{"id":163825,"date":"2023-04-03T12:17:54","date_gmt":"2023-04-03T16:17:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=163825"},"modified":"2023-04-03T12:16:36","modified_gmt":"2023-04-03T16:16:36","slug":"on-mary-wollstonecraft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/04\/03\/on-mary-wollstonecraft\/","title":{"rendered":"On Mary Wollstonecraft"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Detail from John Opie’s portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, 1790\u20131. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

Around the time I realized I didn\u2019t want to be married anymore, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft\u2019s grave. I\u2019d known it was there, behind King\u2019s Cross railway station, for at least a decade. I had read her protofeminist tract from 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman<\/em>, at university, and I knew Saint Pancras Churchyard was where Wollstonecraft\u2019s daughter, also Mary, had taken the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when they were falling in love. When I thought about the place, I thought of death and sex and possibility. I \ufb01rst visited at thirty-four, newly separated, on a cold gray day with a lover, da\ufb00odils rising around the squat cubic pillar. \u201cMARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN,\u201d the stone reads. \u201cAuthor of A Vindication of the rights of Woman. Born 27th April, 1759. Died 10th September, 1797.\u201d I didn\u2019t tell him why I wanted to go there; I had a sense that Wollstonecraft would understand, and I often felt so lost that I didn\u2019t want to talk to real people, people I wanted to love me rather than pity me, people I didn\u2019t want to scare. I was often scared. I was frequently surprised by my emotions, by the things I suddenly needed to do or say that surged up out of nowhere.<\/p>\n

Unexpected events had brought me graveside: when I was thirty-two, my fifty-seven-year-old mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer\u2019s. It wasn\u2019t genetic; no one knew why she got it. We would, the doctors said, have three to nine more years with her. Everything wobbled. This knowledge raised questions against every part of my life: Was this worth it? And this? And this? I was heading for children in the suburbs with the husband I\u2019d met at nineteen, but that life, the one that so many people want, I doubted was right for me. I was trying to \ufb01nd my way as a writer, but I was jumping from genre to genre, not working out what I most wanted to say, and not taking myself seriously enough to discover it, even. Who do you tell when you start to feel these things? Everything seemed immovable. Everything seemed impossible. And yet I knew I had to change my life.<\/p>\n

There were a string of discussions with my husband, threading from morning argument to online chat to text to phone to therapy session to dinner, where we \ufb02oated ideas about open marriage and relationship breaks and moving countries and changing careers and dirty weekends. But we couldn\u2019t agree on what was important, and I began to peel my life away from his. We decided that we could see other people. We were as honest and kind and open as we could manage as we did this, which sometimes wasn\u2019t much. The spring I began visiting Wollstonecraft\u2019s grave, he moved out, dismantling our bed by taking the mattress and leaving me with the frame. I took o\ufb00 my wedding ring\u2014a gold band with half a line of \u201cMorning Song\u201d by Sylvia Plath etched on the inside\u2014and for weeks afterward, my thumb would involuntarily reach across my palm for the warm bright circle that had gone. I didn\u2019t throw the ring into the long grass, like women do in the movies, but a feeling began bubbling up nevertheless, from my stomach to my throat: it could \ufb02ing my arms out. I was free.<\/p>\n

At \ufb01rst, I took my freedom as a seventeen-year-old might: hard and fast and negronied and wild. I was thirty-four and I wanted so much out of this new phase of my life: intense sexual attraction; soulmate-feeling love that would force my life into new shapes; work that felt joyous like play but meaningful like religion; friendships with women that were fusional and sisterly; talk with anyone and everyone about what was worth living for; books that felt like mountains to climb; attempts at writing \ufb01ction and poetry and memoir. I wanted to create a life I would be proud of, that I could stand behind. I didn\u2019t want to be ten years down the wrong path before I discovered once more that it was wrong. While I was a girl, waiting for my life to begin, my mother gave me books: The Mill on the Floss<\/em> when I was ill; Ballet Shoes<\/em> when I demanded dance lessons; A Little Princess<\/em> when I felt overlooked. How could I \ufb01nd the books I needed now? I had so many questions: Could you be a feminist and be in love? Did the search for independence mean I would never be at home with anyone, anywhere? Was domesticity a trap? What was worth living for if you lost faith in the traditional goals of a woman\u2019s life? What was worth living for at all\u2014what degree of unhappiness, lostness, chaos was bearable? Could I even do this without my mother beside me? Or approach any of these questions if she was already fading from my life? And if I wanted to write about all this, how could I do it? What forms would I need? What genre could I be most truthful in? How would this not be seen as a problem of privilege, a childish demand for de\ufb01nition, narcissistic self-involvement, when the world was burning? Wouldn\u2019t I be better o\ufb00 giving away all I have and putting down my books, my movies, my headphones, and my pen? When would I get sick of myself?<\/p>\n

The questions felt urgent as well as overwhelming. At times I couldn\u2019t face the page\u2014printed or blank\u2014at all. I needed to remind myself that starting out on my own again halfway through life is possible, has been possible for others\u2014and that this sort of life can have beauty in it. And so I went back to the writers I\u2019d loved when I was younger\u2014the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the thought of Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Wollstonecraft, the novels of Virginia Woolf and George Eliot. I read other writers\u2014Elena Ferrante, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison\u2014for the \ufb01rst time. I watched them try to answer some of the questions I myself had. This book bears the traces of the struggles they had, as well as my own\u2014and some of the things we all found that help. Not all of the solutions they (and I) found worked, and even when they did, they didn\u2019t work all the time: if I\u2019d thought life was a puzzle I could solve once and for all when I was younger, I couldn\u2019t believe that any longer. But the answers might come in time if I could only stay with the questions, as the lover who came with me to Wollstonecraft\u2019s grave would keep reminding me.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

A Vindication<\/em> was written in six weeks. On January 3, 1792, the day she gave the last sheet to the printer, Wollstonecraft wrote to Roscoe: \u201cI am dissatis\ufb01ed with myself for not having done justice to the subject.\u2014Do not suspect me of false modesty\u2014I mean to say that had I allowed myself more time I could have written a better book, in every sense of the word.\u201d Wollstonecraft isn\u2019t in fact being coy: her book isn\u2019t well-made. Her main arguments about education are at the back, the middle is a sarcastic roasting of male conduct-book writers in the style of her attack on Burke, and the parts about marriage and friendship are scattered throughout when they would have more impact in one place. There is a moralizing, bossy tone, noticeably when Wollstonecraft writes about the sorts of women she doesn\u2019t like (\ufb02irts and rich women: take a deep breath). It ends with a plea to men, in a faux-religious style that doesn\u2019t play to her strengths as a writer. In this, her book is like many landmark feminist books\u2014The Second Sex<\/em>, The Feminine Mystique<\/em>\u2014that are part essay, part argument, part memoir, held together by some force, it seems, that is attributable solely to its writer. It\u2019s as if these books, to be written at all, have to be brought into being by autodidacts who don\u2019t know for sure what they\u2019re doing\u2014just that they have to do it.<\/p>\n

On my \ufb01rst reading of\u00a0A<\/em> Vindication<\/em> as a twenty-year-old undergraduate, I looked up the antique words and wrote down their de\ufb01nitions (to vindicate was to \u201cargue by evidence or argument\u201d). I followed Wollstonecraft\u2019s arguments in favor of education. I knew she\u2019d been a teacher, and saw how reasonable her main argument was: you had to educate women, because they have in\ufb02uence as mothers over infant men. I took these notes eighteen months into an undergraduate degree in English and French in the library of an Oxford college that had only begun admitting women twenty-one years before. I\u2019d arrived from an ordinary school, had scraped by in my first-year exams, and barely felt I belonged. The idea that I could think of myself as an intellectual as Mary did was laughable. Yet halfway into my second year, I discovered early women\u2019s writing. I was amazed that there was so much of it\u2014by protonovelists such as Eliza Haywood, aristocratic poets like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and precursors of the Romantics like Anna Laetitia Barbauld\u2014and I was angry, often, at the way they\u2019d been forgotten, or, even worse, pushed out of the canon. Wollstonecraft stood out, as she\u2019d never been forgotten, was patently unforgettable. I longed to keep up with her, even if I had to do it with the shorter OED at my elbow. I didn\u2019t see myself in her at the time. It wasn\u2019t clear to me when I was younger how hard she had pushed herself.<\/p>\n

Later in her life, Wollstonecraft would defend her unlettered style to her more lettered husband:<\/p>\n

I am compelled to think that there is something in my writings more valuable, than in the productions of some people on whom you bestow warm elogiums\u2014I mean more mind\u2014denominate it as you will\u2014more of the observations of my own senses, more of the combining of my own imagination\u2014the e\ufb00usions of my own feelings and passions than the cold workings of the brain on the materials procured by the senses and imagination of other writers\u2014<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I wish I had been able to marshal these types of arguments while I was at university. I remember one miserable lesson about Racine, just me and a male student who\u2019d been to Eton. I was ba\ufb04ed by the tutor\u2019s questions. We would notice some sort of pattern or e\ufb00ect in the lines of verse\u2014a character saying \u201c\u00d4 d\u00e9sespoir! \u00d4 crime! \u00d4 d\u00e9plorable race!\u201d\u2014and the tutor would ask us what that e\ufb00ect was called. Silence. And then the other student would speak up. \u201cAnaphora,\u201d he\u2019d say. \u201cChiasmus. Zeugma.\u201d I had no idea what he was talking about; I\u2019d never heard these words before. I was relieved when the hour was over. When I asked him afterward how he knew those terms, he said he\u2019d been given a handout at school and he invited me to his room so that I could borrow it and make a photocopy. I must still have it somewhere. I remember feeling a tinge of anger\u2014I could see the patterns in Racine\u2019s verse, I just didn\u2019t know what they were called\u2014but mostly I felt ashamed. I learned the terms on the photocopy by heart.<\/p>\n

Mary knew instinctively that what she o\ufb00ered was something more than technical accuracy, an unshakeable structure, or an even tone. Godwin eventually saw this too. \u201cWhen tried by the hoary and long-established laws of literary composition, [A Vindication of the Rights of Woman<\/em>] can scarcely maintain its claim to be placed in the \ufb01rst class of human productions,\u201d he wrote after her death. \u201cBut when we consider the importance of its doctrines, and the eminence of genius it displays, it seems not very improbable that it will be read as long as the English language endures.\u201d Reading it again, older now, and having read many more of the feminist books that Wollstonecraft\u2019s short one is the ancient foremother of, I can see what he means.<\/p>\n

There are funny autobiographical sketches, as where Mary is having a moment of sublimity at a too-gorgeous sunset only to be interrupted by a fashionable lady asking for her gown to be admired. There is indelible phrasemaking, such as the moment when Mary counters the Margaret Thatcher fallacy\u2014the idea that a woman in power is good in itself\u2014by saying that \u201cit is not empire, but equality\u201d that women should contend for. She asked for things that are commonplace now but were unusual then: for women to be MPs, for girls and boys to be educated together, for friendship to be seen as the source and foundation of romantic love. She linked the way women were understood as property under patriarchy to the way enslaved people were treated, and demanded the abolition of both systems. She was also responding to an indisputably world-historical moment, with all the passion and hurry that that implies. Speci\ufb01cally, she addressed Talleyrand, who had written a pamphlet in support of women\u2019s education, but generally, she applied herself to the ideas about women\u2019s status and worth coming out of the brand-new French republic. In 1791, France gave equal rights to Black citizens, made nonreligious marriage and divorce possible, and emancipated the Jews. What would England give its women? (Wollstonecraft was right that the moment couldn\u2019t wait: Olympe de Gouges, who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen <\/em>in October 1791 and ironically dedicated it to Marie-Antoinette, was guillotined within two years of its publication.)<\/p>\n

And though I love the Vindication<\/em> for its eccentricities, I also love it for its philosophy. It is philosophically substantial, even two centuries later. Wollstonecraft understood how political the personal was, and that between people was where the revolution of manners she called for could be e\ufb00ected. \u201cA man has been termed a microcosm,\u201d she writes, \u201cand every family might also be called a state.\u201d The implications of this deceptively simple idea would echo down the centuries: what role should a woman occupy at home, and how does that a\ufb00ect what she is encouraged to do in the wider world? Every woman in this book struggles with that idea, from Plath\u2019s worry that becoming a mother would mean she could no longer write poetry to Woolf\u2019s insecurity about her education coming from her father\u2019s library rather than from an ancient university. Much of Wollstonecraft\u2019s own thought had risen from her close reading of Rousseau, particularly from her engagement with \u00c9mile<\/em>, his working-through of an ideal Enlightenment education for a boy. I didn\u2019t \ufb01nd as an undergraduate, and still don\u2019t, her argument for women\u2019s education, which is that women should be educated in order to be better wives and mothers, or in order to be able to cope when men leave them, to be feminist. But now I can see that Wollstonecraft was one of the \ufb01rst to make the point that feminists have repeated in various formulations for two hundred years\u2014though I hope not forever. If woman \u201chas reason,\u201d Mary says, then \u201cshe was not created merely to be the solace of man.\u201d And so it follows that \u201cthe sexual should not destroy the human character.\u201d That is to say, that women should above all be thought human, not other.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

With so much of Wollstonecraft\u2019s attention taken up by revolutionary France, perhaps it was inevitable that she would go there. She wrote to Everina that she and Johnson, along with Fuseli and his wife, were planning a six-week trip: \u201cI shall be introduced to many people, my book has been translated and praised in some popular prints; and Fuseli, of course, is well known.\u201d She didn\u2019t say that she had fallen in love with Fuseli. The painter was forty-seven and the protofeminist twenty-nine. Mary hadn\u2019t been without admirers\u2014she met a clergyman she liked on the boat to Ireland; an MP who visited Lord Kingsborough seemed taken with her too\u2014but marriage didn\u2019t appeal. She joked with Roscoe (not just a fan but another admirer, surely) that she could get married in Paris, then get divorced when her \u201ctruant heart\u201d demanded it: \u201cI am still a Spinster on the wing.\u201d But to Fuseli, she wrote that she\u2019d never met anyone who had his \u201cgrandeur of soul,\u201d a grandeur she thought essential to her happiness, and she was scared of falling \u201ca sacri\ufb01ce to a passion which may have a mixture of dross in it \u2026 If I thought my passion criminal, I would conquer it, or die in the attempt.\u201d Mary suggested she live in a m\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois with Fuseli and his wife. He turned the idea down, the plan to go to Paris dissolved, and Mary left London on her own.<\/p>\n

She arrived in the Marais in December 1792, when Louis XVI was on trial for high treason. On the morning he would mount his defense, the king \u201cpassed by my window,\u201d Mary wrote to Johnson. \u201cI can scarcely tell you why, but an association of ideas made the tears \ufb02ow insensibly from my eyes, when I saw Louis sitting with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach, going to meet death.\u201d Mary was spooked: she wished for the cat she had left in London, and couldn\u2019t blow out her candle that night. The easy radicalism she had adopted in England came under pressure. Though she waited until her French was better before calling on Francophone contacts, she began to meet other expatriates in Paris, such as Helen Maria Williams, the British poet Wordsworth would praise. In spring 1793, she was invited to the house of Thomas Christie, a Scottish essayist who had cofounded the Analytical Review<\/em> with Johnson. There she met Gilbert Imlay, an American, and fell deeply in love.<\/p>\n

Imlay was born in New Jersey and had fought in the War of Independence; he was writing a novel, The Emigrants<\/em>, and made money in Paris by acting as a go-between for Europeans who wanted to buy land in the U.S. and the Americans who wanted to sell it to them. It is as if all Mary\u2019s intensity throughout her life so far\u2014the letters to Jane Arden, her devotion to Fanny Blood, her passion for Fuseli\u2014crests in her a\ufb00air with this one man, whom she disliked on their \ufb01rst meeting and decided to avoid. Imlay said he thought marriage corrupt; he talked about the women he\u2019d had a\ufb00airs with; he described his travels through the rugged West of America. After the disappointment with Fuseli, she o\ufb00ered up her heart ecstatically, carelessly: \u201cWhilst you love me,\u201d Mary told him, making a man she\u2019d known for months the architect and guardian of her happiness, \u201cI cannot again fall into the miserable state, which rendered life a burthen almost too heavy to be borne.\u201d And yet she also noticed she couldn\u2019t make him stay: \u201cOf late, we are always separating\u2014Crack!\u2014crack!\u2014and away you go.\u201d<\/p>\n

When my husband and I agreed we could see other people, he created a Tinder pro\ufb01le, using a photo I\u2019d taken of him against a clear blue sky on the balcony of one of our last apartments together. He wanted to fall in love again and have children: pretty quickly he found someone who wanted that too. I met someone at a party who intrigued me, another writer visiting from another city, and I began spending more time with him: in front of paintings, at Wollstonecraft\u2019s grave, on long walks, at the movies, talking for hours in and out of bed. After being married for so long, it was strange and wonderful to fall in love again; I felt illuminated, sexually free, emotionally rich, intellectually alive. I liked myself again. But I fought my feelings for him, reasoning that it was too soon after my husband, that sentiments this strong were somehow wrong in themselves, that he would go back to his own city soon and so I must give him up no matter what I felt. When he was gone, though, I saw I had found that untameable thing, a mysterious recognition, everything the poets mean by love. I wrote him email after email, sending him thoughts and feelings and provocations, trying out ideas for my new life, which I hoped would include him. Sometimes I must have sounded like Wollstonecraft writing to Imlay.<\/p>\n

Mary moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine, a leafy village on the edge of Paris, and began writing a history of the revolution; throughout that summer of 1793, she and Imlay would meet at the gates, les barri\u00e8res<\/em>, in the Paris city wall. (Bring your \u201cbarrier-face,\u201d she would ask him when the a\ufb00air began to turn cold, and she wanted to go back to the start.) \u201cI do not want to be loved like a goddess; but I wish to be necessary to you,\u201d she wrote. Perhaps there was something in her conception of herself that made her think she could handle a \ufb02irt like Imlay. \u201cWomen who have gone to great lengths to raise themselves above the ordinary level of their sex,\u201d Mary\u2019s biographer Claire Tomalin comments, \u201care likely to believe, for a while at any rate, that they will be loved the more ardently and faithfully for their pains.\u201d Mary perhaps believed she was owed a great love, and Imlay was made to \ufb01t. \u201cBy tickling minnows,\u201d as Virginia Woolf put it in a short essay about Wollstonecraft, Imlay \u201chad hooked a dolphin.\u201d By the end of the year, Mary was pregnant.<\/p>\n

Fran\u00e7oise Imlay (always Fanny, after Fanny Blood) was born at Le Havre in May 1794, and Mary wrote home that \u201cI feel great pleasure at being a mother,\u201d and boasted that she hadn\u2019t \u201cclogged her soul by promising obedience\u201d in marriage. Imlay stayed away a lot; in one letter, Mary tells him of tears coming to her eyes at picking up the carving knife to slice the meat herself, because it brought back memories of him being at home with her. As she becomes disillusioned by degrees with Imlay, whose letters don\u2019t arrive as expected, she falls in love with their daughter. At three months, she talks of Fanny getting into her \u201cheart and imagination\u201d; at four months, she notices with pleasure that the baby \u201cdoes not promise to be a beauty, but appears wonderfully intelligent\u201d; at six months, she tells Imlay that though she loved being pregnant and breastfeeding (nursing your own child was radical in itself then), those sensations \u201cdo not deserve to be compared to the emotions I feel, when she stops to smile upon me, or laughs outright on meeting me unexpectedly in the street, or after a short absence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Imlay\u2019s return keeps being delayed, and Wollstonecraft uses her intellect to protest, arguing against the commercial forces that keep him from \u201cobserving with me how her mind unfolds.\u201d Isn\u2019t the point, as Imlay once claimed, to live in the present moment? Hasn\u2019t Mary already shown that she can earn enough by her writing to keep them? \u201cStay, for God\u2019s sake,\u201d she writes, \u201clet me not be always vainly looking for you, till I grow sick at heart.\u201d Still he does not come, and her letters reach a pitch of emotion when she starts to suspect he\u2019s met someone else. \u201cI do not choose to be a secondary object,\u201d she spits. She already knew that men were \u201csystematic tyrants.\u201d \u201cMy head turns giddy, when I think that all the con\ufb01dence I have had in the a\ufb00ection of others is come to this\u2014I did not expect this blow from you.\u201d She starts signing o\ufb00 each letter with the threat that it could be the last he receives from her.<\/p>\n

In April 1795, she decided to join him in London if he would not come to her. \u201cI have been so unhappy this winter,\u201d Mary wrote. \u201cI \ufb01nd it as di\ufb03cult to acquire fresh hopes, as to regain tranquility.\u201d Fanny was nearly a year old, and Imlay had set up home for them in Soho. She attempted to seduce him; he recoiled. (He had been seeing someone, an actress.) She took the losses\u2014of her imagined domestic idyll, of requited love, of a fond father for her daughter\u2014hard, and planned to take a huge dose of laudanum, which Imlay discovered just in time. I \ufb01nd it unbearable that Mary, like Plath, would think that dying is better for her own children than living, but neither Mary nor Sylvia were well when they thought that, I tell myself.<\/p>\n

Imlay suggested that Mary go away for the summer\u2014he had some business that needed attention in Scandinavia. A shipment of silver had gone missing, and he could do with someone going there in person to investigate. She could take Fanny, and a maid. The letters Mary wrote to him while waiting in Hull for good sailing weather show that she had not yet recovered: she looks at the sea \u201chardly daring to own to myself the secret wish, that it might become our tombs\u201d; she is scared to sleep because Imlay appears in her dreams with \u201cdi\ufb00erent casts of countenance\u201d; she mocks the idea that she\u2019ll revive at all. \u201cNow I am going towards the north in search of sunbeams!\u2014Will any ever warm this desolated heart? All nature seems to frown\u2014or rather mourn with me.\u201d But she had an infant on her hip, a business venture to rescue that might also bring back her errant lover, and from the letters she wrote home, she’d mold a book that would unwittingly create a future for herself, even when she was not entirely sure she wanted one.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

An adapted excerpt of\u00a0<\/i>A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again<\/a>,\u00a0to be published by Ecco\/HarperCollins this May.<\/i><\/p>\n

Joanna Biggs is the author of <\/em>All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work\u00a0and a senior editor at\u00a0<\/em>Harper\u2019s Magazine.\u00a0In 2017, she cofounded Silver Press, a feminist publishing house.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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