Mary Wollstonecraft's Social And Aesthetic Philosophy: An Eve to Please Me

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy Saba Bahar

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy: ‘An Eve to Please Me’ Saba Bahar

© Saba Bahar, 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0-333-97390-9 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bahar, Saba, 1964– Mary Wollstonecraft’s social and aesthetic philosophy: an Eve to please me / Saba Bahar. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-333-97390-9 1. Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759–1797 – Political and social views. 2. Feminism and literature – England – History – 18th century. 3. Women and literature – England – History – 18th century. 4. Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759–1797 – Aesthetics. 5. Aesthetics, British – 18th century. I. Title. PR5841.W8 Z58 2002 828’.609–dc21 2001054887 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Abbreviations

viii

Introduction

1.

2.

3.

4.

1

‘An Eve to Please Me’: Mary Wollstonecraft and the ‘Public Woman’

13

‘An Eve to please me’ ‘Invidious censures … will not keep me mute in the cause of Liberty and Virtue’: Catherine Macaulay and the ‘public woman’ Rights and righteousness: wives, mothers and women Mary Wollstonecraft and the ‘public woman’

13

24 36 47

The Old Abelard: or, Héloïse among the Immodest Philosophers

51

The New Héloïse or the same Old Abelard Ogle: or, how the philosopher sinks into the man Mary: or, how genius must educate itself Rousseau’s paradise Modesty Immodest philosophers and female citizens

51 64 66 73 78 88

Making Novel Creatures

92

How novels make women creatures of sensation How women make novels creations of sensation Reforming the genre

97 111 115

The Wants of Women

129

Mary’s and Fanny’s wants Representing women in distress The wants of Scandinavian women

132 137 145

v

vi Contents

5.

Contracting wants From the wrongs of women to the wants of women

154 167

Conclusion

175

Notes

178

Bibliography

203

Index

214

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Gregory T. Polletta for supervising the thesis submitted to the University of Geneva, on which this book is based. I am grateful to the members of my thesis committee, namely Elisabeth Bronfen, Marilyn Butler, Mary Poovey and Richard Waswo, for helpful suggestions for revisions. I am particularly indebted to Marilyn Butler for continued support and encouragement. A fellowship from the Fonds national suisse de la recherche scientifique ensured I had a year in which to devote myself to completing the thesis. I thank François Flahaut, Director of the Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage of the CNRS–EHESS, Paris, for inviting me to participate in the activities of the Centre. I am grateful to Malcolm Bowie, Ian McClean and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, Directors of the European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford for making my stay at the University of Oxford possible. I would like to thank Michèle Le Doeuff for her support during the first stages of this study. I would like to acknowledge numerous colleagues and friends for helpful suggestions on how to pursue my reflections. Ros Ballaster, Pete De Bolla, Valerie Fehlbaum, Agnese Fidecaro, Lucy Newlyn, Simone Oettli and Barbara Taylor generously commented on parts of the thesis in progress. Besides reading significant portions of the thesis, Luisa Calè, Fabienne Michelet and Valeria Wagner listened to the proverbial lamentations of an otherwise solitary thesis-writer. I am indebted to Rashed and Silva Bahar for their encouragement. It is without any ta’arof that I express my gratitude for generous offers of bed and board, conversation and transportation from Delseta Atkins, Jalil and Merya Bahar, Dana Bahar, Nasim Bahar, Sylvie Ferioli, Lise Magnollay, Heide Renner and Reda Sadki. Last but not least, no thank you to Jamal but profound acknowledgements of another sort.

vii

Abbreviations With the exception of her letters, all references to Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings are to The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. J. Todd and M. Butler, assistant ed. E. Rees-Mogg, 7 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1989). Where her correspondence is concerned, I refer either to one of these volumes or to The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979). The following abbreviations are used: AR Contributions to the Analytical Review (1788–97), vol. 7 LI ‘Letters to Imlay’ [1798], vol. 6 LSND Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark [1796], vol. 6 M Mary, A Fiction [1788], vol. 1 MWL The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. R.M. Wardle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979) OP ‘On Poetry’ [1797], vol. 7 OS Original Stories from Real Life [1788], vol. 4 VRM Vindication of the Rights of Men [1790], vol. 5 VRW Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792], vol. 5 WOW The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria [1798], vol. 1

viii

Introduction

Since the publication of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft’s seminal role in the emergence of Anglo-American feminism has been acknowledged. If the initial positive reception was soon repressed in the general conservative backlash following the French Revolution,1 she remained an inspiration and a reference for many subsequent attempts to improve the lives of women and to claim their political rights.2 Recent studies have highlighted Wollstonecraft’s importance for the network of Radical Unitarians,3 for the women of the ‘Langham Place Circle’,4 as well as for the American women’s suffrage movement,5 all of which were directly involved in the nineteenth-century movement for women’s rights. Although the membership of these groups was largely middle-class, there is some evidence of her relevance to women in the emerging socialist and working-class movements.6 By the end of the nineteenth century, interest in Wollstonecraft’s life and work had been revived and was openly celebrated, thanks in large part to the impact of the New Woman and the rise of a full-fledged suffrage movement. New editions of her work were published; sympathetic biographies were written; and a university thesis, charting her relation to the Enlightenment and socialism, was undertaken.7 Wollstonecraft’s position as an icon of the Anglo-Saxon feminist movement was thereafter guaranteed. Much of that early interest is biographical. Although her work was occasionally read seriously, more often than not it was the exemplary life that was privileged. As Virginia Sapiro has argued, Wollstonecraft’s life ‘came to serve as a text for analysis by those who felt compelled to comment against the laws and conventions that subordinated women to men’.8 This observation remains true, with some notable exceptions, for much of the critical commentary undertaken in the twentieth 1

2 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy

century. It is not until the early 1980s, in the aftermath of second-wave feminism and of the institutionalisation of women’s studies in the Anglo-American academy that Wollstonecraft’s writings were taken seriously as objects of research and intellectual interest. Since then, they have risen to their present canonical status. Over the past two to three decades, her Vindication of the Rights of Woman has become an unavoidable text for almost any introductory class to the history of western feminism, as well as for any serious student of the history and philosophy of feminist political theory. Her other works, in particular her novels, are incorporated almost systematically into studies of women’s writing and of feminist literary history, eclipsing equally influential and provocative women writers from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In an age when revisions of the feminist canon have become increasingly necessary and when the very need for such a canon is questioned, why another book-length study of the works of Mary Wollstonecraft? One way to answer this question is to invoke scholarship produced over the past thirty years that has tried to break from a purely biographical reading of an exemplary life. If proponents of feminist historiography and literary criticism have been committed to establishing a legitimate field of study by excavating a lost tradition of female writers, they have also been invested in doing so critically by engaging recent theoretical contributions. In the aftermath of structuralist and poststructuralist criticism of the psychoanalytic, Marxist and Foucauldian variants, concepts such as the author and her unique genius have become increasingly problematic, as has the equally contentious notion of the ‘author’s intentions’. Instead of valorising highly singular literary invention, criticism has called attention to a network of images that cut across a range of texts and discourses. Instead of praising creative novelty, it has tried to identify the privileged subject-position from which certain women speak at the expense of others. Instead of asking what a writer said and what she meant by it, it has asked what her text was doing and how it did so. As such, feminist criticism and historiography have tried to measure what was excluded in celebratory affirmations of womanhood and what was foreclosed in attempts to ground political subjecthood. They have also attempted to identify the blind spots and internal contradictions of these same foundational moments. If women are defined by their capacity to reason, how does this definition exclude women of other races, nations and classes denied that capacity? If femininity is selfcontrol, what kind of ‘women’ unashamedly brandish their joy, sexu-

Introduction 3

ality and rage? If women’s work is measured solely in relation to the public sphere, how do we esteem and value those who contribute primarily as mothers in the private and domestic sphere? Already the beneficiary of substantial attention, Wollstonecraft did not need to be ‘rediscovered’ by feminist scholars of the early 1980s in the way that less prominent women writers, such as Eliza Haywood, Frances Sheridan or Charlotte Smith, did. Her iconic status could be reassessed, and a close reading of her works could highlight her ideological limits as well as those of the early feminist movement. Such an approach is elevated into a methodology in Mary Poovey’s influential The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Interested in exploring how women writers negotiated the constraints masculine bourgeois ideology placed on them, she locates in Wollstonecraft’s writing an ideal site for such a study. ‘[W]e discover,’ she writes, ‘what pieces of ideological baggage even this self-consciously political woman simply could not leave behind.’9 Poovey’s examination allows her to foreground Wollstonecraft’s difficulty in accounting for female sexuality. In order to accommodate herself to the ideals of masculine professional culture, the eighteenth-century feminist oscillates between suggesting that women have no innate sexual desires and implying that these desires are even more voracious than men’s and hence need to be more tightly regulated and disciplined. In the wake of Poovey’s study on literary authorship, others have also emphasised the limits to Wollstonecraft’s feminist politics. They have questioned her excessive faith in the Enlightenment project. The literary scholars Mary Jacobus and Timothy J. Reiss have called attention to her exaggerated emphasis on reason as opposed to feeling,10 while the political theorist Carole Pateman has queried the emancipatory potential of education.11 The exaggerated faith in rationality, they suggest, fails to take into account structural limits to women’s involvement in politics and civic life. Numerous scholars have contrasted the woman with the philosopher. Calling attention to Wollstonecraft’s unhappy love affairs and especially to her disastrous relationship with Gilbert Imlay, they have focused on how incapable she was of actualising in her own life the emphasis on female rationality. This inability should invite, they suggest, a reappraisal of her entire political project.12 Other students of the feminist philosopher have berated her incapacity to deal with female difference in the context of the historical formation of the predominantly male political subject. Rather than forcing conceptions of citizenship to accommodate to the demands of

4 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy

women, Wollstonecraft is said to have acquiesced to its masculine standards. Cora Kaplan, for instance, sees in Wollstonecraft an attempt to contain female sexuality and pleasure in order to establish women as rational subjects capable of political decision-making. For, although Wollstonecraft moves towards the ‘conclusion that it is male desire which must be controlled and contained if women are to be free and rational’, the eighteenth-century feminist refuses to draw the consequences, accepting that male desire, however destructive to women, is part of a man’s identity.13 At the other end of the spectrum, Joan Landes has castigated Wollstonecraft for appealing to a ‘natural’ definition of women as mothers, foreclosing any possibility of political participation outside the domestic sphere.14 When both these constraints are put together, they form an impossible task for women’s continued attempt to attain full citizenship. Or so claims Carole Pateman, who designates these dual and contradictory limitations ‘Wollstonecraft’s dilemma’.15 ‘On the one hand,’ she writes, ‘they [women] have demanded that the ideal of citizenship be extended to them. … On the other hand, woman have also insisted, often simultaneously, as did Mary Wollstonecraft, that as women they have specific capacities, talents, needs and concerns, so that the expression of their citizenship will be differentiated from men.’16 These mutually incompatible requirements produce a predicament that continues to haunt feminist theories of the state. Finally, in the aftermath of white feminism’s increasing self-consciousness of its racist presuppositions, Wollstonecraft has been accused of foregrounding the values and status of her own race, religion and nation at the expense of her black ‘sisters’.17 In short, as feminists continue to debate strategies for the movement and to reflect on the different ways of positioning ourselves in relation to a predominately masculine tradition, be it in political theory or in literature, in the academy or on the streets, Wollstonecraft’s writings have become a locus for discussing the dilemmas that confront us. However useful for the future of the movement, such approaches nevertheless diminish an understanding of the history of feminist thought.18 By abandoning the historical context to favour the textual product, they exaggerate the continuity between Wollstonecraft and the moderns. Highlighting her role in the formation of bourgeois femininity, they have ignored, as Frances Ferguson points out in her persuasive response to Timothy Reiss, Wollstonecraft’s critical intervention against earlier, equally repressive ideals of womanhood.19

Introduction 5

Studies from the 1980s also significantly undervalued Wollstonecraft’s contention with a more generalised debate, not strictly limited to gender issues. Or if they did situate her intellectual and political position, they drew on a vocabulary more familiar to us than to her. Qualifying her as ‘bourgeois’ or ‘liberal’, terms that acquired political currency only in the second half of the nineteenth century, their decontextualised commentary fails to assess her participation in eighteenth-century debates on moral and political philosophy.20 Interestingly, Mary Poovey revised her earlier arguments after reading David Simpson’s attempt to place Wollstonecraft’s argument within the larger eighteenth-century debate on luxury.21 Many of these dehistoricised studies of Wollstonecraft also underestimate her rhetorical strategies. Whereas Poovey’s (1984) close reading of the two Vindications focuses on the frequent recourse to euphemisms, hyperboles and battered syntax to reveal how strained the writer’s control of her own emotional excess remains, there is little recognition that this almost self-conscious miming of the language of sensibility is part of a strategy to undermine her opponent’s (that is, Edmund Burke’s) literary authority.22 There is, moreover, little acknowledgement that the first Vindication is a literary review, constrained by the limited time and space allotted to the production, presentation and dissemination of such texts. In short, what many feminist approaches to Wollstonecraft lack is an ear more attuned to the vocabulary and discursive constructs available to her, to the literary public and the generic forms at hand as well as to her creative appropriations of them. If a more historically sensitive approach will not necessarily exonerate her from the accusations made against her (she is suspicious of female sexuality; she is insufficiently critical of the Enlightenment’s belief in reason; she is trapped by the presumption of women’s ‘natural’ role as mothers; she is far too committed to England’s role as the vanguard of global progress; and – perhaps worse of all – her circumlocutory prose is a pain to read!), it will nevertheless allow us to appreciate the full force of her arguments. In turn, these renewed studies should provide us latter-day feminists with a more complete assessment of the challenges that women have had to face, as well as of the unfinished battles we have yet to confront. Following the bicentenary celebrations of the publication of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, scholarship has been attempting to redress the oversight I have been outlining. A critical edition of Wollstonecraft’s collected works is now available, laying the groundwork for the contextual approach I favour.23 Equally important, recent

6 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy

book-length studies have contributed to a more substantial intellectual historiography, even if much work remains to be done. Gary Kelly’s Revolutionary Feminism: the Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (1992) attempts to do justice to the scope of Wollstonecraft’s literary achievements. Primarily thematic and chronological in its approach, this literary biography reads Wollstonecraft’s writings in relation to an emerging class of professional writers. It provides interesting analysis of Wollstonecraft’s works, highlighting her rhetorical technique and relating them to their biographical context. Published the same year, Virginia Sapiro’s Vindication of Political Virtue complements Kelly’s book by situating these achievements in a larger intellectual context. Interested in the history of political theory, it traces Wollstonecraft’s ties to the Scottish Enlightenment, the Commonwealth tradition and civic humanism, thereby emphasising nascent liberalism at the expense of her radicalism.24 Barbara Taylor’s much-heralded study seeks to balance this over-emphasis by exploring other networks, most obviously the theological strains the philosopher inherits as well as the socialist feminist tradition she foreshadows. This study will not seek to multiply these efforts by producing yet another intellectual biography or thematic study of Wollstonecraft’s major and minor works. Indeed, the following chapters are not organised chronologically to explore the development of a feminist mind. Nor are they centred on given texts to provide thorough and compelling assessments of them. A number of Wollstonecraft’s works, including regrettably her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, receive very little treatment; others, such as her Vindication of the Rights of Men, are not examined for themselves but rather as stepping-stones in her intellectual development. Instead, attention is focused on her more explicitly literary efforts, including her reviews and her novels. Articulated around readings of her unfinished novel, Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, this study will suggest that her crowning achievement lies in the aesthetic revisions present in this novel and in her travel account. As such, I do not pretend to provide in the chapters that follow a definitive account of the life and writings of the eighteenth-century feminist philosopher. Instead Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy examines the feminist philosopher’s attempts to revise models and representations of women, giving them a more active role in public life. Combining history of ideas with close textual reading to articulate Wollstonecraft’s position in relation to other eighteenthcentury writers, including Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Edmund Burke,

Introduction 7

William Godwin, Catherine Macaulay, Richard Price, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, it demonstrates how Wollstonecraft is directly engaged in rethinking key concepts in moral, aesthetic, political and social philosophy, particularly where women are concerned, and situates the ideas propounded by the feminist philosopher within their intellectual and historical context. It turns occasionally to biographical material when it can highlight ideas. Because this book is interested in how these ideas were misread, it sometimes deals with their reception. For instance, William Godwin’s account of his wife’s life, published after her death, becomes a paradigmatic example of how a woman’s active virtue remains invisible. Intrigued by Wollstonecraft’s attempts to promote women’s active role in public life, my exploration is not limited to Rousseauesque concepts of the social (and sexual) contract that have framed most studies of her political philosophy.25 I accord more emphasis to British appropriations of civic humanism, especially as they appear in the work of Richard Price and study the relation between the ethical category of practical virtue and the political one of active citizenship. Moreover, steering away from rigid distinctions between the public and the private, this book highlights instead the ambiguous status of the ‘public woman’, whose very name invokes her sexuality. Woman’s moral autonomy (and ultimately her political action) is compromised by the underlying sexual implications of this figure. In the chapters that follow, I demonstrate how Wollstonecraft tried to wrench the title away from these connotations by according new meanings to such sexualised terms as ‘female modesty’. Urging women to pursue active virtue rather than to maintain passive innocence, she nevertheless recognises that action means something very different in the lives of women. To acknowledge the heroism of virtuous women, she has to demonstrate how women actively struggle to overcome their wretched condition. This revalorisation is crucial for accepting women’s participation in civic life. Aesthetic representation is thus directly related to public and political life. Because one of my main contentions is that Wollstonecraft’s more political claims cannot be separated from her desire to articulate more convincing aesthetic representations of women, I break down the strict disciplinary boundaries between aesthetic, moral, social and political philosophy. Nor do I limit my study of these disciplines to the ways in which they are traditionally explored. As such, although I am interested in Wollstonecraft’s attempt to revise Rousseau’s inherently sexist vision, I neither present his political philosophy nor examine her

8 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy

response to it in great detail. Instead, I privilege Wollstonecraft’s troubled relation to Rousseau by exploring the figure of the male philosopher that appears in the entire corpus of her writings and by suggesting that this figure signals the problematic relation between women and knowledge. I thereby depart from a more conventional understanding of the feminist’s political philosophy to suggest that Wollstonecraft insists first on women’s moral autonomy and only then on their political participation. By identifying the importance of practical virtue, I can affirm the emphasis she places on a woman’s conscience, as well as relate it to her efforts to write a more consciousness-centred novel. Elsewhere, I explore issues related to moral philosophy and specifically to the part the sentiments of pity and respect play in producing political subjects. I demonstrate why any attempt to redefine the ‘public woman’ must also elaborate an aesthetic project that refigures women, transforming them from objects of pity into subjects who command respect. Examining how Wollstonecraft develops an aesthetics of solidarity, I detail her efforts at developing representations of female suffering which channel sympathy without conflating the sufferer and the spectator into an indiscriminate unit. This attempt is crucial for rendering female suffering visible, thereby making it an object of public debate and ultimately of collective political action. Such possibilities, I explain, are denied by more univocal, imperialistic pity. By emphasising the interaction between philosophy and aesthetic practice, and by addressing literary scholars as much as students of the history of political philosophy, I hope to provide a welcome perspective in Wollstonecraft studies. * Before I turn to the study of Wollstonecraft, a few words on how I propose to study her. Wollstonecraft’s relevance today lies partly in the historical period in which she rose to prominence. She wrote at an inaugural moment of modern political culture, when the Enlightenment’s emphasis on knowledge, liberty of conscience, innate human worth and natural rights was transformed into a political culture more recognisable to today’s audience. The French Revolution, the forces it unleashed as well as the responses it elicited mark a turning point for the transformation of these earlier humanist values into liberalism and/or utopian socialism. As much recent scholarship has suggested, the implications transcend political philosophy, resonating in the sciences, literature and education. Confronting the

Introduction 9

conflicting strains in the pivotal position she occupies, Wollstonecraft provides an interesting perspective on both the possibilities and the limits of this transformation. Her feminist contribution to those debates, no matter how little they failed to resonate at the time, alone justifies renewed interest in her. Wollstonecraft’s significance also lies in the coherence of her demands. She is certainly not the first professional writer;26 nor is she the first to challenge the sexual double standard, to request increased political participation for women or even to question their subordinated status in marriage. 27 But if her demands echo both those of earlier feminists and of her contemporaries, she makes the necessary and systematic ties between these demands, realising how interdependent recognising women’s rational capacity and questioning the double standard are, how related increasing political involvement and reforming masculinity are. More importantly, she dissents from the mainstream by insisting on women’s moral and hence civic independence, regardless of their marital status. As such, I shall suggest, she offers an important and qualitative change from other reformers of female manners.28 In signalling Wollstonecraft’s rupture from other eighteenth-century women writers, I do not want to celebrate her singular and visionary voice, capable of seeing through and beyond the sexist schemes of her times. I do not want to stop short at reconstructing the eighteenthcentury writer’s good intentions by providing the necessary background. If I combine the history of ideas with close textual readings it is in order to have an appreciation of the debates in which the Enlightenment feminist was engaged and of their historical stakes. Such increased historical awareness should provide a means to measure and assess the philosopher’s intellectual achievements, understood here not simply as the heroic expression of an autonomous subject and prophetic intellectual genius, but rather as an indication of how possibilities and limits were negotiated for more or less convincing results. Opening the way for her vindication of the rights of women and for new representations of the ‘righteous’ public woman, the historical context also curtails them.29 If, as I shall argue, Wollstonecraft rejects the dominant model of femininity that positions women as objects of pity by suggesting that female subjects can command respect through conscious self-control, she nevertheless continues to uphold representations of the heroic where joyful, despondent and angry passions are tightly restrained. My historicised examination of her work, then, will attempt to set its revolutionary potential against the confines of her own revolutionary times.

10 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy

Given my discomfort with earlier feminist approaches, I do not want to examine Wollstonecraft’s interventions from the disillusioned vantage-point of my ‘post-’generation. I do not believe that in standing ‘outside’ of her time, I stand ‘outside’ ideological shortcomings, in a position to denounce her blindspots for racism, classism, heterosexism and imperialism. As Mary Poovey has recently argued in a reappraisal of the theoretical position adopted in her earlier work, ideological failure only ‘becomes apparent as a result of subsequent changes and (mis)readings’.30 Thus I can recognise Wollstonecraft’s blindspots only in light of my historical hindsight as a twenty-first-century feminist; they take on a political dimension only when they are invested with the intentional desire to deny other kinds of political subjects agency. Writing before the language of class, race or sexuality had a discursive meaning, Wollstonecraft cannot be said to withhold rights intentionally or even to forward deliberately her subject-position at the expense of others. To proceed otherwise would be to advance a paranoid understanding of historical agents, capable of plotting the direction in which progress moves. Such a disclaimer should not prevent me, however, from identifying crucial absences or oversights in her philosophy. Although I am not embracing a pure metanarrative of feminist progress, I do want to undertake what Nancy Fraser has designated ‘emancipatory’ and ‘engaged historiography’: These include [she writes] local histories that recover lost traditions of female agency or resistance; narratives that restore historicity to female-centered practices heretofore misapprehended as natural; histories that revalue previously derogated forms of women’s culture; and genealogies that denaturalize gender-coded categories like ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’ or that reconstruct the hidden gender subtexts of concepts like ‘class’ and the ‘state’.31 In the course of the following chapters, I argue that Wollstonecraft engages in such practices. By valorising a mother’s rational activity, she elevates an ‘instinctive’ and natural love into an acquired virtue. She denaturalises ‘gender-coded categories’ such as respect and tenderness, the sublime and the beautiful. Assessing her much denounced discomfort with female sexuality, I argue that she resists the ideal of passive sexual innocence by urging that women rationally choose and hence acquire sexual virtue. In so doing I suggest Wollstonecraft’s literary production is an emancipatory historiography. Moreover, by foregrounding the background to her philosophical writing and by emphasising her conscious desire to respond to it, I give

Introduction 11

her an intellectual agency that many poststructural feminist studies would seek to question. I nevertheless deem my position all the more necessary because of Wollstonecraft’s own attempts to emphasise women’s moral agency. More importantly, I do so because, historically, her philosophical battles have been largely ignored. As such – and despite my earlier disclaimers – my interrogation is not entirely divested of recent debates amongst feminists. Like women of the preceding generation, I too believe that Wollstonecraft remains a key site for interrogating both the limits to Enlightenment values where women are concerned and the continued relevance of the project.32 Addressing her writings in their context in order to answer problems that still plague us, I try to maintain a Janus-faced perspective that is both aware of contextual debates that produce them and alert to Wollstonecraft’s continued vibrancy, resonance and ultimately relevance. For, if I am preoccupied with her musings on, say, the notion of respect, it is because the fullest sense of ‘respect’ has yet to be accorded to most women. In a world where contraceptive rights and reproductive choice are not guaranteed to the vast majority of women, in both industrialised nations under siege from the ‘religious Right’ and in non-industrialised ones acting in the name of a menacing ‘population bomb’, we cannot say that women are recognised as moral agents capable of making decisions that concern them directly. Moreover, the vast majority of women, even in the ‘sexually liberated’ Euro-American world, still lack the confidence that their appearance, demeanour and nocturnal movements will not be mistaken for a sexual invitation (or vice versa) and that their ‘no’ will be understood as ‘no’. Similarly, as long as the value of typically female work (including maternal labour) remains largely invisible and women’s everyday efforts to juggle work and family (with or without the help of a partner; with or without the assistance of the welfare state) are banalised, women cannot claim to be recognised as subjects of action. Any effort to change this ‘oppressed state’ (LSDN 269; 325) by calling attention to it must contend, in our days as in Wollstonecraft’s, with the very difficulty of developing an aesthetics of solidarity that refuses to position women in distress as objects of ‘pity, bordering on contempt’ (VRW 147). We can only hope – but alas not necessarily assume – that engaged local feminist historiographies may one day change this. * Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy is organised as follows. I begin in ‘“An Eve to Please Me”: Mary Wollstonecraft and the

12 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy

“Public Woman”’ by examining the feminist’s dissatisfaction with representations of Eve – especially as they appear in John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Henry Fuseli’s projects to illustrate it. Identifying Catherine Macaulay as an important predecessor, this first chapter also sets out what is involved in redefining the ‘public woman’ and explores this in relation to Wollstonecraft’s discussion of domesticity and maternity. Turning to her troubled and life-long relationship with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the second chapter examines the difficult relationship between women and knowledge. It locates in her definition of the ‘comprehensively considered’ virtue of ‘modesty’ a conceptual framework for the independent relation to knowledge that she articulates and also explores the sources of her thought on this virtue in the works of Richard Price. Prolonging the discussion of women’s relationship to knowledge and self-knowledge, ‘Making Novel Creatures’ turns to Wollstonecraft’s reflections on the emerging literary genre. It examines her comments on narrative forms – factual histories, novels and romances – to determine why she objects so vociferously to novels and romances. It asks whether she recognises any political potential in narrative representation. The answer is developed by exploring her comments on the literary genre in relation to her interventions on eighteenth-century debates on the formation of the self, especially where the gendered self is concerned. Particularly illuminating here is her contention with Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment, which distinguishes between the unmediated identification of women and the more impartial distance required for male philosophers and legislators. ‘Wants of Woman’ pursues the discussion on Wollstonecraft’s aesthetic revisions. Articulating her Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark in relation to her earlier works, it assesses her attempt to reconfigure the conventional eighteenthcentury scenes of distress and to develop an aesthetics of solidarity. The aesthetic revolutions and reforms Wollstonecraft develops in her largely underrated masterpiece are, in other words, directly related to her political philosophy and her commitment to change the ‘oppressed state of my sex’ (LSDN 269; 325).

1 ‘An Eve to Please Me’: Mary Wollstonecraft and the ‘Public Woman’

‘An Eve to please me’ In a letter to William Roscoe dated 3 January 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft notes that she is finalising her Vindication of the Rights of Woman and that the painter Henry Fuseli has begun to work on illustrations for an edition of John Milton’s works: Our friend Fuseli is going on with more than usual spirit – like Milton he seems quite at home in hell – his Devil will be the hero of the poetic series; for, entre nous, I rather doubt whether he will produce an Eve to please me in any of the situations, which he has selected, unless it be after the fall. When I am in a better humour I will give you an account of those already sketched – but had you not better come and see them? – We have all an individual way of feeling grandeur and sublimity. (MWL 206) As a member of the rather exclusive circle of radical poets, painters and politicians who met at the publisher Joseph Johnson’s house, Wollstonecraft had been involved from its inception in the never-completed edition of John Milton’s works commissioned by Johnson, to be edited by William Cowper and illustrated by Fuseli. Her letters to other parties, and in particular to Roscoe, a Liverpool poet, historian and painter, suggest that she tried to obtain subscriptions for it. She was inspired and influenced by the discussions on the aesthetic, political and philosophical issues of the work. As this citation suggests, although clearly interested in both readings of the founding story and theories of aesthetic representation and reception, Wollstonecraft does not always agree with the way they are laid out, especially where 13

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women are concerned. Although she recognises why Milton’s satanic tempter may be qualified as heroic and sublime, she nevertheless wants to reformulate the account so that these virtuous sentiments can be located in the efforts of postlapsarian humanity and specifically Eve. Wollstonecraft also comments on the unlikelihood of her being ‘please[d]’ by Fuseli’s Eves and in so doing offers a stinging criticism of the painter’s avowed intentions. Some months later in May 1792, Fuseli wrote to the same Roscoe, ‘Eve [Starting from her reflected Image in the Water] is, I flatter myself, as likely to please as I hope the other [Satan Sin and Death] will Surprise.’1 He contrasts the two sketches by referring to the very different responses they will elicit in the spectator: the very gentle or amiable sentiments and the more awful and respectful ones. In this distinction, Fuseli articulates what Edmund Burke analyses in his more famous reflections on the difference between the beautiful and the sublime (vide A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful [1757]), and he maintains Burke’s inherent gender categories.2 The beautiful, female Eve can produce only tender and pleasurable sensations.3 By noting that this Eve does not ‘please’ her, Wollstonecraft challenges the dichotomy. In her letter to Roscoe, Wollstonecraft does not explicitly express this specific meaning of ‘please’. She signals instead her disapproval and dissatisfaction with the way in which the artist has decided to represent Eve, referring to both the Eve he produces and the situations in which she is portrayed, to both the roles she is given and the way in which she plays her role. Clearly, with the exception of postlapsarian Eve, the staging and casting of the Miltonic epic deny the ‘first mother’ the possibility of becoming a sublime subject, one who invites the astonishment, admiration and respect of her spectators. If Wollstonecraft takes to heart these limitations in Fuseli’s Eve as she finalises her own Vindication of the Rights of Woman, it is because she recognises how crucial representations of women are in making them. As in her comments to Roscoe, she knows that both tales and their telling produce women as they now are. Centuries of women were denied a decent life on earth as well as the promise of future redemption because of Eve’s purported role in paradise. Or so Wollstonecraft believes is the case with ‘Moses’s poetical story’, the Book of Genesis, which has given rise to the ‘prevailing opinion that woman was created for man’ (95). Calling attention here to the use of figures in the Old Testament book, Wollstonecraft nevertheless notes that few accept that ‘Eve was, literally speaking, one of Adam’s ribs’. Instead of arriving at the same ‘prevailing opinion’, she proceeds to

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affirm her own, namely that the story only ‘proves that man, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion, and his invention to shew that she ought to have her neck bent under the yoke’. In these comments, Wollstonecraft echoes the concerns of other members of the Joseph Johnson circle, interested in questioning the historical status of the Bible and especially the way these ‘poetical stories’ and their interpretations serve the interest of the priestcraft who strive to control the rest of humanity.4 Arguing by analogy, Wollstonecraft implies that men have used the Bible to force women to accept the inferior position of household servant and drudge. Likewise, the story of Eve the seductive temptress is used to justify women’s subservience to male authority in secular and civil matters. Wollstonecraft demonstrates how with his Paradise Lost and his portrait of Eve as a ‘fair defect’ (114, citing Paradise Lost 10: 891–2),5 Milton becomes one of these ‘inventive’ men who attempt ‘to justify the ways of Providence respecting [women]’. Indeed, by citing the epic poet (VRW 114; vide PL 1: 25–6), Wollstonecraft implicitly addresses him and demonstrates how his tales (like Fuseli’s pictures) are not simply strategic lies. More seriously, they reinscribe women as inherently cunning if beautiful creatures and deny them the possibility of becoming anything else. In her work, Wollstonecraft undertakes a very different reading of the founding myth, one that assures women more agency than the ever-pleasing, if enslaved Eves of Moses, Milton and Fuseli. In challenging the tale’s inscription in gendered aesthetic categories, however, she also articulates a very different theory of representation and reception. Consider the following footnote in which Wollstonecraft again turns to issues of the sublime and the beautiful as they appear in representations of Milton’s poetic series: Similar feelings has Milton’s pleasing picture of paradisiacal happiness ever raised in my mind; yet instead of envying the lovely pair, I have with conscious dignity or satanic pride turned to hell for sublimer objects. In the same style, when viewing some noble monument of human art, I have traced the emanation of the Deity in the order I admired, till descending from that giddy height, I have caught myself contemplating the grandest of all human sights; for fancy quickly placed in some solitary recess an outcast of fortune, rising superior to passion and discontent. (VRW 94 n. 2) Numerous critics have argued from this passage that Wollstonecraft, like many of her fellow proto-Romantics, remains more interested in

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the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost than in Adam and Eve.6 Steven Blakemore, for instance, traces the origins and evolution of her ambiguous relation with Milton to her private correspondence and argues that Wollstonecraft produces a ‘satanic’ reading of the canonical patriarchal text. In a letter to her sister Everina, she compares her friends, the Reverend Henry Dyson Gabell and his wife Ann, to Milton’s ‘first pair’ (MWL 192). And yet, three weeks later, she comments that she feels that Adam and Eve were her inferiors because they ‘could find happiness in a world like this’ (MWL 195). For Blakemore, these comments imply that Wollstonecraft deploys intentional satanic echoes by asserting her superiority to Adam and Eve and her friends and by expressing the characteristics of pride and ambition. Just as Satan tempts Adam and Eve by suggesting that God deliberately denies them access to the tree of knowledge to keep them in their inferior place, in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft tempts women by insinuating that patriarchal conduct book writers deny women knowledge. Blakemore’s analysis, however, does not take sufficient account of Wollstonecraft’s reticence on how Milton and Fuseli make the ‘Devil … the hero of the poetic series’ (MWL 206). She reiterates in the footnote the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime implied in her letter to Roscoe, and, as Blakemore insists, turns her eyes away from the ‘pleasing picture of paradisiacal happiness’ and towards the ‘sublimer objects’ in hell. The question remains whether it is Satan’s rebellion that incites her respect and admiration or rather, as I would like to suggest, the struggles of postlapsarian humanity. For, in fact, she contemplates ‘the grandest of human sights’ (emphasis added). Her descent from ‘giddy heights’ marks, in this sense, less a descent into hell and more one into the struggles and conflicts of human experiences in the world after the fall from grace. Unlike Milton’s Satan, her ‘outcast of fortune’ ultimately rises above its passions and discontents. With her characteristic boldness, Wollstonecraft asserts her ‘conscious dignity’ (emphasis added), even as she recognises that some might call this assertion ‘satanic pride’. She thereby emphasises the self-awareness and self-knowledge that must determine all postlapsarian actions. Unlike the prelapsarian first pair, postlapsarian humanity has knowledge of good and evil. Unlike Satan, it is aware of its potential for salvation and of the ‘heavenly spark’ (LI 419) it bears. Although the postlapsarian acquisition of virtue remains uncertain, this very incertitude and the struggle the attempt entails become the measure of sublime humanity and the respect it invites.

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The refusal to punish Adam’s and Eve’s posterity for their transgressions deviates from Christian orthodoxy of both the hegemonic Church of England and many dissenting sects. It is nevertheless the perspective espoused by a number of Enlightenment philosophers in their debate on the origins, nature and purpose of evil on earth.7 Wollstonecraft’s friend, the mathematician, moral philosopher and dissenting minister Richard Price, for instance, also affirms humanity’s conscious dignity. He sees in the fall of man the promise of redemption through the exercise of conscience and the acquisition of virtue. He reiterates a position already present in Milton. In his ‘Areopagitica’, the poet had affirmed that ‘when God gave [Adam] reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing’8 and subsequently, in Paradise Lost, God assures Adam’s moral agency by making him ‘just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall …’ (2: 95–9). Focusing less on Adam than on his posterity, Price argues that mankind has been given the same moral capacity to rise again through earthly existence after the fall. This capacity includes, as with Milton’s Adam, rational faculties, desire for a virtuous existence and most importantly the absolute liberty in which to exercise this potential. Just as Milton contends that without freedom to choose Adam would be but ‘an Adam as he is in the motions’,9 Price asserts that without ‘scope for action the whole rational universe would be a system of conscious machinery, void of value and dignity’.10 In turn, Wollstonecraft wants to ensure the same ‘conscious dignity’, freedom and moral agency for the Eves who inhabit the world after the fall of the Bastille. In the new political order, unconscious innocence should make way for active virtue. In the process, access to knowledge becomes a pivotal factor. Echoing Price, she insists that women ‘know why [they] ought to be virtuous’ and that they ‘comprehend [their] duty’ (VRW 66; emphasis added). ‘Areopagitica’ makes no mention of women readers and in Milton’s epic poem, knowledge – and hence freedom and dignity – is denied to women.11 Eve does not stay to listen to the words of Rafael: Yet went she not, as not with such discourse Delighted, or not capable her ear Of what was high: such pleasure she reserv’d, Adam relating, she sole auditress; Her Husband the relater she preferr’d Before the angel … (PL 8: 48–54)

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Although God proclaims that both ‘he and his faithless progeny’ (3: 96) will fall, the fault seems to be ‘but his own’ (3: 98; emphasis added). Characterised as Adam’s progeny, Eve is denied any responsibility for her action. She is faithless, whereas Adam, made ‘just and right’, becomes ungrateful, turning his back on good. Not surprising, then, that recognising the role of the eternal child in which Milton’s Eve is cast, Wollstonecraft responds in her Vindication. To Eve’s lines ‘God is thy law, thou mine’ (PL 4: 637), she answers, ‘These are exactly the arguments that I have used to children, but I have added … till it [your reason] arrives at some degree of maturity, you must look up to me for advice – then you ought to think, and only rely on God’ (89; italics in the original; underlining added). (That Wollstonecraft has been developing this critical distance from Milton, perhaps as a result of discussions in the Joseph Johnson circle mentioned above, may be noted by contrasting her perspective here with the fact that she had included, without any critical comment, these very lines from Paradise Lost in her 1789 Female Reader [262–4].) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman develops this pedagogy with respect to girls and puts in place Wollstonecraft’s most cherished desire to teach them to think for themselves. Her belief in women’s rationality is obviously part of this development; so obvious perhaps that Wollstonecraft does not bother to prove it. ‘Who made man the exclusive judge, if women partake with him the gift of reason?’ (67), she asks Talleyrand, the French minister to whom she dedicates her work. She frames her question so that women’s equal claim to reason is its logical presupposition and not the hypothesis it sets out to defend. Her quarrel with the French politician – as with the other men she takes to task – is not whether women are rational, but rather why this rationality is not allowed to flourish and grow. Herein lies her displeasure with the Eves of Milton and Fuseli (and, I might add, of Moses): they are denied the freedom of becoming virtuous through the exercise of reason in favour of being innocent and pleasing, but ultimately faithless and disorderly. Herein also lies Wollstonecraft’s disapproval of some ‘women of superior sense’ (VRW 122). Although these female moralists recognise women’s inherent rationality and dignity, they nevertheless curtail her potential. Although they argue for women’s rational education, by subjecting a wife to the authority of her husband, ultimately they make her into an object for his pleasure. Consider Wollstonecraft’s remarks on two poems by the female dissenter and poet, Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Of the first, ‘To Mrs. P[riestley]’, Wollstonecraft quotes,

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‘Pleasure’s the portion of th’inferior kind / glory, virtue, Heaven for man design’d’ (VRW 123 n.: the emphasis is Wollstonecraft’s). In this poem, Barbauld contrasts birds (the inferior kind) to humanity (man). Given the fact that the verses are addressed to Mrs Priestley, man implies mankind and the acquisition of earthly and celestial glory is extended to women. The female addressee of the poem is thus cast as a heroic subject who, in striving to become virtuous, rises ‘superior to passion and discontent’ (94 n. 2). Which is why Wollstonecraft cannot explain the ‘ignoble comparison’ between women and flowers in the second poem cited, ‘To a Lady, with some painted flowers’. Referring to ‘Eden’s pure and guiltless garden’ and probably to the famous scene in Paradise Lost where Eve names the flowers, Barbauld compares the addressee of this poem to the sweetness, gaiety and delicacy of flowers (123 n.). Unlike the oak and the pine who have to work, her interlocutor is like the flower which ‘to cares unknown / Were born for pleasure and delight ALONE’; her ‘SWEETEST empire is – PLEASE’. Wollstonecraft comments on these final lines: ‘virtue … must be acquired by rough toils, and useful struggles with worldly cares’ (123 n.; emphasis in the original). Here Wollstonecraft extends her admiration for the effort required by the ‘outcast of fortune’ to a specifically female subject. Because the innocence that qualifies the flower-lady in Barbauld’s poem is ascribed, it cannot win praise and respect. Instead of valorising their ‘natural’ innocence, women, like Milton’s Adam and Price’s penitent sinner, must use their innate reason and exercise their will in total liberty. In the process, they will certainly incur more risks. Yet, only as such can they acquire virtue not maintain innocence; only as such will they invite respect for achievements, not pity for their abject – if beautiful – state. Wollstonecraft thus rejects a ‘fugitive and cloister’d vertue … [that] slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat’, as Milton himself had, for one which is ‘purifie[d] … [by] triall, and triall is by what is contrary’.12 In rewriting the founding myth, then, Wollstonecraft attempts to recast women in a more heroic role by shifting attention from Satan to the earthly struggles of Adam and Eve who, through their effort to regain what once was lost, become not only virtuous but also sublime. Already in her 1787 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, she had objected to the oft-repeated dictums of taste regarding Milton. ‘I am sick of hearing,’ she protested, ‘of the sublimity of Milton’ (21) and urged her readers not only to develop their own opinion of canonical authors including Milton, Shakespeare and Pope, but also to identify another kind of sublime. Wollstonecraft is nevertheless not the only

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person in the eighteenth-century debates on Paradise Lost to object to Satan and the sublime being equated.13 So too, for instance, does Hugh Blair. Wollstonecraft’s admiration for the struggles of ‘an outcast of fortune, rising superior to passion and discontent’ echoes his definition of the ‘moral, or sentimental Sublime’. ‘Wherever, in some critical and high situation,’ he writes, ‘we behold a man uncommonly intrepid, and resting upon himself, superior to passion and to fear; animated by some great principle to the contempt of popular opinion, of selfish interest, of dangers or of death; there we are struck with a sense of the Sublime.’14 He suggests that the ‘common language’ for these acts are magnanimity and heroism. Clearly, however, the only heroic acts that produce this effect are those affiliated with warriors and men of state: among the examples he cites are the Horatii, Caesar and Porus. Wollstonecraft, however, situates the ‘critical and high situation’ in apparently ‘cloistered’ domestic relations. In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the footnote I have been discussing compares Milton’s vision of domestic bliss in prelapsarian paradise with the ‘moderate felicity [that] excited more tenderness than respect’ (94) that Rousseau reserves for women cloistered at home. Moreover, as Blakemore indicates, it is seeing the interaction between her friends, the Gabells, which allows her to articulate her hesitation respecting Milton’s ‘pleasing picture’. In her letters she compares Milton’s ‘first pair’ with her friends. Neither couple engages in ‘frequent bodily display’ of their fondness. Instead they lavish ‘pure caresses’ and find ‘most pleasure in each other’s society’ (MWL 192; emphasis in the original). Despite the ‘purity’ of their affection, both couples are content with things as they are: Wollstonecraft wonders how Adam and Eve were able to ‘find happiness in a world like this’ (195) and complains that the Gabells ‘seem … just to have sufficient refinement to make them happy without ever straying so far from common life …’ (192). They are complacent, and do not strive to surpass themselves as the feminist philosopher believes humanity should. She is also particularly disparaging of the model of femininity Mrs Gabell and Milton’s Eve represent. In the same letter, Wollstonecraft explains that despite Mrs Gabell’s ‘rectitude of mind and common sense’, she never looks ‘beyond her family and never enters in the labyrinth of sentiment and taste’. In short, she ‘has tenderness without sensibility – clearness of judgement without comprehension of thought’ (192). With respect to both her sentiment and her intellect, then, Mrs Gabell seems to be like ‘good sort of people [who] deserves neither praise nor censure’ (AR 191; emphasis in the original). She may be content,

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but she will never attain the sublime happiness that can come only through dust and heat, trial and tribulation, labour and care. Her intellectual and affective goodness, like Barbauld’s flower woman, is a passive form, to be found in being innocent and pleasing, not in becoming virtuous and heroic. After all, the conditions that would allow her to become virtuous are not met, limited as Mrs Gabell is to a domestic life. For, as moral philosophers as divergent as Richard Price and Adam Smith argue, it is ‘natural’ and ‘instinctive’ for a wife and mother to love the close and immediate social circle that her family is. Hence conjugal love and parental sacrifice imply neither a rationalised desire to do good, nor a substantial effort to restrain private interest for the common good. If, as Blair argues, the sublime entails acting regardless ‘of popular opinion, of selfish interest, of dangers or of death’ then surely there is nothing sublime in acting in accordance with either conventional wifely duty or natural maternal instinct. Consequently, much less moral value is attached to this ‘instinctive goodness’,15 resulting in the almost universal fact that women’s domestic attachments and commitments do not invite the same esteem and respect as a man’s conscious exertion of his moral duty. Thus, the limited ‘domestic felicity’ that Mrs Gabell experiences not only affects her; it also substantially restrains her spectator’s sentiments. Because her untested goodness does not automatically invite admiration, viewing her cannot produce the desired feelings of ‘grandeur and sublimity’ (MWL 206). As Blakemore argues, in her comments on ‘paradisiacal happiness’ Wollstonecraft may be comparing the middle-class wifely duty and responsibility that Milton represents in his Paradise Lost to the relation between her friends. Yet surprisingly, her description of the Gabells is almost identical to that of her account of Lady Kingsborough, the aristocratic woman of fashion who employed her as a governess and who is also qualified as ‘devoid of sensibility’ (MWL 151). As has frequently been suggested, that lady Kingsborough preferred her puppies to her children inspired many of Wollstonecraft’s disparaging comments and examples in her subsequent Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Although Lady Kingsborough epitomises a very different ideology of womanhood from that of Mrs Gabell, one that renders a woman an object of display and conspicuous consumption, she hardly represents a more appealing alternative. The aristocratic lady is too intent on appearances and fashion and the middle-class clergyman’s wife too devoted to her husband and family to cultivate any ‘real’ sensibility. Lady Kingsborough desires a ‘harmless’ (146) show of passions,

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whereas Mrs Gabell settles for mere tenderness and domestic happiness. Thus, neither the aristocratic model of display (typified more famously by the Marie Antoinette of Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution) nor middle-class frugality and prudence (embodied by Milton’s Eve) has rendered women into beings who deserve praise, esteem and respect. Neither kind of woman rises above her passions, discontent and limited condition in life. Instead of running the ‘race where that immortall garland is to be run for’16 and experiencing the trials of postlapsarian life, thereby truly exercising the moral capacity to achieve sublime happiness and unlimited esteem, these aristocratic and middle-class women remain – like the prelapsarian Marie Antoinette and Eve – content with the beautiful order their lives assure. It is, of course, easier to see Wollstonecraft’s objections to the aristocratic model of womanhood, particularly because she does not entirely shy away from envisaging women in middle-class domestic relations as Mrs Gabell-like mothers and wives. She nevertheless wants to ensure that these virtuous middling women truly merit the epithet by exercising their conscience, and not by adhering to codes of manners and propriety. Because moral judgement can be exercised only through experience, she wants to widen the possibilities of female experience. Not satisfied with merely ‘pleasing’ images of domesticity, Wollstonecraft wants to ensure that the ‘useful struggles of passion, the triumphs of good dispositions, and the heroic flights which carry the glowing soul out of itself’ (94) that Rousseau claims for men are extended to women, including those who remain in purely domestic contexts. Women must be able to feel, as she writes in her letter to Roscoe, ‘grandeur and sublimity’ (MWL 205), just as they must be able to produce these feelings amongst their fellow citizens. Of course, in the letter, Wollstonecraft refers not to ‘real-life’ experiences and feelings, but to representations and accounts of them. Yet, the distinction is not as clear in the eighteenth century as it may seem to be today. She evokes the sensory and ‘sensational’ experience a spectacle produces in the spectator. As such, she reiterates a belief that through the process of ‘sympathetic projection’, the vision or audition of a virtuous act may generate and produce virtuous beings. By staging and relating such acts, literature and the arts play their role in making civil creatures. If, then, Wollstonecraft expresses the displeasure she feels in seeing Fuseli’s Eves and seeks to render them more sublime and heroic, it is surely so that, in turn, women may feel grandeur and sublimity. Eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, as Fuseli, Burke, Barbauld (in at least one of the two poems) and Blair all suggest, has no place for

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sublime women, confined as they are to their private view and to their personal domestic cares. Women’s pleasing beauty assures instead, as Wollstonecraft’s comments on paradisiacal happiness suggest, the ‘order’ against which the sublime hero can measure his more chaotic struggles.17 Beauty does not, however, allow women to become equally heroic through their personal triumphs over distress and suffering. The suffering and self-sacrificing mother or the innocent maid resisting the onslaught of her ravisher may be ‘outcast[s] of fortune, rising superior to passion and discontent’ (94 n. 2). Yet, as Wollstonecraft’s numerous reviews of novels I will discuss in ‘Making Novel Creatures’ imply, they do so more often than not in a sentimental mode which evokes tenderness and pity, not the respect and admiration elicited by sublime spectacles. In holding out for a more sublimely pleasing Eve, Wollstonecraft attempts in part to refigure these accounts of female heroism.18 Herein lies perhaps the possibilities she identifies in Fuseli’s depiction of Eve ‘after the fall’. It is, indeed, not the story of Eve’s fall, but rather the account of her ‘rough toils and useful struggles with worldly cares’ (123 n. 5; emphasis in the original) after the fall that Wollstonecraft seeks to tell. This tale of a woman’s exemplary response will certainly serve as a model for other women. More significantly, in allowing women to feel ‘grandeur and sublimity’ (MWL 206), it will propel them out of their confined view and particular cares. As noted above, Wollstonecraft refers in her letter to Roscoe to her displeasure with both Fuseli’s Eves and her own Vindication of the Rights of Woman, although clearly not for the same reason. ‘I am dissatisfied with myself for not having done justice to the subject,’ she explains, ‘– Do not suspect me of false modesty – I mean to say, that had I allowed myself more time I could have written a better book, in every sense of the word …’ (MWL 205). Like Fuseli, she has failed to produce an entirely satisfactory account. Unlike him, however, she has not remained within the limitations of an already determined representation of women, trying instead to rise above it. He is contented with the ‘pleasing’ picture he has produced; she continues to express the need for further time and more effort. In contrasting herself with the painter, isn’t Wollstonecraft presenting her attempt to do ‘justice to the subject’ (emphasis added) in the terms of a heroic and sublime effort, thereby offering herself as an exemplary model? Earlier she promised Roscoe a sketch of ‘the book that I am now writing, in which I myself, for I cannot yet attain to Homer’s dignity, shall certainly appear, head and heart’ (MWL 203; emphasis in the original). Wollstonecraft certainly ‘appears’ in the book in the impassioned pleas to improve

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women’s education, to change the ‘laws relative to women’ (VRW 70) and to end the assumptions that justify the continued oppression of women. She also appears in the different persona she dons in the course of the work, including the patriotic republican, the experienced governess, the philosopher and the woman speaking to her sisters. Here, in respect to the heroic presentation I am attempting to identify, I would like to consider the opening lines of her dedication to Talleyrand. ‘For, my arguments, Sir,’ writes Wollstonecraft, ‘are dictated by a disinterested spirit – I plead for my sex – not for myself’ (65; emphasis added). By forsaking her private interest for the public one, by abandoning her particular cause for the universal good, she gives herself a heroic presentation. As such she makes her claim to patriotism on a very different basis from that implied in other paragraphs of this dedication, where she suggests that the patriotic role of women is to be found in their maternal and domestic duties. She positions herself as a ‘public woman’, rising above the common condition of her sex. Her action ‘in contempt of popular opinion [and] of selfish interest’, to quote Blair again, should therefore produce a sense of the sublime in her readers. Her gesture may be derisive of the fate of common woman. Yet, if I want to take her claim that we ‘have all an individual way of feeling grandeur and sublimity’ (MWL 206) seriously, then surely Wollstonecraft wants her women readers to feel the grandeur and sublimity of her status as a public woman. By presenting herself as such a woman, she is also opening the way for others. ‘Pleasing’ herself – as she suggests to Roscoe that Fuseli will certainly not – becomes, in other words, the means to educate new public-spirited Eves for the world after the fall.

‘Invidious censures … will not keep me mute in the cause of Liberty and Virtue’: Catherine Macaulay and the ‘public woman’ I have been suggesting that Wollstonecraft’s objections to Fuseli’s Eves reflect her very different understanding of humanity’s and specially women’s postlapsarian existence and her desire to recognise their heroic attempt to rise after abjection. Her rewriting of the founding story thereby reflects on the relation between women and knowledge as well as on the equally important question of the public representation of women. Moreover, by suggesting that Eve’s struggles after the

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fall are not only a worthy but also an imperative aesthetic subject, the feminist challenges received wisdom about the female aesthetic subject. She rearticulates Eve’s position in the public spectacle, transforming a beautiful object into a heroic and sublime subject, rendering passive innocence that invites pity and tenderness into active virtue that elicits admiration and respect. Eve is, of course, only one of the many cultural and discursive figures crucial to the female culture of the eighteenth century that Wollstonecraft refashions in her work. If, as Joseph Wittreich has suggested, Milton’s Paradise Lost was regarded ‘as a woman’s text – not just one through which women could challenge the cherished beliefs of men but one through which Milton himself had challenged those beliefs by fashioning a new female ideal’,19 the same can and indeed has also been said about Samuel Richardson and his Clarissa; Rousseau and both his Héloïse and his Sophie, and perhaps even Burke and his Marie Antoinette (although, in the last case, the appeal to women readers is certainly not equally present). As I shall argue, in the course of her literary and philosophical career, Wollstonecraft appropriates these figures, trying to give them a radically new expression. More often than not, ‘Mary’ becomes the way to refuse these paradoxical, often debilitating male fictions of women and to invent in their place an entirely new woman.20 The transformation of the canonical Eve and the debate in which it is inscribed is thus paradigmatic of Wollstonecraft’s more extensive attempt to give a new representation to women and hence of the ‘public woman’ she vindicates. In the following chapters I will return to the issues mentioned here, examining in greater detail the gender implications of the crucial interrelation between moral categories (innocence and virtue) and their aesthetic (beautiful and sublime) and sentimental (tenderness and respect) counterparts. At this point, however, I would like to pause to explain what I mean by ‘public woman’. Modern readers, interested in current debates on the division between the private and the public spheres, immediately recognise the stakes involved in ‘confining’ women to their domestic roles. Denied ‘civil and political rights’, they remain, as Wollstonecraft tells us, ‘immured in their families groping in the dark …’ (VRW 67). Under the protection and authority of their husbands, brothers and fathers, women are denied any voice in changing the misery and subservient conditions of this sphere. They have no place to appeal against the ‘domestic tyranny and despotism’, as Wollstonecraft herself knew only too well. Which is perhaps why so

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many contemporary feminists remain sceptical of the eighteenthcentury feminist’s valorisation of a domestic ideal. ‘I have repeatedly asserted,’ Wollstonecraft writes in her dedication to Talleyrand, ‘that women cannot, by force, be confined to domestic concerns; for they will, however ignorant, intermeddle with more weighty affairs, neglecting private duties only to disturb by cunning tricks, the orderly plans of reason which rise above their comprehension’ (VRW 68). Here Wollstonecraft accepts women’s domestic role, even as she objects to their forced confinement. She nevertheless wants them to choose this imposition rationally. Failure to reason will have negative consequences on women themselves and society more generally. For women who are denied an education and an active role in the moral and civil interest of mankind on the grounds of their supposedly inherent cunning nature will become more cunning still in their attempts to redeem their denied personal authority and dignity. Recognising their inherent rationality and encouraging their comprehension of the civil and moral obligations, on the other hand, will produce very different women, ‘more … attached to their duty’ (67) and more willing to ‘cooperate’ (66) with their roles as patriotic mothers. As recent commentary has repeatedly argued, Wollstonecraft’s argument in favour of extending national education to women thus seems to depend on a rather contradictory movement. She does not seem to challenge the role proscribed to women by the republican government. She insists on their status as mothers and argues in favour of a more extensive education so that they can be better mothers, and indeed so that they can choose to be so. An education that respects their rationality will ensure only that current proscriptions are better enforced. ‘Even as she resists the most inegalitarian implications of republican doctrine,’ writes Joan Landes, speaking to this very issue, ‘her own rhetoric implies that the home and women’s role within it can be given a civic purpose; and consequently, that women may come to be satisfied with a domestic rather than public experience.’21 Although Landes recognises Wollstonecraft’s challenge, she nevertheless remains more interested in the far less obvious continuity between Rousseau and Wollstonecraft. Both eighteenth-century writers are suspicious of sensibility and excessive femininity and ambivalent towards women’s use of language and rhetorical artifice.22 Landes thereby suggests that the feminist philosopher does not question the central presumption of her age, namely the very different natures of men and women, but looks instead to republican reform as the means

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of making this sexual difference accord with socially articulated virtues. Hence Wollstonecraft’s telling emphasis on such traditional ‘female virtues’ as chastity and modesty. Landes does not see in this emphasis an end to female sexual pleasure, but rather an attempt to channel it towards domestic bliss. Through marriage and maternity, women’s excessive femininity, a product of cultural refinement, is forestalled and their biological nature elevated to a social virtue that contributes to the glory of the republic. According to Landes, Wollstonecraft’s valorisation of motherhood does not, however, take women directly into the public sphere. Their presence remains mediated through their relation with patriotic sons and husbands. Landes’s argument remains contingent on a far too facile equation between ‘private virtues’ and the ‘private’ (read domestic and feminine) sphere.23 She thereby ignores the process that recent historians have referred to as the ‘privatisation of virtue’, whereby private virtues such as frugality and chastity become increasingly as important expressions of civic consciousness as ‘public spirit’.24 This process is articulated in relation to the changing discourse of civic humanism. Indeed, today we are less likely to recognise in the expression ‘public women’ a reference to classical theories of republican government and the particular inflections they receive in their importation and adaptation into British social, political and cultural life. Republican theory, J.G.A. Pocock tells us, is articulated primarily through two discourses: a juridical one based on notions of rights and a humanist one defined in relation to man’s natural essence.25 The former recognises that all citizens do not have the same rights: the right to rule, for instance, is invested in the sovereign alone. Civic humanism, on the other hand, argues that man’s natural essence can be actualised only in a republic of equals, even as it recognises the fragility of this political form. Thus, if the juridical discourse of republicanism articulates citizenship around fundamental questions concerning the different rights of the sovereign and the subject respectively (what does the former owe the latter? how to limit and curtail these rights?), citizenship as defined by civic humanist discourse affirms equality, defined by ‘virtue’, a divine essence or attribute implanted in each member of the republic. Yet, this original and primary equality is no more guaranteed in this discourse than it is in its juridical counterpart. First, certain conditions that curtail the citizen-subject’s independence through political or economic patronage also prevent the full realisation of his virtue. Second, not all citizens realise their potential equally. The externalised manifestation of

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this inner quality rapidly becomes a means of distinguishing between different ‘equal’ citizens. Because man in a republic is defined by his membership and presence in the civitas or polis, the most important virtues are public, to the detriment of the private ones valorised in the civitas dei. Modesty and chastity, for instance, are less important measures of virtuous citizenship than public spirit. The latter entails far more than the integrity required of a magistrate, the Roman publicus, which, as John Barrell reminds us, is the etymological source of ‘public man’.26 Although a show of ‘public spirit’ is certainly a requirement for public office, the willingness to serve the common good above and beyond any personal interest is certainly not limited to those who officially exercise power and authority. A precondition of the possibility of expressing this disinterested spirit is nevertheless ‘independent life’. In its origins, civic humanism recognises two qualities that guarantee this independence: the right to carry arms and the ownership of property in land. By giving the citizen defensive arms, the former forestalls dependence on the protection, power and might of others. Real property, on the other hand, ensures economic independence, preventing an excessive reliance on patronage or credit. Because it is not contingent on either the vagaries of trade and commerce or on the power of the court, it guarantees autonomy. Thus, although others (namely those whose dependence renders them unfit for citizenship) rely on money or patronage, landed aristocrats can stand alone.27 In the course of the eighteenth century, changes in economic organisation produce a new ruling elite, whose status is contingent on the mutually interdependent exchanges articulated around a monied economy. New modes of production whose greater division of labour necessitates greater regional interdependence; increasing commercialisation of society resulting in relations based on exchange; and more interdependence between government and citizens due to public debt all contribute to diminishing the economic, political and military autonomy of citizens who wish to affirm their independence and disinterested virtue. Another discourse more in tune with the demands and needs of the times develops. It argues less for internalised virtue and more for the externalised polish of manners and taste. Private virtues such as civility, politeness and manners become increasingly important expressions of these new civic subjects. ‘Addison, Steele, and the third Earl of Shaftesbury …’ Lawrence Klein argues, ‘were all Whigs whose efforts on behalf of the post-1688 regime involved redefining the public and private manifestations of virtue in many ways, appropriate

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to the complexities of eighteenth-century commercial society and remote from earlier religious and civic versions of the concept.’28 The virtuous citizen is no longer the rugged and stoic character who stands alone, unfettered and undaunted. Significantly, women play a key role in providing this external polish through the art of conversation and civility.29 Before turning to the more pressing question of who or what is the ‘public woman’ in the discourse of civic humanism, it is nevertheless important to note that this new form of civic virtue coexisted with another, grafted on to the earlier one. Oppositional groups, most notably the Tory Country Party, the Old Whigs and the eighteenthcentury Commonwealth men, all argue against the corrupting influence of commerce and economic exchange, which they claim results in the ‘slavish dependence’ of the present political and economic regime. They reject this new ‘effeminate’ culture of manners, politeness and civility. Instead, they express nostalgia for an agrarian past of arms-bearing, independent, freeholding proprietors, organised either under the leadership of a ‘patriot king’ and a benevolent landed aristocracy (as in the Tory Country Party) or in a republican commonwealth governed by balanced institutions (as in the Old Whigs).30 Their absence or retreat from public life of the court and city, corrupted by patronage and monied interest, enhances a disinterested and virtuous ‘public spirit’. What possibilities exist, then, for women in the discourse of civic humanism? I might begin by noting that in its origins the inner essence of the citizen, or its virtue, is a resolutely masculine quality. This is less the case because of its etymological origins in the Latin ‘vir’ (man) than because of the defining characteristics of the independent citizen. Consider, first, the crucial importance of carrying arms. The distinctly martial virtues disqualify women from active citizenship: because women must depend on the power and force of others for protection they can never be truly independent. Nor were women, strictly speaking, heritable owners of real property, even if legal mechanisms may have existed to guarantee some rights.31 In her utopia, inspired by the earlier writings of James Harrington, the ‘female patriot’ and Old Whig historian Catherine Macaulay explicitly excludes women from the right to inherit property, thereby considerably diminishing the few rights they do have.32 In so doing, Macaulay is clearly motivated by the desire to ‘prevent aristocratical accumulation of property’33 which may ultimately curtail the development of a republican community of equal and independent citizens. As historians have suggested,

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Macaulay’s proposal for ‘agrarian laws’ may well imply a more egalitarian vision of society.34 It is nevertheless telling that women are not included as part of this vision. (I might add in Macaulay’s favour, however, that she insists that provisions be made for widows, unmarried daughters and for the education of all daughters; I will return to this last point shortly.) It is equally telling that the heroines of both of Mary Wollstonecraft’s novels forfeit their right to property – and hence their independence – upon marriage. In fact, matrimonial law and custom actively militate against women’s status as public-spirited persons. The more euphemistic terms of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England do not conceal the patriarchal and the paternalistic assumptions of this status. He writes, ‘the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything.’35 Concretely speaking, these laws deny married women the right to own and dispose of property, to incur debts, to contract with another party, to deploy legal power in relation to their children and to bring action for injury to their person or their property without the consent of their husband. Nor could wives be sued without making husbands defendants. In her second Vindication, Wollstonecraft qualifies the wife as ‘the upper servant [of the man], who provides his meals and takes care of his linen – the first servant of the household’ (VRW 109). In so doing, she echoes, amongst other things, eighteenthcentury legal theory which considered servants in the same rubric as wives and children.36 Indeed, as recent feminist historians have argued, eighteenth-century marriage contracts resemble in many ways employment ones.37 As dependent servants, wives are clearly excluded from the community of independent and equal republicans. In her posthumous novel, Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, Wollstonecraft provides a no less acrimonious if accurate evaluation of women’s legal status in marriage. A wife, claims Maria, the eponymous heroine, is like her husband’s ‘“horse or his ass; she has nothing she can call her own”’ (149). As I shall suggest later in this chapter, the heroine’s experience provides a case study of the partial laws governing matrimony and demonstrates how upon marriage a woman loses her right to property as well as becoming her husband’s property. Wives then do not fulfil the conditions to become active and virtuous public ‘men’. Marriage renders them inevitably dependent on and hence ‘interested’ in the specific condition of their husbands.

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The problem of women’s status in marriage is, however, not only a legal one; it is also and significantly a moral one. For as long as property is passed through the father, he needs to ensure that only his offspring are the beneficiaries. Hence the unquestioned emphasis on female chastity. Rules on female sexual conduct guarantee that women and their ‘products’ remain the property of man; they also ensure that they appear to be his property. As David Hume explains, it is in the public utility that a woman’s private virtue of chastity is more important than a man’s, as any public assertiveness of female sexuality becomes a direct threat to patriarchal and patrilineal transmission.38 The ‘public woman’, derived, as John Barrell reminds us, from the Roman publica or prostitute, is therefore the quintessence of the ‘interested’ and ‘dependent’ public person, subservient to commercial ties and relations based on exchange.39 Subject to the fluctuation of male desire, she is incapable of determining herself and strengthening her inner virtue. Moreover, by publicly selling herself and her sexuality, she sells her father’s or husband’s good. The analogy with the ‘common good’ is not far away. Small wonder, then, that addressing the question of sexual virtues of modesty and chastity is crucial to redefining the ‘public woman’. Small wonder, too, that any attempt by a woman to become a public and published writer must walk the tightrope between the ‘public woman’ and the ‘proper lady’, as Mary Poovey has convincingly argued.40 I would like to consider briefly how Catherine Macaulay relies on a recognised discourse of the disinterested, independent, public-spirited citizen to do just so. If, as Lawrence Klein and others have argued, women played a significant role in ‘polishing’ the earlier civic manifestations of virtue and introducing the more social arts of civility, politeness and manners, Macaulay who clearly identifies with the more ‘traditional’ form, offers another alternative to women. Her political affiliations make her an ideal figure for authorising the extension of the virtues of the independent, property-owning and arms-bearing male citizen to women.41 Her lengthy history of England demonstrates how these virtues are increasingly threatened by parliaments governed by commercial interest and regal power. Defending the common interest against self-interested ministers and corrupted courtiers, she could easily be situated within the tradition of the Commonwealthman were it not, as J.G.A. Pocock points out, ‘a term for which no feminine equivalent has been found’.42 The impartiality of the ‘patriot historian’ was easily derided by calling attention to her female partiality for a

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younger man. Following her marriage to a man some twenty years her junior, she was ousted from favour and publicly ridiculed.43 Yet even before this public display of her sexuality, Macaulay was mocked. By merely designating her a ‘female patriot’, her opponents could insinuate that civic virtues are too unstable in women. Macaulay prefaces her eight-volume History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (1763–83) with the following comments: The invidious censures which may ensue from striking into a path of literature rarely trodden by my sex, will not permit a selfish consideration to keep me mute in the cause of Liberty and Virtue, whilst the doctrine of slavery finds so many interested writers to defend it by fraud and sophistry, in opposition to the common reason of mankind and the experience of every age.44 I want to draw attention to Macaulay’s attempt to rise above ‘selfish consideration’ and ‘interested’ perspectives in the cause of Liberty and Virtue. She is clearly aware of the nefarious consequences such a public departure from the strictures placed on her sex will have. In her lifetime, she certainly suffered the consequences of it. Her work as a historian was continually questioned because of her sex and praise more often than not delimited by the suggestion that women ought to have something better to do. Her professional skills were seen as a compensation of her lack of feminine traits.45 ‘[S]he is unfortunately ugly,’ one account explains, ‘she despairs of distinction and admiration as a woman, she seeks therefore, to encroach on the province of man.’46 If by calling her a ‘Republican Virago’, Burke recognises the virtuous citizenship to which she aspires, he nevertheless also emphasises how denatured her aspiration is.47 Despite these ‘invidious censures’, Macaulay persists, placing the cause of Liberty and Virtue above her private interests in her reputation. There is a need for a good historian, one who will ‘digest … [information] … to give a true and accurate sense of [it] to the public’.48 She has the necessary skills and places them in the service of truth. Clearly, then, there is a strong analogy to be made between the patriots Macaulay writes about and Macaulay herself, between the personal sacrifices they are willing to make in the interest of society and the sacrifice she herself undertakes in memorialising them for the cause of liberty. If they relinquish their personal affections, their lives and their property, she is willing to forsake her reputation as a woman –

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and most certainly the tranquillity and peace that such a reputation provides – in the cause of liberty. Overlooking the ‘invidious censures’ becomes, in other words, a patriotic gesture par excellence. In addressing the question of her sex and her sexuality, then, the woman historian clearly figures herself as a public-spirited person. To claim that Macaulay’s rise above ‘invidious censures which may ensue from striking into a path of literature rarely trodden by my sex’ is a disinterested patriotic gesture is nevertheless to accept its implicit presupposition of sexual difference. It is to accept that a woman’s highest worth is her private reputation or her sexual chastity and to distinguish between the respect accorded to the self-commanding public man and that granted to the sexually private woman. For the public man who sacrifices his private interest for the public good is respected for the self-command he demonstrates, yet a woman is respected only for the self-control and restraint she exercises on her body. But both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft – as Lawrence Klein claims Addison, Steele and Earl of Shaftesbury do – redefine public and private manifestations of virtue. They do so not through conversation, politeness and manners, but through questioning the double standard on chastity and through arguing for increasing emphasis on women’s active virtue, regardless of whether it is private or public. Referring only to Wollstonecraft, I shall explore this reformation in later chapters. Postponing this discussion, here I want to pursue the conditions that make Macaulay’s disinterested public spirit possible. Not surprisingly, the precondition of this public spirit is, as in the civic humanist tradition I have been discussing, ‘independence’. Macaulay argues that her condition as a female may, in fact, assure her far more independent thinking than her male counterparts. Consider first her comments on how active political involvement may produce an inaccurate history. ‘Party prejudice,’ she writes, ‘and the more detestable principle of private interest, have painted the memoirs of past times in so false a light …’49 No such ‘private interest’ in holding office or in receiving political patronage can underlie her enterprise as a historian. She has nothing to gain by doing so. Although an open sympathiser of a party, as a woman Macaulay is nevertheless excluded from holding public office in the name of the party.50 (Her brother deemed less intelligent, on the other hand, served as Member for Hythe, as Sheriff of Middlesex and as an alderman of the city of London.51) There is thus no reason for her to write a flattering history in exchange for patronage or reward. Her political exclusion, in other

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words, ensures that her history will be impartial, founded on ‘immutable fitness’52 and not on partisan lines. More interesting, perhaps, is how her education as a woman also guarantees her independent mind.53 She notes that the young gentleman who goes to university may be taught grammar, Latin and divine precepts, but he is not taught that most cardinal of virtues, ‘Independence, which is the only characteristic of a real gentleman’. She adds that at university ‘are taught doctrines little calculated to form patriots to support and defend the privileges of the subject in this limited monarchy’.54 Universities, like parties and public officers, depend on political patronage and hence cannot assure a disinterested perspective. Given the attention Macaulay calls to her nascent love of liberty, cultivated not in dependent universities but from disinterested readings, we may wonder whether she affirms that her own independent scholarship exceeds any partisan, partial and self-interested position.55 Macaulay provides us, then, with a sense of how, despite material limitations placed on female independence and hence on her status as a public person, she can nevertheless turn the discourse around to affirm her commitment to the public spirit of liberty and virtue. Despite her absence from the public sphere, Macaulay clearly displays public spirit. The independence it requires is guaranteed paradoxically through private life, not public office; private education, not public university. It is, in short, Macaulay’s independent mind that becomes the basis for her virtuous and civic action. Macaulay’s emphasis on intellectual independence appears in her later works, notably in her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783) and her Letters on Education (1790). This is not the place to examine in detail the arguments she espouses in these texts, nor their relation to English and Enlightenment intellectual history more generally, although such an examination certainly needs to be undertaken. I would however like to analyse briefly how Macaulay positions herself in eighteenth-century debates on the sources of understanding and on divine and social justice with respect to the ‘independent’ thinking she espouses. Regarding the sources of moral understanding, she counters Lord Bolingbroke’s doubts on humanity’s capability to understand rationally the divine being. In so doing, she rejects a purely sensory and empirical basis for human knowledge and affirms instead a form of Platonic idealism of an essential ‘abstract fitness or unfitness in moral entities’.56 This abstract fitness underlies divine justice, for the wisdom of God is defined by his perfect knowledge of this moral essence.

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Thanks to its rational faculties, humanity attempts to live a virtuous existence, based on these same immutable principles. If mankind does not always obtain happiness in this world, it may nevertheless acquire redemption in the next. As such, Macaulay defines life as a ‘state of trial aptly fitted for the exercise and improvement of that virtue which will find its fruition by an enlarged and more permanent enjoyment of its excellence in another state’ (380). She affirms, as I demonstrated Milton, Price and Wollstonecraft do, man’s fall from grace as a felix culpa and recognises in humanity’s postlapsarian struggles its ‘conscious dignity’ and ‘grandest of all human sights’ (VRW 94 n. 2). Indeed, if Macaulay likens Bolingbroke to Hobbes, it is because both have agreed to sink ‘the hopes of the animal, man, into the supposed mortality of the brute, they will not allow him to be possessed of a nature deserving a higher fate’ (403).57 Although this theodicy, where evil plays an important role in testing virtue, seems to belittle prevalent misery and distress in favour of future redemption, it clearly argues that mankind can rationally understand earthly and human disorder and in so doing improve it. As such, Macaulay explicitly rejects Bolingbroke’s theodicy of human resignation for one where human action can mirror and imitate divine justice. It is not ‘self-love’ that should be the governing principle of humanity, she argues, but ‘rational self-interest’ (403). Contingent as it is on individual interest and particular situations, self-love remains arbitrary and uncertain. The ‘ambitious man’ may therefore recognise that ‘his interest lie[s] in the exercise of such social qualities, as preserve in some measure the compacts of society’, but will not seek to defend general and abstract principles such as ‘rights of men … justice and integrity’ (409–10). Likewise, a ‘lustful’ man will understand that ‘seducing innocence’ is immoral, but will nevertheless claim that the ‘sacrifice … require[d], is quite contrary to [his] happiness’ (410–11). Rational self-interest, on the other hand, seeks to accommodate self-love to ‘abstract fitness’: humanity’s reasoning faculties will regulate its passions in accordance with the ideal moral essence. There is, of course, nothing new in this relationship between selfinterested passions and rational control, neither when articulated with respect to the individual, nor when extended by analogy to a larger community where impassioned people are ruled by reasoning philosophers. Yet, this affirmation of both immutable principles and rational understanding allows Macaulay to ground her claim to patriotism and public spirit. The value of her history depends on abstract principles and not, as I have argued, on the ‘detestable principle of private interest’ that produces an imperfect and partisan scholarship. If Macaulay

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upholds the republican distinction between the philosopher governed by his reason and the ‘common herd’ of citizens who are not, women are included amongst the former. ‘The love of Freedom … lies latent in the breast of every rational being …’58 she writes in the preface of her History, self-consciously avoiding the more sexed term of ‘man’ to include herself as a woman amongst these beings. In her Letters on Education, this postulate that knowledge can have no ‘interested’ sex becomes the very basis of the system of education she proposes. Small wonder then that Mary Wollstonecraft, recognising the historian as the ‘woman of the greatest abilities, undoubtedly, that this country has ever produced’, regrets that she has ‘been suffered to die without sufficient respect being paid to her memory’ (VRW 174).59 Her eulogy is all the more noteworthy given the social ostracism Macaulay had experienced following her marriage to a younger man, a detail that Wollstonecraft tellingly elides from her homage. Indeed, by no means does her respectful memorial of a public woman allude specifically to her sexual (un)respectability. On the contrary, she insists that the ‘very word respect brings Mrs Macaulay to my remembrance’ (174; emphasis added). More than simply rectifying absent honours, Wollstonecraft prophesises that a more judicious ‘[p]osterity’ will ‘remember Catherine Macaulay … [as] an example of intellectual acquirements supposed to be incompatible with her sex’ (175). Macaulay’s exemplarity functions both as a memorial for past triumphs and as a promise of a future world where sex is no longer an excuse for ignorance. Significantly, this tribute erases all private details of the woman’s life and affirms only the brilliant intellectual and public persona.

Rights and righteousness: wives, mothers and women I have been arguing that Macaulay self-consciously fashions herself as a disinterested, public-spirited person by subjecting her interest in her private womanhood to the demands of the public the good. I have also suggested that she founds her claim as a superior historian by affirming abstract moral principles and humanity’s rational capacity to understand them. Her claim to public spirit is thus more than an artful rhetorical representation; it is invested with her deepest religious, moral, philosophical and political conviction that humanity can redeem its fallen state through rationally determined rules and under the guidance of rational philosophers. Where this second point is concerned, Macaulay’s Platonism is not restricted to her epistemological

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idealism. Her vision of a ruling philosopher-caste that includes women is informed by the fifth book of Plato’s Republic. Women, he explains, have the same nature as men and hence may partake in the same tasks. There is, in fact, more difference between the male carpenter and the male physician than between male and female physicians. Thus, as in Macaulay’s Letters, ‘women of a superior cast’ (VRW 217) may become ‘guardians’, receiving the same education as their male counterpart. By emphasising intellectual capacity above sexual difference, Macaulay reiterates the classical vision of a sexually egalitarian society. Significantly, as with Plato, the elitist distinction between ruler and ruled is based on intellectual capacities, not on economic power whether landed or commercial. But Macaulay’s emphasis on knowledge and self-knowledge does not only look backwards to the classical heritage. It also lays the groundwork for the emerging professional middle class invested with a bourgeois ethic of self-realisation and self-actualisation. Discussing the slow political ascendancy of this ethic, taking place in the final decades of the eighteenth century, Isaac Kramnick locates its origins not in the civic humanist tradition, but in John Locke’s theories of natural right.60 He recognises that ‘radical bourgeois ideology’ as epitomised by dissenters such as Joseph Priestley, Richard Price and James Burgh had past antecedents, who also proclaimed liberty and equality the defining characteristics of a commonwealth. The novelty of the radical bourgeoisie of the second half of the eighteenth century lies, however, in politicising current ideas and values and in channelling them towards political struggle that ensures the establishment of both an equality of opportunity and the liberty to use it – or not – to its fullest advantage. If Kramnick forsakes civic humanist discourse for the juridical language of rights, he nevertheless admits that these legitimate and original rights are the preconditions for the realisation of the citizen’s inner essence or virtue. Aristocracy and societies based on rank deny these rights, seriously curtailing possibilities for self-actualisation and self-improvement. Radical bourgeois ideologists favour instead a society based on merit. They can subsequently justify inevitable disparities in achievement by referring to the different degrees of effort and rational self-sacrifice civic subjects exert in actualising their potential. Kramnick suggests that other morally unacceptable inequalities nevertheless persist. In seeking to liberate people from political and religious restraints, the radical bourgeoisie nevertheless introduces discipline and subordination in the workplace. Increased civic freedom for the middle class implies increased authority for the working class.61

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Yet, although he clearly places Wollstonecraft within this tradition, Kramnick does not see how male radical bourgeois ideologues also fail to question sexual inequality. This questioning is nevertheless her primary contribution to the debate.62 Echoing Macaulay, she too seeks to lay the groundwork for the independent and virtuous woman, the female counterpart to the virtuous Commonwealth men, by extending the rights promoted by their political philosophy to women.63 If, as David Simpson has argued, Wollstonecraft’s analysis ‘situate[s] the condition of women exactly in the inherited vocabulary criticizing the decline of civic virtue within commercial economies … [thereby embedding the “woman question”] within a general analysis of the negative effects of a surplus (luxury) economy’,64 she also argues for a change in the laws and institutions which curtail the development of this virtue. Like the male radical bourgeois ideologists, she addresses primarily a middle-class audience. Unaffected by the prerogatives of rank and freed from the immediate necessities of life, middle-class women should be capable of affirming their identity through personal achievement and merit. Yet, surprisingly, the same changing economic and political conditions which allow middle-class men to actualise their potential deny this possibility to women of the same class, thereby alienating them from the emerging bourgeois ideology of autonomy and self-determination. The reason for this disparity may lie, as Wollstonecraft suggests, in both the ‘laws relative to women … and … their peculiar duties’ (VRW 70). For despite movements to change civil and political legislation, laws on marriage that subordinate a wife to her husband remain in place. Likewise, women’s civic role and virtue remain underestimated by this emerging bourgeois ideology. If Wollstonecraft leaves legal issues to a subsequent (never finished) second volume, in her published and completed Vindication of the Rights of Woman she wants to valorise women’s contribution. What remains crucial, regardless of the choice women make, is that they act neither instinctively nor submissively, but that they exercise a conscious and rational decision on what they do and what they will become. Only this active process will ensure self-actualisation and self-realisation. Changing laws and valorising women’s duty may thus ultimately result in more virtuous female citizens. This causal relationship between rights and virtue is reflected in the semantic ambiguity of the title of Wollstonecraft’s most celebrated work: Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Readers clearly recognise her demand that the ‘civil and political rights’ (VRW 67) French revolu-

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tionaries would like to grant men be extended to women. We are less likely to see that Wollstonecraft also vindicates women’s potential righteousness, or virtue. After all, the book clearly argues against women’s inherently cunning nature and for their heavenly aspiration: woman can become righteous and good. Wollstonecraft insists, however, that this aspiration can be fulfilled only if a woman’s rationality and her civic and moral independence are recognised. The ambiguity of the title plays with this argument, suggesting that women need rights in order to become righteous. Consider the arguments Wollstonecraft develops in contesting Rousseau’s gendered social contract.65 To his scoffing remarks that women cannot ‘leave the nursery for the [military] camp’ (VRW 216; she is referring to his Emile) and that this failure to participate in republican duty is the basis for denying women equal citizenship, Wollstonecraft answers by suggesting that women have a parallel but different function as rational female citizens. Their duty to the state lies in being good mothers, wives and neighbours: Yet, if defensive war, the only justifiable war, in the present advanced state of society, where virtue can show its face and ripen amidst the rigours which purify the air on the mountain’s top, were alone to be adopted as just and glorious, the true heroism of antiquity might again animate female bosoms. But fair and softly, gentle reader, male or female, do not alarm thyself, for though I have compared the character of a modern soldier with that of a civilised woman, I am not going to advise them to turn their distaff into a musket, though I sincerely wish to see the bayonet concerted into a pruning-hook. I only re-created an imagination, fatigued by contemplating the vices and follies which all proceed from a feculent stream of wealth that has muddied the pure rills of natural affection, by supposing that society will some time or other be so constituted, that man must necessarily fulfil the duties of a citizen, or be despised, and that while he was employed in any of the departments of civil life, his wife, also an active citizen, should be equally intent to manage her family, educate her children, and assist her neighbours. (216) Here Wollstonecraft seems to articulate a gender-based distinction in heroism, virtue and active citizenship. This distinction is contingent on unquestioned assumptions about the nature of sexual difference. Since it would be alarming for women to carry arms, their heroism and

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citizenship are expressed in their devotion to their husbands, children and neighbours. As such, Wollstonecraft constructs the paradigm of the republican mother, whereby women’s ‘natural’ difference implies a different social and civic role. Given this difference, they are ultimately excluded from participation in the public sphere.66 But to read this passage merely in terms of these gender-defined roles is to ignore the implications of Wollstonecraft’s social vision where women’s active citizenship is concerned. Echoing Isaiah’s prophetic voice which announces that nations and people will ‘beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks’ (Isaiah II:4, emphasis added), she articulates her vision of the New Jerusalem. In so doing, she offers a stinging criticism of her society, structured around unnatural hierarchies of wealth, military power and sexual difference. Borrowing the rhetoric of the Tory Country Party and the Old Whigs, she contrasts the corruption of urban life with the fresh and invigorating country life that allows true independence to flourish.67 Exploiting the same rhetoric, she compares slavishly obedient soldiers, denigrated in arguments against standing armies, with unnatural contemporary women. Both are denied the necessary independence to exercise their reason and acquire active virtue. Significantly, Wollstonecraft extends her discomfort with standing armies to soldiers more generally. For despite her affirmation that defensive wars are the ‘only justifiable’ ones, her argument ultimately diminishes even their value. Although she does not wish women to ‘turn their distaff into a musket’, she has no objection to substituting the pruning-hook, a synecdoche for productive and useful agriculture, for the bayonet and the warrior culture it represents. More importantly, however, the last sentence in the passage raises the question of what exactly active citizenship for women means. The direct objects in the final part (family, children, neighbours) suggest that a woman’s activities are to be limited to the domestic and private sphere. If, on the other hand, the verbs and activities (manage, educate, assist) are emphasised, an entirely different picture of women’s participation as citizens emerges, one which implies more of an overlap with masculine activities. It is not, then, that women have innately different capacities, but rather that they exercise them in different contexts. What Wollstonecraft calls for here is the recognition of both these contexts and women’s specific contributions towards social well-being and public benefit. The expression ‘manage her family, educate her children and assist her neighbours’ reiterates a commonplace of treatises on women’s edu-

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cation that also ask that women receive ‘a little education’ in order better to govern their husband’s house, do their husband’s accounts and educate their husband’s children.68 Despite their insistence on female rationality and moral self-determination, these treatises accept the wife’s dependence on and submission to her husband in marriage. Ultimately, the dignity they want to accord allows women to work for their husbands only, maintaining them in an oppressed state. Ridiculing the limited advantages this kind of marriage offers women, indicated above, Wollstonecraft speaks of the wife as ‘the upper servant [of the man]’ (VRW 109). Although her utopian vision of society may well be contingent on gender differences in occupations, she nevertheless makes the housewife her husband’s equal and argues for women’s independent civil existence regardless of marital status. Only civic and financial independence will ensure more virtuous mothers and wives. For, as Wollstonecraft pursues her response to Rousseau and departs from a utopian moment, she draws more attention to the relation between rights and righteousness, arguing: But to render her [a wife] really virtuous and useful, she must not, if she discharge her civil duties, want individually the protection of civil laws; she must not be dependent on her husband’s bounty for her subsistence during his life, or support after his death; for how can a being be generous who has nothing of its own? or virtuous who is not free? The wife, in the present state of things, who is faithful to her husband, and neither suckles nor educates her children, scarcely deserves the name of a wife, and has no right to that of a citizen. But take away natural rights, and duties become null. (216–17) Wollstonecraft insists, then, on the importance of according women the protection of civil laws because they have duties as wives and mothers. Only with the necessary independence will they be able to pursue active virtue as female citizens. As such, more than acting according to rules of good behaviour, they can consciously decide to go beyond the pleasing complacency of Milton’s Eve and Mrs Gabell. If, then, Wollstonecraft’s argument echoes the discourse of republican motherhood, it also emphasises female self-determination. Although she clearly participates in the emerging family ethos, characterised by fewer but healthier and happier children,69 she insists that this ethos should not be promoted at the expense of marital obedience. In taking a more uncompromising stand on women’s moral autonomy in marriage, Wollstonecraft differs from her contemporary

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reformers. Consider Sarah Trimmer who, in her Œconomy of Charity, urges women of the leisure class to undertake charitable activities among women of the deserving poor and teach them to become better mothers. In the course of this attempt to change familial and maternal practice, the narrative accords a voice to a poor woman who mentions, among the many details of her wretched condition, ‘how my constitution is worn by frequent child-bearing and nursing my infants at the breast, without a proper supply of nourishment myself’.70 This speech, deliberately framed to elicit the compassion of middle-class patronesses, recognises the relationship between pregnancy, nursing and poor maternal health, especially when accompanied by poor nutrition. Yet Trimmer never articulates this recognition into a demand for a woman’s self-determination as mother or wife. She urges instead a wife to obey her husband, writing: ‘I would by no means recommend disobedience to husbands; for unreasonable commands must be submitted to, rather than to make what are destined as the blessings of life occasions of domestic wranglings.’71 Her charitable works strive to ameliorate conditions as they are and render them more bearable. She has no wish to refashion the ‘natural’ and political order. Wollstonecraft’s ‘wisely ordered nature’ (VRW 263) implies a very different ‘return’ to nature, where women who exercise their obligations as mothers do so because they act according to the authority of their conscience and not because they submit to their husbands. Small wonder then that Trimmer, who appreciates other aspects of Wollstonecraft’s second Vindication, objects to what it has to say about marriage. ‘I can say nothing more,’ she states, ‘than that I found so much happiness in having a husband to assist me in forming a proper judgment and in taking upon him the chief labour of providing for a family that I never wished for a further degree of liberty or consequence than I enjoyed.’72 Wollstonecraft’s insistence on women’s autonomy within marriage may well have been the most shocking aspect of her Vindication. Despite Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on maternity and domesticity, it is important to note that she does not limit women’s role to the domestic sphere. As she continues to recount her ‘re-created imagination’, she changes the direct objects of the verbs. First, women might manage ‘[b]usinesses of various kinds’ (218) and not just families. Second, if they study either ‘the art of healing’ or politics, their assistance will not be limited to their neighbours but would extend to ‘the broadest basis’ (218) as doctors and legislators. She even goes so far as to ‘hint’ – despite all the laughter it might provoke – that women

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ought to be in government, ‘instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government’ (217). Finally, they might – and in fact they do – ‘take charge of the education of children as governesses’ (219). Wollstonecraft nevertheless reminds her readers that as teachers of other people’s children, women do not receive the same recognition as their male counterparts, tutors. By calling attention to this wage and status differential, she suggests that the question of female participation in civil society is not so much one of which sphere but rather the lack of recognition and respect for their contribution, regardless of the sphere and regardless of the activity. Wollstonecraft pursues this demand for women’s, wives’, mothers’ and workers’ independent civil status to its logical extremes. Indeed, if responsibilities for childcare fall primarily to women and if their civil status guarantees their right to decide how they will undertake these responsibilities, then children can no longer be considered the father’s property. Some years later, when pregnant and confronted with the prospect of bringing up her own child, Wollstonecraft writes to Gilbert Imlay, the father: Considering the care and anxiety a woman must have about a child before it comes into the world it seems to me, by a natural right, to belong to her. When men get immersed in the world, they seem to lose all sensations, excepting those necessary to continue or produce life! – Are these the privileges of reason? Amongst the feathered race, whilst the hen keeps the young warm, her mate stays by to cheer her; but it is sufficient for man to condescend to get a child, in order to claim it. – A man is a tyrant! (LI 377; emphasis in the original) Wollstonecraft’s observation on male ‘immersion’ in the vainglories of the world to the exclusion of more domestic cares and charms foresees her conflict with Imlay, which I will examine in ‘Wants of Woman’. She juxtaposes the male bird’s more active involvement in his brood to the human male, who believes that his duties and responsibilities stop with the procreative act. Man’s condescension positions women as objects of tenderness who, as beneficiaries of his sexual favours, absolve him of any further responsibilities. It also implies a disregard for the demands of everyday life that are crucial for the lasting existence of a family and a larger community. Arguing against such inconsideration, Wollstonecraft may well be insisting, as Susan

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Mendus has indicated, on the need to ‘moralise’ love, turning it, with the help of reason, from a sensation and a passion into something ‘reliable and habitual’.73 Yet here Wollstonecraft’s claim goes beyond a demand that politics and the public sphere recognise the ‘female’ qualities of love and compassion. She suggests that because men fail in their familial responsibilities and duties, women should be accorded more rights. The only way to rectify the unjust tyranny is by acknowledging the ‘generosity’ of female maternal labour. Children should therefore ‘belong’ to the mother and not the father. The ‘natural right’ mentioned is thus not that found in the state of nature where the mother’s immediate compassionate sympathy and instinctive tenderness for the child form the first social bond, where the child remains with the mother and where couples do not form to protect the long and helpless state of infancy. Rather, it is the inalienable natural rights to property which constitutions and laws of enlightened governments promise to defend. Contrary to what Joan Landes has argued, then, Wollstonecraft is not simply insisting that women’s domestic roles give them a civic purpose. She does not merely suggest that women need rights regardless of this role. By insisting specifically on a mother’s ‘natural right’, she also acknowledges that the real nature of women’s oppression lies in their efforts in the service of patriarchal marriage and patrilineage and argues vociferously that this injustice be rectified.74 The philosophical and political principles expressed in Vindication of the Rights of Woman as well as the concerns and anxieties articulated in the private letter are given a particularly cogent expression in Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria. The novel thereby fulfils the promise made in the ‘Advertisement’ of the second Vindication to write a subsequent volume on the ‘laws relative to women’ (VRW 70). The eponymous heroine’s misery, recounted in an inset confessional tale addressed to her unborn daughter, becomes a convincing illustration of how women’s education fails to prepare them for an independent existence and how married women’s legal status of feme covert deprives them of civic responsibility. Juxtaposing the case study to the lives of other women, most notably Jemima to whom I shall return in subsequent chapters, it provides a very effective demonstration of how women, married or not, do not receive the protection of the law.75 Like the young women Wollstonecraft invokes in her explicitly polemical work, Maria is prepared only for marriage, through which her husband obtains rights to her and all that belongs to her. Although soon disappointed with him, she finds that she has neither financial nor legal recourse to leave him. Since property has no

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right to own property, he can dispose of her property as he will. Not even the concerns and responsibilities of motherhood confer on her legal prerogatives to spend wealth on her children. As Maria explains, ‘The tender mother cannot lawfully snatch from the gripe of the gambling spendthrift, or beastly drunkard, unmindful of his offspring, the fortune which falls to her by chance …’ (149). Eighteenth-century marital laws offered wives protection against physically dangerous cruelty, making it one of the few grounds on which women could demand divorce. When Maria refuses her husband’s sexual overtures, he attempts to pull her into the chamber, but stops when Maria resists him because, she explains, he does not want to ‘give me any reason for saying that he used violence’ (155). Even if Venables stops short of using force, the novel nevertheless insists on the limits of this protection. When the unhappy wife finally disavows her marriage and leaves her home, he pursues her and even places an advertisement in the newspaper, threatening anyone protecting her ‘“‘with the utmost severity of the law’”’ (159). A haberdasher, who had been assisted by Maria, informs her, ‘“when a woman once married, she must bear everything”’ (158). This woman certainly bears the brunt of her husband’s violence: he ‘“would beat her if she chanced to offend him, though she had a child at the breast”’ (158). Given that a wife is considered her husband’s property, the law overlooks his adultery but not hers. She cannot sue for divorce on the grounds of his adultery but he can on the grounds of hers. The law can even apply the perverse logic of ‘protecting’ the wife to the bitter end by allowing the husband to sue the lover for damages under criminal conversation.76 Ironically, under this procedure, the law fulfils its commitment to ‘protect’ married women. Since her ‘very being is suspended’,77 she is not considered responsible for having been seduced into marital infidelity. It is thus all the more striking that when charges are brought against her lover Darnford, Maria instructs his counsel to ‘to plead guilty to the charge of the adultery; but to deny that of seduction’ (178). Refusing protection as her husband’s property, she demands recognition for her legal existence and her moral responsibility. Equally significant is the fact that Maria decides to undertake her own defence, writing a paper ‘which she expressly desired might be read in court’ (178). Echoing the narrative she authors for her unborn daughter, the paper enumerates the effects of the legal double standard of the feme covert which have been mentioned earlier in this chapter. Reiterating Wollstonecraft’s hopes for legal recognition of maternal responsibility, Maria’s defence denounces laws ‘“which force women,

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when they claim protectorship as mothers, to sign a contract, which renders them dependent on the caprice of the tyrant, whom choice or necessity has appointed to reign over them”’ (179). It also counters the specific accusation of criminal conversation and questions the underlying implications of such laws. Insisting that her age of ‘“six-andtwenty”’ makes her capable of ‘“direct[ing] my own actions”’, Maria states she ‘“acted with deliberation”’ (180) and was not seduced into an affair. Not only does she accept legal responsibility for her moral choice, she also refuses to be kept in a state of eternal childhood. The paper concludes by asking for divorce. Yet, to read Maria’s narratives purely as illustrations and denunciations of the ‘misery and oppression, peculiar to woman, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society’ (WOW 83) is to forget that they are embedded in the fictional universe and narrative construct of a novel, a genre against which Wollstonecraft had vociferated in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In ‘Making Novel Creatures’ I will return to her polemic to identify her arguments against the novel as well as to explore her attempts to reform it. Here I would like to call attention to the narrative act involved in the presentation of this letter.78 To request that the charges of criminal conversation against Danford be dropped and to insist on her moral responsibility in the adulterous relation, Maria ‘puts herself forward instead of desiring to be absent’ (178; emphasis added). In so doing, she literally goes public. Not only does she represent herself in a public courtroom, a legal and social impossibility in the England of her time. She also proclaims her sexual desire for a man other than her husband, thereby accepting the risks attached to a (sexually) tarnished reputation. That Maria is careful to justify her actions by insisting on her husband’s neglect and on her attempts to shake off ‘“the fetters which bound me to Mr Venables”’ (181) does not diminish the dangers of her gesture. If, as Elaine Jordan has convincingly argued, Maria’s attempts to intervene in the courtroom and against the implication of a criminal conversation trial is a ‘silent and fantastic (im)possibility’,79 so too is the public acknowledgement of her sentimental and sexual choice. Yet these very impossibilities allow readers to imagine the revolutionary potential of redefining the ‘public women’. For within the terms of Maria’s narrative, her virtue is not defined by her sexual innocence but by her conscious deliberation. Contrary to the judge who believes she ‘“plead[s] … [her] feelings”’ (181), her act, like Wollstonecraft’s in her second Vindication and Macaulay in her History, is ultimately ‘dictated by a disinterested

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spirit … [that] plead[s] for [her] sex’ (VRW 65). Ignoring the dangers of being sexually public, her act goes beyond the demand that unjust laws be modified to urge that the assimilation between sexual reputation and active virtue is undermined.

Mary Wollstonecraft and the ‘public woman’ Examining Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman and her Wrongs of Woman, I have been suggesting that she establishes a crucial relation between rights and virtues, arguing that women need the former in order to acquire the latter. Although her arguments clearly depend on underlying assumptions about gendered roles, she nevertheless differs from her contemporaries by insisting on women’s independent civil status, regardless of marital and maternal status. Strange, then, that Wollstonecraft’s Maria, who in elaborating Danford’s legal defence provides a strong example of female virtue, should not have the legal rights and civic status necessary. Perhaps this discrepancy is another of the ‘fantastic (im)possibility[ies]’ of the fictional universe.80 Perhaps it is because she is a ‘woman of sensibility, with an improving mind’ (WOW 83), as the author suggests in her preface. By insisting on an innate quality (sensibility), this suggestion may potentially distinguish between women of different ranks and orders, thereby undermining the political project to ‘show the wrongs of different classes of women, equally oppressive, through from the difference of education, necessarily various’ (84; emphasis added). 81 This apparent inability to deal with social differences between women is potentially a serious limitation, and I will return to it shortly. But first I would like to mention one final explanation for Maria’s ability to pursue active virtue notwithstanding her state of legal dependence. Despite her limited education, she has been encouraged, by her uncle at any rate, to think for herself and as, a result has the necessary moral and intellectual independence (although, as I shall argue in the next chapter, this independence too is curtailed by her tendency to read romance into her life). Beyond questions of civic participation and legal rights, Wollstonecraft’s wish for an ‘Eve to please’ (MWL 206) her is ultimately about this moral and intellectual autonomy. If she insists that civil autonomy is a precondition for women to exercise rational choice, she also argues that they deserve this autonomy because they are capable of acting virtuously. In the following chapters, I shall forsake the more explicitly political resonance of Wollstonecraft’s philosophy to explore issues related to

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moral autonomy, subject formation and their relation to aesthetics. I shall suggest that Wollstonecraft’s attempt to recognise women for themselves and not as means to achieve a male-defined moral or utilitarian end also involves reassessing the importance of private virtue for public life. In the course of her different writings, Wollstonecraft challenges a number of key eighteenth-century moral philosophers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, on this issue. Virtuous behaviour, she writes responding to Smith’s theory of the moral spectator, cannot be based on ‘viewing ourselves as we suppose we are viewed by others’ (VRW 205). It is thus not the visibility of heroic or moral action that counts, but rather the more often than not invisible internal conflicts and deliberations that determine the result that need to be valorised. A social or moral order that denies individuals the authority of their own conscience and this deliberative process is, for Wollstonecraft, an immoral one. Hence the crucial importance of cultivating a woman’s rationality through her education and the equally significant need to acknowledge her moral and civic autonomy, regardless of marital and maternal status. After all, if knowledge, free will and the total liberty in which to exercise it are the preconditions for a truly virtuous act, then women who are subject to the authority, however rational, of their husbands can never be virtuous. Although Wollstonecraft reaffirms the value of domesticity and motherhood, she nevertheless gives it an entirely new meaning by refusing to place wives and mothers under the tutelage of male preceptors or husbands and by insisting, as in the case of her heroine Maria, on their right to choose. The move from external appearances to internal deliberation and action nevertheless has consequences on the public representation Wollstonecraft would like to give women. We immediately see the tension between demanding recognition for women’s heroic gesture in their lives as ordinary mothers and citizens and claiming that heroism cannot always be a highly visible act but may be a silent deliberation taking place within isolated and internal consciences. By focusing attention on this internal deliberation, Wollstonecraft challenges the gendered aesthetic categories of her time and articulates a very different theory of representation. On the one hand, as with Fuseli’s Eve, she refuses to see women as beautiful objects of pity and instead tries to represent them as subjects to respect. Her response to Burke – and particularly to his veneration of the French queen – inaugurates her approach. Time and time again, she attempts to find a way in which representing misery does not need its ‘cap and bells’ and where tears

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are not reserved for ‘the declamation of the theatre, or for the downfall of queens’ (VRM 15). In the process, she soon realises that it is not sufficient to replace the theatrical queen with an equally theatrical ‘industrious mother’ (15), who continues to invite a ‘pity, bordering on contempt’ (VRW 147). In her final novel, Wollstonecraft explicitly rejects accounts of ‘great misfortunes [that] … have more of what might justly be termed stage effect’ for ‘the delineation of finer sensations’ (WOW 84). As such, she moves from the visible acts of heroism and distress to the more invisible internalised conflicts that women must confront on a day-to-day basis. The ‘public woman’ that Wollstonecraft vindicates is, then, not necessarily in the public sphere, although she is clearly committed to civic action and participation.82 This commitment certainly has a public representation, although not to the exclusion of a private conscience. Wollstonecraft’s public-spirited woman, in short, struggles to contribute to the public good without selling her private soul. Significantly, more often than not, this good is articulated in relation to the needs of women of all classes. This commitment already appears in the ‘disinterested spirit’ with which, I suggested, she pleads for her sex in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman.83 It is even more present in her later works, most notably Letters Written … in Sweden and Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, where she attempts to give solidarity between female citizen-subjects both a literary and political form. Thus, not surprisingly, by insisting on a woman’s moral, civic, economic and political independence, Wollstonecraft lays the groundwork for an independent women’s movement: the public woman she vindicates ensures that ordinary female citizens enter public life. Yet surely this public woman and the women’s movement she heralds remains primarily a middle-class one, vested in nascent bourgeois ideology, values and subjectivities.84 Throughout her second Vindication, Wollstonecraft explicitly addresses middle-class women. Moreover, in highlighting the effort needed for individual redemption, she expresses a work ethic. Favouring a more rationally controlled individual, she denigrates the more carnal and carnivalesque practices of populist milieux. Similarly, her plea for personal liberties and responsibility resonate with emerging laissez-faire liberal ideology. Finally, although her commitment to social change and progress reveal her sense of social responsibility, it often betrays condescension and paternalism towards women so unlike her. Indeed her attempt to redefine the ‘public woman’ must be understood as an attempt to wrest it away not only from the aristocratic ‘public woman’ of the court who derives

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her prerogative from her person and through her influence over powerful men, but also from the lower-class ‘public woman’ of the street. It therefore remains unclear to what extent Wollstonecraft favours the extension of rights and responsibilities she demands for middle-class women to those women she deems her childlike inferiors. If Wollstonecraft’s arguments clearly reinforce her own class position and particularly so in the aftermath of the energies unleashed by the French Revolution, she nevertheless takes an uncompromising stand, as I have suggested in this chapter, on a wife’s and mother’s moral, civic and political independence. In her writings, this revalorisation resonates throughout society. Moreover, her attention to the needs of women of all classes appears, I will argue in the final chapter, in the character of Jemima and in some of the women she describes during her trip to the Scandinavian countries. It is for this reason that I have made Wollstonecraft the ‘“hero of … [this] tale”’ (LSND 241) on the emergence of the public and political woman. Certainly, many of her propositions echo the demands of earlier feminists. Recognition of female rationality, complaints against the double standard, demands for better education, and even increasing political involvement all have precedents. Wollstonecraft nevertheless remains an inaugural figure for modern feminism, not only because she writes during the French Revolution, an inaugural moment of modern political culture. If the elitist and aristocratic presuppositions of classical civic humanism are beginning to be rewritten in more egalitarian terms whereby independence required for virtue is defined not by independent property but by property in oneself, then surely Wollstonecraft’s importance lies in demanding the inclusion of women. Some earlier women, of course, had had certain prerogatives, but they were – as she points out – both exceptional and exceptions (vide vrm 146 and 146 n.14). Her philosophy, politics and aesthetics all want to ensure that these exceptions become the rule. Small wonder then that Wollstonecraft becomes such an icon for the modern AngloSaxon feminist movement and the public woman and citizen it vindicates.

2 The Old Abelard: or, Héloïse among the Immodest Philosophers

The New Héloïse or the same Old Abelard Among the many wrongs Jemima recounts in Mary Wollstonecraft’s posthumous Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria is her experience as the servant and mistress of a ‘“man of great talents, and of brilliant wit”’ (113). Although a minor incident in the novel, it takes on increasing significance seen through the frame of the novel and through the even larger one of Wollstonecraft’s life and works. Jemima’s narrative emphasises the opposing extremes of this incident. The man expresses both a ‘“delicacy of sentiment”’ and a ‘“grossness of sensuality”’ (WOW 113). For all the pain this encounter may have provoked – and Jemima leaves no doubt in our mind on this subject – it is nevertheless crucial in promoting her self-improvement. She has both time and books on her hands and, when she can, devotes herself to reading, attempting to return to the ‘“respectable part of society”’ (114). This reading renders her ‘“sentiments and language … superior to … [her] station”’ (113), becoming the basis (but certainly not the ends) of her sympathies with Maria. Although forced to listen to obscenities, she nevertheless hears arguments and discussions from which most ‘“women are excluded”’ (114). Both degrading and elevating, this encounter sets the terms for the relationship between women and knowledge, when this knowledge is mediated through a male philosopher or man of sensibility and genius. Jemima’s account of the inherent sadism of this philosopher renders it a particularly horrifying version of Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse. Rousseau’s acclaimed novel renovates and updates the medieval chronicle of Héloïse who is seduced by Abelard, the priest hired to teach her. Julie, Rousseau’s New Héloïse, is also seduced by the philoso51

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pher who tutors her. Although in love with him, she marries an older man chosen by her father. A good part of the epistolary novel dramatises the conflict that opposes her love for the philosopher-tutor to her obligations and duties towards her family. Herein lies its appeal to many contemporary women readers. In the critical debate that surrounded its English publication, this highly dramatised conflict is seen as an expression of both Julie’s sensibility and her virtue.1 Unlike Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, whose virtue is said to be always triumphant, the French heroine redeems herself by returning to the respectable existence defined by social standards without denying the sentiment that had almost led to her fall. By examining the nature of a woman’s virtue and respectability, both novels dramatise the very tenuous boundaries which separate the respectable from the unrespectable, the fallen from the steadfast woman. They also explore definitions of women’s goodness and how (and indeed whether) a fallen woman can return to society. Yet despite the discussions these novels inaugurated and the possibilities they opened for women, their alternatives nevertheless reveal an essentially sadistic misogyny. The only means for women to affirm their virtue is through selfdestruction, Clarissa’s choice, or through respectful submission that constrains a simmering sensibility, as with Julie. These novels inspired many rewrites, renewing the investigation and the discussion prompted by Richardson and Rousseau. Postponing a discussion of the responses to Richardson’s Clarissa to a subsequent chapter, I mention here only the transposition of Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse to England present in many eighteenth-century novels, from Henry Mackenzie’s Julie de Roubigné to Thomas Holcroft’s Anna of St Ives, from Helen Maria Williams’s Julia to Charlotte Smith’s Desmond. In their attempts to translate the French Julia, many of these novels examined the constraints education and laws placed on female sensibility in light of the events transpiring in France. Such too is the case of Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria which, as more than one commentary has suggested, is an attempt to rework Rousseau’s debilitating, disempowering and doomed account of the woman of sensibility. Much of this critical attention has focused on Maria, the middle-class heroine of the novel, and her adulterous triangle that selfconsciously draws attention to Julie’s. Maria’s love for Darnford is mediated through a reading of Nouvelle Héloïse: she first learns of and about him through his marginalia in the copy she peruses. Her subsequent decision to live with him despite her marital vows to Venables contrasts with Julie’s more obedient choice.2

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Critics have also convincingly argued that this adulterous relationship is less central to the novel than the relationship between the two women, Maria and Jemima. The latter increasingly overwrites the terms of Rousseau’s plot where both narrative and narration are concerned. The story turns away from the heterosexual couple towards the bonds forming between the two women and, in one of the projected endings, concludes with the female couple reunited in their commitment to Maria’s daughter. As for narration, Wollstonecraft abandons the overt epistolary form for a framed narrative which incorporates different memoirs. Instead of the feminine, spontaneous, unmethodical and sentimental letter which Wollstonecraft objects to in her review of Helen Maria Williams’s Letters from France (vide AR 322) and which she uses to different ends in her Letters written … in Sweden, she borrows from the formal experiments of William Godwin and other Jacobin novelists, relying on the didactic and political possibilities of a retrospective confessional. The cleavage between the narrator and the heroine of the memoir allows the former to use the experience of the latter to articulate political truths common to other women. As Jemima speaks of her life, she considers the implications it may have for moral, political and aesthetic theory. Moreover, the framed narrative structure of the novel allows parallels between different memoirs to be made. Maria’s account of her legal prostitution clearly resonates in Jemima’s illegal marriage. The brutality and degradation Jemima experiences at the hands of her man of genius is not unlike that which Maria experiences with her husband Venables. The narrative structure of the novel, however, also insists on the differences between these first-person accounts and on more than one occasion invites a retrospective reappraisal of Maria’s narrative of seduction. In ‘Wants of Women’, I will return to these differences. Here I want to limit my remarks to the very different reading Jemima produces of Nouvelle Héloïse, for her inset account of the ‘“man of great talents, and of brilliant wit”’ (113) must be read as part of Wollstonecraft’s reappraisal of Rousseau’s novel. Indeed, the man may well be an allusion to Rousseau as he is figured in Wollstonecraft’s discussions of him. The contrasts between sentiment and sensuality, delicacy and grossness, genius and baseness recall the terms Wollstonecraft uses to describe Rousseau in Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Although she recognises his poetic genius and his lively imagination, she nevertheless characterises his philosophy as ‘unphilosophical’ (83), ‘impious’ (83) and ‘lascivious’ (117 n. 4). Rousseau’s cowardly descent into physical experience is not unlike Jemima’s master’s sunken condition.

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Jemima’s account also echoes Wollstonecraft’s earlier attempts to discuss Rousseau’s experience with his mistress and the mother of his children, Theresa. In a review of the second part of the Confessions, Wollstonecraft notes that ‘[Theresa] was a negative character, which was, perhaps the only character that he could live with comfortably …’ (AR 230). Although Wollstonecraft mentions Theresa’s tenderness and goodness, careful to cite Rousseau’s authority on this point, it remains clear that she blames the woman and her family for debasing Rousseau’s genius. Similarly, in Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft locates in Rousseau’s affection for the ‘fool Theresa’ his negative opinion of women in general. ‘He could not raise her to the common level of her sex,’ she writes, ‘and therefore he laboured to bring woman down to her’s [sic]’ (246). This general degradation is nevertheless concealed by Rousseau’s epithet for Theresa, ‘celestial innocent’, revealing how his ‘veneration’ of female innocence denies women their humanity and ultimately results in their debasement. Despite the implications of this analysis, Wollstonecraft nevertheless makes Theresa bear the brunt of Rousseau’s theoretical inadequacies. The Theresa-like Jemima does not blame her own simplicity for bringing all women down, but instead implies that such an assault on women is a sine qua non of male philosophers. She accuses them, revealing the hypocrisy of libertine philosophers who, on the one hand, exclude women from human aspirations and, on the other, directly contribute to their treatment as ‘“creature[s] of another species”’ (WOW 111). She insists on the importance of her presence in the perfection of her master’s work: not only is she his first reader, he also ‘“caught up hints for thought, from my untutored remarks”’ (114). Jemima’s awareness of the libertine perversions of her master contrasts with Maria’s naïveté respecting her lover Darnford, whose poetic sensibilities render him more similar to the Rousseau-like man of genius than the more commercially-oriented and insensitive Venables. Yet, unlike Jemima who refuses to assimilate her experience with that recounted in novels of seduction, Maria remains trapped within the conventions of sentimental fiction, falling for heroes she herself ‘“dubbed”’ (127). On more than one occasion, the narrative voice invites an alternative reading of the fictions Maria tells herself. Darnford’s narrative is prefaced by commentary in free indirect style, ‘In a few words, he informed her that he had been a thoughtless, extravagant young man; yet as he described his faults, they appeared to be the generous luxuriancy of a noble mind’ (100). Darnford’s faults, combining excessive

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sensuality with spiritual nobility, invite a comparison with the physical libertinism and imaginative talent of Jemima’s master. Yet, unlike Jemima, Mary’s open condemnation is attenuated, the origins of the faults in the noble mind being offered as an apology for the faults themselves. It remains unclear, however, who offers this apology, the narrator or Maria. Is the narrator describing Darnford’s narrative or is she reporting Maria’s thoughts, thereby attributing the apologetic glorification of Darnford’s misdeeds to her alone? To whom, in other words, do his faults ‘appear’ a mere expression of his sensibility? That Maria is the more likely answer is confirmed retrospectively when the narrative voice distances itself from Maria. It does not simply mention her response to Darnford’s proposal that follows his perusal of her narrative. It also qualifies it, asking, ‘What could have been more flattering to Maria?’ (172; emphasis added). It thereby implies that she cannot see through the pleasing gestures. However ambiguous the free, indirect style, it nevertheless introduces some critical distance between Maria’s and the narrator’s understanding of Darnford. Jemima, whose narrative, as Claudia Johnson reminds us, intervenes in such a moment as to postpone the coupling that is taking place, also questions Darnford.3 Her account provides the prostitute’s version of the encounters he censors out of ‘respect’ for Maria: ‘“I was taught to love by a creature I am ashamed to mention; and the other women with whom I afterwards became intimate, were of a class of which you can have no knowledge”’ (100–1), he states on one occasion, ignoring consciously or unconsciously details of Jemima’s past. The silence he maintains is bought at Jemima’s expense, making him not unlike her master’s circle of friends. ‘“Having lost the privileged respect of my sex, my presence, instead of restraining,”’ she states, ‘“perhaps gave the reins to their tongues … ’” (113). We are left to wonder how unreined Darnford’s tongue is with creatures he does not deign to mention. Jemima’s subsequent question (‘“Who ever acknowledged me to be a fellow-creature?”’ [119]) addresses Darnford’s disrespect and disregard for women so clearly like her. Jemima’s account of the ‘“man of great talents, and of brilliant wit”’ (113) thus comments as much on the adulterous relation based on sympathetic affection that Maria aspires for with Darnford as it does on legal prostitution that marriage to Venables is. In fact, it speaks more about the seductive dangers of knowledge and sensibility than the more obvious and brutal violence of the marital institution. Both Jemima and Maria are seduced by the promises of self-improvement and respect offered by relationships with men of sensibility, which is

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why their (possible) degradation seems all the more tragic. Indeed, were it not for Jemima’s self-awareness, this fact would offer a very negative and pessimistic commentary on the future for women in society, condemning them to ‘“‘have always the worst of it, when law is to decide’”’ (165) as well as when it does not. Maria’s and Jemima’s illegitimate and socially proscribed relationships with men are thus not the solution to the partial laws that govern legitimate ones. Fortunately, Jemima sees through Darnford, inviting both Maria and the reader to do likewise. She also offers an alternative and, like her namesake, Job’s daughter born after the reconciliation with God, promises a new and better world for women. Her narrative forces Maria to abandon the comfort and solace in romantic reveries about herself and instead ‘to consider the oppressed state of woman, and to lament that she had given birth to a daughter’ (120). As a result, Maria proposes that Jemima helps her find her daughter in order for the two of them, in turn, to help the daughter together. In exchange, Jemima will not only be considered ‘“a second mother”’, she will also be rewarded ‘“a better fate”’. Later on, when Maria’s despondency threatens to prevent her from trying to free herself, Jemima reminds her of the promise: ‘“I have perhaps no right now to expect the performance of your promise”,’ she says, ‘“but on you it depends to reconcile me with the human race”’ (174). The alternative to Rousseau’s doomed fiction of a woman of sensibility is solidarity and collective action between women. The apparently minor character Jemima thus plays a significant role in focusing attention on the dangers women risk in their encounters with seductive men of knowledge and sensibility. Just how radical and threatening her utopian vision is may be seen by examining how William Godwin, who posthumously edited the novel for publication, effaces it, thereby reinscribing his dead wife’s political arguments into a sentimental plot. After all, the alternative I have been evoking is only one of the proposed endings to the unfinished novel.4 Godwin prefaces the utopian vision of Maria restored to life by Jemima and her daughter after a failed suicide. He calls attention to its divergence from the ‘preceding hints’ (183) for an ending where, according to him, Wollstonecraft plots the more dismal suicidal end. Godwin’s vocalised hesitation respecting this conclusion betrays his failure to envisage women as subjects of action and agents of their own history. Such a failure is confirmed by his editorial interventions elsewhere in the book. On at least two occasions, Godwin emphasises a conclusion even more different from those alluded to in the hints, namely one where Darnford – and not Jemima – is the ‘deliverer of Maria’ (103 n. 1; 163

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n. 1). He even goes so far as to suggest that an anonymous gentleman who promises that Maria will not be ‘insulted or forced out of the house, by any body’ (163) including her husband may well refer to Darnford. (He nevertheless adds that this possibility remains decidedly improbable.) Whereas Godwin sees the inconsistencies between his reading of the story and the details in front of him, he attributes them to an ‘afterthought of the author’. In doing so, he blatantly ignores both the narrative voice and Jemima’s own intervention which warn against imagining a happy ending and marital bliss for Maria. Godwin’s editorial comments reveal, paradoxically, that he remains as trapped in sentimental and romantic conventions as Maria. Not only does he desire romantic closure; more seriously he relocates the heroine in the conventional plot of virtue in distress where the woman of sentiment depends on the actions of her male counterpart. This desire reveals much about Godwin’s anxieties concerning both the nature of his relationship with Wollstonecraft and the implications of collective action amongst women. What indeed would men like Godwin and Darnford do if women in distress do not rely on them? Godwin’s reading of the Maria–Darnford plot in terms of a conventional sentimental fiction parallels his attempt to write Wollstonecraft as a woman of feeling and sensibility – as a ‘female Werther’ or a Julie – in his biographical account. Of course, as recent commentary on the ongoing process of Godwin’s revisions suggests, his intention is not so much to misrepresent Wollstonecraft as a sentimental object of distress as to acknowledge a more central role to sympathy and feeling as well as advance his own agenda for reform.5 Such readings are crucial to a more comprehensive understanding of Godwin’s philosophy. They nevertheless fail to confront how he overlooks his dead wife’s feminism. Depicting her as a latter-day Julie, Godwin’s biography revealingly suppresses Wollstonecraft’s intellectual contributions and, in particular, her lifelong determination to insist on women’s rationality as well as on their moral, intellectual and civic autonomy. Godwin thereby sets the terms for almost all subsequent accounts of Wollstonecraft’s life and works which, taking their cue from him, render her a New Héloïse. In so doing, he plays directly into the hands of her anti-Jacobin opponents. For, in the aftermath of the events of the French Revolution, sentimentality becomes a dirty word as Rousseau’s plot of domestic seduction takes on national – even international – proportions. If Edmund Burke’s defence of the French queen clearly valorises the man of feeling who weeps over female

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virtue in distress, he nevertheless protests against the extension of this sensibility to men of other classes and to women in general. He writes of the events in France as the dangerous outcome of this extension when, as in the Nouvelle Héloïse, the dancing-master or valet de chambre seduces the ‘females of the first families’ into domestic and political disorder.6 The woman who falls by her excessive sensibility spells the downfall of the entire social order as the plot of seduction is written in overtly class-conscious terms.7 Biographies of Wollstonecraft remain caught between these two visions of excessive sentiment. She is, as in the Godwinian account, valorised as the woman of sensibility caught between the dictates of principles and the demands of her sentiment. Alternatively, in the anti-Jacobin account, she is demonised as the woman whose excessive sentiment renders her an hysteric threat to the very fabric of society. Her destiny is trapped within the two moments of Rousseau’s fiction. She is either the fallen Julie or the redeemed New Héloïse, either woman ‘sunk below the dignity of rational creatures’ or ‘angel’, to apply Wollstonecraft’s description of the creatures who people Rousseau’s paradise (VRW 143), to which I shall return shortly.8 Consider discussions of Wollstonecraft’s relationship with the painter Henry Fuseli which cast her as the sentimental heroine of a Nouvelle Héloïse-like plot of the innocent seduced – or almost seduced – by the worldly man. Despite their different political agendas, both William Godwin and John Knowles, Fuseli’s official biographer, explain Wollstonecraft’s departure to France as a consequence of the failed love affair. Knowles claims that Wollstonecraft could not have foreseen that ‘the attachment on her part … would be the cause of her leaving this country, and thus becoming an eye-witness of the system of Gallic liberty which she attempted to uphold … ’9 In accordance with the antiJacobin version, Wollstonecraft’s sentimental excesses overdetermine her commitment to the hysterical cause of the French Revolution. Godwin, on the other hand, suggests that she left England because she could no longer endure the pressures of a Platonic relationship. Increasingly desiring the happiness of a ‘more intimate union’ which she knew she could not have, he explains, she felt alone and abandoned. This was why she moved to France. Like Rousseau’s Julie, Godwin’s Mary is torn between illegal love and legal respectability and, by choosing the former, expresses her inherent nobility, virtue and sensibility. If Godwin and Knowles differ in how they portray Wollstonecraft’s love for Fuseli, they are alike in suggesting that she succumbs to it totally, allowing it to

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become the guiding principle in her life. She remains caught between the two extremes of sentimental excess. Similarly, both Godwin and Knowles argue that Fuseli the man had an undeniable influence on Wollstonecraft the woman. Knowles suggests that his influence exerted itself on Wollstonecraft’s relation to clothes and fashion. He claims that when they first met she was what Fuseli most disliked in woman: ‘a philosophical sloven’.10 In order to be more like him, she ‘paid more attention to her person, dressed fashionably, and introduced furniture somewhat elegant into commodious apartments … ’11 In short, according to Knowles, at the very moment when Wollstonecraft was writing her now famous attack against women of manners and fashion, she was becoming just such a woman under the influence of and in order to please Fuseli. Knowles, of course, does not even mention Wollstonecraft’s literary and philosophical works, except for her translations and reviews, neither of which represent innovative and original material. He translates Fuseli’s comments into a verdict on her appearance as opposed to her intellectual rigour, thereby precluding any possibility for a female intellectual to be anything but a ‘sloven’. In keeping with the anti-Jacobin’s hysterical Héloïse, his oxymoron (‘philosophical sloven’) translates the absurd presumptions of a woman who aspires to be a philosopher, an aspiration that creates disorder both in her life and in philosophy more generally. Godwin, on the other hand, recognises the intellectual in Wollstonecraft. He emphasises the shared interest that Wollstonecraft and Fuseli had in painting and Rousseau. Godwin remains similar to Knowles in his suggestion that it is Wollstonecraft who is enraptured by Fuseli and not the other way round. Thus, although they both like discussing painting, Fuseli is portrayed as the active element in the relationship. He finds in Mary ‘a person perhaps more susceptible of the emotions painting is calculated to excite, than any other with whom he ever conversed’. Fuseli’s conversation, on the other hand, is ‘very conducive to the improvement of Mary’s mind’.12 Mary is thus the willing pupil, eagerly awaiting the words of wisdom to fall from the genius’s mouth. If Godwin casts Mary in the role of the student, it is because he cannot imagine her in any other. This typecasting is all the more striking when Godwin discusses Fuseli’s and Wollstonecraft’s common interest in Rousseau. Godwin explains that Homer and Rousseau are Fuseli’s favourite authors. Although Godwin does not question the choice of Homer, he sees in the preference for Rousseau a youthful choice. ‘Smitten with

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Rousseau’s conception of the perfection of the savage state, and the essential abortiveness of all civilization,’ he explains, ‘Mr Fuseli looks at all our little attempts at improvement, with a spirit that borders perhaps too much contempt and indifference.’ Godwin is, of course, using this example to insist on his own belief in progress. This insistence should not prevent us from commenting on how he figures Wollstonecraft. He concludes this paragraph affirming: ‘Mary came something more a cynic out of the school of Mr Fuseli, than she went into it.’13 For Godwin, only Wollstonecraft, the painter’s dutiful student, could have been affected by the encounter. He remains totally silent on Wollstonecraft’s own interest in Rousseau and especially on her clearly articulated divergence from him. Both Knowles and Godwin, then, see Wollstonecraft as a youthful and eager apprentice in love with a worldly man of wisdom, as a Nouvelle Héloïse who succumbs – catastrophically or not – to the philosopher’s seduction. Shades of this heritage are present in Claire Tomalin’s more recent vision of this relationship. In her biography of Wollstonecraft, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, Tomalin writes: No doubt she [Wollstonecraft] saw herself as an Héloïse; her curiosity about the world she had scarcely seen, the grandiose emotions she had scarcely experienced, the art she had not sufficiently studied or appreciated – all could be satisfied by him. He had only to talk, and she to listen and worship. The prospect was irresistible to both.14 Reiterating her sources uncritically, Tomalin portrays Wollstonecraft here as an innocent sycophant who lends an uncritical ear to the more learned man.15 Tomalin never evokes Wollstonecraft’s few surviving letters, including the excerpt cited in ‘“An Eve to Please Me”’, which suggest that just maybe she did not see herself as a young student, but rather as a published and recognised philosopher. Nor does Tomalin consider Vindication of the Rights of Woman where Wollstonecraft explicitly argues against relationships of dependency, namely those where women must submit to the authority of their parents and husbands instead of to the authority of their own reason. In short, not only does she accept that Héloïse is Wollstonecraft’s model, more seriously and not unlike Godwin, she cannot imagine any other. Tomalin’s oversight nevertheless provides us with some insight. Despite its continuities with the other accounts I have been discussing, hers makes Fuseli’s would-be Abelard just as risible as Wollstonecraft’s would-be Héloïse. He is as gratified by the role he plays as she is. In

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focusing on the depravities of the philosopher, Tomalin’s account echoes the more biting examination of Jemima’s version of Rousseau’s essentially sado-masochistic fiction and invites us to consider the analysis of the male philosopher – as opposed to his female student – as a central aspect of this rewrite. If Wollstonecraft is Héloïse, then she is an Héloïse who is clearly capable of distinguishing between the seduction of philosophy and that of the philosopher, between mastering thinking and thinking like/for the master. Perhaps the Héloïse in question is not Rousseau’s. In her seminal analysis of women and philosophy, Michèle Le Doeuff argues that the relationship between the twelfth-century Héloïse to her teacher and seducer Abelard is paradigmatic of that between women and philosophy.16 Like other women of her time, Héloïse was denied attendance in a university. Instead she was provided with a private tutor, Abelard. The absence of any institutional infrastructure or mediation made her particularly vulnerable to seduction of both a carnal and an intellectual nature. Whereas her fellow male philosophy students might also have been equally susceptible to seduction, alternative schools of thought might have counterbalanced the overwhelming weight of the overly esteemed single master. The institution would have represented a third and mediating instance, breaking the highly personal and binary relationship. In the absence of this third instance, Héloïse’s relation to knowledge is ultimately a relation to the knowledge of the master, to whom she plays the devoted disciple. Instead of being taught to philosophise, she is taught to repeat the precepts of Abelard’s philosophy. In this sense, argues Le Doeuff, Héloïse remains essential for the propagation of Abelard’s philosophy. For the male student to affirm himself as a philosopher and to philosophise, he has to establish a radical break with the philosophy of his master. To do so, he expresses his disappointment by exposing the limitations of his master, produces a new system to overcome or replace this lack and thereby affirms his own philosophical authority. Not so, explains Le Doeuff, the female student, who has not been taught how to philosophise but rather how to venerate the philosopher. She becomes instead the ‘healer of his battered texts … the housekeeper … responsible for the upkeep of monuments built in his honour’.17 Abelard the philosopher needs his student-mistress to assure his own posterity when other male students in turn will demolish him. For Le Doeuff, the details of this twelfthcentury story become paradigmatic of the relationship between women and philosophy, and not only for those women like Abelard’s Héloïse

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and René Descartes’s Elisabeth of Bohemia who were excluded from universities, but also for those like Simone de Beauvoir who were not. The Héloïse complex, then, describes how woman’s relationship to philosophy is reduced to her relationship with a would-be male philosopher, whereby he postures as the subject who knows and she accepts knowledge from him and him alone, much like Milton’s Eve prays to her God and Adam’s through Adam.18 Like Jemima’s comments on her man of genius, Le Doeuff’s model reveals more about the philosopher’s dependence on women than on women’s dependence on the philosopher. Women furnish him with concrete and material needs: indeed, it is no more possible to overlook Jemima’s status as house servant or housewife who provides both domestic and sexual services than to ignore Le Doeuff’s images of the ‘healer’ and the ‘housekeeper’, borrowed from the conventionally female work of catering, cleaning and maintaining. The metaphorical use of these images allows the transition from material to affective needs, evoking the disciple-like relationship between the woman and the philosopher. Whereas Jemima certainly alludes to the veneration her master required of her, her retrospective analysis of the situation authorises her to express repugnance for this requirement. For, as mentioned above, in reading her his unpublished productions, her philosopher needs more than her adulation; the origin of some of his work may well lie in her ‘“untutored remarks”’ (114). Read through the lens of Le Doeuff’s Héloïse complex, Jemima’s New Héloïse narrative reveals the extent to which the glorification and development of the philosopher is at the expense of women’s improvement. The man works in the service of philosophy, the woman as the philosopher’s servant. Significantly, Jemima’s account indicts Godwin as much as Rousseau: hadn’t the former claimed in his 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice that the life of a philosopher is of higher worth than his chambermaid? If under the dire situation of a fire the life of either Fenelon or his chambermaid could be saved, Godwin claims that ‘there are few of us that would hesitate to pronounce’ which one should be.19 He adds that this rational and utilitarian choice should be made regardless whether ‘I had been myself the chambermaid’ or that she had been my ‘wife, my mother or my benefactor’. Yet, as Jemima claims, the philosopher’s social value depends not only on the domestic labour but also on the physical and intellectual effort of his maid. She thereby questions not only the results of Godwin’s utilitarian calculus but also its very presuppositions. Of course, as has been frequently noted, fol-

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lowing his encounter with Wollstonecraft, Godwin changes the female chambermaid to the masculine ‘valet’20 (and mutatis mutandis ‘my brother, my father or my benefactor’), reflecting perhaps the greater importance he accords to feeling and sentiment.21 Yet, surely, the implicit argument that the person who assures the material conditions of the philosopher’s intellectual life is not as important as he is remains.22 Although appearing at the end of Wollstonecraft’s career, Jemima’s analysis does not represent a new moment in the feminist philosopher’s thought. The analysis in the novel echoes the terms of all of Wollstonecraft’s encounters with male intellectuals. In the course of her relationship with male thinkers – from the unknown Ogle to the forgotten Reverend Waterhouse, from the painter Fuseli to the poet Imlay, from the philosopher Rousseau to the politician Mirabeau – Wollstonecraft praises the philosopher but deplores the libertine, admires the fine sentiment but scorns the gross sensuality, praises their genius but repudiates the manner in which they ‘sink into sensuality’ (MWL 155). Time and again, she reiterates the essential terms of her lifelong encounters with men of sensibility, genius and taste and, like Jemima, recognises the potential of philosophy, sensibility and genius for female improvement but rejects the philosopher’s destructive seduction. This repetition invites us to consider how these encounters may be crucial to understanding Wollstonecraft’s moral, political and aesthetic philosophy. In the rest of this chapter, I would like to examine in more detail Wollstonecraft’s analysis of the figure of the philosopher tracing it from her early encounter with a man of sensibility through her different writings on Rousseau. This analysis, I would like to suggest, distinguishes between the male philosopher and the ungendered subject of philosophy, to which women also have access. It thereby becomes the basis of Wollstonecraft’s argument in favour of public women. Yet, although Wollstonecraft adopts the perspective of the disinterested philosopherspectator who refuses participation in the theatre of the world, she nevertheless abandons it in favour of a more ‘modest’ position. In the final sections of this chapter, I will argue that modesty, liberated from its sexual connotations and invested instead with an emphasis on self-knowledge and experience, articulates a very different subject of knowledge. By comparing Wollstonecraft’s definition of modesty to philosopher Richard Price’s emphasis on practical virtue, I will demonstrate that her use of the term is more than an appropriation of a Christian virtue and implies instead a philosophical and analytical concept.

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Ogle: or, how the philosopher sinks into the man Wollstonecraft’s first and in many ways paradigmatic relationship with male intellectuals is that with an insignificant and now forgotten man, George Ogle, whom she met during her stay as governess in the Kingsborough household in Ireland. In a series of letters to her sisters, Wollstonecraft contrasts her true sensibility to that of the lady who acts as the fashionable woman of sentiment. To Kingsborough, aristocrat of birth, wealth and power, Wollstonecraft juxtaposes her membership in an aristocracy of feeling. She draws attention to her employer’s affected tenderness: her lisping, her rouge, her displays of affection towards her lapdogs to the exclusion of her own children. We recognise in this portrait the aristocratic women of display Wollstonecraft spends so much time dissecting in Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The woman of sensibility who ‘takes her dogs to bed, and nurses them with a parade of sensibility, when sick, will suffer her babes to grow up crooked in a nursery’ (VRW 244) is not a far cry from Lady Kingsborough’s affectations. Of more concern here is the fact that Wollstonecraft emphasises her real sensibility by referring to a male authority, Mr Ogle, for whose attention both women compete: He is between forty and fifty – a genius and unhappy – Such a man, you may suppose would catch your sister’s eye – As he has the name of being a man of sense Lady K. has chosen him for her flirt – don’t mistake me – her flirtations are very harmless and she can neither understand nor relish his conversation. But she wishes to be taken particular notice of by a man of acknowledged cleverness. As he had not seen me lately he came and seated himself by me – indeed his sensibility has ever lead him to pay attention to a poor forlorn stranger – He paid me some fanciful compliments – and lent me some very pretty stanzas – melancholy one[s], you may suppose as he thought they would accord with my feelings. (MWL 146–7; emphasis in the original) For Wollstonecraft, Lady Kingsborough’s interest in Ogle is a prolongation of her affectation. Incapable of understanding or appreciating him, she is, in fact, no more interested in him than she is in her children. Instead she values what appearing in his company will do to her image. To this pretentiousness Wollstonecraft juxtaposes her own true sensibility, for she can appreciate the genius on his own terms. In the course of these few lines, she insists more than once on the attention

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he lavishes on her. The first time, she reflects on his sensibility: he is attentive to her distressful situation as a stranger in Ireland. The second, she comments on hers: together they appreciate the delicacy of his poems. Wollstonecraft establishes her identity as a person of true sensibility, then, by contrasting herself with another woman and by comparing herself to a man.23 In seeking to establish herself as Ogle’s equal, Wollstonecraft also describes his wife. The man has ‘great faults’, his wife ‘little ones’. Whereas he is full of ‘sensibility and genius’, she is full of ‘tenderness’ (MWL 151; emphasis in the original). Mrs Ogle – much like Rousseau’s Theresa and Fuseli’s wife Sophia – is thus typecast into a gendered role which Wollstonecraft herself wants to escape. Instead of identifying with the tender-hearted Mrs Ogle or the dazzling Lady Kingsborough, she sees herself as the equal of Mr Ogle. She too is a person of genius and sensibility and both her sense of solitude and her melancholic spirit are offered in support of this identification. In one letter, she boasts to her sister that what Ogle finds ‘renders her interesting’ is how she ‘rails at a fault’, only to find ‘new sympathies and feelings start up’ (MWL 151). Such emotional instability, reflecting both the desire to improve mankind and disgust at its debasement, signifies in eighteenth-century discourse the intensity of emotion present in men of sensibility and genius.24 Wollstonecraft thus seems to be bragging that Ogle finds the symptoms of genius and sensibility in her soaring and despairing spirit. Two months latter, on the eve of her departure from Ireland, however, Wollstonecraft’s praise for Ogle has evaporated. She writes to her sister Eliza, ‘I pity him – I am sorry to hear a man of sensibility and cleverness talking of sentiment sink into sensuality – such will ever I fear be the case with the inconsistent human heart when there are no principles to restrain and direct the wayward impulses of it’ (155; emphasis in the original). If, earlier, she had measured herself in relation to his talents and his genius, here she evaluates him in terms of abstract standards. In the discrepancy between what he is and how he acts, he seems to be no better than Lady Kingsborough and Mrs Ogle. Wollstonecraft does not need to refer to a male authority to articulate Ogle’s inefficiencies and to emphasise her own genius. Instead, she bases it on a generalisable principle, one that contrasts sentiment and sensuality, principle and impulse. But the distinction that Wollstonecraft notes here is significant for another reason. It points to one between the man and the philosopher that she begins to develop. Her disappointment in Ogle implies a more general belief that the

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‘man of sensibility and cleverness’ should not prevail over the man himself, that his refined spirit is in fact an elaborate cultured masquerade for his more physical desires.25 This evocation of the philosopher’s descent into the man offers a significant departure from the more documented analysis of women’s failure to ascend into philosophers. Indeed, a now standard and accepted reading of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman consists in mentioning her attempt to efface any trace of the female body by regulating and controlling it or by proscribing female pleasures and desires more generally.26 Wollstonecraft’s disappointment in Ogle suggests that there may be something more than revulsion for female sexuality and rejection of female identity and all the more so because, in this same letter, she offers herself as a counter-example. ‘[W]hen I have more strength,’ she writes, ‘I read Philosophy – and write – I hope you have not forgot that I am an Author yet many are the hours that are loaden with cares …’ (155). There is no mistaking the pride with which Wollstonecraft affirms her occupation and her recently acquired published and public status, even as she continues to bemoan the melancholia and depression which more often than not afflicted the eighteenth-century literati. She may well be juxtaposing the very pride in having lifted herself up to the more sensual pleasures that drag Ogle down. More importantly, if the man sinks into sensuality, then sensibility, delicacy and refinement cannot have a sex. Wollstonecraft expresses, in other words, her considerations on the subject of philosophy and genius. She affirms the need to separate the philosopher from the man, the disinterested, disembodied subject from a corporate or corporeal interest. The consequence this separation has for women is selfevident: if the subject of philosophy has no gender, then women can become philosophers like any ‘man’. Her disappointment with Ogle seems to mark a key moment for Wollstonecraft’s considerations on the subject of philosophy, allowing her thereby to affirm more clearly women’s inherent right to philosophise.

Mary: or, how genius must educate itself By analysing Wollstonecraft’s encounter with Ogle, a man of sensibility, I have suggested that she distinguishes between the seductive charms of the male philosopher himself and her own personal love of knowledge. In so doing, she stakes her claim as a philosopher. What is

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perhaps less obvious is the implications her claim has for other male would-be philosophers. When Rousseau speaks of women, for instance, he speaks not as a disinterested philosopher but as a man. The theoretical limitations of his system are a consequence of this position. Proceeding from this paradigmatic encounter with Ogle, I will now turn to Wollstonecraft’s problematic relationship with the Genevan man of genius. Although it is primarily the feminist philosopher’s resistance to the seduction of Rousseau that preoccupies me, I will also examine her no less scathing reticence regarding Adam Smith’s ‘impartial monitor’. Wollstonecraft’s dissatisfaction with Rousseau follows a similar path as with Ogle. Just as she originally identifies with the latter, in describing her recent discovery of Emile, Wollstonecraft very much wants to identify with its author: I am now reading Rousseau’s Emile, and love his paradoxes. He chuses a common capacity to educate – and gives as a reason, that a genius will educate itself – however he rambles into that chimerical world in which I have too often [wand]ered – and draws the usual conclusion that all is vanity and vexation of spirit. He was a strange inconsistent unhappy clever creature – yet he possessed an uncommon portion of sensibility and penetration. You know my concatenation of ideas. (MWL 145) As a governess, she too is engaged in the ‘common capacity to educate’. She is also educating herself: hadn’t she mentioned in an earlier letter that she is ‘reading some philosophical lectures and philosophical sermons – for my own private improvement’ (MWL 137-8)? Moreover, both Rousseau and Wollstonecraft ‘ramble into that chimerical world’, sink into melancholy and despair, and possess an ‘uncommon portion of sensibility and penetration’. She lets her reader draw the obvious conclusion. What a startling shock it must have been to discover that as a woman she could never be such a man, that the genius mentioned in Emile can only be male. As Barbara Taylor has noted, Wollstonecraft’s Mary attempts to set the record straight.27 If the Advertisement clearly rejects the model of Rousseau’s Sophie, a letter written some months before the publication of the novel gives as its reason the very same Wollstonecraft attributes to Rousseau: ‘it is a tale to illustrate an opinion of mine, that a genius will educate itself’ (MWL 162). Yet, as the title implies, this genius is a woman. The novel demonstrates why a female genius in particular needs to educate herself. Unlike her brother who is sent away to school,

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Mary receives no formal training. After the housekeeper teaches her to read and her mother’s French maid provides her with some notions of the foreign language, Mary relies on these rudiments of knowledge to pursue her own interests. She peruses ‘with avidity every book that came in her way’ (10), including tales of woe (11), the scriptures (16) and canonical works by Thomson, Young and Milton (15). Her reading experience rapidly becomes constitutive of her identity and in this invites a parallel with the dissipating novels her more ‘feminine’ mother holds up as a mirror for her soul. Like her mother who planted a rose bush ‘in imitation of those susceptible souls’ (8) encountered in novel-reading, Mary’s fondness for tales of woe ‘made her almost realize the fictitious distress’ (11). If here the narrator’s qualifying ‘almost’ draws a wedge between the experience of the mother and the daughter, nothing prevents Mary from making her subsequent readings real. Her perusal of the scriptures encourages her to stay up at nights ‘discussing some points of doctrine which puzzled her’ (16). The interlocutor of these discussions appears to be none other than God himself. Indeed, given the narrator’s request to call Mary’s perusal, ‘conversing with the Author of Nature’ (16; emphasis in the original), we may well ask what kind of realisation occurs in these nightly readings.28 Mary also ‘realises’ these readings in a very different sense: she makes her own texts out of those she reads. In parallel with her self-education as a reader is an equally, perhaps more striking, emphasis on her education in and through writing. Even before she becomes literate, she composes songs and tunes addressed to angels. As her reading expands she learns how to write by borrowing, copying and appropriating language. ‘Mary had very little instruction,’ we are informed, ‘but by copying her friend’s letters, whose hand she admired, she soon became a proficient; a little practice made her write with tolerable correctness, and her genius gave force to it’ (13). The narrator’s comments echo Wollstonecraft’s promise in her letter and suggest that the entire novel can be read as the story of how Mary becomes an author of her own making. Like Wollstonecraft who refuses, in the Advertisement, to ‘copy the originals of great masters’ and prefers instead to be among those who ‘speak for themselves, and not to be an echo – even of the sweetest sounds – or the reflector of the most sublime beams’ (5), Mary soon discovers her own voice. From simply eliminating the mistakes of her childish hand, she produces ‘formal answers to his [her husband’s] formal letters’ (22). We are nevertheless subsequently reminded that most of her letters remain ‘a transcript of her heart’ (25), and many of

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the examples of her writing provided in the novel remain transcriptions of her sentiment and sensibility. The clear presence of two narrative voices, the unnamed narrator’s and Mary’s, thus plots the progress of Mary’s literary apprenticeship by interposing the critical commentary with examples from Mary’s slow mastery of writing.29 This narrative separation invites the reader to position herself in relation to Mary’s sublime excesses by adopting a critical distance from both the ‘transcripts of her heart’ and the narrator’s more objective criticism. If, in this first novel unlike the later Wrongs of Woman (vide ‘Wants of Women’), the ‘woman who has thinking powers’ (5) does not adopt both the abstract, disembodied and disinterested voice of philosophy and the embodied voice of experience, it is nevertheless significant that both the voice of and the voice on genius are female. What remains striking about this account of an education in writing is the fact that Mary’s reflections are transcribed in ‘The little book [in which she wrote] that was now her only confident’ (51). That Mary’s medium is a private journal and her preferred interlocutor herself distinguishes the ‘Heroine of this fiction’ (5) from both Clarissa and Héloïse, whose dependence on the epistolary and hence on confidences in another is so clearly part of their narrative. For, if private journals and letters share a number of formal features, including shared origins in the confession, they clearly differ in who mediates relations between the private conscience and the larger world. By becoming both addresser and addressee of her writing, Mary allows no one else to intercede between herself and her conversations ‘with the Author of Nature’ (16). Moreover, the particular formal aspects of the ‘little book’ further emphasise how ‘a genius will educate itself’ (MWL 145; 162). This insistence on the heroine’s self-dependence hampers her identification with her fellow creatures, urging her instead to look to herself. The introverted journal, then, is not far from the mirror-like novels that screen her mother from the larger world to reflect the desires of the written word. Nor is the journal writer different from Milton’s Eve, who turns away from Adam ‘less fair,/Less winning soft, less amiably mild’ and back to ‘that smooth watery image’ (PL 4: 479–80), a reflection of herself. In short, for all the moral self-dependence the private journal proclaims it may well imply a dangerous and illusory lens, causing – as the repeated reference to Corinthians suggests – the heroine to see through a glass darkly (I Corinthians 13: 12; M 16; 47).

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It would nevertheless be wrong to assimilate Mary’s self-dependence to the narcissistic projections of her mother and Milton’s Eve, for her introverted speculations imply a moral conscience which does not rely on the false reflections of the worldly mirror. Attempting to justify her illicit passion, she tells Henry: ‘My conscience does not smite me, and that Being who is greater than the internal monitor, may approve of what the world condemns; sensible that in Him I live, could I brave His presence, or hope in solitude to find peace, if I acted contrary to conviction, that the world might approve of my conduct – what could the world give to compensate for my own esteem?’ (47) In her reference to the ‘internal monitor’, Mary alludes here to the philosophy of Adam Smith, the ‘cold moralist’ mentioned in the next paragraph.30 She suggests that instead of relying on the way in which others see us, we must learn how to know ourselves. We may well want to compare this preference for braving the presence of the absolute disembodied subject of knowledge over the embodied worldly judges with Wollstonecraft’s attempt to define herself through absolute principles and not through Ogle’s sensual eyes. And if like Milton’s Eve, Mary must forsake her self-reflection, she is not lead to the equally illusive mirror constituted by Adam’s eyes but to the divine presence itself. Like Adam seeking and (subsequently granted) ‘[his] likeness … [his] fit help, … [his] other self, / … [His] wish exactly to [his] heart’s desire’ (PL 8: 450–1), Mary spends her time on earth in search of a fellow creature. Unlike the father of mankind, she is not given her heart’s desire, and time and again realises how singular and solitary she is. Consider her repeated attempts to differentiate herself from the numerous beneficiaries of her (more often than not) monetary help. On one occasion, she asks of drunken women ‘who attacked the sailors’, ‘Are these my fellow creatures!’ (54), her very horror and disgust signalling a resounding ‘no’. Similarly, her relationship with Anne is doomed less by the latter’s bad health than by their two very different natures. Although Mary begins her writing career instructed by Anne, she rapidly distinguishes herself. ‘In every thing it was not the great, but the beautiful, or the pretty that caught her [Anne’s] attention. And in composition, the polish of style, and harmony of numbers, interested her much more than the flights of genius, or abstracted speculations’ (19). Whereas her friend remains curtailed by a feminine taste for the beautiful and the orderly, clearly Mary is swept by her affinities for the

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more powerful sublime. These affinities are expressed not only by her self-educating ‘genius’ and her passionate involvement with religion, but also, as John Barrell has indicated, by her strong preference for the masculine historical painting over the feminine portrait.31 Despite the suggestion that Henry’s hand ‘seemed that of a fellowcreature’ (40; emphasis added), Mary’s relationship with Henry is equally doomed. With his sickly nature and his disposition for melancholy tunes, Henry is not unlike other ‘men of genius’ whose company ‘delighted her. With beings of this class she did not often meet; it is a rare genus; her first favourites were men past the meridian of life, and of a philosophic turn’ (25). We may well wonder whether the author’s subsequent disappointment with such men is not written into Henry who, despite his avowed admiration, fails to recognise Mary as his equal. Instead of discussing historical paintings with her, he turns her, like other women, into a spectacle for his eyes. ‘“I would give the world for your picture, with the expression I have seen in your face, when you have been supporting your friend”’ (34), he tells her, figuring her as a tamed object of compassion. Similarly, when she expostulates on the question of earthly passions, he answers in patronising tones, ‘“Dear enthusiastic creature … how you steal into my soul”’ (46). One wonders whether a revengeful spirit may not explain Mary’s subsequent inability to ‘pray for his recovery’ and what unsaid wish is being expressed in the only prayer she can say on his deathbed: ‘The will of Heaven be done’ (70). Henry’s death is, of course, announced from his first appearance in the novel and comes as no surprise. Yet given a literary tradition where women are consumed by their unsaid or illegitimate passions, Henry’s death nevertheless surprises, heralding subsequent attempts by Helen Maria Williams (in Julia) and Eliza Fenwick (in Secrecy) to rewrite the socially debilitating ending of Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse. As in these novels, Mary Wollstonecraft’s heroine outlives both her illegitimate passions and their object, channelling her desires into charity and good deeds. In so doing, however, she affirms ultimately the solitude of the female genius, to whom the sympathy of a fellow-creature, male or female, is denied. Yet some sort of fellowship is nevertheless recognised in Mary’s encounter with another man ‘of polished manner, and dazzling wit’ (60) who in the extremes he embodies sounds like Jemima’s master and not unlike Rousseau.32 Although good-natured and humane, he remains a ‘slave to [female] beauty, the captive of sense’ (60); although interested in virtue, he is incapable of practising it; although rich, he is

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discontent. This libertine philosopher considers women toys until Mary’s genius and conversation makes him doubt ‘whether heaven was peopled with spirits masculine’ (60). We may well wonder what kind of fictional possibilities, to paraphrase the Advertisement, are being imagined here. Perhaps Wollstonecraft imagines Rousseau’s encounter with a woman other than Theresa, one who will invite a more positive vision of her sex. Just as in her real-life confrontation with Ogle, Wollstonecraft does not stop with an affirmation of her own sensibility, here too Mary reflects on this man’s character, distinguishing between his befuddled thinking and the clarity that the disinterested philosopher should acquire. ‘… It is very difficult to discipline the mind of a thinker, or reconcile him to the weakness, the inconsistency of his understanding; and a still more laborious task for him to conquer his passions, and learn to seek content, instead of happiness. Good dispositions, and virtuous propensities, without the light of the Gospel, produce eccentric characters: comet-like, they are always in extremes; while revelation resembles the laws of attraction, and produces uniformity; but too often is the attraction feeble; and the light so obscured by passion, as to force the bewildered soul to fly into void space, and wander in confusion.’ (61) Mary’s comments argue that potentially explosive innate qualities need to be restrained and formed through rigorous training and effort. This necessity is articulated through the reference to discipline, to the struggle to retain passions and to the image of light, clearly borrowed from the Bible. Yet, if Mary argues in favour of control, she also remains strangely obsessed by the excesses and extremes of the undisciplined mind. Despite the confusion and chaos it might provoke, the ‘“cometlike”’ flamboyance seems a more tempting alternative than the more staid and uniform certainty that comes with the light of the Gospel. The temptation this flamboyance offers Mary becomes all the more obvious when her comments are resituated in the narrative, where they intervene as clearly demarcated direct discourse and as one of the numerous samples of her writing. The narrator prefaces Mary’s speech by noting how they result from observations on the man of wit as well as from the ‘tinge from her own mind’. Contrary to what her remarks on confused thinking might lead us to think, Mary’s reflections are no more disciplined and clarified than the man’s. The narrator informs us that it is in ‘that kind of painful quietness which arises from reason

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clouded by disgust; she had not yet learned to be resigned; vague hopes agitate her’ (60; emphasis added). Like the man referred to in the passage, Mary seems to seek happiness rather than contented resignation. These introductory comments invite us to consider the ‘thinker’ discussed in Mary’s comments as an abstract reference encompassing both the man of wit and Mary herself. The masculine pronouns, in other words, refer less to the specific man and more to an abstract model of a thinker. In her observations and in her interest in ‘cometlike’ excesses, Mary may in fact be considering herself as the potentially explosive genius. Paradoxically, although seeming to criticise the Rousseau-like man of dazzling wit, read as an expression of her own sublime excesses and her own flights of genius, Mary’s comments almost defend him.

Rousseau’s paradise I have been suggesting that Wollstonecraft’s Mary, a Fiction, responding to Rousseau’s Emile, stages the difficulty of both being and becoming a woman of genius and sensibility. By turning to the far more celebrated response to Rousseau presented in Vindication of the Rights of Woman, I will examine how she converts this fascination into an argument in favour of women’s right to self-determination. In a review of Germaine De Staël’s Letters on the Works and Characters of J.J. Rousseau published not long after Mary, Wollstonecraft defends Rousseau. She accuses De Staël of attempting to discipline, control and regulate Rousseau’s thinking, of levelling all the excesses and disparities into one uniform and ordered appearance. De Staël, writes Wollstonecraft, ‘transform[s] a sublime mountain into a beautiful plain …’ (AR 136). Echoing Mary, she implies that De Staël has ‘uniformed’ his thinking. This time her fascination for extremes is clear. Likewise, in a review of David Williams’s Lectures on Education, published at the same time, she defends the Genevan philosopher in very similar terms. ‘Rousseau’s mistake was the mistake of genius, ever eager to trace a well-proportioned system,’ she comments, ‘though vortex whirling round vortex threatened immediate destruction to the airy fabric, yet every thing must bend to the forming hand of ardent fancy, and worlds and minds move as it directs’ (142). Although she clearly recognises the ‘mistake’, she nevertheless admires the spirit, energy and force involved in the construction of the ‘system’. The sublime power of his ‘ardent fancy’ almost justifies his mistake.

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Wollstonecraft’s fascination with Rousseau’s thought cannot be understood separate from her emerging reflection on the distinction between passive resignation and active struggle, between content and happiness, between the beautiful and the sublime, between the paradisiacal pair Adam and Eve and their satanic tempter. When she addresses and represents Rousseau’s thought in her more polemical Vindication of the Rights of Woman, it is cast in images and language borrowed from Milton and from eighteenth-century debates on the sublime and beautiful. As in Mary, the story of the New Héloïse and her philosopher-seducer is grafted onto that the first pair. On one occasion, Wollstonecraft attacks the domestic bliss that Rousseau defends in his description of Sophie. She compares this ‘moderate felicity’, which incites ‘more tenderness than respect’ to the ‘emotion similar to what we feel when children are playing, or animals sporting’ (94) and in a footnote likens this scene to the ‘pleasing picture of paradisiacal happiness’. She notes, however, that she prefers contemplating the ‘grandest of all human sights’ (94 n. 2). As I argued in ‘“An Eve to Please Me”’, this preference expresses her faith in and respect for postlapsarian struggles of humanity. Not surprisingly, Rousseau’s vision of domestic serenity is as defective as Milton’s. ‘Permanent virtue! alas! Rousseau, respectable visionary!’ she exclaims elsewhere, ‘thy paradise would soon be violated by the entrance of some unexpected guest. Like Milton’s it would only contain angels, or men sunk below the dignity of rational creatures …’ (143). In its diametrical extremes and in its inability to resolve contradictions, Rousseau’s romantic vision of beautiful paradise conveys little of drama, passions and struggles of humanity. Nor is he a particular prophetic visionary: in his blindness to human nature and human aspiration, he fails to foresee the obvious dangers. Now, clearly in Wollstonecraft’s rewriting of the myth of origins, Rousseau is cast as the eloquent satanic tempter.33 In a ‘most insidious attempt to hasten her fall by apparent respect’ (142), the French philosopher seduces Eve into believing that pleasure is virtue, that immediate gratification can substitute for the effort that achieves success only in the long run. Like other educators, Rousseau, the satanic seducer, denies Eve the possibility of acquiring knowledge through experience in exchange for information he will bestow; he ‘regulates her passions’ instead of allowing her to learn through her own struggles. To top it all, he calls this denial ‘respect’ for the weaker sex. In the conclusion to the first chapter, Wollstonecraft articulates the terms of Rousseau’s limited satanic view. ‘[H]ad Rousseau mounted one

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step higher in his investigation,’ she writes, ‘or could his eye have pierced through the foggy atmosphere, which he almost disdained to breathe, his active mind would have darted forward to contemplate the perfection of man in the establishment of true civilization, instead of taking his ferocious flight back to the night of sensual ignorance’ (87). In his struggles with passions, Rousseau announces the beginning of the dynamic motion of the sublime, but like Milton’s Satan this outcast of fortune does not rise high enough above his ‘passion and discontent’ (94 n. 2) to attain great virtue. In the midst of his struggles he gives up, never attaining the sublime heights. Rousseau, suggests Wollstonecraft, is a lazy visionary, one who prefers to take the coward’s way out, who prefers immediate sensual gratification to the knowledge that comes with struggle. Instead of ascending the philosophical heights, like Ogle and Satan he descends into ignorance and sensuality. The angels and sunken men who people his paradise recall both the terms Rousseau uses to describe his Theresa and the degraded condition in which he keeps her. As such they certainly refer to women, on the one hand venerated and protected from knowledge, on the other hand despised for their very stupidity. The philosopher’s veneration of the softer female sex results ultimately in his open contempt for women. But these angels and brutes refer also to Rousseau himself, who in venerating his own innocent purity contributes directly to the debasement of the common person, for Rousseau’s romantic sensibility, like Jemima’s master’s, expresses itself as libertine fantasies. Indeed, by implying that Rousseau is a ‘romantic visionary’, Wollstonecraft draws an implicit comparison between the philosopher and both female readers specifically and women more generally. Novels, she argues in the Vindication, make women ‘creatures of sensation’ (VRW 130), suggesting as I will argue in the next chapter, that such creatures never develop a conscious subjectivity. Instead of an education that encourages the acquisition of knowledge, they are ‘accomplished’ and finished early in life. Such too seems to be the nature of Rousseau’s existence as he retreats into a pleasingly ordered prelapsarian paradise, suspended out of human time. In short, in Vindication of the Rights of Woman Rousseau the satanic seducer is also cast as the prelapsarian Eve, who without knowledge and experience cannot see the arrival of Satan ‘the unexpected guest’ (143). Like Eve, Rousseau confuses the fruit of virtue and toil for the ‘fading wreath’ (142) that pleasure gives. Wollstonecraft articulates this double comparison between Rousseau and Satan and Rousseau and Eve, through a transitional paragraph that

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permits the shift from Rousseau’s paradise to the earthly question of women’s education: But leaving superior minds to correct themselves, and pay dearly for their experience, it is necessary to observe, that it is not against strong, persevering passions, but romantic wavering feelings that I wish to guard the female heart by exercising the understanding: for these paradisiacal reveries are oftener the effect of idleness than of a lively fancy. (143) Although the paragraph explicitly addresses women’s education, it also attends to Rousseau’s shortcomings. Her sarcastic barb on ‘superior minds’ quite obviously targets him. Moreover, the contrast between ‘strong persevering passions’ and ‘romantic wavering feelings’ speaks to and of Rousseau just as much as it speaks to and of women. Rousseau may be a man of feeling and sentiment, a man of imagination and fancy, but he lacks the strong passions. If, as she argues in the beginning of the Vindication, knowledge is attained by ‘struggling with [passions]’ (81), then Rousseau lacks knowledge that leads to a virtuous existence. His moral system is, like that of so many other male authorities, ‘a dogmatical assertion made by men who have seen mankind through the medium of books’ (179), and surely given the title of her polemic, she refers specifically to the sexed being and not to the abstract subject of philosophy. Refusing to experience life himself, Rousseau also denies this experience to women. In fact, he has been seduced by ‘deluding charms of eloquence and philosophic sophistry’ (110) and the magic of his own eloquent pen. He is thus the biggest victim of the ‘dangerous pictures’ his imagination sketched (142). Wollstonecraft turns her back on Rousseau’s paradise, the paradise where he is both God and man, both angel and brute. She articulates her own movement into philosophical abstraction in very different terms. Like the male philosopher, she invokes her own ascent into visionary heights. ‘Let me now as from an eminence survey the world stripped of its false delusive charms’ (179–80), she writes, casting herself in the role of the contemplative philosopher–spectator, withdrawn from the worldly theatre. The distance from which she surveys the world assures her impartial, panoramic and superior vision.34 The world becomes a stage where the vanity of human folly is acted for her amusement. Yet, if the phantom pursuits of human ambition and human love make her laugh with the resounding laughter of superior beings, Wollstonecraft rejects this superiority. ‘Such slaves are we to

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hope and fear!’ she comments, including herself amongst the enslaved masses (180; emphasis added). She moves down from the position of the disinterested spectator to that of the actor on stage only to reascend even higher and offer a metadiscursive reflection on the different scenes just witnessed. The object of human action may be vain and fickle, she states, but what matter, for in the process of running after the fallacious object, humanity has learned through trial and error; it has required the ‘habit of reflection and the knowledge attained by fostering any passion’ (181). Wollstonecraft moves higher than Rousseau in her investigation and sees with more clarity, but she refuses to remain in these giddying heights. ‘I descend from my height, and mixing with my fellowcreatures, feel myself hurried along the common stream …’ (181). Her descent marks her reaffirmation of experience in the acquisition of knowledge. Now clearly, these ascents and descents are part of an elaborate staging to prove the truth of the rhetorical question that frames the entire movement. ‘But if, in the dawn of life, we could soberly survey the scenes before as in perspective, and see everything in its true colours, how could the passions gain sufficient strength to unfold the faculties?’ (179), she asks, before she makes her own ascent in the midday of life. Her subsequent descent stages a resoundingly negative answer to this question and even implies that we always remain in the ‘dawn of life’. Once we deny activity to the passions by retaining the panoramic perspective of the disinterested and superior view we are ‘fitter for death than life’ (181). Wollstonecraft’s attack on the dead superiority of self-proclaimed philosophers cannot be mistaken, not least because she explicitly mentions them. In addition to Milton and Rousseau, she also takes Jonathan Swift and Adam Smith to task. Refusing as she had done in Mary, the position of Smith’s impartial spectator, she comments, ‘The world cannot be seen by an unmoved spectator, we must mix in the throng and feel as men feel before we can judge of their feelings’ (181). Likewise, the limits to Rousseau’s philosophical system, to his misogynist and misanthropic perspectives, are derived from his adherence to that exalted position of the permanently outcast visionary. ‘Impressed by this view of the misery and disorder which pervaded society, and fatigued with jostling against artificial fools, Rousseau became enamoured of solitude…’ (83), she writes. Confusing the Parisian theatre for human nature, Rousseau builds his entire philosophical system on the basis of his own illusions. The ‘romantic’ philosopher does not recognise human dignity and pride any more than he celebrates his own.

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Although committed to viewing things ‘philosophically’, Wollstonecraft refuses to embody the abstract but dead voice of philosophy and returns instead to the common stream of mankind. As has been noted, in the second Vindication, Wollstonecraft dons different voices, including certainly that of a philosopher (181; 193), but also of a woman (73; 200) and an experienced governess (112).35 By rejecting a single monolithic presentation of self, Wollstonecraft forgoes the role of the educated and exceptional superior being, amused and disgusted by the vain follies of lesser ones. By alternating between these different voices and roles, Wollstonecraft addresses the question of women’s oppression through a multiplicity of facets. Her philosophy is developed, then, in the contrast between these different perspectives, for it would be wrong to assume that she refuses to ascend to abstraction, to speak as a disinterested philosopher, to view the general rather than the individual. As she herself suggests, among the deficiencies of women’s education is their ‘confined view’ of ‘little employments, and private plans’ (261) and their failure to view the world from the more panoramic perspective. Indeed, even as she objects to Swift’s cynical and disinterested perspective, she claims to have read his work with ‘a philosophical eye’ (181). The difference between Wollstonecraft and Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and Smith, Wollstonecraft and the male philosophers she attacks lies instead in the continual reconstitution of her position. She moves up to examine the importance of reflection, moves down to experience in order to test the truth of this affirmation only to ascend even higher into abstraction. Philosophy is a position to occupy, a voice in which to speak; it is not a permanent embodiment as Rousseau, by preferring his solitary retreat, seems to have suggested.

Modesty In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, these ascents and descents into philosophy and humanity, these renewed questioning of abstract principles through experience are given a conceptual identity: modesty. Wollstonecraft devotes at least one chapter to a discussion of this virtue, articulating her insightful analysis through an artful rhetorical staging of the problem. Recent scholarship has begun to examine this analysis, highlighting the centrality of ‘modesty’ to her moral and political philosophy.36 Here I would like to pursue this investigation, juxtaposing Wollstonecraft’s considerations on the issue with those on the recurrent figure of the libertine philosopher. I would like to suggest

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that modesty, as conceptualised by Wollstonecraft, expresses a very different relation to knowledge than an Héloïse-like discipleship. Any serious reflection on the concept and the virtue must begin, as Wollstonecraft’s does, by recognising its two prevalent meanings. Modesty implies both ‘purity of mind, which is the effect of chastity’ and a ‘just opinion of ourselves equally distant from vanity or presumption, though by no means incompatible with a lofty consciousness of our own dignity’ (191). Wollstonecraft thereby distinguishes between the sexual virtue, ascribed more often than not to women, and a realistic knowledge of one’s capacities and qualities. Focusing on the second of these definitions, Wollstonecraft differentiates modesty from vanity, humility and bashfulness. Since these qualities imply a discrepancy between self-knowledge and reality, they do not represent a ‘just [self]-opinion’. To be modest, on the other hand, is to know who and what one is. It is, moreover, to affirm this knowledge publicly without hesitation, which is why this ‘consciousness’ of one’s own importance and dignity may often be mistaken for ‘satanic pride’ (94 n. 2). The mistake is further compounded where women are concerned because of the gendered nature of the first definition of modesty. A woman’s assertiveness and her public self-affirmation is equated with excessive sexuality, a measure of her descent from innocence into the fall that comes with sexual experience. For, as the intertextual echoes of both book three of Paradise Lost (vide 191) and Wollstonecraft’s own earlier rejection of Milton’s ‘pleasing picture’ in favour of ‘conscious dignity’ (94 n. 2) imply, Wollstonecraft responds in this ode to modesty to the English poet, rewriting her own account of postlapsarian Eve’s ascent into grace. Central to this rewriting is the devalorisation of innocent ignorance and the re-centring on self-knowledge, be it sexual or not. Consider the significant counter-example of the prostitute and how Wollstonecraft refuses the semantic ambiguity of the ‘public woman’, whose sexual availability is directly related to her presence in the public sphere and whose sexual ‘immodesty’ is furthered by her public assertiveness of her sexuality.37 Wollstonecraft carefully distinguishes between the loss of sexual innocence, typified by these women and the loss of modesty, of which, she explains, they ‘never had any … to lose’ (192). In their deviation from a quality conventionally ascribed to their nature as women, they become even more unnatural than similarly ‘depraved’ men. These men never appear as lewd or as monstrous because they have not been taxed with an original and qualifying innocence to lose; they merely fail to acquire modesty. Whereas the

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women elicit only the ‘alternate emotions of pity and disgust’ (192), the men may win some respect for their attempt to acquire modesty. At stake in this distinction between innocence and modesty is, thus, that between a naturalised and ascribed quality (women are supposed innocent; by losing this quality, they lose their identity as women, becoming monsters) and an acquired virtue (men strive to become modest; failing to do so does not deny them their essential humanity or dignity). Whereas the former implies an innate condition, the latter entails an active process through which it is attained or strengthened. If the loss of the quality elicits pity and disgust, the partial acquisition elicits some respect, although obviously not as much as a more successful attempt. In the next chapter, I will return to the difference between pity and respect and to what it implies for women; here I would like to examine Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on active virtue and its implications for the way she redefines modesty. Recent critical scholarship has begun to trace Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on active virtue to the civic humanist strain of republican discourse, where it refers both to the natural essence of the citizen and to its actualisation and embodiment in actions which contribute to the common wealth or the public good.38 Because, in the terms of this discourse, virtue can be fully realised under certain conditions only, namely those where the citizen-subject is not curtailed by its dependence on either political or economic patronage, much of eighteenthcentury oppositional political discourse denounces the social, economic and political conditions which prevent its acquisition. Wollstonecraft, as suggested in ‘“An Eve to Please Me”’, gives this argument a feminist slant by suggesting that women’s dependence on men prevents them from becoming virtuous. This slant also appears in her discussion of the sexual definition of female virtue, as the distinction between ‘innocence’ and ‘modesty’ examined here implies. Indeed, as long as it is a woman’s innate nature that is emphasised there is no possibility for her to become anything but less innocent. To understand Wollstonecraft’s definition of virtue, I turn now to the philosopher and mathematician Richard Price and argue that his arguments for self-determination as the precondition for virtue and his insistence on moral acts in and for themselves are important sources for her moral and political philosophy.39 Biographers have, of course, noted how Price befriended Wollstonecraft during her stay in Newington Green. She mentions in a 1786 letter to her sister Eliza that he has been ‘uncommonly friendly to me. I have the greatest reason to be thankful’ (MWL 113).40 She was,

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moreover, acquainted with his work, as her 1788 recommendations to George Blood imply: ‘I had rather you would not read Dr Price’s sermons, as they would lead you into controversial disputes, and your limited range of books would not afford you a clue – the Dissertations are less entangled with controversial points, and contain useful truths – coming from the heart they find the direct road to it; but the sermons require more profound thinking, are not calculated to improve the generality’ (170). Despite her suggestion not to read it, Wollstonecraft does not deny the value of Price’s Sermons on the Christian Doctrine. She does imply that her interlocutor is not sufficiently cultivated to appreciate it, insinuating as in her references to Ogle, that she is. Her comments thus reflect on her self-perception as capable of the required philosophical thinking. They also reflect on her perception of Price. She recognises a cleavage between a more theoretical treatise, demanding serious reflection and consideration and a work that addresses the heart. As such, she identifies him not only as the staunch defender of reason and intellect but also, surprisingly given his subsequent reputation, as a man of sensibility and feeling. In ‘“An Eve to Please Me”’, I suggested that Wollstonecraft’s vision of postlapsarian humanity may be likened to Price’s theology. Given the fact that Wollstonecraft’s discussion of the virtue of modesty rewrites the narrative of original sin, here I would like to develop this point.41 Refusing to impute Adam’s transgressions to his posterity, Price emphasises instead the way each rational being determines its future salvation. If mankind has clearly fallen from grace, it is nevertheless penitent and may lift itself up through virtuous actions. Be ‘… conscious of your own dignity’ he urges in what could be the textual source for Wollstonecraft’s definition of modesty (‘a lofty consciousness of our own dignity’ [VRW 191]).42 Price incites fallen humanity to stand upright and look upwards so that they might ultimately rise. Although elsewhere Price suggests that forms of religious fervour and blind zeal may be effects of ‘pride and presumption’,43 there is no suggestion that this reasoned affirmation of human possibilities is ‘satanic pride’ (VRW 94 n. 2). Yet despite his insistence on the joyous prospect of a future state, Price does not suggest that salvation is guaranteed. In his earlier Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, Price had argued that liberty or the possibility of self-determination is the absolute precondition for moral agency and throughout his career, in his political writings on the American revolution, in his debate on necessity and free will with Joseph Priestley and in his theological works, be they written in the

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language of the mind or the heart, he returns to this axiomatic supposition.44 In his account of fallen man, he echoes Milton’s claim that mankind is ‘just and right … though free to fall’ (PL 3: 99) and recognises in this freedom the supreme logic of divine design which wants to assure humanity both the fullest bliss achieved through personal efforts and, equally importantly, total responsibility for any action. Absolute liberty – despite, or rather because of the obvious, hazardous risks it entails – is the necessary condition for postlapsarian humanity’s conscious dignity and moral agency. Without ‘scope for action’, writes Price, human existence would be nothing more than ‘a system of conscious machinery, void of value and dignity.’45 Similarly, because we must be free to act, we cannot be given and guaranteed present virtues and future blessings: we must instead acquire them. They ‘are offered to our acquisition, not our acceptance,’ he explains, ‘and the condition of our having them, is our earning them by the exercise of the powers given us.’46 Clearly, this demand for absolute freedom in order to attain virtue echoes the claim of civic humanism that only the disinterested and independent citizen-subject can become truly virtuous. Yet, by articulating the argument through a narrative of Christian redemption potentially open to every one, Price extends the possibility of gaining virtue to a far larger community than the landed aristocracy, whose financial and social autonomy made it the traditional bedrock of civic humanism. The basis for the acquisition lies within the individual. It is knowledge – its acquisition and its application – that becomes the new and pivotal element in the realisation of the citizen’s virtuous potential.47 As such Price insists on the importance of knowledge as both a virtuous end and as a means to attain this end. If liberty and knowledge imply the ‘capacity’ for a virtuous act, what actually determines it is the intention or the rational decision to do good.48 Intention, and the manner in which determination and knowledge are exercised towards a virtuous end, become more significant than the end itself. Consider the distinction he elaborates between absolute and practical virtue.49 The former derives from an abstract, immutable standard of truth, a Platonic Ideal embodied by the divine will. Although mankind, through the exercise of its rational faculties can discover this will and can increasingly act upon its truths, it can nevertheless not be judged by these same absolute standards. Unlike the divine being, mankind does not have the same extensive knowledge, even if it has the same capacity to acquire it and to strive towards a godlike existence in the next world. Therefore, it cannot always arrive at the same objective

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standards of truth and virtue. Whereas standards of rectitude and virtue are universal and unchangeable in the abstract sense, in particular circumstances they vary. In this insistence on the practical and particular aspects of virtuous deeds, Price certainly does not opt for a relativist approach to human actions and morals. He insists that the moral agent must always strive to do ‘what, according to his best judgement, he is persuaded to be the will of God’ (180). Price identifies here two standards of virtue: the will of God and the limited judgement of the moral agent (i.e. ‘his best judgement’). These standards underlie the distinction between absolute virtue (the will of God) or objective standards understood ‘independently of the sense of the agent’ (177) and practical virtue (the judgement of the moral agent) or what the ‘agent ought to do, upon supposition of his having such and such sentiments’ (177). Whereas the former highlights the virtuous result, the latter shifts attention to the process by which the virtuous agent arrives at this end. If his or her intention has been to do good according to the best of his or her knowledge, then regardless whether the results are deemed wrong by objective standards, the agent has been ‘practically virtuous’. Price’s practical virtue thus valorises the role of individual conscience, or the informed decision to act according to the most righteous and virtuous ends. It mediates between particular circumstances and abstract ideals, allowing the moral agent to be judged ‘upon the conformity of our actions to the sincere conviction of our minds’ (179). Given Price’s clear emphasis on a distinctly human sphere of action and knowledge, it is hardly surprising that this second approach to virtue is more important. In fact, he even implies that evaluating human virtue on the grounds of absolute virtue is either a form of divine presumption (because it claims to know the totality of the circumstances surrounding the act) or a debilitating morality, which denies humanity the possibility of a moral conscience. Significantly for our purposes, in these extremes, we are not far from the ‘superior beings’ and ‘brutes’ that, Wollstonecraft claims, people Rousseau’s paradise. Nor are we, in the emphasis on self-judgement implied by practical virtue, far from her second definition of ‘modesty’ (‘a just opinion of ourselves’). Yet if in his insistence on the agent’s conscious deliberation Price makes knowledge a precondition for virtuous action, elsewhere he implies that it is also an end in itself, and in this sense may well compete with virtue. In a 1766 sermon he argues for both knowledge and virtue and concludes that only their combined acquisition constitute the most ‘complete excellence’.50 Despite our desire for a virtuous

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existence, we can attain it only if we recognise what such an existence implies. For, without the possibility of knowing what a moral action is, how can the virtue of an action be determined? Thus, the more developed the understanding becomes, the more the possibility for acquiring virtue increases. Similarly, the more virtue we acquire, the more we desire knowledge to further our pursuit of a virtuous existence. Price, of course, recognises that this happy union does not always take place. Knowledge without virtue, he explains, produces the ‘greatness of a demon’, whereas virtue without knowledge ‘the amiableness … of a well-meaning bigot, or of a good-natured enthusiast’.51 The examples are telling: in the distinction between ‘greatness’ and ‘amiableness’, between the terrifying demon and the good-natured enthusiast, we recognise the more famous distinction between the powerful, but horrifying sublime and the delicate and tender beautiful. Like Wollstonecraft in her response to the angels and brutes who people Rousseau’s paradise, Price rejects this diametrical cleavage between innocents and demons. The hero of his tale, like hers, is penitent postlapsarian humanity who, having tasted from the tree of knowledge, is now free to rise again through the conscious exercise of its moral agency.52 Having outlined the rudiments of Price’s philosophy, I can now examine its influence on Wollstonecraft’s discussion of virtue. The two mutually reinforcing powers that determine Price’s moral agent anticipate both meanings of modesty: ‘purity of mind’ (virtue) and a ‘just opinion’ (knowledge). This fact may be less startling when we recall the opening lines of the first chapter of the Vindication and how the axiomatic preconditions of Wollstonecraft’s moral philosophy also insist on reason and virtue, but nevertheless add knowledge (81). Of course, if Price is famed for his emphasis on reason,53 he does not systematically refer to it, speaking of ‘intelligence’ in his Review of Morals and of ‘knowledge’ as he does in both the 1766 sermon and his 1789 ‘Discourse on the Love of One’s Country’. Indeed, in the space of one paragraph where he affirms the three chief blessings of humanity – truth, virtue and liberty – he uses ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ as interchangeable synonyms.54 (He is, I might add, no more systematic in his use of ‘virtue’, using rectitude, obligation, duty, righteousness with the same idea or concept in mind.55) Why he does so is beyond the scope of this study; what remains relevant here is that in chapter 1 of her polemic Wollstonecraft substitutes for his dichotomy a triad. Clearly distinguishing between ‘reason’ and ‘knowledge’, she accords equal importance to both. Reason, I will

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assume, refers specifically to rational faculties that distinguish mankind from other animals. ‘Knowledge’, which also differentiates humanity from brutes, is acquired ‘through struggling with [passions]’ (81). We are born with reason and passions; by exercising reason; we acquire knowledge and virtue. Not surprisingly, Wollstonecraft arrives at precisely such a conclusion in her discussion of modesty, when understood as both virtue and knowledge. ‘I have then philosophically pursued these reflections,’ she writes, ‘till I inferred that those women who have most improved their reason must have the most modesty’ (193). Modesty, defined as the acquisition of virtue and knowledge through the exercise of reason, can come only with experience of the world and with guaranteeing women absolute liberty to acquire it, if they so strive. Herein lies the principal error in the education of both Milton’s Eve and Rousseau’s Sophie: they have been taught to seem modest but not allowed to acquire this virtue. Milton, Rousseau and other male educators have equated chastity with modesty and confused ‘chastity’ with the ‘effect of chastity’ (191; 194). In their utilitarian approach to the education of women, they have valorised the social ends obtained over the virtue itself. When, for instance, Wollstonecraft cites Rousseau’s claims that ‘“Opinion is the grave of virtue among the men, but its throne among women”’ (VRW 203), she recognises that he identifies two forms of virtue, one for men who must acquire it and one for women who must embody and ‘appear’ to possess it. Hence, although women have more ‘propriety of behaviour’ (194) and seem to be more modest and chaste than men, they are not. Subject to more rules of decorum, behaviour and propriety, they have not been guaranteed the liberty necessary for its acquisition. Female modesty is thus reduced to little more than a dress code, where agency and intention make way for ‘a system of conscious machinery, void of value and dignity’.56 Small wonder then that women are rarely objects of respect and esteem, as I shall argue in the next chapter. Elsewhere, Wollstonecraft suggests that this confusion between virtue itself and its effect is not only immoral and unethical, but results in precisely the condition that was to have been avoided. Consider the refusal to teach women the ‘indelicate’ details of biology, anatomy and animal reproduction. Although it purports to deny women any knowledge of their existence as beings with sexual desires, this ‘mock modesty’ in fact reminds both women and men how sexual they are, making ‘men’ always ‘men’ – that is, beings defined by their sexual instincts – ‘in the company of women’ (193). Another example presents itself in the fact that women are allowed to parade naked in front

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of other women, but not to view male sexual organs. Because their ‘modesty’ towards men is only propriety of behaviour, once married they ‘fall into old habits and treat their husband as they did their sisters …’ (198). Given these arguments against allowing women to expose their bodies and that ‘part of the business … which ought never to be done before a fellow-creature; because it is an insult to the majesty of human nature’ (197), I might want to qualify, as recent criticism has done, Wollstonecraft’s insistence on women’s absolute liberty where sexual and corporal knowledge is concerned.57 Doesn’t she claim that ‘silence ought to reign’ (197) and that delicate women should not ‘notice that part of animal oeconomy, which is so very disgusting’ (198)? By refusing to gaze at the animal in the human, isn’t she echoing Burke who deems it necessary ‘to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation …’? Isn’t she, like him, insisting that cultural screens and clothes prevent us from seeing that ‘a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order’?58 Yet, unlike Burke, Wollstonecraft insists that the screening and covering should be done ‘without any distinction of rank’ (197), implying that instead of venerating only queens, all women require these gestures of decency. Moreover, they merit them not as women but because of the ‘majesty of [their] human nature’ (emphasis added). Which is why, I might add, covering is as important amongst women alone as in mixed company. It should also be reciprocal between women of different classes: for although ‘modest women take care not to let their legs be seen’ by other women of their rank and class, they ‘do that [indecent] part of business’ (197) in front of women who have assisted them in their bathing and dressing, namely their servants. Rather than encouraging women to behave modestly among women of their rank or of those superior to them, Wollstonecraft insists that rules of social behaviour – if they are determined by moral principles – should prevail throughout society.59 More importantly, Wollstonecraft does not deny biological and ‘animal’ facts. The excessive ritual bathing of the Essenes makes the body ‘an insult to God’ (198), she claims. Through her disapproval, she implies that despite the necessary social clothing our ‘naked shivering natures’ remain sacred and significant.60 She publicly discusses these biological details, a gesture which – despite all the careful circumlocutions – would certainly qualify her as ‘immodest’ under the conditions of ‘mock modesty’. There is, not surprisingly, a way in which these

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philosophical discussions on bathing and ‘animal oeconomy’ echo her conversations ‘with medical men, on anatomical subjects’ (193 n. 3). Sexual knowledge is, in short, paradigmatic of the acquisition of modesty. Through exercising her reason to understand her body and her physical desires, a woman acquires the just knowledge of (her) sexuality. This acquired virtue is clearly not the ‘modesty’ implied by the study of ‘regulation of behaviour’ and ‘rules of decorum’ (193). For if the modest woman looks to herself, the ‘mock modest’ woman looks to ‘superior beings’ for their opinion and their knowledge. Like the courtier and the merchant dependent on political and economic patronage, this dependence on the external authority of the eyes of the world prevents the ‘mock modest’ woman from acquiring virtue. Although she may not be a ‘public woman’ who sells her sexuality, neither will she be a ‘public person’ whose disinterested desire for common good serves the public interest. There is, however, another way in which these ‘mock modest’ women, who never consciously had to choose virtue, are ultimately not unlike the ‘immodest’ prostitutes. They can never be respected and esteemed for acquiring virtue through the exercise of liberty, knowledge and intention. Although they may not ‘disgust’, in their preference of ‘shadows and tinsel’ and the ‘order of their dress … while they suffer their minds to lie waste’ they elicit – and here Price, not Wollstonecraft speaks – ‘contempt as well as pity’.61 The distinction between modesty and mock modesty is also important for morality. Indeed, we begin to understand not only Wollstonecraft’s quarrel with Rousseau, but also, and equally significantly, her objections to Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiment. ‘[I]f we pant after higher improvement and higher attainments, it is not sufficient to view ourselves as we supposed we are viewed by others, though this has been ingeniously argued, as the foundation of our moral sentiments’ (VRW 205), she writes echoing Mary’s comments on ‘cool moralists’ (M 47). Wollstonecraft is not only insisting that immutable principles of morality surpass more relative and empirical forms of knowledge based on sensory experience. Equally significantly, she expresses here her objections to a purely utilitarian approach to virtue, whereby only the ends or the effect of female virtue are valued while the individual intention or will is ignored. Like Price, she suggests that practical virtue, with its focus on the agent and its desire to do something virtuous because it is virtuous and not because of the good consequences it will have is, in fact, more important than absolute virtue, which stresses the resulting action.62 She

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condemns the divine presumption of the male educators, moralists and philosophers who insist on woman’s absolute virtue. They ‘pretend arbitrarily to judge’ both a virtue and its importance, but in fact they ‘shap[e] it to their own convenience’ (VRW 120). In its insistence on self-awareness and on experience, then, ‘modesty’ implies a form of practical virtue, determined by the agent’s inward-looking conscience. Small wonder then that fictional Mary’s preferred medium is the private and personal self-confession: What other form can provide such thorough and detailed information with which to assess intention and will? What other form articulates and asserts a ‘just knowledge of ourselves’? By rejecting a sexual definition of modesty, Wollstonecraft nevertheless continues to vindicate the same ends of female education as the male philosophers: a sexually chaste woman. This point has been made often enough by recent criticism and remains a serious limit to Wollstonecraft’s feminist project. Without wanting to deny these limits, I have been trying to suggest that by shifting emphasis from the ends of women’s education (chastity) to the means (rational and conscious understanding of its necessity), her arguments inaugurate a qualitative change in women’s lives and significant advantages for their integration into civic life. She insist on a sexual education, opening the way for studies in medicine as well as in art. Equally significant is the possibility of reintegrating the once unchaste woman into the social fabric. If her concerns reiterate those of many of her predecessors, she nevertheless rejects Magdalens as viable solutions, arguing ‘It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world!’ (140).63 Finally, as I suggested in the previous chapter, by arguing for women’s moral autonomy as wives and as mothers, she articulates a demand for their autonomous civic, political and economic status.64

Immodest philosophers and female citizens Juxtaposing Wollstonecraft’s reflections on modesty to Richard Price’s moral philosophy, I have argued that she defines ‘modesty’ as knowledge and self-knowledge derived through experience. By emphasising the desire to do good and the absolute liberty in which this desire can be exercised, it insists on the agency of the moral actor – even if she is a woman and even when questions of sexuality are concerned. Thus, by encouraging ordinary people, and especially women, to forsake the authority of their own conscience in favour of social opinion, philoso-

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phers encourage immodesty. They deny the acquisition of knowledge and virtue through the exercise of reason. In her discussion of Smith, Wollstonecraft evokes the difference in her own approach, suggesting that philosophical authority is never authoritative. More than propagating immodesty, immodest philosophy also makes philosophers immodest. They define themselves in contrast to common, ordinary people and maintain themselves in the lofty philosophical heights of abstraction without a realistic appreciation of human struggles. This self-representation of the philosopher becomes his social representation: his authority is canonised and his perspective venerated. Critics have observed the extent to which Wollstonecraft builds her own arguments about the degraded status of women by comparing them to soldiers, aristocrats and kings.65 These comparisons extend the analysis developed by republicans and civic humanists on the nefarious consequences of a society based on hierarchy to the rank implicit in theories of sexual difference. By attacking the immodesty of philosophers, Wollstonecraft articulates an even more radical comparison between women and self-designated philosophers. For it is in this light that I understand the significance of the analogy between Rousseau and women novel-readers and of his status as both Eve and Satan. Like that of women, of soldiers, of aristocrats and of kings, the immodesty of philosophers lies in their status as angels superior to all others, in their promotion of pleasing manners instead of hard-won morals, in their ‘knowledge of life’ without acquaintance with ‘human nature’ (93). If the adulated king is little more than an ‘indolent puppet’ (87), the soldier a well-disciplined machine lacking ‘strong passions, or … vigorous facilities’, and the woman’s humility cunning servility, the philosopher’s sensibility and modesty is a corporate and self-interested sensuality and arrogant immodesty. Wollstonecraft’s denunciation of the immodesty of self-elected philosophers is crucial for her argument about women’s role in civic life. Once authority substitutes for experience the door is open for the corruption of an artificially maintained order not unlike that found in armies and monarchies. ‘Why then do philosophers look for public spirit?’ she asks (VRW 210). The question is rhetorical, implying that philosophers should also look for private virtues, including chastity and modesty. She suggests ultimately that this division – like Rousseau’s and Smith’s insistence on reputation – is both artificial and dangerous for virtuous individuals and societies. In order to maintain its beautiful order, it forces citizens to submit to the authority of the philosopher who has severed his ties from common experience.

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Whereas women epitomise this undemocratic state, the consequences are also felt more generally, in the cleavage between citizen and philosopher. Yet, surprisingly, Wollstonecraft reiterates comments present in the male philosophical tradition. After all, Rousseau’s Emile, in particular ‘Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard’, deplores the distinction between the ordinary man and the philosopher as much as Wollstonecraft does, and the first chapter of David Hume’s Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals implores the reader to ‘Be a philosopher; but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.’66 Yet, although they pretend to abolish these distinctions where male citizens and philosophers are concerned, they allow them to return through the front door with respect to women. Wollstonecraft’s analysis of the interdependence between the private virtue of modesty and the public one of public spirit suggests that this ‘open-door’ policy affects social virtues more generally. The disciple-like Héloïses of the philosopher Abelard are, in this sense, the paradigmatic uninformed subject of modern democratic republics. Wollstonecraft closes her chapter on modesty with an address to ‘sisters’. ‘Would ye,’ she writes, ‘O my sisters, really possess modesty, ye must remember that the possession of virtue, of any denomination, is incompatible with ignorance and vanity!’ (200). This moment is one of the rare moments where the feminist explicitly addresses a uniquely female audience. It is all the more rare in so far as she addresses them as equals, that is as sisters and not as inferior daughters or students as she had done in her earlier Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and Original Stories or as philosophers of education do. If this final paragraph remains far more didactic and axiomatic than those where she addresses philosophers, by inviting women to pursue knowledge, modesty and virtue, she nevertheless refuses to provide pleasing and ordered formula to do so, recognising the importance of each woman’s experience. This address to sisters is significant for another reason: it invokes the collective identity of women as subjects of moral and political action, announcing both the fictive contract between Jemima and Maria discussed in the beginning of this chapter and the gestures of solidarity in the Letters Written … in Sweden, I will discuss in ‘Wants of Women’. As such, she opens a public space for interaction and interrogation amongst modest female philosophers and women citizens.

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Postscript Some years after the publication of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft confessed to Imlay, ‘… but to honour J.J. Rousseau, I intend to give … [Fanny] a sash, the first she has ever had round her – and why not? – for I have always been half in love with him’ (MWL 263). More than one commentator or biographer has used this confession to suggest that Wollstonecraft had gone back on her earlier public attack on Rousseau. Softened by her love for Imlay and by the charms of maternity, she seems to have reassessed her proposals on women’s education and on their inclusion in the public sphere. By joining in the activities of the fête revolutionnaire, she seems to have accepted the Jacobin policies on women’s role in the Republic. More seriously perhaps, by speaking of her ‘love’ she reverts to the role of the sentimental Héloïse-like heroine in which she casts herself in so many of her earlier letters. Perhaps, however, Wollstonecraft is merely reaffirming the separation between the man and the philosopher. I must, in this light, ask if she is half in love with Rousseau, how does the other half feel. Perhaps, like Jemima, she is pained and repulsed by the ‘disgusting libertinism … of [her] protector’ (WOW 114). In this – and regardless of the confession of her romantic proclivities – Wollstonecraft reminds herself of the destructive potential of her love.

3 Making Novel Creatures

Wollstonecraft is not a writer who figures prominently in discussions of the eighteenth-century novel. Her literary productions do not conform to the ideals of the realistic novel which, until recently, have defined the masculine canon of the eighteenth century.1 Nor has she fared much better in feminist revisions.2 She is accorded at best a passing mention in recent critical attempts to move away from an emphasis on realism and towards the different directions taken by the Johnsonian philosophical novel,3 fictions of sensibility4 as well as the polemical fictions of the 1790s.5 Accepting that Wollstonecraft’s radical and feminist politics make her diametrically opposed to Samuel Johnson’s apparently more conservative vision, the critical tradition has failed to read her fictional production in light of his theories of romance and in relation to his moral tales.6 Yet her uncompleted novel Cave of Fancy adopts the model of personal development present in Johnson’s tales. Moreover, as I hope to argue, her theories of the reading experience resonate with his. Similarly, because Wollstonecraft mounts a full-scale attack against the sentimental literature of sensibility, her own novels have rarely been read as creative revisions of this tradition. Instead discussions of both Mary, a Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria focus on how she repeatedly falls back into the traps of this heritage, thereby rendering the feminist a willing prisoner of the very ideology she seeks to escape.7 Her last unfinished novel does receive more attention in discussions of the political novels of the 1790s. Yet here too the literary works are read as stagings of her political ideals, even if more than one critic acknowledges that these ideals have been transformed. Whereas they recognise the stylistic and formal innovations of the novel, more often than not they attribute them to Godwin’s influence and revisions.8 92

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Of course, Wollstonecraft’s contributions to the genre appear in the final decade of the eighteenth century, subsequent to key moments in the rise of the genre, regardless of whether we speak in terms of the classical and hence predominantly male canon or of recent feminist revisions. Moreover, not only are her efforts in fiction-writing eclipsed by her more political Vindication of the Rights of Woman, they also seem scanty and ineffective when compared to the more voluminous productions and innovations of the recently sanctified Frances Burney and Anne Radcliffe. It is not, however, only as a writer of novels that Wollstonecraft deserves scholarly interest in histories of the genre. It is also in what I hope to show is her recognition of its potential as a powerful tool in forming subjects. This claim seems to contradict Wollstonecraft’s deprecatory comments on novels and on their nefarious effects on the woman reader. Yet despite her remarks, which are by no means particular to her,9 she was a voracious reader of novels, including, as Jacqueline Pearson reminds us, those of the more sensational kind.10 Her fiction reflects a self-conscious appreciation of the tradition of the novel as well as of the growing critical discourse on it. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how aware her posthumous Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria is of other novels, suggesting not only that she perused novels but more significantly that she engaged them, rewriting them with her objectives in mind.11 Equally revealing is the seriousness with which she engages her role as a professional reviewer for Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review.12 Rather than group all works of fiction into the demeaned category, she establishes distinctions between the novels, appreciating some more than others. These distinctions appear more clearly when her judgements are compared with her contemporaries’. In his assessment of eighteenth-century reviewing, Denis Roper has argued that Wollstonecraft’s reviews are, comparatively speaking, more severe. 13 A close reading of her reviews also indicates that she has somewhat clearly defined criteria for evaluating these works, of which more shortly. Both in her polemical writings and in her literary commentary, Wollstonecraft’s reflections on the novel draw on a circulating critical discourse on the emerging genre.14 Much of this discourse is negative, insisting on the inferior quality as well as on the potential dangers of ‘silly novels’, especially where women are concerned. Only by emphasising the explicitly didactic aspects of fictions, which exemplify high moral deeds and encourage virtue, could this critical discourse valorise them. Such was the case of Samuel Johnson’s celebrated distinction

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between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ romance, where the moral potential is as much at stake as the probability of events recounted. If Wollstonecraft’s disapproval of the genre clearly draws on this cultural commonplace, she also tries to recuperate it for its revolutionary potential. It is hardly surprising that in so doing she draws on the Johnsonian vision. Equally significant to the ‘rising’ of the novel is the fact that much of the institutional critical apparatus continues to rely on the belletrist and rhetorical tradition. Yet this tradition defines ‘literature’ in relation to a classical past that excluded novels. Moreover, it is more attentive to the variety of persuasive styles and to their relevance in given speech situations than to establishing a critical discourse on the novel. The undervalued genre nevertheless occasionally makes its way into the discussion. Among Scottish conjectural historians, accounts of different forms of ‘fictitious histories’ become important landmarks in attempts to plot narratives of historical progress. In the works of James Beattie, Hugh Blair, John Millar and Adam Smith, to name just a few, the novel is said to ‘progress’ from the improbable romance, with its origins in feudal society, to the more credible and natural novel.15 Any examination of these accounts is nevertheless confronted with the instability of the categories and terminology; for although the rhetorical tradition refers to novels, it extends or artificially adapts the critical discourse on more classical and traditional literary forms. Thus, at times discussions on the novel and the romance are included with those on historical narratives, collapsing the distinction between fiction and fact in favour of the narrative form adopted. At other times, when critical commentary emphasises less the realism of an account and more the impact on the reader, the novel is categorised with the more dramatic but more overtly fictional genres of epic poetry and tragedy. Similarly, referring alternatively to the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ romance, to the heroic and the comic, or to the romance and the novel, Scottish belletrists organise works in relation to probability, to the quality of the style or to the effect on the reader.16 Relying on this tradition, Wollstonecraft inherits many of it problems. When she wants to suggest that a work is too improbable, she may state that it is either too ‘romantic’ or too ‘novel-like’, revealing how similar the two terms ultimately are despite the numerous attempts to distinguish between them. Similarly, because she alternates somewhat arbitrarily between different terminologies, any attempt to appreciate her assessment of the genre is significantly hampered. What remains clear is the way she elaborates her own feminist history of the

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novel. She argues that women – like the children, the credulous and the uneducated the belletrists refer to – continue to read stories about the marvellous, peopled by supernatural beings and involving impossible events. For her, these supernatural beings and improbable happenings are not fairies, giants or genies, but rather the insipid heroes and heroines of the love plot. Consider her comments on an obscure piece of fiction, Juliet; or, The Cottager published ‘by a Lady’: It has been judiciously observed by one of our brother Reviewers, that the publication of Miss Burney’s novels formed a new aera in this flimsy kind of writing. A varied combination of the same events has been adopted, and like timid sheep, the lady authors jump over the hedge one after the other, and do not dream of deviating either to the right or left. Richardson destroyed the giants and dwarfs that figured away in romances; however she had still to protect her chastity with vigilant care against violent assaults, and after having passed unsullied through the ordeal trial, a demi-hero freed her, and matrimony wound up the plot, etc. etc. Now the method is altered; the fortress is not stormed, but undermined, and the belles must guard their hearts from the soft contagion, and not listen to the insidious sigh, when the hand is gently pressed, nor trust the equivocal protestations of love – and then they obtain a husband, etc. etc. (AR 92; emphasis in the original) Wollstonecraft echoes here the belletristic denigration of the old romance’s reliance on supernatural effects. She nevertheless remains sceptical as to whether Samuel Richardson’s work marks a fundamental breaking point from earlier romances. Whereas, in the past, the hero frees the maiden who has preserved her chastity, now the demi-hero does so, and here Wollstonecraft’s added emphasis further ridicules this apparent change. As if to add outrage to injury to Richardson, she claims Frances Burney’s novels represent a further ‘advance’ in the changing fortunes of the novels. Despite this ‘advance’, however, the plot remains strikingly similar: the heroine protects her chastity from the hero who does not try to steal her away but rather to woo her through the expression of his feeling and sensibility. In any case, matrimony and the happy-ever-after is always the desired resolution, and we may well ask whether Wollstonecraft insinuates that such a desire remains as ‘marvellous’ in the more recent sentimental fictions as it was in the so-called Dark Ages. Small wonder then Wollstonecraft refuses to lament with Edmund Burke that the ‘age of chivalry is

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gone’.17 Her extended attack on his defence of chivalry should be read, as I shall shortly argue, as part of a more general argument on how aesthetic categories are part of a complex ideological web that produces gendered human subjects. After all, Wollstonecraft’s discussion of the novel is also informed by her more general debates with eighteenth-century moral philosophy on the formation of the self and particularly so where questions of gender are concerned. Her attempts to bring innovations to the form and structure of the novel as well as to the reading experience can be appreciated only in relation to her attempts to refashion and reeducate women. This relationship appears in the following passage from Vindication of the Rights of Woman where she situates fictional productions in the ideological apparatus responsible for the production of the insipid and hollow woman of the day and explores the complicated network that prevents women from achieving moral autonomy and self-determination: Novels, music, poetry, and gallantry, all tend to make women the creatures of sensation, and their character is thus formed in the mould of folly during the time they are acquiring accomplishments, the only improvement they are excited, by their station in society, to acquire. This overstretched sensibility naturally relaxes the other powers of the mind, and prevents intellect from attaining that sovereignty which it ought to attain to render a rational creature useful to others, and content with its own station; for the exercise of the understanding, as life advances, is the only method pointed out by nature to calm the passions … Yet, to their senses, are women made slaves, because it is by their sensibility that they obtain present power. (VRW 130) Claiming that novels and other cultural tools ‘make’ women, Wollstonecraft denies a naturalised definition of what woman is, arguing instead that she is socially produced. Informed by eighteenthcentury sensational psychology, she demonstrates how contemporary society has transformed ‘women’ into ‘creatures of sensation’ and has insisted that this culturally produced woman is the only possible one. By showing how existing ‘woman’ is the result of both her education and of an ideology of femininity, she hopes to make way for another woman, more fitting to the demands of the utopian world, heralded by the French Revolution. Taking this passage as my starting point, I examine in this chapter how novels make women ‘creatures of sensation’. In doing so, I am

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attentive to the way Wollstonecraft extends the received wisdom of belletrists and moral philosophers to practices conventionally considered female. I also explore how she disputes this wisdom, demonstrating its limits where questions of gender formation are concerned. Finally, affirming Wollstonecraft’s inherent belief in the potential and power of the novel, I identify ways in which reforming the genre might produce a more socially useful woman.

How novels make women creatures of sensation Wollstonecraft’s suggestion that human subjects are not ‘born’ into existence but are ‘made’ by the complex interaction between intellectual and sensory faculties as well as by their responses to external stimuli draws on the highly influential eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Adhering as much to John Locke’s sensationalist psychology with its emphasis on rationality as to his pupil’s, the third Earl of Shaftesbury’s, insistence on an innate moral sense, these theories examine how rational and sensory faculties interact in the development of self-identity, in forming moral conscience and in encouraging human sociability.18 Preoccupied with social change, these philosophies address the possibility of reforming humanity from its more ‘natural’ state into a more ‘civil’ one and assess both historical and individual mechanisms that encourage this movement.19 Without wanting to deny the different strains of these theories and the very heated public conflicts between them, here I focus primarily on Wollstonecraft’s intellectual engagement with Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment. Not only was it one of the most influential composite accounts of subject formation at the end of the eighteenth century; more importantly, as Carol Kay has argued, in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft repeatedly questions some of its postulates where women are concerned.20 In his major contribution to eighteenth-century moral philosophy, Smith suggests that the self always emerges out of social encounters and clearly argues that there can be no ‘I’ without an other who shapes, modifies and consolidates personal identity. This relationship between the self and the other is posited in terms of a spectator and the object of his gaze (the ‘person principally concerned’), thereby relegating the formation of self-identity to the sphere of a social theatre.21 Smith’s discussion renders this theatre an interactive and dialogic one, where the spectator responds as much to the spectacle as the ‘person principally concerned’ restructures himself to maximise his impact on the former. Not only can humans project themselves into the body,

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passions and situation of an other, identify with its joys or sorrows and act in accordance with this identification. Equally important is the restraint that the other must impose on his own passions in order to facilitate the imaginary projection. As in Smith’s model of commercial society where market mechanisms regulate exchange-values, the outgoing sympathy of the spectator and the delimited feelings of the object of his gaze can meet each other on a common ground and respond to their respective needs. Faithful to his analogy with spectacles, Smith refers to this common ground as the position of the ‘impartial spectator’ and urges both the subject and the object of the gaze to adopt it. The former needs to resist his spontaneous identification with the feelings of the other, whereas the latter needs to delimit his excessive emotions and position himself in a place accessible to impartiality’s mediation. The movement towards this neutral place is crucial in the development of a moral conscience as well as of individual consciousness. Significantly, literature plays an important role in this formation, as a comparison between the ethical psychology of Smith’s Moral Sentiments and the reading techniques he advocates in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres indicates.22 Given the dialectic relation involved in the encounter between the spectator and the object of his gaze, in his Theory of Moral Sentiment Smith pays equal attention to the self’s status as subject and as object of a sympathetic gaze. He identifies in the different efforts to direct and restrict passions the basis for two virtues: the ‘soft, the gentle amiable virtues … of candid condescension and indulgent humanity’ and ‘the great, the awful and respectable, the virtues of self-denial, of selfgovernment, of that command of the passions which subjects all the movements of our nature to what our own dignity and honour, and the propriety of our own conduct require’.23 If, in this sentence, Smith seems to accord the outgoing effusions of the amiable virtues and the inward retention of the awful ones the same weight, it rapidly becomes clear that this is not the case. Turning repeatedly to the relation between parent and child, he claims that parents are more likely to feel tenderness, the condescending and humane feeling associated with the amiable virtues, for their children, whereas children will revere their parents. He further argues that parental compassion is a more ‘natural’, more omnipresent feeling and at the very least a ‘stronger affection’, suggesting that it is crucial for the ‘continuance and propagation of the species’ (142). It urges stronger and independent parents to attend to the needs of the weaker and dependent child. Hearing an infant cry, a mother (and Smith’s

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example of parenthood is clearly sex-typed) answers because she identifies with its helplessness and projects ‘her own terrors for the unknown consequences of its disorder’ (12). Her compassion is an immediate response to fears of her own helplessness. This mechanism is very different from the one involving the ‘awful virtues’. Characterised by the extent to which apparently ‘ungovernable passions’ are ultimately controlled, they imply anything but a spontaneous response. Not only must rules of propriety, honour and conduct be learned; they must also be subjected to the conscious exercise of rational faculties and self-command. ‘Awful virtues’ in short imply the existence of an internally arbitrating instance. Whereas the amiable virtues encourage the identification of the spectator, the awful ones refuse it, affirming a more self-contained autonomous self. As such, the two virtues elicit two different kinds of feelings: we feel tenderness for the display of gentle virtues and respect for that of the awful ones. Because tenderness or compassionate identification entails a more natural, instinctive and spontaneous reaction, Smith ultimately undervalues it. The ‘stronger presence’ of parental tenderness needs, he claims, to be ‘moderated’ through an education which teaches how to ‘restrain … excessive attachment’ (VRW 142). Elsewhere, however, Smith’s sex-determined example implies how impossible such an education is where women are concerned. He distinguishes between forms of tenderness, namely ‘humanity’, characterised as a pure, unmediated feeling and ‘generosity’ where it is coupled with self-denial and selfcommand. Then, sex-typing the distinction, he writes, ‘Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity of a man. The fair-sex, who have commonly much more tenderness than ours, have seldom so much generosity’ (190). Male parents can be taught to restrain their natural affection and to transform their self-interested feelings into public generosity. Indeed, Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric argues for a programme of reading that could ‘improve’ uncouth Northerners into educated and polite civil beings capable of participating in the developing British empire as legislators.24 Yet the novels that women read produce merely ‘creatures of sensation’, their unformed subjectivity resulting from an excess of natural and restrained passions and affects. Understood in these terms, the creature made by the novel is primarily a subject of sensation: a subject who perceives the world only through her sensory faculties and hence remains ‘subjected by ignorance to [her] sensations …’ (255). Echoing Smith’s distinction, Wollstonecraft warns in Vindication of the Rights of Men against ‘confounding mechanical

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instinctive sensations with emotions that reason deepens …’ (53). Like other animals, humankind possesses instincts and passions that mediate their relationship to the world. Unlike animals, they are also endowed with the capacity to reason, which must be cultivated and developed until ‘intellect … [becomes] the guide of passions’ (31). Wollstonecraft thus seems to accept Smith’s theories of self-formation, challenging him only by denying his sex-typing. For her too, reason strengthens, guides and directs the passions, transforming a sensation or passion that is perceptual and spontaneous into one that has been controlled and reshaped through reflection and consideration. The incremental value added by rational faculties gives the sensation its worth, for it is deliberation that converts the passive and immediate response into an active and sustained conviction. ‘Men who possess uncommon sensibility,’ Wollstonecraft explains focusing on the less problematic example of male genius, ‘soon forget the most forcible sensations. Not tarrying long enough in the brain to be subject to reflection, the next sensations, of course, obliterate them’ (VRM 53). These spontaneous effusions never contribute to the development of individual consciousness. Nor are they incorporated into memory. Only the intervention of the rational faculties can register these strong feelings, allowing them to leave a ‘lasting impression on the mind’ (AR 189). Because Wollstonecraft believes that women can be taught to restrain their natural affections through exercising their rational faculties, she is critical of women’s education that does not encourage recourse to reason. By ‘overstretching’ sensibility, such an education prevents the acquisition of ‘strong, persevering passion’, leaving in place ‘romantic wavering feelings’ (VRW 143). For, despite an insistence on the ‘sovereignty of reason’, Wollstonecraft does not deny the importance of sensations and the passions. Indeed, her objection to a purely sensory relation to the world rests on its inability to engender real and strong feelings. Instead women must don the clothes and cosmetics of fashionable sentiment. The novel plays a significant role in inculcating this ‘language of passion’ which can only ‘mimic … the flame of [real] passion’ (VRW 258; emphasis added). Novel-reading women, explains Wollstonecraft, ‘[who] have fostered a romantic unnatural delicacy of feeling, waste their lives in imagining how happy they should have been with a husband who could love them with a fervid increasing affection every day, and all day’ (101; emphasis in the original). The consequences of women’s passive, unproductive and inauthentic being multiply endlessly. Instead of acting and achieving, they waste their lives. Even if the verb is used here in its transitive

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form, it resonates with the meaning of the intransitive: the novelreaders themselves waste away and slowly disappear. Thus, the weakening mind affects the body, in an inverse movement to a strong mind, which Wollstonecraft claims is ‘accompanied by superior strength of body …’ (VRW 107). Moreover, not only do novel-reading women ‘imagine’ instead of ‘understand’, more seriously in their very imagination they are wrong to think that happiness results from an everpassionate husband. Although such an education seems to be geared towards the natural senses and feelings, in fact, it merely produces a further ‘unnatural delicacy’, leading the novel-reading women into a falser and falser order of knowledge and self-knowledge. Such is the case of Eliza, the novel-reading mother of the eponymous heroine of Wollstonecraft’s Mary, a Fiction, who presents a sharp contrast to her daughter’s self-determined consciousness and self-made conscience. Eliza, the narrator tells us, ‘was so chaste … that is, she did not make any actual faux pas; she feared the world, and was indolent, but then, to make amends for this seeming self-denial, she read all the sentimental novels, dwelt on the love-scenes …’ (M 9). Encouraged to fear the world, Eliza never overtly confronts and expresses her own desires and passions. Only thus does she manage to maintain an appearance of chastity. Yet by denying her involvement in the world, Eliza also fails to learn about it and more importantly about herself. As a protection from the world, her fear prevents her from confronting both the worldly gaze and more importantly her own. Developing neither strong feelings nor lasting passions, she must instead borrow the diluted sentiments and fantasies of the love stories she reads. Even when considered according to its internal logic, Eliza’s education is unsuccessful. Her self-denial is only an appearance: the love-scenes on which she dwells so intensely provide her with all the unchaste language and thoughts she otherwise begs to deny. By giving free rein to passions and sensations, then, novels prevent women from seeing themselves as they are. They thus make women subjects of immediate sensation, denying the more lasting sensory understanding and reasoned sentiment. As Wollstonecraft explains in the beginning of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a meaningful existence is one where knowledge is attained through ‘struggling with passions’ (VRW 81). By encouraging the development of sensations to the exclusion of reason, female education and pastimes deny women this struggle and thereby the acquisition of knowledge mediated through experience. In turn, without knowledge, this subject of sensation can never exercise informed choice and decision. She behaves instead in

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accordance with her natural instincts, passions and sensations. Small wonder then that despite her excessive sensibility, a woman’s affections are invested in her children and her family, in the immediate ties to which she is bound by her person but not by her deliberation. Echoing Smith’s disparaging comments on the more natural sentiment of ‘humanity’, Wollstonecraft accepts his definitions and his contempt for women’s excessively ‘narrow affections’ (VRW 261). The ‘clinging affection of ignorance has seldom anything noble in it,’ she notes, ‘may mostly be resolved into selfishness’ (VRW 260). Yet unlike the Scottish moral philosopher, the feminist blames women’s failure on their education and in particular their reading habits. Insisting that women are rational beings, she suggests that they need not be limited eternally to their natural and immediate feelings and may be educated into adopting a more just perspective. But Wollstonecraft also challenges Smith and other eighteenthcentury philosophers by demonstrating how the apparently instinctive form of parental affection can in certain conditions be considered a form of conscious generosity. She distinguishes between ‘natural duty’, common to all animals, and ‘accidental duty due to parents’ (VRW 225), namely to humanity endowed with rational powers. Whereas the former may be an immediate and instinctive response to the helpless child, the latter incorporating conscious deliberation and selfcommand is not. This natural affection once refashioned and reformed by reason gives human dignity to the duty, and the parent who exercises it ‘acquires all the rights of the most sacred friendship’ (225; emphasis added). By recognising and measuring the added value of a feeling informed by reason, Wollstonecraft attributes to it more moral value and thereby elevates it to a virtue that must be esteemed. This elevation is crucial to acknowledging women’s individual worth and their active contribution to the larger community. As such, it is an important step towards insisting on their role in public life. Indeed, as I argued in chapter 1, Wollstonecraft highlights women’s conscious efforts as mothers. Although she clearly argues that they deserve civil autonomy as a result of this contribution, she also implies that this autonomy, and hence the possibility of exercising rational choice, is a precondition of producing cultivated generosity and not natural humanity. It is, in short, part of the process that encourages women to pursue active virtue, their own improvement and ultimately that of society more generally. A similar re-evaluation appears in her attempt to eliminate the sexual connotations of modesty and to insist instead on increased self-knowledge. This attempt is crucial, I suggested in the

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previous chapter, to distinguishing between passive sexual innocence and active virtue. It is equally significant, I shall argue below, in appreciating the reform of the novel she undertakes and specifically so where narratives of seduction and betrayal are concerned. The feminist philosopher thus seeks to recognise the conscious effort required by typically female activities, such as mothering and chastity, that eighteenth-century philosophy deems instinctive, natural and hence having little moral worth. In so doing, she strives to reformulate the ways in which women’s actions are perceived. For, given the theatre in which the self is formed, a creature of sensation is an object as well as a subject of sensation. Determined by the gaze of the world that surrounds her, her ‘amiable’ actions invite sentiments measured according to a clearly determined hierarchy. Indeed, it is not only that women express more compassionate identification or natural tenderness; they also elicit it from spectators. That the recipients of such sentiments are deemed ‘weaker’ and lesser beings appears in the context of the example provided by Smith: the helpless baby. This understandable response to a dependent being betrays a more revealing and troubling response. Smith contrasts the ‘reverence’ and ‘respectful attention’ expressed for ‘that silent and majestic sorrow, which discovers itself only in the swelling of the eyes, in the quivering of the lips and cheeks, and in the distant, but affecting, coldness of the whole behaviour’ (24) with the ‘disgust’ (emphasis added) felt for a spectacle of tears, lamentations and sighs.25 Whereas male self-control, which refuses any spontaneous and unmediated identification, invites respect, the display of excessive emotions, associated more often than not with women, ultimately elicits contempt. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argues that since sympathy does not arise so much from the ‘view of the passion’ as from the ‘situation which excites it’ (12), the spectator is better able to determine the justness of a feeling, even its very necessity, than the person herself. As objects of tenderness and pity, then, women are not only recipients of masculine condescension because of their apparently irremediable weakness. In their failure to exercise the necessary self-control and to evaluate the seriousness of a situation, they also invite ‘disgust’. This contempt is increased as the male spectator becomes more and more aware of the impropriety of female weakness and of his own superior impartiality and judgement. The subject of respect, in other words, needs the object of pity to affirm his self-worth. For, as David Marshall has argued, the subject-positions generated from the theatrical social encounter are grounded in the movement of sentiments.26 Smith’s

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model thereby forsakes a theory of innate individual value, suggesting instead that this value is determined through the exchange of sentiments, to paraphrase his more famous labour theory of value. Even though he presupposes an implicit sexual difference through his appeals to sex-typed examples and through his assumptions about ‘natural’ femininity, he also indicates how this difference is further reinforced by the dialogic interdependence between the subject and object of the spectacle. But the opposite also remains true. Although the Scottish philosopher clearly argues that social identities are forged not inherited, ultimately the fashioning of modern subjects for commercial societies remains possible only for men. Or rather, as recent scholarship on the curriculum of chemistry and law have argued, given the restricted access to universities and to polite society, it remains possible for only a minority of men. Despite claims that education, including in belles lettres, will ‘improve’ men into human beings, it continues to legislate differences.27 Ultimately, the position of impartial spectator is reserved for legislators, philosophers, heroic warriors and statesmen – the wise and virtuous men who differ from the common multitude, including but not only women and children. The implicit hierarchy contained in the interaction between female objects of tenderness and male subjects of respect becomes even more apparent when considered in relation to eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. Given that Smith articulates his theory of sympathy as a relationship between a spectator and a spectacle, it is hardly surprising that his gendered typology of virtues has its equally gendered aesthetic equivalencies. Edmund Burke’s distinction between the sublime and the beautiful can be mapped directly on to the awful and amiable virtues: they elicit similar responses. Like the amiable virtues, Burke’s beautiful inspires ‘sentiments of tenderness and affection’.28 The sublime, on the other hand, invites admiration, reverence and respect. If the latter is characterised by greatness, obscurity, terror and power, the beautiful is specifically affiliated with weakness, delicacy, smallness and timidity. These traits are especially desirable in beautiful women who are even, according to Burke, ‘enhanced by their timidity, a quality of mind analogous to it’.29 Throughout her intellectual career, Wollstonecraft contests these ideas on women and strives to identify ways through which women invite respect for their active virtue and not tenderness for their passive innocence and beauty.30 In the next chapter I will examine how she reworks the traditional sentimental scene of distress by calling atten-

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tion to social situations that produce female suffering, thereby both justifying the grief they display and demonstrating how this ‘excess’ is, given the circumstances, not as excessive as all that. By declining to pity the suffering women and expressing her respect instead, Wollstonecraft refuses to conflate her position with that of the person principally concerned. Nor does she elaborate her self-aggrandisement at the expense of the other’s continued distress. On the contrary, she recognises the latter’s subjectivity, autonomy and self-determination even as she invites a disinterested comparison between their situations. The respect she grants women in distress is crucial to her attempt to elaborate an aesthetics of solidarity. For solidarity, unlike pity, depends on both an acknowledgement of two equally respected subjectivities and a detachment from the scene of suffering. This aesthetics transfers the distress into the public realm as well as insists on a collective response to change the conditions that produce it. Postponing this discussion to the next chapter, here I would like to reread Wollstonecraft’s much examined response to Edmund Burke in light of her debate with Adam Smith on the formation of the gendered subject. I will thereby set the stage to examine her aesthetic reformation. Responding to Burke in her 1790 Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft demonstrates how his aesthetic categories depend on excessively naturalised gender configurations, indicating that his ‘naturally’ beautiful woman is very much a social artifice. Her extended attack on his defence of the French queen specifically and of chivalry more generally in Reflections on the Revolution in France can be understood in this light. Chivalry, after all, protects women because they are beautiful, or rather because they are delicate, little and weak. Hence, to attract the gaze of courteous knights, ladies ‘have laboured to be pretty, by counterfeiting weakness’ (VRM 45). Wollstonecraft emphasises here the wasteful and expended energy that goes into the production of a beautiful woman who will elicit the appropriate feelings of tenderness. Elsewhere, she enumerates in great detail the physical torture and pain that women endure in order to ‘counterfeit’ weakness, mentioning not only footbinding but also corsets and cosmetics. Novels have their place in this counterfeit. Like the ideology of chivalry which ‘makes those beings vain inconsiderate doll …’ (VRM 25), novels encourage women to play a false part in order to heighten their appearance as beautiful, but delicate beings. They thereby damage both a woman’s body and her language. Women of fashion cultivate lisps in order to give themselves a youthful and delicate air. They adopt the affected language of the novel, the pretty ‘superlatives’, which say

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so much about so little. ‘The language of passion in affected tones slips for ever from their glib tongues,’ writes Wollstonecraft, ‘and every trifle produces those phosphoric bursts which only mimic in the dark the flame of passion’ (VRW 258). The artificial language that accomplished and fashionable ladies speak is more than a sophisticated veneer, more than a mask to conceal and protect their passions, emotions and sentiments. In fact, their language prevents them from having affections of their own. Instead they feign feeling. The irony of women’s current condition lies, as I suggested in discussing the character Eliza, in their reputation for heightened sensibilities and their real failure to feel either for themselves or for the misery that surrounds them. The inauthentic existence of these ‘dolls’ (VRM 25) is derived partly from their status as objects of male fantasies, partly from the lies that must be told to maintain this status. It is not, however, only imaginative fictions including the romance and the novel that misrepresent women; so too do sermons. When Wollstonecraft likens James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women to novels, she is being deliberately insulting, debasing the illustrious claims of this authoritative moralist by comparing his works to lowly novels. She is also suggesting that the image of middle-class women – the wife and the mother – produced in and by his sermons is scarcely more authentic than the aristocratic woman of fashion and display – made by poets and novelists. Whereas men are shown in an infinite variety, women are always ‘levelled, by meekness and docility, into one character of yielding softness and gentle compliance’ (VRW 165). As she does to courtly chivalry, Wollstonecraft objects to the ideology of the soft, gentle and pleasing woman of the sermons. Her comments on Fordyce reveal the not so surprising similarity with Burke. Both men rely on the language of passion and feeling to describe as well as to address their clearly female readers. The man of religion reduces women’s piety and holiness – just as the man of feeling does their sensibility – to a mere ‘cosmetic’, as Millicent Garrett Fawcett, women’s suffragist, was to comment.31 When Fordyce writes ‘British fair, the fairest of the fair’ (cited in VRW 164; emphasis is Wollstonecraft’s), there is, in fact, little to distinguish this object of sensation from the ‘morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy’ to which Burke compares Marie Antoinette.32 Similarly, just as Burke’s morning star is ‘“but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order” … if she is not more attentive to the duties of humanity’ (VRM 25 citing Burke’s Reflections), the ‘angels’ Fordyce claims to venerate for their ‘yielding softness’ are reduced to the status of ‘house slave’, ‘domestic drudge’ and ‘ass’ (VRW

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165). Finally, like Burke’s, Fordyce’s homage to the ‘fairest of the fair’ is clearly limited to certain kinds of women – ‘the young and beautiful’ (164). As for the others, their entire being – character, reason, passion and religion – ‘is absorbed in that of a tyrant’s’ (165). This limitation reveals, as Wollstonecraft points out, that the homage Fordyce pays the fairest of the fair is to ‘their persons’ not to ‘their [acquired] virtues’ (164). More significantly, it denies any recognition, homage or respect to women who are not – and indeed cannot be – young and beautiful. The self-effacing and obedient housewife and mother of the sermons is, then, surprisingly like the beautiful queen of Burke’s Reflections and at the centre of the ideology of chivalry and romance. In both cases, women are offered no possibility to improve or perfect themselves: they either are beautiful, soft and gentle or, not appropriate to the male spectator’s field of vision, they simply are not. Pursuing Smith’s conception of tenderness that ultimately becomes disgust, Wollstonecraft suggests that in the long run these tortured objects of sensation become objects of contempt. As the title to chapter 5 of Rights of Woman, ‘Animadversion on some of the writers who have rendered women objects of pity, bordering on contempt’ (147) implies, writers such as Burke, Rousseau, Fordyce and Gregory have made women objects of pity – because they are small and weak. But because chivalry denies women the possibility of becoming subjects who can change this initial weakness, it is a pity ‘bordering on contempt’. An ideology based on women’s natural weakness and delicacy is contemptuous of women. It offers protection in exchange for submission, thereby denying women an active role in determining their own existence. Significantly, in the logic of this ideology, male self-worth depends on the naturalisation of female weakness. For pity has, as Hannah Arendt notes commenting on Wollstonecraft’s contemporary Maxmillien Robespierre, a ‘vested interest in the existence of the unhappy’.33 An equally serious problem lies in the fact that this ideology denies the same protection to those women who do not and in fact cannot conform to standards of femininity because of age, infirmity and social class. ‘[T]he distress of many industrious mothers,’ Wollstonecraft responds to Burke, ‘whose helpmates have been torn from them … were vulgar sorrows that could not move your commiseration’ (VRM 15; emphasis in the original). These mothers, who work for sustenance and not to counterfeit weakness, are denied the ‘respect’ and homage so generously given to the queen and other fashionable ladies. Finally, the ideology of chivalry also naturalises the power relations between men and women, creating a situation in which a woman

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depends on a man because she is weaker and in which, in turn, this dependence is maintained in the name of the original weakness. ‘Men have superior strength of body,’ she writes, ‘but were it not for mistaken notions of beauty, women would acquire sufficient to enable them to earn their own subsistence’ (VRW 155; emphasis added). Novelists and poets who glorify women’s passive beauty exploit this generally established, albeit mistaken notion of womanhood. Instead of making women subjects of action, they position them as objects of male tenderness, pity and, ultimately, contempt. The creature of sensation is thus an object of sensation, subject to and determined by the gaze of worldly spectators. Taught to valorise only her external appearance and her ornamental skills, she is made into a woman of fashion and display in order to ‘make an impression on the senses of the other sex’ (VRM 23). Directly dependent on the approval and pleasure she brings to the world, her self-esteem and selflove are measured only in relation to her status as a spectacle. Without knowledge and will to determine her actions, this creature of sensation is reduced to a mere machine of pleasure for the primarily male gaze that views her. Significantly, she is made into this object of contempt by novels, poetry, music and gallantry, all of which purport to sing her praise and pay homage to her delicacy. Wollstonecraft’s objection to the unique representation of women offered by gallantry, novels and sermons is thus more than a demand for more authentic images and for a variety of choices. It is, more importantly, a demand to recognise a woman as a being in her own right not as an instrument for male fantasies, desires and affirmations of self-importance. In Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft inscribes the inauthenticity of the beautiful novel-reader in the social network of a plantation economy. Enumerating the nefarious consequences for both self and social development, she offers a perceptive analysis of the internal contradictions of an ideological system that promotes such inauthentic ‘creatures of sensation’: Where is the dignity, the infallibility of sensibility, in the fair ladies, whom, if the voice of rumour is to be credited, the captive negroes curse in all the agony of bodily pain, for the unheard of tortures they invent? It is probable that some of them, after the sight of a flagellation, compose their ruffled spirits and exercise their tender feelings by the perusal of the last imported novel. (VRM 45) In this scene of the reading lady, Wollstonecraft establishes a parallel between the existential slavery of women, reduced to creatures of sensa-

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tion whose being is absorbed into their husbands’, and the more literal slavery of the ‘captive negroes’.34 Given the grammar and the syntax of the phrasing, the formation of female identity is privileged. Wollstonecraft nevertheless invokes the slaves’ agency by inscribing their resistance: however much they are tortured, they continue to curse. Although subsequently they are relegated to the object-position crucial in the engendering of female sensibility, their outcry cannot be denied. The misery of slavery is directly dependent on the delicate and dainty pleasures of the ‘sex called the tender’. To articulate this relationship, Wollstonecraft relies on the constitution of woman as a conspicuous consumer, whose frivolous needs maintain the cruel economy of slavery. Abolitionist literature, for example, specifically addressed women, asking them to stop consuming tea and sugar (men and in particular sailors, on the other hand, were asked to refrain from drinking rum); here these frivolities and luxuries are figured in the imported, hence expensive and unnecessary novel. Moreover, Wollstonecraft’s reference indicates an awareness that a key ideological feature in the maintenance of plantation economies centres on the threat of miscegenation. Under such a system, white womanhood, even more than white manhood, has to be preserved, venerated and protected from potential ‘contamination’ by black blood. The fair ladies, like Marie Antoinette at the centre of the ideology of chivalry upholding a society of rank, must become creatures of sensation to justify the cruelty on which the economy depends. Women are conspicuous consumers of the products of slavery, but they are also conspicuously consumed by an economic system that depends on slavery. It is as consumer and as object of consumption that white women are responsible for the misery of black slaves. The fair novel-readers’ ‘natural’ tenderness further engenders such responsibility. The novels they consume ‘outstretch’ their sensibility (VRW 130) to such an extent that they fail to see the distress they provoke. In the fashionable sympathy they reserve for the miseries portrayed in their novels, they are not unlike Burke, whose ‘tears are reserved … for the declamation of the theatre, or for the downfall of queens’ (VRM 15). Like this man of ‘uncommon sensibility’, these venerated white women actively encourage cruelty, by viewing flagellations and inventing tortures. ‘Rumours’ of their cruelty proliferate in parliamentary speeches and abolitionist literature, as they do in Wollstonecraft’s account. More importantly, Wollstonecraft locates this engendered cruelty in novel-reading. Reading, as it appears in this scene, is a private act, a

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retreat into the domestic and private sphere, an escape from cruel realities and an abdication from worldly affairs. Reading, in other words, is reduced to the immediate and unmediated consumption of imported novels, which in turn induces the conspicuous consumption of and by women. Indeed, the practice of reading forces women to withdraw from the public sphere. At the same time, however, it returns them to this sphere, metamorphosed into objects to be consumed: as signs of whiteness, wealth and gentility through which they uphold the plantation economy. In her reference to the novel-reading slave-owners, then, Wollstonecraft argues that false knowledge and false sensibility inculcated by female education have repercussions beyond a woman’s individual existence and self-determination. They engender and reproduce the cruelty on which social divisions are based. The ‘creature of sensation’ made by ‘[n]ovels, music, poetry, and gallantry’ is thus both a subject and an object of sensation. Or rather, she results in the mutually reinforcing and dialogic interaction of these two positions. For as this discussion has been suggesting, Wollstonecraft offers a complex account of the formation of genderedsubject formation which heralds recent feminist theorisations inspired by the Althusserian concept of interpellation. The inauthentic, artificial woman ‘made’ by novels is neither located simply in the negative representations of women produced by the ideology of chivalry and the fictions of sensibility; nor is she merely produced by the form and content of women’s education, which encourages certain relationships with the world. Instead, she occupies a position determined by the dialectic exchange between the spectator and the spectacle. As such, the formation of female subjects is directly related to the formation of male subjects. This account nevertheless conflicts with another, implicit in the discussion on modesty in the previous chapter. Rather than suggesting that the self is always socially produced and that it results from the exchange of social sentiments, a model more fitting with the demands of commercial society, in her repeated references to humanity’s postlapserian conditions, Wollstonecraft upholds a more classical, humanist vision of innate virtue and worth. Arguing that current social conditions curtail the realisation and development of human value, she indicts specifically the laws on marriage, the sexual double standard and inadequate female education. These two conflicting models of subject-formation have implications for the importance she accords the novel. As I will suggest, although Wollstonecraft favours accounts of embattled and pathetic female individuality striving to affirm its

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autonomy and virtue in a fallen world, she refuses to stop here. Instead, her scattered comments on improving the novel repeatedly insist on a more interactive model of reading, related to Smith’s dialogic theatre.

How women make novels creations of sensation Establishing a parallel between Adam Smith’s distinction between tenderness and respect and Edmund Burke’s contrast between the beautiful and the sublime, I have tried to show how Wollstonecraft’s comments on the novel are directly related to her theories of the formation of the gendered subject. Like other aspects of female culture, they stunt the complete development of the female mind. As a result of their overdeveloped sensory faculties, women are denied the possibility of reasoning or of feeling. This stunted development plays a key role in rendering them inauthentic, theatrical beings determined by the will and gaze of the male entourage. Like ‘[r]iches and hereditary honours’, they make women ‘cyphers’ (VRW 93): nothings and nonentities who have no value in themselves but who as symbols to be deciphered may affect the value of those who own, possess or merely gaze at them. Wollstonecraft’s account has implications for the transformation of ‘creatures of sensation’ into active public citizens. Given the way in which subjects are ‘interpellated’ as women through a specular exchange, she does not seem to suggest that women can be woken from the sleep of false ideology in which society has plunged them for centuries. Substituting more positive images of women for the ideology of chivalry and the fictions of sensibility will not suffice, any more than simply reorienting women’s education. Instead she argues for a more general social restructuring, one that includes the reformation of the novel. A site where women are both figured as objects and interpellated as subjects, the genre is an interesting locus where and through which transformations occur. As Catherine Gallagher has argued in her study of Wollstonecraft’s near-contemporaries, Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, the novel tells ‘nobody’s story’ and has no innate value. Providing a domain where identities can be projected, it becomes a place where nascent subjects can take form.35 Echoing Gallagher, I might ask whether Wollstonecraft, in attributing to the novel powers to ‘make’ women, affirms an intrinsic belief in it. Can novels ‘make’ women into something other than cyphers and creatures of sensation?

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For despite her disparaging comments on novels and novel-writers, Wollstonecraft knows exactly how difficult it is to write a praiseworthy novel. Commenting on Helen Maria Williams’s first attempt at the genre, she notes: ‘[I]t may require more knowledge of the human heart, and comprehensive views of life, to write a good novel than to tell a pretty story in verse, or write a little plaintive lay’ (AR 251). Wollstonecraft uses diminutives to qualify gentle and feminine verse compositions, reproducing the very criteria of Burke’s theory of the sublime and the beautiful. Pretty, little and hence feminine poetry contrasts with the more totalising scope of the novel. Whereas the latter requires familiarity with rules of formal composition, knowledge of both the heart and life is imperative for writing the novel. Similar preoccupations inflect Wollstonecraft’s discussion of Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake. ‘We were rather amused than interested by the story,’ she writes, ‘every thing is described with that minute exactness, which distinguishes a mind more inclined to observe the various shades of manners than the workings of passion, or the inconsistencies of human nature’ (AR 189). Although she praises Smith’s descriptions, she nevertheless implies that the work fails to provide the more comprehensive vision necessary for a convincing and dramatic novel. Smith’s skills are limited to her capacity to observe external appearances – or manners – at the expense of inner feelings – or passions. Implicit to this contrast is that Smith’s aesthetics of detail describes only a static moment rather than an active process. The internal conflicts and deliberations of human passions are thus entirely absent from her account. Yet, as I have argued in earlier chapters, it is this conflict – the struggle with passions – that Wollstonecraft finds the important and necessary part of human development in real life and so too, I may presume, in the novel. Smith’s skills of observation have another consequence. Excessive attention to detail may prevent a view of the whole picture, or so claims eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. Its most authoritative figure, Sir Joshua Reynolds, argues that only the second-rate artist copies nature’s infinite particularities of detail; the Genius, on the other hand, pays attention to the whole. Only as such can the imperfections in nature be improved by art.36 Rejection of detail also figures prominently in eighteenth-century theories of the sublime. Burke, for instance, suggests that concrete enumeration provided by inventorylike descriptions prevents the mind from moving into the ‘roused’ state induced by the sublime. Given Wollstonecraft’s implicit contrast with the beautiful poem, I want to pursue this comparison.

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When Wollstonecraft addresses the question of ‘minute details’ and the ‘whole picture’ in Vindication of the Rights of Woman, however, it is not with respect to aesthetics and affective responses, but to knowledge: The power of generalizing ideas, [she writes] of drawing comprehensive conclusions from individual observations is the only acquirement … that really deserves the name of knowledge. Merely to observe, without endeavouring to account for any thing, may … serve as the common sense of life; but where is the store laid up that is to clothe the soul … (123) According to this definition, then, Charlotte Smith’s excessive attention to detail does not produce the kind of ‘knowledge’ deemed worthwhile. More seriously, much like the novel when read as the history of ‘particular men’ (VRW 218), her portrait of manners may even prevent and forestall the articulation of this more abstract, comprehensive generalisation. In Vindication of the Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft addresses the difference between the two forms of knowledge and the education that produces them. Comparing the education of women with that of soldiers, she writes, ‘they both acquire manners before morals, and a knowledge of life before they have, from reflection, any acquaintance with the grand ideal outline of human nature’ (93). Both in this comparison between women and slavish soldiers and in the very distinction between morals and manners, Wollstonecraft borrows from the recognised language of civic humanism. Opposing external polish or manners, she reiterates her preference for the more independent and self-sufficient commonwealth man.37 Significantly, in the context of this discussion of how novels might make public women, this distinction between ‘manners’ and ‘morals’, external ‘life’ and ‘internal human nature’ may well underlie her reflections on the genre. Consider her comments on an anonymous novel Albertina, which seems to lack the more complete understanding. The story, Wollstonecraft writes, is ‘strictly moral’, the sentiments are ‘seldom absurd’ and the characters possess a ‘kind of feudal dignity’. She nevertheless concludes that the work is quite forgettable, an ‘insipid, harmless production, which, resembling that numerous class, termed good sort of people, deserves neither praise nor censure’ (AR 191; emphasis in the original). Although the novel seems to know external rules of

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decorum and conduct, it does not know internal torments of the heart and the vicissitudes of life. Like the soldiers and women Wollstonecraft deplores, its morality expresses either a blind submission ‘to authority’ or is a purely ‘instinctive’ response to the world (VRW 93). In this sense, the ‘strictly moral’ book has manners only, not morals.38 To return to an opposition articulated in earlier chapters, this book may teach propriety of conduct, but it will not teach modesty. For although the two are often confused, the external appearance of good behaviour – or manners – is not the self-knowledge acquired with the absolute liberty to exercise reason in the struggles with passions – or morals. The distinction between manners and morals, between mere propriety and real modesty, may also explain why as a genre the novel contrasts with more ‘feminine’ poetry. The latter, Wollstonecraft argues in ‘On Poetry’, does not really require the originality that experience of life brings, but rather knowledge of verse, emulation of standard rhymes and much practice. Production of ‘pretty verses’ (9) is little more than a schoolroom exercise. Given the protective and enclosed education characterised by an induction to rules of conduct and behaviour (the equivalent in moral philosophy to an exercise in poetic metre) which women are subject to, few women have the more ‘just’ and adequate knowledge necessary. Their ‘confined views’ (VRW 261) and their lives as a whole also prevent the acquisition of a more ‘grand ideal outline’ (93). ‘Having their attention turned to little employments, and private plans’ (261), they can never see ‘below the surface’ (93). Hence, although women – including the well-known poetesses Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams – aspire to be novelists, they nearly always fail to be good ones. Almost paradoxically, then, if novels have made women into creatures of immediate sensation, women (or rather women educated into a confined view) have made novels into creations of sensation. They fail to recognise the genre’s sublime potential to depict the struggles with passions and to produce a more comprehensive view of human nature. Given that much of the distinction between manners (detailed observation, common sense of life, external appearance, rules, poetry, feminine) and morals (abstraction, profound understanding of human nature, internal experience, originality, ideal novels, masculine) also underlies the more celebrated distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, Wollstonecraft is in fact upholding the novel as the most heroic of genres. The heroic and sublime potential is located in the

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genre’s capacity to inculcate morals, or an understanding and appreciation of human struggles.

Reforming the genre Wollstonecraft not only affirms the powerful potential of the novel. In the course of her literary career, she identifies different ways of reforming the novel in order to make use of its fullest possibilities. In the following sections I will examine what these means are. In the final chapter of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft suggests that it may, in fact, be better to read novels and romances than nothing at all. This refusal to censure novelreading accords with her insistence on experience and on learning through struggling with passions. A woman who is forced not to read novels is not unlike one who is given little choice but to do so. Both are made; neither makes herself/itself. As in other aspects of her life, a woman must rationally understand the imposed limitations. In her chapter on reading in her 1787 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, Wollstonecraft had argued in favour of ‘the mind being put into a proper train, and then left to itself’. The mind, she notes in this early work which is already marked by her emphasis on individual experience, ‘cannot be created by the teacher, though it may be cultivated’ (21). This emphasis may also explain why Wollstonecraft does not proscribe novels and bad books. She argues instead for a ‘judicious person’ who will ‘point out both by tones, and apt comparisons with pathetic incidents and heroic characters in history, how foolishly they [novels] caricatured human nature’ (258). The young novel-reader should be closely monitored and supervised in her reading until her mind is set ‘into a proper train’. In time, however, the young student will internalise this authoritative counsel and ridicule; reading will then become both a sensory and rational experience.39 In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, this ‘judicious person’ is clearly either an older friend or a teacher. I would like to suggest, however, that cultivation-through-ridicule might also come from a narrative voice that constantly draws attention to the limited perspective of the novel. As I demonstrated in ‘The Old Abelard’, Wollstonecraft certainly develops such techniques in her own novels. Moreover, her unending praise for the novels of Robert Bage may well derive from his narrative technique. In her reviews of his work, she calls attention not to the

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story, the content or the message of the story, but rather to the narration, to the narrative structure and, more importantly, to the effect this digressive narrative has on the reader. For, although Bage may seem to imitate the conventions of eighteenth-century fiction, he does so, as Marilyn Butler has argued, ‘in such a manner that he criticized its underlying assumptions, while at the same time availing himself of the popular novelist’s power to create an attractive autonomous world’.40 One way of reforming the novel may lie, then, in the introduction of a narrative voice, which helps to forestall an immediate, naïve and purely sentimental identification with the fictive universe. By promoting this voice, Wollstonecraft is surely encouraging readers to experiment with different subject-positions articulated through the universe of the novel. The reader can both identify sympathetically with the heroine and evaluate the justness of the situation as well as the excess of the response. Such a novel may well provide a crucial arena for exercising immediate responses into more socially formed and mediated ones. If Wollstonecraft is interested in preventing an unmediated identification in the reading experience, it is ultimately to encourage further interaction with the world. Active reading should therefore engender this conscious involvement. Consider, for instance, the following paragraph where Wollstonecraft argues for women’s active participation in politics, a participation whose prior condition is another kind of education in reading. [Women] might also study politics, and settle their benevolence on the broadest basis; for the reading of history will scarcely be more useful than the perusal of romances, if read as mere biography; if the character of the times, the political improvements, arts, etc., be not observed. In short, if it be not considered as the history of man; and not of particular men, who filled a niche in the temple of fame, and dropped into the black rolling stream of time, that silently sweeps all before it into the shapeless void called – eternity. – For shape, can it be called, ‘that shape hath none’? (VRW 218) Wollstonecraft opposes not so much one genre to another, but rather the different ways in which they are read and how these ways are gendered. History is useful in preparing men to be politicians because it develops a sense of public virtue, emphasises the general over the particular, attends to global changes in art and politics, and sketches the spirit of each epoch. But history can also be read as biography, emphasising the particular and separating the individual from his context and

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time. In this sense, it is hardly more useful in training a politician or a public man than reading a romance. It is thus not so much the narrative form itself that matters but rather what the reader makes of it. In articulating these two ways of reading history, Wollstonecraft refers to a distinction that had already appeared in the belletrist and rhetorical tradition. Adam Smith, for instance, differentiates between history as amusement and history as instruction. In the second case, history narrates ‘the more important facts and those which were most concerned in the bringing about great revolutions, and unfolding their causes, to instruct their readers in what manner such events might be brought about or avoided’.41 By encouraging readers to explore relations of cause and effect, Smith emphasises a rational and scientific approach, one that is ultimately characterised by its disinterested abstraction. Similarly, Joseph Priestley articulates the difference between an entertainment and a science, noting: ‘By reading history with some farther view, as a means to farther end, we make it a science. It then engages our active powers. It is a serious business, and is capable of being pursued with continued and increasing ardour. Otherwise, history is no more than an amusement.’42 For both Smith and Priestley, the rational and conscious activity required to understand history contrasts with the apparently more passive experience of novel-reading. In Wollstonecraft, however, there is an attempt to extend this more active science of reading to the fictional novel. In the Author’s preface to Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, she writes: I could have made the incidents more dramatic, would I have sacrificed my main object, the desire of exhibiting the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society. In the invention of the story this view restrained my fancy and the history ought to be considered, as of woman, than of an individual. (WOW 83) In apologising for the delimited ‘drama’ of her account, Wollstonecraft refers – as I shall argue in the next chapter – to her attempt to articulate a new aesthetics around representations of ordinary miseries and sufferings (the ‘vulgar sorrows’ [VRM 15] that Burke fails to see). More important here is the manner in which she insists on her ‘main object’: she wants to articulate a cause-and-effect relationship between the ‘partial laws and customs’ and the ‘misery and oppression peculiar to

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woman’. As such, she writes this fictional history as, to quote Priestley, a ‘means to farther ends’. Equally significant is her attempt to articulate the relationship between a particular case and a general rule. As she writes in a letter to George Dyson, which Godwin subsequently reproduced as the preface to her novel, ‘I have in view … to show the wrongs of different classes of women, equally oppressive, though, from the difference of education, necessarily various’ (84). The account of Maria cannot be read then as ‘mere biography’ but must be read as the ‘history of [wo]man’ (VRW 218). The reader who weeps over the plight of Maria will, it is hoped, also be urged to understand how related this is to Jemima’s plight and to appreciate how both are caused by the same partial custom and law.43 Significantly, in the move towards a more ‘scientific’ novel, Wollstonecraft does not deny the significance of sentiment and sensibility, even if she gives them an entirely new meaning. Her defined objectives and her narrative experiments in narration may make woman into an authentic being. They may also reform the novel into a better genre. But perhaps the most significant means of improving the genre is by rendering it more moral and hence capable of producing virtuous female citizens. It may well be here that Wollstonecraft’s divergence from other female intellectuals concerned with the role the novel plays in women’s education is most evident. For, wishing to render the novel a more moral work, Wollstonecraft does not merely want to change its didactic content. If, as I have been suggesting, her complex theory of subject-formation does not locate identity either in the spectatorreader or in the spectacle-text, then surely more convincing, positive and empowering images of women are not sufficient to produce public citizens. Moreover, an engaged reader herself, Wollstonecraft knows that being morally good is not a sufficient condition to render a novel interesting. The author of The Castle of Mowbray is both modest and unaffected, she writes. The work itself has no tendency to immorality and yet the reader is wearied, rather than amused, by the various episodes that tie it together (vide AR 134). Similarly, The Negro equalled by few Europeans invokes the just sentiments of benevolence, justice and human sympathy, thereby impelling the reader to protest at the cruelties of the slave trade. Yet Wollstonecraft remains reluctant to give it her unqualified praise, explaining that ’it would have been more interesting if it had been less romantic’ (AR 282; emphasis added). Despite its political correctness and apparent morality, this novel remains unconvincing.

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By qualifying The Negro as ‘romantic’, Wollstonecraft is not alluding to the ideology of chivalry she criticised in Burke’s Reflections. Rather, she inscribes her comments in the hegemonic discourse on the novel, referring more implicitly to the debate between the stage tricks of old romance and the more plausible, probable and natural new romance. Not only does the former rely heavily on a theatrical machinery (‘Almost all the fictions of the last age will vanish,’ writes Samuel Johnson, ‘if you deprive them of a hermit and a wood, a battle and a shipwreck’44), but also on an almost outdated erudition and knowledge, one that is no longer pertinent or meaningful to contemporary readers. The new romance must instead present settings and characters that are recognisable in the universe of rational eighteenth-century readers. Yet, given its obligation to both truth and virtue, the new romance must also provide probable accounts of virtue and vice. Thus, if Johnson’s discussion of Richardson’s Clarissa concludes by favouring descriptions of the ‘most perfect idea of virtue’, he nevertheless insists that these should be ‘not angelical, nor above probability, for what we cannot credit we shall never imitate, but the highest and purest that humanity can reach’. Similarly, if Johnson insists that vice ‘is necessary to be shewn’, he nevertheless adds that it ‘should always disgust nor should the graces of gaiety, or the dignity of courage, be so united with it, as to reconcile it to the mind’.45 Because of these somewhat conflicting obligations, Johnson’s reflections on representing vice introduce an apparent rupture between what the new romance should say and what it should do. In speaking about vice, it should make the reader turn away. Hoping that the distaste the reader feels will forestall vicious possibilities, he ignores and denies any immediate pleasure in the reading experience and in its implicitly sadistic logic.46 For to convey a disgusting vice, virtue must suffer, possibly even undergo situations of extreme torture (think of the succession of mishaps that befall not only Clarissa but any of the ‘virtuous’ female heroines of the eighteenth century). Although virtue may ultimately triumph, the reader must visualise and perhaps even relish the pain and distress that precedes this triumph. Developing his comments on the new romance as a defence of Richardson’s Clarissa, Johnson participated in a debate dominated by women writers. They were, after all, among Richardson’s strongest proponents, in part because of his role in revalorising of women’s culture and women’s lives.47 Through this debate, they not only defended the moral and respectable qualities of the ‘feminine’ novel, they also engaged the question of women’s (sexual) virtue and the related one of

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how to reintegrate the fallen woman into the social fabric.48 Were a man to behave ‘with cowardice on one occasion,’ explains the philosopher David Hume, ‘a contrary conduct reinstates him in his character;49 not so a woman who loses not her chastity and hence her virtue, but quite simply her reputation as a chaste woman. ‘What once [was] lost’ remains, Wollstonecraft laments, ‘lost for ever’ (VRW 203). By vindicating the eponymous heroine who, despite her ‘fallen’ status and the loss of her virginity is upheld as exemplary virtue, women writers tried to redress the unbalanced burden placed on female respectability: their novels justly belong to the tradition of ‘feminist’ protest. Yet by equating femininity with innocence and purity and masculinity with sexual guilt, the narratives of seduction that these novelists told reinforced an ideal of passive, if virtuous woman. Her very goodness and innocence lead inevitably to her betrayal. These limits are also inherent in implicit theorisations of the reading experience. Consider Anna Laetitia Barbauld. In her scattered comments on the novel and the romance, she reflects on the implications Johnson’s comments have on women. By referring to novels far more frequently and more systematically, she reveals a conscious awareness that women are the genre’s most avid readers and writers.50 Her comments also betray nostalgia for the less truthful but more ‘virtuous’ old romance. Contrasting the two strains, she writes, ‘the old stamp, which tended to raise human nature, and inspire a certain grace and dignity of manners of which we have hardly any idea. The high notions of honour, the wild and fanciful spirit of adventure and romantic love, elevated the mind; our novels tend to depress and enfeeble it.’51 Elsewhere, she insists on representations of virtue not to be met in real life. These, she argues, will inspire amazement and wonder for ‘ideal excellence’52 and ‘“forms unseen, and mightier far than we”’.53 Her admiration for Clarissa’s stand against Lovelace is prototypical of the object of wonder that inspires virtue. Although neither a queen nor a lady of chivalry, Clarissa uplifts the reader to the ideal virtue that the latter can neither experience nor attain.54 As my discussions in previous chapters suggest, Wollstonecraft contests the presupposition underlying this veneration, namely that passive innocence is qualified as active virtue even where the sexual virtue of chastity is concerned. Referring specifically to Clarissa, she notes: Nay, the honour of a woman is not made even to depend on her will. When Richardson makes Clarissa tell Lovelace that he had robbed her of her honour, he must have had strange notions of

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honour and virtue. For, miserable beyond all names of misery is the condition of a being, who could be degraded without its own consent! (VRW 141) She also, I will suggest, questions the reading experience where any identification with Clarissa-like models of perfection is foreclosed. Wollstonecraft did not always prefer a more practical and probable approach to representing virtue in the novel. In her early reviews, she promotes romances of nobility and dignity. Echoing Barbauld, she laments the disappearance of pure and moral stories, ‘How far preferable are these histories of deeds of chivalry to the insipid love tales daily offered to the public, which, exhibiting a faint semblance of life, lead the youthful fancy astray, and instead of inspiring a taste for virtue, by exalting the first impulses of nature, debase the expanding mind’ (AR 90). Yet some two years later, in her comments on Helen Maria Williams’s Julia, a Novel, she enunciates a very different idea of how virtue should be represented in novels, claiming that models of absolute virtue fail to ‘interest’. In general, Wollstonecraft is highly eulogistic of this revision of Rousseau’s New Héloïse and Richardson’s Clarissa. Comparing it favourably to Charlotte Smith’s works, she notes how Williams avoids the romantic plot devices that abound in the latter. Her novel is not theatrical and affected; nor does it rely on a complex plot to ‘rouse a kind of restless curiosity’ (AR 251). The story is not based on a much recycled plot, but instead displays originality, simplicity and artlessness. But Wollstonecraft has reservations about this novel that are worth quoting at some length: But a reader, with the least discernment, must soon perceive that Julia’s principles, are so fixed that nothing can tempt her to act wrong; and as she appears like a rock, against which the waves vainly beat, no anxiety will be felt for her safety: – she is viewed with respect, and left very tranquilly to quiet her feelings, because it cannot be called a contest. A good tragedy or novel, if the criterion be the effect which it has on the reader, is not always the most moral work, for it is not the reveries of sentiment, but the struggles of passion – of those human passions, that too often frequently cloud the reason, and lead mortals into dangerous errors, if not into absolute guilt, which raise the most lively emotions, and leave the most lasting impression on the memory; an impression rather made by the heart than the understanding; for our affections are not quite

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so voluntary as the suffrage of reason. (AR 252–3; emphasis in the original) Williams’s novel fails on two, related accounts. First Julia’s rock-like resistance is implausible. Second, and as a result, the reader fails to identify with the representation. Having little impact, the narrative cannot contribute to the formation of more self-commanding and rational female subjects. To appreciate why this might be the case, consider first how Wollstonecraft’s comments on Julia also resonate with her theological vision. The analogy between both the Biblical and Miltonic Eves is implicit to the passage, not only because of ‘dangerous errors’ and ‘absolute guilt’ that threaten the heroine, but also in the necessary struggles of ‘mortal’ (hence postlapsarian) humanity. More surprising but no less relevant is the fact that Wollstonecraft’s remarks echo Samuel Johnson’s implicit reticence regarding Milton’s Paradise Lost. ‘As human passions did not enter the world before the Fall,’ he writes, ‘there is in Paradise Lost little opportunity for the pathetick.’55 As a result, he explains, ‘The reader finds no transaction in which he can be engaged, beholds no condition in which he can by any effort of imagination place himself; he has, therefore, little natural curiosity or sympathy.’56 In her discussion of Williams’s Julia, Wollstonecraft applies Johnson’s comments specifically to the heroine. By attributing ‘fixed principles’ to her, Williams denies her the absolute liberty to err or not and the ‘triall … by what is contrary’.57 The consequences are numerous. First, being already determined by her principles, the character cannot determine herself. As such, Williams caters to the libertine reveries of men like Fordyce, Burke and Rousseau, who maintain women eternally between the two extremes of the prelapsarian world: as venerated ‘angels’ or as contemptuous ‘sunk[en]’ beasts (VRW 143). Equally important, in light of Wollstonecraft’s perception of the reading experience as a dialogic one, is the impact this static account will have on the reader. Julia, she tells us, is ‘viewed with respect’, thereby recalling the impenetrable distance imposed by Adam Smith’s portrait of ‘awful virtues’. Thus, as in Johnson’s appreciation of Paradise Lost, the absence of ‘human passions’ in Williams’s Julia results in the novel’s failure to rouse the ‘lively emotions’ of sympathy in the reader.58 Instead, the latter is ‘left … to quiet her feelings’ (AR 252–3). Reading becomes, as a result, a perception of the embodiment of great virtues; it is not an experience that will inculcate morals or

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knowledge derived from life and reflection. It becomes, to quote Johnson on Milton again, ‘a duty rather than a pleasure … [therefore] we desert our master, and seek for companions’.59 Johnson’s reflections on the impact of Milton’s Paradise Lost on its readers certainly evokes the crucial importance of pleasure in the reading experience. It also insists on the individual experience of each member in a community of equals. By questioning the absolute and dogmatic authority of the master, he valorises the authority of the reader’s conscience in strengthening reason and feeling. Surely a similar concern underlies Wollstonecraft’s doubts on the reader’s response to the absolute moral superiority of Julia. The heroine’s knowledge can be revealed only to the reader who, as such, cannot partake in its acquisition. Instead of inculcating morals, it only presents manners required for appropriate behaviour. Instead of the ‘strong persevering passions’ (VRW 143) acquired through experiencing the struggle between reason and passion, reading Julia invites a once-gonesoon-forgotten immediate and instinctive feeling. More than echo Johnson, Wollstonecraft’s comments on Williams’s novel reiterate her preference for practical virtue that appears, I have argued, in her moral philosophy. Affirming the importance of conscious and active virtue, she insists on the particular circumstances of the agent and on its conscious desire to do good more than on the deed itself. If the reading experience is expected to mime real life experience and more importantly to produce self-commanding subjects by creating a place where the reader practises self-control both through sympathetically identifying with the character and through rationally distancing herself from her, this insistence is crucial. Unstained and absolute perfection like Clarissa – at least as celebrated by Barbauld – and like Julia implies above all the virtuous act itself. Although the reader will recognise absolute virtue for what it is, she cannot experience – understand and feel – the process through which it is acquired. A more consciousness-centred account of practical virtue, allowing the reader to exercise and hence develop her moral judgement, is clearly preferable. Wollstonecraft’s considerations on the representation of female virtue, then, differ substantially from Barbauld’s. Although she insists that they have to be both probable and the ‘highest and purest that humanity can reach’,60 this height is emphasised not in the contrast with vice (a contrast that may lend itself to a sadistic fascination with distress), but rather in the active struggle needed to attain virtue. She thereby ensures that the account is not only credible but also imitable.

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Herein lies the importance she accords in her review of Julia to ‘dangerous errors, if not … absolute guilt’. This emphasis should not suggest that Wollstonecraft urges women to ‘fall’, but rather to rise again and, by reaching for new heights, attain virtue. For not only is this acquired virtue respected; more importantly this respect ‘once lost’ is not ‘lost for ever’ (VRW 203), and can surely be found again. As such, for all this emphasis on the reader’s critical engagement with the novel, Wollstonecraft does not completely forsake a moralising position and thereby remains consistent with the affirmations of the innate human dignity that appears in her philosophy. Even if she does not entirely reject lapses into ‘dangerous errors’ and ‘absolute guilt’, her reviews indicate her preference for more noble endings. She deplores Elizabeth Inchbald’s Simple Story for failing to suggest that a rational education will render women more self-commanding subjects. The contrast between the ‘giddy’ mother and her more principled daughter should have been heightened, she argues, by focusing on the former’s faults and on the latter’s ‘greater dignity of mind’ (AR 370). Yet a rational education has not incited the daughter to respond heroically to her ‘critical and high situation’.61 Instead, Matilda gives in to her weakness and the reader’s perspective is confined to the deformed details of female suffering and rage. Her excessive ‘fevers, swoons, and tears’ (AR 370) are a far cry from Adam Smith’s picture of stoic restraint which invites the spectator’s ‘reverence’ and ‘respectful attention’ (24). In her failure to control her emotions, Matilda confirms the gendered presuppositions of this picture. Positioning women as delicate and frail objects of pity and ultimately contempt, Inchbald’s novel leads Wollstonecraft to protest: ‘Why do all female writers, even when they display their abilities, always give a sanction to the libertine reveries of men? Why poison the minds of their own sex, by strengthening a male prejudice that makes women systematically weak?’ (AR 370). As they appear through her reviews, then, Wollstonecraft’s revisions of the narrative of female virtue suggest that she extends the terms of bourgeois tragedy to women and specifically to narratives of female seduction and betrayal. Rejecting the stories of innocence’s fall from high places, she substitutes accounts of self-making that chart the tribulations and trials against which the heroic character must ultimately succeed in order to acquire her virtue.62 Suppressing the expression of female desire and rage, she favours not so much sexlessness, as critics have claimed often enough, but more importantly a regimented and disciplined control of emotions. For, in Wollstonecraft’s terms as

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in Smith’s, the failure to suppress any overt physical and bodily display inevitably ‘disgusts’. Forsaking the exhibition of emotions and passions, Wollstonecraft turns instead to the dilemmas the heroine’s conscience must confront if she is to become a better citizen for this world and a redeemed soul for the next. Although she continues to vindicate the standards of a sexually chaste woman, she nevertheless transforms the concept of female virtue by insisting on conscious and active virtue. Her revisions also suggest that she favours abandoning descriptions of valiant deeds, preferring instead representations of mental conflicts. This consciousness-centred narrative of internal deliberations is also a key to appreciating the role the novel might play in making more rational, self-commanding virtuous women. Identifying with the heroine’s struggles, the reader engages in the reflective process and reproduces the steps necessary for acquiring practical virtue. Invited to assess this process, she may well ultimately withhold her identification and sympathy. As such, a new subject-position may be produced, which lies neither purely in the text, nor uniquely outside it. Wollstonecraft’s attempts to apply these revisions become apparent when read against her efforts in narrative prose, including her history, her travel writing and her novel. In her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, she returns to the events of 5 and 6 October 1790 which she had discussed earlier in Vindication of the Rights of Men to qualify her attack on Marie Antoinette. Vivien Jones has argued that this second account relies on the mechanisms and images of the bourgeois novel of seduction: Marie Antoinette is cast as the Clarissa-like heroine whose sense of virtue has yet to triumph over the advances of the archetypal sexual libertine – the ‘grand sultan of this den of iniquity’ (207), or the Duke of Orleans – aided and abetted by bestial, monstrous and indecent women.63 Jones’s discussion ignores the fact that Marie Antoinette is not the heroine of the story – a role that Wollstonecraft appropriates for herself. Her narrative voice repeatedly insists that she charts the narrow waters between the ancien régime’s artistocratic libertine, the Duke of Orleans, and the French Revolution’s New Man of Feeling, Honoré Gabriel, comte de Mirabeau. She castigates him for his artful eloquence and his recourse to flattery (vide 152; 154). Unlike the queen who is innocent (at least where the invasion of her ‘sanctuary of repose, the asylum of care and fatigue, the chaste temple of a woman’ [209] is concerned), Wollstonecraft becomes virtuous by refusing the seduction and flattery of ‘designing men’ (196).

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Nor is she like the market women who have lost their innocence without realising it. Extending the middle-class ideology of self-making to women, she does not equate ‘respectability’ with mere ‘sexlessness’, but rather with a regimented and disciplined control of emotions. If the market women ‘disgust’, it is in their failure to suppress any physical and bodily display. In her Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, Wollstonecraft turns to the story of another queen, Matilda of Denmark. She evades the sensational details of the latter’s adulterous affair with the minister Johann Frederick Struensee to focus instead on her commitment to social reform and on her maternal virtues. As in her earlier tribute to Catherine Macaulay, discussed in ‘“An Eve to Please Me”’, here too Wollstonecraft proclaims her ‘respect for your memory’ (LSND 322), upholding this female paragon by suppressing details of socially sanctioned sexual misconduct, namely adultery. Nor does Wollstonecraft’s account of Matilda’s life fall into the trap she denounces in Williams and in Inchbald. Unlike Williams’s Julia, she errs not only in breaking her marriage vows, but also in ‘wishing to do immediately what can only be done by time’ (LSND 322). Unlike Inchbald’s Matilda, Wollstonecraft’s is not portrayed as ‘systematically weak’ (AR 370). On the contrary, she responds to her adversity. Married by proxy to the mentally retarded King Christian VII, she uses her position as regent to introduce the liberal reforms alluded to in the Letters. Wollstonecraft even goes so far as to suggest that, in such ciecumstances, the adulterous affair does not ‘disgrace her heart or understanding’ (322). As such, the emphasis on Matilda’s obvious errors, on the particular circumstances of her action and on her attempt to rise above her fallen state offers an account of practical virtue in fitting with Wollstonecraft’s theoretical discussions. Here too the attempt to acknowledge active virtue is problematic. Despite the attempts to curtail the romance-like elements by speaking only of the woman and not of the queen, the heroine’s royal rank overdetermines the nature of the narrative. For all the emphasis on valiant republican self-making, middle-class becoming and active virtue, ultimately Matilda’s story interests the narrator because she is a princess, endowed from birth with exceptional sensibility. Moreover, although Wollstonecraft certainly strives to divorce her respect for female virtue from its sexual quality, she does not entirely conceal her discomfort. Matilda, she proclaims, was not a ‘woman of gallantry’ (322). She thereby strives to position her heroine’s conduct within the

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constraints of sexually appropriate behaviour and denies the possibility of a woman’s active sexual desire. Consider finally Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, which differs from earlier representations in containing an overtly utopian and critical discourse. Unlike Williams’s Julia, Wollstonecraft’s Maria does not have ‘fixed principles’. As Mary Nyquist has convincingly argued, even after she has been mistreated by her husband, she continues to ‘waste … [her life] in imagining how happy … [she] would have been with a husband who could love [her]’ (VRW 101; emphasis in the original).64 Instead of saving herself like the eponymous heroine of Thomas Holcraft’s Anna St Ives (which Wollstonecraft had criticised for its tendency to be affected and romantic [AR 439]), Maria wants to be saved by a male protector. As I argued in ‘The Old Abelard’, Wollstonecraft invites readers to distance themselves from this desire through the presence of a narrative voice as well as through Jemima. In the fragment of her letter to George Dyson, which Godwin included in the Preface, Wollstonecraft defends her project: ‘What are termed great misfortunes may more forcibly impress the mind of common readers, they have more of what might justly be termed stage effect but it is the delineation of finer sensations which, in my opinion, constitutes the merit of our best novels, this is what I have in view’ (WOW 83; emphasis in the original). By rejecting stage effects and great misfortunes, Wollstonecraft certainly refuses the improbabilities of the old romance, applying them specifically to representations of internalised conflicts. These theatrical tricks of ‘great misfortunes’ – like the ‘more dramatic’ (84) incidents she has decided to forsake in favour of her objectives – may highlight the moral or virtuous act. They will not, however, bring to light the action required to arrive there. By abandoning drama for the ‘delineation of finer sensations’, Wollstonecraft favours a more consciousness-centred and narrative representation of the practical attempt to rise ‘superior to passions and discontent’. By sacrificing the visible effect for invisible feeling, however, this approach may also sacrifice the ‘representativity’ of the account, thereby conflicting with the equally important emphasis she places on the history of ‘woman’ as a group not as an individual. In her objections to an excessively dramatic approach, Wollstonecraft specifically protests against accounts of ‘great misfortunes’. Yet, the title of her work is The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (emphasis added), implying that she nevertheless remains concerned with the misfortunes of women. This title remains ambiguous, evoking

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both the wrongs done to women and the wrongs that women do, the wrongs they experience and the wrongs they provoke because of this experience. What remains crucial, however, is the suggestion – in both the title and the letter – that she is concerned with accounts and representations of misfortunes, and particularly of the misfortunes of women. Given her strident objections to both Williams’s and Inchbald’s novels, these accounts and representations should differ from the more common, disrespectful accounts of virtue in distress, which either venerate women’s silent heroism or deride their hysterical suffering. In the next chapter, I will examine more systematically the problems raised by such an approach. I will explore how she tries to do so without sacrificing the general history to the excessive details of a particular misfortune. By focusing on Wollstonecraft’s travel book and her novels, I will investigate how she attempts to represent more common and ordinary misfortunes of women, which have remained invisible in much of the aesthetic and philosophical tradition. I will analyse how, refusing to cast these suffering women as objects of ‘pity, bordering on contempt’ (VRW 147), she elaborates an aesthetics of solidarity, thereby making the suffering amenable to collective, political action.

4 The Wants of Women

Scholars now universally agree that Mary Wollstonecraft undertook her trip through the Scandinavian countries as Gilbert Imlay’s business representative. Imlay’s ship, the Maria and Margaretha (possibly named for Wollstonecraft and their daughter’s nurse, Marguerite), had been spirited away by its Norwegian captain, taking with it a large part of Imlay’s financial assets. Research by the Swedish historian Per Nyström suggests that the treasure ship carried the equivalent of £3,500 in silver and Bourbon plates which Imlay was planning to use to import alum and naval construction materials from the Baltic. Ellefsen, the captain, probably kept the cargo and gave the ship to the English first mate in exchange for his silence. The disappearance of the ship put Imlay in a difficult situation because he had little apparent recourse for legal action. The French had no jurisdiction over the case, and the British would clearly have regarded Imlay’s attempt to break the blockade on trade with France as the more criminal and treacherous matter. Imlay appealed to the Danish court, instructing his partner Elias Backman in Gothenburg (the ‘friend’ who accompanies Wollstonecraft in the Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark) to do what was necessary. Following the indecisive investigation, Imlay asked Wollstonecraft to go to Scandinavia to reach an out-of-court settlement through her personal intervention.1 In his biography, William Godwin seems to recognise the difficult task that Wollstonecraft confronted. He writes that Imlay’s schemes ‘require[d] the presence of some very judicious agent, to conduct the business to its desired termination. Mary determined to make the voyage, and take the business into her own hands.’2 In these comments, Godwin seems to pay tribute to the public woman 129

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Wollstonecraft believes she is. He emphasises her determination and her skills in business and worldly matters. His tribute is nevertheless rapidly effaced in the subsequent paragraphs in which the devoted husband writes no longer of her mission itself but of the book in which it results: The narrative of this voyage is before the world, and perhaps a book of travels that so irresistibly seizes on the heart, never, in any other instance, found its way from the press. The occasional harshness and ruggedness of character, that diversify her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, here totally disappear. If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration. Affliction had tempered her heart to a softness almost more than human; and the gentleness of her spirit seems precisely to accord with all the romance of unbounded attachment. Thus softened and improved, thus fraught with imagination and sensibility, with all, and more than all, ‘that youthful poets fancy, when they love,’ she returned to England …3 Of course, Godwin has nothing but praise for Wollstonecraft’s literary and poetic genius, which ‘commands … admiration’. But by emphasising the effect her sorrows have on her reader’s heart, he reinscribes her as the female object of male sentiment which Wollstonecraft deprecates in her polemical writing. In the previous chapter I have demonstrated how Wollstonecraft contests the gendered structure implicit to models of sympathetic identification. She objects, I suggested, to tenderness when accorded without respect for moral agency and selfdetermination. Godwin’s description of the relationship between the reader and the author of Letters Written … in Sweden, however, returns to these very distinctions, articulating an interdependency similar to that between the man of feeling and sensibility and the beautiful female in distress over whom he weeps.4 The male reader falls in love with the female author because of the sorrows and afflictions she undergoes. Indeed, her sorrowful experience softens and hence feminises her even more, making Godwin’s representation of his dead wife abide by a Burkean aesthetics, where fragility and weakness render women more beautiful. Filled with ‘tenderness’ for this weaker being, Godwin expresses little respect for the manner in which Wollstonecraft

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actively confronts her adversity. He even compares this more feminine work to the ‘harshness’ of her second Vindication, as if to suggest that the polemical, public and political concerns of the celebrated book are somehow contrary to female nature and – at any rate – to that part of female nature that men might love. There is no denying, of course, that Wollstonecraft ‘speaks of her sorrows’ in her Letters Written … in Sweden. Moreover, in insisting on this sorrow, Godwin may well be acknowledging a more central role to sympathy and feeling as well as advancing his own agenda for reform, as recent studies of his revisions have suggested.5 Without denying this effort, it remains important to insist that by characterising Wollstonecraft as ‘softened’, Godwin reveals a fundamental misreading of both this work and the autobiographical context in which it is written. He reinscribes her as a female ‘object of pity, bordering on contempt’ (VRW 147), thereby denying her any recognition of the struggle she has undertaken to ensure a virtuous and independent existence. Godwin fails to see the relevance of her arguments on the relation between aesthetic representation and subject formation to her travel book. For, in the Letters Written … in Sweden, Wollstonecraft speaks of her distress in a manner that attempts to undermine the very distinctions that Godwin reintroduces in his biographical comments. The discussion of her sufferings invites not only pity, but also respect for any attempt to alleviate them. Wollstonecraft also extends this manner of speaking of sorrows to her accounts of other women in distress. Whereas her descriptions are certainly inscribed within a specular model of sympathetic understanding, she nevertheless attempts to recognise the subjectivity of the object of the commanding gaze. As such, she tries to forestall the rapid degeneration from pity into contempt. More importantly, however, she assures the object of the gaze – the conventional ‘female in distress’ – her agency. Wollstonecraft accepts that the sufferer can change her abject condition without depending on the condescending and patronising spectator. This chapter is devoted to examining how Wollstonecraft reconfigures the spectacle of female suffering and develops an aesthetics of solidarity. For, as I will suggest, the implications of her aesthetic transformation are crucial to inciting women to undertake collective political action to change prevalent injustice. By inviting respect rather than pity for the sufferer, this aesthetics recognises the latter’s independence and self-determination. By eliciting identification as well as differentiation, it urges the sympathiser to recognise the shared misery

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and oppression. Finally, by showing how this ‘misery and [this] oppression … arise out of the partial laws and customs of society’ (WOW 83), Wollstonecraft’s aesthetics of solidarity urges sufferer and sympathiser to act together to change them. In what follows, I first examine the biographical context in which the Letters are written to demonstrate how Wollstonecraft’s personal conflicts with Imlay over money, parental responsibility and their affective relation are central to her considerations. Her own difficulties allow her to commiserate with many of the women she encounters in her travels.6 I then turn to the representations of misery present in her earlier works. The final section of this chapter concentrates on the narrative mechanisms of Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria which encourage women readers both to identify the wrongs experienced by women of different social classes and to respect their different and individual subjectivities.

Mary’s and Fanny’s wants Wollstonecraft’s attempt to represent the miseries experienced by women in Letters Written … in Sweden both renew the considerations articulated in her earlier work and stem from her recent conflicts with Imlay as chronicled in her more personal and private letters to him.7 These letters reveal the extent to which she continues to be motivated by the same moral principles and political demands present in what Godwin deems her more ‘hardened’ feminist manifesto.8 For instance, in one letter written during her stay in Gothenburg, she writes to Imlay: I am not, I will not be, merely an object of compassion – a clog, however light to teize you… I can take care of my child; you need not continually tell me that our fortune is inseparable, that you will try to cherish tenderness for me. Do no violence to yourself! When we are separated, our interest, since you give so much weight to pecuniary considerations, will be entirely divided. I want not protection without affection; and support I need not, whilst my faculties are undisturbed. (LI 426) By refusing to be an object of compassion, Wollstonecraft reaffirms her earlier rejection of the dominant model of femininity, where the woman, as in the case of Milton’s Eve, is given ‘submissive charms’ while the man smiles with ‘superior love’ (vide VRW 102). She also emphasises her ability to support herself financially, echoing her claim

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that properly educated women, capable of earning their own bread, will not recourse to ‘legal prostitution’ and ‘marry for a support’ (VRW 218). This letter, moreover, plays out the continuing conflict between Wollstonecraft and Imlay. The conflict stems in part, as Richard Holmes has argued, from business worries and monetary concerns which reveal much about their very different attitudes towards money, poverty and lifestyles.9 Wollstonecraft’s double entendre on ‘fortune’ and ‘interest’, which implies both wealth and concerns, suggests as much. In the course of their private correspondence, Wollstonecraft constantly reproaches Imlay for not being content with what he has. ‘Is it not sufficient to avoid poverty?’ (LI 395) she asks on one occasion, suggesting that for Imlay riches have become an end rather than a means to attain and ensure self-respecting independence. Of course, as I have argued in earlier chapters, a necessary condition of both self-respect and independence is self-knowledge and Wollstonecraft’s objections to Imlay’s projects and his pecuniary interest stem from his failure to know his own limits. ‘When you first entered into these plans, you bounded your views to the gaining of a thousand pounds’, (402; emphasis added), she writes, contrasting his original modest and self-restrained ambitions to the more extravagant plans he ultimately undertakes. Paraphrasing Hamlet, Shakespeare’s hero of inaction, Wollstonecraft compares his restless quest to a ‘sea of trouble’ and contrasts it to her own more contracted projects: ‘I can still exert myself to obtain the necessaries of life for my child,’ she writes, ‘and she does not want more at present’ (400–1; emphasis added). These comments on her daughter Fanny are, of course, a jibe at Imlay’s claims that if he exerts himself, it is to satisfy Mary’s and Fanny’s needs. But Wollstonecraft plays on the double meaning of ‘want’, implying both a desire for and the lack of something.10 She thereby indicates the fatuity of Imlay’s pretensions. Fanny neither lacks the fundamental necessities of life nor needs any of the ‘secondary comforts’ (399) that her father claims to be striving to guarantee her. Principles of action, justice and truth that are not founded on the ever-shifting grounds of ever-increasing desires give Wollstonecraft her more bounded, directed and limited view. They force her to limit and restrain her ‘very thoughts’ (418) and to know when to say no to Imlay, despite all the pain that doing so may entail. She repeatedly reiterates her refusal to accept money instead of parental companionship and proclaims her decision to pay for both her daughter and herself. Reiterating this point on one occasion before embarking on her trip, she adds, ‘I may be termed proud – Be it so – but I will never

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abandon certain principles of action’ (LI 396). Earlier in her first Vindication, she had equated pride with an affirmation of ‘conscious dignity’ (VRW 94 n. 2; 191). Here she confirms this equation. For in the course of her voyage to Scandinavia, Wollstonecraft asserts her affection for Imlay, but adds that these feelings have ‘made me forget the respect due to my own emotions – sacred emotions, that are the sure harbingers of the delights I was formed to enjoy – and shall enjoy, for nothing can extinguish the heavenly spark’ (LI 418–19). She recognises that her self-respect is a necessary precondition for demanding respect from Imlay. Herein lies her insistence on paying her own and her daughter’s ways. His offer of money certainly recognises her poverty and her misery, but it also refuses to accept her ability to do something about it. As such, it makes her an object of compassion whose suffering can be alleviated only by the generous gesture of the powerful protector. His sacrifice – like his offers of money and protection, like Burke’s offer of chivalrous protection to small, delicate if beautiful women, like sentimental charity in general – are little more than the self-glorifying projects of one person at the expense of another’s right to respect. Wollstonecraft, then, does not let money mediate her relation with Imlay and tries instead to force him to recognise her as another person with her own ‘inextinguishable heavenly spark’. She nevertheless realises that money does mediate human relations and that it is necessary to satisfy wants, no matter how contracted these may be. In her letters to Imlay, she mentions on numerous occasions that she has her own projects to earn her subsistence. Whereas this mention may be understood as a veiled threat, it must also undoubtedly be recognised as a proclamation of her self-respecting independence. Part of Wollstonecraft’s project involves reducing her costs and expenditures to live according to more modest means. As such, she will ‘avoid poverty’ (LI 395). But in the course of her voyage to Sweden, she articulates another project, countering Imlay’s futile treasure hunt. ‘I have begun [Letters Written … in Sweden],’ she writes on 30 July 1795, ‘which will, I hope, discharge all my obligations of a pecuniary kind. – I am lowered in my own eyes, on account of my not having done it sooner’ (422). The work of the ‘judicious agent’ and the vain promises of the £3,500 fortune have given way to the work of a writer who already promised to become part of the ‘new genus’ (MWL 164). In working for her own project, Wollstonecraft redeems some of the selfrespect she believes she has lost.

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By speaking only of the love he feels for the sorrows evoked in Letters Written … in Sweden, then, Godwin erases the project for independence that inspires the work. This erasure is all the more serious because, in affirming her self-respect, Wollstonecraft also respects the miseries and sorrows of the women she encounters during the course of her voyage. She tries to write their sorrows without rendering them objects of pity denied independence and self-determination. Consider Wollstonecraft’s concern for her daughter’s wants. When she refuses Imlay’s financial support, she does so in Fanny’s name too. In one letter from Paris, she writes: You know my opinion of men in general; you know that I think them systematic tyrants, and that it is the rarest thing in the world, to meet with a man with sufficient delicacy of feeling to govern desire. When I am thus sad, I lament that my little darling, fondly as I doat on her, is a girl. (LI 396–7) Wollstonecraft’s reference to the ‘systematic tyranny’ of men heralds the argument of recent feminist scholarship that all men, collectively, benefit from the privileges patriarchy endows upon them, regardless of their individual goodwill. Masculine tyranny is derived from men’s inability to limit desires and wants, be they sexual or monetary. The procreative consequence of unbounded sexual wants may force women to chose between the lesser of two evils (when indeed such a choice is available to them). As a result of unwanted pregnancies, women run the risk of being abandoned by their lovers or of being dependent on them. Whereas the former publicly disgraces the ‘fallen woman’, the latter personally diminishes them. In short, a woman inevitably pays the price for the man’s uncontrolled sexual desire. Wollstonecraft’s daughter – because she is a girl – will necessarily experience the oppression inherent to the condition of her sex. Private maternal anxieties are thus articulated in relation to Wollstonecraft’s public commitment to the general state of her sex. Her concerns for Fanny are reiterated in the published volume on her travels in Sweden when Wollstonecraft writes: You know that as a female I am particularly attached to her – I feel more than a mother’s fondness and anxiety, when I reflect on the dependent and oppressed state of her sex. I dread lest she should be forced to sacrifice her heart to her principles, or principles to her heart. (LSND 269)

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The resonance between the two passages is so apparent that it is clear that the private letter inspired the revised published one. Yet there is a crucial distinction between the two letters. Men’s tyranny and indelicacy are the key focus of the private musings. In the published account, however, Wollstonecraft highlights instead the conflicts that face the female subject. Although her daughter is still figured as a victim, she becomes less of a passive victim to be ‘lament[ed]’ (LI 396) and more an active subject who must choose between the lesser of two evils. Moreover, Wollstonecraft speaks of the ‘dependent and oppressed state’ more generally. Male desire and tyranny thus become just one of the many problems that confront women in their attempts to be true to their principles as well as their hearts. More significant, perhaps, is Wollstonecraft’s comment that she feels ‘more than a mother’s … anxiety’ (emphasis added). As such, she suggests that her sympathy results less from maternal bonds than from solidarity between women more generally. Her daughter’s wants, in other words, stand for the wants of all women, including those of Wollstonecraft herself. After all, the choice alluded to in the final lines is one that the mother not the daughter must exercise in her relationship with Imlay: should she accept his promises of tenderness, forced though they may be, or should she remain true to her principles, maintaining her self-respect?11 The discussion of Fanny in Letters Written … in Sweden thus blurs the distinctions between private sorrows and public virtues, between mother and daughter, between the wants of one woman and the wrongs of another. In the move from the private letter to the published travelogue, Wollstonecraft transposes her private miseries into a public problem. The concern for her daughter and for assuring that she does not ‘want’ becomes a concern for all daughters and sisters. The question of the wants of women and how to discuss them is thus central to the travel account, and all the more so because these desires and wrongs both cause and result in the ‘oppressed state of my sex’ (LSDN 325). Because Wollstonecraft hopes to change the customs and laws that give rise to the wretched condition of women, she needs to articulate an aesthetics that will invite collective political action, not the impotent tears of excessive sensibility. This hope is not, however, new to the Letters. Indeed, as I argued in the previous chapter, throughout her literary career Wollstonecraft searched for the means in which narrative representation might impel the reader to act in a more virtuous fashion and thereby make new political subjects. I would therefore like to interrupt this discussion of her voyage to return to her earlier attempts to represent misery and

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suffering in a manner which is respectful of the sufferer as well as amenable to making more politically engaged subjects.

Representing women in distress In her early reviews, Wollstonecraft is attentive to the difficulty involved in representing distress. She dubs Mariana Stark’s The Poor Soldier; an American Tale (1789) an ‘interesting tale’ because it attempts to channel sensibility toward a worthy cause: It particularly merits the attention of young people, as the tears, the perusal will scarcely fail to draw, are such as a human creature ought to shed, and not the pumped up effusions of false sensibility: every production that tends to awaken the opening mind to a sense of real woe is a public benefit, as a feed of active virtue thus sown by chance, may extend its benign branches and shade many a wretch from misery … (AR 95; emphasis in the original) If Wollstonecraft, taking care to avoid any gender specifications, insists here on young readers, it is surely because she recognises the importance such literature plays in the production of virtuous citizens. She acknowledges that the ‘real woe’ she valorises is also a representation but insists that it contrasts favourably to the false sensibility characteristic of most novels. Her sarcastic comments on Louisa and Nina in another review provide a more precise understanding of this falseness. ‘Sudden death, everlasting love, methodical madness, bad weather, a breaking heart, putrid body, worn out night cap, etc. etc.,’ she writes, enumerating the conventional episodes that pace sentimental and romantic fiction before adding her final touch: ‘Nothing but sentiment! the finely fashioned nerves vibrate to every touch – Alas poor Yorick!’ (120). The object of woe seems to have disappeared in favour of the sentimental outpouring, and these fashionable tears become the focus of the representation instead of the effect produced upon viewing spectacles of misery and distress. Nor is Wollstonecraft more tolerant of sentimental outpourings for more meritorious causes. Describing the anxieties and concerns of a mother’s feelings for a child is certainly, she argues in her review of An American Hunter, ‘an object worth following’ (33). As she does in her response to Edmund Burke (on which more shortly), here too she implies that maternal worries are authentic and ‘real woes’. Yet Wollstonecraft is not entirely satisfied with this representation of

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maternal sorrows. She complains that ‘the perpetual recurrence of misery fatigues the mind, and destroys sympathy, by attempting to stretch it too far…’ (AR 33). In these comments, Wollstonecraft reiterates aesthetic ideas already in circulation. Consider Anne Laetitia Barbauld’s ‘An Enquiry into those Kinds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensations’, which discusses both received conventions and the specific problems encountered by writers interested in social reform.12 Comparing novelists to inquisitors, Barbauld argues that novelists err in their zeal. Instead of ‘scenes of distress without end or limit’, they should intersperse the miserable with ‘light strokes of pleasantry and mirth’ (210); instead of the dramatic extremes of swooning and death, they should depend on the ‘thousand little touches of grief, which though slight are irresistible’ (200). Only this alternation between joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain will produce the more agreeable sensations of sympathetic compassion. Barbauld insists on the alteration between joy and sorrow because she believes that pain itself does not interest the spectator. To have an effect, pain must elicit another sensation, either the sublime sense of wonder, awe and reverence, which is more fitting for the theatre, or the pleasurable sense of compassion, tenderness and pity, which is more appropriate for the novel. As the title suggests, the essay enumerates characteristics that contribute to the production of the more agreeable sensations. It excludes objects of horror and terror, including deformity and violence, as well as heroic acts that invite admiration. Instead, the ideal subject of such representations must be imperfect and helpless, with a ‘simplicity bordering upon weakness’ (207). It may be for similar reasons that Barbauld argues against realistic and authentic representations of poverty, claiming that ‘real poverty’ shocks, disgusts and ultimately forces the spectator to turn away. She replaces this ‘real’ with classical aesthetic convention, arguing that ‘the distress must arise from the idea of depression, and the shock of falling from higher fortunes’ (203). She nevertheless admits that the failure to produce authentic representations will ultimately result in a false and romantic sense of what poverty is. She concludes her essay by arguing: The objects of pity in romance are as different from those in real life as our husbandmen from the shepherds of Arcadia; and a girl who will sit weeping the whole night at the dedicated distresses of a lady Charlotte or lady Julia, shall be little moved at the complaint of her neighbour, who, in a homely phrase and vulgar accents, laments to her that she is not able to get bread for her family. Romance-writers

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likewise make great misfortunes so familiar to our ears, that we have hardly any pity to spare for the common accidents of life: but we ought to remember, that misery has a claim to relief, however we may be disgusted with its appearance; and that we must not fancy ourselves charitable, when we are only pleasing our imagination. It would perhaps be better, if our romances were more like those of the old stamp, which tended to raise human nature, and inspire a certain grace and dignity of manners of which we have hardly any idea. The high notions of honour, the wild and fanciful spirit of adventure and romantic love, elevated the mind; our novels tend to depress and enfeeble it. Yet there is a species of this kind of writing which must ever afford an exquisite pleasure to persons of taste and sensibility; where noble sentiments are mixed with well fancied incidents, pathetic touches with dignity and grace, and invention with chaste correctness. Such will ever interest our sweetest passions. (213) Barbauld’s closing comments evoke what seems to be an irresolvable paradox. On the one hand, authentic representations of misery and poverty shock and disgust the mind, provoking a sublime sense of horror and not the more pleasurable tenderness and compassion. On the other hand, these more tender accounts ultimately result in the denial of poverty. Barbauld seeks to maintain an absolute distinction between representation and reality. She wants representations to provoke the tenderness and pity that reality cannot, but she also wants her readers to forget these sensations when confronted with ‘disgusting’ reality. Part of the anxiety reflected in this final paragraph arises from her awareness of the very impossibility of her demand: her only remedy is to increase the distance between ‘romance’ and ‘reality’. It remains unclear, moreover, to what extent the return to the romances of the ‘old stamp’ (which although more dignified remain more distanced from reality) will inspire more compassion for the disgusting poverty of real life. Similarly, will the ‘persons of taste and sensibility’ evoked in the final lines be more capable of sparing pity for the ‘common accidents of life’? In Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories, which as critics have noted owes much to Barbauld’s stories for children, she refuses to produce the aseptic and romanticised vision of poverty. The governess Mrs Mason takes her pupils on a visit to London and urges them to resort to charity and to relieve the obvious distress that surrounds them. One such ‘object in distress’ presents itself and, we are told, ‘her meagre

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countenance gave weight to her tale’ (OS 444). In describing the residence of this person, Wollstonecraft does not spare the ‘grossness’ (VRM 30), the indelicacy and the disgusting details that Barbauld warns against representing. Of course, Original Stories is overtly didactic, written to ‘illustrate the moral’ (360) and hence different from the sentimental romance that Barbauld discusses in her essay. It is, in this sense, not significantly different from the vast body of literature on poverty produced in the final decades of the eighteenth century that, as Gary Harrison has argued, articulates a rigid dichotomy between the idle and the industrious poor. This literature figures the spectacle of poverty in order to offer a lesson in morality to the poor. Whereas it asserts the importance of benevolent, middle-class sensibility and subjectivity, it casts the poor themselves as objects of pity.13 Thus, if Wollstonecraft evokes ‘real woe’ without succumbing to excessive details of misery that might harden the heart, it is because the scene, as the entire episode, is inscribed in the education of two daughters of wealthy families. The disgust they feel is quickly effaced by the pleasure produced by their benevolent and charitable gesture. A similar strategy is adopted in Wollstonecraft’s first novel, Mary, a Fiction, in which the eponymous heroine engages in frequent gestures of benevolence to relieve the surrounding misery. Yet these scenes are rarely described. Perhaps to avoid destroying the reader’s sympathy, they are merely indexed, leaving much to the reader’s imagination and projection. On one occasion, towards the end of the book, however, a ‘disgusting’ scene of rural poverty is represented: What a sight for Mary! Her blood ran cold; yet she had sufficient resolution to mount to the top of the house. On the floor, in one corner of the room, lay an emaciated figure of a woman; a window over her head scarcely admitted any light, for the broken panes were stuffed with dirty rags. Near her were five children, all young, and covered with dirt; their sallow cheeks, and languid eyes, exhibited none of the charms of childhood. Some were fighting, and others crying for food; their yells mixed with their mother’s groans, and the wind which rushed through the passage. Mary was petrified; but soon assuming more courage, approached the bed, and, regardless of the surrounding nastiness, knelt down by the poor wretch, and breathed the most poisonous air; for the unfortunate creature was dying of a putrid fever, the consequence of dirt and want. (56) The rural poor described here are certainly not the shepherds who people a pastoral Arcadia; their hunger, dirt and wants are amongst the

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‘common accidents of life’ that the romance-reading miss, as Barbauld suggests, ignores. The description detailing the people in the landscape is nevertheless framed and contained by Mary’s outstanding response to it. Her initial disgust and horror are subsumed in her attempt to do something other than turn away. She uses her medical knowledge to relieve the more immediate sufferings of the unnamed and silenced ‘wretch’ before addressing other material wants. Her dedication is not without risk, however, as she soon catches a fever. This detail may be offered as a cautionary note to readers who wish to follow her example. It also, however, underlines her exemplary courage and, as suggested in ‘The Old Abelard’, her difference from her fellow-creatures. Mary leaves the house ‘with a mixture of horror and satisfaction’ (56), offering a rather revealing condensation of how she objectifies the poor in order to affirm her (self-)satisfaction. As in Original Stories, the response to these ‘scenes of misery’ remains in the virtuous acts of middle-class patrons and patronesses. Indeed, the final paragraphs of the novel offer another vision of the rural landscape, where Mary does for her community what Wollstonecraft, in her subsequent Vindication of the Rights of Men, suggests should be done for all of England: she turns it into well-ordered rural Arcadia where prosperity, happiness and peace reign. This reformed landscape is only possible, however, because of the ‘paternalist’ rural capitalism embodied in the heroine’s generosity and hence ultimately because of the triumph of her middleclass subjectivity. As critics have noted, this triumph is central to both Wollstonecraft’s politics and her aesthetics. It reveals her conflicting discourse on class and in particular her clearly expressed revulsion for working-class misery.14 Without denying these class sympathies, I would nevertheless like to situate them in her attempt to revolutionise ‘disinterested’ aesthetics by formulating representations of misery that respect both the sufferer and the spectator. 15 If in these two early works, the only means of doing so is by gratifying the conscience and subjectivity of the do-gooding middle class, I hope to demonstrate how subsequently this self-glorification is also problematised. Despite her attempts to the contrary in both Original Stories and Mary, Wollstonecraft later acknowledges the dangers of representing poverty. In her Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft accuses Edmund Burke of doing precisely what Barbauld warns women novelreaders not to do, namely confusing the distress of the shepherds of Arcadia with that of a poor, hungry woman. Commenting on his

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description of the poissardes, the fishwives who descended on Versailles on the night of 5 and 6 October , she writes: … and a gentleman of lively imagination must borrow some drapery from fancy before he can love or pity a man. Misery, to reach your heart, I perceive, must have its cap and bells; your tears are reserved, very naturally considering your character, for the declamation of the theatre, or for the downfall of queens, whose rank alters the nature of folly, and throws a graceful veil over vices that degrade humanity; whilst the distress of many industrious mothers, whose helpmates have been torn from them, and the hungry cry of helpless babes, were vulgar sorrows that could not move your commiseration, though they might extort an alms. (VRM 15–6; emphasis in the original) As in other polemical responses to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Wollstonecraft mocks his preference for the highly theatrical tragedies.16 By evoking the poor, she questions the ideological limitations of his sympathy as well as his theory of the beautiful and the sublime. She ridicules his tenderness for the beautiful and delicate woman of rank and status. The ‘cap and bells’ that this miserable creature wears is that worn by fools and court jesters, who, having little social stature, derive their public recognition by acting a part. By using the plural ‘queens’, she demystifies the exceptional status of the rank. The plural moves the term from the register of social hierarchy to that of the theatre, where the downfall of queens is frequently recited. Finally, Wollstonecraft questions Burke’s ability to distinguish between the real misery of working mothers and the highly dramatised one of queens. He can see and sympathise only with the false and constructed beauty of the court and of high drama. This beauty acts as weakness. Wollstonecraft’s mothers and babes, on the other hand, are weak from hunger and distress. They are not beautiful, however, in Burke’s eyes; nor do they elicit his tenderness or sympathy. Not only does Burke’s tenderness for women belittle them, making them into children; when it comes down to it, it does not even exist. Of course, it might be argued that in her answer to Burke, Wollstonecraft merely substitutes one figure of distress (the mother) for another (the queen) and as such remains within the constraints of a highly sentimental mode, positing a relationship between a passive object of distress and an active subject who views it. Certainly the hyperbolic mode in which she writes (hungry, helpless and crying

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babies; ‘helpmates’ literally wrenched away from the women) contributes to this saccharine sentimentality and renders the female objects of Wollstonecraft’s commanding eyes almost as weak and delicate as Burke’s. Yet she qualifies the mothers as ‘industrious’, affirming their assiduity, energy and single-mindedness in scraping an existence in the absence of male companionship. As such she begins to challenge the sentimental mode of representation. Later in her Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a gesture that repeats the tension I noted in Barbauld, Wollstonecraft contradicts her attack on Burke, ‘I know, indeed, that there is often something disgusting in the distresses of poverty, at which the imagination revolts, and starts back to exercise itself in the more attractive Arcadia of fiction’ (VRM 56). In affirming her regret for romantic poverty, she nevertheless questions, as Elizabeth Bohls has convincingly argued, landscape aesthetics which does everything to render the spectacle pleasurable to the eye, forgetting in the process the people who live and work on the land.17 Towards the end of the essay, Wollstonecraft provides another landscape, where the heart beats ‘true to nature’ and ‘plenty smile around’ (VRM 56): What salutary dews might not be shed to refresh this thirsty land, if men were more enlightened! Smiles and premiums might encourage cleanliness, industry, and emulation. – A garden more inviting than Eden would then meet the eye, and springs of joy murmur on every side. The clergyman would superintend his own flock, the shepherd would then love the sheep he daily tended; the school might rear its decent head, and the buzzing tribe, let loose to play, impart a portion of the vivacious spirits to the heart that longed to open their minds, and lead them to taste the pleasures of men. Domestic comfort, the civilizing relations of husband, brother, and father, would soften labour, and render life contented. Returning once from a despotic country to a part of England well cultivated, but not very picturesque – with what delight did I not observe the poor man’s garden! – The homely palings and twining woodbine, with all the rustic contrivances of simple, unlettered taste, was a sight which relieved the eye that had wandered indignant from the stately palace to the pestiferous hovel, and turned from the awful contrast into itself to mourn the fate of man, and curse the arts of civilization! (56–7) The Edenic view of the relationship between men and women, between the rich and the poor, intervenes in the text as a utopian

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moment, offering a respite from the representation of the despotic power and of the cruelty that results from the inequitable division of property. In this sense, it functions exactly as Wollstonecraft claims ‘the more attractive Arcadia of fiction’ does: it provides a refuge for the reader’s imagination, horrified by the discussion of misery and recoiling from these unpleasant sights. This agrarian idyll is, as Gary Harrison has suggested, typical of the late eighteenth-century discourse on poverty. It proffers a conservative and nostalgic reconstruction of a lost rural past where benevolent paternalism replaces the harsher, competitive struggles of emerging capitalism. Rural poverty is sanitised and offered as a response to urban depravation. Yet, as Harrison has also insisted, this romantic reconstruction invokes at the same time utopian possibilities for revolutionary change.18 After all, turning from the truths of Britain’s landscape that are being proffered by a discussion in the text, Wollstonecraft’s rural arcadia promises a utopian moment to come, one which also offers comfort and solace in light of the visible, present-day landscape. The text questions this distinction between the literal, ‘real’ landscape of England and the figural, imagined landscape of Eden, by evoking a third landscape, mentioned this time in an account of a return voyage. The account suspends and postpones the solacing moment, forcing the reader to engage the present day by shifting between the narratives of two voyages: the imaginary voyage that the reader is invited to make to Eden and the narrative of Wollstonecraft’s own voyage to Portugal. Thus, when the second paragraph begins ‘Returning once from a voyage to a despotic country’, the return to the realities of England is marked twice by the text: first, in Wollstonecraft’s return from Portugal and second, in her return from the more attractive Eden of her imagination. Moreover, the ‘delights’ of the poor man’s garden offer to Wollstonecraft the same refuge from the ‘awful contrasts’ (VRM 56) of despotic regimes and from ‘distresses of poverty’ (VRM 56) as the utopian landscape does. The narrative and argumentative moves in this passage suggest, then, that Eden is already inscribed in the English landscape, or at least in those parts where large estates are divided into small farms and where ‘simple, unlettered taste’ overcome the corrupting luxury of ‘Eastern grandeur’. In its flights of imagination and its returns to ‘real’ England, Wollstonecraft’s description of a utopian landscape does more than merely recall the utopian possibilities of the English landscape. It becomes a self-conscious reminder of the romance that Wollstonecraft has written into her text and thus warns against equating and distancing it from ‘real’ poverty.

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It thereby stages the very stakes that become central to Letters Written … in Sweden.

The wants of Scandinavian women Letters Written … in Sweden breaks with convention that portrays only the exceptional sorrows of the great and mighty. Consider Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments and the aesthetics they imply. We are more likely to sympathise with the smaller joys, stemming from ordinary and common causes, than we are with the little sorrows of everyday life. On the other hand, he pursues, our sympathy is more genuine when there is deep distress resulting from a singular, extraordinary misfortune. Our more natural propensity to sympathise with small, ordinary joys and with singular, great sorrows explains, according to Smith, both the origin of rank and the subject of tragedy. ‘It is the misfortune of Kings only which afford the proper subjects for tragedy … because, in spite of all that reason and experience can tell us to the contrary, the prejudices of the imagination attach to … [this state] a happiness superior to any other.’19 In her Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft responds as much to this proposition as to Burke’s echoing claim in Reflections on the Revolution in France that ‘when kings are hurl’d from their thrones by the Supreme Director of this great drama, … [they] become the objects of … pity to the good.’20 In the passage I cited earlier, she reminds her interlocutors that this perspective ignores the ‘vulgar sorrows’ and ‘distress of many industrious mothers’ (VRM 15–16). The account of her voyage through the Scandinavian countries strives to rectify this social and theatrical oversight. Consider her encounter with a young wet-nurse: A young woman, who is wet nurse to the mistress of the inn where I lodge, receives only twelve dollars a year, and pays ten for the nursing of her own child; the father had run away to get clear of the expence. There was something in this painful state of widowhood which excited my compassion, and led me to reflections on the instability of the most flattering plans of happiness, that were most painful in the extreme, till I was ready to ask whether this world was not created to exhibit every possible combination of wretchedness. I asked these questions of a heart writhing with anguish, whilst I listened to a melancholy ditty sung by this poor girl. It was too early for thee to be abandoned, thought I, and I hastened out of the house, to take my solitary evening’s walk – And here I am again, to

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talk of any thing, but the pangs arising from the discovery of estranged affection, and the lonely sadness of a deserted heart. (LSND 283) Wollstonecraft’s response to the distress of a poor girl is, in fact, a topos in sentimental travel literature, recalling Yorick’s encounter with a Parisian fille de chambre or with poor Maria in Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Voyage and even young Mary Wollstonecraft weeping over her sister Everina’s ‘tender unaffected letter’ (MWL 117). The specular relationship articulated in this passage posits the unilateral gaze of a subject contemplating the object of distress. The spectacle of the girl and her ‘melancholy ditty’ become the means through which Wollstonecraft considers her own wretchedness as she projects her ‘lonely sadness’ onto both the vision and the voice she contemplates. The melancholy ditty is soon muffled by the reflections of the female philosopher, preventing us from hearing the ditty. Finally, like that of the male sentimental traveller, Wollstonecraft’s sympathetic compassion conceals her essential impotence to do something about the misery other than grieve. Yet unlike Yorick, Mary offers neither money nor tears as tokens of her ineffectual sensitivity and impotent sympathy.21 Instead, she abandons the social encounter for a solitary walk. For indeed, Wollstonecraft’s description contains details distinguishing it from Sterne’s and from the sentimental mode against which she works. Most notable perhaps is her concern with what Elizabeth Bohls has called ‘the material conditions of every day life’.22 Wollstonecraft provides realistic details to explain the origins of the young woman’s sorrows. She specifies both the wages and the cost of childcare. The calculation the reader is invited to make thus provides cold, impersonal evidence absent from sentimental outpourings. As such, she justifies the apparently excessive distress by recalling the ‘situation which excites it’.23 Moreover, in the more conventional sentimental topos, a woman is abandoned by a man. Given these economic details, however, it remains unclear, in this description, who exactly has abandoned the young wet-nurse. The father, we are told, did not leave her, but rather the expenses their child incurred. Yet despite the mother’s attempt to overcome cruel necessity and to provide for her child in the absence of her partner, society accords her little support, not to mention respect. As such, it may well be the social system that abandons the woman. In turn, these material details develop the more hardened argument of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, where Wollstonecraft had argued for better working opportunities for women. She had complained that

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the few professions open to them were either disappearing (the male accoucheurs substitute for female midwives); degrading (the governess is not treated with the same respect as the clerical tutor); or menial (little separates milliners and mantua-makers from prostitutes) (VRW 218–19). She also suggests that much of the disrespect for ‘fallen’ women might disappear if they could earn a decent living: ‘nor would an attempt to earn their own subsistence, a most laudable one! sink them almost to the level of those poor abandoned creatures who live by prostitution’ (218). In these comments, Wollstonecraft points to the general disrespect for working women, regardless of whether they are sex workers or not. Because a woman’s respectability is associated with her sexuality, because her private virtue is her reputation for sexual chastity, the working woman who leaves the confines of domesticity to become a public woman is also denied respectability. In the second Vindication, a line, however fine it may be, nevertheless demarcates the boundaries between those who ‘almost’ sink and those who do. In the passage cited from Letters Written … in Sweden, however, the boundary seems to have disappeared, announcing the even stronger parallel between legal and illegal prostitution which Wollstonecraft was to dramatise in her posthumous Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, which I shall consider at the end of this chapter. By refusing to specify who has abandoned her – her lover or society – Wollstonecraft effaces the disrespect accorded to women more generally. She characterises the wet-nurse as in the ‘painful state of widowhood’, forsaking the more sexual – and disrespectful – connotations of ‘abandoned’. She also evokes the wants of single women, whether they are mothers or not. They want respect; they want financial independence; and last but not least, they want quite simply. Earlier, in a letter to Imlay, Wollstonecraft had bemoaned, ‘Love is a want of my heart’ (LI 418). This desire is echoed here in the portrait of the wet-nurse. After all, whatever the reason for her lover’s departure, whoever may have abandoned her, the young mother remains melancholic, lonely and solitary because he has gone. Perhaps Wollstonecraft tries so hard to respect the wet-nurse because of the obvious similarities between them. Indeed, we may well wonder how much of herself has the philosopher-spectator projected onto the spectacle. For, what remains striking about this representation of misery is the extent to which the distance separating the subject and the object of sympathy is blurred. Consider the final lines of this paragraph. Despite the deixis (here) and the present tense that imply a shift

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from the scene of representation to the scene of presentation, the sentence forces us to ask both whom she is talking to (her epistolary correspondent or her ‘correspondent’ in Sweden, like her an impoverished and abandoned young mother) and whom she is talking about (herself or her Swedish correspondent). After all, the girl’s melancholic ditty sings the ‘estranged affection, and the lonely sadness of a deserted heart’ about which Wollstonecraft writes. This erasure, moreover, pervades the very scene that Wollstonecraft describes. For when she asks questions ‘of a heart writhing with anguish’, the grammatical ambiguity of ‘of’ prevents us from determining whether it is with or to such a heart that she asks questions. In a move that both parallels Wollstonecraft’s identification with her daughter and announces the relationship between the working-class Jemima and the middle-class Maria in her unfinished novel, the correspondences between the women almost efface the correspondence that Wollstonecraft attempts to maintain with the unnamed Imlay to whom she addresses her letter. The sympathy and solidarity between the two women are highlighted to the detriment of the relation with the man. Note, however, that in her description, Wollstonecraft positions herself as a spectator who goes unnoticed by the object of her gaze. Although she mentally addresses the young woman, the latter is so absorbed by her singing and her misery that she ignores the presence of her spectator and would-be interlocutor. This absorption, in turn, allows Wollstonecraft to be absorbed by the spectacle of suffering and absorbed into it, feeling the very misery it feels. The tableau offered by the wet-nurse and Wollstonecraft’s sympathetic projection into it thus resemble what Michael Fried has called in his discussion of a series of eighteenth-century paintings and of their theoretical complement in the works of Denis Diderot, the ‘absorptive tableau’.24 John Bender has argued that Adam Smith’s theory of moral sympathy, where isolated spectators project themselves into each other’s passions and learn how to feel as an other, articulates the aesthetic procedures of these tableaux into a theory for social cohesion and association.25 Paradoxically, however, in Smith the very move towards social cohesion through the process of sympathetic projection ultimately maintains individuals in their isolation and self-consciousness. The absorption of the figures in the spectacle maintains the illusion of an absent spectator, who in turn can be absorbed into the painting precisely because s/he is not addressed by it. In other words, the more absorbed the figures of the spectacle are in their own activities, the more likely the spectator will be absorbed into it. Although as much absorbed by the tableau of

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wretchedness as by her own wretchedness, Wollstonecraft puts a stop to this aesthetics of isolation. Recognising how ineffectual her sympathy is, she turns her back on the spectacle of wretchedness, refusing to speak both of it and of her own lonely sadness. Of course, Wollstonecraft may simply be disrupting the increasing likeness by abandoning the young girl for her ‘solitary evening walk’. This denial of identity is all the more evident in the intertextual resonances: Wollstonecraft writes herself as a female equivalent to JeanJacques Rousseau, whose Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire, as Mary Favret reminds us, resonates in Letters Written … in Sweden.26 Wollstonecraft identifies herself with Rousseau and against the seated girl. But in the context of the more general discussion of abandoned, widowed and single women, ‘solitary’ takes on a special meaning recalling less the anguish of a misunderstood soul and more the practical problems of existence. The ‘solitary’ woman traveller, the mother worrying about her absent child, the widow barely scraping together a meagre existence all want the helping hand that is denied them. Where women are concerned, solitary is nearly synonymous with the ‘deserted’ and ‘abandoned’ condition that both Wollstonecraft and the wet-nurse lament. As such, Wollstonecraft’s ‘solitary walk’ may well be reaffirming the similarities with the other woman. More importantly, in this move from ‘abandoned’ to ‘solitary’, she refigures the woman in distress. Whereas the semantics of both deserted and abandoned represent women as passive victims, as objects of compassion, solitary, especially because of its evocations of Rousseau, suggests an almost virtuous resistance to social ills. By opting for ‘solitary’ in her description of herself and of other women like her, then, Wollstonecraft implies an active decision to maintain independence and self-respect in the face of adversity. If women want a helping hand, they do not want it at the expense of their own self-respect. My discussion of Wollstonecraft’s encounter with a wet-nurse has highlighted ways in which the travel account strives to refigure the conventional figure of woman in distress by rendering social injustice visible and by recognising the nurse’s active response to her discontent. The travel writer thereby strives to render the object of her contemplation a subject of respect not an object of pity. This attempt is furthered by Wollstonecraft’s refusal to gaze in voyeuristic fashion at the objectified victim. Elsewhere in her travel book, she refuses to indulge in a ‘perpetual recurrence of misery’ (AR 33) that might harden the heart. She alternates descriptions of the hardships people encounter with the ‘ineffable pleasure’ (280) of viewing the landscape.

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An encounter with the boorish women of fortune is followed by comments on the lower class of people who ‘amuse and interest me much more than the middling …’ (259). This attempt is even inscribed in the narrative. Wollstonecraft rejoices on her arrival in Germany because of the better living conditions. The appearance of comfort and industry contrasts with the generalised unrelieved misery, the barren lands and the meagre conditions that she had witnessed throughout her voyage in the northernmost regions. Such endemic misery was, she writes, ‘surely sufficient to chill any heart, awake to sympathy, and throw a gloom over my favourite subject of contemplation, the future improvement of the world’ (338). Wollstonecraft recognises that in real life as in representations, too much suffering, too much hardship can result in fatalism and despondency. The more cheerful conditions in Germany do much to restore her belief in the principles of the Revolution, perhaps even inciting the more optimistic note of the appendix. Wollstonecraft’s concern not to overload the mind with wretched representations may also explain why she prefers the company of pretty girls. If her work is, as she comments self-ironically, a non-stop ‘harping on the same subject … the oppressed state of my sex’ (325), she must interrupt these constant references to wretched women with more joyful ones. When a trip to Frederichshall, in Norway, is planned with some gentlemen, for instance, she invites the prettiest girl in the family who hosts her to join them. ‘I invited her,’ she explains, ‘because I liked to see a beautiful face animated by pleasure, and to have an opportunity of regarding the country, whilst the men were amusing themselves with her’ (265). Much can be said of the way Wollstonecraft presents herself as different from both the men and the girl. Like the men, Wollstonecraft considers the girl as an object for her amusement and pleasure. Unlike them, however, she can divert her gaze from the girl to the world outside the carriage. Her very subjectivity seems to be derived from the control she exerts over her gaze, which moves at her will between the beautiful face and the country outside, between the pleasurable spectacle and the more scientific observations. More important however, by insisting on the animation and the pleasure of the face, Wollstonecraft recognises the girl’s subjectivity. On arriving in a German village, Wollstonecraft has another encounter: [A] pretty young woman, with languishing eyes, of celestial blue, conducted us into a very neat parlour; and observing how loosely,

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and lightly, my little girl was clad, began to pity her in the sweetest accents, regardless of the rosy down of health on her cheeks. This same damsel was dressed, it was sunday, with taste, and even coquetry, in a cotton jacket, ornamented with knots of blue ribbon, fancifully disposed to give life to her fine complexion. I loitered a little to admire her, for every gesture was graceful; and, amidst the other villagers, she looked like a garden lily suddenly rearing its head amongst grain, and corn-flowers. As the house was small, I gave her a piece of money, rather larger than it was my custom to give to the female waiters; for I could not prevail on her to sit down; which she received with a smile; yet took care to give it, in my presence, to a girl, who had brought the child a slice of bread; by which I perceived that she was the mistress, or daughter, of the house – and without a doubt the belle of the village. (338) The beauty and grace of the girl render her particularly fit for a representation of misery and for being the beneficiary of an act of charity. With her tasteful Sunday dress, her blue ribbon, and her fine complexion, this German girl conforms to the romanticised representation of poverty, to the Arcadian shepherdess that Barbauld mentions as well as to Burke’s carefully draped figure of misery. Beautiful, desirable and amiable, she evokes pity and love, invoking the pleasurable sensation. In a gesture that, as in the episode with the wet-nurse, recalls that of the male sentimental traveller, Wollstonecraft tries to affirm her mastery of the situation by converting it into an economic exchange. She tries to render the woman an object of her charity as well as of her gaze. In her earlier works, Wollstonecraft had warned against the ills of charity. Thus, if in Original Stories Mrs Mason encourages the girls to be bountiful and generous, she nevertheless insists that this cannot be done at the expense of restricting their own caprices and appetites. In this same work, as in her Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft compares alms-giving to ‘weeping at a tragedy, or … reading an affecting tale’ (OS 443). In her Letters Written … in Sweden, she reiterates her admonishments against charity, writing that charitable givers ‘forget that they [the recipients] are men’ (337). The limits to charity without justice are also noted in Wollstonecraft’s comments on the gestures of Copenhagen’s propertied class following a fire there. Although she recognises the important role private relief plays in alleviating the misery caused by the fire that ravaged Danish capital, she nevertheless notes the ironic fact that such gestures would not have

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been necessary had these same people of property helped in controlling the fire instead of preserving their valuables and furniture. Charity, in other words, allows the rich and powerful to forget their role in maintaining misery, while simultaneously allows them to represent themselves as its relievers. In this, it is not unlike false sensibility which emphasises the expression of sympathetic grief at the expense of relieving the subject of grief. Given her own admonishments, Wollstonecraft’s charitable gesture towards the pretty German woman is clearly inappropriate. Wollstonecraft’s gesture is undermined, however, by the very scene that she describes. She discovers herself in the very same position that she had attempted to place the object of her gaze. The woman invites attention because she pities poorly clad Fanny. Wollstonecraft indignantly notes this misplaced sentiment by insisting on the apparent signs of health in her daughter’s face. Moreover, the German woman responds to the charitable gesture with another: she refuses Wollstonecraft’s pity, transferring the money given to her to the child who earned it by bringing out the bread. Realisation dawns on Wollstonecraft: this young woman is not one of the deserving poor who allows the spectator to assume a charitable role by representing a poverty that pleases the imagination. As far as her social position in the village, her appearances and her efforts, this woman is to the village what Wollstonecraft is to English society. In short, the girl invites charity and compassion because she is so like the subject of the gaze. As such, she screens other figures of misery, who appear only when realisation dawns. The reversal forces Wollstonecraft to question her assumptions and – more importantly – to forgo her compassionate pity for mutual respect. In her final comments, references to ‘cheerful industry’ replace those of degrading poverty, and Wollstonecraft speaks no more of passive misery but of active work. One final example of how Wollstonecraft interrupts the ‘perpetual recurrence of misery’ (AR 33) bears mentioning because it contrasts so blatantly with Godwin’s reading of the work. During one of her walks, she pauses to appreciate the picturesque scene of a working-class family, dressed in their Sunday best, returning to the enjoyment of hearth and home: ‘My eyes followed them to the cottage, and an involuntary sigh whispered to my heart, that I envied the mother, much as I dislike cooking, who was preparing their pottage. I was returning to my babe, who may never experience a father’s care or tenderness’ (315). Even as she sighs nostalgically over this sentimental picture of domestic bliss, Wollstonecraft disrupts it. In the preceding

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lines, she reminds us how it abides by pictorial and pastoral conventions because it presents ‘for the pencil and heart, the sweetest picture of a harvest home’ (315). As she gazes on the picture, however, reality intervenes. Her own domestic disorder, noted in the reference to her absent and fatherless child, prevents any facile and simple assimilation or absorption into the picture. More significantly, her subjective dislike of domesticity – or cooking at any rate – prevents the reader from wallowing in the saccharine sentimentality of the scene. The different episodes from Letters Written … in Sweden which I have been examining demonstrate how Wollstonecraft works both within and against the constraints of conventional theories on the representation of misery and suffering. She avoids depicting a poverty that might shock and horrify the middle-class spectator because it might either force her to turn away in disgust or to harden her heart. She also, however, demonstrates the limits of this convention, indicating how the more representable figure of misery is in fact someone who either pleases ‘our’ imagination or is like ‘us’. By recognising the subjectivity of this person, as she herself does in her encounters with the pretty Swede and the pretty German, she nevertheless attempts to articulate an alternative representation, one which will neither disgust nor merely please. In so doing, she moves away from representing objects of compassion to describing subjects who demand respect. The pretty German’s polite refusal of charity forces Wollstonecraft to reconsider her configuration as a passive object of pity. Other objects of Wollstonecraft’s gaze also challenge her objectifying gaze. Commenting on the spectacle of slaves working, the traveller notes that they ‘excited my attention, and almost created respect’ (305). Equally important is the manner in which Wollstonecraft herself rewrites the conventional object of distress into a subject who demands respect for having attempted to acquire virtue. Such is her encounter with the wet-nurse. Such too is her account of Princess Matilda. As I argued in the previous chapter, Wollstonecraft transposes the more conventional narrative of the adulterous wife and scorned queen into that of a mother and citizen who struggles to improve her existence and social conditions more generally. Wollstonecraft’s account thereby encourages her readers to revise their view of the more conventional and debilitating narrative of the ‘fallen woman’. The movement away from objectifying pity and towards respect for the subjectivity of the other also appears in Wollstonecraft’s refusal, on a number of occasions in the course of her voyage, to watch the spectacle of suffering and hence to represent it. In Denmark, she refuses to

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witness an execution. Such spectacles, she claims, treat ‘reality as a show’ (323). As we have seen, she also, turns her back on the wetnurse. By refusing to indulge in self-pity and by highlighting her selfcommand and self-respect, Wollstonecraft respects the other’s suffering. Consider, finally, her response to hearing about the ravages of the Copenhagen fire. Normally, she explains, she takes ‘refuge in the thought; they suffered – but they are no more!’ (319; emphasis in the original). This time, however, she cannot. She is aware that her sympathy is being tested by the unbearable conditions that she is asked to witness. In order to prevent the eventual hardening of her heart caused by the anguish that replaces sympathy, she attempts to reason to calm her mind. Because she recognises that she is ‘treading on live ashes’ and that the suffering the fire has caused persists, she cannot take refuge in the stoical and philosophical reflections that would do injustice to the continued sufferings of the people. Her only response, then, is to ‘avert my eyes’ (320), refusing both to view and to represent the spectacle of distress. Her refusal to occupy the position of the disinterested philosopher emphasises her respect for the sufferers, for she does not turn them into an object of abstract contemplation.

Contracting wants I have been examining Wollstonecraft’s continued attempt to articulate a representation of misery and suffering which will impel spectators and readers to alleviate it, and thereby improve the world. Confronted with the difficulty of representing misery without objectifying it, Wollstonecraft, on more than one occasion, chooses solitude and silence in preference to ineffectual sympathy and sociability. This conflict between solitude and sympathy, between the need to feel for herself or for others, becomes central to the travel book. It is thematised, for instance, in the contrasting images of being alone in the world – of being ‘sovereign of the waste’ (279) – or being overwhelmed by people. On one occasion, she writes: The view of this wild coast, as we sailed along it, afforded me a continual subject for meditation. I anticipated the future improvement of the world, and observed how much man had still to do, to obtain of the earth all it could yield. I even carried my speculations so far as to advance a million or two of years to the moment when the earth would perhaps be so perfectly cultivated and so completely peopled, as to render it necessary to inhabit every spot; yes; these

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bleak shores, Imagination went still farther, and pictured the state of man when the earth could no longer support him. Where was he to fly to from universal famine? Do not smile: I really became distressed for these fellow creatures, yet unborn. The images fastened on me, and the world appeared a vast prison. (295) Echoing other eighteenth-century social philosophers, Wollstonecraft assumes that a well-peopled country is a measure of scientific and artistic innovation, good government and, ultimately, a happy society. The narrative she imagines nevertheless undermines the tale of progress and improvement she would like to tell, for increasing advancement ultimately results in Malthusian prophesies of an over-cultivated and overpeopled world. By attempting to perfect the world and itself, humanity has abandoned Rousseau’s ‘golden age of stupidity’ (288) and the unsociable state it implies for sympathy and social union. But this very sympathy and sociability may also be humanity’s ultimate undoing. The dangerous necessity of sociability is, moreover, staged in the ambiguous identity of the hero of the story. For as in her account of the wet-nurse’s distress, here too we have to ask whom Wollstonecraft is talking about: man the species (when she speaks of the state of man and the unfortunate creatures) or man the individual (when she recounts how the singular hero of the tale will fend for himself when faced with universal famine). Or is, in fact, Wollstonecraft herself the ‘“little hero of each tale”’, as she announces in the advertisement (241)? After all, the narrative subjects her both to the melancholic and oppressive images and to the ridicule of her reader and given the latter, there can be no compassionate sympathy for the former. In sympathising with her unborn fellow creatures, then, Wollstonecraft stages herself as more desolate and more alone in the crowd. In so doing, however – and I think this is a crucial point – she refuses any compassionate sympathy for what she knows to be a self-glorifying project. The only means of curtailing and contracting her ever-increasing selfconsciousness is paradoxically through an increasingly self-conscious ridicule of it. The conflict between population increase as a measure of progress and overpopulation as the catastrophic result of this progress traces the conflict Wollstonecraft experiences over the nature of human history. Following the tragic failure of the French Revolution to affirm the progress of mankind, she is torn between her optimistic principles and an overwhelmingly pessimistic reality. Yet Letters written … in Sweden claims to ‘trace the progress of the world’s improvements’ (326),

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reaffirming the belief in historical advancement. As numerous critics have noted, it plots the terms of this temporal progression onto spatial and geographic terms, relying on what was to become a key metaphor for nineteenth-century anthropologists.27 Her work thereby becomes a graphic attempt to respond to the conjectural histories of the Enlightenment. As Wollstonecraft moves further and further north, she feels closer to the state of nature. Mankind’s origins, she argues, could not have been in the pleasantly warm southern climes, but rather in the rugged and sunless north. Such climatic conditions were crucial propellers for human progress. The ‘primitive inhabitants of the world … [adored] a sun so seldom seen,’ she writes, going so far as to propose that this worship forced them ‘to run after the sun, in order that the different parts of the earth might be peopled’ (263). Mankind’s gradual appropriation and utilisation of the world is both inevitable and necessary. In peopling the world, it also learns how to use its own innate faculties and skills, making it ‘physically impossible … [to remain] in Rousseau’s golden age of stupidity’ (288). Much of the Letters thus seems to prolong Wollstonecraft’s earlier reflection on Rousseau’s misanthropy and gloomy pessimism, which leads him to forsake the vision of the ‘perfection of man in the establishment of true civilization’ (VRW 87). In her travel account, she tries to explain why Rousseau’s reasoning is fallible and why it is both impossible and undesirable to remain in the original innocence of a southern paradise. When humanity is so bent on satisfying its primary and basic need for food, as is the case in the Scandinavian countries, it has ‘little or no imagination to call forth the curiosity necessary to fructify the faint glimmerings of mind which entitle them to rank as lords of creation’ (LSND 245). It is only when the basic desires of the senses have been satisfied and the search for food is no longer the primary motor for action that the secondary desires for knowledge and the pleasures of the imagination begin to be addressed. Civilisation, writes Wollstonecraft, both ‘refines our enjoyments’ and ‘produces a variety which enables us to retain the primitive delicacy of our sensation’ (250). It is thus not only an indication of the increased exploitation of the earth, but also of the movement to higher forms of pleasure. The purely physical pleasures that food and warmth provide give way successively, as in the accounts of many eighteenth-century philosopher-historians, to the pleasures of curiosity, wonder and finally imagination and refined sentiment. Humanity, in other words, acquires an existence in historical time only once basic subsistence is satisfied and secondary wants increase,

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resulting in the rise of civilised arts and pleasure. Wollstonecraft, of course, sees artistic production only when it abides by standards defined by European ‘gentlemen of taste’. Although she admires the simplicity and the individual taste she discovers in the houses of the Scandinavian peoples, specially the farmers and peasants who live closer to the state of nature, she nevertheless affirms that she cannot live continually amongst such a people ‘whose minds have such a narrow range’ (259) that they fail to explore more refined pleasures. Without denying Wollstonecraft’s commitment to criteria based on European civilisation, I do want to insist on how she protests against naturalising aesthetic and intellectual inferiority. ‘Brutes’ and ‘slaves’ are not ‘stupid by nature’, she writes; they are kept stupid because the social conditions necessary for the production of the arts and sciences have not been met. Propelled only by the satisfaction of their basic wants, they ‘have not their faculties sharpened by the only thing that can exercise them, self-interest!’ (266). Such people, subject to the cruelty of either natural or social conditions, do not control the terms of their own reproduction, much less their own productions. Hence they lack the necessary motivation. Far more than in her earlier works, then, in her Letters Wollstonecraft confronts the dilemmas imposed by commercial society on the more classical virtuous resilience of the independent citizen-subject.28 Money and wealth, as well as the self-interest and inequality that the establishment of this fortune implies, are necessary preconditions for the advancement of civilisation. This advancement should satisfy not only immediate wants but rather must give ‘a greater scope to the enjoyments of the senses, by blending taste with them’ (LSDN 307). In the course of her travels, Wollstonecraft objects to the rather austere architecture that typifies not only Christiania but also the meeting-houses of Dissenters, including that of her ‘respected friend, Dr Price’ (307). She argues in favour of a more elaborate and pleasing art. For her, this art – and not more elementary necessities – spurs and encourages the accumulation of wealth. ‘Who would labour for wealth,’ she asks her dissenting friends, ‘if it were to procure nothing but conveniences?’ (307). Yet, Wollstonecraft’s changing perspective on the narrative of humanity’s progress betrays an ambivalent relationship with the civilising process. This ambivalence appears more clearly when re-evaluating her disclaimer of ‘Rousseau’s golden age of stupidity’ (288). For if in some places she ridicules the male philosopher’s praise for the original state of nature, elsewhere in the Letters she speaks in highly positive terms of the Scandinavian peasantry and their subsistence level

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economy. She appreciates the farmers’ ‘overflowing of heart and fellowfeeling’ (246); their ‘sympathy and frankness of heart’ (259); their ‘independence and virtue’ (309) and even the ‘individual taste’ without ‘apish’ imitation (293) of their household furniture. Moreover, despite her obvious misgivings respecting the French Revolution and the French people, Wollstonecraft observes that a similar simplicity, sympathy and frankness of heart also exist amongst them, which clearly ‘balance[s] the account of horrors’ (326). Finally, more than once, when insisting on the benevolence, virtue and sympathy of the northern peasantry, she compares their condition to the ‘golden age’ but without any pejorative associations with stupidity. ‘There is … so much of the simplicity of the golden age in this land of flint’ (246), she writes. Later in the book, she comments, ‘The description I received of them carried me back to the fables of the golden age …’ (308). The image of the ‘golden age’ mentioned in the context of Rousseau thus also refers to Wollstonecraft’s experience in the course of her European travels. Just as she had attempted to relocate the golden-aged ‘Arcadia of fiction’ (VRM 56) in the English rural landscape, she refers to the ‘golden age’ when speaking about the new world promised by the French Revolution. In her ‘Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation’, she had bemoaned, ‘[N]ow, the perspective of the golden age, fading before the attentive eye of observation, almost eludes my sight …’ (444). If her encounter with the excesses of the Revolution has incited an increasing pessimism about human perfectibility, her voyage through Scandinavia may have urged her to overcome this growing despair by resituating the elusive ‘golden age’ within her viewpoint. But references to the discovery of the ‘golden age’ in Sweden are not only figural. They should also be understood quite literally in light of Wollstonecraft’s voyage in search for Imlay’s gold. The simplicity and social sympathies of the peasantry invite a positive contrast with his money-grubbing contractors and urge readers to do as she does: to search for another kind of gold, one that will bring happiness. After all, Wollstonecraft’s comments on Rousseau’s ‘golden age of stupidity’ elicit questions on the source of happiness. After asserting the physical impossibility of eternally remaining in the state of nature, she asks, ‘And, considering the question of human happiness, where, oh! where does it reside? Has it taken up its abode with unconscious ignorance, or with the high-wrought mind?’ (288). The very pathos of these interrogations indicates that Wollstonecraft has not found the answer and

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allows the different experiences and encounters of her voyage to explore it. Exploiting both the literal and figural meaning of the ‘golden age’, Wollstonecraft nevertheless remains self-consciously aware that it is a trope. When she writes, ‘The description I received of them [the Scandinavian peasants] carried me back to the fables of the golden age …’ (308; emphasis added), she calls attention to the rhetorical convention at stake. She is, on the one hand, ‘carried back’, or literally returned to the golden age. She is, on the other hand, figuratively and mentally ‘carried back’, or reminded that they are mere fables. In so doing, Wollstonecraft forestalls some of the dangers Barbauld warned against in her discussion of the representations of distress. For in comparing the northern peasantry to the shepherds of the ‘golden age’, Wollstonecraft cleans up her objects, rendering them more pleasing to the imagination. She does not, however, neglect to call attention to this artifice, insisting as she does on the crucial difference between the ‘fables of the golden age’ and the potentially repulsive poverty of the northern farmers. As such, the farmers she describes both are and are not those of the ‘golden age’. This self-consciousness serves as an interrogation of the use and abuse of rhetorical conventions. By both maintaining and obliterating the literal and the figural terms of the trope, Wollstonecraft refuses to naturalise them and instead uses them as the beginning for her inquiry and investigation. Indeed, the self-conscious use of the trope becomes the very basis for Wollstonecraft’s voyage, one where theoretical abstractions on the principles of human progress are grounded in concrete experience. Even as she uses the trope, she interrogates and questions its value and its source. Wollstonecraft thereby enacts what she urges fellow-writers to do, namely ‘promote inquiry and discussion, instead of making these dogmatical assertions which only appear calculated to gird the human mind round with imaginary circles, like the paper globe which represents the one he inhabits’ (266). Wollstonecraft denies here the structuralist’s ‘Prisonhouse of Language’, insisting instead on the need to re-evaluate, renovate and revise rhetorical conventions through the prism of personal experience. Instead of being a codified and fixed means of viewing the world, linguistic conventions become the basis for pluralistic discussion. Language, as I suggested, was the case with theoretical abstraction in ‘The Old Abelard’, becomes reinhabited by the very real context in which it is used and reappropriated. In short, the ‘golden age’ is inhabited at once by Rousseau’s stupidity and Wollstonecraft’s disclaimers, by mythic fables and present

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realities. It bears the marks of her conflicting attempt to ‘trace the progress of the world’s improvements’ (326). Subsequently, in ‘On Poetry’ Wollstonecraft returns to reflections on the role of figures and tropes, adding that the reinvestiture of language is the work of genius. Most people see the world through the prism of an already determined convention. They prefer the ‘nature’ described by poets to the one they see themselves; their sensations and passions must be mediated by images in the storehouse of language. Moreover, she writes, if many images ‘now frequently appear unnatural’, it is because they are ‘remote’ (8) or ‘servilely copied’ (9). These same images were once derived from ‘surrounding objects’. Already in Letters Written … in Sweden, she attributes the adoration of the sun to such practical considerations that have since disappeared in use, if not in poetical and linguistic conventions (vide 263). In ‘On Poetry’, she argues that the poet or the ‘man of strong feelings’ is the only person sufficiently in touch with higher feelings to submit prefabricated images to scrutiny and enquiry. S/he questions the conventions transmitted by books instead of permitting them to ‘gird … the mind with imaginary circles’. This constant reevaluation of the laws of language renews them. Yet Wollstonecraft warns against the dangers of this Promethean will to power. The same strong feelings that promote discussion, she argues, may in fact ‘frequently’ make ‘a libertine of him [the poet or the man of genius], by leading him to prefer the sensual tumult of love a little refined by sentiment’ (11). The explosive potential of sensibility and the quickness of sense to which Wollstonecraft alludes in her final paragraph of ‘On Poetry’ reiterates the tensions identified in ‘The Old Abelard’ that underlie her relation with the different philosophers and men of genius. Yet, in the last text published in her lifetime, she focuses less on the differences between men and women and more on those between educated gentlemen of taste and the exceptional poetic genius. By highlighting both the positive and the negative consequences of this excessive sensibility, she raises the question of how to channel it. This question is, moreover, at the heart of her ambivalence towards the ‘progress’ of civilisation which, I have been arguing, is staged in Letters Written … in Sweden. The tensions between the social and solitary self, the narrative of the catastrophic consequences of overpopulation and the trope of the ‘golden age’ all allude to the conflict between the positive and negative consequences of one individual’s excessive desires and feelings to the detriment of the more basic wants of an other.

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I would like to suggest that Wollstonecraft becomes the ‘“hero of [her] tale”’ by attempting to harness her excessive feelings and sensibility, without which she cannot be a genius, but too much of which might make her a libertine who forsakes all the hopes and promises of a more dignified vision of human nature and society.29 Although she upholds the classical model of pathetic and embattled individuality trying to survive in a fallen world, she also inscribes this model within a more socially interactive situation. To pose the terms of her debate and to evoke the stakes of her personal conflict Wollstonecraft invests another key rhetorical trope, that of the island. ‘I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind,’ she writes, ‘– I was alone, till some involuntary sympathetic emotion, like the attraction of adhesion, made me feel that I was still a part of a mighty whole, from which I could not sever myself …’ (249). The realisation that she is both ‘broken off’ and ‘part of’ the mighty whole, clearly summarises the conflict she faces between her own wants and those of others. Perhaps the centrality of the image of the island reveals Wollstonecraft’s attention to the geography of the Scandinavian country and the dangers she confronts in manoeuvring her boat between the multiple isles and rocks scattered in the way of the ships. Wollstonecraft is attentive to this geography, commenting on one occasion how the rocks and islands ‘formed very picturesque combinations’ (292). Her description, which focuses on the contrast between the pine trees and the ridges and moves from the wafting waves to the ‘straggling houses’ in the landscape, conforms to picturesque convention. She describes each separate part and particle of the rugged, rough and disorderly landscape only, as William Gilpin had argued, to recompose these separate parts into a distinctly framed whole.30 Yet, as Elizabeth Bohls suggests, Wollstonecraft breaks with the tradition of the picturesque by inserting working-class figures into this landscape and by providing realistic detail about their work.31 The islands house fishermen, farmers and pilots who pay taxes and earn both the necessaries of life and its superfluities. Wollstonecraft also breaks with aesthetic tradition when she calls attention to her presence in this landscape, inscribing her subject position in a tableau that claims to speak from a subjectless position. Sitting then in a little boat on the ocean, amidst strangers, with sorrow and care pressing hard on me, buffeting me about clime to clime, I felt

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‘Like the lone shrub at random cast, That sights and trembles at each blast!’ (292) Wollstonecraft’s explicit comparison between the lone shrub and herself evokes her own cares and sorrows, her own precarious position in the world. The simile invites us to reread the sentence in which it is embedded and forces us to see the more implicit and allusive comparison between Wollstonecraft and her boat which, like the shrub, is also lone, fragile and precarious. The ‘little boat on the ocean’, in other words, stands in metonymic relationship to Wollstonecraft. Through these extended comparisons, Wollstonecraft projects herself into the landscape that is the object of her gaze, just as she identifies with the working-class women she portrays throughout the Letters. In so doing, she challenges in yet another way Gilpin’s accepted dictums on picturesque convention. The picturesque eye, argues Gilpin, must ‘survey nature’. Although it ‘examines parts … [it] never descends to particles.’32 Yet, the lone and fragile subject in the boat, in turn lone and fragile in the middle of the ocean, is more a particle than a part of the scene. Moreover, by insisting on the significance of this particle through the embedded system of tropes, Wollstonecraft prevents the more surveying and general view to dominate, calling attention to the particular and subjective position she occupies. She takes the reader through the very opposite movement of her own selfdoubts. As I suggested above, she claims to have gone from considering herself ‘a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind’ until she felt she ‘was part of a might whole’ (249). Yet, in the description of herself afloat in the northern seas, she reverses her steps, again reducing and diminishing herself to a minute particle. Wollstonecraft has become, in other words, an island, and in so doing interrogates not just Gilpin’s conception of the picturesque. She also responds to an entire rhetorical and philosophical convention which figures man as a sovereign self, an island entirely on its own. Such is the case, for instance, of Rousseau, whose Emile, as Michèle Le Doeuff reminds us, is both an island-lover (aime-île) and a reader of Robinson Crusoe (Rousseau is, phonetically speaking, an amputated Crusoe).33 Already in Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft admonishes this insular, self-contained world. ‘A man cannot retire into a desert with his child’ (VRW 229), she writes, revealing the impossibility of the male philosopher’s asocial programme. In the same work, as Michèle Le Doeuff has argued, Wollstonecraft articulates an alterna-

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tive image of the island that is not really one. ‘Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath’ (VRW 65; emphasis added). By insisting on independence, Wollstonecraft is clearly aligning herself with the image of the self-determining, self-reliant and virtuous man that is, as indicated in earlier chapters, a cornerstone of civic humanism. It is also the ideology of manhood that both Defoe’s Crusoe and Rousseau’s Emile promote. Yet, Wollstonecraft is not an island-lover. Unlike the desert island where man, cut off from all sides, is left to rediscover and reorganise the world again in relation to himself and his centrality, the heath – barren and isolated though it may be – ensures a passage between worlds. It imposes a contract, a pact, a union between parts. Wollstonecraft moreover realises that this ‘independence’ must be at the expence of something: she must contract, reduce her wants and not allow herself the endless territorial and imperial expansion that her male counterparts promote. The double entendre of ‘contract/contract’ announces the irresolvable ambiguity of necessarily social humanity. The connection with the main mass of mankind does indeed involve a loss, but without this loss survival would be impossible. In her Letters Written … in Sweden, Wollstonecraft returns to this figure. If she seems to have abandoned the ‘barren heath’ in favour of the island, she nevertheless insists on the passage with the main.34 She cannot break away from the whole. Although she may have ‘frequently strayed’ from the large mass of mankind to become, in an intertextual echo of both Crusoe and Rousseau, ‘sovereign of the waste’ (279), she nevertheless soon wakes up to see ‘fishermen … casting their nets’ and to bow ‘before the awful throne of my Creator’ (289). Nor does Wollstonecraft necessarily want to remain in solitary isolation. If she relishes the solitude, she also recognises the danger. Consider again both the explicit comparison with the ‘lone shrub’ and the implicit one with the boat. The solitary and isolated particles adrift in the strangeness of the northern seas graphically reveal both fragility and vulnerability. So do the broken grammar, the system of embedded tropes and the reported speech that contribute to her self-description. The syntax disrupts the cohesion of the speaking subject and as such considerably diminishes its otherwise expansive potential. Indeed, despite the centrality of the subject in the picture, the centrality of the speaking subject seems to have disappeared, forcing the reader and the spectator to be both in and out of the representation, to be both the ‘whole’ and the ‘particle’ (249). The excessive and overwhelming senti-

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ments of this woman of strong feeling are thus not allowed to assume a self-glorifying stature. The vulnerability and the fragility of the speaking subject harness sentiment and passion, preventing them from developing into a libertine perversion or excess. Elsewhere Wollstonecraft is self-derisive of her insularity: ‘A discourteous wave interrupted my slumbers, and obliged me to rise and feel a solitariness which was not so soothing as that of the past night,’ she writes (268). Self-deprecation takes an almost comic proportion in the personification of the wave. More than being impolite, the wave reminds her of the dangers of nature, inciting her not to overindulge in the ‘reveries of solitary wanderer’ and to accept instead the social contract and the contracting of wants that it should imply. The Letters accept the contract I have been evoking by articulating the move from Wollstonecraft’s own economic, affective and social wants in relation to the wants of women and society more generally. Increasing wants may result not only in the chaos of the French prerevolutionary and revolutionary government, but also in the gloomy and desolate scenes of an overpopulated world. One solution then is to contract, reduce and limit wants, as Wollstonecraft had argued in the Vindication. The problem is that she cannot rely on the males of the species for, as she comments to Imlay, men who can ‘govern desire’ are the ‘rarest thing’ (LI 396–7). Or if they do, it is only to help other men. Commenting on the condition of servants early in the travel book, Wollstonecraft remarks on the costs of solidarity between men. They ‘stand up for the dignity of man, by oppressing the women’ (LSDN 253): the latter are given the most menial and laborious offices, despite their much proclaimed physical weakness. Given their failure, Wollstonecraft proposes instead a contract with women. By detailing the condition of women’s work in Letters Written … in Sweden, Wollstonecraft attempts to ‘stand up for the dignity of [wo]men’, without necessarily oppressing men in turn. Gestures of solidarity between women abound in the work. In discussing her penchant for pretty women and her sympathetic identification with the wet-nurse, I have commented on three such occasions and on the manner in which they both increase Wollstonecraft’s importance, making her the ‘“little hero of each tale”’ (241) and, as she self-mockingly remarks, reduce her subjective expansion. To these encounters, vested in the aesthetics of the gaze I need to add a more concrete example. During her visit to Tonsberg, a woman proposes to row her across the water, ‘But as she was pregnant,’ writes Wollstonecraft, ‘I insisted on taking one of the oars, and learning to row’ (281).

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In discussing the work of Wollstonecraft’s contemporary, the French politician Maxmillien Robespierre, Hannah Arendt has attempted to define solidarity and to theorise its political significance.35 Examining the importance given to the suffering and misery of the people in the context of the French Revolution, Arendt identifies three possible responses: compassion, pity and solidarity. Compassion (or what, referring to Smith, I have also been calling tenderness) is a passion that entails immediate and spontaneous identification with the sufferer. Because the spectator is conflated with the sufferer, there is no possibility of dialogue and discussion between the person principally concerned and his/her sympathiser. For this reason, compassion can never become the motor or focus of political action. This is the case not so much because, for Arendt, an enlightened politics requires feelings to be subjected to and controlled by reason and impartial justice as because the spontaneous response must be mediated by the ‘market place’ (read the public sphere). Only then can particular and even singular suffering become amenable to public discussion and eventually collective action. Pity may, in these terms, lend itself to political possibilities. A sentiment produced after the immediate passion has been mediated establishes a critical distance between the spectator and the person principally concerned. A dialogue between the two is thus possible. Yet here too problems persist that should in principle exclude pity from the terrain of politics. Because it depends on its objects to proclaim its self-worth, it has a ‘vested interest in the existence of the unhappy’.36 Because it is a sentiment, Arendt adds, it ‘can be enjoyed for its own sake, and this will almost automatically lead to a glorification of its cause, which is the suffering of others’. Indeed, such glorification may well be at the expense of either alleviating the suffering or acknowledging the efforts of the sufferers themselves. As such, Arendt’s comments echo Wollstonecraft’s admonishments against charity and middle-class benevolence as well as her analysis of how cultural practice has ‘rendered women objects of pity, bordering on contempt’ (VRW 147). As I have been suggesting is the case for Wollstonecraft, for Arendt too the alternative to compassionate sympathy and pity is solidarity. Although equally aroused by the spectacle of suffering, it is not limited to an immediate and spontaneous identification with the sufferer as is the case with compassion or tenderness. Hence it can become the object of debate in the market place. Moreover, because it partakes of reason far more than the sentiment of pity, solidarity’s disinterested, dispassionate and deliberated abstractions are far more inclusive of

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social classes, peoples and the very varieties of human experiences. Propounding abstract ideals that have been subject to public discussion, solidarity can, in this sense, provide political ‘principles that can inspire and guide action’. Arendt’s discussion of the political principle of solidarity insists on its disinterested nature. As a result, she may be too rapid in denying the importance of particular suffering as a ground and motivation for political action. For, it is not the reference to the suffering of given and ‘interested’ groups, such as Wollstonecraft’s women or Robespierre’s malheureux, that impedes collective action. Rather it is how the spectacle of this particular suffering is represented to elicit a given response, namely compassion, pity or solidarity. By definition, politics and collective action imply the existence of at least two subjects who can discuss existing wrongs and elaborate abstract and ‘disinterested’ principles from concrete situations and particular experiences. Yet, as I have been insisting, representations of distress that invite only compassion or pity deny the moral and political autonomy of the sufferer, acknowledging the existence of only one subject, the spectator. Only solidarity presupposes the presence of two distinct political subjects and agents. Indeed, the solidarity Wollstonecraft represents is not only characterised by concrete gestures towards women in distress but also by the overt recognition of the other’s subjectivity. Gone is the distinction between the subject of pity, the man of feeling, and its object, the beautiful female in distress over whom he weeps. The aesthetics of solidarity Wollstonecraft elaborates time and again is contingent on the recognition of two equally respected subjectivities. Unlike pity that borders on contempt and reduces the other to an object without agency, solidarity recognises and respects the other’s self-determination and in this is crucial to the constitution of political subjects. The aesthetic issues that Wollstonecraft grapples with in her representation of suffering and misery thus become central for the articulation of a collective political movement. Wollstonecraft, then, reconfigures the conventional spectacle of woman in distress by developing an aesthetics of solidarity and thereby renders spectacles of female suffering into scenes for collective political intervention. As I have suggested in my discussion above, she calls attention to social situations that produce female suffering. By inviting a closer examination of the circumstances that give rise to the display of grief, she both justifies the display and suggests that it is not as excessive as might seem. By refusing to pity the woman in distress

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and expressing her respect instead, she does not conflate her subjectivity with that of the person principally concerned. Instead she both highlights the intervention of the sufferer’s subjectivity and prevents the continual glorification of herself as the spectator. Acknowledging the other, she invites a disinterested comparison between the two situations. As such, her accounts try to mediate the encounter between the two parties and thereby transfer the spectacle to the public sphere. As with Arendt, the solidarity Wollstonecraft figures in her Letters Written … in Sweden also depends on an abstract idea and on a political ‘principle that can inspire and guide action’. This principle may be read in the optimistic vision of the appendix which attempts to stabilise the constant oscillation in the book between hope and desperation by affirming Wollstonecraft’s belief in progress and social justice, a belief which she tells us is strengthened by the experience of the voyage. ‘And, to convince me that such a change is gaining ground, with accelerating pace, the view I have had of society, during my northern journey, would have been sufficient, had I not previously considered the grand causes which combine to carry mankind forward, and diminish the sum of human misery,’ she concludes (346). This conclusion suggests that the most expansive of wants has finally been contracted. ‘I want faith,’ writes Wollstonecraft during the last stretch of her voyage (308), adding to the catalogue of socio-economic, sexual and affective wants. The oscillation between sociability and solitude reflects the tension inherent to this want, namely both the need to believe in progress and the failure to do so. The final optimism of the conclusion allows her to transpose the whining self-indulgence that invites compassion and pity into a more vociferous call for faith in social change. The description of a lack or absence becomes, in this sense, a powerful speech-act capable of transforming the future of the world. The wants of one woman, and of women more generally, have become a key force in the remaking and refashioning of the world. Not only has aesthetic convention between reworked and language between reinvested with a new power, but more significantly, thanks to networks of inter-generational and inter-class solidarity, women begin to represent themselves as a collective force ready to identify and claim their own wants.

From the wrongs of women to the wants of women Examining primarily Letters Written … in Sweden, I have explored Wollstonecraft’s attempt to articulate an aesthetics that will account for and represent the distress of women without positioning them as

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objects in distress. She attempts to diminish the excessively valorised subjectivity of the spectator, favouring instead the recognition of the two different subjectivities. Even as the feminist admires the excessive sentiment of a lively imagination, she recognises the dangers its unrestrained desires represent. Indeed, these abstract concerns cannot be separated from her political commitments to right the wrongs of women. It is significant that she both draws parallels between the distress common to all women she meets and invites them to act together against it. The movement away from male protection and towards female solidarity is even more present in her unfinished novel, Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria where Wollstonecraft turns once again to the collective wants of woman. In what remains of this chapter I will explore the formal narrative experiments she puts in place to encourage this contract. The continuity between the autobiographical travel account and the novel might be exposed through Wollstonecraft’s continued attention to realistic detail. The mere physical effort required for washing, for instance, is in the novel, as in the travel account, more than a trope for women’s status as ‘drudges’ (vide LSDN 253; WOW 117). It is part of the reality of their lives. Similarly, in Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft evokes women’s experience with the law. More than one woman, on more than one occasion insists that women do not receive the protection of the law.37 Both Maria and Jemima consider themselves ‘“outlaws”’ (113; 146) and another woman comments, ‘“‘that women have always the worst of it, when law is to decide’”’ (165). This shared oppression under the law is further articulated in the contrast between legal and illegal marriages, between legal and illegal prostitution (vide VRM 22; VRW 129),38 between middle-class Maria and working-class Jemima. As mentioned in chapter 1, much of Maria’s misery is a very convincing illustration of how the married woman’s legal status of feme covert deprives her of a civil existence, just as Jemima’s illegal one demonstrates the hypocritical but equally degrading treatment of prostitutes. I have insisted how, in her preface to the novel, Wollstonecraft explains her commitment to a more realistic narrative. She forsakes a more ‘dramatic’ account in favour of one that will ‘exhibit the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society’ (83). Moreover, as suggested earlier, the account of individual suffering interests Wollstonecraft less as an expression of the extreme sensibility of a singular, exceptional being and more as an expression of the collective oppression of women. If, in the travel book, the individual wants of her daughter are transposed

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into the wants of women, here the story of one woman stands in metonymic relation to all women. Or rather, as Wollstonecraft explains in a letter to George Dyson subsequently reproduced in part by Godwin in the preface to the posthumously published book, she intends to ‘show the wrongs of different classes of women, equally oppressive, though, from the difference of education, necessarily various’ (84). Her rupture with conventional aesthetics is thus twofold. First, she substitutes the ‘delineations of finer sensations’ for the pure ‘stage-effect’ dramatising ‘a singular great misfortune’. More significantly, perhaps, women of ‘different classes’ have also become representable subjects of distress, misery and suffering. Indeed, by describing the gruesome details of Jemima’s life, Wollstonecraft breaks with aesthetic convention that claims that representation of real poverty disgusts the mind. Jemima’s story is a catalogue of evils that can befall women. Born a bastard to a woman who dies in childbirth, Jemima becomes a servant first to her stepmother then to a succession of cruel masters. Pregnant after being raped by one master, she has an abortion. She then takes to the street and to prostitution, experiencing almost the entire gamut of possibilities in sex work from the most debasing form in the street to the more exclusive companionship of a libertine philosopher. Expelled from hospital and rejected by charitable workhouses, she reverts to stealing from necessity. This account is certainly a long way from the more amiable Arcadian shepherdess who should elicit compassionate sympathy. As numerous critics have noted, Wollstonecraft appropriates other literary genres to describe urban poverty. Her novel bears the traces of the more sensationalist scandalous memoirs, populist Newgate chronicles and reformist tracts.39 She nevertheless reworks these genres to grant their subjects more dignity and respect. Instead of inciting the curiosity of the idle reader, Jemima’s story attempts to elicit their sympathy and urges them to understand the conditions that have led to her present misery. However undignified her existence, Jemima nevertheless maintains her ‘conscious dignity’ (VRW 94 n. 2), having the ‘finer sentiments’ Wollstonecraft mentions in the preface. She teaches herself to read, considering money as less important than self-improvement, even if she subsequently half-heartedly regrets doing so. More significantly, she suffers ‘“both in body and in mind”’ (117) when she discovers that her self-interest has resulted in the death of another young woman. She thereby suggests that sensibility is not the prerogative of the rich men of taste and feeling. In fact, Jemima’s sufferings contrast with the indifference with which the ‘“man of rigid morals”’ (114) and

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the gentlemen of sensibility treat her. They refuse even to listen to her story, much less to acknowledge the misery that it recounts. Such indifference stages the problem central to representations of distress, misery and poverty. Poverty disgusts not only in romance, but also in real life, and the man who weeps so effusively in the theatre remains deaf to the ‘vulgar sorrows’ (VRM 16) of everyday poverty, even as he is willing to do charitable acts. Jemima’s account mocks such people. Destitute once again, following the death of the libertine philosopher who had ‘kept’ her, she encounters one of the gentlemen who had frequently dined at her table. Although the man asks after her, ‘“without waiting to hear me, he impatiently put a guinea in my hand, saying, ‘It was a pity such a sensible woman should be in distress …’”’ (115). Jemima’s account is self-consciously aware of its attempt to question both the indifference and the self-satisfaction of middle-class sensibility. She comments on the difference between her story and the one that abounds in sentimental literature by opposing her experience with the ‘“desire of the brutes I met”’ to accounts she reads in ‘“novels of the blandishments of seduction”’. Unlike these fictions, she had ‘“not even the pleasure of being enticed into vice”’ (112). Later, she questions what is repeated far too often ‘“in conversation and … in books”’, namely that ‘“every person willing to work may find work”’ and that ‘“poverty is no evil”’ (115–16). She adds that these truisms are particularly wrong and nefarious where women are concerned. As such, she voices Wollstonecraft’s more abstract and philosophical concerns. Jemima also calls attention to another aspect of Wollstonecraft’s aesthetics: the refusal to recourse to endless scenes of misery that might harden the heart. Indeed, since Jemima’s life is little more than a series of the ills that befall poor women, her narrative seems to counter Wollstonecraft’s theoretical claims. Yet, the servant interrupts the ‘perpetual recurrence of misery’ (AR 33) with both philosophical and selfreflexive comments. Although Darnford and Maria use Jemima’s tale as an example ‘“giving rise to the most painful reflections on the present state of society”’ (116), much of the philosophising comes in fact from Jemima herself. Capable of abstracting general conclusion from her own particular circumstances, she becomes both the voice of poverty and, more significantly, a voice on poverty. This ability to theorise from her experience makes Jemima significantly different from the poor woman in Sarah Trimmer’s Œconomy of Charity who offers herself as a spectacle for a middle-class gaze. Figured as a descriptive object,

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this woman remains subject to change not a subject of her own change.40 Jemima, on the other hand, dismantles the rupture between the abstract, disembodied and disinterested voice of philosophy and the embodied voice of experience and in so doing becomes an agent of political change. On at least two occasions, Jemima reminds her listeners that she is not providing a full account: ‘“I shall not … lead your imagination into all the scenes of wretchedness and depravity, which I was condemned to view,”’ she glosses (112). Elsewhere her comment becomes a more direct interpellation of the limits of middle-class imagination, ‘“But I will not attempt to give you an adequate idea of my situation, lest you, who probably have never been drenched with the dregs of human misery, should think I exaggerate”’ (109). This rupture in perpetual misery becomes an angry interpellation of her audience, almost implying that Maria, Darnford and indeed we the readers are in the same position as the ‘“well-meaning people who exclaim against beggars”’ (118) but who refuse to hear how workhouses resemble prisons. Jemima’s attempt to ‘protect’ the sensibility of her readers echoes the same anger present in Wollstonecraft’s letter to George Dyson: ‘I am vexed and surprised at your not thinking the situation of Maria sufficiently important, and can only account for this want of – shall I say it? delicacy of feeling by recollecting that you are a man …’ (MWL 391–2). As Claudia Johnson explains, in his preface to the posthumous Wrongs of Woman, Godwin reproduces the letter, but suppresses this indignant expostulation that places Dyson in a position not unlike that of the judge at the end of the novel: both men fail to understand why Maria’s marriage to Venables is unbearable.41 Wollstonecraft’s irritation, argues Johnson, implies her increasing awareness of the limits to male sensibility where women are concerned. As suggested in ‘The Old Abelard’, the novel itself stages the extent to which men – including Darnford – are incapable of hearing, seeing and understanding both the wretchedness of Maria’s marriage and the extent of Jemima’s degradation. Godwin’s subsequent suppression of this part of the letter certainly confirms this suggestion. It remains crucial to note, however, that Jemima’s self-restraining narrator alludes to a similar insensibility amongst middle-class readers, male or female. Just as neither Dyson nor Godwin seems to be sufficiently disgusted with Venables, Jemima implies that Maria may not be sufficiently disgusted with the truth of her tale. Jemima’s selfreflexivity calls attention to the position of the reader and thereby inserts a break between her and the middle-class subjectivity that

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attempts to engulf or appropriate her. In this, it marks a significant departure from the pseudo-absorptive tableaux of the Letters. I argued above that Wollstonecraft’s gaze on working-class women in Scandinavia emphasises the identity between them. A similar move towards identity underlies much of Wrongs of Woman. The novel does more than erase the thin line that separates those who almost sink into disrespect from those who do. Jemima the prostitute’s narrative mirrors and echoes Maria the wife’s plight, inviting the reader to draw parallels. On more than one occasion, they share a similar experience. Both women are thrown out of their father’s home by an avaricious stepmother. Both are confronted with the limits of their female solidarity. Jemima tells how she is responsible for the death of a young, pregnant girl. In order to assure her own comfort and security, she becomes a ‘“wolf”’ (117) and forces a lover to turn out a girl expecting his child into the cold. (The girl drowns herself in a horses’ trough, a detail that, as Marilyn Butler suggests, may well refer both self-consciously and self-mockingly to Wollstonecraft’s own attempted suicide by drowning.) Likewise, Maria discovers that, on their marriage, Venables sent away a country girl he had seduced and whose pregnancy was ‘“too visible”’ (142). As with Jemima’s victim, this woman dies and, although cared for by an older woman, the child is hardly in the most enviable condition. Finally, both women experience the censure and hypocrisy of women who refuse to see through the perverse logic of marital laws and codes. A woman of ‘“rigid morals”’ refuses to give a reference to Jemima because it ‘“‘would go against her conscience to recommend a kept mistress’”’ (115). As a result, Jemima is forced to return to a life of destitution and poverty. Similarly, the women with whom Maria had been ‘formerly intimate’ (176) refuse her friendship when she leaves her husband. Ironically, ‘had she remained with her husband, practising insincerity, and neglecting her child to manage an intrigue, she would still have been visited and respected’ (176). But it is not only with respect to the plot that Maria’s and Jemima’s stories are similar; it is also the language. In her story, Jemima calls prostitutes ‘“outlaws of society”’ (113; emphasis added); in hers, Maria describes ‘“many amiable women”’ as ‘“the out-laws of the world”’ (146; emphasis in the original) and states that women have no country in so far as ‘“the laws of her country … afford her no protection”’ (149). Elsewhere, Jemima describes her life on the streets, saying: ‘“I had been hunted almost into a fever, by the watchmen of the quarter of the town”’ (112–13; emphasis added). Maria uses a very similar turn of phrase to explain how the law pursued her once she left her husband’s home:

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‘“I was hunted like a criminal from place to place …”’ (179; emphasis added), she states. Both women refer to themselves as ‘“monsters”’: Jemima, when she discovers the young girl she had had turned out frozen to death (117); Maria, when she reflects on how her education could have potentially damaged her (133). Finally, both women are likened to a plague. The narrator describes Jemima as ‘infected with a moral plague’ (89) and Maria’s husband complains of ‘“the plague of marrying women who pretended to know something”’ (155). These similarities clearly reinforce the polemical nature of the novel, inviting readers to compare legal and illegal prostitution. They also, however, invite readers to identify the two women, in a manner not unlike the grammatical ambiguity in Wollstonecraft’s description of the Swedish wet-nurse. The framed narrative structure itself institutes this systematic mirroring and echoing of stories and subjectivities. Yet, by drawing attention to the narrative context, it addresses the limits of such identification, in particular that between middle-class readers and the objects they produce in their romantic and sentimental readings. In ‘The Old Abelard’, I evoked some of these differences by contrasting the two women’s very different response to men of sensibility and to their romantic plotting. Given these differences and given Maria’s general proclivity to act out the part of a romance, what are we to make of the repetitions and echoes between Jemima’s and her narrative? Is it not possible that Maria, inspired by the illegal prostitute’s story, is once again acting a part, casting herself in the role of a legal prostitute? Is she, unlike Jemima who is aware of the difference between representation and reality, projecting her romantic fictions unto reality? Is she appropriating Jemima’s experience to articulate her own? Such a reading, I believe, fails to recognise the contract established through the act of narration. Jemima’s story, as I argued in ‘The Old Abelard’, offers Maria an alternative to debilitating sentimental plots. She emerges from listening to the tale with a new, more social identity, recognising her membership in an oppressed group and accepting her responsibility towards this group. Jemima’s identity has also been reconstituted through the telling. Despite the limits she recognises in her listener, telling a tale has become crucial for the consolidation of Jemima’s identity. It functions like a mirror reflecting back a human image to the woman who had considered herself a monster. Maria’s gesture at the end of the telling, her repetition of Jemima’s tale, her promise as well as Jemima’s comments on the promise all authorise Jemima finally to see herself as a human being. Equally important is the affirmation of Maria’s

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humanity through the performance of the story: she upholds her word to Jemima, and together they agree to fashion a world more fit for her daughter. The narrative contract articulated in The Wrongs of Woman gives, then, a tangible form to the collective identity that Wollstonecraft attempts to sketch in her aesthetics of suffering. Unlike Original Stories, however, the benevolence of middle-class subjectivity does not engulf working-class experience. Unlike Letters Written … in Sweden, Wollstonecraft does not need to revert to rupture and silence in order to harness the ever-expanding identity of the sympathising subject. The framed narrative structure and the self-reflexive narrative invite identification even as they draw attention to its limits. The sufferer and her sympathisers alike retain their restricted subjectivities as they promise to articulate both new individual and collective identities together. Acknowledging their moral and political autonomies, the narrative structure reveals how there has been discussion towards the construction of a political project. In short, Jemima and Maria act out of solidarity, establishing the ‘community of interest’ necessary for a feminist politics of the future.42

5 Conclusion

Mary Wollstonecraft died in childbirth, leaving behind not just two young daughters but also several uncompleted literary and philosophical projects, including an unfinished novel and notes for a second volume for her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Throughout this book, I have been perhaps excessively attentive to her posthumous novel, discerning in it a revolutionary prophecy for women’s lives. This potential is not always confirmed by the remaining fragments. Although there is no indication that she would undertake a discussion of the ‘laws relative to women’ that she had promised (VRW 70), her notes reiterate many points of the completed first volume. Her providential vision of human action transpires clearly, as does her emphasis on innate human dignity. She continues to affirm the same ends of female education as the dominant ideology: a sexually chaste woman. But, as in her earlier work, she also attempts to make this compatible with her strong emphasis on active virtue. She argues that women must have a rational and conscious understanding of its necessity; that men’s sexuality needs to be further regulated; and that women cannot be positioned as beautiful objects of male desire. The last fourth of these scattered hints nevertheless reveals an increasing awareness of the powers and indeed importance of the imagination. Writing about the origins of poetry, the need for a more electrifying reading experience and the liberating potential of individual creativity, she expresses ideas that take full form in her ‘On Poetry’. In both works, she shifts her attention away from the distinction between men and women to that between the poetic genius and the mass of common people. Not only has the model of femininity she attacked so virulently become a model for the ‘lesser’ subjectivity of 175

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the non-poet.1 More seriously perhaps, she almost relishes this distinction and the special position it offers her. As such, Wollstonecraft seems to be embarking on the same path as male ideologues of British High Romanticism. Despite the conservative position Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth were to adopt, in numerous respects the conflicts they confronted in the course of their literary careers render them interesting yardsticks for the alternatives open to Wollstonecraft. Like her, both poets were initially favourable to the French Revolution, changing their judgement, albeit far more dramatically than she did, in response to the subsequent ‘radical’ phases. Rejecting disciplinary barriers between literary and political history, much recent scholarship has demonstrated how the development of their aesthetics is a response to this change. They attempted to curtail the dangerous potential of the sublime into a more tamed ‘beautiful’.2 Their ideological vision favoured the retreat of aesthetics to an autonomous realm.3 Heirs of civic humanism’s legacy to the Enlightenment, they continued to emphasise the individual ‘worth’ and ‘value’ of men, refusing to reduce autonomous individuality to an insignificant part of the programmatic ends of utilitarianism, Malthusianism and liberal political economy.4 Coleridge in particular argued for a secular clerisy, capable of inculcating aesthetic and cultural values to unenlightened common men. Wollstonecraft, of course, did not live as long as Wordsworth and Coleridge, her death in childbirth determined as much by her sex as by her failed suicide.5 Yet the comparison does invite reflections on the roads not taken. Was she increasingly proposing the divestment of the aesthetic from the political?6 Despite her portrait of Jemima and her sympathies for the material sufferings of the lower class, was she arguing for an enlightened elite, male and female, capable of providing moral guidance? How would she have responded to the growing domination of political economy and liberal ideology while upholding her humanist vision of individual worth? How would she resolve the tension between her theological vision of individual redemption in a fallen world with the demands of more collective action? Like the male poets, Wollstonecraft straddles eighteenth-century’s heritage of civic humanism and nineteenth-century liberal ideology. Like them, she needs to be read critically against both strains. Equally important is the need to read her aesthetic practice against her evolving political theory, to chart her moral philosophy against her social vision. The preceding chapters have tried to provide this more dynamic

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account of Wollstonecraft’s appropriations of Enlightenment values. They have demonstrated how she favoured acknowledging women’s human worth and extending rational education to members of her sex. They have also indicated how, in the process, she revised a number of the postulates inherent to these values. Whereas Wollstonecraft upholds individual autonomy, she also works towards articulating a vision of solidarity and collective action in her last works. It remains, of course, difficult to say how successful her project was. It was curtailed by her untimely death, which prevented a more fullfledged conceptualisation and refiguration, by the conservative backlash that followed the revolutionary 1790s and, as Anna Wilson has argued, by the absence of a self-identified audience that recognised itself in the appeal to female solidarity.7 Hardly surprising too that the feminist movement remains haunted by these same issues, not least of which is the need to articulate an aesthetics of solidarity. How do we turn personal experience into a political issue without indulging in the sentimental and possibly voyeuristic effusiveness of television chatshows? How do we represent female suffering without making the women in distress objects of feminist pity and imperialist contempt? Other Wollstonecraft studies are less positive than this one, and her unfinished fragments may well justify this stance. In either case, as feminists on the threshold of a new millennium, we remain heirs to both the limits and possibilities of her work. As we continue to confront our own dilemmas and to explore in her writing pre-figurations of our own predicaments, we should strive to figure Wollstonecraft not only as a prophetic visionary for nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury feminist politics, but also as a philosopher trying to negotiate the contradictions and tensions imposed by her own troubled times.

Notes Introduction 1. R.M. Janes, ‘On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 293–302. For a discussion of the figure of Wollstonecraft in the literature of the 1790s and early nineteenth century, see also J. Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835, a Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 79–82. 2. See P. Hirsch, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: A Problematic Legacy’, in Wollstonecraft’s Daughters: Womanhood in England and France, 1780–1920, ed. C.C. Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); B. Caine, English Feminism, 1780–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 3. K. Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1831–51 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Hirsch, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: A Problematic Legacy’. 4. Gleadle, Early Feminists. 5. V. Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 272–79. 6. B. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983), 9; B. Taylor, ‘Feminism and the Enlightenment, 1650–1850’, History Workshop Journal 47 (1999): 261–72. 7. The new editions include M. Wollstonecraft, Letters to Imlay with a Prefatory Memoir, ed. C.K. Paul (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1879); M. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. M.G. Fawcett (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891); M. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. E.R. Pennell (London: Walter Scott, 1892). Vindication of the Rights of Woman was also serialised in 1897 in the woman’s periodical Woman’s Signal. Elizabeth Pennell wrote a biography, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (London: W.H. Allen, 1885). It relied heavily on material published in C.K. Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols. (London: Henry S. King, 1876). The university thesis by Emma Rauschenbush-Clough, submitted to the University of Bern, Switzerland, was subsequently published as A Study of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Woman (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1898). Although biographies of Wollstonecraft were published continuously during the twentieth century, it was not until 1979 that her correspondence was made available to the general public. See R.M. Wardle, ed., The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979). For a more extensive discussion of the reception of Wollstonecraft’s work during the last decade of the nineteenth-century, see Caine, English Feminism, 131–73. 8. Sapiro, Political Virtue, 277. 9. M. Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), xvi. 178

Notes 179 10. M. Jacobus, Reading Women: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 27–40; T.J. Reiss, ‘Revolution in Bounds: Wollstonecraft, Women, and Reason’, in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. L. Kauffman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). For a recent defence of Wollstonecraft’s commitment to reason, see K. Green, The Woman of Reason: Feminism, Humanism and Political Thought (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 82–103. 11. C. Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). See also M. Gatens, ‘“The Oppressed State of My Sex”: Wollstonecraft on Reason, Feeling and Equality’, in Feminist Interpretation and Political Theory, ed. M.L. Shanley and C. Pateman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 12. See C. Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974); S. Tomaselli, ‘The Death and Rebirth of Character in the Eighteenth Century’, in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. R. Porter (London: Routledge, 1995). For a reply to such positions, see S. Mendus, Feminism and Emotion (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 13–28. 13. C. Kaplan, ‘Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism’, in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. N. Armstrong and L. Tennenhouse (New York: Methuen, 1987), 174. For other discussions of Wollstonecraft’s imposition of compulsory hetersexuality, see J. Christensen, ‘Setting Byron Straight: Class, Sexuality, and the Poet’, in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. E. Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); T. Furniss, ‘Nasty Tricks and Tropes: Sexuality and Language in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman’, Studies in Romanticism 32 (1993): 177–209. 14. J.B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 93–151; C. Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 179–210. 15. Pateman, Disorder of Women, 179–209. 16. Ibid., 197; emphasis in the original. 17. M. Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 8–22; F. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 73–95. 18. Making an argument for a different kind of literary history, Janet Todd articulates many of the following comments in her Feminist Literary History (London: Polity Press, 1988), 103–18. 19. See F. Ferguson, ‘Wollstonecraft Our Contemporary’, in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. L. Kauffman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 20. A landmark text in reversing this trend is Sapiro, Political Virtue. There is at present an increasingly substantial body of literature on Wollstonecraft’s debt to the tradition of ‘civic humanism’, her relation to the Scottish Enlightenment and to the tradition of the commonwealth man, as well as on her dependence on eighteenth-century religious discourse. G.J. Barker-Benfield, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Eighteenth-Century

180 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy Commonwealthwoman’, Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 95–116; M.W. Carpenter, ‘Sibylline Apocalyptics: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Job’s Mother’s Womb’, Literature and History 12 (1986): 215–28; L. Cole, ‘(Anti)Feminist Sympathies: The Politics of Relationship in Smith, Wollstonecraft, and More’, English Literary History 58 (1991): 107–40; C. Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993), 85–107; C. Kay, ‘Canon, Ideology and Gender: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Critique of Adam Smith’, New Political Science (1986): 63–76; D. Robinson, ‘Theodicy versus Feminist Strategy in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Fiction’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9 (1997): 183–202; G. Spence, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Theodicy and Theory of Progress’, Enlightenment and Dissent 14 (1995): 105–27; B. Taylor, ‘For the Love of God’, in Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminisms, ed. E.J. Yeo (London: River Oram Press, 1996); B. Taylor, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Wild Wish of Early Feminism’, History Workshop Journal (1992): 197–219. This list is by no means exhaustive. 21. D. Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 104–13; M. Poovey, ‘Aesthetics and Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century: The Place of Gender in the Social Constitution of Knowledge’, in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. G. Levine (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994). I might also indicate that Pateman similarly revised her more ‘aggressive’ perspective in her ‘Equality, Difference, Subordination: The Politics of Motherhood and Women’s Citizenship’, in Citizenship, Feminist Politics and Female Subjectivity, ed. G. Bock and S. James (London: Routledge, 1994); C. Pateman, ‘Conclusion: Women’s Writing, Women’s Standing: Theory and Politics in the Early Modern Period’, in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 22. A number of recent works have tried to read Wollstonecraft’s works against the rhetorical and generic constraints placed on her. For a discussion of her relation to the language of sensibility, see S.M. Conger, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility (London: Associated University Press, 1994). See Gary Kelly’s reading of Wollstonecraft’s rhetorical manipulation in Vindication of the Rights of Men in his Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 84–107. Claudia Johnson’s excellent study pursues this reflection, relating it to the crisis of masculinity. See Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 23–46. For other accounts, see, J. Mulholland, ‘Constructing Woman’s Authority: A Study of Wollstonecraft’s Rhetoric in Her Vindication, 1792’, Prose Studies 18 (August 1995): 171–87; P. Yaeger, Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Struggles in Women’s Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 149–76. For a discussion of the lack of a receptive reading public, see A. Wilson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Search for the Radical Woman’, Genders (1989): 88–101. 23. M. Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. J. Todd and M. Butler, 7 vols. (London: Pickering, 1989).

Notes 181 24. Sapiro’s approach is nevertheless taken to task in K. Soper, ‘Naked Human Nature and the Draperies of Custom: Wollstonecraft on Equality and Democracy’, in Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminisms, ed. E.J. Yeo (London: River Oram Press, 1996). Critical of the Enlightenment project, Soper reiterates the limits to Wollstonecraft’s philosophy mentioned in earlier studies. 25. See Green, Woman of Reason, 82–103; Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, 93–151; Pateman, Disorder of Women, 179–209. 26. See the discussion in C. Turner, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1992). 27. For earlier attempts, see A. Browne, The Eighteenth-Century Feminist Mind (London: Harvester Press, 1987). 28. See also A. Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 170–84. Comparing Wollstonecraft and Macaulay to other women writers, he demonstrates the relevance of their commitment to egalitarian practices and to social change. 29. I am paraphrasing Joan Scott’s comments on agency formulated in J.W. Scott, ‘Review of Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence. By Linda Gordon’, Signs 15 (1990): 848–52. 30. M. Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 22; emphasis in the original. 31. N. Fraser, ‘False Antitheses’, in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (London: Routledge, 1995), 62–3. 32. See also Green, Woman of Reason, 82–103.

Chapter 1 1. D.H. Weinglass, ed., The Collected English Letters of Henry Fuseli (Millwood, New York: Kraus International Publications, 1982) 81; emphasis added. The second picture is not explicitly mentioned in this letter. Fuseli simply notes that the Eve prepared for printing by Bartolozzi must be ‘ready before Sharp’s’. In his 22 October 1791 letter to Roscoe, he states that Satan Sin and Death ‘will probably be done by Sharp’ (74). Weinglass notes that the print on Eve has not been traced. 2. There is a substantial body of literature on the gender implications of Burke’s categories. See, among others, F. Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 37–54; T. Eagleton, ‘Aesthetics and Politics in Edmund Burke’, History Workshop Journal 28 (1989): 53–62; L. Runge, Gender and Language in British Literary Criticism, 1660–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 168–210. 3. For a discussion of how theories of the sublime and the beautiful are applied to illustrations of Paradise Lost, see M.R. Pointon, Milton & English Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970), 62–173; M. D. Ravenhall, ‘Illustrations of Paradise Lost in England, 1688–1802’ (PhD in Art History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1980), 359–95 and 529–90.

182 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy 4. For background on this milieu, see J. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon Paperbacks, 1992), 161–213. For Wollstonecraft’s place in it, see W. Richey, ‘“A More Godlike Portion”: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminist Rereadings of the Fall’, English Language Notes XXXII (1994): 28–38. 5. J. Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. A. Fowler, in The Poems of John Milton, ed. J. Carey and A. Fowler (London: Longman, 1968 [1674]). All further references are to this edition; henceforth the abbreviation PL will be used. 6. The most thorough account of Wollstonecraft’s rewriting of Milton is S. Blakemore, ‘Rebellious Reading: The Doubleness of Wollstonecraft’s Subversion of Paradise Lost’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34 (1992): 451–80. See also L. Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 156–7. Discussing this footnote, Newlyn claims that Wollstonecraft affirms her radical sympathies and her ‘masculine’ choice in preferring the sublime Satan over the beautiful Eve and in so doing affirms a stronger distinction between them than there apparently is. Whereas I agree that Wollstonecraft objects to the pleasing and beautiful Eve, in this chapter I will nevertheless argue that Wollstonecraft does not necessarily identify the fallen Satan with the sublime and, in the next chapter that she does recognise the similarities between Satan and prelapsarian Eve. My overall hypothesis is that Wollstonecraft shifts the focus of the debate to the sublime struggles of postlapsarian mankind, including and especially Eve. On Wollstonecraft and Milton, see also S.M. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1980), 204–5 and passim; R. Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 85–7; J. Wittreich, Feminist Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), passim. 7. For a discussion of Wollstonecraft’s interest in the Enlightenment debate on theodicy, see D. Robinson, ‘Theodicy Versus Feminist Strategy in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Fiction’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9 (1997): 183–202. 8. J. Milton, ‘Areopagitica’, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. E. Sirluck, vol. 2 of 8 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959 [1644]), 527. 9. Ibid. 10. R. Price, Four Dissertations, second edn (London: A. Millar and T. Cadell, 1768), 94. 11. Milton’s considerations on the ‘woman issue’ remain, in fact, far more problematic than Wollstonecraft’s reading implies. For different perspectives, see, amongst others, Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman; C. Froula, ‘When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy’, Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 321–47; Wittreich, Feminist Milton. 12. Milton, ‘Areopagitica’, 515. 13. For discussions of eighteenth-century debates on Milton and the sublime, see Newlyn, Romantic Reader, 19–63; Pointon, Milton & English Art, 62–173; Ravenhall, ‘Illustrations’, 359–95 and 529–90. 14. H. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, fourth edn., vol. 1 of 3 vols. (London: Printed for A. Strahan; T. Cadell, in the Strand; and W. Creech, in Edinburgh, 1790), 66–67.

Notes 183 15. R. Price, A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, ed. D.D. Raphael, third edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948 [1787]), 191. 16. Milton, ‘Areopagitica’, 515. 17. For more recent discussions of the (dangerous) powers of the beautiful over the sublime, see Ferguson, Solitude, 37–54; Runge, Gender and Language, 168–210. 18. For another discussion of Wollstonecraft’s attempt to articulate a ‘female’ sublime, see J. Ellison, ‘Redoubled Feeling: Politics, Sentiment and the Sublime in Williams and Wollstonecraft’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1990): 197–215. 19. Wittreich, Feminist Milton, xii. 20. For another discussion of how Wollstonecraft becomes a heroine of her own making, see C.N. Parke, ‘What Kind of Heroine Is Mary Wollstonecraft’, in Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics, ed. S.M. Conger (London: Associated University Presses, 1990). Parke does not discuss the second Vindication, examining instead the novels, the children’s book and (very briefly) the travel book. 21. J.B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 129. 22. Ibid., 93–151. 23. See also the recent scholarship that questions the principle of gendered ‘separate spheres’ in the eighteenth century. A good beginning is the bibliography at the end of H. Barker and E. Chalus, eds., Gender in EighteenthCentury England (London: Longman, 1997). See also E. Varikas, ‘Une Représentation en tant que femme? Réflexions critiques sur la demande de la parité des sexes’, Nouvelles questions féministes 15 (1995): 81–127. Varikas explains why Wollstonecraft’s position is not as anti-progressive as Landes suggests. For an examination of the contextual meaning of public in the eighteenth century, see J. Brewer, ‘This, That and the Other: Public, Social and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century, ed. L. Sharpe and D. Castiglione (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995). 24. See J. Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: “The Body of the Public” (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986); L.E. Klein, ‘Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere in Early EighteenthCentury England’, in Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices, ed. J. Still and M. Worton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). 25. The following discussion depends primarily on J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 37–50. For a historical overview, see the longer, more extensive J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). For a parallel account, see A. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Literary criticism has been exploring the relationship between this political tradition and the status of the writer and poet. See, for instance, Barrell, Political Theory of Painting; D. Simpson,

184 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy

26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Methuen, 1987), 56–79; C. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 145–202. Barrell, Political Theory of Painting, 5. The literature on this subject is vast. Here I rely primarily on the works of Pocock cited above and I. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1968). Klein, ‘Gender, Conversation’, 109–10. See ibid.; L. Klein, ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions About Evidence and Analytic Procedure’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1995): 97–110; G.J. BarkerBenfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 154–351. For an analysis of how problematic the question of women’s position in the eighteenthcentury discourse on civilisation remains, see S. Tomaselli, ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women’, History Workshop (1985): 101–25. For a discussion of the nostalgia of the Tory Country Party, see Kramnick, Bolingbroke. For its echoes in the political and social vision of Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, see J.J. Fruchtman, ‘The Apocalyptic Politics of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley: A Study in Late Eighteenth-Century English Republican Millennialism’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 73 (1983). See S. Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990). See C. Macaulay, Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to Be Found in Mr. Hobbes’s Philosophical Rudiments, or a Short Sketch of a Democratical Form of Government, in a Letter to Signior Paoli (London: T. Davies; Robinson and Roberts; and T. Cadell, 1767). The evaluation is Bridget Hill’s. See her The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 171. Macaulay, Loose Remarks, 36. See C. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 15 and passim. W. Blackstone, The Commentaries on the Laws of England, fourth edn, vol. 1 of 4 vols. (Dublin: John Exshaw, Henry Saunders, et al., 1771), 442. See, for instance, A. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R.L. Meek et al., vol. 5 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974 [ 1766]), 141 and 200. In Blackstone, the chapter ‘Of Husband and Wife’ follows ‘Of Master and Servant’. See Blackstone, Commentaries, 433. See B. Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 196–211. See D. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974 [1777]), 206–7 and 238–9.

Notes 185 39. Barrell, Political Theory of Painting, 64. For a discussion of the prostitute as emblematic of the problems posed by women’s public presence, see also V. Jones, ‘Scandalous Femininity: Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Narrative’, in Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Language of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century, ed. D. Castiglione and L. Sharpe (Devon: University of Exeter Press, 1995). 40. M. Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 41. For biographical information on Macaulay, see Hill, Republican Virago. 42. J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Catherine Macaulay: Patriot Historian’, in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 246. 43. Hill, Republican Virago, 121–9. 44. C. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Elevation of the House of Hanover, third edn, vol. 1 of 5 vols. (London: Printed for Edward and Charles Dilly, 1769–72), x. 45. Hill, Republican Virago, 239–51. 46. Cited in ibid., 134. 47. Cited in ibid., 173. 48. Macaulay, History, ix–x. 49. Ibid., viii. 50. This point is not, however, as cut-and-dry as it may seem. Upper-class women – and politics in the eighteenth-century was primarily an upperclass matter – did have significant roles to play within the system of patronage and borough politics. See E. Chalus, ‘“The Epidemical Madness”: Women and Electoral Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Gender in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. H. Barker and E. Chalus (London: Longman, 1997); A. Foreman, ‘A Politician’s Politician: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and the Whig Party’, in Gender in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. H. Barker and E. Chalus (London: Longman, 1997). 51. See Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, 358. 52. C. Macaulay, Letters on Education (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1994 [1790]), 198. 53. On this point, see also M. Le Doeuff, Le Sexe du savoir (Paris: Aubier, 1998), 288–93. 54. Macaulay, History, xvi. 55. It is nevertheless important to note that Macaulay’s History was not received as an ‘impartial’ one, but rather as one with a clear republican bias. Without entering into the details of this debate, I nevertheless call attention here to the way she suggests that an ‘impartial’ account is one which does not reaffirm the position of existing power and authority. 56. Macaulay, Education, 380. Until indicated, all references to Macaulay’s work in the text are to this one. 57. Kramnick cites Bolingbroke’s claim that humans should neither ‘soar so high as Plato and Cudworth’ nor ‘sink so low as Hobbes’(Bolingbroke, 84). Macaulay may be responding to this comment. 58. Macaulay, History, v.

186 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy 59. This public tribute is echoed in a private letter reproduced in B. Hill, ‘The Links between Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay’, Women’s Historical Review 4 (1995): 177–92. ‘I respect Mrs Macaulay Graham,’ she writes, ‘because she contends for laurels whilst most of her sex only seek for flowers’ (177). 60. I. Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1–40. 61. For an interesting problematisation of the so-called ‘meritocratic’ ethic related to professionalisation, see A. La Vopa, ‘Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe’, Journal of Modern History 64 (1992): 79–116. If in the Enlightenment discourse – as it is in my discussion of Macaulay – virtue is paired with knowledge rather than with property, it is nevertheless important to note that the ‘enlightened elite not only claimed the right to educate the masses on its own terms: it also reserved for itself a “higher” knowledge that was too dangerous to disseminate broadly’ (95). Whereas Macaulay includes women amongst this elite, others clearly do not. 62. For an examination of Wollstonecraft’s life and works as part of the female version of this emerging professional culture, see G. Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). 63. For Wollstonecraft’s relation to this tradition, see G.J. Barker-Benfield, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthwoman’, Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 95–116; V. Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 77–165; D. Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 104–13. 64. Simpson, Romanticism, 107. 65. For a discussion of Rousseau’s ‘sexual contract’ and sexual politics, see C. Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 96–102; K. Green, The Woman of Reason: Feminism, Humanism and Political Thought (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 65–81. 66. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, 93–151; C. Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 179–210. Discussing this passage, Pateman has qualified her earlier ideas, recognising, as I do here, Wollstonecraft’s more nuanced approach. See C. Pateman, ‘Equality, Difference, Subordination: The Politics of Motherhood and Women’s Citizenship’, in Citizenship, Feminist Politics and Female Subjectivity, ed. G. Bock and S. James (London: Routledge, 1994). 67. For a discussion of this rhetoric and Wollstonecraft’s use of it in her earlier Vindication of the Rights of Men, see Barker-Benfield, ‘Commonwealthwoman’. 68. See, for instance, the conduct books reproduced in The Young Lady’s Pocket Library, or Parental Monitor; Containing Dr Gregory’s Father’s Legacy to His Daughters; Lady Pennington’s Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to Her Daughters; Marchioness de Lambert’s Advice of a Mother to Her Daughter; Moore’s Fable for the Female Sex, ed. V. Jones (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995 [1790]).

Notes 187 69. For a discussion of this ethos as reflected in the valorisation of breastfeeding during the French Revolution, see E. Badinter, L’Amour en plus: histoire de l’amour maternel. (XVIIième–XXième Siècle) (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 141–94; M.L. Jacobus, ‘Incorruptible Breast-Feeding and the French Revolution’, in Rebel Daughters: Women in the French Revolution, ed. S. Melzer and L. Rabine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 70. S. Trimmer, The Œconomy of Charity (London: T Bensley; T. Longman; G.G.J. Robinson and J. Johnson, 1787), 63–4. 71. Ibid., 97. 72. S. Trimmer, Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Trimmer, vol. 1 of 2 vols. (London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1814), 355. 73. S. Mendus, Feminism and Emotion (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 13–28 and in particular 22. 74. Wollstonecraft’s failure to acknowledge this is criticised in, among others, Green, Woman of Reason, 82–103. 75. For a more extensive discussion of the legal discourse informing Wrongs of Woman, see E. Jordan, ‘Criminal Conversation: On Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman’, Women’s Writing 4 (1997): 221–34. 76. For details, see S. Staves, ‘Money for Honor: Damages for Criminal Conversation’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 11 (1982): 279–98; L. Stone, Road to Divorce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 231–300. 77. Blackstone, Commentaries, 442 78. I am drawing on concepts developed in R. Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 79. Jordan, ‘Criminal Conversation’, 224. 80. Ibid. 81. This is Mary Poovey’s argument regarding Wollstonecraft’s failure to articulate an alternative romance in her final novel. See Poovey, Proper Lady, 82–113. 82. My usage of ‘public woman’, contingent on the development and expression of ‘public spirit’ regardless of the sphere, differs from the way in which it is used both in today’s common parlance and by many histories of women’s public role. See, for instance, Landes, Women and the Public Sphere; G. Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman: Woman’s Power and Woman’s Place in the United States, 1630–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); M. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Although ‘public spirit’ and ‘public sphere’ are clearly related, I believe that the former reflects the concerns and the discourse of the eighteenth century more directly. 83. See A. Wilson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Search for the Radical Woman’, Genders (1989): 88–101. Although I agree with Wilson’s claim that Wollstonecraft’s political failure lies less in her own conservatism and that of her time than in the absence of a collective female political identity, I nevertheless believe that especially in her later work Wollstonecraft was striving to develop such an identity. I will argue this point in ‘Wants of Women’. 84. For a discussion of Wollstonecraft’s ‘class’ position, see C. Kaplan, ‘Pandora’s Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist

188 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy Criticism’, in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. G. Green and C. Kahn (London: Routledge, 1985).

Chapter 2 1. For a discussion of responses to both these novels, see N.J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 1–68; A. Browne, The Eighteenth-Century Feminist Mind (London: Harvester Press, 1987), 57–78. 2. See C.L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 47–69; J. Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 191–208; Watson, Revolution and Form, 23–68. 3. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 47–69. 4. On the closure of the novel as it relates to Wollstonecraft’s attempt to rewrite the patriarchal plot, see G.E. Haggerty, Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 103–22. 5. See, for instance, M. Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986), 142–53 and in particular 202–9. 6. E. Burke, ‘Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L.G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 [1791]), 274. 7. For an account of Burke’s revolutionary plots, see R. Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 57–87; Watson, Revolution and Form, 1–23. 8. See also M. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 96–132. It argues that Godwin’s biography determined the subsequent figures of Wollstonecraft, casting her either as ‘the saint or the whore’ (132). 9. J. Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, the Former Written and the Latter Edited by John Knowles, vol. 1 of 3 vols. (Millwood, New York: Kraus International Publications, 1982 [1831]), 162–3. 10. Ibid., 164. 11. Ibid., 166. 12. W. Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’, ed. M. Philp, vol. 1 of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1992 [1798]), 110. 13. Ibid., 111; emphasis added. 14. C. Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974), 117; emphasis added. 15. Indeed, Tomalin relies almost exclusively on Fuseli’s biographers and acolytes, including his contemporaries John Knowles and Allan Cunningham, but also the more recent works by Eudo Mason and Ruthven Todd. 16. I am referring here primarily to M. Le Doeuff, L’Imaginaire philosophique (Paris: Payot, 1980), 135–66. Le Doeuff returns to the Héloïse complex in her L’étude et le rouet: des femmes, de la philosophie, etc. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988), passim.

Notes 189 17. Le Doeuff, Imaginaire philosophique, 163; my translation. 18. See J. Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. A. Fowler, in The Poems of John Milton, ed. J. Carey and A. Fowler (London: Longman, 1968 [1674]), 4:637. All further references are to this edition; henceforth the abbreviation PL will be used. 19. W. Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. M. Philp, vol. 3 of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols. (London: Pickering, 1993 [1793]), 50. 20. W. Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice: Variants, ed. M. Philp, vol. 4 of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols. (London: Pickering, 1993 [1796; 1798]), 64. 21. See Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice. Philp also challenges this view, arguing that killing one’s father is the ‘familial form of regicide’ whereas killing one’s mother may entail the risk that she is ‘pregnant with another Godwin’ (205). 22. Throughout his life and his works, Godwin reworks this ‘primary scene’ that exerts a fundamental choice, but that is another story. See W. St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989); Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice. 23. For a discussion of Wolllstonecraft’s self-presentation as a heroine of sensibility, see M. Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 48–81. 24. For a discussion of the ‘medical symptoms’ of genius and sensibility, see G.S. Rousseau, Enlightenment Borders. Pre- and Post-Modern Discourses. Medical, Scientific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 78–117; J. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 201–40. 25. Throughout this chapter, I refer to the ‘philosopher’ and the ‘man of sensibility’ interchangeably. This reference is justified by the wider connotations of both these terms in eighteenth-century language. For an analysis of this language, specifically with respect to the emerging concepts of genius, see C. Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: The Women’s Press, 1989), 103–47. 26. See M. Jacobus, Reading Women: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 27–40; C. Kaplan, ‘Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism’, in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. N. Armstrong and L. Tennenhouse (New York: Methuen, 1987); T. Furniss, ‘Nasty Tricks and Tropes: Sexuality and Language in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman’, Studies in Romanticism 32 (1993): 177–209. 27. B. Taylor, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Wild Wish of Early Feminism’, History Workshop Journal (1992): 197–219. 28. See B. Taylor, ‘For the Love of God’, in Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminisms, ed. E.J. Yeo (London: River Oram Press, 1996). Taylor evokes the erotic element in these ‘conversations’. 29. I differ here from the argument developed in T. Rajan, The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 167–96. I am suggesting that Mary demonstrates a strong self-consciousness of how texts fashion reality, one that is already

190 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

announced in the subtitle – ‘a fiction’. I would certainly agree, however, that this self-consciousness is mastered even more in the second novel. See C. Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993), 85–107. It suggests that the ‘internal monitor’ and Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’ are the same. J. Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: “The Body of the Public” (New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, 1986), 65–8. For other autobiographical referents, see P. Penigault-Duhet, Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin (Paris: Diffusion Didier Erudition, 1984 [Thèse présentée devant l’Université de Paris III, le 13 décembre 1975]), 53–4; R. Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft, a Critical Biography (London: Richards Press, Ltd, 1951), 22–59. Penigault-Duhet suggests that the origins of this figure lies not in Rousseau but in Wollstonecraft’s sentimental friendship with the Reverend Joshua Waterhouse, thirteen years her senior, whom she met during her stay at Newington Green. This encounter left her as devastated as many of the others. Wardle relates this affair to the references to Wollstonecraft’s wretchedness that appear in her letters of the period. The man of ‘polished manner, and dazzling wit’, I might add, also resembles what Wollstonecraft says about Ogle. Through these textual and real encounters Wollstonecraft creates a composite fiction through which she figures the relationship with immodest philosophers I investigate here. For other discussions of Wollstonecraft and Milton, see S. Blakemore, ‘Rebellious Reading: The Doubleness of Wollstonecraft’s Subversion of Paradise Lost’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34 (1992): 451–80. A more extensive list appears in ‘“An Eve to Please Me”’. For another account of Wollstonecraft’s challenge to the seductive authority of Rousseau’s voice, see P. Yaeger, Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Struggles in Women’s Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 149–76. Yaeger nevertheless remains far less optimistic about the challenge Wollstonecraft offers philosophy. On the panoramic perspective and the public man, see J. Barrell, The Birth of Pandora and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1992), 41–62. Barrell refers rather allusively – if suggestively – to the passage I am discussing here. Likewise Wollstonecraft constructs different publics to address, alternating between Talleyrand to whom she dedicates the text, ‘men of genius’, a women only group, and a mixed, general public. See also A.E. Smith, ‘Roles for Readers in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, Studies in English Literature 32 (1992): 555–70. See Browne, Feminist Mind, 155–78; Taylor, ‘Wild Wish’; M. Le Doeuff, ‘La Question de Zazie’, in Le Respect: de l’estime à la déférence, ed. C. Audard (Paris: Autrement, 1993); M.W. Carpenter, ‘Sibylline Apocalyptics: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Job’s Mother’s Womb’, Literature and History 12 (1986): 215–28. These articles invite us to problematise Mary Poovey’s reading, which implies that Wollstonecraft’s address to modesty is an expression of repressed sexuality. See Poovey, Proper Lady, 48–81. See Browne, Feminist Mind, 161–2; Taylor, ‘Wild Wish’. Browne compares it with Laetitia Hawkins’s use of the term and provides a particularly clear analysis. On Wollstonecraft and the civic humanist tradition, see G.J. BarkerBenfield, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Eighteenth-Century Commonwealth-

Notes 191

39.

40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

woman’, Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 95–116; V. Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 77–165; D. Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 104–13. On the civic humanist discourse and ‘virtue’, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 37–50. The relation is also discussed in Barker-Benfield, ‘Commonwealthwoman’; G. Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), passim. Kelly’s editorial annotations to Mary, a Fiction in the Oxford World Classics edition of the novel also evoke the direct influence of Richard Price on this novel. A letter from Price thanking and complimenting Wollstonecraft for her Vindication of the Rights of Men, where she had defended him against Burke, is cited in Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism. Kelly notes that it is ‘one of the few letters to her that Wollstonecraft bothered to preserve’ (101). In doing so, I articulate the philosophical content of his work primarily through his religious writing, ignoring the large corpus of political writings. For more complete studies of Price’s philosophy, see A. Lincoln, Some Political & Social Ideas of English Dissent, 1763–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938); H. Laboucheix, Richard Price as Moral Philosopher and Political Theorist, trans. S. Raphael and D. Raphael, vol. 207 of Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, at the Taylor Institute, 1982); D.O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). For a recent attempt to reposition Price’s philosophy in the eighteenth-century political landscape, see P.N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). R. Price, Four Dissertations, second edn (London: A. Millar and T. Cadell, 1768), 356. Ibid., 282. Price shares this insistence on liberty with many of his fellow dissenters, whose arguments in favour of individual religious conscience and the right to freedom of worship spearheaded the fight for civil and political liberty in Great Britain. See Lincoln, Political & Social Ideas; Miller, Common Good, 266–348; J. Seed, ‘“A Set of Men Powerful Enough to Many Things”: Rational Dissent and Political Opposition in England, 1770–1790’, in Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. K. Haakonssen (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1996). For a more general background on English dissenters, see M.R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution, vol. 1 of 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Price, Dissertations, 94. R. Price, Sermons on the Christian Doctrine (London: T. Cadell, 1787), 295–6; emphasis in the original.

192 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy 47. For a discussion of the political implications of this stand, see Miller, Common Good, 349–60. Miller suggests that Price’s commitment to individual judgment reversed the proclamation ‘laws, not men’, providing an uncompromising defence of individual liberty. 48. R. Price, A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, ed. D.D. Raphael, third edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948 [1787]), 184. Until indicated, all citations of Price’s works are to this one. For a detailed discussion of the importance of intention in Price, see Thomas, Honest Mind, 87–111. 49. See Price, Morals, 177–99. For very lucid accounts of this distinction, see Lincoln, Political & Social Ideas, 109–11; Thomas, Honest Mind, 87–111. For a discussion on why this distinction is important for Godwin, see Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice, 15–38. Philp demonstrates that the theistic argument on how the rational Christian strives to approach divine will shifts towards a secular one, emphasising Truth as opposed to God. 50. R. Price, The Nature and Dignity of the Human Soul (London: A Millar, 1766), 14. 51. Ibid., 14; emphasis in the original. 52. Price does not go as far as many fellow rational dissenters: although he insists on the criteria of sincerity, he does not forsake the intervention of divine grace. Although necessary, human action is never a sufficient criterion for salvation. 53. See, for instance, his Sermons on Christian Doctrine, where he claims: ‘Reason is the nature of a reasonable being; and to assert that his chief happiness consists in deviating from reason, would be the same as to say that his chief happiness consists in violating his nature, and contradicting himself’ (Price, Sermons, 231–2). 54. R. Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (Oxford: Woodstock, 1992 [1789]), 11. 55. A.S. Cua, Reason and Virtue: A Study in the Ethics of Richard Price (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966), 107. I might note, however, that Thomas, Honest Mind, 68–86 has explored the difference between obligation and duty. 56. Price, Dissertations, 94. 57. See Kaplan, ‘Wild Nights’; Jacobus, Reading Women, 27–40; Poovey, Proper Lady, 48–81; Furniss, ‘Nasty Tricks and Tropes’. 58. E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L.G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 [1790]), 77. 59. On Wollstonecraft’s ‘classless’ notion of dignity and modesty, see also Le Doeuff, ‘Zazie’. 60. See also Carpenter, ‘Sibylline Apocalyptics’. By showing how Wollstonecraft draws on the language of prophecy of the Book of Job, Carpenter argues that ‘Like Job, Wollstonecraft seems to affirm a faith in a spiritual body even as she perceives the corruptions of the “flesh”’ (225). 61. Price, Morals, 230. 62. I might note that historians of philosophy have commented on the similarity between Price’s reflections on a purely moral act (namely one where both the end and the intention are virtuous) and Emmanuel Kant’s. See, for instance, D. Daiches Raphael 1948 introduction to A Review of the Principles of Moral Philosophy. To my knowledge, there has been no discussion on how Wollstonecraft applies these same reflections to the question of a woman’s moral agency.

Notes 193 63. For a discussion of the debates on the fallen woman and their echoes in the sentimental novel, see Browne, Feminist Mind; M. Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 160–89; A.J. Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 16–45. 64. See also A. Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 170–84. Comparing Wollstonecraft and Macaulay to other women writers, Richardson demonstrates the relation between their commitment to social change and their vision of women’s virtue. 65. See, among others, Poovey, Proper Lady, 48–81; Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 23–46. 66. D. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974 [1777]), 9.

Chapter 3 1. For instance, Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman is indexed only once in J. Richetti, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 2. J. Spencer, ‘Women Writers and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. J. Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). This article is a condensation of Spencer’s book-length study, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Unlike the shorter piece, this one offers significant treatment of Wollstonecraft’s work by charting its revolutionary relationship with the novel of seduction and its appropriation of utopian romance. It thereby provides a useful backdrop against which to measure Wollstonecraft’s achievements. 3. See, for instance, F.M. Keener, The Chain of Becoming: The Philosophical Tale, the Novel, and a Neglected Realism of the Enlightenment: Swift, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Johnson, and Austen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Many of Wollstonecraft’s concerns for the development of the female mind could be discussed in this context. For an interesting exception, see J.G. Basker, ‘Radical Affinities: Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Johnson’, in Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, ed. A. Ribeiro and J.G. Basker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 4. See C. Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993), 85–107; J. Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Metheun, 1986), 110–28; J. Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 236–52. 5. Wollstonecraft receives only passing mention in G. Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel: 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); M. Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). For recent attempts to reassess this failure, see C.L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

194 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy

6.

7 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

1995); G.E. Haggerty, Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 103–22. See L. Langbauer, Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Although this study doesn’t invoke the comparison with Johnson, turning instead to the theories of Julie Kristeva, it discusses romance-like elements in Wollstonecraft’s works. See the discussion in Todd, Sign of Angellica, 236–52. See N.J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 23–68, which discusses Wollstonecraft’s use of the retrospective confession. A recent exception to this tendency is Haggerty, Unnatural Affections, 103–22, which looks at how Wollstonecraft problematises closure in her revision of the patriarchal plot. For a discussion of the female reader in eighteenth-century England, see the recent J. Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835, a Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 87–121. For a discussion of the anxieties produced by this figure in relation to the discourse on the sublime, see P. De Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 230–78. Pearson, Women’s Reading, 93. For three different treatments of the relation between Wrongs of Woman and the tradition of the novel, see Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 47–69; G. Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 196–228; Watson, Revolution and Form, 23–68. The authorship of many of the reviews published in Johnson’s periodical remains disputed. For a discussion of the implications for Wollstonecraft, see the introduction to volume 7 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. My discussion is based on the reviews anthologised in this edition. Wollstonecraft’s involvement in Analytical Review is also discussed in G.P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979), 104–6; S.N. Stewart, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Contributions to the Analytical Review’, Essays in English Literature 11 (1984): 187–99. See D. Roper, Reviewing before the Edinburgh (London: Metheun & Co., 1978). For a collection of some early commentary on the novel, see I. Williams, ed., Novel and Romance, 1700–1800: a Documentary Record (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). For a study of literary reviews of the preRomantic period, see Roper, Reviewing. For discussions of the relation between this discourse and the emerging institutions of English literature, see F.E. Court, Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750–1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 17–38; I. Duncan, ‘Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson and the Institutions of English’, in The Scottish Invention of English Literature, ed. R. Crawford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); P.G. Bator, ‘The Entrance of the Novel into the Scottish Universities’, in The Scottish Invention of English Literature, ed. R. Crawford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); P.G. Bator, ‘Rhetoric and the Novel in the Eighteenth Century British University Curricula’, Eighteenth Century Studies 30 (1996–7): 173–96. For an attempt to think of these issues in relation to women readers and writers, see

Notes 195

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

S.S. Lanser, Women Critics, 1660–1820 (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1995); K.M. Rogers, ‘Anna Barbauld’s Criticism of Fiction – Johnsonian Mode, Female Vision’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 21 (1991): 27–41. See the works anthologised in Williams, ed., Novel and Romance. For discussions of the belletrists and the novel, see Duncan, ‘Smith, Johnson’; Bator, ‘Rhetoric and the Novel’; Bator, ‘Entrance of the Novel’. For a more extensive discussion of the problems, see Bator, ‘Rhetoric and the Novel’; Bator, ‘Entrance of the Novel’; M. McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 25–64. E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L.G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 [1790]), 76. For succinct accounts of these theories, see G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); M. Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Todd, Sensibility; J. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). On the relation between these theories and the study of literature in Scotland, see Court, Institutionalizing English, 17–38. This relation is pursued and examined in R. Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 16–110. C. Kay, ‘Canon, Ideology and Gender: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Critique of Adam Smith’, New Political Science (1986): 63–76. For discussions of A Theory of Moral Sentiment in relation to Smith’s work and to the Scottish Enlightenment, see the essays in I. Hont and M. Igantieff, Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See also S. Copley and K. Sutherland, eds., Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Although more concerned with Smith’s Wealth of Nation, the essays provide new ways of thinking about his work in general. The importance of this model is examined in detail in D. Marshall, The Figure of the Theatre: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). For discussions of Smith’s innovation in the field of rhetoric, see W.S. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 536–77. Duncan, ‘Smith, Johnson’. See also D. Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 9–49, which establishes this analogy in other eighteenth-century texts. A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, vol. 1 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974 [1790]), 23; emphasis added. All further references to this work appear in the text. Although they focus less on Smith and more on the Scottish school, see Crawford, Devolving English Literature; R. Crawford, ‘Introduction’, in The Scottish Invention of English Literature, ed. R. Crawford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); N. Rhodes, ‘From Rhetoric to Criticism’, in The Scottish Invention of English Literature, ed. R. Crawford (Cambridge:

196 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy

25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

Cambridge University Press, 1998). For a more complex account of Smith’s theory of how literature fashions subjects, see Duncan, ‘Smith, Johnson’. See also the discussion on ‘objects of pity’ in A.J. Van Sant, EighteenthCentury Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 16–45, that relates this philosophical construction to the philanthropic industry. Marshall, Figure of the Theatre, 167–92. For a discussion of restrictions in the field of chemistry, see J. Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 11–50. For the legal profession, see R.S. Dosanjh, ‘The “Eloquence of the Bar”: Hugh Blair’s Lectures, Professionalism and Scottish Legal Education’, in The Scottish Invention of English Literature, ed. R. Crawford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. J.T. Boulton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987 [1759]), 57 and 136. Ibid., 116. See F. Ferguson, ‘Wollstonecraft Our Contemporary’, in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. L. Kauffman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Discussing Vindication of the Rights of Men, it invokes the difference between two forms of identification, reason (what I call respect) that addresses a superior, and pity (tenderness) an inferior. As I do here, Ferguson suggests that Wollstonecraft is striving to undermine the sexual division of these forms of identification. M. Fawcett, ‘Introduction to the New Edition’, in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891), 8. Burke, Reflections, 75. H. Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 89. I will compare the two women philosophers’ preoccupation with pity in the next chapter. On this parallel as it pertains specifically to Wollstonecraft, see D. Coleman, ‘Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English Women’s Protest Writing in the 1790s’, English Literary History 61 (1994): 341–62; M. Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 8–33; F. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 73–95. For a very convincing reading of this passage, see M. Nyquist, ‘Wanting Protection: Fair Ladies, Sensibility and Romance’, in Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminisms, ed. E.J. Yeo (London: River Oram Press, 1996). C. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). See, for instance, J. Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. R.R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997 [1778]), 42. For a feminist ‘archeology’ of the gender-implications of the disapproval for details, see N. Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), 11–22. See J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 37–50 and the discussion in chapter 1.

Notes 197 38. In the following attempt to delineate Wollstonecraft’s use of ‘manners’ and ‘morals’, I am confronted with her very inconsistent usage that may be due to shared etymological origins in mores. Rather than valorise the words themselves, I call attention to the oppositions she identifies in producing meaning and signification. As in the present example, she may write ‘morals’ to imply (given the distinctions she evokes) ‘manners’. Thus, although ultimately she may call for a ‘REVOLUTION in manners’ (VRW 265), it is to replace an education in ‘local manners’ with ‘unchangeable morals’ (114). In short, what she ultimately argues for is a ‘REVOLUTION in female manners’ so that women will have an understanding of morals. 39. For a discussion of Wollstonecraft’s reviews, see M. Myers, ‘Sensibility and “the Walk of Reason”: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Literary Reviews as Cultural Critique’, in Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics, ed. S.M. Conger (London: Associated University Press, 1990). Myers lucidly demonstrates how Wollstonecraft favours a reading experience structured around the interaction between sentiment and reason. See also S.M. Conger, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility (London: Associated University Press, 1994), 85–96. 40. Butler, Jane Austen, 86. 41. A. Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J.C. Bryce, vol. 4 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983 [1762–3]), 110. 42. J. Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (London: J. Johnson, 1777), 145; emphasis in the original. 43. Critics have already examined Wollstonecraft’s attempt to articulate the particular case to the general rule, but in general they have attributed this interest to her encounter with Godwin. See Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism, 196–228; Watson, Revolution and Form, 23–68. By drawing this parallel between the Vindication and the novel, I am trying to suggest that her attempt may well predate their relationship. 44. S. Johnson, The Rambler, ed. W.J. Bate and A.B. Strauss, vol. 3 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 8 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969), 22. 45. Ibid., 24. 46. For a comparison between Richardson and the Marquis de Sade, see R.F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sterne (London: Macmillan, 1974). For a discussion of the ‘tortured’ logic of Richardson, see Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility, 60–82. 47. See A. Browne, The Eighteenth-Century Feminist Mind (London: Harvester Press, 1987), 57–78; Pearson, Women’s Reading, 22–41. For appropriations of his novel by women, see R. Perry, ‘Clarissa’s Daughter’s, or the History of Innocence Betrayed: How Women Writers Rewrote Richardson’, Women’s Writing 1 (1994): 5–24. For a more general discussion of the novel of seduction and betrayal, see Spencer, Rise of the Woman Novelist, 107–32. 48. See Browne, Feminist Mind, 57–78; Ellis, Politics Sensibility, 160–89; Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility, 16–45. 49. D. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974 [1777]), 239.

198 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy 50. See Rogers, ‘Anna Barbauld’s Criticism’; C.E. Moore, ‘“Ladies … Taking the Pen in Hand”: Mrs Barbauld’s Criticism of Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists’, in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. M.A. Schofield and C. Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986). For a discussion of the relation between Johnson and women writers more generally, see Pearson, Women’s Reading, 29–32. On the more surprising relationship between Wollstonecraft and Johnson, see Basker, ‘Radical Affinities’; S. Sherman, ‘Wollstonecraft and Johnson’, Johnsonian News Letter LI and LII (1992): 11–15. 51. ‘An Enquiry … Agreeable Sensations’ in J. Aiken and A.L. Aiken, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, second edn (London: J. Johnson, 1775), 213. Subsequently attributed to Anna Laetitia Barbauld. 52. ‘On Romances’ in ibid., 43. Subsequently attributed to Anna Laetitia Barbauld. 53. ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’ in ibid., 125. Subsequently attributed to Anna Laetitia Barbauld. 54. In the course of Barbauld’s long intellectual career, she repeatedly turns to the exemplary status of Clarissa. As editor of both Richardson’s correspondence and of a series on novelists, she invokes the relevance of this moral fiction. See her A.L. Barbauld, ‘On the Origin and Progress of NovelWriting’, in The British Novelists; with an Essay, and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, vol. 1 of 50 vols. (London: F.C. and J. Rivington, etc., 1820); A.L. Barbauld, ‘Life of Samuel Richardson with Remarks on His Writings’, in The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, Author of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison. Selected from the Original Manuscripts, vol. 1 of 6 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1804). 55. S. Johnson, ‘Life of Milton’, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G.B. Hill, vol. 1 of 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905 [1779–81]), 180. 56. Ibid., 181. 57. J. Milton, ‘Areopagitica’, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. E. Sirluck, vol. 2 of 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959 [1644]), 515. 58. Ironically, subsequent Romantic readers articulate a very different reading of Paradise Lost than Johnson does by underplaying the author’s intentional design and by recognising that the reader ‘like Adam and Eve is fortunately free to fall’, as Lucy Newlyn puts it. See L. Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 89. Significantly, although Wollstonecraft articulates through the example of Julia her own reticence respecting Milton’s Paradise Lost, in more than one way her comments on the reading experience – specially where sin and vice are concerned – echo Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’. In this sense, as implied in ‘“An Eve to Please Me”’, she may well be turning Milton against Milton to demonstrate how – especially where Eve is concerned – he does not always live up to his promise. 59. Johnson, ‘Life of Milton’, 184. 60. Johnson, The Rambler, 24. 61. H. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, fourth edn, vol. 1 of 3 vols. (London: Printed for A. Strahan; T. Cadell, in the Strand; and W. Creech, in Edinburgh, 1790), 66–67; emphasis added. 62. For a discussion of this revision as it pertains to her historical narrative see V. Jones, ‘Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality

Notes 199 in Wollstonecraft and Williams’, in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780–1832, ed. S. Copley and J. Whale (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991). 63. Jones, ‘Women Writing Revolution’. 64. Nyquist, ‘Wanting Protection’.

Chapter 4 1. P. Nyström, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian Journey (Gothenburg: Acts of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences of Gothenburg, Humanoria No. 17, 1980). See also R. Holmes, ‘Introduction and Notes’, in A Short Residence in Sweden and Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’, ed. R. Holmes (London: Penguin Classics, 1987). 2. W. Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’, ed. M. Philp, vol. 1 of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1992 [1798]), 122. 3. Ibid., 122–3. 4. For a discussion of this figure and of Wollstonecraft’s response to it, which I discussed more thoroughly in previous chapters, see C.L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1–19. 5. See, for instance, M. Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Duckworth, 1986), 142–53 and in particular 202–9. 6. In so doing, I refer primarily to the letters to Imlay that Godwin published posthumously. 7. For discussions of how Letters Written … in Sweden stages Wollstonecraft’s attempts to revise her earlier optimistic stand, see G. Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 171–95; S. Tomaselli, ‘The Death and Rebirth of Character in the Eighteenth Century’, in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. R. Porter (London: Routledge, 1995). 8. The relation between the letters to Imlay and the letters from Sweden has also been examined in M. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 96–132. I focus here on the relevance of this comparison to Wollstonecraft’s attention to the distress of women. 9. Holmes, ‘Introduction and Notes’. 10. In a reading of Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman, Mary Nyquist has also insisted on the double meaning of ‘want’ and concluded with similar arguments. See her ‘Wanting Protection: Fair Ladies, Sensibility and Romance’, in Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminisms, ed. E.J. Yeo (London: River Oram Press, 1996). 11. See also Tomaselli, ‘Death and Rebirth’. Tomaselli argues that the personal conflict that Wollstonecraft confronts casts her as a ‘modern’ hero. 12. ‘An Enquiry into those Kinds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensations’ in J. Aiken and A.L. Aiken, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, second edn (London: J. Johnson, 1775). Subsequently attributed to Anna Laetitia Barbauld. All citations will henceforth appear in the text.

200 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy 13. G. Harrison, Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse: Poetry, Poverty and Power (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 27–56. See also A.J. Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 16–45. 14. See, for instance, E.A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 140–60; C. Kaplan, ‘Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism’, in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. N. Armstrong and L. Tennenhouse (New York: Methuen, 1987); M. Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 48–81. Bohls also focuses on the more ‘revolutionary’ aspects of Wollstonecraft’s work on aesthetic representation. 15. For a discussion of ‘disinterested’ aesthetics and the ‘particular’ suffering, see E.A. Bohls, ‘Disinterestedness and Denial of the Particular: Locke, Adam Smith and the Subject of Aesthetics’, in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art, ed. P. Mattick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 16. See the discussion on the rhetorical tradition in the pamphlet wars in S. Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution (Hanover: Published for Brown University Press by University Press of New England, 1988); J.T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963); M. Butler, ‘Introductory Essay’, in Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, ed. M. Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); T. Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); R. Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 57–87; O. Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 35–67 and 68–109. 17. Bohls, Women Travel Writers, 140–69. For another reading of Wollstonecraft’s landscape aesthetics as it relates to questions of gender, see V. Jones, ‘“The Coquetry of Nature”: Politics and the Picturesque Women’s Fiction’, in The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, ed. P. Garside and S. Copley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 18. Harrison, Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse, 27–56. 19. A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, vol. 1 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974 [1790]), 52. 20. E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L.G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 [1790]), 80. 21. For a discussion of the impotent theatrics of Laurence Sterne’s Yorick, see R. Markley, ‘Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue’, in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. F. Nussbuam and L. Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987). 22. Bohls, Women Travel Writers, 152. 23. Smith, Moral Sentiments. 24. See M. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

Notes 201 25. See J. Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 201–31. 26. See Favret, Romantic Correspondence, 96–132. See also G. Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 99–138. The latter extends the discussion to a comparison with Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse and Social Contract. 27. The literature on this topic is vast and growing. See, for instance, J. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). The Letters are surprisingly self-conscious of the question of time both as a formal issue related to the epistolary genre and the journal Wollstonecraft purports to keep and as a thematic issue in her investigation of the present, ‘futurity’, ‘eternity’ and, as I will discuss in greater detail, with the trope of the ‘golden age’ which is at once ‘in’ and ‘out’ of time. 28. This point is also made in Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism, 171–95. 29. This contracted self-restraint also contrasts with the more expansive Romantic subject that Frances Ferguson discusses in her comparison between Thomas Malthus and William Wordsworth. See F. Ferguson, ‘Malthus, Godwin, Wordsworth, and the Spirit of Solitude’, in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. E. Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). 30. W. Gilpin, Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: To Which Is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting (London: Gregg International Publishers, 1972 [1794]). 31. Bohls, Women Travel Writers, 140–69. 32. Gilpin, Picturesque Beauty, 26. 33. See M. Le Doeuff, ‘On Some Philosophical Pacts’, Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies (1993): 395–407. 34. See also Favret, Romantic Correspondence, 96–132. In her discussion of the textual resonance between Rousseau and Wollstonecraft, she argues that Wollstonecraft is far less solipsistic. 35. H. Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 59–114 and in particular 88–9. See also the discussion in E.V. Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 59–89. Spelman uses Harriet Jacobs’ anti-slavery autobiographical narrative to question Arendt’s refusal to acknowledge the potentially political significance of compassion. 36. Arendt, On Revolution, 89. 37. For a more lengthy discussion of the relation between the novel and eighteenth-century legal practice, see E. Jordan, ‘Criminal Conversation: On Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman’, Women’s Writing 4 (1997): 221–34. 38. The editors of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft indicate that this expression was already used by Daniel Defoe in Conjugal Lewdness; or, Matrimonial Whoredom (1727). See volume 5, pp. 22 n. b and 129 n. a. 39. See, among others, Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism, 196–229; V. Jones, ‘Scandalous Femininity: Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Narrative’, in Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Language of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century, ed. D. Castiglione and L. Sharpe (Devon: University of Exeter Press, 1995).

202 Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy 40. S. Trimmer, The Œconomy of Charity (London: T. Bensley; T. Longman; G.G.J. Robinson and J. Johnson, 1787), 63–4. 41. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 46–69. 42. Arendt, On Revolution, 88.

Chapter 5 1. A similar argument is developed in N. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Armstrong does not focus on Wollstonecraft. She is, moreover, less concerned with aesthetic revisions than with economic ones. 2. See T.M. Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For a discussion of the poet’s intellectual relation with Edmund Burke, see also J.K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984). 3. P. Hamilton, Wordsworth (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1986); N. Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1988). 4. See F. Ferguson, ‘Malthus, Godwin, Wordsworth, and the Spirit of Solitude’, in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. E. Scarry (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); K. Heinzelman, The Economics of Imagination (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 196–234; D. Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Metheun, 1987); D. Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 233–322. 5. On the gender implications of Wollstonecraft’s failed suicide, see J. Todd, Gender, Art and Death (London: Polity Press, 1993), 102–20. 6. For a discussion of Wollstonecraft’s attempt to dissolve politics into culture in the aftermath of the French Revolution, see also G. Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 99–139. His study sets Wollstonecraft against other cultural workers of her time. 7. A. Wilson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Search for the Radical Woman’, Genders (1989): 88–101.

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Index absorptive tableau, 148–9 abstract Smith, A., 99, 103–4 Wollstonecraft, M., 53, 65, 69, 73, 76–8, 170–1 see also detail; disinterest; experience; general; particular aesthetics of solidarity Wollstonecraft, M., 8, 11, 12, 105, 128, 131, 165–7, 174, 176 see also solidarity agency, 10–11 Price, R., 17, 20, 21, 82–4, 192 n. 62 Smith, A., 99, 117 Wollstonecraft, M., 15, 17, 21 192 n. 62 see also deliberation; experience agrarian idyll, 140–1, 143–4, 150–1, 158 see also landscape aesthetics; picturesque Analytical Review see under Wollstonecraft, M., works Arendt, H., 107, 165–6, 174 see also pity, solidarity Bage, R., 115–16 Barbauld, A.L., 6, 21, 22, 143, 151, 198 n. 54 Wollstonecraft, M., 18–19 see also distress, scenes of; Richardson, S. Barrell, J., 28, 31, 71 beautiful see under sublime and beautiful belletrists, 94–5, 97, 104, 117 Bender, J., 148 Bible, 14–15, 18, 40, 69 Blackstone, W., 30, 45 Blair, H., 94 see also sublime and beautiful Blakemore, S., 16, 20, 21 Bohls, E., 143, 146, 161

Burke, E., 6, 32, 134 Wollstonecraft, M., 5, 48–9, 95–6, 105–7, 109, 117, 119, 122, 137, 141–3, 145 see also French revolution; pity; respect; Rousseau, J.-J.; sublime and beautiful; tenderness Burney, F., 95 Butler, M., 116, 172 ‘Cave of Fancy’ see under Wollstonecraft, M., works charity, 71, 88, 133–4, 139–40, 151–2, 165 chastity, 31, 33, 42, 81 Wollstonecraft, M., 79, 81, 85, 88, 95, 101 120, 175 see under knowledge; modesty; sexual double standard; virtue citizenship, women’s active citizenship, 3–4, 7, 9, 39–43, 90, 111–13, 116 civic humanism, 27–31, 40, 80, 176 disinterest, 27–9, 30 Wollstonecraft, M., 40, 89, 110, 113 see also Commonwealth man; disinterest Clarissa see under Richardson, S. Coleridge, S., 176 commercial society, 28–9, 31, 38, 104, 110 Smith, A., 98 Wollstonecraft, M., 133–4, 157 Commonwealth man, 6, 29, 31, 37–8, 89, 113 see also civic humanism; disinterest compassionate sympathy see under pity; tenderness conscience, 70, 98, 123, 125 see also deliberation Defoe, Daniel, 201 n. 38 Robinson Crusoe, 162–4 214

Index 215 deliberation, 38, 41, 46–7, 48, 87, 102–3, 116, 123, 125, 130, 131, 136, 170–1, 175 see also conscience detail, 112–15 see also abstract; general; particular dignity Price, R., 17, 81–2 Wollstonecraft, M., 15–17, 79, 81, 134, 167, 169, 175 disinterest Price, R., 82 Smith, A., 103–4, 117 Wollstonecraft, M., 24, 47, 49, 63, 66, 69, 72, 76–8, 87, 89–80, 104–5, 141, 153–4, 171 see also abstract; civic humanism distress, scenes of, 23, 119, 123, 130 Barbauld, A.L., 138–9 Godwin, W. 58–60, 129–30, 135 Wollstonecraft, M., 23, 68, 104–5, 107–8, 130, 139–41, 142–3, 145–9, 176–7 see also pity; sensibility; tenderness domestic woman Rousseau, J.-J., 74 Wollstonecraft, M., 12, 20–2, 25–7, 40–4, 48, 50, 101–3, 106–8 see also motherhood; paternal affection Dyson, G., 118, 127, 169, 171 experience, 16, 22–3, 53, 63, 68–9, 75–8, 79, 85–8, 89–90, 101–2, 114, 115, 122–3, 127–8, 158–60, 166, 170–1 see also abstract; agency; general; knowledge; modesty; particular Fawcett, M.G., 106 feeling see under sensibility Female Reader see under Wollstonecraft, M., works feminism, nineteenth-century, 1, 106, 177 Ferguson, F., 4, 196 n. 30 Fordyce, J., 106–7, 122 Fraser, N., 10

French Revolution, 1, 8–9, 50, 96, 125, 164, 165, 176 Burke, E., 22, 25, 57–8, 86, 95–6, 145 Wollstonecraft, M., 57–8, 91, 150, 155–6, 158 Fried, M., 148 Fuseli, H. Milton Gallery, 12, 13–15, 22–4, 181 n. 1 relation with Wollstonecraft, M., 58–61, 63 Wollstonecraft, M., 12–15, 16, 18, 22–3, 24, 48 Gabell, H.D. and A., 16, 20–2 Gallagher, C., 111 general, 112–13, 136–7 Smith, A., 136–7 Wollstonecraft, M., 53, 78, 112–15, 116–18, 128, 136–7, 167, 172–3 see also abstract; detail; experience, particular genius, 64–5, 67, 68–9, 72–3, 160, 175–6, 189 n. 25 see also sensibility Gilpin, W., 161, 162 see also picturesque Godwin, W., 7, 189 n. 22, 192 n. 49 editor of Mary Wollstonecraft’s posthumous works, 56–7, 92, 171 Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’, 7, 57, 58–60, 129–30, 135, 152 Political Justice, 62–3 see also distress, scenes of; sensibility Harrison, G., 140, 144 Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution see under Wollstonecraft, M., works Holcroft, T. (Anna St Ives), 127 Hume, D., 90 see also sexual double standard Imlay, F., 132–3, 135–7 see also motherhood Imlay, G., 3, 43–4, 63, 91, 129, 132–5, 147, 148, 158, 164

216 Index Inchbald, E. (Simple Story), 124, 126, 128 innocence, 18, 19, 25, 46–7, 54, 74–5, 79–80, 103 see also knowledge; virtue Jacobus, M., 3 Johnson, C., 55, 171 Johnson, J., 13–15, 93 Johnson, S., 92, 93, 119–20, 122–3 Jordan, E., 46, 47 Kaplan, C., 4 Kay, C., 97 Kelly, G., 6, 191 n. 39 and 40 Kingsborough, Lady, 21–2, 64–5 Klein, L., 28, 31, 33 knowledge, 34–6, 37, 61–2, 186 n. 61 Macaulay, C., 34–5, 186 n. 61 Price, R., 82–4 self-knowledge, 12, 16–17, 63, 68–70, 79, 87–8, 100–2, 114, 133, 175 sexual knowledge, 66, 79–80, Wollstonecraft, M., 8, 12, 16–17, 24, 52, 55–7, 63, 66, 67–8, 70–1, 72–3, 74–8, 79–80, 84–8, 89–90, 100–2, 108, 110, 112–14, 122–3, 141, 156, 170 see also abstract; experience; Le Doeuff, M.; modesty; reason Knowles, J., 58–9 Kramnick, I., 37 Landes, J., 4, 26–7, 44 landscape aesthetics, 143–4, 149–50, 158–9 see also agrarian idyll; picturesque Le Doeuff, M., 162 Héloïse complex, 61–2, 79, 90 Letters (ed. Wardle) see under Wollstonecraft, M., works ‘Letters on the Character of the French Nation’ see under Wollstonecraft, M., works ‘Letters to Imlay’ see under Wollstonecraft, M., works Letters Written … in Sweden see under Wollstonecraft, M., work

libertine philosopher, figure of, 7–8, 51, 53–4, 55–6, 63, 65–6, 71–3, 74–6, 78, 160, 169–70 see also Ogle, G.; Rousseau, J.-J.; sensibility Locke, J., 37, 97 Macaulay, C., 7, 12, 29–30 History of England, 31–4, 36, 185 n. 55 Letters on Education, 34–6, 37 moral philosophy, 35–6 Wollstonecraft, M., 36, 126, 186 n. 59 see also knowledge; public woman; reason; theodicy Malthusianism, 155, 166, 176 manners, 28–9, 31–2, 33, 89 Wollstonecraft, M., 22, 85, 89, 112, 113–14, 198 n. 58 marriage, 30, 38, 40–2, 45 Wollstonecraft, M., 9, 38, 40–2, 44–6, 55, 110, 168, 171 see also Blackstone, W. Mary, a Fiction see under Wollstonecraft, M., works Mendus, Susan, 43–4 middle class, 21, 38, 49–50, 140–1, 153, 171–2 Milton, J., 35 ‘Areopegetica’, 17, 19, 22, 122 Paradise Lost, 12, 14, 17–18, 25, 70, 74–7, 79, 82, 85, 122–3, 132 Wollstonecraft, M., 14–18, 19–20, 21, 85, 122, 132, 198 n. 58 Mirabeau, H.G., 63, 125 modesty false modesty, 28, 86–8, 101 Wollstonecraft, M., 12, 63, 78–80, 84–8, 102, 110, 114 see also experience; knowledge; sexuality; virtue morals, 112, 113–14, 198 n. 58 motherhood, 4–5, 10, 21, 40, 42, 106 Wollstonecraft, M., 4–5, 10, 12, 22–3, 26–7, 39–40, 43–4, 45–6, 48–9, 50, 56, 68, 88, 102–3, 106–7, 126, 135–7, 142–3, 145–7, 149, 152

Index 217 see also domestic woman; Imlay, F.; parental affection Newlyn, L., 182 n. 6, 198 n. 58 Nouvelle Héloïse see Rousseau, J.-J. novel, 52, 92–4, 119–20 Wollstonecraft, M., 94–7, 100–1, 105–6, 108–10, 112, 113–15, 116–19, 125, 127–8 see also Bage, R; Burney, F; Holcroft, T; Richardson, S; Rousseau, J.-J.; sensibility; Smith, C.; Williams, H. M. Nyström, P., 129 Ogle, G., 63, 64–6, 70, 190 n. 32 ‘On Poetry’ see under Wollstonecraft, M., works Original Stories see under Wollstonecraft, M., works parental affection, 21 Smith, A., 98–9 Wollstonecraft, M., 26–7, 39–44, 102, 133–4, 135–6, 146–7, 153 see also domestic woman; motherhood particular Price, R., 82–3 Wollstonecraft, M., 116–18, 126, 128, 136–7, 167, 172–3 see also abstract; detail; experience; general passion see under sensibility Pateman, C., 3, 4, 180 n. 21 Philp, M, 189 n. 21, 192 n. 49 picturesque, 152–3, 161–2 see also agrarian idyll; Gilpin, W; landscape aesthetics pity, 42, 80, 87, 103–4, 138–40, 145, 165–7, 177 Arendt, H., 107, 165–6 Burke, E., 145 Price, R., 87 Smith, A., 103–4 Wollstonecraft, M., 8, 9, 11, 19, 23, 25, 48–9, 65, 71, 79–80, 104–5, 107–8, 124, 128, 131–2, 134,

137–8, 140, 142–3, 145–9, 150–4, 165–7 see also aesthetics of solidarity; distress, scenes of; respect; sensibility; solidarity; sublime and beautiful; tenderness Pocock, J.G.A., 27–8, 31 Poovey, M., 3, 5, 10, 31, 196 n. 36 Posthumous Works (with the exception of those listed separately) see under Wollstonecraft, M., works postlapsarian humanity Price, R., 17, 81, 84 Wollstonecraft, M., 14, 16, 22, 24, 122–3, 182 n. 6 see also theodicy Price, R., 7, 17, 21, 35, 37, 63, 80–5, 87–8, 156, 191 n. 39, 191 n. 44, 192 n. 47 and n. 52 see also agency; dignity; disinterest; knowledge; particular; pity; postlapsarian humanity; reason; theodicy; virtue Priestly, J., 37, 117 progress, narrative of, 94, 155–7 Wollstonecraft, M., 95–6, 155–9, 160 public man, 20, 28, 33, 104, 117 see also Commonwealth man; civic humanism public spirit see under disinterest public woman, 25–7, 31–3, 79, 187 n. 82 Macaulay, C., 31–4 Wollstonecraft, M., 7–8, 9, 24, 25, 36, 38–9, 42–3, 46–7, 49–50, 63, 146–7 reason, 37, 97, 50 Macaulay, C., 34–6 Price, R., 17, 81, 82, 192 n. 53 Smith, A., 99, 116–17 Wollstonecraft, M., 2, 3–4, 5, 10, 18–19, 21, 26, 38–9, 40, 43–4, 47–8, 49, 57, 58, 60, 72–3, 84–5, 87–8, 88–9, 74, 96, 99–100, 101–3, 114, 115, 116–17, 121–3, 124, 125, 175, 177 Reiss, T., 3, 4

218 Index republican see under civic humanism; Commonwealth man; Kramnick, I.; Pocock, J.G.A. respect, 10–11, 14, 21–2, 33, 52, 107, 119–20, 130–1, 166–7 Burke, E., 104 Smith, A., 98–9, 103–4, 111 Wollstonecraft, M., 8, 16, 14, 15–16, 18–19, 20, 23, 25, 36, 43, 48, 51, 55, 57–8, 74, 79–80, 85, 87, 104–5, 107–8, 111, 121–4, 126–7, 130–2, 133–7, 141, 146–9, 149, 152–4, 157, 166–7, 169, 172 see also aesthetics of solidarity; pity; solidarity; sublime and beautiful; tenderness, Reynolds, J., 112 Richardson, S. (Clarissa), 25, 52, 95, 119–20, 121, 125 Barbauld, A. L., 120, 121 Wollstonecraft, M., 95, 120 Robinson Crusoe see under Defoe, Daniel rights, 37 Wollstonecraft, M., 38–9, 41, 43–4 Roscoe, W., 13–14, 23–5 Rousseau, J.-J., 7, 90, 159, 162–3 Emile, 67, 39–43, 74–5, 162–3 Nouvelle Héloïse, 25, 51–2, 71, 121; Burke, E., 57–8; Wollstonecraft, M., 51–3, 74; Wollstonecraft, M. as Nouvelle Héloïse, 57–61 Wollstonecraft, M., 7–8, 12, 20, 51–2, 54, 56, 63, 67, 71–2, 73–8, 85, 89, 91, 122, 155–6, 158 see also domestic woman; sensibility; libertine philosopher, figure of Sapiro, V., 1, 6 sensibility culture of sensibility, 5, 64–6, 140–1 false sensibility, 87–8, 106–7, 108–10, 137, 142–3 literature of sensibility, 52–3, 92, 119–20, 125; Wollstonecraft, M., 5, 51–3, 95, 96, 118, 120, 121, 142–53, 161–2, 169–71; see also novel; Rousseau, J.-J.; distress, scene of

man of sensibility, 56–7, 58–9, 63, 65, 67, 189 n. 25; Godwin, W., 56–7, 58–9, 129–31; Wollstonecraft, M., 54–6, 63, 65–6, 69–72; see also genius; libertine philosopher, figure of sensibility as innate quality, 20–1, 26, 57, 67, 69, 72 sentiment, 14, 22, 25, 76; Burke, E., 104–5; Smith, A., 97–100, 103–4; Wollstonecraft, M., 99–103, 104, 156; see also distress, scene of; pity; respect; sublime and beautiful; tenderness sexual double standard, 9, 11, 31, 33, 79, 81, 120 Hume, D., 31, 120 see also chastity; knowledge; sexuality sexuality female sexuality, 3, 4, 66, 86–8, 124, 126–7; see also chastity; sexual double standard male sexuality, 9, 135, 175; see also libertine philosopher, figure of Wollstonecraft, M., 85–6 see also knowledge; virtue Simple Story see under Inchbald, E. Simpson, D., 5, 38 slavery, 4, 108–9 Smith, A., 7, 12, 21 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 94, 117 Theory of Moral Sentiment, 97–100, 103–4, 111, 122, 124, 145, 148 Wollstonecraft, M., 12, 48, 70, 77, 87, 89, 145 see also abstract; agency; commercial society; disinterest; general; parental affection; pity; reason; respect; subject formation; tenderness Smith, C., 3, 52 Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake, 112–13, 114, 121 solidarity, 105, 165–7 see also aesthetics of solidarity; Arendt, H.; pity; tenderness Spencer, J., 193 n. 2

Index 219 de Staël, G. (Letters on the Works and Characters of J.J. Rousseau), 73 Sterne, L., (Sentimental Voyage), 146 subject formation Smith, A., 97–9, 103–4 Wollstonecraft, M., 93, 95–6, 99–102, 105–11, 115–16, 118, 122–3, 124–5, 131, 136–7 sublime and beautiful Blair, H., 20, 21, 22, 24, 124 Burke, E., 14, 104, 111, 112, 130, 151 Wollstonecraft, M., 14–15, 16, 19, 21–4, 25, 70–1, 73–4, 75 see also pity; respect; sensibility; tenderness Swift, J., 77–8

active virtue, 16–17, 18, 19, 33, 38, 40–1, 46–7, 48, 80, 84, 86–8, 102–3, 104, 125–7, 149, 175 practical virtue, 63; Price, R., 82–4; Wollstonecraft, M., 7, 87–8, 121, 123 Price, R., 12, 82–4 sexual virtue, 199–21; Wollstonecraft, M., 46, 85, 125–7; see also chastity; modesty, sexual double standard virtue in distress see under distress, scenes of Wollstonecraft, M., 38–9, 47, 71, 74–5, 85, 90; see also modesty see also innocence

Talleyrand, C. M., 24, 26 Taylor, B., 6, 67 tenderness Burke, E., 104 Smith, A., 98–9, 103–4, 107, 111 Wollstonecraft, M., 20, 25, 74, 104–5, 107–8, 109, 132–3, 142–3, 165–6 see also distress, scenes of; pity; respect; sensibility; solidarity; sublime and beautiful theodicy Macaulay, C., 34–5 Price, R., 17, 81–4 Wollstonecraft, M., 15, 56, 175 see also postlapsarian humanity Thomas, D.O., 192 n. 55 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters see under Wollstonecraft, M., works Tomalin, C., 60–1, 188 n. 15 Trimmer, S., 42, 170

Waterhouse, J., 63, 190 n. 32 Whigs, Old see under civic humanism; Commonwealth man Williams, D. (Lectures on Education), 73 Williams, H. M. Julia, a Novel, 52, 71, 121–4, 128 Wollstonecraft, M., 53, 112, 114 Wilson, A., 177, 187 n. 83 Wittreich, J., 25 Wollstonecraft, E., 16, 64, 146 Wollstonecraft, M. self-representation, 23–4, 25, 66, 76–8, 125–6, 144–6, 147–9, 150–4, 155, 161–4 works, Analytical Review, 6, 20, 23, 53, 59, 54, 73, 93, 95, 100, 112–13, 115–16, 118–19, 121–4, 126, 127, 137–8, 149, 152, 170, 194 n. 12; ‘Cave of Fancy’, 92; Female Reader, 18; Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, 6, 125; Letters (ed. Wardle), 13–14, 16, 20–2, 23–4, 43, 63, 64–6, 67, 69, 80–1, 134, 146, 171; ‘Letters on the Character of the French Nation’, 158; ‘Letters to Imlay’, 16, 43–4, 132–7, 147, 164; Letters Written … in Sweden, 11, 12, 49, 50, 53, 90, 126–7, 129–32, 134, 136, 145–54, 154–64, 167–8, 174, 201 n. 27; Mary, a Fiction, 6, 67–73, 87–8, 92, 93, 101, 140–1,

utilitarianism, 48, 62–3, 85, 87–8, 176 Vindication of the Rights of Men see under Wollstonecraft, M., works Vindication of the Rights of Woman see under Wollstonecraft, M., works virtue, 25, 27–8, 32–3, 37–8, 50, 52, 120 absolute virtue, 88, 120

220 Index 189 n. 29, 191 n. 39; ‘On Poetry’, 114, 160, 175–6; Original Stories, 90, 139–40, 141, 151; Posthumous Works (with the exception of those listed separately), 175–6; Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 19, 90, 115; Vindication of the Rights of Men, 5, 6, 48–9, 99–100, 105–6, 107, 108–10, 117, 125, 140, 141–5, 151, 158, 168, 170; Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1, 2, 5–6, 11, 13, 14–24, 25–6, 30, 35, 36, 38–44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 53, 54, 58, 64, 66, 73–8, 79–80, 81, 84, 85–8, 89–90, 92–3, 96, 97, 99, 100–2, 106–8, 111, 113, 115, 116–17, 120–1, 122, 123, 130–1, 132–3, 134, 146–7, 156, 162–3, 164, 175; Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, 6, 30, 44–7, 49, 50, 51–7, 62–3, 69, 90, 91, 92, 93, 117–18, 127–8, 132, 147, 148, 168–74, 176 see also abstract; aesthetics of solidarity; agency; agrarian idyll; Bage, R.; Barbauld, A.L.; Bible; Burke, E.; Burney, F.; charity; chastity; citizenship; civic humanism; commercial society; conscience; deliberation; detail; dignity; disinterest; distress, scenes of; domestic woman; Fordyce, J.;

French revolution; Gabell, H.D. and A.; Fuseli, H.; general; genius; Holcroft, T.; Inchbald, E.; innocence; Kingsborough, Lady; knowledge; landscape aesthetics; libertine philosopher, figure of; Macaulay, C; manners; marriage; middle class; Milton, J.; Mirabeau, H.G., modesty; morals; motherhood; novel; parental affection; particular; picturesque; pity; postlapsarian humanity; progress, narrative of; public woman; reason; respect; Richardson, S.; rights; Rousseau, J.-J.; sensibility; sexuality; slavery; Smith, A.; Smith, C.; de Staël, G.; subject formation; sublime and beautiful; Swift, J.; Talleyrand, C.M.; tenderness; theodicy; virtue; Waterhouse, J., Williams, D.; Williams, H.M.; work, women’s; working class; Wordsworth, W., 176 work, women’s, 40–1, 42–4, 107, 146–7, 164, 168–9 working class, 49, 140–1, 161, 169–72, 176–7 Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria see under Wollstonecraft, M, works