements usually appropriated to female children, she held in contempt; and felt a much greater propensity to join in the active and hardy sports of her brothers . . .” Uh oh. Nothing good can come of girls who act like boys.
At nineteen, Wollstonecraft struck out on her own to pursue a career separate from her family. She seemed relatively uninterested in marriage, and was constantly striving to be an independent breadwinner. Young ladies who constantly follow after such masculine pursuits might be prone to other masculine undertakings. Like having sex whenever you feel like it and giving little thought to the aftermath . . .
(Ah, we are reading ahead in Memoirs. The difference, we might suggest, is that men who gallivanted through the countryside, leaving title aftermaths in their wake, were not professionally discredited for a hundred years as a result.)
“Unsex’d female” was the term popularized in this period to attack women such as Mary Wollstonecraft. While at first that sounds like a woman who just needs more sex to solve her problems, it actually meant a female who did “mannish” things, such as, apparently, having a career. When A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792, at least one parent publicly denounced the treatise as infecting her daughters with this species of unsex’d mannishness:
“A ‘mother’ wrote to the Ladies [sic] Monthly Museum to lament that her four daughters had been corrupted by the book: one lost her ‘softness’ and indulged in horse-racing, fox-hunting and betting; a second had taken up Latin and Greek; a third was scientifically dissecting her pets; and a fourth was challenging men to duels.”
By the mid-nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft’s name was anathema. “It is to be lamented that Wollstonecraft, whom nature . . . meant should be a bright pattern of perfection to her sex, should, by her erroneous theories and false principles, have rendered herself instead, rather the beacon by which to warn the woman of similar endowments with herself, of the rocks upon which enthusiasm and imagination are too apt to wreck their possessor.”
And that isn’t even from some rabid Wollstonecraft critic. That was a selection from one of the earliest sympathetic discussions of her life, published in a Literary Ladies of England compilation from 1843, fifty years after her death.
For more than a century, and to some extent even today, Wollstonecraft couldn’t escape the damage of her husband’s ill-fated biography. Unlike a male author whose sexual dalliances could be revealed with his reputation relatively intact (Mr. Hemingway, again), Mary had no such luxury. A scarlet letter on her person equaled a scarlet letter on everything she had ever thought or written.
To understand the depth of her “immoral” actions, one needed only read Memoirs as far as the section on the Revolutionary War officer Gilbert Imlay. Captain Imlay was in his late thirties, tall, fit, and extremely handsome. These qualities could easily be assessed at a glance. But he was also a kind southern gentleman with considerable landholdings in his family state of Kentucky. Imlay’s Revolutionary War veteran status lent him glamour in the tumultuous Europe of the 1790s. He was an American adventurer, a man of refinement, and a successful entrepreneur. He was the eighteenth century’s Han Solo. How could you not fall for the guy? We’re falling for him and we’ve never seen him before. Wollstonecraft developed the same feelings after traveling to Paris in 1793. Unlike some of her previous infatuations, Imlay was single, open-minded, and passionately interested in her.
Captain Imlay was also a confident man. Like, a very con(fident) man. Despite his filling Mary’s head with visions of retiring to an idyllic farm in Kentucky, it’s unlikely Captain Imlay could ever have returned to the Bluegrass State. For one, Gilbert Imlay was born and bred in New Jersey. He served briefly in the War for Independence, receiving the rank of captain. From whence Kentucky, you might ask? After the war, Imlay used his veteran benefits to lay claim to lands in Kentucky that had been (cough) appropriated (cough, cough) from local Native American tribes. He became a deputy land surveyor and used his position to make shady business deals on the side. Whatever the extent of his scams, they backfired, and Imlay fled the American continent ahead of a barrage of lawsuits.
How much of this Wollstonecraft actually learned is open to speculation. She certainly knew that Imlay’s current profession was “French smuggler.” During the violent upheavals of the French Revolution, the British Navy blockaded the country. Imlay threw himself into overcoming that problem by running grain, iron, soap, and other supplies through the siege lines. Wollstonecraft euphemistically referred to that part of his business as “alum and soap.”
There’s a good chance that thirty-three-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft was a virgin when she met the charismatic, experienced Gilbert Imlay. Whatever the differences in their starting lines, once the pistol fired, Wollstonecraft did her best to catch up. This dawning sexuality would have been a conundrum for anyone familiar with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published just the year before. According to Vindication, ideal marriages were supposed to be nearly devoid of sex. In its place, Wollstonecraft argued for a relationship of mutual respect, in which “the heart, rather than the senses, is moved.” In Vindication, she approves of “affection,” but argues that “the personal intercourse of appetite . . . is despicable.”
During the more chaste periods of her life, Wollstonecraft looked at sexual passion as an elaborately decorated outhouse. Sure, what goes on behind that fancy door is necessary, but for God’s sake, let’s not dwell on it. Then she had sex and was like, Come again? (Sorry, that was too easy.)
“After years of preaching deferred gratification and rational living, sexless marriage and pure affection, Wollstonecraft had complemented the French Revolution with her own revolution: she had entered a sexual relationship outside marriage.” And she hadn’t just “entered a sexual relationship”; she’d cannonballed into the pool, utterly jettisoning the sexual ideals from Vindication. Now sex wasn’t a disease infecting a marriage of mutual affection. It was a basic human experience, “like hunger or thirst.” Exactly, say Second Wave feminists in the 1960s and ’70s. Gasp, say readers in 1798.
Wollstonecraft even went so far as to change the meaning of a fairly important word: “[She] now saw sexual desire as natural and right for women; indeed she went on to affirm that ‘chastity consisted in fidelity and that unchastity was an association with two people at the same time.’” That is a moral shift of tectonic proportions. Wollstonecraft was saying that premarital sex is totally fine and that things go morally askew only when you’re involved in more than one sexual relationship at a time. Wollstonecraft’s open-mindedness would have been out of place even two hundred years later, in a country that had undergone a sexual revolution, let alone in eighteenth-century Britain. For that reason, she stayed in France with Imlay, rather than returning home. France didn’t have time to hem and haw over whom Mary Wollstonecraft was sleeping with. It had its own guillotine-y problems.
There was another reason Wollstonecraft was reluctant to return to England. In May 1794, she gave birth to a girl named Fanny Imlay. Because Robespierre and the Terror were in full swing in Paris, and British citizens were being arrested and jailed, Wollstonecraft had taken Imlay’s last name as a form of protection. To her, this implied a marriage-level commitment. Imlay, however, saw things differently. Within weeks of Fanny’s birth, he departed revolutionary France for London. Wollstonecraft was left behind.
Thus begins one of the more tragic episodes that Memoirs lays out before the public in excruciating detail. “She had expected his return from week to week, and from month to month, but a succession of business still continued to detain him.” Time and again, Imlay promised to
return to Wollstonecraft. Time and again, he did not. After a particularly harsh and dangerous winter in France alone with her child, Wollstonecraft returned to London in 1795, only to find that Imlay had moved on to other paramours.
Wollstonecraft left a note and drank poison (presumably laudanum). Whether before or just after she’d imbibed, Imlay intervened, and the suicide was averted. Five months later, she finally realized that any reconciliation with Imlay would be impossible, and she made the second attempt on her life by throwing herself from Putney Bridge into the River Thames.
Far from William Godwin’s original intentions when publishing Memoirs, the public’s reaction of moral horror to Wollstonecraft’s sexual promiscuity destroyed any chance of a fair reading. Godwin, himself a controversial and well-known philosopher, may have tried to turn things around at the end by describing his generally happy courtship and marriage to Wollstonecraft. But every ceremonial sword he unsheathed was double-edged. He let slip (or rather came right out and said) that he and Wollstonecraft shared a passionate premarital sexual relationship, that said relationship resulted in a child, and that he married her after the pregnancy so she wouldn’t be ashamed in front of London society. It didn’t take long for critics to pounce on these scandals.
While the shiny apple of economic independence hung before professional authors, women such as Wollstonecraft who managed to get their hands on such fruit found theirs laced with poison. Even the most celebrated female authors were respected according to their ability to “value female modesty and morality above literary ambition.” According to literary scholar Catherine Ingrassia, “The eighteenth century began its own process of writing a kind of women’s literary history. Publications [favored female] writers who exhibited propriety, modesty, and decorum.” On the flip side, if you’re a woman and you scorn society’s values, then your contributions are blasted to pieces through morally inflected attacks. Thus Wollstonecraft, author of one of the greatest works on women’s rights, is reduced to the following verse about the “dame the Rights of Women writ”:
Lucky the maid that on her volume pores,
A scripture, archly fram’d, for propagating w---s.
The periodical that published this verse disliked Wollstonecraft for her liberal politics, and it wasn’t above demonstrating its disdain by attacking her sexuality. In its debut issue, the word Prostitution was cross-referenced to “See Mary Wollstonecraft.” Once the famous female rationalist, now she was reduced to nothing but a sexual punch line.
The extreme humanizing of the Mother of Feminism was just too much for, well, everyone, for the next hundred years. Never mind that Vindication laid the groundwork for women’s rights all over the Western world. Wollstonecraft had not one, but two premarital sexual partners and periodically suffered from depression. In an era when female authors were often written off as emotional “scribblers,” the passions of Mary Wollstonecraft were just too easy a target.
Wollstonecraft was not just forgotten. She became persona non grata. If people spoke of her at all, it was as a cautionary tale. Considering her traumatic death, that tale would probably have been a German fairy tale, and all the children of Europe would have wept and promised never to give women equal rights because look how it turned out for Mary “the Bridge Jumper” Wollstonecraft.
Mary Hays, another British feminist and an acquaintance of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, left Wollstonecraft’s name out of a six-volume history of more than three hundred famous women published in 1803. As one scholar points out, “Hays’s actions here remind us of just how dangerous it had become by 1800 for a woman who hoped to be published and taken seriously to identify openly with Wollstonecraft as a person.” Because a woman’s standing could not survive a scandal of the magnitude of Godwin’s Memoirs, other women’s rights advocates, “who did not wish to be tarred and feathered with the blackened brush of Wollstonecraft’s reputation,” felt they had no choice but to excise Wollstonecraft from their cause.
In this climate, Wollstonecraft’s due as an author was initially revived not through her own works, but through later biographies. Ironically enough, her rehabilitation started with someone who initially intended to write a biography of Godwin. Charles Kegan Paul’s 1876 biography of William Godwin focused on many overlooked details of Wollstonecraft’s life, but whitewashed much of her sexual history. These well-intentioned lies achieved what Godwin’s well-intentioned truths could not.
New editions of Vindication began to appear from the 1890s onward. With each new edition, commentators have continually resurrected and reinvented Wollstonecraft to suit the needs of their generation. Even our current scorn for Wollstonecraft’s sexist treatment is more a reflection of our society than hers. Her reputation will continue to change as long as our society and our concept of authorship do the same—which is to say, forever.
Long before the invention of the Western printing press, the definition of “author” had been in flux. Maybe the author was a prophet, standing in the place of the gods. Or perhaps he was simply an entertainer, imitating for a living. An author might be a vessel, merely recording the inspiration of God as it flowed through him. Or he might be a professional writer, selling the products of his mind for cash. Near the time of Wollstonecraft’s death, the author became an individual genius, standing far above his fellow human beings.
Mary Wollstonecraft did her best to change all the hes in that last paragraph to shes. As one scholar aptly puts it, “For women who had no rights, no individual existence or identity, the very act of writing—particularly for a public audience—was in essence an assertion of individuality and autonomy, and often an act of defiance. To write was to be; it was to create and to exist.”
At a time when the world recoiled at the complicated emotions of human relationships, women such as Mary Wollstonecraft lost their words, their identity, and even their historical existence. Because the words author and authority have always had a tenuous relationship, it would take another century to begin to restore Wollstonecraft’s feminist nom de guerre.
Wollstonecraft’s writings mean something different to each person and each generation. This means that in many ways the story of Mary Wollstonecraft is really the story of ourselves. Charlotte Whitton, the first female mayor of a major Canadian city, once remarked with characteristic acerbity that, “Whatever women do[,] they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.” In 1798, however, Godwin’s biographical gamble turned out to be a poor one indeed. Whatever else he may have predicted about his wife’s reputation when he published Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, he didn’t understand that a prophet cannot pursue gratification. A vessel cannot be flawed. A professional cannot be desperate. And a genius cannot be weak.
Well . . . if you’re a woman, anyway.
9
AMERICAN BOOKANEERS
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-TWO YEARS BEFORE screaming crowds would welcome the Beatles to New York, American fans waited with similar anticipation in Boston for the arrival of the biggest cultural celebrity of their day: Charles Dickens. This visit was probably the greatest thing that had ever happened to Boston Harbor, next to the vandalism that started this country in the first place. In the very least, it had been a while since anyone in the United States was this thrilled about a Brit setting foot on American soil. Just twenty-eight years before, in 1814, England had invaded Washington, DC, and set fire to the White House. But this was Charles “Defender of the Downtrodden” Dickens, baby. He may have called London home, but he was one of us. He wrote stories that spoke to our lives and situations, books that transcended state and economic borders. Dickens was “a phenomenon, an exception, a special production.” He was Beatlemania more than a century before the Beatles. Unfortunately, he also lived in an era before international copyright. So while he was enjoying Paul McCartney’s fame, he certainly wasn’t enjoying Paul McCartney’s fortune.
The American press loved Dickens. While a little grumpy about the throngs of w
orshippers in the streets, the New-York Evening Post seemed genuinely proud that “a young man, without birth, wealth, title, or sword, whose only claims to distinction are his intellect and heart, is received with a feeling that was formerly rendered only to emperors and kings.” The Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer ran a story just after he arrived, noting that Dickens was receiving attention beyond many “distinguished persons who had never been so feted by the nation, among them the ‘illustrious WASHINGTON, the Father of this Country,’ and ‘LA FAYETTE . . . a public benefactor, and the Nation[’s] guest.’” In the nineteenth century, the world of print had exploded into the mainstream culture of the English-speaking world. And Dickens was at the center of it all.
Charles Dickens didn’t inherit his noble status. He earned it with his own labor and unique talent. He was the embodiment of the American Dream. He was British, sure—whatever—but so were most American Dreamers just a few decades before. “His mind is American,” boasted the New York Herald, “his soul is republican—his heart is democratic.” What greater act of narcissistic affection can there be than to shout as a nation, We love you, Mr. Dickens! We love you because you are we!
For his part, Dickens returned that endearment. Upon settling into his room at the opulent Tremont House, he descended the staircase with his wife, jauntily announcing to his adorers, “Here we are!” Writing later, Dickens declared, “Boston is what I would have the whole United States to be.”
That’s a nice sentiment, Mr. Dickens, but here’s what Americans would be saying about you in just a few weeks’ time: “cockney,” “literary bagman,” “penny-a-liner loafer.” In case the outdated insults are a bit too obtuse for a modern audience, allow us to continue: “[Dickens is] the most flimsy—the most childish—the most trashy—[and] the most contemptible . . . [his writing is the] essence of balderdash reduced to the last drop of silliness and inanity.”
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