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Literary Review
Biography
A feminist manifesto
RUMINA SETHI
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Lyndall Gordon attempts to see in Mary Wollstonecraft's contrariety, a positive desire to inculcate and discard, to test and shape her growing genius.
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Mary Wollstonecraft: A New Genus, Lyndall Gordon, Little, Brown, 2005, p.562, price not stated.
RESISTING the temptations of the Enlightenment principles of a "state of nature", Mary Wollstonecraft, arguably one of the earliest proponents of feminist thought, dismisses the idea that men possess the natural capacity for reason, logic and rationality which had eluded women. One may give Wollstonecraft credit for the formulation of gender as a socio/cultural rather than natural construct in A Vindication of the Right's of Woman, which has become a manifesto of feminist criticism. To a large extent, feminism in the West is traced to the bold, independent and experimental attempts of Mary Wollstonecraft in the late 18th Century along with Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir in the 20th.
Initial impetus
Mary's productive strength for the cause of women arose first upon seeing her mother as a victim of household violence. Her father, an unpredictable bully, showered his wife and children frequently with blows. This led to an interrogation of the laws of marriage by the young Mary. It would be another 100 years before the Assault Act would be passed and victims of male abuse would be able to claim their release from the legality of marriage. Later on, while teaching in Ireland, Mary associates the "undeveloped" heart of young boys with "domestic atrophy: the disempowering and exclusion of the mother". It was during these years that she came "alive", reading Rousseau avidly and writing a novel, Mary, side by side. Wollstonecraft's aim was to "demonstrate `the mind of woman, who has thinking powers': such a creature `may be allowed to exist' as a fictional possibility". After her stint as a governess to the Kingsborough family in Ireland, Wollstonecraft found herself in the company of Thomas Paine who had promoted women's rights in "An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex", and Joseph Johnson, her publisher and friend. It was now that Wollstonecraft perfected her skills as a spokesperson for womankind, demanding "JUSTICE for one-half of the human race".
Entering the male domain
In 1790, after the storming of the Bastille, a 31-year-old Wollstonecraft entered the male domain of politics and published anonymously A Vindication of the Rights of Men, which was a pamphlet against vain, verbose politicians like Edmund Burke who could bemoan the passing away of French royalty and be utterly indifferent to the issue of slave trade. She was something of an anarchist when she met William Godwin. Their first meeting around Johnson's dinner table ended in a quarrel since Wollstonecraft disagreed with Godwin's sweeping atheism. Godwin, who was there to meet Paine and talk to him, ended up hearing Wollstonecraft instead.
But before Godwin became her husband, Mary had another sweetheart — the American, Gilbert Imlay. In the days of the Revolution in France, owing to the considerable threat to British aliens, Imlay proclaimed Mary to be his wife in order to save her from Robespierre and the Jacobins who had, in any case, declared war on "Amazons". Mary's new status as "wife' without being legally wed suited her anti-marriage ideology. Soon she was pregnant. But Imlay proved not to be the knight in shining armour. Mary Wollstonecraft, whom all of Europe had come to acknowledge as a bright and intelligent woman, had to be so dim in perceiving the reality of her "husband" who kept slaves in America and was shrewdly commercial rather than intellectual. Imlay was scarcely ever home; the biography covers in detail Mary's beseeching letters to him urging him not to covet commercial gains and to come home. Fanny, their daughter, was born "naturally" without the help of male doctors who tended to treat women's bodies like "ill-designed machines that required their intervention", and nourished in tune with Mary's pet theories of breast feeding, preventive hygiene and an informed, matter-of-fact attitude. Eventually, true to her suspicions, Imlay dumped her for an actress, setting up Mary in the much-disliked circumstance of a mistress. Few know that Mary Wollstonecraft attempted suicide twice: first, through an overdose of laudanum and saved by Imlay, and second, by throwing herself into the Thames and rescued unconscious by a boatman.
Gordon, her biographer, devotes several hundred pages to Mary's affair with Imlay during the most volatile period of the French Revolution before she marks her return to London and treats her better known relationship with Godwin. She delightfully describes through the love letters both wrote each other, how the cold and remote Godwin fell for Mary's charms. At first, Godwin is uneasy when Mary asks him to spend the night with her. By and by, he relents and we see him begging to meet Mary: "Suffer me to see you." Mary immediately replies in the affirmative and arrives at Godwin's doorstep to deliver the letter rather than acting as a Victorian prude. But each time, their attempts at sex fail: Mary finds Godwin reserved and he, in turn, finds her threatening. Although the two lived round the corner from each other, they wrote sometimes three times a day with the speed of emails. Despite opposing the institution of marriage, they got married in 1797, but continued to live separately in pursuit of independence. They even had separate friends and still corresponded through letters though they lived 20 blocks from each other. The two were to have a daughter Mary (Shelley) leading a week later to Wollstonecraft's death.
Openness and contradictions
Yet Mary is regarded as something of an inconsistent and notorious hussy, at once hailing and spurning the French Revolution, condemning marriage and getting married herself. Horace Walpole called her a "hyena in petticoats" while John Adams, America's second president, regarded her to be "a mad woman", foolish and licentious. Some late-20th Century feminists have also found her many attachments to men embarrassing. Lyndall Gordon attempts to see in her contrariety, a positive desire to inculcate and discard, to test and shape her growing genius, to maintain her ego in the acknowledgment of her fallibility. As Virginia Woolf writes: "Every day she made theories by which life should be lived; and every day she came smack against the rock of other people's prejudices. Every day too — for she was no pedant, no cold-blooded theorist — something was born in her that thrust aside her theories and modelled them afresh".
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