Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan 9781399503112

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. ‘The Most Sublime Virtues’: Wollstonecraft’s Philanthropic Personae
2. ‘Original Spirit’: Translating the Maternal Educator
3. ‘Affection for the Whole Human Race’: Wollstonecraft’s Cosmopolitan Love of Country
4. ‘A More Enlightened Moral Love of Mankind’: Philanthropy and the French Revolution
5. ‘Gleams of Truth’: Transparency, Eloquence and the Language of Revolution
6. ‘Imperious Sympathies’: Wollstonecraft’s Philanthropic Traveller
7. ‘The Growth of Each Particular Soil’: Authenticity and Diversity in Wollstonecraft’s Narrative of Progress
Coda. ‘Out-Laws of the World’: Cosmopolitanism in The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Mary Wollstonecraft

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism Series Editors: Ian Duncan and Penny Fielding Available Titles A Feminine Enlightenment: British Women Writers and the Philosophy of Progress, 1759–1820 JoEllen DeLucia Reinventing Liberty: Nation, Commerce and the Historical Novel from Walpole to Scott Fiona Price The Politics of Romanticism: The Social Contract and Literature Zoe Beenstock Radical Romantics: Prophets, Pirates, and the Space Beyond Nation Talissa J. Ford Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858 Megan Coyer Discovering the Footsteps of Time: Geological Travel Writing in Scotland, 1700–1820 Tom Furniss The Dissolution of Character in Late Romanticism Jonas Cope Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience, and Claim-making during the Romantic Era Michael Demson and Regina Hewitt Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786–1831 Gerard Lee McKeever Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain Michelle Levy Scottish Romanticism and Collective Memory in the British Atlantic Kenneth McNeil Romantic Periodicals in the Twenty-First Century: Eleven Case Studies from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Nicholas Mason and Tom Mole Godwin and the Book: Imagining Media, 1783–1836 J. Louise McCray Thomas De Quincey: Romanticism in Translation Brecht de Groote Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire Ve-Yin Tee Romantic Pasts: History, Fiction and Feeling in Britain and Ireland, 1790–1850 Porscha Fermanis British Romanticism and Denmark Cian Duffy Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan Laura Kirkley Forthcoming Titles Romantic Networks in Europe: Transnational Encounters, 1786–1850 Carmen Casaliggi Romanticism and Consciousness Richard Sha and Joel Faflak Death, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Authoring Romantic Scotland Sarah Sharp The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History Jennie Batchelor Seeking Justice: Literature, Law and Equity during the Age of Revolutions Michael Demson and Regina Hewitt Remediating the 1820s Jon Mee and Matthew Sangster Visit our website at: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ECSR

Mary Wollstonecraft Cosmopolitan

Laura Kirkley

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cuttingedge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Laura Kirkley 2022 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 3995 0309 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 3995 0311 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 3995 0312 9 (epub) The right of Laura Kirkley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgementsvi Introduction1 1. ‘The Most Sublime Virtues’: Wollstonecraft’s Philanthropic Personae26 2. ‘Original Spirit’: Translating the Maternal Educator

52

3. ‘Affection for the Whole Human Race’: Wollstonecraft’s Cosmopolitan Love of Country 

74

4. ‘A More Enlightened Moral Love of Mankind’: Philanthropy and the French Revolution 101 5. ‘Gleams of Truth’: Transparency, Eloquence and the Language of Revolution

130

6. ‘Imperious Sympathies’: Wollstonecraft’s Philanthropic Traveller155 7. ‘The Growth of Each Particular Soil’: Authenticity and Diversity in Wollstonecraft’s Narrative of Progress

178

Coda. ‘Out-Laws of the World’: Cosmopolitanism in The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria

200

Notes215 Bibliography246 Index263

Acknowledgements

My love of Mary Wollstonecraft began at Exeter College, University of Oxford in 2001, when I was supposed to be writing an essay about Austen but came across a passage on Wollstonecraft in one of the works on my reading list. It was my immense good fortune then to be an undergraduate at the college where the late, great Marilyn Butler was Rector, and kindly agreed to supervise my final-year dissertation, which got me hooked on research. I initially thought that Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan would be an edited version of my doctoral thesis, but for various reasons the book has taken several years to complete, and along the way it has evolved into an almost entirely fresh project. Still, the foundations were laid in my years as a graduate student at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. I am grateful for the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who funded my PhD, and to the best of friends, Imogen Gunn and Tyara Banerjee, who saw me through the writing of it. I am also thankful for the inspiring and incisive supervision of Mary Jacobus and Jenny Mander, as well as the invaluable comments and enthusiasm of Yota Batsaki and Susan Bassnett. Gillian Dow supported my interest in translation and transnational women’s writing before it was fashionable and in many sparsely attended conference panels. During my Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity Hall, I unpicked the conclusions I had drawn in the thesis, and began to form new ones. I have since benefited hugely from the advice and support of my colleagues at Newcastle University, especially Lucy Pearson and Jennifer Orr, and from all those at the North East Forum in EighteenthCentury and Romantic Studies. I am particularly grateful to Kate Chedgzoy, Anne Whitehead, James Procter and Helen Freshwater for their practical advice on the road to publication. Special thanks also go to Lucy Cogan, Michael Rossington, Daniel Cook and Kate de Rycker for reading and commenting on drafts, particularly Lucy who has gone above and beyond the call of duty and friendship. Sincere thanks also go

Acknowledgements    vii

to Jessica Stevens for scrupulous proofreading. To Emma Clery and the other founding members of The Mary Wollstonecraft Fellowship: thank you for the stimulating events and conversations, I can’t wait to collaborate again in the future. Another great pleasure was Roberta Wedge’s guided tour of Wollstonecraft’s turf at Newington Green, especially New Unity where I was thrilled to sit in her pew. Michelle Houston, Susannah Butler and Fiona Conn at Edinburgh University Press have been a pleasure to work with throughout the editorial and production process. My fantastic parents, Ken and Maureen Kirkley, supported me in my early obsession with languages and literature, and continue to support my efforts to balance family life with an academic career. I cannot thank them enough. My incredible husband, Tristan White, has held my hand, literally and metaphorically, at every stage of this project, with unfailing empathy, generosity and good humour. As Godwin once said of Wollstonecraft, ‘I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy.’1 This book would have been published sooner were it not for our beautiful children, Charlie and Aurelia, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The author is grateful for permission to reproduce material from the following book chapter: Laura Kirkley, ‘“Original Spirit”: Literary Translations and Translational Literature in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft’, in Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory, ed. by Robin Truth Goodman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). © Robin Truth Goodman 2015. Reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear.

Introduction

In Mary Wollstonecraft’s final work, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798), the eponymous heroine wonders ‘if women have a country’.1 Her argument foreshadows that of Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas (1938): ‘“For,” the outsider will say, “in fact, as a woman, I have no country”’.2 In the 1790s, Maria’s husband can abuse her, imprison her, separate her from her child and spend her inheritance – yet she has no right to divorce or prosecute him. Almost 150 years later, Woolf reflects on the gender inequality still enshrined in British law and custom. For both writers, this disenfranchisement exempts women from ‘unreal loyalties’ to their nations.3 With no stake in international rivalries, women are free to embrace a broader love of humankind. ‘As a woman’, Woolf writes, ‘I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’.4 This book contends that Wollstonecraft took just such a global perspective. Not only was she driven to reject national allegiances, her oeuvre was shaped by the European exchange of enlightened ideas and her experiences of travel and expatriation in Revolutionary France. To this transnational perspective, she brought an overarching belief in the commonalities of human experience and a growing appreciation of cultural diversity. In short, Wollstonecraft was a cosmopolitan. The term ‘cosmopolitan’ is loose and contested, invoked to support a range of philosophical positions and competing political agendas. It is clear, however, that ‘cosmopolitanism’ suggests, not simply globetrotting, but a deliberate attempt to expand one’s imagined community beyond the nation. In the last two decades, literary critics and historians of the long eighteenth century have challenged the constraints of national literatures, drawing attention to the pivotal role of translation and panEuropean exchanges in the growth and development of literary systems and genres.5 Recent scholarship has also illuminated vital networks of transnational exchange and influence between women writers in the period, patterns of literary and cultural transfer that Wollstonecraft’s

2    Mary Wollstonecraft

works undoubtedly exemplify.6 As Galin Tihanov points out, however, ‘transnationalism’ is ‘a value-free descriptive framework’, a catchall term to describe phenomena that transcend national borders.7 Cosmopolitanism, by contrast, has an ethical dimension. As well as recognising human interdependence across the boundaries of race, nation and culture, almost all cosmopolitan thought ‘maintains that there are moral obligations owed to all human beings based solely on our humanity alone’.8 I define Wollstonecraft as a cosmopolitan because she spent much of her career as a translator and reviewer of European literature, a traveller, and an expatriate in Revolutionary France; but also because, in developing her ethical framework, she engages with the moral questions raised by our shared membership of the human family. At the heart of Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan ethic are a belief in universal justice irrespective of race or nation and a moral imperative to practise philanthropy, in its root sense of ‘love of humankind’. As Sylvana Tomaselli puts it, these guiding principles derived from her fundamental conviction that ‘whatever the observable differences between human beings across time or diverse parts of the world, all shared the same God-given nature’.9 Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan ethic makes her a die-hard supporter of the Revolutionary fight for human rights and a vocal critic of any practice, from the Atlantic slave trade to imperial enterprise, that enriches the homeland at the expense of others. I pay particular attention to her preoccupation with love of country and the ways it can limit or cultivate philanthropy. Her cosmopolitan principles owe much to the early mentorship of Richard Price, a rationalist theologian with a strong commitment to world citizenship, but her thoughts on refining private affects into universal philanthropy were also shaped by the Scottish sentimental philosophers and the Swiss-French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau. These philosophical influences cannot, however, be detached from the contexts in which Wollstonecraft encountered them. She never travelled outside of Europe, but the Continent was a melting pot of different political systems, societal practices and literary traditions, and her travels forced her to confront her prejudices. With each border crossing and culture shock, she re-examined her cosmopolitan ethic, struggling towards the end of her life to square her philosophical universalism with her preference for diversity over economic and cultural imperialism. She also recurred consistently to questions that still divide theorists of cosmopolitanism. How far can our imagined communities extend? If philanthropy stems from instinctive feelings, can it be truly universal? And how can the moral imperatives of a cosmopolitan ethic be reconciled with the claims of culture and the realities of human psychology?

Introduction    3

Wollstonecraft’s cultural inheritance was derived from an elite European intelligentsia, self-proclaimed citizens of the world.10 Travelling extensively, they rubbed shoulders in scientific societies and literary salons, setting up pan-European and even global networks of sociability, translation and epistolary and literary exchange.11 For Gerald Newman, they might be regarded as members of a ‘“gentlemanly international social club”’, operating in a patrician ‘spirit of worldly sophistication and tolerance’ of religious and cultural differences.12 The problem with a gentleman’s club, of course, is that it excludes women and all but a few privileged men. Still, with their philosophical eclecticism and relativist attitudes, many Enlightenment thinkers espoused shared values that can be described as cosmopolitan. Prominent historians such as Voltaire, David Hume and William Robertson – all of whom Wollstonecraft read – compared the progress of different nations towards modernity, manifesting ‘an intellectual investment in the idea of a common European civilisation’ and drawing attention to affinities between apparently disparate cultures within and beyond Europe.13 For the majority, the underlying synergies of different faiths were evidence of a single ‘natural’ religion accessible to all humankind. Philosophy was regarded as ‘an attitude of the mind that automatically transcended national limits’.14 The Revolutionary decades inherited the ideals and tensions of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, but Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries were also living through an era of nation-building.15 National identities developed in relation to perceived kinships between nations and in opposition to rivals for global supremacy and targets for imperial domination. Mixed with the resulting racial and cultural prejudices were changing perceptions of the European social hierarchy. In Britain, professionals and literate artisans were effecting a ‘cultural revolution’ that challenged the status and authority of their aristocratic compatriots, widely regarded as excessively Frenchified and morally degenerate.16 Nonetheless, Francophilia had a profound impact on British taste and manners, leading to anxieties about the warping of English culture and a widespread tendency to hold French influences responsible for corruption amongst the upper-class oligarchy.17 A sense of the British collective self as robust, down-to-earth, plain-speaking and Protestant developed in opposition to images of effete, ostentatious, silver-tongued French Catholics.18 Despite this apparent hardening of nationalist feeling, however, recent scholarship has identified ‘continuities between Enlightenment philosophy and the concept of the nation’, and a concomitant persistence of cosmopolitan attitudes and practices.19 Margaret C. Jacob is one of several critics to argue that the c­ osmopolitan spirit

4    Mary Wollstonecraft

generated by transnational literary and cultural exchange ‘infused actual political causes, pressing by the 1770s and more easily embraced when thinking beyond the nation’.20 By the end of the century, political liberals and radicals could draw connections between democratic and republican movements in Europe and North America, looking beyond local and national constraints in pursuit of political change.21 Janet Polasky identifies a phenomenon of ‘itinerant revolutionaries’, individuals whose ‘multiple and ever-shifting allegiances transcended the boundaries of the nation-state’, and who ‘saw themselves as part of a revolutionary movement cascading from one place to another and leading toward the creation of a world at peace’.22 In the latter part of her career, Wollstonecraft was just such an ‘itinerant revolutionary’, but her private letters and early works point to a longstanding interest in foreign literature and politics. In 1787, she wrote to her sister, Everina, that she was ‘not born to tread in the beaten track’.23 The letter concerns her unorthodox plans to write for a living but also foreshadows her pursuit of social and political justice to foreign soil. We can trace this pursuit back to the mid-1780s when she ran a day-school in Newington Green, at that time peopled by a large community of politicised Dissenters, including Richard Price. Price placed the American and French Revolutions within broader narratives of human perfectibility. In this respect, he echoes the works of Immanuel Kant, who was influential in his circles and who hoped that the ostensibly ‘confused and fortuitous’ actions of nations, cultures and individuals might be ‘recognised, in the history of the entire species, as a steadily advancing but slow development of man’s original capacities’.24 Through the cosmopolitan circle of artisans and intellectuals surrounding her publisher and devoted friend, Joseph Johnson, Wollstonecraft was exposed not only to foreign literatures but also to radical politics, and she saw the impact of political revolutions extending far beyond the borders of nations and the events of her era.25 In the 1770s and 1780s, practical and ideological bonds had been forged between Paris and Johnson’s bookshop in St Paul’s Churchyard which deepened with the onset of the Revolution. Paris had a thriving clandestine publishing industry, but controversial works were often printed in London and smuggled back into France. Johnson’s printing press was part of this international publishing network. Throughout his career, he was also instrumental in bringing philosophical, political and educational ideas from mainland Europe to the British public, as well as establishing strong transatlantic connections.26 Together with the Scottish radical writer Thomas Christie, Johnson also co-edited the Analytical Review, which devoted considerable space to ‘Literary

Introduction    5

Intelligence from Europe’ and often reviewed near-unattainable works of foreign literature.27 From 1788 until her departure for France in December 1792, and again from 1796 until her death, Wollstonecraft was a prolific literary critic for the Analytical. A self-taught polyglot, she reviewed French works frequently and German works on occasion, as well as travel narratives from Europe and beyond. The foreign works were usually translations, but her commentary suggests that she was able to compare them with their source texts.28 She also translated French and German works for Johnson, sometimes using the opportunity to correspond with their original authors. This work as a reviewer and translator would undoubtedly have ‘enhanced Wollstonecraft’s sense of being a cultural revolutionary in a European context’.29 Amongst those Johnson hosted at his famous Tuesday-evening dinner parties was the political radical Thomas Paine, whose notorious rejection of national allegiances would lead to his indictment for high treason. As numerous scholars have observed, Paine supported the revolutions in America and France on the grounds that he was a world citizen defending universal principles.30 ‘My attachment is to all the world’, he declares in The American Crisis VII (1778), ‘and not to any particular part’.31 Similarly, in his Letter to the Abbé Raynal (1782), he advances a cosmopolitan definition of ‘a great nation’ as ‘that which extends and promotes the principles of universal society; whose mind rises above the atmosphere of local thoughts, and considers mankind, of whatever nation or profession they may be, as the work of one Creator’.32 Wollstonecraft, who met Paine at Johnson’s gatherings, espouses a comparable cosmopolitan ethic. When the Bastille fell in 1789, she supported the Nouveau Régime, not only because she held democratic convictions, but also because, like other British radicals, she anticipated the spread of egalitarian principles across national borders and regarded political change in France as part of the human progress to universal justice. The Revolution, she wrote in 1794, ‘did not interest frenchmen alone; for it’s influence extending throughout the continent, all the passions and prejudices of Europe were instantly set afloat’ (VI, 146). At the relatively peaceful dawn of the Revolution, France issued a warm welcome to foreign intellectuals. This apparent commitment to world citizenship was expressed in the pages of pacifist newspapers like Le Cosmopolite, launched in 1791, and affirmed in the naturalisation in 1792 of eighteen ‘citizens of the world’, including Paine, the Dissenting natural philosopher Joseph Priestley, and Anacharsis Cloots, a Prussian nobleman whose enthusiasm for democracy led him to renounce his title. Progressive women writers, such as Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte

6    Mary Wollstonecraft

Smith and Mary Robinson ‘cultivated a radicalized cosmopolitanism through their engagement with French Revolutionary politics’.33 British radicals and political tourists made trips to the French capital, amongst them Christie, a young William Wordsworth, the radical writer and translator Thomas Holcroft, the leading abolitionist Thomas Clarkson – and, in the winter of 1792, Wollstonecraft. During her time in Paris, she socialised with Paine and Christie, but she also made an effort to forge acquaintances amongst the French, as well as likeminded individuals from other European countries. Anti-Jacobin hysteria made 1790s Britain an inhospitable place for radicals and its patriarchal infrastructure was repugnant to a feminist who could see positive change for women under French law. She stayed in France until 1795, an eyewitness to Robespierre’s Terror. Shaken and fighting disillusionment, she returned only briefly to London before embarking on a still more intrepid voyage through Sweden, Norway and Denmark. As Richard Holmes observes, in this period ‘the shores of the distant Baltic, and the half-legendary lands of the midnight sun beyond, were terra incognita for all but a few hardy sailors, merchants, diplomats and the new race of commercial travellers’.34 For Wollstonecraft, this ‘terra incognita’ was fertile ground not only for literary innovation, but also for empirical enquiry and philosophical reflection. After the trauma of the Terror, she sought to renew her faith in humanity’s progress to universal justice. None of this is to suggest that Wollstonecraft was immune to the cultural prejudices of her era or the pitfalls of its universalist epistemologies. Not all eighteenth-century cosmopolitans occlude difference or eschew relativism,35 but poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques have highlighted a widespread tendency to privilege white, masculine, classically educated perspectives and side-line anything that diverges from this dominant episteme. Moreover, Enlightenment thinkers often evaluate foreign cultures in relation to racial and cultural hierarchies complicit in imperialist violence.36 Wollstonecraft is no different. There is plenty of evidence that she subscribes to a Eurocentric teleology of progress in which Western Europe represents the pinnacle of civilisation, relegating other cultures to lower rungs on the scale to enlightenment. Then there is her Francophobia and use of ‘topoi from anti-Semitic, antiCatholic and anti-Irish myths’, all commonplace in eighteenth-­century reformist and Dissenting rhetoric but no more palatable for that.37 Since the publication of Joyce Zonana’s much-reprinted essay, ‘The Sultan and the Slave’, in which she identifies Wollstonecraft’s pioneering Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) as the source of a Western discursive tradition of ‘feminist orientalism’, critics have also recognised that Wollstonecraft ‘uncritically associates the East with despotism and

Introduction    7

tyranny’, pouring her greatest scorn on Islam.38 As Samara Cahill points out, Wollstonecraft is a constructivist who takes aim, not at Muslims per se, but at cultural inequalities and their effects on the human psyche.39 It is nonetheless troubling that, even as she condemns jingoism and imperial conquest, she perceives no irony in mobilising orientalist and Islamophobic rhetoric to her feminist critique. For Eileen Hunt Botting, a less Eurocentric version of Wollstonecraft’s philosophy could form the basis for ‘a revised and internationalized theory of women’s human rights’, but only if we hold her to account for creating a ‘Western-biased rhetorical model for women’s human rights argumentation’.40 I have no wish to elide or excuse Wollstonecraft’s biases or to downplay their long-term effects. I suggest, instead, that they coexist in her oeuvre with a broader belief in the underlying commonalities of human nature. Moreover, the Terror and the Revolutionary Wars combined with her distaste for capitalism to destabilise her conception of the European cultural hierarchy; by the time she travelled to Scandinavia, she was curious to explore alternative social and political systems and evinced a growing respect for cultural differences. Several present-day theorists have interrogated cosmopolitanism’s potential as a model for finding common ground while resisting the homogenising effects of globalisation and Western imperialism.41 For some, cosmopolitanism risks complicity with imperialist violence at every turn;42 others consider that it lends itself more readily to engaging difference and accommodating local loyalties than its universalist and humanist counterparts.43 As Daniel Carey and Sven Trakulhun observe, the belief in human equality calls for ‘the preservation rather than assimilation of cultural difference in so far as culture is integral to our understanding of humanity’, and in this context, ‘universal ideals of the Enlightenment are seen as logically connected to diversity’.44 These ideals sit uncomfortably in many texts of the period alongside orientalist fantasy and racist caricature; but just as often and sometimes with puzzling synchrony, they complement cross-cultural dialogue, as well as calls for broadmindedness and international political consensus. I therefore align my approach with that of Amanda Anderson, who concedes the justice of postcolonial critiques but advocates a critical turn towards examining ‘the complex forms of cultural positioning, and the more radical potentialities, that are implicit and explicit in the articulation of different cosmopolitan ideals’.45 Wollstonecraft wrote in a transnational context that complicates her ‘cultural positioning’, and for all their flaws, her works pit ideas of universal justice, philanthropy and diversity against the aggressive nationalism and empire-building of her era. Although her cosmopolitan ethic is built on an abstract metaphysical framework, I disagree

8    Mary Wollstonecraft

that her ‘attempt to adopt a universalistic perspective on morality may mask the fact that the perspective is ineluctably rooted in a particular historical, cultural, and personal context’.46 In fact, my close reading of her works identifies literary techniques calculated to acknowledge her subjectivity, contingency and ideological conflicts. Although we have long recognised Wollstonecraft’s debt to the politics and literature of the French Revolution, the many transnational influences evident in her thought remain under-researched.47 Vivien Jones remarked in 1993 on the ‘internationalist “patriotism”’ that informs Wollstonecraft’s response to the Revolution, and Tomaselli observed two years later that, even before Wollstonecraft left England, she was ‘an intellectual whose awareness was shaped by partaking in the Scottish, German, and French Enlightenment debates’.48 But until the publication of Richard Vernon’s Friends, Citizens, Strangers (2005), Hunt Botting’s Family Feuds (2006) and Michael Scrivener’s The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction (2007), no scholar had paid close attention to Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan worldview.49 More recently, Enit Karafili Steiner has claimed for Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796) a form of cosmopolitanism that anticipates and critiques the Kantian model, ‘a cosmopolitan critique based on suffering that faces the exhaustion of the Enlightenment idea of progress itself’.50 In a short section in Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics (2021), Tomaselli observes that Wollstonecraft’s definition of true patriotism in Rights of Woman incorporates ‘love of humanity’, and that the (often unflattering) ‘national characterization’ that marks her writings from France sits alongside ‘an expression of a cosmopolitanism that can be detected in her earlier writings’.51 My account of Wollstonecraft’s transnationalism aligns with that of Scrivener, who argues convincingly that she advances a model of ‘communicative reciprocity’ across national and cultural boundaries – the modus operandi of enlightened cosmopolitans.52 Regarding her idiosyncratic ethical framework, let me acknowledge that wresting her complex texts into any single philosophical category is always ­reductive. Like Vernon, I recognise the shaping effects on Wollstone­ craft’s works of diverse strands of thought, including a tension between her cosmopolitanism and a republican tradition that is ‘patriotic and solidaristic’.53 I also concur with him that ‘Wollstonecraft clearly sought to contain her republicanism within a larger, cosmopolitan ethic’.54 As the next section will demonstrate, however, Vernon mistakenly locates Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitanism within the Stoic tradition, a move which I believe grossly caricatures her reliance on

Introduction    9

reason and obscures her emphasis on the role of sympathy in moral development. Equally, I resist Karafili Steiner’s attempt to distinguish ‘Wollstonecraft’s empathy-based from Kant’s justice-based cosmopolitics’.55 Like Hunt Botting, I locate Wollstonecraft within a rationalist theological tradition distinct from that of Kant which informs her universalist ideal of justice but also proves hospitable to her vision of intimate bonds as wellsprings of sympathy swelling into public-spirited affection, first for neighbours, then for compatriots and ultimately for fellow world citizens.56 At the same time, I examine her struggle to mediate between her universalist ideal and a model of moral sentiment tied to the play of affect. In Wollstonecraft, Mill and Women’s Human Rights (2016), Hunt Botting identifies a ‘Wollstonecraftian strand of cosmopolitanism [that] prioritizes universal human rights, especially the basic right to agency itself, yet subsequently examines how gender and other cultural differences affect the differential and unjust treatment of women within and across societies’.57 In doing so, she critiques the racial and cultural politics of Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan philosophy and its far-reaching effects on Western feminist discourse. Wollstonecraft’s significance for feminism cannot be overstated, but it is not the primary focus of this study, partly because it has already received so much attention, and partly because mining her works chiefly for feminist insights risks obscuring their richness and variety. As a philosopher, political commentator, literary critic and novelist, her subject matter was wide-ranging, and this study therefore aims to highlight the underappreciated influence on her thought and style of a number of European writers: the French educationalist Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis; the German minister and pedagogue Christian Gotthilf Salzmann; and the renowned French Revolutionary orator Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau. I also draw on modern theorists to illuminate the different forms of cosmopolitanism evident in the works of Wollstonecraft’s most significant – and dissimilar – philosophical influences, Price and Rousseau. Whilst I engage strategically with cosmopolitan philosophy, however, this is first and foremost a work of literary criticism. I am concerned less with judging the validity of Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan ethic than with examining how it informs and finds expression in her writing. To this end, I demonstrate that Rousseau also inspired many of the signature literary devices through which she conveys her cosmopolitanism and constructs herself as a world citizen. It is well known that Wollstonecraft skewered Rousseau’s gender politics in Rights of Woman, and that she feminised his autobiographical Solitary Walker in Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden,

10    Mary Wollstonecraft

Norway and Denmark. But gender politics and proto-Romantic selffashioning are just the tip of the iceberg: Wollstonecraft read every work of Rousseau available to her, once confessing that she had ‘always been half in love with him’.58 I demonstrate that she draws on his works to showcase and examine, not only her philosophical dilemmas, but also her subjective responses to them. Especially influential are Rousseau’s Confessions and Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782), which set an important precedent for granting personal experiences philosophical significance. The multiple personae peopling his oeuvre also broke new ground by emphasising and instantiating the connections between subjective response and philosophical deduction. Rousseau’s influence is unmistakeable in Wollstonecraft’s use of textual self-portraiture to foreground her personal feelings, even at the risk of introducing contradictions into a narrative or argumentation. Depicting herself alternately as moral perfection incarnate, solitary maverick and woman of feeling, Wollstonecraft constructs textual personae to embody different – and sometimes contradictory – aspects of her philosophical vision, inviting intertextual interpretation. Fascination with her eventful life has often led to reductive readings of her works as mere reflections of her subjecthood, and it has been heartening to witness the recent critical shift towards analysis of her texts in all their philosophical and literary complexity. Yet for Wollstonecraft, the personal was not only political; it was the raw material she moulded into her cosmopolitan philosophy. Her texts offer, not a finished philosophical system, but a work-inprogress which self-consciously reflects on the defining events of her life, as well as the cultural and historical contexts in which they unfolded. In the section that follows, I define the cosmopolitan ethic she consistently revisited in the course of that eventful life and identify its central paradoxes.

‘Goodwill To All The Human Race’: Wollstonecraft’s Cosmopolitan Ethic Women too often confine their love and charity to their own families. They fix not in their minds the precedency of moral obligations, or make their feelings give way to duty. Goodwill to all the human race should dwell in our bosoms, nor should love to individuals induce us to violate this first of duties, or make us sacrifice the interest of any fellow-creature, to promote that of another, whom we happen to be more partial to. (IV, 44)

This passage is taken from Wollstonecraft’s first published work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female

Introduction    11

Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life (1787). In this case, the important duty is ‘benevolence’, and the claims she makes for its potential scope represent an early effort to articulate the cosmopolitan ethic that shapes her work. Reflecting Price’s influence, this ethical stance – the belief that ‘goodwill to all the human race should dwell in our bosoms’ – is informed by her philosophical universalism. Price was a vocal supporter of the American and French Revolutions, and in his Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789), he advocates ‘Universal Benevolence’, a cosmopolitan commitment to extending human rights across national borders.59 In Thoughts, Wollstonecraft also sets a cosmopolitan standard for the practice of benevolence, insisting that it should be directed not simply towards our nearest and dearest but towards ‘all the human race’. As the work focuses on female education, she recommends charitable giving as the best way for women to fulfil this duty. What is at stake, however, is justice: women are enjoined to palliate social and economic inequalities by eschewing bias towards relations and distributing their wealth in society at large. ‘Goodwill to all the human race’ entails impartiality, suppressing instinctive or deeprooted affections to fulfil a moral duty to promote equality. Justice, for Wollstonecraft, should have no borders. Five years after Thoughts appeared, Wollstonecraft became famous throughout Europe with the publication of Rights of Woman – a fame that endured on the Continent long after her death.60 In the dedication to Talleyrand, one of the leading political figures of the French Revolution, she makes it clear that a commitment to universal justice is central to her philosophical outlook. Capitalising the word to denote its importance, she demands ‘JUSTICE for one half of the human race’ (V, 69). In this particular context, ‘justice’ entails revising the new French constitution to grant women equal rights, but the philosophical foundations of her argument underpin the broader cosmopolitan ethic that characterises her thought. Wollstonecraft took a Kantian deontological stance on human rights, arguing that we have a universal duty to treat each other as moral equals with shared rights and ethical responsibilities. For Wollstonecraft, as for Kant, this duty is perceptible through the exercise of reason;61 but she follows Price in adopting ‘a metaphysical understanding of human rights’, in which reason is an attribute bestowed by God on human souls so that we can discern and implement His ‘universal moral law, to which all rational beings, even God Himself, are bound’.62 When she declares in Rights of Woman that ‘God is Justice itself’, and that men and women should ‘learn to submit to the authority of reason’, she alludes to her belief that universal principles of justice are derived from this divinely implanted faculty, which gives all human beings equal

12    Mary Wollstonecraft

status and equal rights (V, 170).63 For Wollstonecraft, however, reason must work in tandem with two other divine gifts. The first of these is the passions, which she defines in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) as ‘necessary auxiliaries of reason’ (16).64 The second is the imagination, which she considers ‘a sacred faculty, linking the fantasising mind to its Maker’, a means to apprehend divine truths through ‘transcendent fantasy’.65 If developed and refined together, these interdependent attributes can lead us to knowledge of virtue, a ‘rational love’ of the good which Wollstonecraft equates with love of God.66 With passion in the mix, though, how can we attain the impartiality requisite for ‘goodwill to all the human race’? Can our capacity to love one another ever be reconciled entirely with the dictates of reason? As she moves from pedagogy to politics and cultural commentary in the 1790s, these questions lie at the heart of Wollstonecraft’s writing, in which she both reaffirms and persistently modifies her cosmopolitan ethic. Price’s Discourse takes a providentialist view of the human progress to universal rights, which he traces from Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 through the American Revolution to the fall of the Bastille. Defining the nation as a community held together by mutually beneficial laws and a shared constitution, he declares that ‘our first concern as lovers of our country must be to enlighten it’.67 He thus presents the French Revolution as part of the march of reason that will put British and French alike ‘in the secure and complete possession of the blessings of liberty’.68 All three revolutions represent universal truths, namely, that political and civil authority is derived from the people, and that these people are entitled to resist any tyrant who usurps their collective sovereignty. By the time Price delivered his Discourse to the Revolution Society in 1789, there was a longstanding practice of opponents of the government conceiving of patriotism as ‘principled public-spiritedness’ to put an ethical spin on their dissent from the status quo.69 Price similarly advocates a critical love of country and, as Esther Wohlgemut observes, his language of universal rights ‘allows him to open patriotism to a cosmopolitan ethic’, in which partiality for one’s native land is balanced by rational principles of justice.70 His cosmopolitan patriot promotes human rights both within and beyond the borders of their nation, and is therefore compelled to support French democratic republicanism. Wollstonecraft’s address to Talleyrand places Rights of Woman firmly in this Revolutionary context, but by referring not simply to the women of the First Republic but to ‘one half of the human race’, she frames French politics as a test case for the human progress to universal justice. Hunt Botting identifies the cosmopolitan implications of Wollstonecraft’s ‘broad metaphysical perspective’, from which rights are not simply a

Introduction    13

God-given gift to all human souls, but also ‘morally universal, insofar as they apply in all times and places, regardless of what positive law, culture, or religion says about particular people’s eligibility for claiming them’.71 This perspective reflects the levelling politics of Wollstonecraft’s era, but it remains a touchstone of cosmopolitan thought. Hence modern theorists, such as Amartya Sen, Martha C. Nussbaum and Kok-Chor Tan have brought rights-based theories of justice into a global context on the grounds that ‘principles of justice ought to transcend nationality and citizenship, and ought to apply equally to all individuals of the world as a whole’.72 Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre represents an attempt to construct just such a cosmopolitan ethical framework amidst the political turmoil of Revolutionary Europe. The origins of cosmopolitan thought can be found in the Stoic conception of the kosmou politês (citizen of the world). This rational subject overcomes their ingrained preference for the oikos (all that is close and familiar) in favour of an abstract commitment to the good of humankind. Moral maturity involves cultivating detachment from instinctive allegiances, a position often defined as ‘universalist cosmopolitanism’. Commonly associated with the Enlightenment, this form of cosmopolitanism also has its proponents in contemporary philosophy and political theory, most notably Nussbaum, who has advanced a ‘contemporary neo-Stoic view’ of emotions and argued that we should privilege our moral obligation to the race as a whole over local and particular loyalties.73 In a much-discussed essay first published in 1994 in the Boston Review, Nussbaum claims that national or regional identity ‘substitutes a colorful idol for the substantive universal values of justice and right’, and that ‘we should regard our deliberations as, first and foremost, deliberations about human problems of people in particular concrete situations, not problems growing out of a national identity that is altogether unlike that of others’.74 Her work offers a useful standpoint from which to view Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitanism because she shares some common ground with Price, who recommends ‘Universal Benevolence’ as ‘an unspeakably nobler principle than any partial affections’.75 This outlook finds a secular echo in the work of the radical philosopher William Godwin, whom Wollstonecraft married towards the end of her life, and who argued in his controversial Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) that intimate affections were often selfish and possessive and that we should strive instead for impartial philanthropy.76 From this perspective, one can see why Vernon perceives in Wollstonecraft’s universalist emphasis on reason ‘the Stoic critique of passion’.77 Price acknowledges the naturalness of personal and local ­attachments – ‘we are so constituted that our affections are more drawn

14    Mary Wollstonecraft

to some among mankind than to others’78 – but he argues that love of our nearest and dearest should not amount to partisanship.79 Ultimately, living a moral life demands that ‘a narrower interest ought always to give way to a more extensive interest’: In pursuing particularly the interest of our country we ought to carry our views beyond it. We should love it ardently but not exclusively. We ought to seek its good, by all the means that our different circumstances and abilities will allow, but at the same time we ought to consider ourselves as citizens of the world, and take care to maintain a just regard to the rights of other countries.80

In short, a moral love of country demands a cosmopolitan worldview. At every stage of Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre, one finds Pricean injunctions to ‘universal benevolence’ and ‘universal love’, which acknowledge the sway of passion and partisanship, but also appear to advocate detachment from them. We might be tempted to agree with Hunt Botting that Wollstonecraft deploys the term ‘universal love’ to denote ‘benevolence toward all humanity based on respect for the rationality in each and every human creature’.81 Similarly, Lena Halldenius suggests that Wollstonecraft only writes approvingly of ‘benevolence’ when ‘it is universal, an expression of enlightened understanding founded on the principle of respect for mankind in its totality, and on a fair appreciation of oneself in relation to others’.82 According to Halldenius, setting this standard for benevolence means stripping the term of its affective content: ‘A motivating force imparts moral value on what we do only when it is independent of transient emotional or partial allegiances or sympathies’.83 There is certainly evidence to support these claims. In Thoughts, Wollstonecraft declares that ‘Universal benevolence is the first duty, and we should be careful not to let any passion so engross our thoughts, as to prevent our practising it’ (IV, 30). In Rights of Men, she criticises Edmund Burke for allowing sentiment to obscure universal principles of justice, deriding his readiness to sympathise with Marie Antoinette while ignoring the widespread suffering of her subjects: ‘in my eye all feelings are false and spurious, that do not rest on justice as their foundation and are not concentred by universal love’ (V, 34).84 Four years later, she argues in An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) ‘that a more enlightened moral love of mankind should supplant, or rather support physical affections’ (VI, 21). It is one thing to state that justice should have a universal reach, however, and quite another to envisage human subjects adopting a global perspective at the expense of local loyalties and personal attachments.

Introduction    15

Price enjoins us to love our country ‘ardently but not exclusively’, but his injunction begs the question whether people in the grip of intense feeling are capable of such even-handedness. Cosmopolitanism is frequently criticised for disregarding a basic fact of human psychology, one elaborated in the Stoic concept of oikeiôsis, whereby affection depends on affinity, identification with the self. If most of us are incapable of empathising with distant and unknown others, we can have little motivation to treat them with the benevolence we might show to our loved ones or compatriots. Perhaps the most common objection to universalist cosmopolitanism is that the abstract idea of ‘humanity’ can hold little appeal in comparison to the bonds of intimacy and kinship, tribe and nation. When Price’s Discourse was published, it famously provoked Burke’s excoriating attack in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in which he denounced the Revolution and its supporters, who could shrug off the emotional weight of longstanding customs and practices that instilled loyalty to the Crown. Accusing Price and his ilk of viewing ‘human actions’ and ‘human concerns’ in ‘all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction’, he goes on to connect their outlook with the cosmopolitan tenets of the Enlightenment philosophes, ‘suggested by clubs composed of a monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations’.85 More recently, sceptics of modern cosmopolitan theory have argued that we seldom feel loyalty to imagined communities beyond the bounds of the nation. Unlike family pride or love of country, the ideas of ‘justice’ or ‘humanity’ rarely motivate collective action and never collective self-sacrifice.86 Nussbaum’s critics typically reject the unqualified universalism of her Boston Review essay and strive to accommodate love of country within a broader commitment to global justice, variously arguing that ‘our affiliations can be multi-layered and nonantagonistic’ or that ‘we need to make identifications on a scale smaller than the “world” or “humanity”’.87 Acknowledging these objections, Nussbaum concedes that world citizenship is ‘often a lonely business […] a kind of exile – from the comfort of local truths, from the warm, nestling feeling of patriotism, from the absorbing drama of pride in oneself and one’s own’.88 Universal benevolence offers ‘only reason and the love of humanity, which may seem at times less colorful than other sources of belonging’.89 And it is not simply a question of local colour; in its most abstract form, universalist cosmopolitanism lacks awareness that the cosmopolitan subject is a flesh-and-blood individual who speaks, thinks and feels from a very specific position and whose loyalties may conflict with the demands of global justice.90 While there can be no question of resolving Wollstonecraft’s paradoxes by identifying her with any modern philosopher, Nussbaum’s

16    Mary Wollstonecraft

work provides an illuminating theoretical lens for examining them. This is not because Wollstonecraft is a Stoic cosmopolitan, but because both writers take up a universalist stance which they strive simultaneously to maintain and adapt to accommodate the human tendency for passionate attachment to places, individuals and imagined communities. Nussbaum confronts this tendency in more recent work, demonstrating the interdependence of human emotions and institutional frameworks for justice. Recalling Wollstonecraft, she posits that a productive interplay of rational judgement and imagination could harness the human instinct for partisanship to philanthropic ends. In Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (2013), which focuses primarily on public emotions operating within the nation-state, she identifies limited, inconsistent or misdirected forms of compassion as ‘emotional impediment[s] to justice’.91 Conceiving of patriotism as a crucial building-block for moral engagement at the international level, she imagines a ‘public culture of compassion’ and a system of national education which could foster patriotic love that embraces cosmopolitan principles.92 This analysis reflects her recent acknowledgment that pursuing ‘justice […] in a world that is in many respects hostile to our strivings requires sources of energy, attachment, and pleasure that the Stoics rejected’, and that the cosmopolitan tradition must therefore adapt by ‘fashioning a politics that cultivates particularistic love’.93 At the same time, she pays close attention to psychological phenomena impeding that ideal, in particular the ‘projective disgust’ that vilifies alterity and stymies compassion.94 I draw strategically on these different aspects of Nussbaum’s work both to delineate Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan ethical position and to examine where and how she deploys an antagonistic rhetoric of disgust that threatens its collapse. Nussbaum also represents the philanthropic capabilities of love of country as a function of its erotic character, and this psychological model informs my understanding of Wollstonecraft’s later textual personae, who repeatedly integrate erotic attachment and cosmopolitan altruism. By emphasising the pivotal and disruptive role of human sympathies in the progress to universal justice and philanthropy, Wollstonecraft sets herself apart from the caricature of heartless abstraction painted in the works of Burke and self-defined anti-Jacobins. She never articulates her cosmopolitan ethic in terms of Stoic impartiality: wary of untrammelled emotion, she nonetheless acknowledges and even celebrates the fact that universal benevolence has its roots in more intimate bonds of affection. In Thoughts, the key to her position lies in the term ‘charity’. Halldenius argues that Wollstonecraft regards ‘justice and charity’ as ‘mutually exclusive categories’, the former signifying equality based on principle

Introduction    17

and the latter propping up unjust social hierarchies, where the wealthy display their munificence as ‘an instrument of power and a vehicle for amour-propre’.95 But although Wollstonecraft does increasingly demand systemic reform to eliminate the poor’s dependence on upper-class largesse, she also uses ‘charity’ in its Christian sense to denote both love of one’s neighbour and love of God. This is evidently the definition she has in mind when she makes ‘charity’ a synonym both for ‘philanthropy’ and ‘divine love’: Our philanthropy is a proof, we are told, that we are capable of loving our Creator. Indeed this divine love, or charity, appears to me the principal trait that remains of the illustrious image of the Deity, which was originally stampt on the soul, and which is to be renewed. (IV, 24)

In the 1780s, the term ‘philanthropy’ was still used primarily to denote ‘love of humankind’, and Wollstonecraft here uses it interchangeably with ‘charity’ to describe benevolence with a universal reach, which reflects the divine element in human nature. Building on the work of Susan Khin Zaw and Barbara Taylor, who highlighted the theological roots of Wollstonecraft’s thought, Hunt Botting has turned scholarly attention to the cosmopolitan potential of her faith, summing up the ‘psychological premise’ of her early work thus: ‘love of God inspires love of His creation. Love of God’s creation, in turn, inspires a radically egalitarian sympathy with His other creatures – not just one’s own kin, class, country, or species, but all of God’s family’.96 Writing from this radical theological perspective, Wollstonecraft brings to the education of English daughters a cosmopolitan ethical vision that surpasses the apparently modest scope of the text. With the onset of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft invests still brighter hopes in human philanthropy, and her injunctions to palliate injustice with charity give way to political devotion to the cause of human rights. Taylor demonstrates that, in Wollstonecraft’s portrait of the ideal female citizen, ‘love of humanity’ emerges as ‘the sine qua non of good citizenship. The right-minded citizenness is the woman who, her natural sympathies elevated into universal benevolence, equates her personal interests with the general good’.97 From this point of view, patriotism is not only closely allied with domestic ties but also indistinguishable from world citizenship. In Thoughts, Wollstonecraft describes benevolence as the ‘first, and most amiable virtue’, and ascribes it to ‘compassionate emotions’ (43). These emotions can thrive in the early years, provided that the child belongs to an ‘egalitarian family – marked by moral, social, and political equality between spouses and siblings and parental respect for the dignity of children’.98 In such an environment,

18    Mary Wollstonecraft

affection for kith and kin will flower into philanthropy. As Martina Reuter points out, in Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft ‘explicitly argues that we have to feel passionately for particular individuals in order to be able to learn how to love universal beings and values’.99 If she hopes to restrain ‘partial’ affections, she also acknowledges that philanthropy could not develop without them: it is not simply a rational principle, it is also a moral sentiment. The houseroom Wollstonecraft gives to feeling owes something to Scottish sentimental philosophy, especially the works of Hume and Adam Smith, which place particular emphasis on the operation of ‘sympathy’, imaginative identification with the emotional experiences of others.100 At the same time, her position has much in common with that of Price who, although he ‘sees heart and reason as connected’, rejects the Scots’ more-or-less collective belief in the primacy of affect.101 In their different ways, both Hume and Smith conclude that sympathy is not coextensive with moral sentiments and that even compassion cannot guarantee any meaningful subdual of self-interest.102 For his part, Price argues that reason can transform instinctive loyalties into universal benevolence.103 Wollstonecraft echoes Price in her belief that true patriots have a clear-sighted love of country that keeps the global perspective in view. Her emphasis on reason, however, is less pronounced. According to Taylor, ‘the idea of reason operative in her writings was not the rather chilly deductive faculty found in most Unitarian preachings […] but a much more libidinised, imaginative drive toward the True and the Good derived from Rousseau and Christian Platonist tradition’.104 Certainly Wollstonecraft held a belief in divinely implanted moral intuition provided reflection could hone and refine it. As in her Hints (1798) for the second volume of Rights of Woman, though, she conceptualised this intuition differently from Hume and Smith, as part of ‘flights of the imagination’, which ‘seem to reach what wisdom cannot teach – and, while they delude us here, afford a glorious hope, if not a foretaste, of what we may expect hereafter’ (V, 274). In Rights of Men, she draws on the sentimentalist lexicon to depict sympathy generating ‘reverence for the rights of men’, which she equates with ‘universal love’: Sacred rights! for which I acquire a more profound respect, the more I look into my own mind; and, professing these heterodox opinions, I still preserve my bowels; my heart is human, beats quick with human sympathies – and I FEAR God! (34)

As she explains in the passage that follows, God does not here represent ‘an arbitrary will’ but ‘unerring reason’ (34). To be God-fearing entails cultivation of this divine gift, which works in tandem with s­ympathy

Introduction    19

to develop the capacity for ‘universal love’ vouchsafed to all human beings (34). In his Reflections, Burke equated religious awe with what he saw as the natural tendency to venerate social superiors: ‘We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility’.105 Wollstonecraft counters Burke’s argument, not by dismissing human emotion, but by contending for its philanthropic potential: she claims not simply to ‘see’ but to ‘feel, that happiness is reflected, and that, in communicating good, [her] soul receives its noble aliment’ (34). At the heart of their famous dispute is a fundamental disagreement about the potential reach of human sympathies. For Burke, local and particular allegiances naturally take precedence over the abstract idea of humankind. In Wollstonecraft’s eyes, Burkean patriotism supports the ‘institutionalized self-interest’ that values the status and property rights of the ruling classes above universal benevolence.106 Her support for the Revolution rests on a vision of ‘human sympathies’ refined and expanded into cosmopolitan moral sentiments. The problem remains, however, that ‘human sympathies’ are stubbornly non-universal. Grounded in affective response, they are inextricable from contingency, idiosyncrasy and spontaneous impulses. Paradoxically, then, the cosmopolitan imperative to apply principles of justice across national borders conflicts with the psychological make-up requisite for philanthropy. Without philanthropy, there is no impetus to practise benevolence beyond a narrow circle or extend rights beyond the nation-state; but the instincts at the root of this cosmopolitan moral sentiment also threaten to undermine it. This is the paradox Wollstonecraft wrestled with as she charged into the pamphlet wars and faced the Revolution head-on in Paris. Initially sanguine about humankind’s philanthropic potential and proportionally scornful of Rousseau’s nostalgia for the state of nature, her optimism faltered in the face of the Terror and the Revolutionary Wars. As she revisits and modifies her cosmopolitan ethic, she engages frequently with Rousseau, who not only embraces paradox but also offers an alternative perspective on the socially cohesive powers of human feeling. If Price’s Discourse laid the groundwork for Wollstonecraft’s universalist principles, through Rousseau she could scrutinise the affective foundations of philanthropy and the power of sentiment both to thwart and further the ends of justice. Rousseau argues that human beings are naturally benevolent but corrupted in social existence by competition, constraints on their freedom, and mutual dependence. The distrust of human society evident in his political philosophy finds its autobiographical counterpart in the Solitary Walker, who shuns human society because it falls short of his fantasies

20    Mary Wollstonecraft

of perfection. And yet, by his own admission, Rousseau remains sentimentally attached to the idea of human benevolence. Paradoxically, he claims that his ‘inclinations naturelles’ (natural inclination[s]) are towards ‘une bienveillance universelle et parfaitement désintéresée’ (universal and perfectly disinterested benevolence), but that his ideal is to exercise that benevolence ‘sans former jamais d’attachement particulier, et sans porter le joug d’aucun devoir’ (without forming any particular attachment, or bearing the yoke of any duty).107 One of the governing fantasies of the Reveries is of anonymous but omnipotent altruism: love of humankind realised without the need for contact with individuals, whose flaws and demands would dismay the solitaire. Detaching himself from others, he nonetheless maintains an abstract philanthropy which manifests in surges of emotion. Whereas Price places the burden for developing philanthropy on the faculty of reason, Rousseau believes that virtues beneficial to the common good depend on sentiment to inspire them. According to his vision of human nature, the impulse to alleviate distress is deeply ingrained in the race, and in Emile, ou de l’Éducation (Emile, or On Education) (1762), the Tutor adopts strategies to develop and expand this essential benevolence. His view is that, if a child can be educated to identify his own wellbeing with that of the human family, then amour-propre (self-love)108 will be indistinguishable from virtue: Moins l’objet de nos soins tient immédiatement à nous-même, moins l’illusion de l’intérest particulier est à craindre; plus on généralise cet intérest, plus il devient équitable, et l’amour du genre humain n’est autre chose en nous que l’amour de la justice. The less immediately the object of our care is attached to ourselves, the less the illusion of self-interest is to be apprehended; the more we generalise that interest the more equitable it becomes, and the love of mankind will be no other than the love of justice.109

The importance of affect in Rousseau’s understanding of human psychology goes some way to explaining his paradoxical stance vis-à-vis cosmopolitanism, which he regards as theoretically compelling but practically impossible.110 Like Smith, he concludes that the ‘sentiment de l’humanité’ (sentiment of humanity) is too weak in most human subjects to embrace unfamiliar objects of affection.111 Associating cosmopolitanism with the philosophes and sophisticates he held in contempt, Rousseau argues that their claims to love humanity belie their lack of heartfelt sentiment for anyone in particular.112 He connects this underlying coldness with abstract reasoning which, because it is divorced from concrete realities, deadens the human instinct for sympathy. He distrusts cosmopolitans because he believes that, ‘in expanding their love of humanity, they spread it thin and,

Introduction    21

in the process, dilute its motivational energy’.113 Whereas love of country can inspire self-sacrifice for the good of the whole, except in a few exceptional cases, love of humankind cannot.114 Even though Rousseau recognises our potential for moral development, then, he can imagine few social models that could reawaken our moral sentiments, and all of those depend on isolating a relatively small community from the rest of the world. Even in the earliest articulations of her cosmopolitan ethic, Wollstonecraft is also preoccupied with the human reflex to form closeknit communities and the conditions in which this reflex might favour or inhibit a broader moral perspective.115 Throughout her works, she grapples with the intrusiveness and complexities of affective response, not least her own, but never loses sight of the integral role of fellowfeeling in developing philanthropy. In French Revolution, she makes it clear that political change in France has been driven by sentiment as well as principle, and that establishing a lasting democracy will demand widespread emotional investment in the new Republic. For Nussbaum, this emotional investment must grow from the same psychological and affective ground as a personal relationship. Heartfelt love of country, she claims, demands ‘an emotion that is not simply abstract and principle-dependent, but that conceives of the nation as a particular, with a specific history, specific physical features, and specific aspirations that inspire devotion’.116 Obviously ‘humankind’ can never be imagined with the cherished idiosyncrasies of a loved one, but it follows that if human subjects are to act on behalf of fellow (world) citizens, they need both to identify with and to care about them. As Nussbaum puts it: Respect grounded in the idea of human dignity will prove impotent to include all citizens on terms of equality unless it is nourished by imaginative engagement with the lives of others and by an inner grasp of their full and equal humanity’.117

It is not enough simply to have empathy (the imaginative engagement with others that the sentimentalists called ‘sympathy’). Like Smith, Nussbaum distinguishes between empathy and the compassion requisite for altruism, concluding that the ‘type of imaginative engagement society needs […] is nourished by love’.118 ‘Love’, conceptualised as a passionate attachment to an autonomous subject, can motivate disinterested benevolence. But if love matters for justice, it is also subjective where justice is impartial, and therefore as likely to inspire partisanship as philanthropy. Chasing the phantom of human benevolence from Revolutionary France to the remote reaches of Scandinavia, Wollstonecraft questions how human sentiments – from erotic love to maternal devotion – can be harnessed to altruistic ends.

22    Mary Wollstonecraft

It is clear that Wollstonecraft seeks a model for universal justice and philanthropy that accommodates principle as well as sentiment, taking inspiration from the literatures and cultures of eighteenth-century Europe. In Scandinavia, she also begins to question the cultural hierarchies taken for granted in her earlier works and, to some extent, she adapts her universalist outlook to take account of diversity and resist cultural and economic imperialism. This study alternates between chapters focused on Wollstonecraft’s engagement with European literature, and chapters analysing the development of her cosmopolitanism. This is because, once we understand how her writing matures in response to Continental influences, we can appreciate the literary techniques she deploys to articulate her worldview. In Chapter 1, I focus primarily on two of Wollstonecraft’s Rousseauvian personae: Mrs Mason from her children’s conduct-book, Original Stories from Real Life (1788), and the eponymous heroine of her first novel, Mary, a Fiction (1788). Mrs Mason shares significant characteristics with Rousseau’s Legislator, a figure of supreme authority, while Mary takes her DNA from the sensitive maverick of his life writing. In Original Stories, Rousseau’s influence is both augmented and offset by that of Genlis, a bestselling author in French and English.119 Read intertextually, Wollstonecraft’s alter-egos articulate complementary aspects of an argument for refusing convention in favour of personal authenticity. By adhering to their divinely implanted internal monitors, they retain the innate benevolence that makes philanthropy possible. Continuing to examine Wollstonecraft’s writing for children, Chapter 2 focuses on Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children (1790). This is Wollstonecraft’s interventionist translation of Christian Gotthilf Salzmann’s Moralisches Elementarbuch (1782–3; new edition 1785), in which she ‘domesticates’ her source text for her British readership. This is not the narrow insularity of a dyed-in-the-wool Englander, but an effort to make her target audience receptive to the moral and cultural value of the German text. Elements bears witness to Wollstonecraft’s critical agency in a male-dominated transnational public sphere, in which the cosmopolitan exchange of enlightened ideas was offset by a struggle, between nations, for cultural pre-eminence.120 Her interpolated material also brings a transnational dimension to the narrative, reflecting both her British resistance to French cultural hegemony and her cosmopolitan broadmindedness. Having established Wollstonecraft’s transnational perspective and nascent cosmopolitanism, in Chapter 3 I consider how she draws on the work of Price and the Scottish sentimentalists to develop her ethical framework. According to the model put forward in her Vindications, patriotism does not demand partisan allegiance to one’s native soil;

Introduction    23

nor should it countenance colonial conquest, aggressive expansionism or unscrupulous forms of trade. For Wollstonecraft, all these attitudes and practices manifest selfish passions intent on subdual or exploitation. By contrast, a ‘true’ patriot engages in clear-sighted acts of love, viz. identifying their nation’s shortcomings and promoting its progress towards political and moral virtue. Convinced of the expansive potential of moral sentiment, Wollstonecraft claims in Rights of Men that ardent patriotism can incorporate cosmopolitan philanthropy, and in Rights of Woman she envisages the private sphere as the birthplace of sympathies which, under the guidance of reason and imagination, draw an ever-broader compass of philanthropic feeling. This model for world citizenship effectively combats Burke’s attempt ‘to increase the political distance between England and revolutionary France’ by ‘casting his understanding of nationness in the insular terms of inheritance and local attachment’ and instituting ‘a correlative banishment of cosmopolitan ideals as nationally disruptive’.121 While Wollstonecraft emphasises the unifying powers of moral sentiment, however, she also recognises that human sympathy can generate tribal mentalities and phobic or violent responses to otherness. For this reason, the Vindications delineate a paradoxical relationship between instinctive sympathies and the moral sentiments essential to philanthropy. These paradoxes deepen in French Revolution, written from Terrorist France and marked by the tension between Wollstonecraft’s democratic ideals and their cataclysmic implementation. In Chapter 4, I argue that Wollstonecraft compares her cosmopolitan model of patriotism with the ‘false’ or ‘mock’ patriotism on display in the National Assembly. She attributes this phony love of country to self-­interestedness ingrained in French cultural life by centuries of arbitrary power, identifying moral and psychological parallels with jingoism, imperial enterprise and hardnosed commercial exchange. By contrast, her cosmopolitan ethic privileges philanthropy over narrow allegiances and self-aggrandisement in all its forms. French Revolution therefore defends democratic and republican principles but, with its emphasis on human fellowship, also implicitly rejects Robespierre’s political genocide. Alternating between ironic detachment, Revolutionary polemic and interludes of high sensibility, Wollstonecraft lays claim to universalist impartiality but constructs a textual persona who bears witness to the situatedness and subjectivity of her writing project. Her proximity to the Revolution attunes her to the pragmatic demands of the moment, not least the need to secure emotional as well as rational investment in the ideal of universal rights. In Chapter 5, I demonstrate that she draws on British and French linguistic theory to argue for a transparent language

24    Mary Wollstonecraft

of politics and a principled form of eloquence. In French Revolution, she critiques the mystifying rhetoric of the ruling elite but, as in her pedagogical works, she is alert to the need for strong and persuasive leadership in the absence of rational principles of (self-)government. To this end, she attempts, with dubious success, to distinguish aristocratic sophistry from what she calls the ‘commanding’ eloquence of Revolutionary patriots (VI, 124). The latter are exemplified by Mirabeau, whose charismatic extemporising represents the happy equilibrium of sentiment and principle that defines her cosmopolitan patriot and establishes sentimental community. And yet, for all Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on the cohesive effects of sympathy, her textual personae tend to be isolées whose insights and affects set them apart. Chapters 6 and 7 focus primarily on Short Residence, in which Wollstonecraft constructs a cosmopolitan epistolary persona whose subjectivity and particular circumstances shape her account of the Scandinavian nations and temper the universalism of her earlier works. Several critics have commented on Wollstonecraft’s debt to Rousseau’s Reveries, but none have explored how she uses her persona to refine her cosmopolitan ethic. In Chapter 6, I argue that, whereas the Solitary Walker represents solipsism as well as abstract philanthropy, Wollstonecraft’s persona finds in reverie an imaginative means to philanthropic union with humankind. Her universalism persists, but she also turns to the idea of the sympathetic imagination to affirm the value of transnational communities of sentiment and an ethic of caring compatible with the framework of justice. In Chapter 7, I argue that Short Residence reflects her troubled integration of universalist abstractions with nascent receptivity to foreignness, challenging the taxonomies of natural philosophy and conjectural history, and refining her cosmopolitan ethic to incorporate appreciation of cultural diversity. In common with Rousseau, she connects cultural and personal authenticity with moral integrity, suggesting that both are essential for the moral health of a nation. I contend that this emphasis on distinctive national character indicates a growing tendency to apply broadly universal principles with sensitivity to indigenous cultural practices. Finally, in the Coda, I turn to Wollstonecraft’s unfinished draft of Wrongs of Woman and find evidence that she sought in her final novel to re-examine the cosmopolitan ethic of caring, delineating the mechanisms that cultivate or suppress philanthropy and constructing a symbolic model for world citizenship. Like Wollstonecraft, we are living through an era of rising nationalism. Political phenomena like Brexit and the US border wall reflect the tribal urge to exclude outsiders; yet telecommunications, global markets and international travel daily expose the fiction of national boundaries.

Introduction    25

If the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates anything, it is that we are all bound to share the blue planet, and in the midst of the crisis, we have seen people hoarding goods to protect their own and mobilising for their wider community. Wollstonecraft is one of the foremothers of modern feminism; but her relevance to our modern world extends beyond the ongoing fight for women’s rights. From her earliest works to the end of her life, she advocated universal justice and philanthropy over narrower loyalties, and in her final unfinished novel she explicitly rejects national allegiances. Despite her philosophical universalism, she also values the distinctness of individual cultures and recognises that philanthropy has its roots in sentimental bonds as well as imagined community. None of this makes her an exemplary cosmopolitan; but the tensions and paradoxes of her work are worthy of exploration precisely because she isn’t. As she strives to construct a cosmopolitan ethical framework, she struggles with its theoretical consistency and practical implementation. One of the distinctive features of her work is her willingness to foreground that struggle. Just as she examines the intractable connection between instinctive feeling and philanthropy, so she acknowledges how contingency and emotional response can shape principles regarded as universal. She is a cosmopolitan writer coming to terms with unprecedented events and engaging with her work is more urgent now than ever.

Chapter 1

‘The Most Sublime Virtues’: Wollstonecraft’s Philanthropic Personae

The importance Wollstonecraft ascribes to philanthropy is embodied in her semi-autobiographical personae, who often delight in doing good for others beyond their immediate circle. Wollstonecraft uses recurring traits and narrative positions to delineate an identifiable, if protean, textual self, drawing on Rousseau to give her life experiences ideological value and to train her reader’s gaze on the paradoxes of her texts.1 Her fascination with Rousseau is partially explained in a letter written to her sister, Everina, in March 1787: ‘I am now reading Rousseau’s Emile’, she writes, ‘and love his paradoxes’.2 As Michèle Crogiez observes, paradox is useful to Rousseau because it can introduce ‘une apparente contradiction qui pousse l’auditeur à remettre en cause ses certitudes’ (an apparent contradiction that impels the listener to question their own certainties).3 In Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft uses the term as a synonym for ‘nonsense’, condemning Rousseau for sacrificing ‘truth to a favourite paradox’ (V, 111), but elsewhere she derides the narrow-minded readers of his Confessions who ‘rudely laugh at inconsistencies as if they were absurdities’ (VII, 229). When she read Rousseau’s works, she took pleasure in ‘concentering seeming contradictions’, and came to see paradox as the gateway to more nuanced understanding (229).4 One of the defining paradoxes of Rousseau’s oeuvre is that his political utopias depend on assimilating all human subjects to a single-minded collective, whereas his life writing reflects his commitment to living authentically in defiance of social convention. These apparent inconsistencies make his work fertile ground for Wollstonecraft to explore the challenges of her cosmopolitan ethic, including the need for critical dissent from national or cultural norms and values, and the difficulty of subordinating local and particular loyalties to the general good. This chapter focuses on Mrs Mason, the accomplished pedagogue of Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories, and the eponymous heroine of her

‘The Most Sublime Virtues’    27

first novel, Mary, a Fiction. Wollstonecraft’s approach to textual selfconstruction owes much to Rousseau, whose self-portraits are partial fictions through which he moulds the raw material of his life into ‘moral fables’ with universal significance.5 For this reason, his personae also incarnate the intertextual tensions set up in his oeuvre: Emile’s Tutor is an authoritative pedagogue committed to an ideal, whereas the Solitary Walker is an acutely sensitive misanthrope resigned to disillusionment. At first glance, Wollstonecraft’s personae likewise seem strangely dissimilar. Read intertextually, however, they represent complementary dimensions of a complex argument for personal authenticity over social conformism, and philanthropy over narrow loyalties. In Original Stories, Wollstonecraft depicts Mrs Mason as the author of the conduct-book in which she appears, blurring the line between her actual and fictional selves.6 The severity of Mrs Mason’s virtue sets her apart from Wollstonecraft’s other personae, however, and critics are often struck by her peculiar blend of charisma, coerciveness and control.7 What has not been sufficiently examined is how much Mrs Mason’s characterisation reflects Wollstonecraft’s close engagement with Francophone literature. She shares traits with the exemplary mothers found in the works of Genlis, most notably the semi-autobiographical Baronne d’Almane from Adèle et Théodore ou lettres sur l’éducation (Adèle and Théodore or letters on education) (1782),8 which Wollstonecraft found ‘wonderfully clever’.9 Mrs Mason also takes her form from Rousseau’s educational philosophy, both directly through Wollstonecraft’s reading of Emile and indirectly through Genlis’s critique of it. Mrs Mason and the Baronne d’Almane employ empirical methods reminiscent of the Tutor, a version of Rousseau and the pedagogical manifestation of an iconic authority figure who appears in various guises to superintend his utopias. The blueprint for this figure is the Legislator from The Social Contract, whose purpose is to control and assimilate each member of the demos to the General Will.10 The Baronne d’Almane and Mrs Mason are the unofficial legislators of their fictional worlds, wielding authority predicated on unassailable moral virtue. Unlike the Baronne d’Almane, however, Mrs Mason loosens her grip on her charges as they grow in moral independence, an important prerequisite for the philanthropic virtue essential to Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan ethic. The Legislator is Rousseau’s answer to the psychological truth that people love their country more ardently when it has a human face.11 For Nussbaum, in the right conditions, patriotic love can contribute to a cosmopolitan value system insofar as it can ‘cultivate an impartial altruism, by asking people to love the nation as a whole, and thus all of its people’.12 In theory, such patriotic love could drive demands for

28    Mary Wollstonecraft

a foreign policy that aligns the nation with a broader altruism compatible with world citizenship. But if this ‘altruistic emotion’ is to have ‘motivational power’, it must ‘hitch itself to the concrete’.13 We are more inclined to make sacrifices for those we love when we see them as uniquely special and somehow our ‘own’.14 From this perspective, Nussbaum reads patriotic love as erotic in character but philanthropic in its potential, a passion that can elevate and even abstract its object of desire. In her view, however, the problem with Rousseau is that he instigates a philosophical tradition, consolidated in the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte, which extends sympathy between citizens through ‘coercive homogeneity’.15 Nussbaum sees this uncritical enthralment to the nation as an undesirable form of patriotism, anathema to the cosmopolitan ideal of universal justice. Just as Price declares that ‘our first concern as lovers of our country must be to enlighten it’, so Nussbaum argues that ‘we need to cultivate the critical faculties early and continuously, and to show admiration for them, insisting that critical freedom, not herd-like obedience, is the mark of the true patriot’.16 For this reason, educational programmes should ‘begin with love’, teaching children to ‘care about the nation’, but they should also ‘introduce critical thinking early, and keep teaching it’.17 Mrs Mason embodies a similar pedagogical method, using legislator-like charisma to ignite benevolent emotions and alert her charges to social injustices; but although she never disparages love of country, her philanthropy bears no relation to national loyalties. Rousseau’s Legislator enthrals in the service of his ideal republic, but Mrs Mason’s tales typically focus on close ties (love for family or even pets) or model even more abstract forms of love (world citizenship, devotion to God). Whereas the Baronne d’Almane teaches her daughter to subordinate personal desires to the demands of Ancien Régime society, Mrs Mason says little to endorse the British social order and strives instead to attune her charges to their divinely implanted inner monitors. Attaining moral independence entails exercising not only reason but also compassion, the ‘emotions of humanity’ that draw people together across social and national boundaries (IV, 369). Since compassion suggests affective parity between human subjects, Wollstonecraft often presents private sympathies as the ground from which universal benevolence can grow. Her view of this philanthropic potential gets murkier, however, when it comes to erotic love. In Mary, published in the same year as Original Stories, she begins to confront this problem. Presenting her heroine as a fictional construct through which ‘the soul of the author is exhibited’, Wollstonecraft invites the reader to draw intertextual connections between her contemporaneous personae (I, 5). Whereas Mrs Mason is a paragon in her conduct-book

‘The Most Sublime Virtues’    29

universe, however, Mary’s acute sensibility sets her apart from the ‘misjudging crowd’, and like Rousseau’s confessional personae, she refuses to kow-tow to their narrow-minded expectations (46). Nonetheless, Wollstonecraft uses her epigraph, drawn from Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or The New Heloise) (1761), to connect Mary’s maverick ‘genius’ explicitly with virtue: ‘L’exercice des plus sublimes vertus élève et nourrit le génie’ (Practising the most sublime virtues elevates and nourishes genius) (4).18 In the context of Rousseau’s novel, one of the principal connotations of ‘sublime virtue’ is the ‘ability to surmount love’s emotional disturbances’ in the name of social duty.19 At the same time, love inspires the imagination with illusive visions of ideal beauty and goodness. Holding sway over the psyche, these illusions can transmute sensual impulses into nobler sentiments that elevate and purify the lover (although Rousseau makes it clear in Emile that he considers ‘the most sublime virtues’ to be the preserve of men). In Mary, Wollstonecraft scrutinises the paradoxical (and gendered) relationship Rousseau delineates between erotic love and philanthropic sentiments, attempting to imagine a desiring female subject whose virtue is also sublime. Trapped in an arranged marriage, Mary has a passionate but unconsummated love affair with a Rousseauvian man called Henry. Wollstonecraft uses this scenario to interrogate the erotic impulse towards virtue, examining the mechanisms that transform affective responses into moral sentiments. In an implicit critique of Rousseau’s gender politics, she dares to suggest that erotic love in women is neither solipsistic nor socially disintegrative but tends, instead, to cultivate the expansive sympathies crucial to philanthropy.

Original Stories: Wollstonecraft’s Rousseauvian Legislator In the Social Contract, Rousseau puts forward a model for an ideal democratic republic, in which the citizens’ self-love (amour-propre) is redirected towards love of the state and solidarity with their compatriots. Thanks to this emotional engineering, they are willing to give up their natural independence for the benefits of collective existence. For Nussbaum, the problem is that ‘partisans of this tradition advanced proposals for emotional solidarity without creating spaces for critical freedom’.20 Rousseau does recognise, however, that retaining some measure – or illusion – of freedom is essential to human happiness, and in their different ways, all his utopias are designed to create that illusion. In his ideal democratic republic, the citizens perceive no difference between their individual wills and the General Will of the state, which

30    Mary Wollstonecraft

is unerring and indivisible. This univocity is only possible, however, because the General Will is guided by a god-like figure, the Legislator, who persuades the discordant voices of the multitude to harmonize. The Legislator’s powers of persuasion depend on his ability to comprehend and redirect human emotion, which he uses to manoeuvre citizens towards complete psychological assimilation with the collective. Animated by an illusion of personal freedom conjured by the Legislator’s rhetoric, the citizens give themselves up to an esprit de corps that consumes and overwhelms their egos.21 Whenever Rousseau constructs a utopia, it is held together by an authority figure cut from the same cloth as the Legislator. Since he regards the family as a microcosmic state that moulds future citizens, he also places ‘legislators’ in the private realms of one-to-one tutelage or country estate. In Julie, the legislator is Wolmar, the judicious patriarch presiding over the Clarens estate. In Emile, he is the Tutor educating the eponymous protagonist.22 Both figures steer their charges onto a preconceived path of virtue but leave them with the illusion of free will.23 Ingrid Makus sums up the two most important talents of the Rousseauvian Legislator: ‘the ability to see through others, to discern what is in their hearts; and the ability to transform their hearts through deception’.24 Despite having a thorough knowledge of human nature, the Legislator must be impervious to the passions and the ordinary concerns of human existence. His demiurgic goodness makes him devote himself to the wellbeing of lesser mortals, even though his happiness does not depend on them. If the Legislator owes his ‘grand âme’ (great soul) to genuine communion with the divine, however, he also deploys religious discourse strategically, intent on awing the benighted multitude into conformity with the laws and practices that will eventually enlighten them.25 To influence others without appearing manipulative or dogmatic, he must combine superhuman omniscience with great personal magnetism and sleight of hand. The Tutor has just such a hold over Emile. Indeed, these traits characterise every legislator in Rousseau’s diverse body of works, which in turn shape Genlis and Wollstonecraft’s pedagogical alter-egos. The Tutor abstains from imparting knowledge or giving commands, leaving his pupil at liberty to learn from experience. Emile thus avoids the denaturing effects of social constraint, preserving not only his natural sense of freedom but also his innate compassion. This sense of freedom is illusory, however, because the Tutor contrives all of Emile’s experiences, controlling his environment, observing his every move and subtly engineering his actions: ‘Il n’y a point d’assujetissement si parfait que celui qui garde l’apparence de la liberté; on captive ainsi

‘The Most Sublime Virtues’    31

la volonté même’ (There is no subjection so complete as that which preserves the appearance of liberty; it is by these means even the will itself is led captive).26 Rousseau justifies this paradoxical conflation of coercion and freedom on the grounds that, in Emile’s mind, the Tutor is coextensive with the reason he teaches. His authority therefore appears to offer the same freedom as the internal authority of Emile’s underdeveloped reason and conscience. This is the pedagogical enactment of Rousseau’s claim in the Social Contract that, ‘l’obéissance à la loi qu’on s’est prescrite est liberté’ (to pay obedience only to those laws which we prescribe to ourselves, is liberty).27 If these laws express the dictates of reason, understood as the promptings of divine wisdom, the law imposes constraints only to free the subject from enslavement to their self-regarding passions. Just as the rabble needs the Legislator to persuade them to submit to this law, so Emile needs the Tutor. Controlling his pupil until he musters the strength of reason to jettison self-interest, the Tutor teaches him to direct his passions towards an idealised object of moral sentiment: his future wife, Sophie. This method enables Emile eventually to commit to monogamous marriage whilst preserving his capacity for a broader love of humankind.28 Having also travelled extensively, he reaches adulthood unfettered by national allegiances and benevolently disposed towards his fellow world citizens: ‘que m’importe où que je sois? par tout où il y a des hommes je suis chez mes fréres’ (What signifies where I live? Wherever there are men, I shall be among my brethren).29 In short, Emile can be read in some respects as a work of cosmopolitan pedagogy.30 As Halldenius has demonstrated, freedom is also central to Wollstonecraft’s conception of virtue.31 It is therefore a precondition for cultivating the philanthropy essential to her cosmopolitan ethic. Showing her debt to republican theory, Wollstonecraft emphasises that human subjects cannot attain virtue unless they can exercise their reason free from the constraints of arbitrary power. According to her rational theology, since God is coextensive with perfect reason, it follows that, ‘to be directed by one’s reason alone in whatever actions and choices one undertakes, is to act and choose virtuously’.32 But whereas ‘it is impossible to be oppressed or degraded by the authority of reason’, being ‘subjected to the will of another “fallible being” is oppression’.33 Norms and conventions fall into this ‘fallible’ category, the accumulated detritus of social pressures. At the same time, Wollstonecraft recognises the relative frailty of human reason. Although she defended the principle of universal rights, like Rousseau she doubted that an uneducated populace could internalise the rationale for democratic enfranchisement. In French Revolution, she draws an analogy between

32    Mary Wollstonecraft

human progress and ­ developing reason in children, observing that the ‘pageantry of kings’ and the ‘fopperies exhibited at courts’ have been ‘supported hitherto by childish ignorance’ (VI, 164). This ignorance is dissipating as ‘the understanding of the world approaches to manhood’, but is not yet consigned to the past (164). Wollstonecraft’s pedagogical goal was to form individuals who, by refining their passions with reason, would develop a philanthropic desire to eradicate injustice. With a degree of wishful thinking, she perceives the progress of human reason in the widespread rejection of arbitrary power during the decades leading to the Revolution: no sensible person would now regard a king as sacred; nor subjugate a woman to a vicious husband; nor argue ‘that obedience to parents should go one jot beyond the deference due to reason, enforced by affection’ (111). But just as children run wild without discipline, so the French people, drunk on their newfound liberty, exact violent retribution on their oppressors: ‘Like boys dismissed from school, they might wish to ascertain their freedom by acts of mischief; and by showing a total disregard of the arbitrary commands, that kept down their spirits without exercising their understandings’ (60). Faced with the excesses of a wronged and unreasoning multitude, Wollstonecraft concedes the need for compelling authority figures to enthral and guide them. Original Stories first appeared six years before the publication of French Revolution, but Wollstonecraft’s approach to tackling unreason varies little from her pedagogy to her politics. Imagining children whose prejudices limit their capacity to reason, she creates in Mrs Mason a figure of supreme but emphatically temporary authority. At the beginning of Original Stories, Mrs Mason takes over the education of two girls named Mary and Caroline, thought to be based on Margaret and Caroline King, Wollstonecraft’s Anglo-Irish charges during her time as a governess. As their mother neglected Mary and Caroline before her untimely death, they have ‘caught every prejudice that the vulgar casually instill’ (IV, 361). On this premise, Wollstonecraft claims to fit her conduct-book ‘to the present state of society; which obliges the author to attempt to cure those faults by reason, which ought never to have taken root in the infant mind’ (359). In her preface, she endorses Rousseau’s empirical method. Yet even as she declares that ‘knowledge should be gradually imparted, and flow more from example than teaching’, she acknowledges that ‘the way to render instruction most useful cannot always be adopted’ (359). Against Johnson’s advice, Wollstonecraft included an inflammatory passage in the Preface, in which she claims that the ‘present generation’ are incapable of effective parenting because they ‘have their own passions to combat with, and fastidious pleasures

‘The Most Sublime Virtues’    33

to pursue, neglecting those pointed out by nature’ (359). Galvanizing change means educating young people to resist the corrupting effects of their imperfect society, but regrettably, educators untouched by this corruption are few and far between. To combat this problem, Wollstonecraft creates in Mrs Mason a Legislator-like figure whose passions are directed to philanthropic ends. By telling Mary and Caroline moral tales and staging learning experiences, she cultivates their reason and awakens their dormant compassion, thereby propelling them to moral independence and altruism. Yet at first glance, Mrs Mason appears anything but benevolent. She criticises Mary and Caroline relentlessly and her affection is conditional on their ‘advancement in virtue’ (449–50). Somewhat inexplicably, the girls love and admire her despite this severity. Their self-esteem depends on her good opinion, and thus her authority over them becomes complete: ‘She was never in a passion, but her quiet steady displeasure made them feel so little in their own eyes, they wished her to smile that they might be something; for all their consequence seemed to arise from her approbation’ (388). Mrs Mason’s kinship with Rousseau’s legislators is clear: she is at once the authority figure who guides the errant will of her charges and the object of love giving human shape to the ideal of benevolence. Still, her characterisation only truly makes sense if this kinship is read in relation to Wollstonecraft’s interpretation of Genlis, who approaches teaching with ‘a “mother-knows-best” philosophy, featuring a benign but absolute authority’.34 In 1777, Genlis became governess to the twin daughters of her married lover, the Duc d’Orléans, and retired to an estate at Bellechasse to preside over her own comprehensive educational programme. Shortly afterwards, Orléans made the unprecedented decision to appoint Genlis as ‘Gouverneur’ to his sons and, as Ellen Moers puts it, the change from Gouvernante to Gouverneur was ‘as momentous in French as it is in English, for Governess is in the nursery, and Governor rules the world’.35 In her published works, Genlis praises Rousseau’s positive effect on educational practice but refutes some of his pedagogical and moral principles, alluding constantly to her experiences with her pupils to justify her positions.36 She also aligns herself with the impeccable virtue of her textual alter-egos which, for some contemporary commentators, crossed the line between discretion and downright hypocrisy. In Genlis’s eyes, however, her whitewashed personae presented no ethical dilemma. They were social necessities and useful literary devices, and, in her moral universe, the social actor retained their integrity as long as they recognised the disjunction between inner self and performance. In Adèle and Théodore, virtue comes, not from a divinely

34    Mary Wollstonecraft

implanted moral compass, but from behaviour learned and rehearsed – ­fictions practised until they become reality.37 The Baronne d’Almane’s letters focus primarily on the education of her daughter, the eponymous Adèle, whose name alludes to Genlis’s real-life charge, Adélaïde, one of Orléans’ daughters. Like the Tutor, the Baronne d’Almane concocts learning experiences for her pupils. But whereas Rousseau worries that even the most fleetingly imposed authority demands subordination devastating  to the human psyche, Genlis has the Baronne d’Almane preach virtue explicitly. Although she never places undue or capricious restraints on her children, she leaves them in no doubt of her authority, and teaches them to fear the consequences of defying her: ‘La crainte est l’estime des enfants, s’ils ne craignent pas ceux dont ils dépendent, ils les méprisent et ne les aiment point véritablement’ (That kind of fear, is the only esteem children are capable of feeling; for if they do not fear those on whom they depend, they will despise instead of loving them).38 Mrs Mason’s connection with the authority figures of Rousseau and Genlis is clear in the close watch she keeps over her charges and the unsettling mix of devotion and anxiety she thereby instils. In order to eradicate Mary and Caroline’s prejudices, we are told, ‘Mrs Mason never suffered them to be out of her sight’ (IV, 361). This feature of her character recalls the Baronne d’Almane and her disquieting aura of omniscience. For example, when Adèle attends an evening ball, she  overindulges in rich food and is duly punished by copious sickness.  The Baronne d’Almane describes this incident as a necessary experience on Adèle’s journey through temptation to self-control, but her  rebuke also warns her that she is constantly under surveillance:  ‘Ceci  doit vous  apprendre […] que rien ne peut me distraire de vous, et que même,  en ne paraissant pas vous regarder, je vous vois parfaitement’  (This will teach you […] that nothing can prevent my attention to you, and that, when I seem not to regard you, I see every thing you do).39 As Didier Masseau points out, Genlis seems here to apotheosise one of the fundamental fantasies of Enlightenment pedagogy: omnipresence and absolute transparency resulting in total knowledge of the pupil.40 The Baronne d’Almane’s acute observational powers give her an almost sinister authority, for she claims practically to read Adèle’s mind: J’ai dit à ma fille que lorsqu’elle ne me répond pas avec sincérité, je le vois clairement dans ses yeux et sur sa physionomie; et je ne la trompe point, car, lorsqu’on connaît les enfants, il est bien facile de lire sur leur visage tout ce qu’ils pensent: ainsi elle n’a jamais la tentation de me déguiser la vérité, sûre que je la pénètre toujours.41

‘The Most Sublime Virtues’    35 But I tell Adelaide, when she does not answer me with sincerity, I see it plainly in her countenance; and in truth it is so, for, when you know children thoroughly, it is very easy to read in their eyes all that they think. By this means she is never tempted to disguise the truth from me, certain that I should always penetrate through it.42

The Baronne d’Almane’s omniscience is such that, like a Rousseauvian legislator, she acquires demiurgic status that gives her ascendancy over her child and control over her fate. In this respect, she is reminiscent of the Tutor. Another ‘legislator’ figure is Rousseau’s Wolmar, the benevolent patriarch of his domestic utopia, and although Genlis rejected him as a model of perfection owing to his atheism and dispassion, the Baronne d’Almane also shares some of his legislator-like characteristics.43 Wolmar marries Julie after her love affair with her tutor, Saint-Preux, is thwarted by class barriers and parental tyranny. Years later, SaintPreux comes to live at Clarens as tutor to Julie and Wolmar’s sons. Taking both lovers under his wing, Wolmar turns what might have been a temptation to adultery into a method of ‘curing’ them of their mutual passion. Like the Legislator, he is preternaturally wise, benevolent and insightful, and he has a gift for transforming hearts and minds. This gift has a manipulative aspect, however, manifesting in covert but total control over his household. As a condition of the trust that he places in Julie and Saint-Preux, Wolmar demands transparent communication of all their thoughts and feelings. He delights in observing and analysing others – ‘J’aime à lire dans les cœurs des hommes’ (I love to read the hearts of mankind)44 – and even confesses to an eerie fantasy of transformation into ‘un œil vivant’ (a living eye).45 This recurring motif connects Wolmar’s preternatural insight with divine omniscience.46 At her wedding ceremony, Julie imagines God as an all-seeing eye reading into the depths of her heart,47 and likewise, Saint-Preux imagines Wolmar discerning his unspoken passion for Julie: ‘Je croyais voir son œil pénétrant et judicieux percer au fond de mon cœur et m’en faire rougir encore’ (I imagined that I could perceive his judicious and penetrating eye pierce to the very bottom of my soul, and make me blush again).48 In Original Stories, there seems to be a conscious echo of this motif in Wollstonecraft’s characterisation of Mrs Mason, whose penetrating stare unsettles her charges. Mary confesses to her sister that she cannot sleep because she is ‘afraid of Mrs. Mason’s eyes – would you think, Caroline, that she who looks so very good-natured sometimes could frighten one so?’ (IV, 389). Like both Wolmar and the Baronne d’Almane, Mrs Mason also demands total knowledge of her pupils. At the end of the story, when the girls leave for London, she makes

36    Mary Wollstonecraft

complete transparency a condition of their continued correspondence and friendship: Write often to me, I will punctually answer your letters; but let me have the genuine sentiments of your hearts. In expressions of affection or respect, do not deviate from truth to gain what you wish for, or to turn a period prettily. (450)

Mrs Mason’s near-omniscience combines with her role as judge and arbiter of the girls’ behaviour to give her the demiurgic authority of Rousseau’s many legislators as well as the Baronne d’Almane.49 When Wollstonecraft reconstructs these authority figures in her semi-­ autobiographical image, however, she does so partly to examine the tension set up in Rousseau’s works between freedom and conformism. This tension is especially evident in Julie, yet Wolmar represents an effort to resolve it. Using his knowledge of Julie and Saint-Preux to stage-­manage their interaction, Wolmar compels them to subordinate their desires for each other to their roles at Clarens. Under his benign but vigilant tutelage, they play their parts so perfectly that the performance comes to feel authentic, granting them some sense of fulfilment within the class-bound society that denied their union. Analogously, the Baronne d’Almane coerces Adèle to conform to accepted standards of Ancien Régime womanhood. Having submitted to an arranged marriage with a reluctant husband, the Baronne d’Almane represents the mould to which Adèle must fit herself, and whereas Julie confesses on her deathbed to long-suppressed love for Saint-Preux, the Baronne d’Almane acknowledges no such disjunction between her principles and her personhood. Genlis thus promotes a model of virtue that forms and reconciles her pupils to existing social mores and gender norms.50 Endorsing the hierarchical structure of the Ancien Régime, she equips them to thrive within it. Hence Adèle and Théodore live in a world where the peasantry are poor but industrious and apparently content with their lowly status.51 In this educational system, young women learn to control not only the degree of knowledge they display to others, but also the degree of passion they permit themselves to feel: they must ‘sachent aimer sans emportement’ (feel the passion of love without giving themselves up to enthusiasm).52 In short, the inner self is almost entirely subsumed by social performance. More disturbingly, Adèle is in thrall not only to her society but also to the Baronne d’Almane, whose maternal megalomania persists even after her daughter reaches maturity. On the point of marriage, Adèle tells her future husband that they must live with her mother or live apart, conflating filial piety with the very dependence Rousseau attributed to overt authority.

‘The Most Sublime Virtues’    37

In Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft praises Genlis’s pedagogy, but decries ‘her absurd manner of making the parental authority supplant reason. For every where does she inculcate not only blind submission to parents; but to the opinion of the world’ (V, 174). According to Wollstonecraft, even benevolent authority is potentially corruptive, which means that parental control must be finite. From this perspective, Adèle’s continued subordination to her mother makes virtue impossible. Wollstonecraft also dismisses the idea that public opinion should be a yardstick for right conduct because it effectively makes morality a relative idea – a notion she rejects.53 For these reasons, she creates in Mrs Mason a catalyst for Mary and Caroline’s progress to self-government, with the caveat that she keeps track of their moral development. As ‘candidates for [her] friendship’, a mode of relating predicated on equality, they emerge from under her watchful eye with the moral independence essential to philanthropy (IV, 449).54 As Halldenius explains, in Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft argues that ‘a person whose mind has been habituated to dependence’ will be unable ‘to see beyond personal emotional ties or self-interested gratification. She will act benevolently only when it serves her own interests or pleases the narrow circle in which she moves’.55 If women are placed on an equal footing with men, they will be free to practise reason rather than obedience. This developing reason initiates ‘the move from being swayed by self-interest and partial commitments, towards being an agent acting on principle’.56 It follows that such a principled agent will be equipped for just and benevolent (world) citizenship. This same model underpins Wollstonecraft’s pedagogy, although Mrs Mason describes the shift from self-interest to principle in religious terms, advising her pupils to emulate ‘the disinterested goodness of God’ (423). A similar model for philanthropy informs Wollstonecraft’s unfinished philosophical tale, The Cave of Fancy, published posthumously in 1798 but drafted in 1787, the year she encountered Emile. Combining the allegory of Plato’s cave with a Christian narrative of spiritual purification and Gothic fairy-tale tropes, Wollstonecraft constructs another pedagogical fantasy of total control. Making the little girl at the heart of the tale the sole survivor of a shipwreck, she kills off her parents and imagines her moral education at the hands of a wise hermit, Sagestus, who can control the spirits of the dead. These spirits undergo a kind of purgatory in the Cave of Fancy, where they ‘are confined to purify themselves from the dross contracted in their first stage of existence’ (I, 192). Wollstonecraft gives Emile’s isolation a supernatural twist by having the little girl, who is renamed Sagesta, spend her childhood in the cave, learning from encounters with spirits who narrate their

38    Mary Wollstonecraft

‘counterexemplary lives’.57 Wollstonecraft draws Sagestus’s wisdom as a jarring admixture of compassion and detachment, his curious characterisation dramatizing her investment in reconciling the two contrary mindsets. When he finds Sagesta on the beach, the ‘hoary sage’ feels some pity for the victims of the shipwreck and the tiny girl trying vainly to wake her drowned mother (I, 192). Yet he also makes a dispassionate physiognomical assessment of the dead woman’s character, concluding that ‘the orphan was not very unfortunate in having lost such a mother’ (198).58 The problem lies in the woman’s underdeveloped reason, which saw her adhere to public opinion rather than exercising her judgement. Without this crucial faculty, although her ‘compassion’ was ‘sincere’, it ‘wanted activity’ and ‘only embellished her face, or produced casual acts of charity when a moderate alms could relieve present distress’ (197). In other words, the woman could act on compassionate impulses but never developed them into a philanthropic principle of action. Like her charitable giving, her moral outlook was localised and contingent. Wollstonecraft’s narrator therefore joins with Sagestus in imagining the mother as the kind of parent who ‘inspires fond affection without respect’ for ‘they only are respectable, who consider right and wrong abstracted from local forms and accidental modifications’ (198). Maternal sentiment has no traction here; the mother is valuable only insofar as she can educate her daughter, and her inability to derive general principles from her limited experiences makes her unfit for the task. Clearly Halldenius is right to emphasise the role of reason in forming Wollstonecraft’s self-governing philanthropist; but there is still plenty of evidence that sentiment plays a central role in her model of virtue. Unlike Rousseau’s legislators, Mrs Mason is not immune to feeling. She has a painful back-story that makes her less a demiurge than a flesh-and-blood woman stricken by bereavement, including the deaths of a husband and ‘darling child’ (IV, 432). Genlis makes a panacea of virtue, depicting the Baronne d’Almane content as a virtuous wife so devoted to her arranged marriage that her husband’s initial reluctance has turned to appreciation and fondness. By contrast, Wollstonecraft emphasises that Mrs Mason’s self-control does not protect her from sorrow: ‘the death of friends I loved has so clouded my days’, she tells Mary and Caroline, ‘that neither the beams of prosperity, nor even those of benevolence, can dissipate the gloom’ (422). In the same passage, she confesses to a ‘feeling heart’ that has been ‘wounded by ingratitude; my fellow-creatures, whom I have fondly loved, have neglected me – I have heard their last sigh, and thrown my eyes round an empty world’ (422). If Mrs Mason does have a divine aspect, this partial deification arises from an emphatically human source in broken bonds of affection. By her own account, the

‘The Most Sublime Virtues’    39

need to find a way of enduring her pain is what leads her to sublimate it in religious devotion. This devotional mindset, in turn, inspires her to practise charity in the Christian sense of loving one’s neighbour and treating them with benevolence: ‘more particularly feeling the presence of my Creator, I poured out my soul before Him, and was no longer alone! I now daily contemplate His wonderful goodness; and, though at an awful distance, try to imitate Him’ (423). Moers describes Mrs Mason as ‘an awesome figure of at least equal severity with the educating heroines in Genlis’, but this is rather a broadbrush comparison.59 Tenderness may not be Mrs Mason’s strong point, but she does express compassion frequently through acts of benevolence and teaches her charges to palliate injustices. As Mitzi Myers points out, her stories ‘resonate with the themes dear to other bourgeois female writers’, including ‘the progressive humanitarian advocacy of animals, slaves, and the downtrodden or victimized of every description’.60 Perhaps more significantly, though, as well as having a good supply of tales in which wicked characters bring sorrow upon themselves, unlike her Genlisian counterparts, Mrs Mason also relates the suffering of virtuous characters beset by terrible loss and hardship, often because of the greed and cruelty of their social superiors.61 One pertinent example is Crazy Robin, who is driven mad by grief at the loss of his wife and children. He begins as a humble man who, through ‘various accidents’, falls far behind with his rent (IV, 375). Perceiving that Robin is ‘an honest man’ with a family to support, the landlord makes no demands on him; but when he is succeeded by a less benevolent heir, Robin is arrested (375). One by one, his wife and children die from over-work, starvation and poverty-related diseases. For Khin Zaw, there is a philosophical as well as political purpose for this ‘spectacle of undeserved suffering’, for it is designed to ‘enlarge[-] the heart and prompt[-] it to active benevolence’.62 By invoking compassion for Robin in her charges, Mrs Mason aims to inculcate altruistic principles of action. To prove our devotion to God, she explains, we must be moved to ‘do justice to all our fellow-creatures, and even to the brute creation’ (423). When Mary and Caroline witness a boy stealing a birds’ nest, the mother bird’s ‘intelligible tones of anguish’ awaken ‘the emotions of humanity’ (369). Actuated by compassion, Caroline buys the nest and returns it to the mother. Crucially, in the 1791 and 1796 editions, Mrs Mason describes this benevolent act as the work of ‘rational creatures’, connecting the development of virtuous principles inextricably with fellowfeeling: ‘man is allowed to ennoble his nature, by cultivating his mind and enlarging his heart. He feels disinterested love; every part of the creation affords an exercise for virtue, and virtue is ever the truest source

40    Mary Wollstonecraft

of pleasure’ (370). Mrs Mason equates love for one’s fellow creatures with love of God – indeed, in the first edition, the claim that ‘man is allowed to ennoble his nature’ contains an explicit reference to the spark of divinity in humankind: ‘man is allowed to retrace the image that God first implanted in him’ (370, n.51). This divine element in human nature makes ‘the emotions of humanity’ wellsprings of ‘disinterested love’, the philanthropy essential to Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan ethic. Mrs Mason explains that a practical way to demonstrate ‘disinterested love’ is relieving the poor. Charity is not simply a duty; it is the offspring of fellow-feeling, testifying to the connectedness of all human subjects: One being is made dependent on another, that love and forbearance may soften the human heart, and that linked together by necessity, and the exercise of the social affections, the whole family on earth might have a fellowfeeling for each other. (412)

Mrs Mason represents the ‘social affections’ with localised acts of kindness, but within the narrow bounds of the children’s experience, she also emphasises the need for love of near neighbours to expand and embrace an imagined global community. In this spirit, she allows a poor family from another county to sleep in her barn while they seek employment, and she introduces the children to a Welsh harper whose family she helped to raise from destitution.63 Moreover, she acts not simply from principle, but also because altruism is a source of pleasure: ‘she was ever ready to smile on those whom she obliged; for she loved all her fellowcreatures, and love lightens obligations’ (393). The grateful recipients of her charity in turn stress the importance of benevolence, as well as discouraging prejudice towards foreign or unfamiliar people. Caught in a sudden storm, Mrs Mason and the children are forced to take shelter in the cottage of honest Jack, a former sailor shipwrecked and lamed during the War of Independence. Partially blinded and injured in a storm, he was taken prisoner by the French, who were allies of the Americans. Even though the context of his tale is international conflict, Jack rejects the Francophobic caricatures bandied about in eighteenth-century England, instead depicting salutary benevolence between nominal enemies: ‘Yet the French have not such hard hearts as people say they have!’ (397). Languishing in an unsanitary French prison, Jack was saved by some local women, who brought the English captives broth, wine and dressings for their wounds; one even nursed him at home during an illness: ‘I for certain ought to speak well of the French; but for their kindness I should have been in another port by this time’ (398). Expressing gratitude to the Frenchwomen and to Mrs Mason, Jack hopes to emulate their philanthropy: ‘We catch fish for

‘The Most Sublime Virtues’    41

Madam, and I watch for a storm, hoping some time or other to be as kind to a poor perishing soul as she has been to me’ (398). Mrs Mason’s authoritative and all-pervasive presence makes her a Rousseauvian legislator reminiscent of the Baronne d’Almane. Drawing on Rousseau, however, Wollstonecraft makes freedom as central to her pedagogy as it is to her republican politics and feminist moral philosophy. Consequently, Mrs Mason relinquishes control of her charges as their reason strengthens and they begin to feel the ‘emotions of humanity’ (369). Working together, these divinely implanted attributes enable Mary and Caroline to reject self-interested passions in favour of philanthropic sentiments. This model of virtue encourages the girls to identify and redress injustice at the local level, but Wollstonecraft also has Mrs Mason emphasise the ubiquity of human benevolence regardless of culture or creed. In doing so, she underlines the emotional parity of human subjects and raises the prospect of a self-perpetuating, borderdissolving practice of philanthropy. At the same time, Wollstonecraft’s pedagogical strategy presents a contrasting reality of lives blighted by cold hearts and conflict. Mrs Mason combats this state of affairs by fostering altruism and cooperation. Yet she is impeccably virtuous in part because she is ‘weaned from the world’ by pain and loss (422). In this pedagogical incarnation, at least, the female philanthropist is cut off from the ordinary ties of human existence.

Mary, a Fiction: Erotic Love and Philanthropy In Mary, the eponymous heroine represents the self-government and benevolence that Mrs Mason strives to instil. Her impressive ‘thinking powers’ give her the moral independence to be reliant on her ‘own faculties, not subjugated to opinion’ (I, 5). Mary’s exceptionality lies not simply in acute intellect but also in her ‘philanthropy’, which points to her kinship with Mrs Mason (21). An ‘instrument of good’, Mrs Mason ‘give[s] bread to the hungry, physic to the sick, comfort to the afflicted’ (IV, 373). Similarly, the adolescent Mary practises ‘the most rigid oeconomy’ in order to give to the poor (I, 17). But whereas Mrs Mason is a widow ‘weaned’ from close personal affections, Mary spends most of the novel suffering for her love affair with Henry, which pits her against the conventional morality of her patriarchal society. Challenging Rousseau’s misogynist portrayal of unconstrained female desire as immoderate and corruptive, Wollstonecraft uses Mary’s experiences to suggest that female erotic love can inspire altruistic moral sentiments. Yet despite portraying her alter-ego as both a desiring subject and

42    Mary Wollstonecraft

a consummate philanthropist, she struggles to imagine her pursuit of an authentic emotional life ending in fulfilment. Wollstonecraft devotes considerable space to describing Mary’s charitable acts, the practical manifestation of her love for humankind. In line with Wollstonecraft’s belief that philanthropy has its origins in close familial bonds, Mary’s benevolence originates in her care for her sickly mother, which ‘exercised her compassion so continually, that it became more than a match for self-love, and was the governing propensity of her heart through life’ (11). By the time she reaches adolescence, she is extending this compassion across the social chasm to ‘beggars’ (12) and ‘poor fishermen’ (15), saving money to bring them relief by denying herself ‘every childish gratification’ and even basic necessities (15). This ascetic mastery of her ‘appetites and whims’ gives her an almost saint-like selflessness, carried to the point that, ‘when her understanding or affections had an object, she almost forgot she had a body which required nourishment’ (17). Mary is a philanthropist in the sense that she is wealthy and openhanded, but also in the sense that she practises beneficence beyond her immediate circle: Her benevolence, indeed, knew no bounds; the distress of others carried her out of herself; and she rested not till she had relieved or comforted them. The warmth of her compassion often made her so diligent, that many things occurred to her, which might have escaped a less interested observer. (16)

Wollstonecraft thus depicts her philanthropic alter-ego as superior to the average person not only in sentiment but also in self-control. It is as if universal benevolence requires a certain immunity to the ordinary concerns of human existence. Significantly, though, for Mary administering to the needy is also a source of emotional sustenance and delight: ‘Her heart yearned for them, and would dance with joy when she had relieved their wants, or afforded them pleasure’ (15). If this immense capacity for fellow-feeling moves Mary to countermand social and economic injustice, it also leaves her emotionally vulnerable. Wollstonecraft’s characterisation of Mary intensifies the melancholy fleetingly exposed in Mrs Mason, primarily because Mary has an unbounded capacity to love that heightens the pain she feels when love is disappointed. Consistently thwarted in her attempts at emotional selfrealisation, she echoes Mrs Mason as she exclaims: ‘Too well have I loved my fellow creatures! I have been wounded by ingratitude’ (57). Not only are the recipients of Mary’s charity often ungrateful, she has a husband who can offer her neither sexual fulfilment nor supportive companionship. At the beginning of the novel, she is forced into a mercenary marriage with the son of an aristocrat from a neighbouring estate. When he

‘The Most Sublime Virtues’    43

sets off on the Grand Tour, she travels abroad with her ailing friend Ann – based on Wollstonecraft’s dear friend Fanny Blood  – in the hope that warmer climes will improve her health. Like Fanny, Ann dies in Portugal, and Mary finds consolation in her love for Henry. Awkward and flawed, he has also fallen prey to the errors of an aberrant imagination, but he has a distinctive ‘genius’ that appreciates Mary’s uncommon attributes (64). He is also dying of consumption. Towards the end of the novel, he succumbs to his illness, and Mary’s husband – a shallow, empty-headed aristocrat – calls her home to a loveless marriage that makes her ‘wish, involuntarily, that the earth would open and swallow her’ (72). Mary’s anguish is symptomatic of patriarchal oppression that alienates women from their natural selves, and like Rousseau’s confessional personae, she responds to this threat of self-alienation with more than usual sensitivity. By thus subjecting an exceptional woman to an unexceptional female fate, Wollstonecraft makes her semi-­ autobiographical fiction surpass personal disclosure or self-exculpation. In doing so, she attacks the patriarchal system upheld in Book V of Emile, where Rousseau depicts women as both highly sexed and innately duplicitous. His Everywoman, Sophie, is an instinctive tease, seductive but programmed by nature to play hard to get. Rousseau concludes that women’s ‘dangerous, heterogeneous sexuality must be kept chaste and confined to marriage’.64 In the domestic realm, these ‘caretakers of affectivity, desire, and the body’ can redirect their energies towards wifely and maternal devotion.65 Constrained by the tyranny of their fragile public reputations, women must accept that freedom and personal authenticity are exclusively male privileges. In Mary – and later in Rights of Woman  – Wollstonecraft defends women’s right to live authentically. Even as she rejects Emile, however, she remains ‘half in love’ with Rousseau.66 Not only in her novels but consistently throughout her oeuvre, she makes Julie the lens through which to examine the contradictory imperatives of fidelity to self and responsibility to the collective. Nussbaum finds Rousseau’s ideal of ‘political love’ lacking because it ‘was not quirky, personal, like the love of one individual for another; instead, everything was engineered so as to produce people who loved and thought alike and experienced mass emotions’.67 This emotional engineering contributes to the ‘totalitarian overtones’ others have found in Rousseau’s utopias.68 There is no question, however, that the drive towards homogeneity in his works jars with his status as ‘an originating theorist of authenticity’.69 This tension in his works explains why, in Julie, there is always a hint of trouble in Wolmar’s domestic paradise. Julie and Saint-Preux’s love affair can be read as part of a Rousseauvian quest to live authentically, and its renunciation reflects their realisation

44    Mary Wollstonecraft

that virtue involves self-denial for the good of the social order. In Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft is torn between scepticism about the rewards of erotic love and infuriation at the misogynist control and demonisation of female desire. In her novels, however, she returns persistently to the tension between virtue and erotic love, picking at the knotty problem of how desiring (female) subjects can live philanthropically. As Wollstonecraft observes, Rousseau insists throughout his oeuvre on ‘the transient nature of love’ (V, 159), a view Julie puts forward in a letter to Saint-Preux: ‘Il n’y a point de passion qui nous fasse une si forte illusion que l’amour […] il s’use avec la jeunesse, il s’efface avec la beauté, il s’éteint sous les glaces de l’âge’ (There is no passion whatever which exposes us to such delusion as that of love […] it glows in youth, it grows faint with decaying beauty, it is utterly extinguished by the frost of age).70 Similarly, Wollstonecraft claims in Rights of Woman that ‘love, from its very nature, must be transitory’ (98), calling it ‘the most evanescent of all passions’ (96). But neither she nor Rousseau doubts the power of love while it lasts, nor its capacity to inspire virtue in the right conditions.71 Crucially, Wollstonecraft follows Rousseau in connecting love with the creative imagination, extolled in his works as a means to moral insight and self-solace. As Taylor explains, in the eighteenth century the imaginative faculty was often considered ‘a fount of true selfhood’, and depicted in religious discourse as ‘a psychic pathway between humanity and the divine’.72 Her seminal work has demonstrated that the ‘epistemic impulse’ towards God in Wollstonecraft’s writing is ‘essentially imaginative and erotic in character’, and her game-changing insight is that ‘Wollstonecraft’s ideas about sexual love were not freestanding but embedded in a universalist ethical creed, which in her case meant in her idiosyncratic brand of enlightened Christianity’.73 Compellingly, Taylor argues that we should read ‘erotic attachments’ in Wollstonecraft’s works as ‘modes of psycho-ethical relating – to oneself as well as to others – with transcendent significance’.74 Although she traces this erotic element to the Christian Platonist influence on Unitarian thought, she also emphasises the pervasiveness of the platonic eros in the literature of the period.75 She draws particular attention to Milton’s distinction between ‘carnal pleasure’ and ‘true love’, which ‘refines/The thoughts and heart enlarges, hath his seat/In Reason and is judicious, is the scale/By which to Heav’nly love thou may’st ascend’.76 In other words, without the debasing effects of sexual passion, earthly love can reach towards the divine. Rousseau brought this Miltonic conception of love to Julie, in which his heroine describes the feelings she shares with Saint-Preux in

‘The Most Sublime Virtues’    45

­ evotional terms as a ‘feu sacré’ (sacred fire) that inspires ‘l’amour des d sublimes vertus’ (love for the sublimest virtue).77 Yet she can be virtuous only by sublimating erotic love and directing her illimitable sensibility to the creation of a domestic utopia. Faced in fleeting moments of lucidity with her unaltered but hopeless love for Saint-Preux, Julie concludes that happiness can exist only in the imagination: ‘Le pays des chimères est en ce monde le seul digne d’être habité, et tel est le néant des choses humaines, qu’hors l’Etre existant par lui-même il n’y a rien de beau que ce qui n’est pas’ (The world of fancy, therefore, the land of chimeras, is the only world worthy to be inhabited; and such is the inanity of human enjoyments that, except that Being which is self-existent, there is nothing delightful but that which has no existence at all).78 At the end of the novel, Julie sacrifices her life to save her son, and several critics have speculated that what looks like the ultimate expression of maternal altruism is, in fact, the fulfilment of a death-wish.79 As Susan Moller Okin observes, Julie is Rousseau’s heroine ‘because in spite of her rigid and repressive upbringing and her love of virtue, she is passionate and, like the original Héloïse, “made for love”’.80 Paradoxically, her loving heart invests her with an ideal of sublime virtue but, in the earthbound world of the novel, she can reach for this ideal only by constraining her feelings to the point of sanctification in death. Like Julie, Mary finds that her ‘feelings do not accord with the notion of solitary happiness’ (46); she ‘cannot live without loving’ (68).81 Taylor’s analysis focuses on the ‘heavenward’ trajectory of Wollstonecraft’s platonic eroticism, but it is worth remembering that she brought this same perfectibilism to her vision of earthly life: originating in intimate bonds of affection, moral sentiments inspire disinterested benevolence on a universal scale.82 For this reason, although there is much emphasis in Wollstonecraft’s first novel on transcendent emotion, Mary’s conception of the divine derives from her experiences of earthly love: ‘In a state of bliss, it will be the society of beings we can love, without the alloy that earthly infirmities mix with our best affections, that will constitute great part of our happiness’ (I, 46). Once again invoking Milton, Wollstonecraft has Mary conceptualise her love for Henry, not as a temptation to infidelity, but as a spur to philanthropic sentiments: My affections are involuntary – yet they can only be fixed by reflection, and when they are they make quite a part of my soul, are interwoven in it, animate my actions, and form my taste: certain qualities are calculated to call forth my sympathies, and make me all I am capable of being. The governing affection gives its stamp to the rest – because I am capable of loving one, I have that kind of charity to all my fellow-creatures which is not easily provoked.

46    Mary Wollstonecraft Milton has asserted, That earthly love is the scale by which to heavenly we may ascend. (46)

Here Mary rejects Henry’s suggestion that she stay open to developing affection for her husband, insisting that her instinctive ‘affections’ stem from sympathetic identification with ‘certain qualities’ in her loved ones. These qualities are compatible with virtue because they allow her to fulfil her innate moral potential, ‘all [she is] capable of being’. Although her love for Henry is adulterous (in spirit if not in fact), she regards her capacity to love him as the source of ‘charity to all [her] fellowcreatures’, the philanthropic virtue that Rousseau called ‘sublime’. From this perspective, the most sublime virtue comes not from suppressing erotic love, but from authentic experience of it. In The Cave of Fancy, Wollstonecraft sketches a precursor to Mary’s love triangle in the life story of a female spirit ostensibly summoned as a ‘warning voice’ against excessive romantic feeling (200). Like Julie, this spirit was married to a benevolent husband lacking the finely tuned sensibilities that characterised his wife and bound her emotionally to a man of feeling. The spirit prefaces her story with a conventional injunction to let feeling ‘be reined in by principles’, but her narrative often blurs the distinction between them (200). She also resembles Mary in her tendency to describe moral action in the language of love and can be read as a ghostly forebear of Wollstonecraft’s textual persona. Connecting her adulterous passion with the divine in human nature, the spirit describes it as the motive force for disinterested virtue: ‘if virtue inspired love, love gave new energy to virtue, and absorbed every selfish passion’ (203). Like Mrs Mason and Mary, the spirit found romantic fulfilment impossible: the lover died, removing the risk of sexual infidelity and leaving her to idealise him without guilt. In the Cave of Fancy, however, she has discovered how she neglected philanthropic action whilst she ‘fostered a devouring flame’ (206). Like Julie, she has also come to consider erotic love an illusion dispelled by age and familiarity: Worthy as the mortal was I adored, I should not long have loved him with the ardour I did, had fate united us, and broken the delusion the imagination so artfully wove. His virtues, as they now do, would have extorted my esteem; but he who formed the human soul, only can fill it, and the chief happiness of an immortal being must arise from the same source as its existence. (206)

From this perspective, philanthropy appears to depend on renouncing erotic fantasy. As Kari E. Lokke rightly observes, however, ‘the starkness of Wollstonecraft’s moralistic conclusion’ is ‘challenged by the powerful eroticism of [the spirit’s] earlier vision of ecstatic union in death with her beloved’.83

‘The Most Sublime Virtues’    47

Crucially, Wollstonecraft connects the spirit’s experience of erotic love with knowledge of the divine: I had seen the divinity reflected in a face I loved; I had read immortal characters displayed on a human countenance, and forgot myself whilst I gazed. I could not think of immortality, without recollecting the ecstacy I felt, when my heart first whispered to me that I was beloved; and again did I feel the sacred tie of mutual affection; fervently I prayed to the father of mercies; and rejoiced that he could see every turn of a heart, whose movements I could not perfectly understand. (205)

In this passage replete with religious allusions – ‘divinity’, ‘immortality’, ‘sacred tie’ – the spirit depicts her ‘ecstacy’ as the precursor to philanthropic action. Finding a weeping girl on the heath, she tended to her sick mother and, from that moment, she realised that her life could be ‘enlivened by active benevolence’ (206). By the end of her story, she appears to concede that her lover’s perfection was a figment of her imagination or ‘fancy’.84 In Wollstonecraft’s tale, however, the Cave of Fancy is literally the seat of wisdom as well as a conduit to divine bliss, and even as the spirit laments that fantasies of love inhibit social utility, she represents them as wellsprings of altruism. For Lokke, Wollstonecraft’s tale ‘founders on this conflict between erotic vision and ethical dictum’.85 Evidently, she was torn in her early work between rejecting erotic passion and investing it with philanthropic potential. According to Julie Carlson, what sets Mary apart from The Cave of Fancy is Wollstonecraft’s ‘explicit challenge’ to the ‘conventional morality regarding love’ that the spirit both advances and undermines.86 Implicitly condemning Julie’s decision to renounce Saint-Preux, Mary declares loveless marriage immoral: ‘Could she set a seal to a hasty vow, and tell a deliberate lie; promise to love one man, when the image of another was ever present to her – her soul revolted’ (42). Fulfilling her marriage vows will demand a lifetime of insincerity, regarded by Rousseau as anathema to masculine virtue but essential to its feminine counterpart, which he makes synonymous with reputation. Wollstonecraft rejects this double standard, identifying sincerity as a keystone of virtue in all human subjects. In Portugal, Mary encounters a party of conventional women who disapprove of her free-spiritedness, but she dismisses them as ‘shackled with a set of notions concerning propriety, the fitness of things for the world’s eye, trammels which always hamper weak people’ (30). Suggesting that her ‘tumultuous passions’ issue from the same divinely implanted source as her moral intuition, Mary pits both against ‘the maxims of worldly wisdom’ and ‘the cold dictates of worldly prudence’:

48    Mary Wollstonecraft 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? it is ever hostile and armed against the feeling heart! (46–7)

Self-esteem demands self-government, allegiance to the ‘internal monitor’. Connecting ‘spirit’ and ‘conscience’ with her ‘feeling heart’, Mary here dissolves the distinction between emotional experience and moral truth, and she gives them both an ethical magnitude that exceeds the limitations of her society and era.87 As Mary sails home from Portugal, Wollstonecraft deploys pathetic fallacy to depict her alter-ego’s virtue as sublime. More importantly, she makes this sublimity Rousseauvian insofar as Mary’s virtue is both philanthropic and inspired by apprehension of the divine through the awe-inspiring spectacle of nature. Caught in a violent storm, a tremendous display of ‘contending elements’, Mary puts her faith in God and remains calm: ‘In a little vessel in the midst of such a storm she was not dismayed; she felt herself independent’ (50). This imperviousness to danger gives her a grandeur which, Wollstonecraft implies, surpasses earthly concerns and rises towards God. Significantly, however, her serenity also allows her to redirect her energies to the survivors of a shipwreck, including ‘one poor woman, who fainted when she was hauled on board’, and who turns out to be a widow who lost her only surviving child to the storm (51). Having given way temporarily to anxiety, Mary regains her calm after soothing and caring for the woman, efforts which she finds have ‘gratified her benevolence’ (51). Here the ‘emotions of humanity’ (compassion, tenderness) inspire disinterested virtue. At the same time, Wollstonecraft’s brief – and supercilious – sketch of the bereaved mother makes it clear that Mary’s extraordinary selflessness comes from directing (com)passion with ‘thinking powers’ (5). As Julie Kipp has demonstrated, eighteenth-century philosophers often cited mother love as definitive evidence of the human capacity for altruism. The mother who ran into a burning building (or, like Julie, jumped into a lake) to save her child was proof that ‘human sympathies served as an antidote to self-love’, and the mother–child bond was therefore a perfect trope for envisaging a ‘civil society characterized by an harmonious relationship between the individual and the larger social group’.88 In Mary, however, the mother’s grief is initially held back by her instinct for selfpreservation, and then – Wollstonecraft hints – overindulged: ‘Full of her own danger, she scarcely thought of her child till that was over; and then she gave way to boisterous emotions’ (53). The ensuing c­ ommentary on

‘The Most Sublime Virtues’    49

Mary’s attempts to offer religious comfort seems designed both to reinforce our impression of her benevolence and to attribute the woman’s comparative self-absorption to her untutored intellect: Mary endeavoured to calm her at first, by sympathizing with her; and she tried to point out the only solid source of comfort; but in doing this she encountered many difficulties; she found her grossly ignorant, yet she did not despair: and as the poor creature could not receive comfort from the operations of her own mind, she laboured to beguile the hours which grief made heavy, by adapting her conversation to her capacity. (53)

If the patronising attitude to an uneducated mother’s grief undercuts the emphasis on compassion (a problem to which we shall return in Chapter 3), the intended meaning is nonetheless clear: Mary has achieved sublime virtue by combining her acute capacity to feel with reason, which supports sound theological principles and altruistic action. Yet even as Mary takes comfort from the practice of benevolence, she reflects on her longing for emotional fulfilment with an object of love: I try to pierce the gloom, and find a resting-place, where my thirst of knowledge will be gratified, and my ardent affections find an object to fix them. Every thing material must change; happiness and this fluctating principle is not compatible. Eternity, immateriality, and happiness, – what are ye? How shall I grasp the mighty and fleeting conceptions ye create? (52)

Described in a subsequent chapter as a ‘forlorn wanderer’ (54), Mary can find no ‘resting-place’ because her pursuit of earthly happiness is as unrelenting as it is futile, a means to make the ‘panting soul push forward, and live in futurity’ (52). As Taylor observes, ‘Mary knows that love, illusory and unrealisable in its earthly form, will transmute into the verities of eternal bliss’.89 In the meantime, philanthropy is both the natural outgrowth of her compassionate nature and her only remaining consolation. When her ‘loved Ann’ dies, she succumbs to depression (58). Only her commitment to charitable acts prevents her from becoming reclusive: ‘a thick gloom spread itself over her mind: but did not make her forget the very beings she wished to fly from’ (58). Instead of seeking solitude, Mary directs her energies towards relieving an impoverished family. Similarly, following Henry’s death in the penultimate chapter and her subsequent reunion with her husband, she finds solace in benevolence, bringing about what distributive justice she can by dividing her country estate into small farms. In her first novel, then, Wollstonecraft implicitly critiques Rousseau by making ‘the most sublime virtues’ incompatible with conformity to an unjust social system. Although Mary never consummates her love for

50    Mary Wollstonecraft

Henry, she never repents of it either. In her eyes, her patriarchal society exacts compromises and deceptions from women that are literally souldestroying, including the suppression of erotic desires that derive from and support her apprehension of virtue. Mary lets herself be guided by her moral sentiments, trusting to the ‘internal monitor’ that connects her with God (47). The purity of these moral sentiments is guaranteed by her benevolence, which is only strengthened by her experience of love. As in Original Stories, however, Wollstonecraft yokes female philanthropy inextricably with personal loss. Wollstonecraft’s multiple semi-autobiographical alter-egos demonstrate that, although her cosmopolitan ethic owes much to Price, Rousseau’s works are the prism inflecting her attempts to resolve its paradoxes. Her personae can seem contradictory until one reads them as rhetorical standpoints, born of the imperative to communicate effectively with a society perceived as flawed and hostile, but intended as aspects of a more complex argument developed at the intertextual level. Wollstonecraft’s transnational literary influences are also apparent in her debt to Genlis: Mrs Mason is a literary descendent of the Baronne d’Almane who takes her form as much from the Rousseauvian legislator as from Genlis’s experiences as an educator. But while the Baronne d’Almane exercises an overt and absolute authority over her daughter, advocating self-conscious role-play which blurs social performance with reality, Mrs Mason inculcates self-government and reliance on the divinely implanted internal monitor. Simultaneously performing and repudiating the authority of Rousseau’s legislators, she is the loved object that humanises the moral imperative to philanthropy. Yet even though Mary and Caroline’s progress to active benevolence begins with their attachment to Mrs Mason, she also encourages them to develop their reason, so that they come to act benevolently from principle as well as devotion. Wollstonecraft gives this benevolence a distinctly cosmopolitan aspect, explicitly debunking the demonisation of foreigners and connecting charitable deeds with the broader principle of love for humankind. If Wollstonecraft takes pedagogical inspiration from Emile, in Mary she also critiques Rousseau’s gender politics, resisting his claims that female virtue was coextensive with public reputation rather than righteous moral conduct. Constructing an alter-ego who strives to live in tune with the promptings of her internal monitor, Wollstonecraft also invokes Julie to tackle the quintessential Rousseauvian conflict between authenticity and responsibility to the collective. Defying patriarchal convention, Mary implies that her love for Henry actually intensifies the expansive sympathies that move her to benevolence and lift her mind towards

‘The Most Sublime Virtues’    51

God. Paradoxically, given her conflicting textual guises, Wollstonecraft advocates sincerity even at the risk of social ostracism. Her ethical project emerges as a commitment to self-realisation over social conformity, an attempt to establish a continuum between social actor and inner self. Sincere self-expression allows the subject to develop not only their reason but also their ‘emotions of humanity’ (IV, 369). These latter are the innate sympathies that make it possible for us to extend compassion to human subjects beyond the barriers of nation, culture or creed, and to act altruistically from sentiment as well as principle. For Wollstonecraft, this disinterested love of humankind represents the most sublime form of virtue, and it can thrive only if both men and women are free to live and love as they choose, acting in concert with the divine spark implanted in every human soul. Yet in both Original Stories and Mary, the lives of her philanthropic personae are shaped by lost or abortive love. While she defends women’s right to desire, she seems unable to imagine its fulfilment as part of her construction of a philanthropic female subject. Nine years later, in Short Residence and Wrongs of Woman, she would revise her self-portraiture to incorporate the possibility of erotic fulfilment, but these early alter-egos can find solace only in pious resignation. Erotic love might inspire love of humankind, but there is no model in Wollstonecraft’s early works for their enduring coexistence.

Chapter 2

‘Original Spirit’: Translating the Maternal Educator

Mrs Mason is not the only maternal educator in Wollstonecraft’s early works. She has a counterpart in Mrs Jones, who also articulates many of Wollstonecraft’s pedagogical principles. Mrs Jones is distinct, however, because she has a German foremother: Christian Gotthilf Salzmann’s Sophie Herrmann. In the same year as she published Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft translated Salzmann’s Moralisches Elementarbuch  into Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children. In doing so, she anglicised his maternal educator and established connections between her pedagogical practices and those of her autofictional persona in Original Stories. As Chapter 1 has demonstrated, Wollstonecraft appropriates and transforms material from foreign source texts; her translations are the most overt manifestation of this writing practice. Just as her textual personae should be read as different sides of her Rousseauvian selfportrait, so her translation of Salzmann’s Elementarbuch should be read as a creative work that speaks to her other texts. Sophie Herrmann becomes Mrs Jones, another mouthpiece for Wollstonecraft’s developing feminism and philanthropic philosophy. Recalling Mrs Mason, Mrs Jones engages in instructive dialogue with a number of other characters, each of whom amplifies the subtly politicised voice of the ideal maternal educator. Historically, translation has been associated with inauthenticity – with the distortion or even betrayal of an original text. In recent years, however, translation theorists have sought to reclaim the discourse of translation, celebrating the creative rewriting of texts in new cultural contexts or in response to political and aesthetic agendas,1 and examining how this rewriting can grant the translator power to ‘effect cultural change’ and ‘penetrate reified worldviews’.2 In common with many writers of the period, Wollstonecraft demonstrates just such a creative and ideologically engaged approach to translation. In her Advertisement to Elements, she states that, although she ‘term[s] it a translation’, she does ‘not pretend

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to assert that it is a literal one’ (II, 5). On the contrary, she suppresses and reworks many aspects of her source text, as well as interpolating her own material, both to domesticate the translation for her English readership, and to ‘give it the spirit of an original’ (5). For this professionally confident Wollstonecraft, translation presents an opportunity to innovate, to assert her critical acumen and to comment on the different cultural identities she perceived in the nations of ­eighteenth-century Europe. In her transformation of Salzmann’s text, she effectively engages in an international debate on education and its role in establishing moral principles. Her translation invests these principles with a subtly radical politics that chimes with the rest of her oeuvre, as well as advancing the philanthropic principle first expressed in Thoughts. Moreover, although she and Salzmann share similar pedagogical convictions, her nascent feminism is evident in the primacy she gives to female intellect in general and to maternal educators in particular.

Wollstonecraft and Eighteenth-Century Translation Let us first consider the gender politics of translation in Wollstonecraft’s era. As Sherry Simon has demonstrated, for centuries translation was regarded as an inferior art form, and its inferiority often expressed with feminine imagery. Translators and their works were handmaidens called to serve the original author and his text. They were weaker, derivative – and inevitably unfaithful.3 In the mid-seventeenth century, scholars from the newly formed Académie française made a virtue of this infidelity, promoting translational practices which brought foreign texts in line with neo-classical principles dominant in French literature. The resulting interventionist strategies, in which whole sections of source texts were excised or adapted, also found favour in Britain. ‘Domesticating’ foreign texts became a common and accepted practice which endured into the eighteenth century. As Julie Candler Hayes has demonstrated, the line between author and translator was often unclear and translations were frequently published as original works with no mention of their source texts.4 Enlightenment intellectuals such as Turgot and Diderot did put the case for translations that bore witness to their foreign sources but, as creative innovation became increasingly prized, interventionism also found renewed cultural currency. In the course of the century, enthusiasm grew for literature that seemed to express original thought and literary works were disparaged for imitation. Edward Young, whom Wollstonecraft admired, complains in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) that literary ‘Imitators only give us a

54    Mary Wollstonecraft

sort of Duplicates of what we had, possibly much better, before’, while ‘knowledge and genius, are at a stand’.5 By contrast, ‘Originals are, and ought to be, great Favourites, for they are great Benefactors; they extend the Republic of Letters, and add a new province to its dominion’.6 In Wollstonecraft’s era, few translators articulated coherent and detailed strategies for their work, but there is evidence that many took a creative approach to their art. In his Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791), Alexander Fraser Tytler proposes ‘a perpetual contest of genius’ between translator and author.7 He argues that the translator should expunge or alter ‘low images and puerile allusions’, and other features regarded as defects.8 This ‘contest’ is supposed to refine the source text, but also gives the translator some creative freedom. The translator’s goal is to effect a ‘difficult union of ease with fidelity’.9 To do this, he must ‘adopt the very soul of his author, which must speak through his own organs’, so that he becomes a conduit for the spirit of the source text.10 In spite of this image of authorial possession, the logic of Tytler’s metaphor reasserts the translator’s agency. The author ‘speak[s] through’ the translator’s vocal organs, but the ‘contest’ between them suggests that both make their voices heard. Each voice adapts to the ‘genius’ of the other. At times, they speak in uneasy unison. This model of competing voices is reminiscent of Barbara Godard’s theory of feminist translation in which a ventriloquist translator speaks through the author (her dummy) by transforming his language.11 Feminist translators practise creative intervention – what Godard calls ‘womanhandling’ the text.12 Their strategies aim to highlight or redress patriarchal biases and to disrupt dominant discourses that elide or distort the experiences of women. Rejecting the self-effacing, ‘ladylike’ rhetoric of so many translational prefaces, feminist translators choose to foreground their interventionism.13 As Godard puts it, the ‘feminist translator, affirming her critical difference [...] flaunts the signs of her manipulation of the text’.14 In her ventriloquist model, the translator modulates the authorial voice so that it bears traces of her own. Such traces might manifest as excisions, interpolations, stylistic changes or even thinly veiled textual self-constructions, all of which amount to critical commentaries on the source text. Tytler and Godard write from very different ideological standpoints, but the fact they imagine translation in comparable terms suggests that eighteenthcentury translational practices could enable the ‘womanhandling’ of male-authored source texts. Where modern feminist translators proclaim their creative input, however, their eighteenth-century counterparts often translated anonymously or resorted to the cryptic attribution ‘By a Lady’. This a­ pparent

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reticence has led many scholars to suggest that translation enabled women to engage critically with the authoritative texts of the period without laying claim to the intellect arrogated to men and casting doubts on their modesty. Since translation has traditionally been viewed as a reproductive – as opposed to creative – practice, women translators could sidestep accusations of hubris or impropriety.15 As Candler Hayes points out, however, a significant percentage of women translators were also authors in their own right. Many put their names to their translations or identified themselves in advertisements that referred to previous original publications.16 In fact, apart from Frances Burney, almost every major eighteenth-century woman writer published translations as precursors or complements to her other works.17 Taken together, their prefaces and letters reveal a complex array of motivations and agendas; their translational strategies, moreover, are rarely monolithic. Nonetheless, it is clear that – whatever some claimed in their prefaces – a large number of women did not consider translation the merely imitative, demure alternative to authorship. Take the bluestocking classicist, Elizabeth Carter, who translated from Latin and Greek and who, after 1738, transformed classical texts into works of piety.18 By altering her source texts to promote her Christian values, Carter asserted moral superiority over some of the greatest male authors of Western history. In her prefaces, however, she presents her project in quite a different light, describing her 1758 translation of the works of Epictetus as ‘pretty strictly literal’ and explaining that ‘it seemed necessary, upon the whole, to preserve the original Spirit, the peculiar Turn and characteristic Roughness of the Author’.19 Carter’s preface exemplifies the disingenuous humility adopted by many women translators in the period to comply with conventional standards of modesty or excuse interventionism. In her version of the memoirs of Ninon de l’Enclos, Elizabeth Griffith acknowledges that she translated ‘in such a free manner as one tells a story or repeats a conversation’, but attributes her strategy to her imperfect command of French and efforts to ‘catch the spirit’ of the text.20 Going further, Elizabeth Inchbald openly admits to creating her own version of August von Kotzebue’s Das Kind der Liebe (1791). Confessing that her Lovers’ Vows (1798) departs from its source text, she rejects ‘mere verbal translation’ as ‘tedious and vapid’, and thereby proves that, in the case of translation, women could and did flaunt their infidelity.21 Wollstonecraft was just such a translator, although her willingness to acknowledge her interventionism seems to have grown with time. When she became a professional (re)writer, she was learning German and Italian, but still most proficient in French. She appears to have relied on dictionaries and grammar books to decipher the gist of foreign

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texts before polishing her translations for publication. Her method was not foolproof – she had to abandon a translation from Italian because she found both the manuscript and idioms indecipherable – but it was a vital part of her autodidacticism. She chose as her first source text Jacques Necker’s De l’importance des opinions religieuses (1788). Her translation, Of the Importance of Religious Opinions (1788), was published anonymously shortly before her Female Reader (1789) appeared under the pseudonym ‘Mr Cresswick, Teacher of Elocution’. Anonymity and pseudonymity are typically interpreted as attempts to avoid the public gaze; but, if this was Wollstonecraft’s motive, it seems unlikely she would have acknowledged her authorship of Thoughts or Original Stories, both published around the same time. In fact, she seems to have regarded the translational process as an opportunity to make contact with the authors of her source texts. In 1788, Everina was living in Paris, and Wollstonecraft charged her with finding out as much as possible about Necker – ‘the character of the man, in domestic life and public estimation &c and the opinion the French have of his literary abilities’.22 Although Wollstonecraft was later critical of Necker, at this stage she was eager to correspond with him, giving Everina urgent instructions: ‘I [...] enclose a letter for M. Necker, which I request you immediately, without delay, to deliver yourself to M. Laurent [...] do not lose time’.23 With such overtures to leading public figures, Wollstonecraft sought to elbow her way into the upper echelons of French intellectual life. Be that as it may, in her Advertisement to Religious Opinions, Wollstonecraft adopts the time-honoured rhetoric of service to the author. She confesses to taking ‘Liberties’ with her source text, but attributes her strategy to eagerness to ‘preserve the Spirit of the Original’ (III, 5). Readers of her version may be surprised, therefore, to encounter word-for-word translation in several passages. For instance, ‘C’est un frein toujours agissant qu’il faut absolument employer’ (It is an ever-active restraint that we must certainly use) is translated as ‘a check always acting, which must be used absolutely’ (22).24 Perhaps Wollstonecraft’s literalism betrays her inexperience; perhaps she was working under time pressure. Her review of Henrietta Colebrooke’s Thoughts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (c.1788) suggests that, in fact, she favoured a more creative approach to translation. Colebrooke’s version is ‘sometimes obscure, but oftener incorrect’, she complains: ‘the spirit of the author has not been transfused into it, though the most obvious meaning of the words has generally been given’ (VII, 49). A year later, in 1789, she panned the English version of Germaine de Staël’s Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau (1788) for being at times ‘almost unintelligible by being too literal’ (137). By contrast, she

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gave ‘great praise’ to The Garden; or the Art of laying out Grounds (1789), a ‘free translation’ of the Abbé de Lille’s poem, Les jardins, ou l’art d’embellir les paysages (1782) (303). This preference for creativity manifests in her subsequent translational practice. In 1790, Wollstonecraft put her name to Elements and confidently avowed her deliberate and thorough-going interventionism. With this move she differentiated herself from the paradigm of the subservient translator and laid claim to the creative originality regarded traditionally as the province of men but also, increasingly, as quintessentially British.25 In the same year, however, she published another anonymous translation, Young Grandison (1790). The source text was a Dutch work, De kleine Grandisson (1782), by Margareta Geertruid de Cambon-van der Werken, an admirer of Samuel Richardson whose pedagogical works found favour in France as well as Britain.26 According to Godwin, Wollstonecraft was actually given an earlier translation, which she ‘new-modelled and abridged’.27 He also records that she ‘began a translation from the French, of a book, called, The New Robinson’.28 Young Grandison, The New Robinson and Elements were all pedagogical works, which suggests that Wollstonecraft often translated within her sphere of expertise, perhaps to bring a critical eye to the source texts. Why, then, does she put her name to Elements but not Young Grandison? The answer may lie in the different degrees of ownership Wollstonecraft took over the ideological content of her translations. As Bonnie Latimer observes, ‘Young Grandison provides lessons much less radical than we might expect from the author of the Vindications’.29 For instance, it stands apart from Elements ‘in largely sidestepping issues of gender inequality’.30 As we shall see, Young Grandison does share some ideological common ground with Elements – rather more than Latimer acknowledges – but certain passages are extraordinarily out of character for Wollstonecraft. Latimer is tempted to conclude that ‘in spite of her extensive rewriting of Cambon’s original, Wollstonecraft was simply working within someone else’s ideological framework’, and there is undoubtedly evidence to support that conclusion.31 In her Advertisement to Young Grandison, Wollstonecraft presents herself as an ‘editor’ motivated by clear pedagogical principles (II, 215). One such principle is that children be allowed to develop their reason gradually, for ‘affectation rather than virtue may be produced by endeavouring, through a mistaken zeal, to bring the mind forward prematurely’ (215). On these grounds, she confesses to making ‘material alterations’ to her source text, partly to eliminate this ‘mistaken zeal’, and partly to ensure that ‘no narrow prejudices’ remain ‘to cramp the understanding, or make it

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submit to any other authority than that of reason’ (215).32 The implication, then, is that Wollstonecraft has corrected a text with significant flaws. By contrast, in her Advertisement to Elements, she pays tribute to her source text, which she claims to have translated for pleasure: This little Work fell accidentally into my hands, when I began to learn German, and, merely as an exercise in that language, I attempted to translate it; but, as I proceeded, I was pleased to find that chance had thrown in my way a very rational book, and that the writer coincided with me in opinion respecting the method which ought to be pursued to form the heart and temper, or, in other words, to inculcate the first principles of morality. (5)

Wollstonecraft emphasises the parity between Salzmann’s Elementarbuch and her own pedagogical works. The German text contains a ‘welldigested system’, written ‘on the same plan’ as her Original Stories’ (6). As she often sought to alert initiated readers to connections between her texts, it would seem that she intended Elements to be read alongside them. Although she had worked to excise ‘narrow prejudices’ from Cambon’s text, she may have published Young Grandison anonymously because even this edited version was insufficiently attuned to her ideological project. By connecting Salzmann’s ‘rational’ work with her own, she stakes a claim to its content and puts herself on a par intellectually with the author, thereby setting the subtly feminist tone of her translation as well as situating her work within a transnational pedagogical context. In the Advertisement to Elements, Wollstonecraft also explains that she has chosen to domesticate her source text, replacing ‘German customs or local opinions’ with British equivalents: ‘I did not wish to puzzle children by pointing out modifications of manners, when the grand principles of morality were to be fixed on a broad basis’ (5). Assuming that the ‘grand principles of morality’ are universal, Wollstonecraft nonetheless suggests that they are best exemplified in familiar cultural contexts. This goal of making the source text more accessible to the target readership was a common justification for such domesticating strategies. In her preface to Lovers’ Vows, Inchbald makes no apology for domesticating her source text, claiming – with some judicious flattery of her readership – that ‘in no one instance’ did she ‘suffer [her] respect for Kotzebue to interfere with [her] profound respect for the judgment of a British audience’.33 In acknowledging her strategy of domestication, Wollstonecraft commented on the disparities between the German culture of her source text and the French culture which had so much influence in her native land. As the British came to imagine their national character in terms of forthrightness and common sense, they defined themselves against p ­ erceived

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threats to their collective values from foreign rivals. Translators often connected domestication with censorship, frequently citing concern for the moral health of their imagined readership. Translational prefaces and strategies can be read as indexes of the moral and cultural images attached to different European nations in the course of the eighteenth century. Of course, different translators give these images varying degrees of credence and, depending on their ideological convictions, they respond to them by turns with fascination, enthusiasm or hostility. For British women writers, self-definition in cultural terms was complicated by the gendering of certain national characteristics. Frivolity and duplicity were supposedly feminine traits, but they were also accusations frequently levelled at the French. In Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft is notoriously severe in attributing these flaws to her own sex, and in French Revolution, she describes the French in similarly unflattering terms. When she praises the rational principles of Salzmann’s Elementarbuch, she defines herself as a rational woman who seeks to transmit those principles to her British readership. In the British literary system, the French style was often perceived as a threat to cultural integrity. Elaborate language and rhetorical flourishes seemed to reflect what middle-class writers saw as the insincere manners of the Ancien Régime aristocracy and the Francophilic beau monde in Britain. The stakes involved in preserving linguistic simplicity were no less than the authenticity and integrity of the native self and its idiom. Comprehended in an overarching ideal of what Newman calls ‘the Sincerity of the True Briton’ were several analogous terms invoked in praise of individuals, literary works or other artistic productions.34 Chief amongst these terms were ‘simplicity’ and ‘originality’. A ‘sincere’ person was not only open and candid (‘simplicity’), but also unguarded in their expression of their individuality (‘originality’), even if this set them apart from fashionable life. This kind of sincerity necessarily precluded all forms of imitative behaviour, particularly when it came to the polished civility of the French.35 In his Comparative View of the French and English Nations (1785), John Andrews claims that the French language, ‘like a person of an artful, insinuating address, deals much in hints and circumlocutions’, whereas English, ‘like a plain, blunt man, avoids prolixity, and comes to the point at once’.36 Similarly, in her review of Jean-Pierre-Louis, marquis de Luchet’s Galerie des Dames Françoises (1790), Wollstonecraft remarks that ‘it is easy to see that these portraits are drawn by a Frenchman’, citing insincere language detrimental to individual characters and social interaction: ‘where politeness destroys the great outline of character, the fine shades of manners will ever be caught, and artfully diversified’ (VII, 240). In the same spirit, she praises

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the writing of Alexander Jardine, who confesses to deliberate stylistic ‘negligence’ and relates his ‘love of brevity and simplicity’ to the mutually reinforcing qualities of the English language and national character.37 The content of French source texts was also treated with widespread suspicion. Critics became preoccupied with the idea that translation might contaminate British literature with ‘an immorality typically French’, and translators therefore often claimed to present their readership with modest versions of their over-sexed or immoderately sentimental source texts.38 Those who did not resort to censorship might intervene in the paratext instead. Josephine Grieder suggests that footnotes became fashionable ‘because they offered the advantage of simultaneously presenting the piquant and moralizing on it’.39 If such translators were keen to establish their virtue, however, they and their readerships remained irresistibly drawn to sentimental (and sexy) fiction from the Continent. As the critical reaction to Lovers’ Vows demonstrates, France was not the only moral bogeyman haunting the British collective imagination. Inchbald claims to have made Kotzebue’s drama palatable to her British audience, but it is clear from the chaos that Lovers’ Vows unleashes in Mansfield Park that Jane Austen, at least, interpreted the play as subversive. Nor was she alone. The AntiJacobin complained that Lovers’ Vows had the same tendency as ‘most of the pieces of the modern German school’, which was ‘to render the upper classes of society, objects of indignation or contempt: and to confine all virtue, and every noble quality, to the lower classes’.40 From this perspective, domestication is a sneaky threat to the status quo. Disguised by local colour, foreign values infiltrate an imagined community of Britons previously united in their respect for social hierarchy and staunch moral conservatism. It is clear from Wollstonecraft’s preface to Elements, however, that she envisaged importing moral values from the German Nation which, far from damaging her native culture, would actually improve it. French was accepted as the European lingua franca, but the latter decades of the eighteenth century saw a pluralising of intellectual culture which gradually brought German writers to the attention of the British public. William Taylor of Norwich, whose 1796 version of Gottfried August Bürger’s Lenore (1774) drew Wordsworth and Coleridge to German literature, translated and reviewed prolifically for journals such as the Monthly Review, the Annual Review and the Critical Review. Under the influence of the Swiss artist, Henry Fuseli, to whom Wollstonecraft was for a time profoundly attached, Johnson disseminated the innovative ideologies and poetics of German-speaking writers, including Goethe, a comparativist avant la lettre, and Schiller.41

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Part of the appeal of Germanic literature lay in the rejection of French cultural hegemony and Wollstonecraft responded enthusiastically.42 In a letter to Fanny Blood’s brother, George, she writes that she is drawn to the unpretentiousness of German culture: Tell Bess Delane I will not allow her to find fault with the language I am learning in which I am told the sweetest verses are written, and the people have still that simplicity of manners, I dote fondly on.43

That same year, she saw this vision of German simplicity reflected in Christiane Benedikte Naubert’s Heerfort und Klärchen (1779), translated into English as Heerfort and Clara (1789): ‘The characters are artless, and the conversations natural’, she enthuses, and ‘a touching simplicity of manners reigns throughout’ (VII, 190). In a slightly later review, in which she discusses the works of Schiller, she describes the German language as ‘shamefully neglected’ (361). One might argue that by domesticating Salzmann’s Elementarbuch, Wollstonecraft perpetuates this neglect. In her Advertisement, however, she champions the German culture and its literature, praising her source text for its ‘simplicity of style and manners’, which she describes as an antidote to the ‘smooth compliments’ typical of the French: Though I have not copied, I have endeavoured to imitate the simplicity of style and manners which I admired in the original. If it had been a French work, I should, probably, have had to curtail many smooth compliments, that I might not have led my little readers to the very verge of falsehood; but it did not appear to me necessary to retrench the artless dictates of affection, when I wished to insinuate a taste for domestic pleasures into the hearts of both parents and children. (II, 5)

Concluding that Salzmann’s style is indicative of his national character, Wollstonecraft stakes out her position on one side of a perceived cultural and moral divide, in which the ‘northern’ nations of Germany, Britain and Scandinavia represent a simplicity that counters the sophistication of the French and the Francophilic European aristocracy. Four years later, in French Revolution, she attributes this enduring simplicity to the relative absence, in the German Nation, of the capitalist ethic that had taken firm hold in other areas of Europe: Their simplicity of manners, and honesty of heart are in a great degree preserved, even as they grow more refined, by the situation of their country; which prevents that inundation of riches by commercial sources, that destroys the morals of a nation before it’s reason arrives at maturity. (VI, 116)

In Elements itself, Wollstonecraft makes Mrs Jones and her fellow mother-educators mouthpieces for the simplicity and integrity she

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­ erceived in German literature, virtues she transferred to British culture p when she domesticated her source text. As we have seen, the British self-image incorporated an analogous set of ‘northern’ European virtues, and Wollstonecraft appears to endorse this self-image when she anglicises her characters. At the same time, however, she subtly questions the justice of British self-congratulation, offering a portrait of a society riven by social inequality, ruthless capitalism and colonial enterprise. This moral and cultural commentary underpins a pedagogical project that is rooted in Salzmann’s Elementarbuch but also, through the pre-eminence of maternal educators, connected to the rest of Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre and consistent with her cosmopolitan ethic.

Elements of Morality Although Salzmann and Wollstonecraft hailed from different national and cultural contexts, they shared similar views about the ameliorative potential of progressive education, as well as the importance of learning from experience rather than instruction. Salzmann participated in Johann Bernhard Basedow’s Philanthropinist movement, which adapted the pedagogical theories of Locke and Rousseau with a view to forming rational and philanthropic young people. The Philanthropinists also insisted on the importance of trust and affection between teacher and pupil. Salzmann taught for three years at the Philanthropinium, Basedow’s famous school in Dessau, and in 1784 set up the Salzmannschule for boys in the hamlet of Schnepfenthal on the edge of the Thuringian Forest. There he implemented his pioneering pedagogical practices, which he extended to girls in 1786 with the founding of an adjacent school. Most early Philanthropinists believed that male and female children should be educated differently, but Salzmann disagreed, concurring with Wollstonecraft that children of both sexes could thrive in the same educational system. Wollstonecraft’s attempts to correspond with Necker appear to have failed, but the commercial success of Elements did lead to an exchange of letters with Salzmann. The correspondence does not survive, but it seems probable that they discussed pedagogy, including the education of girls and young women. Judging by Wollstonecraft’s glowing account of education in the German Nation, she was impressed by the progressive methods of Salzmann and his fellow Philanthropinists: Education, in particular, has been studied; and the rational modes of instruction in useful knowledge, which are taking place of the exclusive attention

‘Original Spirit’    63 formerly paid to the dead languages, promise to render the germans, in the course of half a century, the most enlightened people in Europe. (VI, 116)

The esteem appears to have been mutual. When Rights of Woman appeared in 1792, Wollstonecraft sent a copy to Salzmann, and shortly afterwards, he published a two-volume German translation, Rettung der Rechte des Weibes (1793–4).44 The translator was his employee and future son-in-law, Georg Friedrich Christian Weissenborn, but Salzmann provided an introduction and substantial paratextual commentary. The German version frequently tones down Wollstonecraft’s feminist views, but Salzmann assures his readership that they will find in the text ‘Beweise von dem helldenkenden Verstande und dem edeln Herzen der Verfasserin’ (proofs of the lucid understanding and noble heart of the authoress).45 The ideological parity between Salzmann and Wollstonecraft is evident in Elements, which closely echoes the Elementarbuch, and this makes Wollstonecraft’s interventions doubly conspicuous. When she alters her source text, she often corrects passages tainted by chauvinism. For instance, although Salzmann generally writes in positive terms  about  women’s role in society, he does fall back on patronising caricature in referring to their ‘liebenswürdige Umständlichkeit’ (endearing long-windedness).46 Wollstonecraft implicitly levels the same accusation at Salzmann: she cuts his entire, long-winded passage. Similar feminist interventions are evident at even the most minor textual level. Given the emphasis Wollstonecraft puts on maternal educators, perhaps the most significant occurs in her version of the Preface. In the Elementarbuch, Salzmann outlines his project: ‘daß ich durch dieses Buch in Kindern eine gute Gesinnung erzeugen wolle’ (that, through this book, I want to engender a good disposition in children).47 Wollstonecraft unearths a latent feminine meaning already imminent in the German verb ‘erzeugen’, which generally means ‘to produce’, but can also mean ‘to beget’. Seizing on the procreative connotation, she gives it a maternal twist so that the metaphor alludes to the experience of childbirth: ‘After this explanation, I hope my design will be understood, when I say, that I am at giving birth to a good disposition’ (II, 9).48 In Elements, this maternal ‘design’ is largely carried out by Mrs Jones, a Wollstonecraftian mother-educator whose every word of advice or chastisement carries moral connotations that transcend the domestic sphere. Mrs Jones wields power in a moral universe that differs subtly but significantly from that of the Elementarbuch. Whereas Salzmann’s pedagogical strategy is geared to practical social improvements, Wollstonecraft

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frequently ‘raises the moral stakes in what would appear to be less than earthshaking events’.49 For instance, Salzmann warns that overindulging in rich food will injure the health, but Wollstonecraft goes a step further in connecting immoderate eating with the sin of gluttony, depicted as a sickness of both mind and body. Influenced by Taylor’s analysis of Wollstonecraft’s religious influences, Alessa Johns connects this aspect of the translational strategy with the ‘millenarian’ cast to her writing.50 The religious discourse also gives Mrs Jones a legislator-like quality, however, because not only does she represent absolute moral authority, she also enforces that authority by instilling shame in those who transgress. When her maid is caught stealing cherries, she connects her moral failure with her physical flaws: Nay, the pimples on your face expose your gluttony; we should seldom look ugly, or be obliged to take nasty medicines, if we did not greedily overload our stomachs; and if we forget our duty in private, and cheat our fellow-creatures of their share, it is but just that we should be laughed at in company, and called what we really are, gluttons. (88)

The rebuke is devastating; but like Rousseau’s legislators and their female counterparts in Original Stories and the works of Genlis, Mrs Jones inspires adulation as well as fear. She takes purposive control of her children’s education, and of the moral lives of her servants and neighbours, and she exerts moral influence by offering conditional love which they strive to deserve. Crucially, though, she has more in common with Mrs Mason than with Genlis’s mother-educators because her moral principles concede little to social convention. In an interpolated passage, little Mary (Luise in the Elementarbuch), thanks her mother for teaching her orderliness, and Mrs Jones’s reply sums up Wollstonecraft’s pedagogical principles: All my commands have the same tendency, said her mother; I assist your weak mind, and I am endeavouring to make you wise and happy, when I deny you any present pleasure: for you are yet too young to know what is really good. (128)

Wollstonecraft ensures that Mrs Jones consistently explains the moral import and educative purpose of her actions, some of which have a feminist dimension lacking in Salzmann’s text. When Mary is wearing her best clothes, she complains that she cannot join in the boys’ boisterous games. Her corsetry leaves her breathless and her full skirt and accessories prove cumbersome. In Salzmann’s text, the mother is sympathetic, but explains that, in polite society, convention dictates a formal dress code:

‘Original Spirit’    65 Ich weiß wohl, daß Poschen, lange Kleider, Schnürbrust und Frisur, Kindern sehr beschwerlich find, und daß du in denselben nicht so vergnügt und lustig sein kannst, als du wünschest. Deswegen habe ich dich zeither mit allen diesen Dingen verschonet. Aber heute – da du dich in einer so großen geputzten Gesellschaft zeigen wolltest, da konnte es nicht anders seyn.51 I know very well that children find pocket hoops, long skirts, stays and dressed hair very cumbersome, and that you cannot be as cheerful and merry in them as you wish. I have therefore spared you all these things until now. But today – as you wanted to be seen in such grand and well-groomed company, it could not be otherwise.

Wollstonecraft, who objected to separate, less energetic forms of play for female children, alters and extends Salzmann’s paragraph, uniting the mother and daughter in a specifically feminine complaint. While Salzmann writes that children find such clothing uncomfortable, Wollstonecraft has the mother admit to her own discomfort: I know very well that a long train, stays with bones in them, and tangled hair, are very inconvenient, and that you cannot be as easy and gay as you wish. For that reason I have not till now teized you with such useless parts of dress. (113)

Echoing her claim in Original Stories that, ‘when internal goodness is reflected, every other kind of beauty, the shadow of it, withers away before it, as the sun obscures a lamp’ (IV, 390), Wollstonecraft then takes the opportunity to expand the moral reach of the episode: A good girl requires no ornaments; if she keeps her person clean, and puts her clothes on in an orderly manner, people will only look at her good humoured obliging face. But to-day you even wished to be dressed, and I had a mind to let you feel how much more comfortable you would have been in your muslin frock and pink sash. (II, 113)

Fashionable society, which encourages women to value ‘ornaments’, seems to promote the vanity that Wollstonecraft associates with Francophilic aristocrats and poorly educated women, the latter culturally conditioned to exaggerate the so-called charms of weakness and frivolity. Mary is genuinely weakened by the discomfort of fashionable dress, and the implication is that Mrs Jones has subjected her to the experience so that she will prefer to avoid such gatherings in future. Crucially, Mary has not simply been taught a practical lesson; she has been encouraged to consider the moral implications of gendered norms in her society. The mother’s disinterest in fashion is present in Salzmann’s characterisation, but Wollstonecraft expands his descriptions to make Mrs Jones’s

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sartorial choices part of a moral asceticism which also rejects vanity, display and – for the most part – recreational activities beyond the domestic sphere. Sophie is ‘keine Freundin vom Putze’ (not fond of finery);52 Mrs Jones is not only ‘not fond of dress’, but ‘never eager to be the first to adopt a new fashion, nor did she ever wear any thing singular or conspicuous’ (90). Adding a touch of local colour, Wollstonecraft explains that plain clothes are practical because Mrs Jones ‘seldom paid formal visits, or went to public places, except now and then when she attended some of the public breakfasts at the Hotwells’ (90). When the family are invited to a wedding, however, the occasion demands fine clothes, and Luise/Mary is given the onerous task of hemming flounces onto her mother’s gown. At first, she doubts that she can complete her task on time, but her mother counsels that hard work can accomplish what seems impossible. Mary resists the distractions of French street performers with dancing dogs (Italian merchants in the German text) and her self-denial is rewarded with the twin pleasures of a job well done and parental praise. Salzmann comments simply that ‘Sophie umarmte sie und lobte ihre Beständigkeit’ (Sophie embraced her and praised her steadfastness).53 Wollstonecraft inserts extra dialogue in which Mrs Jones takes care to explain that she is praising her daughter’s industry but not the finery itself: ‘when you are praised on account of your clothes, you ought not to feel pleasure, because a wooden doll, without a mind, may look well in fine clothes’ (104). The injunction encourages Mary to value her intellect – traditionally a masculine attribute – above her appearance and represents a notable departure from conventional wisdom, which recommended enhancing feminine charms in a bid to attract suitors. Once again, the episode acquires a feminist dimension that is subtle but significant. For Johns, however, although Wollstonecraft’s works raise the moral status of the mother, they actually function to constrain her sphere of influence. She argues that, by exhorting citizen-mothers to shine in their maternal role, Wollstonecraft makes the part they might play in any social or political change ‘removed and conceptual’.54 Citing Mrs Mason as an example, she argues that, even though Wollstonecraft invites analogies between her mother-educators, the ‘unacknowledged legislators’ of their microcosmic states, and legislators in the public sphere, the connections remain purely metaphorical so long as women are defined in terms of their domestic duties.55 Even as she ‘rearranges’ Salzmann’s Elementarbuch ‘to put women at the center’, Johns claims, ‘she unwittingly contributes to their ultimate marginalization’.56 What Johns does not consider, however, are the connections between Mrs  Jones  and Wollstonecraft’s other mother-educators. The premise

‘Original Spirit’    67

of Salzmann’s source text, which focuses on the domestic life of a bourgeois family, appears to define Mrs Jones’s narrow sphere of influence. If we read Elements in the context of Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre as a whole, however, we can align Mrs Jones with Wollstonecraft’s other alter-egos, and her pedagogy with an intertextual argument for thoroughgoing social change. As we have seen, Wollstonecraft’s Advertisement indicates that Elements should be read as part of her oeuvre; its kinship with her other works is even more evident if we compare the ideological content of the text with that of Young Grandison. Like Elements and Original Stories, Young Grandison features authoritative mother-educators, but their pedagogical strategies sometimes differ markedly from those of Wollstonecraft. In one notable dialogue, Lady Grandison puts her son, Charles, to a trial of obedience. Although his parents had agreed to him spending the upcoming winter and spring with his friend, William D–, she tells him that, for unspecified reasons, they now expect he will ‘chearfully acquiesce’ to being his father’s proxy at their farm instead (II, 303). Lady Grandison makes the prospect of rural life sound so unappealing that Charles struggles to conceal his distress: ‘the farm house you will inhabit, is situated almost in a desart; you will have few companions, and no amusements, except the pleasure of relieving the poor’ (304). When he succeeds in containing his emotions and resolves to do her bidding without question or complaint, she reveals that, in fact, he will only spend a short time at the farm before making a longed-for trip to William D–’s native Holland. These plans have been laid down well in advance, but Lady Grandison nonetheless presents the trip as a reward for Charles’s submission to her will: You are the child of my heart; your submission to your earthly parents proves to me, that you will in future resign yourself to the will of your heavenly father, who never afflicts his children but to improve them. But your trial at this time will not be so severe as you imagine. (304)

Lady Grandison’s religious analogy aligns her authority with that of an inscrutable god arbitrarily imposing tests of faith. This demiurgic command over her domestic kingdom undoubtedly recalls Wollstonecraft’s legislator-like maternal alter-egos. By exacting unquestioning obedience, however, Lady Grandison in fact takes a similar approach to Genlis, whom Wollstonecraft criticised for enforcing ‘blind submission to parents’ (V, 174). As we have seen, Wollstonecraft argued that pedagogical practices should aim to develop children’s reason until it supplants parents and mentors as the principal guide to moral conduct. Mrs Jones tells Mary that she is ‘yet too young to know what is really good’, but she also expects her daughter’s independence to

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grow with her reason (II, 128). Indeed, at the end of the Elementarbuch/ Elements, sudden death removes Sophie/Mrs Jones from her children’s lives altogether. In Elements, then – the only translation Wollstonecraft claimed as her own – maternal authority is impressive but emphatically provisional. In common with the works of Genlis, Young Grandison also contains several episodes designed to defend ‘the “natural order” that pertains to human society and which justifies continued distinctions of rank’.57 When young Emilia argues that ‘all good men ought to be rich’, her tutor, Dr Bartlett, objects that such a meritocratic distribution of wealth ‘would quite alter the nature of things’: The strong and the weak must then dig their own ground; and the ingenious would want a spur to assist the stupid. We must all make our own clothes; manufactures and arts would be no more – industry would languish, and life not only lose its principal charms, but cease to be a probationary state, a field to exercise virtue in, and exert benevolence. (249)

This account of a divinely ordained social order, which justifies subordinating an entire labouring class to ensure the fulfilment of their social superiors, is separately endorsed by Sir Charles Grandison himself, who declares that ‘Providence has placed men in different situations, to facilitate the main end of life, improvement in virtue’ (275). In Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft claims to focus on women ‘in the middle class’ because they are ‘in the most natural state’ – less prone to ‘false refinement, immorality, and vanity’ than the aristocracy but with sufficient opportunities to improve their minds (V, 75). For these women, life may indeed represent ‘a field to exercise virtue in, and exert benevolence’, but Wollstonecraft never cites their good fortune as justification for the suffering of their poorer counterparts. Indeed, Dr Bartlett’s position is radically at odds with the democratic principles which, in the very same year, informed her reply to Burke. By contrast, an analogous episode in Elements gives Wollstonecraft’s pedagogy a political dimension compatible with Rights of Men. The Herrmanns/Joneses attend a garden party and, as they wander into a nearby lane, Luise/Mary expresses disgust at the sight of a poor woman and her dirty children. Her mother promptly admonishes her for this hasty judgement. In the Elementarbuch, Sophie asks their host, Herr Friedlieb, to tell her more about the family; in Elements of Morality, Wollstonecraft has his wife provide the details and enlarge on their moral significance. Herr Friedlieb explains that the woman’s husband lost three fingers fighting with the Hussars during the war. He continues to work as a gardener, however, and his wife and children also work hard

‘Original Spirit’    69

spinning and gardening to supplement their income. In Wollstonecraft’s version, the wife takes centre-stage as the primary breadwinner because her husband, who used to work in a white lead manufactory, suffers from what was known as ‘lead palsy’ or ‘wrist drop’. This debilitating condition, which led to paralysis of the fingers, hand and wrist, would now be described as peripheral nerve disorder and was caused by lead poisoning. The man earns a little money delivering messages but is physically unable to do more profitable work. Mrs Jones’s hostess explains that he was forced to go into hospital for a time and that his wife ‘sold one thing after another to maintain him’ (II, 135). Wollstonecraft then gives the poor woman dialogue that emphasises her husband’s pitiful state: ‘he has no hands to carry parcels with, for, bless your heart, he is as weak as a child! We cut his meat for him, and help him on with his clothes’ (137). This rapid spiral into poverty is reminiscent of the fate of Crazy Robin and his family in Original Stories. In both cases, Wollstonecraft invites sympathy for characters reduced to destitution by a combination of bad luck and social injustice. She also rejects prevailing stereotypes of the undeserving poor when she assures us that the impoverished family take pride in themselves and work hard – in Salzmann’s version, they weed the garden when they find themselves tired by their spinning; in Wollstonecraft’s version, the woman weeds only when there is no more work to be had (135).58 In her interpolated dialogue, the woman also insists that her husband ‘richly deserves’ the help of his wife and children, emphasising that he is ‘a sober man’ who, as he cannot provide for his children, devotes himself to their education instead: I never had to follow him to an ale-house, as some poor women are obliged to do, with a babe crying at their breast, thank God for it! And now he cannot work, he reads good books to us, so my children will have a little learning, and not be brought up like brutes. (137)

This vignette revises the traditional gender roles played out in Salzmann’s text, but the primary focus remains on the suffering of the poor. Occupational exposure to lead carries serious health risks but, implicitly, the sale of white lead enriched manufactory owners who took little care of the safety of their workers. Salzmann’s readers are encouraged to recognise the debt of respect and gratitude they owe to the labouring classes; but the social hierarchy itself is never questioned. By contrast, Wollstonecraft raises the spectre of prosperous elites profiting from exploitation, and thereby implies that wealth is often distributed unjustly.

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To some extent, however, Wollstonecraft’s religious discourse threatens to neutralise her social critique. For instance, she gives the hostess extra dialogue in which she suggests that the poor woman’s soul has been purified by suffering: Indeed, she is my superior; how many idle hours have I spent when she has been toiling to do her duty, though despised by the world. God, the great Father of us all, sees her virtues, and will reward them; – nay, he even now rewards them. She has a contented heart; I often hear her singing at work, and she enjoys good health. (136)

This emphasis on the poor woman’s contentment is almost Genlisian in its implicit defence of the status quo – ‘God fits the back to the burden, Madam’, she says (137). Although ostensibly designed to humanise her, this speech in fact endows her with near-angelic fortitude. Combined with the promise of celestial pay-back, it threatens to remove the need for an urgent challenge to the social order that condemns the family to poverty. In such passages, the ideological content of Elements chimes with that of Young Grandison, in which Dr Bartlett assures his charges that ‘a labourer in his low station, and in his poor cottage, is often happier than those who are exalted to high offices, and reside in noble palaces’ (249). The putative contentment of the lower orders allows him to reject William’s suggestion that God has favoured the rich, piously asserting instead that all virtuous men are equal: God is the Father of the poorest wretch, who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow; and he may call the greatest monarch brother: there is no difference, except what arises from degrees of goodness. (249)

One detects traces of a Wollstonecraftian argument for the equality, before God, of all human beings; but the potentially radical levelling of ‘the poorest wretch’ and ‘the greatest monarch’ is undercut by Bartlett’s claim that celestial equality somehow compensates for earthly deprivation. It is clear that Wollstonecraft’s religious discourse can tend towards a providentialism more compatible with resignation than reform. Nonetheless, the changes she makes to Salzmann’s text ultimately establish Elements as a more radical text than Young Grandison. For example, in the Elementarbuch, Luise feels ashamed of her snobbery, and seeks to make amends to the poor family by striking up a conversation with the children and praising their hard work. In Wollstonecraft’s version, Mary takes practical steps to ease their poverty, apparently following in the footsteps of Mrs Mason, who enjoins her charges to use their wealth to palliate suffering:

‘Original Spirit’    71 Creeping behind her mother, she advanced to the children, began to talk to them, and slipped all the money she had in her pocket into a little girl’s hand, bidding her not for the world to say a word of it to her mother till she was out of the garden. (137)

While this instance of charity hardly amounts to a call for social reform, Wollstonecraft does appear to insist on the need for practical intervention as well as sympathy. Mary’s actions also recall the injunctions to philanthropy in Thoughts, emphasising the importance of redressing social injustice by distributing wealth beyond the family circle. In the Elementarbuch, Friedlieb acknowledges that the poor might resent the lavish lifestyles of their social superiors, but suggests that compassion will alleviate their suffering: Es muβ den armen Leuten eine erstaunliche Kränkung seyn, wenn sie sehen, daβ die Reichen so vieles genieβen, das sie entbehren müssen, und sich überdieβ noch von ihnen müssen verachten oder wohl gar verspotten lassen. Und es wäre gar kein Wunder, wenn sie gegen sie erbittert würden. Aber ein freundlicher Blick, den man ihnen giebt, ein liebreiches Gespräch, das man mit ihnen hält, das erwirbt uns ihre ganze Liebe, und macht, daβ sie etliche Tage die Beschwerlichkeiten ihres Zustandes vergessen.59 It must be an astonishing insult for poor people when they see the wealthy enjoying so much that they must manage without, and when moreover they must put up with being despised or even mocked by them. And it would hardly be surprising, if it made them angry. But if you offer them a friendly look, or if you engage them in kindly conversation, then you entirely win their hearts, and help them some days to forget the hardships of their condition.

In her translation, Wollstonecraft gives the hostess rather more expansive reflections: It must be dreadfully mortifying to poor people to see the rich enjoy so many things, which they are obliged to do without, and to feel that they are ridiculed and despised, because they have them not; and it would not be surprising if such treatment roused their hatred – for a worm will turn again when it is trodden on. But a friendly look, a few kind words, will gain their hearts, and make their cares lighter. They wish us to remember that we all descended from the same parents – all look up to the same God. (137–8)

The poor in Wollstonecraft’s version are not simply angry, they are hate-filled, and her interpolation – ‘a worm will turn again when it is trodden on’ – suggests that this hatred might lead to rebellion. Since Wollstonecraft published Elements the year after the Bastille fell, her metaphor could not fail to evoke the French peasantry turning on the monarchy and aristocrats who had ignored their plight. The final injunction is in keeping with the millenarian cast of much of Wollstonecraft’s

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writing, for it can be read as a religious justification for the Revolutionary principle of equality. She retains Salzmann’s call for compassion, but she also asks her readership to consider their kinship to the needy. This emphasis on common humanity recalls the cosmopolitan ethic in Thoughts and Original Stories, and appears to influence the most significant change Wollstonecraft makes to the Elementarbuch, the only one she highlights in her Advertisement.60 Chapter 3 teaches children to manage fear. In Salzmann’s text, a soldier is so overcome by terror of imaginary foes that he runs straight into the path of the enemy. Wollstonecraft relocates the soldier to the plains of America, where his anxiety convinces him that he is being pursued by hostile Native Americans. Spurring on his horse to avoid the imaginary danger, he is thrown to the ground and breaks his leg. His rescuer turns out to be ‘one of those men whom we Europeans with white complexions call savages’ (28), a Native American whose tender care for the soldier suggests to children their kinship with the indigenous peoples of the Americas at a time of ruthless colonization: Every day did he hunt for food, and dress it for the enemy of his country; and when he could limp along carried him within sight of the camp, and pressing his sick brother’s hand against his forehead, he prayed the Great Spirit to take care of him, and conduct him safe to his own country. (29)

Just as, in Original Stories, Frenchwomen care for official enemies of their country, so in Elements the Native American demonstrates the superior claims of common humanity to conflict between nations. Here Wollstonecraft’s rewriting also brings an extra political dimension to Salzmann’s moral tale, foreshadowing the critique of imperialism that she would develop in French Revolution and Short Residence. The soldier’s fear is unjustified on two counts: firstly, because his Native American pursuers exist only in his head; and secondly, because racist hearsay has taught him to view them as aggressors. In this tale, then, Wollstonecraft expands her radical politics beyond a localised case for social reform, encouraging her readership to approach other races and cultures with compassion and open minds. More than any other episode in the text, this tale illuminates Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan perspective, not only taking a broadminded approach to otherness, but also insisting on the common humanity that unites us across racial and cultural divides. Although eighteenth-century translators often adapted their texts, it is nonetheless significant that Wollstonecraft confesses her interventionism so frankly. In doing so, she repudiates the subservient subject position traditionally occupied by translators and women alike, establishing a claim to the style and ideological content of Elements that goes

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beyond mere reproduction. Cumulatively, her changes bring reformist and feminist dimensions to Salzmann’s moral tales. In certain passages, they also evince her cosmopolitan ethic, emphasising the universality she perceives underlying differences of race, creed and culture, and insisting on the moral and aesthetic value of imports from relatively unfamiliar national literatures. Mrs Jones plays a pivotal role in the moral education of her children and her lessons to Mary occasionally challenge the gender norms of the period. She also proves immune to the stereotypically feminine flaws and preoccupations which Salzmann attributes to women. Presiding over her household with supreme but temporary authority, she engages in dialogue with other mother figures whose different positions within the social order gradually form a picture of an unsatisfactory status quo. This reformist and feminist content – notably absent from the translations Wollstonecraft published anonymously – is consistent with the rest of her oeuvre. From this perspective, Mrs Jones should be read as one of an intertextual collective of Wollstonecraftian alter-egos with their roots in the works of Rousseau and Genlis as well as Salzmann. In Elements, then, Wollstonecraft invests her text with ‘the spirit of an original’, and in doing so she establishes her agency as a feminist, a moralist and a cosmopolitan cultural critic (5).

Chapter 3

‘Affection for the Whole Human Race’: Wollstonecraft’s Cosmopolitan Love of Country

The French Revolution began with the convocation of the EstatesGeneral in May 1789 and the storming of the Bastille on 14 July. In these early months, advocates of democracy on both sides of the Channel looked forward to a peaceful Nouveau Régime made in the image of the American Republic. A sense of millennial possibility spread amongst the British Dissenters and radicals in Wollstonecraft’s orbit, for whom the ‘freeborn Englishman’ had always been a preposterous fiction and democratic republicanism felt relevant and exhilarating. Monarchists and conservatives were appalled, frightened and hostile. Radical and anti-Jacobin pamphleteers waged a war that stoked paranoia in Pitt’s government.1 Christie was a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, which promoted Paine’s inflammatory Rights of Man (1791–2) in pursuit of parliamentary reform, as well as an important agent of literary exchange between Paris and St Paul’s Churchyard. After 1789, he spent considerable time in Paris, fostering political and intellectual relationships with prominent figures such as Necker, Mirabeau and Abbé Sieyès.2 By the autumn of 1792, strong links had been forged between Johnson’s circle and the Nouveau Régime administration. Following the publication of Burke’s Reflections, Johnson quickly issued ripostes in the form of the Foxite Capel Lofft’s Remarks on the Letter of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, Concerning the Revolution in France (1790) and Joseph Priestley’s Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (1791). Remarkably, however, the first reply to Burke came from Wollstonecraft, who until that moment had confined her politics to the subtext of novels and conduct-books, the literary province of women. With the publication of Rights of Men and, two years later, Rights of Woman, she stepped decisively into the arena of philosophy and politics. In both Vindications, she responds to intellectual currents borne across the Channel by the close connections between Parisian Revolutionaries and the intelligentsia who converged at St Paul’s Churchyard. The

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seismic upheavals in Paris made it urgent to communicate political ideas, and theoretical positions acquired potent, even explosive significance. Wollstonecraft’s writing from this period still bears the hallmarks of her earlier works: a complex and critical Rousseauism; the translation of foreign-language source material into new (often feminist) contexts; fascination with the cause and consequences of cultural differences; and a belief in the underlying commonality of human nature and the importance of philanthropy. From 1790, these keynote features combine with her response to the French Revolution to bring her cosmopolitanism to the fore. Rights of Men is an impassioned rejection of Burke’s conservative politics, but it is also an encomium of Price, whose influence is evident in the cosmopolitan ethic underlying Wollstonecraft’s argument. She makes this ethic explicit in her dedication to Rights of Woman, which she addresses to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, a leading light in the French National Assembly. Yoking her arguments explicitly with French republican politics, she warns Talleyrand that, ‘if women are to be excluded, without having a voice, from a participation of the natural rights of mankind’, then he must prove they are without reason, or else this ‘flaw’ in the ‘NEW CONSTITUTION will ever shew that man must, in some shape, act like a tyrant, and tyranny, in whatever part of society it rears its brazen front, will ever undermine morality’ (V, 68). She attributes this feminist and democratic position to a philanthropic desire to better the human condition: ‘It is then an affection for the whole human race that makes my pen dart rapidly along to support what I believe to be the cause of virtue’ (65). Drawing on Price’s cosmopolitan model for love of country, Wollstonecraft reflects in both Vindications on what it means to be a patriot, defining patriotism in cosmopolitan terms as a principled mode of allegiance compatible with ‘affection for the whole human race’. In doing so, she considers what gives rise to public-spirited virtues within the bounds of the nation, and how national loyalties can further or frustrate the claims of justice and philanthropy. Wollstonecraft’s investment in reason makes her a universalist cosmopolitan inasmuch as she believes in the universal legitimacy of abstract principles of justice which properly directed feelings will endorse. When she writes of her ‘affection for the whole human race’, however, she signals the houseroom she gives to fellow-feeling, the ability to walk imaginatively in someone else’s shoes and, where they suffer, to feel compassion for their plight. In this she was undoubtedly influenced by the sentimental philosophy of Hume and Smith as well as Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790), which includes analyses of the operation of feeling and its relationship to reason.3 In both of her

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Vindications, Wollstonecraft also expresses ambivalence about the reliability of feeling as a guide to principled conduct, and strives to distinguish what she calls ‘selfish passions’ from philanthropic sentiments. To the former, she attributes the injustices of the Ancien Régime and its counterpart in the British ruling establishment; but she also extends her analysis to the foreign and economic policies of the dominant European powers, attacking the abuses of the slave trade and imperial enterprise. According to Wollstonecraft, remedying these ills demands that we expand our compassionate impulses and long-held loyalties to embrace the global community, making love of kindred and country synonymous with love of humankind. Addressing the same issue, Nussbaum recognises that ‘compassion begins with the local’, but she insists that it has cosmopolitan potential, if only we can ‘find devices through which to extend our strong emotions and our ability to imagine the situation of others to the world of human life as a whole’.4 In Political Emotions, she explores the challenge of forming a public-spirited culture, furnishing a modern parallel for Wollstonecraft’s attempt to reconcile the vicissitudes of human feeling with the impartial universalism her cosmopolitan ethic demands. Examining the factors that contribute to public spirit within a nation, Nussbaum identifies ethical solutions to the challenges of typical human psychology that are also often broadly applicable at the global level. Her claim is that human beings ‘have two systems of judgment: a system based in the imagination and perspectival thinking, and a system grounded in principle’.5 These two systems need not represent a contrast between the ‘undeliberated and quasi-instinctual’ and ‘conscious deliberation’, for ‘the imagination can involve conscious effort to see clearly, and the application of rules can be reflexive and undeliberated’.6 If the two systems can complement each other, however, they can also clash. Neither does well in isolation. Nussbaum’s model for a philanthropic public sphere involves bringing these systems of judgement into ‘a continual, and watchful, dialogue’ of mutual enrichment and regulation, ‘always asking what we’re entitled to give to those whose situation we vividly imagine and how far we need, by contrast, to follow impartial principle’.7 Nussbaum thus stands by her universalist position, not by downplaying the effects of fellow-feeling, but by suggesting that we can use it to extrapolate imaginatively from particular concerns to a publicspirited form of compassion. Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan ethic demands that she undertake a similar intellectual labour. In her Vindications, she combines Price’s rationalist theology with the lexicon of sentimental philosophy to portray a delicate harmony of rational principles (‘conscious

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­ eliberation’) and moral sentiments (the ‘quasi-instinctual’), a harmony d that results in universal benevolence. Her cosmopolitan patriot not only holds a rational belief in human rights, they are also capable of sympathetic identification with foreign, unknown or distant others. The latter is the work of their imagination, which allows them to expand their compassionate impulses beyond their sphere of experience. This expansive moral sentiment lays the groundwork for principled philanthropy compatible with the dictates of reason, moving them to demand political justice beyond the borders of their homeland. The formation of such cosmopolitan patriots is contingent, however, on simultaneous political and educational reforms. Vexed by Talleyrand’s androcentric Rapport sur l’instruction publique (Report on Public Education) (1791), Wollstonecraft insisted that both sexes were morally perfectible and should have equal opportunities to flourish.8 Women could and should be patriotic (world) citizens, but unequal laws and customs, together with the hierarchies of the patriarchal family, were confining their outlook to home and hearth (or worse, romantic daydreams). In Rights of Woman, therefore, she advocates pedagogical changes designed to grant both sexes the practical and moral independence to develop their God-given faculties of reason and imagination. Functioning in concert, these would curb the worst excesses of the human passions, the partisanship and acquisitiveness driving nationalist pride and imperialist aggression. They would also refine and augment the benevolent emotions crucial to a philanthropic love of country. For Wollstonecraft, this philanthropic emotion is a function of eudaimonia – her vision of human flourishing as the fulfilment of our virtuous potential – and it can expand beyond the nation to embrace the worldwide human community.

Human Sympathies: Love of Country and Philanthropy Price argues that patriotism should have a cosmopolitan component. Love of country is not simply an instinctive predilection for the homeland, but an active duty to enlighten its citizens until universal benevolence takes precedence over local and national loyalties. In the context of the French Revolution, benevolence entails a principled and heartfelt commitment to human rights.9 Price is primarily a rationalist, but he recognises that all forms of patriotism have a sentimental component. His cosmopolitan patriots love their country ‘ardently’, and this language of feeling functions to remind the reader that even the most principled patriotism shares its

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roots with self-regarding passions.10 Like Kant, Price worries that if irrational impulses thrive unchecked in the human psyche, these passions might urge the subordination of others to the self or to perceived extensions of the self, such as blood relatives or compatriots. Without the guiding principle of ‘universal benevolence’, a tyrannical desire for ownership or domination supersedes the human fellowship essential to Price’s cosmopolitan patriotism: As most of the evils which have taken place in private life, and among individuals, have been occasioned by the desire of private interest overcoming the public affections, so most of the evils which have taken place among bodies of men have been occasioned by the desire of their own interest overcoming the principle of universal benevolence and leading them to attack one another’s territories, to encroach on one another’s rights, and to endeavour to build their own advancement on the degradation of all within the reach of their power.11

As Price points out, throughout history, love of country has been a self-interested, acquisitive passion, manifesting in imperial conquest, seizures of power and the enslavement of all those not identified with the home nation. But a truly patriotic community is duty-bound to rebuke any government – including its own – that contravenes the human rights to freedom and equality. And crucially, this duty is not simply acknowledged, it is also deeply felt. Price’s cosmopolitan love of country is a controlled passion, instinctive loyalty harnessed by the universalising powers of reason. Wollstonecraft likewise believed in reason’s ability to discern general ethical principles, but she also found universalising potential in the philosophical concept of sympathy which, although not straightforwardly cosmopolitan, did suggest that human emotional affinities could transcend cultural divides. Daniel I. O’Neill’s analysis of the Burke–Wollstonecraft debate demonstrates Wollstonecraft’s thorough interrogation of the language of sentimental philosophy, which he suggests ‘provided the discursive scaffolding’ both for Burke’s attack on Price and Wollstonecraft’s rejoinder.12 Wollstonecraft uses this ‘discursive scaffolding’ to develop the ideas of Price’s Discourse. One of her central concerns, however, is that although sympathy can nurture philanthropic sentiments, it can also fuel tribalism, xenophobia and exclusivity. Modern cosmopolitan philosophers have credited the Enlightenment sentimentalists with promoting the ‘cultivation of empathy, which involved strenuous outreach to people far away’, and thereby contributing to one of the greatest humanitarian movements in history, the campaign for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.13 Indeed, some contemporary theorists have suggested that Smith’s Moral

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Sentiments is the founding text of an Enlightenment cosmopolitanism distinct from the Kantian model and its Stoic a­ ntecedent.14 From this perspective, it would be easy to claim Smith as a straightforward inspiration for Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitanism. The reality is more complicated, however, because although the sentimental philosophers Wollstonecraft read agreed that sympathy should be directed towards the general good, they disagreed about the possibility and means of doing so. Macaulay was relatively sanguine, arguing that sympathy could lead us ‘to acquire ideas of equity, and the utility of benevolence’, and concluding that ‘all human virtue must derive its source from this useful affection’.15 Both Hume and Smith found human subjects innately sympathetic, but neither ever argued that imaginative identification would lead automatically to disinterested benevolence or even compassion. As Fonna Forman-Barzilai demonstrates, Smith’s moral psychology acknowledges our social embeddedness, suggesting that our ‘natural desire for sympathetic concord’ inclines us to meet the expectations of our immediate  circle,  which might be violently  opposed to outsiders.16 Smith shared Burke’s conservative view that ‘human beings are affectively drawn to the local, are better able to care for the local – and that Stoic imperatives, in attempting to overcome all this, had lost touch with ordinary human life as it is lived’.17 In many respects, therefore, Smith was a reluctant  anti-cosmopolitan. He certainly doubted that patriotic feeling could incorporate disinterested philanthropy, commenting: ‘We do not love our country merely as a part of the great society of mankind; we love it for its own sake, and independently of any such consideration’.18 Moreover, unjust social institutions, such as slavery or class hierarchies, might work to conceal the feelings of the oppressed or to deaden sympathetic response in their oppressors. All things considered, extending sympathy and its moral outgrowth, benevolence, across national borders demands an extraordinary effort of imagination. From this perspective, cosmopolitan thinkers like Price and Wollstonecraft could be accused of ignoring the emotional textures of lived experience, and this is the very ground on which Burke launches his attack in the Reflections. Burke was not simply sceptical about the human capacity for universal benevolence; he also doubted whether the universalist outlook could appeal to the average human subject. ‘But that sort of reason which banishes the affections’, he writes, ‘is incapable of filling their place’.19 This is a point that Wollstonecraft partially concedes, acknowledging that the long-term benefits of political revolution can have little command over an imagination struck by immediate distress:

80    Mary Wollstonecraft I do also most cordially coincide with you, that till we can see the remote consequences of things, present calamities must appear in the ugly form of evil, and excite our commiseration. The good that time slowly educes from them may be hid from mortal eye, or dimly seen; whilst sympathy compels man to feel for man, and almost restrains the hand that would amputate a limb to save the whole body. (V, 18)

Wollstonecraft juxtaposes providentialist discourse with a visceral image of flesh and blood, at once acknowledging the persuasive force of affective response and hinting at its inadequacy in the context of a divinelyconceived narrative of human perfectibility. This self-­ absorption is precisely what Price enjoins us to reject, but in doing so, he gives Burke the material he needs to caricature the cosmopolitan position as callous and abstract. The ‘barbarous philosophy’ of Price and his ilk is ‘the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings’, unfit to inform political practice or foreign policy.20 In Burke’s eyes, the truth of a rational syllogism might bear no relation to the moral and political truths of a particular nation, and would therefore have little power over the hearts and minds of the populace.21 For this reason, like many modern cosmopolitan theorists, he is willing to consider contingencies in his analysis of political and moral action: ‘Circumstances’, he argues, ‘give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect’.22 Wollstonecraft recognises the appeal of Burke’s position; but having done so, she claims that his rejection of the universalist perspective also indicates ‘partial feelings’, self-interested passions that foster political and social injustice as well as jingoism and war (26). As part of her defence of Price and the Revolution, then, she also attacks what she regards as Burke’s unprincipled love of country. Hence the conflict between them can be read as a conflict between two different visions of patriotism and, by extension, the relationship of one’s nation to the wider world. Both of these visions take their form from a belief in the power of human sympathy and its role in generating compassion. As Hunt Botting has demonstrated, in their different ways, both Burke and Wollstonecraft emphasise ‘the crucial role of the family in cultivating the affectivity necessary for human moral development and the formation of human social and civic identities’.23 In one of the most famous passages of the Reflections, Burke describes loving ‘the little platoon we belong to in society’ as ‘the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections’.24 Moreover, he connects these affections with ‘a love to our country and to mankind’.25 Similarly, Wollstonecraft regards childhood loyalties as crucial in developing a principled patriotism: ‘if you wish to make good citizens’, she would argue in Rights of Woman, ‘you must

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first exercise the affections of a son and a brother’ (234). For Burke, a close-knit and affectionate family can inspire sympathies to extend beyond the ‘little platoon’ to the imagined community of the nation. Like Rousseau, however, he doubts they can reach much further. For Wollstonecraft, by contrast, sympathy for kith and kin has the potential to expand into philanthropic sentiments and a heartfelt commitment to world citizenship. In Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft warns against ‘confounding mechanical instinctive sensations with emotions that reason deepens, and justly terms the feelings of humanity’ (53). As Chris Jones points out, in such passages she is ‘quarrelling with Burke’s idea that instinctual feelings are an ultimate court of appeal and have a different authority from that of reason’.26 For emotional intuition to guide us reliably, reflection must sanction and refine it. This outlook reflects the rationalist theology informing Wollstonecraft’s religious faith, which comprehends God as ‘the father of the universal moral law based on reason’.27 All human beings – and God himself – are subject to this law, and all are gifted with the potential to recognise its justness. As Halldenius demonstrates, this argument incorporates ‘an oblique critique’ of Smith’s moral psychology.28 Since we should try to view ourselves ‘as God would’, in accordance with the standard of perfect reason, it follows that we must resist taking our principles from our social group.29 After all, ‘each by-stander may have his own prejudices, beside the prejudices of his age or country’ (205). For Wollstonecraft, this is why patriotism is unethical without a cosmopolitan component. It might germinate from the warm embrace of a parent, from stories by the fireside, from a neighbour’s helping hand, from rubbing shoulders at the local market or from laughter triggered by shared cultural memories; but love of country should also be sanctioned by reason and, as such, compatible with unprejudiced ‘affection for the whole human race’ (65). It should be clear by now, however, that despite her emphasis on reason, Wollstonecraft never underestimates the role of fellow-feeling in human moral development. Rather like Nussbaum, she envisages reason complementing ‘quasi-instinctual’ judgements.30 Hence in Rights of Men she rejects Burke’s caricature of the heartless metaphysician, presenting sentiment as an integral part of the formation of the cosmopolitan subject. Just as Nussbaum argues that ‘love matters for justice’, so Wollstonecraft regards sympathy and compassion as wellsprings of philanthropy, unpredictable but essential elements of the progress to universal justice.31

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A Vindication of the Rights of Men Burke was incensed that Price could endorse the French Revolution amidst reports of an angry mob threatening the French royal family – it was surely natural, he declared, to feel compassion for their predicament. He saw in Price’s enthusiasm unnatural immunity to sentiments liable to move the average human subject, an immunity which led to his ‘rejection of ordinary patriotism’ in favour of a more abstract love for humankind.32 As David Bromwich observes, Burke regards the psychology necessary to make this leap from national loyalty to universal benevolence as essentially ‘perverse’, and suggests that most English subjects are constituted differently: ‘Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers’.33 By presenting local and heritable allegiances as both natural and distinctively English, Burke portrays the English as inherent traditionalists, suggesting that supporters of the Revolution are ‘defectors from the English national character and from human nature itself’.34 He depicts this dual defection as the cause of Price’s failure of compassion as well as his readiness to see the old political order swept away. Price and Burke actually share similar views about the intimate origins of moral consciousness as well as its expansive potential.35 They differ profoundly, however, in their convictions about the likely outcomes of human psychology. When Burke remarks that ‘we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties’, he suggests not simply that patriotism stems from private affections but that it remains ‘inseparable’ from them.36 This view of moral and political authority as founded in emotion rather than reason makes him distrust political measures intended to uproot national traditions or disturb the collective sense of national identity. According to this vision, custom and hierarchy are not barriers to progress; they are safeguards inspiring us with deeply felt allegiances and objects of reverence that hold in check our basest instincts. For Burke, the democratic principle of equality has stripped away this ‘decent drapery’ of civilised life.37 It will mean carnage, he warns, to demolish age-old institutions and expose venerated sovereigns as bare forked animals. In Wollstonecraft’s eyes, however, the real carnage is political injustice, and the ‘decent drapery’ a veil cloaking mass suffering. In Rights of Men, she dismisses Burke’s moral outrage as the disquiet of power under threat, and depicts his claims to patriotism as a front for acquisitive and proprietary passions.

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Like many of Burke’s contemporaries, Wollstonecraft presents his horror at the French Revolution as a hypocritical volte-face: ‘But on what principle Mr Burke could defend American independence, I cannot conceive; for the whole tenor of his plausible arguments settles slavery on an everlasting foundation’ (14). Unlike Price, Burke saw British patriotism incorporating an imperialist foreign policy but, when hostilities broke out between Britain and America, he had recommended conciliatory measures in keeping with his vision of benign colonial sovereignty amenable to local laws and practices.38 As the war dragged on, however, he began to argue for a peace treaty that recognised American independence. Regardless of whether his attitude was more pragmatic than ideological, Burke was widely regarded as having supported the secession of the colonies – so much so that radicals like Paine expected him to greet the fall of the Bastille with enthusiasm. Many were perplexed and dismayed at his apparent change of heart. For her part, Wollstonecraft attributes Burke’s counterrevolutionary stance to self-interest overtaking benevolent principles, and she claims the shift is evident in his emphasis on property rights as a cornerstone of British liberty. Burke argued that a freeborn Englishman’s rights to property were guaranteed by laws of inheritance that the French Revolution had placed under threat. Responding to this claim, Wollstonecraft demands, in a passage densely packed with allusions to the ghosts in Hamlet and Macbeth: ‘Art thou there, True-penny? Must we swear to secure property, and make assurance doubly sure, to give your perturbed spirit rest?’ (37) By describing Burke as a ‘perturbed spirit’, she aligns him with the redundant ideology of a bygone era. As Macbeth has often been interpreted as defending the Stuart ideology of the divine right of kings, the reference also mischievously conflates Burke’s Whiggish defence of property rights with Tory political convictions, giving some credence to his opponents’ accusations of secret Catholic sympathies. Even more pertinently, though, Wollstonecraft begins by comparing Burke with the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who demands the overthrow of a criminal king, then switches to comparing him with Macbeth in his period of tyrannical rule. One spirit is superseded by another in a pointed gibe at Burke’s political inconsistency: ‘Peace, peace to the manes of thy patriotic phrensy, which contributed to deprive some of thy fellow-citizens of their property in America: another spirit now walks abroad to secure the property of the church’ (37). In this passage, Wollstonecraft uses the term ‘patriotic’ to describe the fellow-feeling that granted British liberty to colonists viewed as compatriots and consequently indicted imperialist violence. Burke himself had portrayed his support for American

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independence as in keeping with British patriotism, acknowledging the colonists’ grievances as tax-payers without parliamentary representation, and considering them ‘members of a shared British moral and political community, as “English” in spirit, and as sharing and even exceeding the English passion for liberty’.39 Wollstonecraft points out that Burke’s position necessitated the loss to British subjects of valuable land in the colonies. Her negative language – ‘deprive [...] thy fellowcitizens’ – acknowledges an alternative definition of patriotism which demands narrower loyalties to king and country and in which British property rights infringe on the rights of colonial subjects. In this light, it is telling that Burke’s condemnation of the French Revolution includes a defence of property. By suggesting that Burke focuses on the ‘property of the church’, rather than its moral and spiritual role, Wollstonecraft defines his new ‘spirit’ as avaricious. Following Price, she connects this desire for ownership with a chauvinistic form of patriotism, situating English imperialists within a moral universe that punishes their hubris: The tithes are safe! – We will not say for ever – because the time may come, when the traveller may ask where proud London stood? when its temples, its laws, and its trade, may be buried in one common ruin, and only serve as a by-word to point a moral, or furnish senators, who wage a wordy war, on the other side of the Atlantic, with tropes to swell their thundering bursts of eloquence. (37)

Wollstonecraft’s references to Shakespearean tragedy are pointed because, as Mary Jacobus observes, Burke’s ‘aestheticizing of the French Revolution’ as a tragedy is elitist insofar as it privileges the spectacle of greatness fallen from high estate over the suffering of the French populace and their resultant ‘levelling impulse’.40 Wollstonecraft’s image of ‘proud London’ in ‘one common ruin’ depicts a similar fall from greatness, a noble nation destroyed by its own flaws – in this case, political, social and economic inequalities: The perpetuation of property in our families is one of the privileges you most warmly contend for; yet it would not be very difficult to prove that the mind must have a very limited range that thus confines its benevolence to such a narrow circle, which, with great propriety, may be included in the sordid calculations of blind self-love. (22)

In short, Burke’s emphasis on family property and inheritance narrows the reach of his sympathy to those he can identify with his own selfhood. Wollstonecraft accuses Burke of selective compassion: how can he leap to the defence of Marie Antoinette but pour scorn on her destitute subjects?

‘Affection for the Whole Human Race’    85 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. (15–16)

In this passage, Wollstonecraft portrays Burke’s political stance as a failure of compassion, the result of misdirected sympathy (in the Smithian sense of imaginative identification). Anyone whose heart bleeds for the queen but not the starving peasantry is failing to ask, as Nussbaum puts it, ‘what we’re entitled to give to those whose situation we vividly imagine and how far we need, by contrast, to follow impartial principle’.41 Burke’s pity is excited by the trappings of wealth and status, which Wollstonecraft pointedly relates to the ‘declamation of the theatre’, a display of suffering designed to provoke emotional response. He refuses pity, however, to starving families torn apart by the Royal Navy’s practice of impressment, because he cannot feel their common humanity with members of his own class. In Wollstonecraft’s eyes, this inconsistency reveals, not only the social prejudice underlying Burke’s position, but also the incompatibility of his sentiments with true benevolence. With this insistence on fellow-feeling as the antidote to self-interest, she counters Burke’s description of rights-based philosophy as ‘that sort of reason which banishes the affections’, presenting calls for political justice as the logical consequence of our compassion for fellow (world) citizens even when their predicaments are unfamiliar to us.42 Drawing on Rousseau’s critique of the theatre to consolidate her argument, Wollstonecraft suggests that, in portraying the Revolution ‘as a tragic spectacle’, Burke reveals his compassion to be performative: ‘“The tears that are shed for fictitious sorrow are admirably adapted,” says Rousseau, “to make us proud of all the virtues which we do not possess”’ (16).43 In short, Burke’s rejection of the levelling principles of the Revolution reveals his indifference to the unglamorous masses beyond his sphere of experience. If the American war drove him to a ‘patriotic phrensy’, his response to the French Revolution falls short of the philanthropy requisite for cosmopolitan patriotism. Wollstonecraft extends the scope of her argument beyond Revolutionary politics to a sweeping indictment of tyranny and its roots in the selfish passions. She argues that, if Burke objects to the human rights enshrined in the Déclaration des droits (Declaration of Rights), he might just as well have endorsed slavery:

86    Mary Wollstonecraft Allowing his servile reverence for antiquity, and prudent attention to selfinterest, to have the force which he insists on, the slave trade ought never to be abolished; and, because our ignorant forefathers, not understanding the native dignity of man, sanctioned a traffic that outrages every suggestion of reason and religion, we are to submit to the inhuman custom, and term an atrocious insult to humanity the love of our country, and a proper submission to the laws by which our property is secured. (14)

Slavery made Britain a prosperous nation and a dominant world power, but Wollstonecraft argues that no true patriot could sanction its laying waste to human rights and deadening of fellow-feeling. One might object to her too-easy connection of subservience with literal enslavement, but her aim is to denounce the systematic usurpation of human rights by unequal rights to property, which she also conceives as the loss of philanthropy to a narrow patriotism intent on enriching the mother country.44 For Wollstonecraft, the slave trade demonstrates how individual liberty – supposedly an English birthright – falls prey to avarice. Training her eye on domestic laws and practices, she identifies a similar pattern in the elevation of property over the lives of petty criminals and in the press gangs’ disregard for individual freedom: Our penal laws punish with death the thief who steals a few pounds; but to take by violence, or trepan, a man, is no such heinous offence. – For who shall dare to complain of the venerable vestige of the law that rendered the life of a deer more sacred than that of a man? (15)

From this perspective, the much-vaunted ‘English liberty’ is economic individualism with a gloss of national pride: ‘And to this selfish principle every nobler one is sacrificed. – The Briton takes place of the man, and the image of God is lost in the citizen!’ (15) As Taylor has demonstrated, for Wollstonecraft the ‘image of God’ represents a horizon of possibility, a divine standard to which imperfect human beings can aspire.45 Overweening national pride lowers that horizon, so that serving the state becomes the greatest aspiration imaginable. Such claims reveal the religious foundations of her political beliefs, but they also testify to her cosmopolitan mindset. If the ‘image of God’ should obscure the nation, so the worldwide community of human beings should overshadow one’s ‘little platoon’. In a review of Rabaut Saint-Étienne’s Adresse aux Anglois (Address to the English Nation) (1791), Wollstonecraft links counterrevolutionary sentiments with English ‘national pride’, a misplaced loyalty that ‘leads an ignorant mechanic to give the sweat of his brow to support armaments that pamper placemen, – all for the good of old England!’ (VII, 395).46 Her ironic appropriation of British nationalist discourse counters the

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popular image of Britain upholding rational principles in the face of French barbarity: ‘John Bull has hitherto argued with a high hand, and we have not now any reason to suppose that he will calmly weigh arguments that place Frenchmen on a level with Englishmen’ (394). As in Original Stories – which appeared that same year in a new edition with engravings by William Blake47 – Wollstonecraft’s comments call attention to the common humanity of the British and French people. She thus demands that Revolutionary politics be judged from the clearsighted perspective of world citizenship rather than blinkered national loyalties. Reason – the ability to ‘calmly weigh arguments’ – enables one to reject national prejudices and endorse the principle of universal rights. In the same year, she published a glowing review of Brissot’s Nouveau Voyage Dans Les Etats-Unis de l’Amérique Septentrionale, fait en 1788 (New Travels in the United States of North America) (1791), in which she praises the Girondin leader for writing both as a French patriot and ‘an enlightened citizen of the world, whose zeal for liberty appears to arise from the purest moral principles, and most expansive humanity’ (390).48 One year later Wollstonecraft would declare in Rights of Woman: ‘It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners’ (V, 114). Here she acknowledges the threat posed to moral truth – and consequently political justice – by a too-localised perspective. She identifies reason, which is coextensive with ‘the character of the supreme Being’, as the means to establish general principles distinct from the demands and expectations of one’s immediate circle (114). Yet she also considers compassion a vital characteristic of the philanthropic subject. This is Nussbaum’s point when she argues that ‘love matters for justice’ or that ‘democratic reciprocity needs love’.49 In the absence of coercion, a public-spirited collective ‘needs to be nourished and sustained by something that lies deep in the human heart and taps its most powerful sentiments’.50 If it is not, then ‘the public culture remains wafer-thin and passionless, without the ability to motivate people to make any sacrifice of their personal self-interest for the sake of the common good’.51 The difficulty is that, while affect plays a part in forming the moral sentiments of a cosmopolitan patriot, it also makes them partially unreflective. One can see this knee-jerk element as evidence of divinely implanted intuition, but equally as contrary to the requisite impartiality of a moral arbiter. This is one of the defining paradoxes of Wollstonecraft’s thought, the dual perspective that presents the affective roots of philanthropy as both an essential spur to benevolent action and a threat to its moral integrity. Having used Price’s model for cosmopolitan love of country to reject Burkean politics, in Rights of Woman she wrestles with this paradox,

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drawing on her pedagogical expertise to consider how best to cultivate love that is truly philanthropic. In doing so, she develops a model of patriotic femininity that incorporates world citizenship.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman According to Wollstonecraft, stunting women’s intellectual development is a counterrevolutionary move, an effective endorsement of unjust hierarchies that halt the march of reason. Far from distracting from the core principles of the Revolution, improving female education will guarantee their implementation and success.52 Co-opting Price’s cosmopolitan model for love of country to her feminist agenda, Wollstonecraft argues that the mother of future citizens ‘must be a patriot’, because ‘the love of mankind, from which an orderly train of virtues spring, can only be produced by considering the moral and civil interest of mankind’ (V, 66). Mothers must understand and be able to explain the philosophy of rights and its instantiation in the Revolution in order to instil in their offspring ‘the true principle of patriotism’, which for Wollstonecraft is synonymous with ‘affection for the whole human race’ (66, 65). Once they grasp these philanthropic principles, they will not only fulfil their maternal duties, they will also be moved to extend their care-giving beyond the family to a borderless imagined community. This conception of patriotic maternity is an implicit rebuke to Burke’s narrowlyconceived ideas of human sympathy, whereby the public sphere is only meaningful insofar as it mirrors the private. By contrast, Wollstonecraft demands that women develop a patriotism that is expansive, outwardlooking and conceptually ambitious – a form of world citizenship. From Wollstonecraft’s perspective, however, the women of eighteenthcentury European society are ill-equipped for patriotic maternity: their ‘confined views’, indicative of underdeveloped reason and pedestrian imaginations, inspire them only with ‘narrow affections’, and to this limited outlook ‘justice and humanity are often sacrificed’ (261). In Rights of Men, she undermines the widely held belief in women’s natural capacity for moral sentiment with an indictment of the ‘fair ladies’ of the colonial plantocracy: 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. (45)

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Smith had argued that sympathy depends on recognition of shared humanity and parity of experience. In the case of colonial slavery, Wollstonecraft finds that sympathy extends to those identified with the self, but is cut off entirely in cases of racial difference. Given her knowledge of Moral Sentiments, it is surely significant that her female colonists can take an imaginative leap into sentimental novels peopled with white Europeans, but that their sympathies do not expand into compassion for their slaves and a principled rejection of their bondage. Wollstonecraft thus expresses her concern that selfish passions can masquerade as virtues within one’s ‘little platoon’ while manifesting as inhumanity towards those outside of it. In Rights of Woman, she repeatedly portrays women as prone to such ‘narrow’ or ‘exclusive affection(s)’ (261, 263), and she draws an explicit analogy with patriotism that elevates the homeland at the expense of other nations: The exclusive affections of women seem indeed to resemble Cato’s unjust love for his country. He wished to crush Carthage, not to save Rome, but to promote its vain-glory; and, in general, it is to similar principles that humanity is sacrificed, for genuine duties support each other. (261)

This allusion to Cato, who was convinced that Roman supremacy necessitated the destruction of Carthage, describes women’s narrow affections as reminiscent and even symptomatic of an inward-looking, chauvinistic love of country.53 In both cases, sympathy is confined to perceived extensions of the self, while others are regarded as means to self-glorification rather than independent moral agents deserving of ‘humanity’, another word for ‘benevolence’ in Wollstonecraft’s lexicon. According to Nussbaum, developing ‘a public culture of compassion’ involves encouraging citizens to extrapolate from particular acts of compassion to principles of benevolence.54 The aim is ‘to construct a bridge from the vividly imagined single case to the impartial principle by challenging the imagination, reminding people that a predicament to which they respond in a single vividly described case is actually far broader’.55 Wollstonecraft suggests that the dual action of reason and imagination can construct just such a bridge. In her patriarchal society, however, women are denied the opportunity to exercise their intellects as independent moral agents and their imaginations are fed only on gossip and trashy novels. As a result, they never unfold their God-given capacity to generalise beyond particular experiences, which makes it especially difficult for them to bridge the gap from ‘the vividly imagined single case to the impartial principle’. We might here recall Halldenius’s observation that, for Wollstonecraft, ‘a person whose mind has been habituated to  dependence […] will have no capacity to see

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beyond ­personal emotional ties or self-interested gratification’.56 Vernon likewise observes that, in patriotic republicanism, ‘the capacity for civic judgment is linked to the ability to look beyond immediate personal gratification in order to grasp shared, longer-term interests. Wollstonecraft constantly regrets that this ability is underdeveloped in women’.57 The risk of this emotional and moral deficiency is why Mrs Mason strives to inculcate moral independence in her charges, and to nurture their compassionate instincts to embrace people from different social classes and foreign nations. It is also why, in Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft points to women’s ‘exclusive affections’ as a practical barrier, not only to the development of democratic and republican citizenship, but also to cosmopolitan patriotism. Wollstonecraft claims that, because reason is not cultivated in female children, their capacity to feel also remains underdeveloped. Women are supposed to possess more sensibility, and even humanity, than men, and their strong attachments and instantaneous emotions of compassion are given as proofs; but the clinging affection of ignorance has seldom any thing noble in it, and may mostly be resolved into selfishness, as well as the affection of children and brutes. I have known many weak women whose sensibility was entirely engrossed by their husbands; and as for their humanity, it was very faint indeed, or rather it was only a transient emotion of compassion. (V, 260–1)

By the end of the eighteenth century, women were generally regarded as the more sentimental sex,58 but Wollstonecraft denies that quick or even acute emotional response denotes a correspondent depth of feeling. In The Cave of Fancy, she had granted persons of sensibility a special capacity for insight (I, 201), but in Rights of Woman, she distinguishes the signs and symptoms of sensibility from the altruistic feelings crucial to philanthropy. She aligns the ‘clinging affection’ of ‘weak women’ with ‘the affection of children and brutes’ because both stem from dependency, a need for reassurance from the patriarchal authority figures whose whims control every part of their lives. Women’s ‘humanity’ – their capacity to act benevolently – is ‘very faint’ or ‘transient’ because their emotional energy is almost entirely absorbed by the romantic attachments propping up their self-worth. The vain and primping female caricature that Wollstonecraft appears to endorse owes much to women’s self-image as objects of desire, which subordinates moral conscience to appearance and reputation, and prevents them from ‘acquir[ing] a love for mankind by turning their thoughts to the grand pursuits that exalt the human race, and promote general happiness’ (V, 259). As women thereby fail to develop philanthropic love, ‘they have no moral context in which to find meaning or guidance’, and when they have children,

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they risk perpetuating the same patterns of self-absorption, fixation and exclusivity.59 At this stage of her career, Wollstonecraft levels abrasive criticisms at any love traceable to self-regard. This includes ‘parental affection’, which she denigrates as ‘the blindest modification of perverse self-love’ (221). She appears to use the word ‘perverse’ to mean ‘distorted from the right’ – the first sense listed in Johnson’s Dictionary – because parental love epitomises unreason. She may also mean to imply the senses of ‘stubborn’ and ‘untractable’.60 This is not because she regards parental instincts as particularly strong; in fact, in the same chapter, she dismisses maternal instinct as ‘a very faint tie’, insisting that ‘affections must grow out of the habitual exercise of a mutual sympathy’ (223). Instead, it is because she believes parental love within the patriarchal family expresses a fixed and unreasonable view of the child as an extension of the parental ego and bound to obey commands reflecting its impulses and desires. Deploying the lexis of animality, Wollstonecraft represents parents as creatures of impulse rather than reason, complaining that they ‘often love their children in the most brutal manner, and sacrifice every relative duty to promote their advancement in the world’ (221). This unphilanthropic attitude does not bespeak care for the child so much as desire for self-glorification, for the parents seek ‘to promote, such is the perversity of unprincipled prejudices, the future welfare of the very beings whose present existence they imbitter by the most despotic stretch of power’ (221). Wollstonecraft depicts mothers as particularly prone to putting their offspring before other deserving objects of benevolence. The mother– child bond is ‘brutish’, an animal instinct at odds with philanthropy: Besides, the affection of some women for their children is, as I have before termed it, frequently very brutish; for it eradicates every spark of humanity. Justice, truth, every thing is sacrificed by these Rebekah’s, and for the sake of their own children they violate the most sacred duties, forgetting the common relationship that binds the whole family on earth together. Yet, reason seems to say, that they who suffer one duty, or affection, to swallow up the rest, have not sufficient heart or mind to fulfil that one conscientiously. (222)

Although maternal sentiments were often cited in philosophical works as evidence of the altruism arising from human sympathies, they could also signify the exclusionary nature of blood ties and ingrained loyalties, indicating the limits as well as the potential of human benevolence.61 Arraigning maternal feeling against ‘justice’, ‘truth’ and ‘humanity’, Wollstonecraft pours scorn on mothers ‘who only love their children because they are their children, and seek no further for the foundation

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of their duty, than in the feelings of the moment’ (222). According to Halldenius, Wollstonecraft’s point is that ‘even parental love is subject to a principle of action, according to which you are never allowed to cause harm to others in order to benefit someone simply because that person is close to you’.62 Directing too much emotional energy towards nearest and dearest makes one ‘violate the overriding principle of respect for humanity’.63 Yet this is not simply a case of principle in conflict with feeling, for Wollstonecraft also regards such mothers as incapable of experiencing – and therefore inculcating – love for ‘the whole family on earth’. She criticises the ‘want of reason in their affections’, not because she disapproves of maternal instinct per se, but because she regards unreflective attachments as egocentric and proprietary (222). The mother loves her child possessively, as one she can call her ‘own’, a part of her very selfhood. Without any guiding principle of action beyond her personal gratification, her maternal emotions, as fluctuating as they are intense, lead her by turns to overindulge and neglect her child. For Wollstonecraft, this egocentric mentality is the psychological fallout of women’s subordinate condition. The patriarchal sexualisation of femininity, embodied by Rousseau’s Sophie, teaches women to perceive themselves as objects of male desire and to channel their emotional energies towards ‘narcissistic self-admiration’.64 Hence she frequently connects ‘narrow’ or ‘exclusive’ affections with women’s preoccupation with flirtation and husband-hunting; it is not incidental that, in Rights of Men, the plantocratic ladies turn from their sadistic treatment of slaves to popular novels, a long-established source and symbol of romantic daydreaming. In Rights of Woman, what Taylor identifies as Wollstonecraft’s almost obsessive preoccupation with female sexuality amounts to a commentary on the relationship between intimate desires and philanthropic feeling that preoccupied her in Mary.65 For Wollstonecraft, erotic love remains ‘an instrument to raise [mankind] above his earthly dross, by teaching him to love the centre of all perfection’ (180). At the same time, she frets about the disruptive potential of ‘exclusive affections’. For this reason, she echoes Julie in her insistence on the social utility of tepid marital feeling: In order to fulfil the duties of life, and to be able to pursue with vigour the various employments which form the moral character, a master and mistress of a family ought not to continue to love each other with passion. I mean to say, that they ought not to indulge these emotions which disturb the order of society, and engross the thoughts that should be otherwise employed. (99)66

From this point of view, Wollstonecraft takes aim at ‘women whose sensibility [is] entirely engrossed by their husbands’, comparing

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naval-gazing lovers unfavourably with the expansive sympathies essential to universal benevolence (260). But because inadequate education makes female self-sufficiency nearly impossible, women have little alternative but to pine for a male protector whose authority limits their practical opportunities and moral independence. A woman educated thus is apt to be ‘cold-hearted’ and ‘narrow-minded’, regarding other women, not as objects of compassion, but as competition for the status and material comfort only men can confer (134). It is for this reason that she ‘is jealous of the little kindness which her husband shews to his relations; and her sensibility not rising to humanity, she is displeased at seeing the property of her children lavished on an helpless sister’ (134). Once this woman becomes a mother, her psychological enslavement limits her capacity to view her children as independent moral agents and educate them accordingly. She therefore carries on the behavioural patterns laid down in the patriarchal family, which blights affections in the bud and makes it impossible for philanthropic feeling to flourish.67 Wollstonecraft takes aim, not at women per se, but at systemic inequalities that limit human moral development and, consequently, our capacity for altruism. Where she expresses misgivings about instinctive affections, however, she has recourse to a rhetoric of disgust that undermines her argument. Troubling from a feminist perspective is the fact that, as well as regularly figuring moral and cultural degeneracy in terms of ‘hyper-femininity’, she deploys animal imagery to depict women as flighty, self-interested and shallow.68 Their affections are ‘brutish’ (222), ‘spaniel-like’ (102, 212), ‘cattish’ (246) and marked by ‘animal capriciousness’ (227), and in the absence of meaningful relationships, they ‘plume themselves’ like ‘the feathered race’ (125), birdbrains seeking attention.69 Albeit Wollstonecraft sets out to demand for women ‘respect grounded in the idea of human dignity’, this imagery suggests a failure to achieve ‘an inner grasp of their full and equal humanity’.70 For Taylor, this ‘anti-womanism’ is a form of ‘self-animus’.71 Despite identifying the debasing spectre of feeble, lovelorn, compliant femininity as a social construct, Wollstonecraft is compelled continuously to repudiate and guard against it. This is the phenomenon Nussbaum calls ‘projective disgust’, the othering of a group of people assigned the traits and tendencies most feared within the self.72 Projective disgust typically represents the othered group as ‘quasi-animals, as occupying a border zone between the truly human (associated with transcendence of the body and its substances) and the utterly nonhuman’.73 Thus men have frequently ‘imputed animality to women because of their alleged sexual eagerness and their connection with pregnancy and birth, all the while implicitly denying their own connections to these phenomena’.74

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Wollstonecraft protects her self-image as ‘a philosopher’ and ‘a moralist’ immune to ‘brutish’ instincts by abjuring the unreflective drives, instincts and affects historically demeaned under the aegis of femininity (103). Her rhetoric relegates ‘other’ women to the realm of caricature, where they dwell beyond the reach of her sympathy. When it comes to advancing her cosmopolitan ethic, she deploys images of women to a similar end, especially those with alien lifestyles such as aristocrats, sex workers or the occupants of Eastern harems. Her rhetoric of disgust reifies her anxieties about unmediated affects, making these women foils for her ideal of the rational yet caring philanthropist, living effigies of self-interest and particularism. As Hunt Botting remarks with regard to the orientalist tropes in Rights of Woman, such rhetoric is problematic even when deployed strategically because ‘one’s language ought to reflect one’s human rights values’.75 Wollstonecraft’s rhetoric of disgust reinscribes the habits of mind she strives to repudiate. Regardless of her efforts to stake out a philanthropic ethical position, the knotty issues of self-regard and projective disgust persist at the stylistic level, her prose performing the difficulty of mustering compassion in the face of alterity. Countless critics have observed the dearth of sisterhood in this iteration of Wollstonecraft’s feminism, her tendency to lecture, hector and mock her sex for falling victim to the false consciousness she claims to have eluded. The problem with all this is that anyone concerned to foster public spirit or rally people to their cause has to reckon with a timeless feature of human psychology, the egocentric element in attachment. ‘To make people care’, Nussbaum observes, ‘you have to make them see the object of potential care as in some way “theirs” and “them”’.76 Clashing with her feminist principles and the cosmopolitan ethic that informs them, Wollstonecraft’s passages of decidedly unphilanthropic rhetoric seem unlikely to foster solidarity between women. I shall revisit this feature of her texts in Chapter 4. For now, let me emphasise that she argues, in both Vindications, that we are not irretrievably limited by egocentricity, even if it does rear its head in her prose. On the contrary, the faculties of reason and imagination give us the capacity to transform self-interested feelings into philanthropic sentiments. The onus on each individual to undergo this transformation contributes to what Hunt Botting identifies as the ‘eudaimonic’ thrust of Wollstonecraft’s thought, her conception of virtue as intrinsic to human flourishing. She argues persuasively that Wollstonecraft combined her rationalist theology with the belief that ‘the Aristotelian telos, or final goal, of human life is the realization of eudaimonic, or virtuous, happiness’, and that, ‘to experience virtuous happiness – or the ultimate

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human good – was to cultivate an independent yet caring moral character’.77 We have seen the premium Wollstonecraft puts in her early works on moral independence and on charitable acts. She also expects a moral character to incorporate philanthropy, so that ‘caring’ denotes commitment to universal benevolence as well as concern for particular individuals. The concept of eudaimonia offers a model for reconciling our self-regarding affects with the moral imperative to act altruistically. According to Nussbaum, ‘all the major emotions are “eudaimonistic”, meaning that they appraise the world from the person’s own viewpoint and the viewpoint, therefore, of that person’s evolving conception of a worthwhile life’.78 Eudaimonia is distinguishable from egoism because the eudaimonistic subject recognises the inherent worth of others. Wollstonecraft argues from a similar premise when she distinguishes between ‘the parental affection of humanity’ and ‘instinctive natural affection’ (225). Both are types of parental love, but the former moves the parent ‘to form the heart and enlarge the understanding of his child’ (225). (The masculine pronoun is surely significant; Wollstonecraft struggles to imagine a maternal figure who combines affection with love of humankind.) Where parental affection is eudaimonistic, the child is no longer perceived as a parental adjunct. Consequently, they enjoy recognition as a developing moral agent whose progress in virtue contributes to the parent’s moral growth and sense of personal fulfilment. In short, the philanthropic parent may lavish care and attention on their child without fear of egoism so long as the purpose of that care is to nurture ‘an independent yet caring moral character’. Nussbaum envisages a similar psychological mechanism forming public spirit both within the nation and beyond it. ‘If distant people and abstract principles are to get a grip on our emotions’, she writes, ‘these emotions must somehow position them within our circle of concern, creating a sense of “our” life in which these people and events matter as parts of our “us,” our own flourishing’.79 In the eyes of a cosmopolitan patriot, caring about the wellbeing of their family, their compatriots and their fellow world citizens contributes to their self-definition as a virtuous individual living a valuable life in concert with their philanthropic community. Considering how to promote the moral development of such cosmopolitan subjects, Wollstonecraft returns to intimate bonds. Several critics have recognised her belief that, ‘our affection for universal humankind depends on our affections for particular beings’, and that she ‘wanted personal love to coexist with and strengthen an ethos of universal benevolence within the family’.80 In Rights of Woman, she presents the family as a vital seedbed for philanthropic sentiments: ‘public affections, as well as public virtues, must ever grow out of the private

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character, or they are merely meteors that shoot athwart a dark sky, and disappear as they are gazed at and admired’ (234). Hunt Botting has demonstrated that Wollstonecraft envisages the ‘sympathy first shared between parent and child’ functioning as ‘an emotional springboard for the habitual practice of compassion toward neighbors and strangers, fellow citizens, and foreigners’.81 By practising compassion in everwidening circles from kindred to global community, the child learns to make unseen imagined communities the object of eudaimonistic emotions first excited in the home, eventually perceiving ‘affection for the whole human race’ as an integral part of their virtuous selfhood. In her lengthy penultimate chapter ‘On National Education’, Wollstonecraft connects familial bonds with patriotic citizenship, broadening the scope of ‘public virtues’ to incorporate love of humankind as well as love of country: Few, I believe, have had much affection for mankind, who did not first love their parents, their brothers, sisters, and even the domestic brutes, whom they first played with. The exercise of youthful sympathies forms the moral temperature; and it is the recollection of these first affections and pursuits that gives life to those that are afterwards more under the direction of reason. (234)

In this passage, bonds of sympathy formed in the private sphere shape the moral conscience which, as reason matures, works to extend the reach of sympathy beyond the local and particular. At the same time, Wollstonecraft remains wary of unleavened emotion, warning that ‘the affections seem to have a kind of animal capriciousness when they merely reside in the heart’ (227). This is the state to which women are reduced: they are particularly vulnerable to emotional bias because their reason is underdeveloped and their views confined to the immediate concerns of their family and household. Nussbaum observes that experiencing powerful compassion for a particular subject of distress ‘can often destabilize good principles through just this particularism’.82 By way of example, she cites the parents who become ‘utterly deflected’ from their ideals of educational inclusivity ‘by the particular struggles of their own children’.83 Wollstonecraft is suspicious of fellow-feeling partly because of similar concerns about its warping influence on otherwise principled people. With their attention trained on the details of domestic life and little to broaden their worldview, women fall prey to particularistic emotions and struggle to bring the bigger picture into focus. Still, one need not be a freewheeling globetrotter to develop a cosmopolitan mindset. In her ‘Reply’ to her Boston Review interlocutors,

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Nussbaum claims that ‘it is right to give the local an additional measure of concern’, invoking the ‘immense amount of love and care’ she devotes to her daughter to illustrate her point.84 In this early work, however, instead of acknowledging how instinctive and irresistible maternal love can be, she discusses it in instrumental terms as a vital component of philanthropic action. Claiming that ‘the primary reason’ for giving precedence to the local is that ‘this is the only sensible way to do good’, she also insists that, regardless of the incidental advantages of privileging our personal feelings, we ‘should not […] believe our own country or family is really worth more than the children or families of other people – all are still equally human, of equal moral worth’.85 Like Nussbaum, Wollstonecraft emphasises the equal moral worth of all human subjects. She duly attacks mothers who fawn over their children at the expense of benevolence towards others, giving rise to interpretations of her narrative voice as harsh and unfeeling. As in her earlier pedagogical works, however, she advocates enlarging rather than spurning human affections. In Chapter IV, she asserts that ‘the heart, as well as the understanding, is opened by cultivation’ (135), and in Chapter VII, she enjoins her readers: ‘Make the heart clean, let it expand and feel for all that is human, instead of being narrowed by selfish passions’ (193). To foster these expansive affections, legal and political reforms must work in tandem with pedagogical improvements to dissolve the social and gender hierarchies that make practical and moral independence the preserve of a privileged few. Gripped by Revolutionary hopes for a new world order, Wollstonecraft envisages the hierarchical family transformed into a newly egalitarian cradle of benevolence, one that ‘allows for the proper fashioning of the social bonds of sympathy, civility, and patriotism’, and transforms the private sphere into a primary source of philanthropy.86 Even in the most egalitarian family, however, respect for parental authority inevitably preserves some degree of hierarchy which prevents the children operating on terms of complete equality: Besides, in youth the seeds of every affection should be sown, and the respectful regard, which is felt for a parent, is very different from the social affections that are to constitute the happiness of life as it advances. Of these equality is the basis, and an intercourse of sentiments unclogged by that observant seriousness which prevents disputation, though it may not inforce submission. Let a child have ever such an affection for his parent, he will always languish to play and prattle with children; and the very respect he feels, for filial esteem always has a dash of fear mixed with it, will, if it do not teach him cunning, at least prevent him from pouring out the little secrets which first open the heart to friendship and confidence, gradually leading to more expansive benevolence. (229–30)

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From Wollstonecraft’s perspective, the inhibiting effects of ‘filial esteem’ are only natural, and they should subsist provided the parent has sufficient reason and tender-heartedness to merit the esteem. This does, however, mean that intimate bonds are insufficient to inculcate the human fellowship essential to her cosmopolitan ethic. The ‘expansive benevolence’ requisite for just and philanthropic (world) citizenship germinates within the family but must come to fruition through frank social exchanges within a broader peer group.87 For this reason, children should be neither home-schooled nor sent to boarding schools but educated within a state-funded system of day schools, so they can develop both ‘the domestic affections, that first open the heart to the various modifications of humanity’ and the social affections that come from ‘spend[ing] great part of their time, on terms of equality, with other children’ (230). As well as allowing different social classes to mingle, these day schools would be co-educational. With the sexes interacting as equals, Wollstonecraft envisages the patriarchal gender hierarchy giving way to a spirit of human fellowship: ‘women, by being brought up with men, are prepared to be their companions rather than their mistresses’ (237). Instead of attempting to dominate or possess women as objects of desire and exchange, young men educated within this egalitarian system would learn to recognise their ‘full and equal humanity’. As Wollstonecraft demonstrates, by dividing their time between home and school, children imbibe different kinds of emotional sustenance which work in tandem to inculcate a love of country at once tied to right-minded principles and rooted in the habits and pleasures of childhood. Nussbaum has demonstrated that public spirit must ‘hitch itself to the concrete’, that any public system of education intent on fostering love of country does well to identify appropriate receptacles for children’s patriotic emotions.88 These might be inspiring historical figures, mentors who model public spirit, or anthropomorphised images of the nation. We have also seen that, for people to feel love that motivates self-sacrifice, they must regard the loved object as ‘in some way “theirs” and “them”’.89 Wollstonecraft seems to have understood this. Take, for instance, her image of the pupil dividing his time between day school and family: I still recollect, with pleasure, the country day school; where a boy trudged in the morning, wet or dry, carrying his books, and his dinner, if it were at a considerable distance; a servant did not then lead master by the hand, for, when he had once put on coat and breeches, he was allowed to shift for himself, and return alone in the evening to recount the feats of the day close at the parental knee. His father’s house was his home, and was ever after fondly remembered; nay, I appeal to many superiour men, who were educated in this

‘Affection for the Whole Human Race’    99 manner, whether the recollection of some shady lane where they conned their lesson: or, of some stile, where they sat making a kite, or mending a bat, has not endeared their country to them? (230–1)

The boy in this vignette enjoys every advantage that favours the growth of moral independence and philanthropy. He has sufficient freedom to exercise his reason but is not thereby left rudderless. During the school day he is ‘allowed to shift for himself’, but he can return every evening for guidance ‘at the parental knee’. There is no servant in the picture, which suggests that in the boy’s social circle people rub shoulders on equal terms. His family life is evidently affectionate because, in later life, it is ‘fondly remembered’. In this way, the child is ‘endeared’ to his country because his earliest experiences of it become inseparable from feelings of security, freedom and love. The implication is that children growing up in a democratic republic would connect egalitarian principles with their affections for the parental and pedagogical figures who conveyed them. Love of country would thus take on the human forms requisite to stir intense emotions. Assuming that parents and educators alike had assimilated the principles of political and moral justice, these emotions would be eudaimonistic rather than merely self-regarding. This is because the children’s attachments would become indistinguishable from right-minded principles, including love of humankind, and therefore compatible with fulfilling their virtuous potential. Children educated thus have grown into ‘superiour men’ – and, with reforms implemented to give women similar opportunities, Wollstonecraft envisages both sexes attaining the moral superiority requisite for cosmopolitan patriotism. Wollstonecraft’s Vindications promote an ethical form of patriotism which, albeit it stems from early bonds of sentiment, is compatible with rational principles of political justice and invested in the worldwide recognition of human rights. According to this ethical system, love of country is virtually indistinguishable from world citizenship. As Wollstonecraft advances these arguments, she advocates philanthropic principles derived from a broadly universal standard compatible with reason. She thus implicitly defines herself both as a universalist and a cosmopolitan. She does not, however, underestimate the force and significance of affect, arguing not for the suppression of feeling but its augmentation and refinement. This position means wrestling with the paradox that human sympathies are at once essential to benevolence and liable to corrupt it. Wollstonecraft therefore strives to distinguish between sympathies that originate in self-interest and sympathies refined by the interplay of reason and imagination into philanthropic ­sentiments. To self-interest

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she attributes a comprehensive range of interrelated political and social evils, including the gaping social and economic divides of the Ancien Régime; the British legal system’s elevation of property over human life; the inhumanity of slave-traders and press gangs; and the obliviousness of infatuated lovers and doting mothers to their wider social duties. Just as the colonising British regarded America as an extension of their mother country, so uneducated women see children as extensions of their selfhood. In Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft represents women as more vulnerable to self-interest and ‘narrow affections’ because of their inadequate education and dependent circumstances. As broadening the heart’s purview is one of the keys to philanthropy, she puts forward holistic pedagogical reforms designed to cultivate moral independence and expansive compassion. These reforms would form patriotic women capable of perceiving their children as independent moral agents and instilling them with benevolent principles of action and a cosmopolitan love of their country. In the course of this education, children would learn to equate rational principles of justice and universal benevolence with the quasi-instinctual bonds of affection formed within a community of equals. Wollstonecraft thus constructs a model for converting selfish passions into eudaimonistic emotions and forming cosmopolitan patriots of both sexes – patriots who conceive of ‘affection for the whole human race’ as a vital component of a life well lived (65).

Chapter 4

‘A More Enlightened Moral Love of Mankind’: Philanthropy and the French Revolution

Wollstonecraft travelled to Paris in the winter of 1792.1 She had arranged to stay with a wealthy French couple, but on her arrival, she discovered they had left for the country. Alone in the empty house, she watched from her window as Louis XVI was driven to his trial at the Convention. The streets were silent apart from the ominous beat of a drum. In theory a republican, Wollstonecraft wept. That night, she was haunted by the spectacle of ‘Louis sitting, with more dignity than [she] expected from his character, in a hackney coach, going to meet death’.2 Feeling isolated and shaken, she wrote to Johnson: ‘I want to see something alive; death in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy. – I am going to bed – and, for the first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle’.3 This tension between conviction and feeling is not confined to Wollstonecraft’s private letters; it also runs through French Revolution, reflecting the contingency and subjectivity of her philosophical and moral view. Halldenius rightly rejects the commonplace that Wollstonecraft ‘was not a systematic thinker’, but goes too far when she claims that finding the ‘core concept of [Wollstonecraft’s] politics and morality’ will demolish critiques of its ambiguity.4 While many apparent inconsistencies can be resolved through a fuller understanding of Wollstonecraft’s philosophy, it does not do to downplay the literariness of her texts. Like Rousseau, she did not deal purely in rational analysis, but instead invoked multiple genres and discourses to articulate her arguments, drawing attention to apparent inconsistencies and acknowledging the effects of emotional response. French Revolution exemplifies this approach. In the months following Louis’ trial, Wollstonecraft’s homesickness ebbed and flowed. She was tempted by a seat in a carriage bound for England – and yet she refused it. She knew she was at the vanguard of epoch-forming events. ‘I certainly am glad that I came to France’, she later wrote to Everina, ‘because I never could have had else a just opinion

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of the most extraordinary event that has ever been recorded’.5 As part of the cosmopolitan circle of radical expatriates surrounding White’s Hotel, she socialised with leading members of the Gironde political faction, including Brissot, and other European intellectuals. She declared her intention of visiting Helen Maria Williams often, ‘because I rather like her, and I meet french company at her house’.6 These visits led to ‘a very sincere friendship’ between the two unconventional women.7 By February 1793, Wollstonecraft was working on a ‘plan of education’ for Condorcet’s Committee of Public Education, which also numbered Paine amongst its members.8 There is no evidence that she met Condorcet, but as he was a close associate of Christie and a constant ally of Brissot in the Convention, she was certainly moving in his orbit. In 1790, Condorcet had argued for granting women full citizenship in Sur l’admission des femmes au droits de cité (On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship), and the following year, Olympe de Gouges had published her parodic Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen) (1791), which exposes the specious universalism of Revolutionary discourse. Just before Wollstonecraft set out for France, the National Assembly legalised no-fault divorce after a campaign led by another prominent activist, the Dutch expatriate Etta Palm. Wollstonecraft’s pedagogical project placed her in the thick of Revolutionary reforms, including the fight for women’s rights and improvements in the female condition.9 This intellectual excitement was matched in her personal life by a love affair with the American frontiersman Gilbert Imlay, author of Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (1792). At this stage of Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre, America appears as a Pantisocracy, where human rights have constitutional protection and flourish untrammelled by custom and prejudice. Like many of her contemporaries, she responded enthusiastically to popular travel narratives such as Brissot’s Nouveau Voyage and Thomas Cooper’s Some Information Respecting America (1794). Her review of the former portrays America as having greater economic and social equality than its European counterparts, which both reflects and promotes the sounder morals of its frank and unspoiled citizens. Although she detects some ‘pardonable partiality’ in Brissot’s account (VII, 392), she is evidently thrilled by his descriptions of a republican idyll that fosters ‘universal toleration that fraternally unites different sects’, ‘simplicity conspicuous in the manners of every class’, and the ‘friendly intercourse that subsists between the sexes, when gallantry and coquetry are equally out of the question’ (391). In French Revolution, she depicts British emigrants to America importing principles of justice only partially implemented

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in their homeland and founding a new nation where liberty appears ‘with renovated charms, and sober matron graces’ (VI, 115). Writing to Everina in 1794, she characterises Imlay as ‘a most natural, unaffected creature’, and attributes his virtues to his upbringing ‘in the interiour parts of America’.10 Imlay’s published works would have contributed to this impression. In Topographical Description, he depicts European mores as ‘distorted and unnatural’, using the society of the Old World as a foil for his idealised portrait of American cultural simplicity and moral probity.11 His argument – that political reform led to moral improvement – would have chimed with Wollstonecraft’s dearest hopes for the Revolution and consolidated her starry-eyed vision of his homeland. Three months after they met, he published his Jacobin frontier novel, The Emigrants (1793), in which two sentimental protagonists unite in conjugal bliss at the heart of a settler community, founded in ‘an independent western state governed by the laws of reason and humanity’.12 No doubt inspired by Imlay’s ‘double-barrelled political message of republican-style government and equal rights for women’, Wollstonecraft perceived their relationship as a comparable egalitarian partnership untrammelled by the bonds of marriage and, when she fell pregnant with his child, she looked forward to the arrival of ‘the little twitcher’.13 But all the while, Revolutionary politics grew darker, more dangerous and hostile to outsiders. Louis XVI’s execution sparked war between Britain and France and counterrevolutionary revolt in the Vendée. British nationals became targets of suspicion. In this climate of crisis, the Jacobins rose to power and Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety set out to eliminate so-called enemies of the Revolution. Brissot and his Girondin coterie were arrested. Condorcet went into hiding but was captured and died in prison. Householders had to chalk the names of their cohabitants on their front doors, so that foreigners could be identified and monitored. In October, about 250 British subjects, amongst them Paine and Williams, were taken with other foreign nationals to the Luxembourg prison. Wollstonecraft escaped arrest only because Imlay registered her as his wife and a legal ally of the French Republic. On 31 October, Brissot and twenty other Girondin deputies were executed. The Terror had begun. Letters were opened and read to root out traitors to the Republic. Trials were biased and perfunctory, and the accused invariably put to death. Amongst the many thousands sent to the scaffold were prominent women such as Gouges and Manon Roland, and foreign devotees of the Revolution like Cloots, the self-proclaimed citizen of humanity. Paine narrowly escaped the same fate. Walking one day by the Place de Louis Quinze, Wollstonecraft found the pavement

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awash with blood and ‘burst forth in indignant exclamations’, until ‘a prudent bystander’ warned her that she was risking her life.14 In this unprecedented period of fear, sorrow and paranoia, she wrote French Revolution and sent it to Johnson. Williams, who was driven to destroy the papers Roland left in her care, advised her to burn the manuscript. ‘And to tell you the truth, –’ Wollstonecraft wrote, ‘my life, would not have been worth much, had it been found [...] death and misery, in every shape of terrour, haunts this devoted country’.15 French Revolution focuses on the period before the Terror; but Wollstonecraft implies to the initiated reader that she is writing under its constraints and commenting on it ‘between the lines’.16 Broadly speaking, she defends democratic principles but preaches the wisdom of gradual reform, arguing that political change in France has outstripped the development of moral sentiments in its people.17 In the Preface, her stated aim is to ‘guard against the erroneous inferences of sensibility’, instead considering the Revolution with ‘the cool eye of observation’ (VI, 6).18 This wariness of affect and its power over ‘the sympathizing bosom’ recalls her anxieties in both Vindications about the pitfalls of exclusive or misdirected sympathies (6). When she identifies ‘reason’ as her ‘only sure guide’, however, she does so rhetorically, presenting as unvarnished truth what is in many respects a defence of the Revolution (6). Setting out to win the case for democracy, Wollstonecraft situates the events in France within a universalist teleology of progress, incorporating a potted conjectural model of human development drawn from the philosopher-historians of the Scottish Enlightenment. These works portrayed human societies progressing through four inevitable stages from barbarism to mature civilisation, depicting the final stage as the result of social norms refining natural sympathies. Wollstonecraft adapts them to her personal moral philosophy, however, placing less emphasis on historical contingencies than progress to a universal standard of reason and truth.19 She complements this grand narrative by analysing, reinterpreting and occasionally copying verbatim from French and British public reports, pamphlets and polemics.20 The result is a kaleidoscopic range of perspectives, at times unified and at times unsettled by her eyewitness viewpoint. French Revolution is not, as Halldenius would have it, an ‘unblinkered analysis’.21 On the contrary, Wollstonecraft’s prose often preserves the charge of in-the-moment reactions to the Terror she was living through at the time of writing. According to her perfectibilist argument, although France has been shaken to its core by accelerated political change, it is possible nonetheless to ‘contemplate with benevolent complacency and becoming pride the approaching reign of reason and peace’ (17). Periodically, however, Wollstonecraft casts doubt on

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the philosophical and moral views advanced with apparent certainty in many passages of her text. One consistent theme is Wollstonecraft’s disdain for ‘false’ or ‘mock’ patriots, whose inauthentic love of country cloaks self-interested passions that undermine the Revolutionary cause.22 As we have seen, Wollstonecraft depicts true patriotism as a moral sentiment that stems from narrow loyalties but ultimately transcends them: ‘for what is patriotism’, she demands in Book II, ‘but the expansion of domestic sympathy, rendered permanent by principle?’ (54). Throughout the text, she questions whether cultural reformation can occur rapidly enough to foster true patriotism within the Nouveau Régime.23 In her eyes, the central imperative of this reformation is expanding the natural sympathies of the French to make their love of country synonymous with ‘a more enlightened moral love of mankind’ (21). As she advances her argument, she shifts frequently between detached and partisan rhetoric, her prose reflecting two conflicting moral imperatives at the heart of her cosmopolitan ethic: the imperative to privilege reason and establish a clear-sighted moral view; and the imperative to participate emotionally in the experiences of others. This latter is embodied by a sentimental textual persona, whose interventions seem deliberately to challenge the narrator-historian’s phlegmatic viewpoint. Expressing sympathy for victims of the Terror, this ‘pensive wanderer’ performs the compassion crucial to philanthropy and thereby countermands the Jacobins’ stateorientated mentality, in which sympathy for political rivals is tantamount to treason (85). Wollstonecraft thus calls attention to the complexities of her argument, inviting us to scrutinise its central paradoxes.

Mock Patriots and the Progress to Philanthropy Presenting democracy as the political instantiation of universal benevolence, Wollstonecraft argues that the success of the Nouveau Régime hinges on the French eschewing self-interest for the general good. By the same logic, opposition to the French Republic reflects insularity and egoism. Adapting conjectural history to her radical agenda, Wollstonecraft claims that enlightened civilisation cannot thrive without a just system of government.24 Like Nussbaum, however, she identifies ‘limited compassion’ as an ‘impediment to justice’, and seeks to explain the deficit in her contemporary society, as well as imagining a newly compassionate politics.25 Although she rejects the notion of any innate human tendency to evil, in the opening chapter she also depicts self-interest as an inevitable by-product of early human soci-

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eties, which form haphazardly to meet immediate needs (VI, 21–2). Like Paine, Wollstonecraft observes that arbitrary power thrives in these conditions.26 By aligning such unjust systems with the early stages of human development, she makes self-interest appear as a relic of our primitive ancestors even in the most polished society. Dismissing the popular narrative that Europe had declined with the fall of Rome, she rejects classical civilisation as a blueprint for the ideal republic. As the passions of the Ancient Greeks and Romans were neither regulated nor harnessed by reason, what passed for patriotism in the Ancient World was self-interest with a gloss of refinement, ‘an extension of that family love, which is rather the effect of sympathy and selfish passions, than reasonable humanity’ (21). The Ancients forged empires because they placed self-interest – and by extension, the aggrandisement of their home nations – above human rights. Without the requisite principles to transform their instinctive loyalties into love of humankind, ‘these heroes loved their country, because it was their country, ever showing by their conduct, that it was only a part of a narrow love of themselves’ (21). Throughout the text, Wollstonecraft draws subtle comparisons between the unphilanthropic Ancients, the Ancien Régime and the new French Republic, locating ‘political perfection’ in a cosmopolitan future (21). Alongside establishing her perfectibilist teleology, Wollstonecraft naturalises her ideal of progress to universal justice and philanthropy: When society was first subjugated to laws, probably by the ambition of some, and the desire of safety in all, it was natural for men to be selfish, because they were ignorant how intimately their own comfort was connected with that of others; and it was also very natural, that humanity, rather the effect of feeling than of reason, should have a very limited range. But, when men once see, clear as the light of heaven, – and I hail the glorious day from afar! – that on the general happiness depends their own, reason will give strength to the fluttering wings of passion, and men will “do unto others, what they wish they should do unto them.” (21)

In this passage, Wollstonecraft yokes the conjectural model of inevitable progress with the Christian providentialism of her earlier works. Invoking the New Testament, she follows Price in equating political justice with philanthropy, or the practice of Christian charity on a universal scale. For Wollstonecraft, self-interest will predominate so long as ‘humanity’ (what Nussbaum calls ‘compassion’) has ‘a very limited range’. As human subjects develop the divine gift of reason, however, they recognise the benefits as well as the justice of altruism. Emphasising the close connection between personal fulfilment and ‘general happiness’, Wollstonecraft recalls Macaulay, whose Letters on Education she particularly admired.27 Macaulay argues that an individual’s ‘­happiness’

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and ‘interest’ are ‘so intimately connected with the interests of the society of which he is a member, that he cannot act in conformity to the one, without having a proper consideration for the other’.28 There is a negative echo of this claim in Wollstonecraft’s observation that socialisation did not initially foster social virtues, for ‘men […] were ignorant how intimately their own comfort was connected with that of others’. Macaulay acknowledges that ‘inclination will lead to the performance of the duties of humanity’ only when the ‘benign affection’ of sympathy ‘holds a superiority in the mind to other affections’, and Wollstonecraft was likewise keenly aware of how easily and with what devastating consequences selfish passions could prevail over moral sentiments.29 In the opening passages of French Revolution, and throughout the text, she depicts philanthropy as both the inevitable endpoint of human development and an urgent need, and reflects on the mechanisms that could direct ‘affections’ towards universal benevolence. The model constructed in the Vindications for cultivating philanthropy pertains in French Revolution. ‘It is time’, Wollstonecraft writes, ‘that a more enlightened, moral love of mankind should supplant, or rather support physical affections’ (21). Refining her choice of verb, she emphasises that instinctive feelings are not suppressed by reason but given the requisite ‘support’ to mature into philanthropic moral sentiments. She thereby acknowledges the naturalness and importance of affective bonds, as well as emphasising the need to make them compatible with cosmopolitan ethical principles. In Book IV, she sketches a human developmental hypothesis that details the progress of human reason in accordance with advancing civilisation; significantly, this same passage also charts our progress from local sympathies through patriotism to cosmopolitan philanthropy: The first interest [man] takes in the business of his fellow-men is in that of his neighbour; next he contemplates the comfort, misery, and happiness of the nation to which he belongs, investigates the degree of wisdom and justice in the political system, under which he lives, and, striding into the regions of science, his researches embrace all human kind. Thus he is enabled to estimate the portion of evil or good which the government of his country produces, compared with that of others; and the comparison, granting him superior powers of mind, leads him to conceive a model of a more perfect form. (223)

When human subjects combine their capacity for fellow-feeling with ‘science’ – investigative processes dependent on reason – they become capable of envisaging an ideal form of government. This process begins with concern felt for near neighbours, which develops into more expansive fellow-feeling for compatriots. The resulting distress at social injustice manifests in political engagement, first at the national level, and

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later on the world stage. The relative ‘civilisation’ of any given nation therefore depends on the degree to which its political and cultural conditions promote the mutual reinforcement of reason and sentiment, the principal components of philanthropy. Wollstonecraft situates her arguments within a cosmopolitan value system where human fellowship takes precedence over national allegiances, enjoining her British readers to support the Revolutionary expansion of human rights even though their government does not. This approach is already evident in an earlier, politically charged review of David Ramsay’s History of the American Revolution (1791), in which she applauds the American Republic as the epitome of enlightened civilisation. Comparing George Washington with Leonidas, a Spartan king celebrated for defending his people’s liberty, she enthuses: The American revolution seems to form a new epoch in the history of mankind; for amidst the various changes, that have convulsed our globe, it stands forth as the first work of reason, and boasts of producing a legitimate constitution, deliberately framed, instead of being, like all other governments, the spurious offspring of chance. (VII, 375)

For Wollstonecraft, the enshrinement of natural rights in the American constitution is a triumph for human reason with universal significance – a triumph which only the most small-minded nationalist could decry: The time is now arrived when not only the calm philosophical inquirer, but even the true born Englishman, no longer restrained by the local affections and angry emotions, which, at the moment of separation, narrowed the sphere of humanity, will rejoice that freedom, and all its concomitant blessings, have been the reward of a glorious struggle, though the towering head of our proud isle has been stripped of some of its waving honours. (375)

Wollstonecraft sets philosophical enquiry apart from national allegiances. To a mind unclouded by emotion, she claims, the American Revolution was a ‘glorious struggle’; but ‘local affections’ – the English loyalty to king and country – generated a self-interested  desire to possess the colonial other. Since the Glorious Revolution, Englishmen have regarded political liberty as their birth right; but when Wollstonecraft claims sardonically that the colonists’ newfound freedom will delight ‘even the true born Englishman’, she implies that national pride stifles philanthropy, denying liberty to all those outside the mother country. Wollstonecraft brings similar cosmopolitan convictions to the works she writes from France. Published posthumously but written in 1793, her Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation (1798) condemns the ‘frequent repetition of the word French’ as a pejorative, insisting

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that we are ‘all of the same stock’ (VI, 444). In French Revolution, she punctuates her analysis with appeals to her British readers to support the Nouveau Régime. These are, in effect, exhortations to regard the French as fellow world citizens whose rights it behoves them to defend: Who is so much under the influence of prejudice, as to insist, that frenchmen are a distinct race, formed by nature, or by habit, to be slaves; and incapable of ever attaining those noble sentiments, which characterize a free people? (52)

Wollstonecraft’s rhetoric is designed to appeal to her readers’ sympathies. Those capable of moral sentiment, she declares, will feel invested in the fate of the downtrodden French citizens fighting for their human rights: Who is so callous to the interest of humanity as to say it was not a noble regeneration? Who is so benumbed by selfish fears, as not to feel a glow of warmth, at seeing the inhabitants of a vast empire exalted from the lowest state of beastly degradation to a summit, where, contemplating the dawn of freedom, they may breathe the invigorating air of independence; which will give them a new constitution of mind? (51–2)

In this passage, the reader is imagined as – or enjoined to become – the subject of philanthropic feeling. Like Burke, Wollstonecraft portrays her political opponents as inhumane and her own stance as the natural offshoot of compassion. As a cosmopolitan, she emphasises that the Revolution is in ‘the interest of humanity’, not simply a French victory but an important milestone on the march to universal benevolence. Those who can throw off ‘selfish fears’ must celebrate with the French who, in establishing a constitution that guarantees their human rights, are also fostering ‘a new constitution of mind’, one that cultivates moral sentiment. In Wollstonecraft’s description of the early days of the Revolution, compassion is also the driving force for political progress. Her account of the Tennis Court Oath depicts the institutional fabric of the Ancien Régime disintegrating as the Third Estate draw strength of purpose from fellow-feeling: The benedictions that dropped from every tongue, and sparkled in tears of joy from every eye, giving fresh vigour to the heroism which excited them, produced an overflow of sensibility that kindled into a blaze of patriotism every social feeling. The dungeons of despotism and the bayonets sharpened for massacre, were then equally disregarded even by the most fearful; till, in one of those instants of disinterested forgetfulness of private pursuits, all devoted themselves to the promotion of public happiness, promising to resist, to the last extremity, all the efforts of such an inveterate tyranny. (65)

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Wollstonecraft deploys the semiotics of high sensibility, evident in somatic symptoms of intense emotion, to depict a powerful clash of elements: an ‘overflow of sensibility’ fuels the transmutation of ‘tears of joy’ into patriotic fire. As the deputies unite in ‘disinterested forgetfulness of private pursuits’, she also suggests that their patriotism has philanthropic potential. Later, as the populace prepares to defend Paris, fellow-feeling overrides class distinctions, bringing together French citizens in mutual recognition of their shared humanity. ‘Equality’, Wollstonecraft writes, is ‘first established by an universal sympathy’, which in turn inspires ‘public spirited dignity’ and a collective effort for the common good (88). In such passages, French Revolution recalls Williams’s Letters Written in France (1790), where she depicts the early days of the Revolution in terms of infectious joy and widespread altruism. Like Wollstonecraft, Williams affirms the transnational significance of the Revolution, portraying herself as a British patriot and ‘citizen of the world’ whose sympathy with French egalitarian ideals has overcome national prejudices.30 But whereas Williams’s early letters capture the heady optimism of the Revolution’s blissful dawn, Wollstonecraft betrays anxieties about the strain of fervour that would darken into Terrorist violence. For all she defends democratic and republican principles, she describes the onset of the Revolution knowing that it led to relentless bloodletting. In Book III, she observes: There has been seen amongst the french a spurious race of men, a set of cannibals, who have gloried in their crimes; and tearing out the hearts that did not feel for them, have proved, that they themselves had iron bowels. (126)

Throughout French Revolution, Wollstonecraft is preoccupied with the question of how citizens capable of such an ‘overflow of sensibility’ could prove so ruthless. What had happened to the cosmopolitan ethos of 1789? Why had Revolutionary patriotism come to mean unqualified loyalty to one extreme faction? And how did those who espoused the benevolent principles of the Revolution become the architects of the Terror? Traces of anxiety are evident in Wollstonecraft’s description of the resistance of the aristocratic cour plénière to the convocation of the Estates-General, first by imprisoning deputies and later by armed force. The citizens of Grenoble prepared to defend themselves, but they were spared the necessity of doing so by ‘one of those moments of enthusiasm, which by the most rapid operation of sympathy unites all hearts’ (40). In this episode, opposing factions find themselves united by fellow-feeling; but Wollstonecraft’s lexis betrays ambivalence about

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the relationship between spontaneous emotion and moral sentiment. The people’s ‘enthusiasm’ appears to result from a mechanism of sympathy close to that described in Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), whereby our ‘idea’ of another’s passion is instantaneously ‘converted into an impression, and acquires such a degree of force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself’.31 Feelings, in other words, are contagious. The citizens and soldiers of Grenoble exemplify this phenomenon and their mutual sympathy reveals to them the injustice of their political system: ‘the men who lived on the wages of slaughter threw down their arms, and melting into tears in the embraces of the citizens whom they came to murder, remembered that they were countrymen, and groaned under the same oppression’ (40). Sympathy generates a benevolent form of patriotism; but its association with ‘enthusiasm’ complicates Wollstonecraft’s otherwise sentimental account. In the eighteenth century, ‘enthusiasm’ invariably denoted a state in which passion or fantasy took the place of reason and was often used in contexts of religious zealotry. Wollstonecraft deploys the term frequently in French Revolution to describe extremes of emotion, which she connects in several passages with volatility and lack of judgement or principle.32 In the Grenoble episode, sympathy inspires compassion; but its connection with enthusiasm – overpowering emotion that spreads like wildfire – calls up the Burkean spectre of an unreasoning multitude.33 Just as Wollstonecraft attributes the onset of the Revolution to the expansion of human sympathy, so she links the ensuing chaos to its failure or misdirection. The National Assembly deputies are ‘false’ or ‘mock’ patriots: ‘For, even in the most public-spirited actions’, she laments, ‘celebrity seems to have been the spur, and the glory, rather than the happiness of frenchmen, the end’ (123). In Wollstonecraft’s eyes, their vaunted patriotic sentiments cloak ego-driven ambition, a desire to shine on the world stage. She claims that ‘moderate men, or real patriots’ would have favoured incremental reforms designed to secure human rights in the longer term (185). Instead, the deputies opted for an unprecedented constitutional overhaul that led to prolonged unrest (166). Ever a constructivist, Wollstonecraft attributes this emotional deficit to the enduring impact of Ancien Régime culture. As Karen O’Brien has demonstrated, Wollstonecraft believed it essential that a rapid cultural rebirth accompany the collapse of the Ancien Régime, otherwise the new French Republic might be ‘doomed to replicate, rather than transcend, its inhumane frivolity’.34 She identifies ‘a more enlightened, moral love of mankind’ as a vital component of this rebirth – but she finds it lacking in France (21).

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Following a scornful description of the reign of Louis XIV as a riot of ‘imposing pomp’, ‘false grandeur’ and ‘majestic frivolity’, Wollstonecraft claims that the Sun King ‘accelerated the perfection of that species of civilization, which consists in the refining of the senses at the expence of the heart; the source of all real dignity, honour, virtue, and every noble quality of mind’ (24). Making the ‘heart’ synonymous with morality (110), she depicts the wit and self-display prized in French public life as a barrier to philanthropic sentiment. In her derogatory portrait of the French national character, self-interest stems, not from lack of reason, but from vitiated sentiment. ‘When it is the object of education to prepare the pupil to please every body’, she writes in her final chapter, ‘and of course to deceive, accomplishments are the one thing needful; and the desire to be admired ever being uppermost, the passions are subjugated, or all drawn into the whirlpool of egotism’ (230).35 As O’Neill observes, ‘while the intellect could bring reason to bear on untutored natural affect to produce moral virtue’, for Wollstonecraft ‘it was also capable of papering over a cold moral vacuum, dressed up in the drapery of false sensibility’.36 Hence she complains that the ‘heroic actions’ of the National Assembly deputies, ‘are merely directed by the head, and the heart drops not into them it’s balm’ (126). In a similar vein, she attacks the cultural centrality of the theatre as a source and symptom of shallow feelings: Their national character is, perhaps, more formed by their theatrical amusements, than is generally imagined: they are in reality the schools of vanity. And, after this kind of education, is it surprising, that almost every thing is said and done for stage effect? or that cold declamatory extasies blaze forth, only to mock the expectation with a show of warmth? (25)

‘Vanity’ stems from the social actor’s privileging of ‘stage effect’ over personal authenticity.37 So-called ‘extasies’ are sycophantic performances, artificial fire concealing the coldness within. Once again, Wollstonecraft attacks the conformism that puts public approval before the inner monitors of reason and moral sentiment. Unleavened by principle, selfish passions have run amok in the vacuum left by the Bourbon monarchy. The result is political grandstanding, ‘stage tricks on the grand theatre of the nation’ (25). Describing the conduct of high-ranking nobles and clergy at Necker’s convocation of the Estates-General, Wollstonecraft distinguishes fellowfeeling between compatriots (instinctive sympathetic response) from a philanthropic love of country (principled moral sentiment). She claims that ‘the notables’ reneged on their initial agreements and attributes this volte-face to the unphilanthropic cast of their patriotic sentiments. In

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this case, she deploys the term ‘enthusiasm’ to evoke intense but fickle emotion: Carried away by the general impulsion, with the inconsiderate fervour of men, whose hearts always grow hard as they cool, when they have been warmed by some sudden glow of enthusiasm or sympathy, the notables showed, by their subsequent conduct, that, though they had been led by eloquence to support some questions of a patriotic tendency, they had not the principles necessary to impel them to give up local advantages, or personal prerogatives, for the good of the whole community, in which they were only eventually to share. (43–4)

The ‘glow of enthusiasm or sympathy’ reveals the fellow-feeling crucial to philanthropy; but without firm democratic-egalitarian principles, altruism fades as quickly as the emotions that originally stimulated it. Wollstonecraft’s account of the aftermath of the Tennis Court Oath outlines a similar pattern. At first, the rapid catalogue of ‘interesting events […] fired the fancies of men of different descriptions; till, forgetting every selfish consideration, the rich and poor saw through the same focus’ (69). This unity of purpose subsides with its novelty, however, and when the aristocracy have ‘had time to cool’, they feel ‘more forcibly […] the inconveniences of anarchy’ and return ‘with fresh vigour to their old ground; embracing, with redoubled ardour, the prejudices which passion, not conviction, had chased from the field, during the heat of the action’ (69). The very same capacity for lively emotion that made the aristocracy sympathise with their compatriots later invigorates their defence of their own privileges. Inspired by intense feeling, but without the sustaining force of principle, their patriotism proves short-lived and inconsistent. Wollstonecraft’s fascination with the workings of sentiment predates her expatriation, but the strong link established in her text between true patriotism and heartfelt compassion also reflects the ideological context of Terrorist France, where ‘patriots consulted their hearts to distinguish between genuine feeling and its counterfeit’.38 There is even something of the Jacobin obsession with purity of purpose in her claims that fervent patriotic display reveals an underlying absence of authentic principles. But whereas ‘Robespierre warned his fellow citizens to be wary of false pity’, Wollstonecraft advocates a politics of compassion, considering how social reforms might bring depth and constancy to patriotic feeling and expand its philanthropic potential.39 A judicious combination of reason and sentiment are crucial to this transformative process, but in order to function optimally, they must mature in auspicious political and cultural conditions. For Wollstonecraft, the most crucial condition is equality.40 Like Rousseau, she insists ‘it is not paradoxical to assert,

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that the social virtues are nipt in the bud by the very laws of society’ (22). Despite their nominal rejection of arbitrary privilege, the collective mentality of the French reflects a society riven by inequalities. This social injustice erects artificial barriers between human subjects, stifling their innate benevolence: ‘People are rendered ferocious by misery; and misanthropy is ever the offspring of discontent’ (46). The human capacity for sympathy persists but, in these conditions, it manifests not as altruism but a spirit of faction. Any so-called patriots born into this divided society will probably display vehement loyalty to their comrades and equally vehement hostility towards all those designated as other. In short, the leading Jacobins’ viciousness was born of the regime they sought to crush. Apparently influenced by her reading of Smith, Wollstonecraft recognised that sympathy is more easily felt where there is parity of experience. She draws on conjectural history to confront the difficulty of sympathising beyond one’s immediate circle and the consequent limitations of human compassion. Taking an imaginative leap into the past, she evokes a ‘savage state’, in which the ‘social feelings’ of an aging warrior ‘flow over in long stories’ that inspire his ‘listening progeny’ (146). She thereby depicts a human developmental process in which fellow-feeling drives socialisation: His soul also warmed by sympathy, feeling for the distresses of his fellow creatures, and particularly for the helpless state of decrepit age; he begins to contemplate, as desirable, associations of men, to prevent the inconveniencies arising from loneliness and solitude. Hence little communities living together in the bonds of friendship, securing to them the accumulated powers of man, mark the origin of society: and tribes growing into nations, spreading themselves over the globe, form different languages, which producing different interests, and misunderstandings, excite distrust. (146)

Ironically, human fellowship is driven by self-interest: as the warrior grows vulnerable, he perceives the benefits of having compassionate neighbours. From this self-interest, however, comes an understanding of the pragmatic and emotional benefits of social bonds. Yet Wollstonecraft’s account of human socialisation ends on a note of discord: the same sympathetic impulse that draws near neighbours together also creates a divisive tribal mentality. At this juncture, she shifts the focus from local quarrels to the world stage, concentrating particularly on conflict between nations: During the reign of ignorance, the disagreements of states could be settled only by combats; and the art of dexterously murdering seems to have decided differences, where reason should have been the arbitrator. The custom then

‘A More Enlightened Moral Love of Mankind’    115 of settling disputes at the point of the bayonet, in modern Europe, has been justified by the example of barbarians; and whilst fools continually argue from the practice of inhuman savages, that wars are necessary evils, courts have found them convenient to perpetuate their power: thus slaughter has furnished a plausible pretext for peculation. (147)

As well as forming part of Wollstonecraft’s historical narrative, this passage can be interpreted as a coded reference to the Revolutionary war between Britain and France. Condemning armed conflict as a vestige of barbarism and – with the closing references to power-grabbing and financial gain – driven by self-interest, she suggests that combative foreign policies are impeding the progress to universal justice. As in her Vindications, Wollstonecraft takes her analysis beyond its immediate Revolutionary context, examining transnational as well as historical manifestations of self-interest. Echoing Price, who described Roman patriotism as ‘a principle holding together a band of robbers in their attempts to crush all liberty but their own’,41 she invokes the imperialist aggression of the Ancients to discredit their supposed ‘perfection’ and condemn those who exalt their homelands by subduing foreign others: And were not these vaunted improvements also confined to a small corner of the globe, whilst, the political view of the wisest legislators seldom extending beyond the splendour and aggrandizement of their individual nation, they trampled with a ferocious affectation of patriotism on the most sacred rights of humanity? (15)

Shifting constantly between case studies in classical antiquity and eighteenth-century Europe, Wollstonecraft establishes parity between the jingoist and imperialist mindsets, both of which inhibit compassion for those not identified with the homeland. In a later chapter, she applies similar logic to her condemnation of the despotic Russian Empress Catherine the Great, an imperialist aggressor who mistakes ‘the false glory of desolating provinces for wisdom and magnanimity’ (114). Russia is ‘the amphibious bear of the north’, who has ‘threatened alternate destruction to every state in her vicinity’ (114). As well as condemning the acquisitive passions that fuel imperialist foreign policies, Wollstonecraft also attacks modern capitalism for stoking self-interest. Although she acknowledged that commerce could stimulate political and social progress (70), like Godwin in Political Justice she worried that capitalist systems of power were perpetuating the inequalities they had once challenged. As the capitalist ethic takes hold in Europe, hereditary aristocracy is being replaced by ‘an aristocracy of wealth, which degrades mankind, by making them only

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exchange savageness for tame servility, instead of acquiring the urbanity of improved reason’ (233).42 A year later, in Short Residence, she would reiterate the point, declaring that although commerce ‘created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system […] the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank’ (309). Hence she portrays ‘the manners of Hamburg’ as evidence of ‘the baleful effect of extensive speculations on the moral character’: A man ceases to love humanity, and then individuals, as he advances in the chase after wealth; as one clashes with his interest, the other with his pleasures: to business, as it is termed, every thing must give way; nay, is sacrificed; and all the endearing charities of citizen, husband, father, brother, become empty names. (342)

Businessmen in the grip of acquisitive passions gradually lose their capacity for human fellowship. In the case of her absent lover, the letterwriter attributes this failure of philanthropy to unregulated passions: Ah! shall I whisper to you – that you – yourself, are strangely altered, since you have entered deeply into commerce – more than you are aware of – never allowing yourself to reflect, and keeping your mind, or rather passions, in a continual state of agitation – (340–1)

Untrammelled by reason, selfish passions stem the free flow of sympathy between citizens, family members and lovers. For the letter-writer, commercial interests are also a ‘pestilence’ infecting international relations: The interests of nations are bartered by speculating merchants. My God! with what sang froid artful trains of corruption bring lucrative commissions into particular hands, disregarding the relative situation of different countries – and can much common honesty be expected in the discharge of trusts obtained by fraud? (344)

The different nations of the globe are connected, not by philanthropic feeling, but by ‘the mean machinery’ of profit-mongering (344). As Ingrid Horrocks observes, Wollstonecraft’s ‘critique is in part of a failure to imagine community across distance’.43 Once again, she aligns avarice with the hard-heartedness that perpetuates the slave trade, condemned in Rights of Men as ‘an atrocious insult to humanity’ (V, 14). In this cruel apotheosis of the capitalist ethic, a self-interested desire for ownership obscures the humanity of African peoples for European traders and colonists. Privileging the enrichment of self and nation over the moral imperative to philanthropy, unbridled commerce raises the ‘haves’ above the ‘have-nots’ and turns others into rivals – or worse, objects for exchange. This desensitised psychology ensures that corrupt

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‘­contractors […] like the owners of negro ships, never smell on their money the blood by which it has been gained, but sleep quietly in their beds, terming such occupations lawful callings’ (VI, 344). This is not civilising international cooperation; on the contrary, commercial interests give legal and political sanction to selfish passions, sowing division, mistrust and violence between races and nations. In French Revolution, the sheer scope of Wollstonecraft’s analysis lifts it out of the realm of factional politics, inviting the reader to interpret French culture as one aspect of a common humanity. Concomitantly, she not only endorses the principles of the Revolution, she emphasises their global relevance. Jettisoning national allegiances, she represents human benevolence as a spur to political justice and argues that, since this benevolence should transcend national borders, we fail in both justice and compassion if we deny our fellow world citizens their human rights. But whatever Wollstonecraft’s philosophical and moral view of the Revolution, her text also reflects the anxieties of a radical living through the Terror, the creeping fear that the culture of her adopted homeland might be inhospitable to its political ideals. Even as she advocates altruism, then, she acknowledges the barriers to its cultivation and practice – not least the fact that human sympathy, for all its philanthropic potential, can also harden into tribal loyalties and intensify mob violence. In this context, retaining her faith in the Revolution demands the long view of the philosopher-historian, whose teleology of progress reduces the Terror to a bump in the road to perfection. Yet this detachment is irreconcilable with the cosmopolitan ethic advanced in the text, which depends on expanding the intensely personal instinct for compassion into love of humankind. As the next section will demonstrate, these tensions between conviction and feeling, and ethics and experiences, play themselves out at the rhetorical level.

The Pamphleteer and the Pensive Wanderer According to Wollstonecraft, the egoism causing chaos in the French Republic determined the demise of the Ancien Régime. In Book II, she identifies this ‘gross selfishness’ as the root of France’s instability, arguing that when ‘this complete depravity, prevails in a nation, an absolute change must take place; because the members of it have lost the cement of humanity, which kept them together’ (VI, 62).44 There was no alternative to the Revolution, for such an egocentric culture has ‘death in the heart’ (62). From this perspective, the Terror is a horrifying but explicable phenomenon. As Halldenius puts it, Wollstonecraft

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acknowledges the terrible ‘moral cost’ of radical change, but she ‘places that cost squarely at the feet of the old regime, a regime that had made people ferocious’.45 To make this deterministic argument compatible with her perfectibilist vision, she often takes the ironic stance of conjectural histories whereby the broad perspective of human progress reveals the salutary effects of local or apparent evils. In one such passage, she minimises the importance of individual personalities in the human progress to political justice: But let not the coldly wise exult, that their heads were not led astray by their hearts; or imagine, that the improvement of the times does not betoken a change of government, gradually taking place to meliorate the fate of man; for, in spite of the perverse conduct of beings spoilt by the old system, the preponderancy of truth has rendered principles in some respects triumphant over men; and instruments of mischief have wondered at the good which they have unwittingly produced. (106)

Wollstonecraft portrays her political opponents as unfeeling: if their perspective is ‘coldly wise’, hers must be compatible with sentiment. Yet this same passage tacitly defines the Terror as a negligible deviation from the path of improvement. Arguably, then, her pose of historical irony implicates her in the very heartlessness she condemns. Wollstonecraft does not, of course, sustain her avowed detachment. On the contrary, the pamphleteer frequently drowns out the historian, leaving no doubt of Wollstonecraft’s political allegiances. In these passages of polemic, she often advances her cosmopolitan ethic; but just as often, she resorts to xenophobic invective, invoking cultural stereotypes which recall the centuries-old Francophobia of the English. Instead of the historian’s dispassion, we see the partisan face of sympathy; but whether in the name of impartiality or political allegiance, the result is rhetoric devoid of compassion. Wollstonecraft’s invective is partly strategic, an effort to defend the Revolutionary creed by scapegoating French culture. Moreover, the national character she condemns is, in many respects, a courtly character also found amongst the British upper-classes and attacked in French Revolution as a relic of despotism.46 But whatever Wollstonecraft’s motivation for deploying such rhetoric, there is no question that it exposes her cultural biases and flies in the face of her cosmopolitan ethic. By 1793, the Revolutionary war had provoked an upsurge in Francophobic caricatures and propaganda, which means that Wollstonecraft’s invective echoes the jingoism of political opponents repudiated elsewhere in her oeuvre. Painting the French national character with broad and unflattering brush strokes, she even hints at personal animus: ‘their

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ambition was mostly confined to dancing gracefully, entering a room with easy assurance, and smiling on and complimenting the very persons whom they meant to ridicule at the next fashionable assembly’ (230). One also senses the discomfort of the outsider: Besides, the desire of eating of every dish at table, no matter if there were fifty, and the custom of separating immediately after the repast, destroy the social affections, reminding a stranger of the vulgar saying – ‘every man for himself, and God for us all’. (230)

In eighteenth-century Britain, although a generous spread was served at dinner, it was customary to sample only the two or three dishes closest to one’s place at the table. Until the cloth was removed, it was rude to seek out food or conversation elsewhere.47 Wollstonecraft’s claim that French dining customs ‘destroy the social affections’ reflects her cultural conditioning, and her irritation undermines her self-fashioning as a world citizen. Her concern to cultivate social affections reflects her philanthropic ideal, but when she recoils from French cultural otherness, she also represents the psychological impediments to it. In such passages, Wollstonecraft’s Revolutionary polemic plays out the factional mentality inimical to her cosmopolitan ethic. Ironically, her efforts to inspire sympathy for the Revolutionary cause manifest, at times, in a total failure of compassion for the first victims of the Terror. This feature of the text is exemplified by invective levelled at the fallen monarchy, in particular Marie Antoinette, who becomes a symbol of courtly corruption and selfish passions. Claiming that theft from the public purse was motivated by the queen’s desire to fund her native land and her brother, Emperor Joseph II of Austria, Wollstonecraft depicts her putting blood ties before her responsibility to the French people (30). As Michelle Callander has demonstrated, Wollstonecraft uses theatrical tropes in her portrait of Marie Antoinette to suggest that she gets away with this unjust partiality because she engages in ‘a type of performance which displays a benevolent sensibility while it conceals a malevolent subtext’.48 In such passages, her prose style acquires overtones of a novel, in which the narrator has omniscient insight into her anti-heroine’s motivations and effect on others: From her fascinating smiles, indeed, was caught the careless hope, that, expanding the heart, makes the animal spirits vibrate, in every nerve, with pleasure: – yet, she smiled but to deceive; or, if she felt some touches of sympathy, it was only the unison of the moment. (72)

This portraiture aligns Wollstonecraft’s narrator with the propagandists whose (often pornographic) defamation demonised the queen in the

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eyes of the populace. Through the image of ‘fascinating smiles’, and the false promises they represent, she depicts Marie Antoinette as a deceiver whose calculated behaviour stymies fellow-feeling. Slipping back into an analytical register, Wollstonecraft chooses, in this instance, to portray self-interest as unnatural: It is certain, that education, and the atmosphere of manners in which a character is formed, change the natural laws of humanity; otherwise it would be unaccountable, how the human heart can be so dead to the tender emotions of benevolence, which most forcibly teach us, that real or lasting felicity flows only from a love of virtue, and the practice of sincerity. (72)

As we have seen, although Wollstonecraft advocates ‘a more enlightened moral love of mankind’, she often acknowledges the almost inevitable predilection for kith and kin. It is striking, then, that she claims the queen contravenes ‘the natural laws of humanity’ by confining her sympathies to her immediate circle. This concerted effort to portray Marie Antoinette as unnatural feeds into a sustained characterisation of the queen – later compared with Circe the enchantress – as ‘both a monstrous creature and a woman who has the power to transform others into monsters’.49 In the succeeding pages, Wollstonecraft gives the French nobility ‘heart[s] [...] dead to the tender emotions of benevolence’, and portrays their political corruption in terms of hostility to fellow-feeling: Every precaution was taken to divide the nation, and prevent any ties of affection, such as ought always to unite man with man, in all the relationships of life, from bringing the two ranks together with any thing like equality to consolidate them. (75)

Here Wollstonecraft argues that the steep social hierarchy hindered sympathy between French citizens, which for a time prevented collective political action. Where she lapses into propagandist caricature, however, her prose threatens to play out the limited sympathy she condemns. Even as she lays claim to a politics compatible with philanthropy, then, Wollstonecraft implicates herself in factional loyalties and risks undermining the logic of her argument. This is partly because her polemic often depends for its rhetorical power on refusing sympathy for political opponents or representatives of hereditary privilege. What begins as an analysis of the cultural constructs inimical to political justice easily gives way to scapegoating an entire people (the French) or demonising social groups (the aristocracy). The text is complicated further, however, by the sporadic interventions of a sentimental persona, whose anguish is at odds both with the narrator-historian’s detached perfectibilism

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and the pamphleteer’s invective. These set-pieces should not be read merely as aberrations. On the contrary, the sentimental persona represents the moral potential and political significance of compassion, and where she takes centre-stage, she brings a crucial layer of complexity to Wollstonecraft’s view of the Revolution. Halldenius argues that, because Wollstonecraft’s ‘argument about inevitability explains why [the Revolution] could not have happened in any other way’, she is effectively ‘making moral critique of the violence pointless’.50 This argument ignores the interludes of high sensibility in the text. Where critics have addressed these interludes, they have tended to regard them as stylistic lapses, sources of irresolvable tension or opportunities for psychoanalysis.51 Tacit in such critical approaches is the notion that Wollstonecraft’s radical polemic loses credibility when she deviates from the discourse of reason. Certainly, it is possible to read these emotive passages in terms of the play of affect disturbing discursive integrity. Such readings have limited value, however, because they underestimate Wollstonecraft’s prescience about the paradoxes of her text. I suggest that she acknowledges the difficulties of her ideological position, constructing a persona who tests her claim that ‘reason […] can prove the only sure guide to direct us to a favourable or just conclusion’ (6). Expressing compassion for victims of the Terror, this ‘Wollstonecraft’ breathes life into the philanthropic sentiments crucial to her cosmopolitan ethic but often absent from the discourses of the narrator-historian and the radical polemicist. Moreover, by extending compassion across the political divide, she sets herself apart from the factionalism blighting the French Republic and critiques Jacobin absolutism. One of the most significant intrusions of this ‘Wollstonecraft’ occurs after the account of the Parisian populace mobilising against the militia: ‘hammers, axes, shovels, pikes, all were sought for, and clenched in hands nerved by heroism; yes, by true heroism, for personal safety was disregarded in the common danger’ (84). This rousing, openly partisan version of events once again portrays human philanthropic potential. In this instance, the people are fortified by their collective resistance to a common enemy, taking courage from shared feelings of fear and righteous indignation. By contrast, their assailants are ‘bribed ruffians, who were lurking in ambush, ready to fall upon their prey’ – the crudelydrawn villains of a Gothic tale (84). Having depicted the populace spurred by injustice to extraordinary courage, Wollstonecraft describes a scene of extraordinary vice, in which Marie Antoinette, the Comte d’Artois and their aristocratic cronies flatter, bribe and intoxicate the hired militia in a bid to secure their loyalty. Once again, Wollstonecraft reproduces the misogynist caricatures of Revolutionary propaganda,

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depicting the queen as a corrupt seductress wielding illicit power with ‘honied words’ and ‘coquetish smiles’ (84). The bacchanalian revelry that follows is fuelled by sadistic pleasure and aligned with barbarianism: ‘With savage ferocity they danced to the sound of music attuned to slaughter, whilst plans of death and devastation gave the zest to the orgies, that worked up their animal spirits to the highest pitch’ (84). Wollstonecraft attributes this magnification of human vices to the deadening effects of power and dissolute pleasures on fellow-feeling. She appeals not to her readers’ reason but to their capacity for moral sentiment: After this account, any reflections on the baneful effects of power, or on the unrestrained indulgence of pleasure, that could thus banish tenderness from the female bosom, and harden the human heart, would be an insult to the reader’s sensibility. (84)

Alluding to the commonly held belief, rejected in Rights of Men, that women were innately the more compassionate sex, Wollstonecraft once again depicts Marie Antoinette as denatured by her over-sophisticated existence and invites her readers to demonstrate their comparative benevolence. At this point her persona steps forward to describe a visit to the palace of Versailles, deserted since the fall of the monarchy: How silent is now Versailles! – The solitary foot, that mounts the sumptuous stair-case, rests on each landing-place, whilst the eye traverses the void, almost expecting to see the strong images of fancy burst into life. – The train of the Louises, like the posterity of the Banquoes, pass in solemn sadness, pointing at the nothingness of grandeur, fading away on the cold canvass, which covers the nakedness of the spacious walls – whilst the gloominess of the atmosphere gives a deeper shade to the gigantic figures, that seem to be sinking into the embraces of death. (84)

It is possible to read this passage as illustrating a platitude: for the Bourbon monarchy, pride has come before a fall, and their once-­glittering palace stands a monument to ‘the nothingness of grandeur’. As her account progresses, Wollstonecraft appears to reinforce this message. Just as she depicts the ‘gigantic figures’ of former kings overshadowed by ‘the embraces of death’, so she places the wonders of Versailles in the dwarfing context of the natural world. In the famous gardens, a mere trickle remains of ‘the grand water works’ (85). This ‘futile attempt to equal nature’ not only functions as a transparent metaphor for hubris, it also symbolises the dazzling but empty artifice that Wollstonecraft repeatedly connects with the Ancien Régime (85). Giving some credence to the notion that she was a socialist avant la lettre,52 she uses the

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‘­ melancholy moral’ of the empty palace to mount a radical argument for the redistribution of wealth: Lo! this was the palace of the great king! – the abode of magnificence! Who has broken the charm? – Why does it now inspire only pity? – Why; – because nature, smiling around, presents to the imagination materials to build farms, and hospitable mansions, where, without raising idle admiration, that gladness will reign, which opens the heart to benevolence, and that industry, which renders innocent pleasure sweet. (85)53

In this passage, quickfire rhetorical questions give way after the semicolon to a perfectibilist discourse which joyfully imagines resources and infrastructure freed up by the demise of hereditary privilege. As in the works of the conjectural historians, material comfort creates the conditions for moral sentiment to flourish, cultivating the ‘benevolence’ essential to Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan ethic. With these images of ‘smiling’ nature, ‘gladness’ and ‘innocent pleasure’, Wollstonecraft strives to present the levelling doctrine of the Revolution as compatible with compassion. Her bright vision of social equality sits awkwardly, however, with the mood of solemnity and even distress that dominates the description of Versailles. This disjunction epitomises the ideological confusion personified by the textual ‘Wollstonecraft’, whose misgivings seep into seemingly straightforward political allusions. When she compares the ‘train of the Louises’ to ‘the posterity of the Banquoes’, it is possible to read the latter as a reference to James II, who was popularly considered a descendent of the historical Banquo. From this perspective, Wollstonecraft draws a simple analogy between two absolutist dynasties: the Stuart king and his French counterpart were both deposed in revolutions seeking to establish a broader base of governmental authority. In Rights of Men, however, Wollstonecraft’s allusions to the Stuart dynasty invoked Macbeth, in which Banquo is a relatively scrupulous foil for the power-hungry protagonist who murders him to secure the throne. In French Revolution, this possible literary analogy not only complicates Wollstonecraft’s critique of despotism, it risks aligning her argument with that of Burke, for whom democratic liberty unleashed the latent ferocity of the people. If the reference to the Banquoes conceivably aligns Louis XVI with the victim of a violent usurper, it casts the staunchness of Wollstonecraft’s political allegiances in doubt. Throughout the episode, Wollstonecraft focuses attention on isolated physical features (‘the solitary foot’, ‘the eye’, the ‘languid smile’) and on signs and symbols of embodied experience (‘the fleeting shadow’, ‘the nerves’, ‘the oppressed heart’). She also allows the reader to glimpse her

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body in multiple reflected images, her syntax conveying a fragmented self, one split into observer and observed: ‘Warily entering the endless apartments, half shut up, the fleeting shadow of the pensive wanderer, reflected in long glasses, that vainly gleam in every direction, slacken the nerves, without appalling the heart’ (84–5). According to the grammar of the sentence, it is the ‘long glasses’ that ‘slacken the nerves’; but if that is the case, it becomes difficult to identify an active verb governing ‘the fleeting shadow of the pensive wanderer’. She might be unnerved by her own image, or she might be the object of the narrator’s gaze; it is as if the sanguine proto-socialist ‘Wollstonecraft’ observes, and is shaken by, the anguish relegated to another part of her psyche. As she moves through Versailles, the pensive wanderer’s body, a vessel of sensibility, betrays her emotions. Amplifying each other, her sensory and affective responses are projected onto the already suggestive locale: ‘The very air is chill, seeming to clog the breath; and the wasting dampness of destruction appears to be stealing into the vast pile, on every side’ (85). Even in the gardens, where she seeks ‘relief’, the portraits left behind in the palace appear to ‘glide along the wide neglected walks’ (85). These distorted perceptions of the physical environment seemingly endorse Wollstonecraft’s anxieties about the debilitating effects of feeling on the rational faculty. But she also implies that eruptions of sentiment carry political and moral significance in spite – or perhaps because – of their deviation from the detached perfectibilism of the historical narrative. Like Rousseau’s Solitary Walker, the pensive wanderer represents both the intensely personal experiences of a single individual and human experiences with universal relevance. By eschewing possessive determiners in her references to ‘the solitary foot’ or ‘the oppressed heart’, Wollstonecraft leaves room for the reader to participate in the experiences described. By implication, any lone visitor to Versailles might feel similar melancholy when faced with its echoing halls and darkened galleries, now monuments to victims of the guillotine. The discrepancy between Wollstonecraft’s perfectibilist claims and the dark mood of her persona undoubtedly complicates the argument of the text. Significantly, though, she appears not simply cognisant of this discrepancy but concerned to underscore and examine it. Immediately after she claims to delight in imagining the reallocation of aristocratic assets to the populace, she switches to a first-person narrative which identifies the historian of the preface with the ‘pensive wanderer’: Weeping – scarcely conscious that I weep, O France! over the vestiges of thy former oppression; which, separating man from man with a fence of iron, sophisticated all, and made many completely wretched; I tremble, lest I should meet some unfortunate being, fleeing from the despotism of licentious

‘A More Enlightened Moral Love of Mankind’    125 freedom, hearing the snap of the guillotine at his heels; merely because he was once noble, or has afforded an asylum to those, whose only crime is their name – (85)

The Wollstonecraft of this highly sentimental interlude sheds tears of pity. Her emotive response is also explicitly connected in the same passage with the narrator-historian, who confesses that her pen would ‘almost bound with eagerness’ to record the fall of the Bastille, if only the prison had not once again been ‘appropriated to hold the victims of revenge and suspicion’ (85). Although Wollstonecraft adopts different registers for the historical narrative and these interludes of eyewitness confession, she makes it clear that we should read the historian and the sentimental expatriate as two sides of the textual Wollstonecraft, who struggles to square her political ideals with her emotional responses to the Terror. If the juxtaposition of these discrete viewpoints introduces paradoxes into the text, Wollstonecraft also emphasises their relatedness and invites the reader to reconcile them. The tears of the sentimental expatriate are ‘scarcely conscious’, not simply because they fall in a moment of disorientation, but also because they express what Rousseau saw as one of the most basic and instinctive impulses of humanity. The ‘inferences of sensibility’ are not here portrayed as ‘erroneous’ (6). On the contrary, Wollstonecraft’s compassion proves a reliable guide to philanthropy and serves to demarcate her political position. At first, she seems to extend compassion to all those made ‘wretched’ by an unjust regime that ‘sophisticated all’; after the semi-colon, however, she focuses specifically on the victims of Robespierre’s Terror. In a scene straight from the pages of Gothic horror, freedom is personified as a ‘licentious’ despot and the guillotine takes on a predatory life of its own. One could be forgiven for hearing an echo of Burke’s vicious mob running riot in the name of liberty. Moreover, as in his Reflections, sentiment seems to be given status here as a moral arbiter. Having argued elsewhere in the text that social privilege denatures the beneficiaries of it until they commit unspeakable cruelties, Wollstonecraft solicits compassion for an ‘unfortunate’ aristocrat doomed by the circumstances of his birth. But if, as Burke argued, it is only ‘natural’ to lament the sufferings of the French nobility, what becomes of the political principles that made them enemies of the people? What becomes of rational arguments for democracy if they have led only to bloodshed? Although the anguish of Wollstonecraft’s persona jars with her claims to analytical detachment, it is nonetheless compatible with philanthropy. Her distress stems partly from the fact that offering ‘asylum’ to

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fugitives is punishable by death. In Robespierre’s Republic, the moral sentiment of compassion has become criminal. Wollstonecraft’s sentimental persona refutes Burke’s accusations of cold-heartedness and metaphysical abstraction, but more importantly, she demonstrates philanthropy impervious to national or cultural divisions – or, in this case, factional politics. She thus sets her ideological convictions apart from those of the Jacobins, for whom indiscriminate sympathy signified counterrevolutionary plotting. Wollstonecraft’s account of Versailles therefore reinforces her commitment to Revolutionary principles by enacting the philanthropic imperative at the heart of her cosmopolitan ethic. It is this commitment to universal benevolence – and consequently to human rights – that makes the detachment of the historical narrative so difficult to sustain: arguing for the success of the Republic demands a powerful (if indirect) indictment of the rigid creed operating in its name. In Wollstonecraft’s eyes, Robespierre’s reign has simply given a new face to tyranny: ‘Down fell the temple of despotism; but – despotism has not been buried in it’s ruins! – Unhappy country!’ (85) Despite her frequent claims for the universal relevance of her analysis, Wollstonecraft periodically emphasises that she is responding to political events still unfolding in the scene of writing. The visit to Versailles is, after all, political tourism. Similarly, towards the end of the final volume, she describes her impressions of the French capital: The entrance into Paris, by the Thuilleries, is certainly very magnificent. The roads have an expansion that agrees with the idea of a large luxurious city, and with the beauty of the buildings in the noble square, that first attracts the traveller’s eye. The lofty trees on each side of the road, forming charming alleys, in which the people walk and lounge with an easy gaiety peculiar to the nation, seem calculated equally to secure their health and promote their pleasure. The barriers, likewise, are stately edifices, that tower with grandeur, rendering the view, as the city is approached, truly picturesque. (215)

There is something of the travelogue in this description, which takes the reader through the experience of approaching Paris and attempts to convey its ambience as well as its aesthetics. Despite hinting at personal acquaintance with the city, however, Wollstonecraft describes herself in the preceding paragraph as an ‘impartial observer’ (215). Once again avoiding possessive articles, she casts the experience in terms of detached spectatorship: ‘Still the eye of taste rests with pleasure on its buildings and decorations: proportion and harmony gratify the sight, whilst airy ornaments seem to toss a simple, playful elegance around’ (216). For Wollstonecraft, taste was less a matter of dispassionate analysis than sentimental response. This view was shaped by Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), which she described as

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‘an intellectual feast’.54 For Blair, good taste was refined by the intellect, but its foundation was sensibility, the instinctive love of beauty that bypasses reason altogether. In French Revolution, Wollstonecraft deploys a discourse of aesthetic analysis concerned with ‘proportion’, ‘harmony’, the ‘picturesque’ and judicious combinations of ‘nature and art’; but this discourse is filtered through the subjective impressions of her sentimental persona (216). When she writes that the ‘heavens too smile, diffusing fragrance’ and describes the ‘sweets’ and ‘freshness’ of ‘clustering flowers’, she conveys, not the architectures of an elegant cityscape, but a memory of Paris in fine weather (216). Alluding to a ‘heart, alive to the social feelings’ and ‘the beauties most dear to fancy’, she praises aspects of the city conducive to sympathetic and imaginative responsiveness (216). The ‘fairy scene’ is interrupted, however, by Wollstonecraft’s ‘melancholy reflections’ on the barriers to the city: They were first erected by despotism to secure the payment of an oppressive tax, and since have fatally assisted to render anarchy more violent by concentration, cutting off the possibility of innocent victims escaping from the fury, or the mistake, of the moment. (216)

Paradoxically, although Wollstonecraft initially portrays herself as an expatriate sufficiently detached from French society to see things as they are, her account of Paris constructs her as a traumatised eyewitness whose perceptions are jaundiced by experience of the Terror: ‘the reflections of wounded humanity disenchanting the senses, the elegant structures, which served as gates to this great prison, no longer appear magnificent porticoes’ (216). Universalising the textual Wollstonecraft’s feelings of horror as the response of ‘wounded humanity’, her persona exemplifies the innately human capacity for fellow-feeling. One can align this episode with the account of Versailles: dispassionate prose gives way to a sentimental textual persona who, albeit she disrupts the narrator’s claims to objectivity, performs the compassion essential to philanthropy. In this description of Paris, however, the broken syntax signifies a breakdown of ideological certainty, a crisis precipitated by spontaneous emotional response: ‘Why starts the tear of anguish to mingle with recollections that sentiment fosters – even in obedience to reason?’ (216) Alluding vaguely to personal ‘recollections’ of her time in France, Wollstonecraft insists that ‘it is wise to be happy! – and nature and virtue will always open inlets of joy to the heart’ (216). And yet the ‘tear of anguish’, inexplicable from this sanguine perspective, suggests that the perfectibilism of French Revolution is partially inauthentic, at odds

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with Wollstonecraft’s movements of affect. Viewed through the dark lens of the Terror, Paris transmogrifies to a crumbling ruin, blighted by supernatural agents of death who give Gothic shape to psychological trauma: ‘The cavalcade of death moves along, shedding mildew over all the beauties of the scene, and blasting every joy!’ (216). Calling ­attention to the material realities of Terrorist Paris, Wollstonecraft concedes that her faith in democracy rests on unstable ground: The elegance of the palaces and buildings is revolting, when they are viewed as prisons, and the sprightliness of the people disgusting, when they are hastening to view the operations of the guillotine, or carelessly passing over the earth stained with blood. (216)

And yet, at the end of the passage, Wollstonecraft returns to her perfectibilist refrain, offering ‘consolation only in the conviction, that, as the world is growing wiser, it must become happier’ (216). Juxtaposed with the preceding tableau of sorrow and visceral revulsion, this sudden and determined optimism sounds hollow, even desperate, a palliative for suffering rather than a legitimate mode of analysis. If Wollstonecraft’s sentimental persona embodies her philanthropic vision of human progress, then, she also jeopardises the integrity of that vision. By making her political principles synonymous with philanthropy, ‘a more enlightened, moral love of mankind’, Wollstonecraft emphasises that political justice depends on harnessing the human instinct for compassion to a principled commitment to universal benevolence. She perceives in Terrorist France a culture deficient in this vital moral sentiment, condemning many self-proclaimed patriots as shallow counterfeits of her philanthropic ideal. If patriotic enthusiasm lit up the Revolutionary dawn, it was born of unprincipled sympathies easily co-opted to factionalism and bloodshed. Wollstonecraft underscores the pervasiveness of this affective paradigm, which she finds replicated in the trenchant nationalism, imperialist aggression and burgeoning capitalism of the Western World. The Terror is a paroxysm brought on by seismic changes in the French body politic, but it also reflects broader patterns of selfinterest and subjection. For Wollstonecraft, the cure is cultural renewal that will transform instinctive compassion into ‘enlightened moral love’, not simply for compatriots, but for all citizens of the world. One of the central paradoxes of the text is that she advocates and lays claim to philosophical detachment, but grants this important ethical status to compassion, which is intractably emotive, however broad its embrace. Wollstonecraft’s discursive shifts and conflicting narrative positions perform and underscore this paradox. Avowedly a detached historian, she deploys her sentimental persona to highlight the situatedness and

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subjectivity of her historical and moral view. By extending pity to the aristocrats demonised elsewhere in the text, this ‘pensive wanderer’ casts doubt on the stability of Wollstonecraft’s political allegiances. At the same time, she represents the moral potential of compassion, embodying a crucial element of Wollstonecraft’s philanthropic ideal and repudiating the unfeeling patriotism of the Jacobin regime. This is not to say, however, that the ‘pensive wanderer’ somehow represents the defining ‘truths’ of the text. She might embody critical aspects of Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan philosophy, but her distress is at odds both with the perfectibilism of the narrator-historian and the strategic invective of the pamphleteer. Her intrusions highlight the discursiveness of apparently confident claims made in other parts of the text, but they do not entirely invalidate them. When Wollstonecraft underscores the tensions of French Revolution, therefore, she invites our scrutiny but offers no easy solutions. If her text is shaped by her cosmopolitan ethic, it is nonetheless a work-in-progress: self-reflexive, provisional and responsive to the scene of writing.

Chapter 5

‘Gleams of Truth’: Transparency, Eloquence and the Language of Revolution

Wollstonecraft conceptualised the Terror as a failure of moral ­sentiment; but she also perceived it as a failure of communication. Her efforts to redress that failure mark her out, once again, as a writer profoundly influenced by her French contemporaries and her experiences in Revolutionary Paris. Eighteenth-century debates about the origins and proper use of words reached a high level of sophistication in the coterie of Dissenters and political radicals orbiting Johnson’s publishing house. They would reach their apotheosis, however, in Revolutionary France, ‘where persuasion of a mass audience was crucial and an integral part of the political phenomenon’.1 Prolific intellectual exchange meant that British and French linguistic theories were largely interdependent, as were the rhetorical practices distinctly, if not straightforwardly, related to them, and they shaped Wollstonecraft’s theory and practice of writing. A recurring theme in French Revolution – and one that has been all but neglected – is the Revolutionary obsession with language, which reached a fever pitch during the Terror.2 Issues of language were differently inflected according to the political situations in Britain and France, but in practice, similar rhetorical techniques were used in both nations by conservatives and radicals alike. The ideological statements that accompanied the adoption of a given style varied considerably, however, with the political allegiances of the writer or orator.3 In common with many British radicals, Wollstonecraft presents plain speech and writing as antidotes to the rhetorical obfuscation of the ruling classes; but when she took up residence in France, her p ­ reoccupation with the role of language in consolidating or undermining ideologies evidently deepened. Like her contemporaries on both sides of the Channel, she critiques the rhetorical gymnastics of the elite; but she was also alert to the urgent need to sustain the Revolutionary momentum despite factional disputes and transmit the guiding ­principles of the Déclaration des droits to an increasingly restive French  populace. In several passages, she records

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with admiration the disarming powers of orators like Mirabeau, whose eloquent speeches often changed the course of National Assembly debates; and yet she distrusts her own pleasure. In the charged climate of the 1790s, questions of style acquired an ethical dimension and, by dint of both its associations with performance and its ability to bypass reason, eloquence carried the threat of deception. Many eighteenth-century intellectuals were wary of the figurative language often deployed in eloquent speechifying, considering met­ aphor the sign and source of logical errors and, after Rousseau, a remnant of primordial consciousness.4 In the 1790s, the radical ideal of plain speech and writing envisaged – rather naively – a direct correlation between word and thing, a transparent language that would tether the speaking or writing subject to some objective reality. Where language is a rhetorical tool, of course, the emphasis can easily shift from truth-telling to performance, which makes the persuasive writer or orator an object of suspicion. Wollstonecraft seeks to resolve this problem by placing ‘eloquent’ and ‘sophisticated’ language at opposite ends of her moral spectrum. Although she does not make the definition explicit,  she appears to conceptualise ‘eloquence’ in the eighteenthcentury sense of ‘deliberative oratory’, where it evokes ‘an imagined scene of ancient oratory in which the speaker moves the just passions of a civic assembly and implants a sense of community with his words’.5 This imagined speaker has much in common with the  Rousseauvian Legislator, although he does not necessarily possess the Legislator’s demiurgic gifts of insight and control. In many texts of  the period, eloquence was equated with courage, magnanimity, devotion to justice, civic participation and self-abnegation for the good of the state – all classical virtues praised by politicians and philosophers who lamented their absence in eighteenth-century Europe.6 Broadly speaking, Wollstonecraft conceives of eloquence as a mobilising force that incites the populace to righteous indignation, whereas sophisticated language works to perpetuate the status quo. In practice, of course, ‘eloquent’ and ‘sophisticated’ discourses share many rhetorical features and, in reality, both can deceive. In French Revolution, Wollstonecraft’s attempt to draw distinctions between them is inevitably strained and  reflects her ambivalence about the role of affect in her ideal of philanthropic patriotism. Nonetheless, she seeks to mobilise Rousseauvian linguistic theory to a tentative apology for eloquence, which she regards as an important weapon in the fight for a stable democratic republic.

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‘I Shall Be Employed About Things, Not Words!’ Eighteenth-century assumptions about social structure, moral values and even human development were often conceptualised linguistically.7 In her seminal Marxist analysis, Olivia Smith identifies a series of dichotomies which not only structured ruling-class attitudes to language but also defined the terms of political and moral debate. These dichotomies included: ‘the vulgar and the refined’; ‘the particular and the general’; ‘the corrupt and the pure’; and ‘the barbaric and the civilized’.8 Smith argues that these terms were ‘socially pervasive’ and ‘divided sensibility and culture according to linguistic categories’.9 As is often the case, these dichotomies were, in fact, hierarchies which elevated refined language over its demotic counterpart and aligned it with purity, civilisation and the expression of universal truths. Universal grammarians such as Robert Lowth, Lord Monboddo and James Harris drew on the ‘perfect’ grammatical systems of Latin and Greek to create a ‘pure’ English language, designed to express ‘universal’ ideas divested of any reference to time, place or matter. In their eyes, refined language revealed a mind that was ‘substantially, almost constitutionally, different from the mass of mankind’s’.10 Until the final decades of the eighteenth century, all those unschooled in such linguistic refinement found themselves without a respected public voice. For this reason, the pamphlet wars of the 1790s were fought, in part, along linguistic lines. At the dawn of the Revolution, many of the radicals and Dissenters in Wollstonecraft’s coterie believed that, in the course of time, the universal application of reason would lead each and every human subject to identical moral and political convictions. On the whole, this belief was shared by their contemporaries on the other side of the Channel. Many also believed, however, that progress to this state of concord was held back by inadequacies in the available political discourses. The ideal of reason as a guide to right conduct was bound up with anxieties about the possibility of accessing that ideal and suspicion that the attendant terminologies were being misapplied and abused. Radical writers and orators such as Paine, John Horne Tooke and John Thelwall condemned the language of the elite as unintelligible, a ruse to bamboozle their social inferiors and maintain an unjust status quo. Denouncing the abstractions of universal grammarians and the florid language of the beau monde, they sought in plain speech and writing a clearer correlation between words and their referents. Their political efficacy has been attributed to their use of unashamedly vernacular language and concrete

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and historically specific accounts of ‘things as they are’, which caught the attention of the disenfranchised populace.11 Originally used in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), the phrase ‘things as they are’ became the subtitle for Godwin’s novel, Caleb Williams (1793), where it signified stripping the false drapery of custom from political injustice. It also informed Paine’s prose style in Rights of Man, in which he claims to speak ‘an open and disinterested language, dictated by no passion but that of humanity’ and to ‘view things as they are’.12 The genealogy of Locke’s phrase testifies to the influence of the empirical philosophers upon the later radical philosophers and pamphleteers of the Revolution controversy. For the radicals, as for their predecessors, style was a moral and – especially in the case of the pamphleteers – a political issue. The empirical philosophers espoused the discourse of reason to express and represent their rejection of prejudice, custom, ignorance and superstition. In response to eighteenth-century attitudes to polite language, and in opposition to ‘false colours’, ‘obscure expressions’ and ‘artificial jargon’, they formed convictions about the language best suited to philosophy.13 Their treatises generally purport to remind the reader of simple, even instinctive truths and common sense obscured by false theories and convoluted rhetoric, the majority delivered in a tone of what John J. Richetti calls ‘humanizing intimacy’.14 These attitudes pervade, to varying degrees, the works of British language theorists like Blair and numerous 1790s radicals. Wollstonecraft encountered many of their works and her ideas about language were influenced accordingly. One of the most influential was Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, which recommends a plain style that ‘stands opposed to too much ornament, or pomp of Language’, linking ‘Simplicity of Style’ with ‘natural manners’, which in turn point to the individuality or ‘marked character’ of the writer.15 These same qualities of simplicity and individuality are deemed to indicate sincerity and opposed to the ‘ceremonial of behaviour’ associated with the ‘man at court’.16 One cannot draw an arbitrary link between the empirical philosophers and the radicals surrounding the Analytical Review based on their shared preference for the discourse of reason. Many groups, whether conservative or progressive, co-opted reason to the justification of their particular worldview. The influence of the empirical philosophers on 1790s radicals is clear, however, in the way that both sets of writers associate the discourse of reason with simple common sense. In this way, they make conclusions drawn in historical tracts, philosophical disquisitions or political pamphlets seem self-evident, available to the average person on the street. Olivia Smith claims that, in keeping with this

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project of accessibility, pamphleteers like Paine and radical grammarians like Horne Tooke deliberately used and promoted the vernacular which, in contrast to the language of the elite, could be identified by its truck with the current and the concrete.17 Universal grammars and dictionaries, such as Harris’s Hermes (1751), incorporated a conservative ideology that underwrote an immutable divine plan for the social hierarchy, describing language geared to reflection rather than experience and stability rather than change.18 Demotic speech and writing threatened the order established by such texts because, evolving in tandem with human activity, they expressed a mutable reality – one in which the social hierarchy could change. In a comprehensive and indispensable work underpinned by data from lexical analysis software, Jane Hodson contests Smith’s reading. She refutes what she calls the ‘problematic assumption that eighteenthcentury writers could have recognized the debilitating effects of the standard language ideology’, arguing that it would have required ‘extraordinary prescience’ to identify and write outside of it.19 She also criticises Smith for over-simplifying the relationship between political and linguistic thought and actual language usage. Combining her extensive data with a painstaking analysis of the language of radical pamphlets and grammars, she argues that most radical writers were much less linguistically self-aware than Smith would have it. There is no ‘real evidence’, she maintains, that radical writers could have seen beyond conservative linguistic ideology ‘simply because of the insight granted them by their political perspectives’.20 It is undoubtedly problematic that Smith ignores both the insidious role of language in constructing mentalities and its manipulation by radical rhetoricians, whose ‘plainspeaking’ manifestos ironically garner much of their power from an astute, if self-dissembling, eloquence.21 On the other hand, Hodson overstates her claims for the unselfconsciousness of language used in the pamphlet wars. Despite similarities in the rhetorical techniques used in Burke’s Reflections and Paine’s Rights of Man,22 each avows a distinctive linguistic attitude and related ideological convictions. Paine maintained that sincerity resided in the plain-speaking at the heart of his ideological programme and absent, as he and Wollstonecraft both argued, from Burke’s Reflections. More importantly, the ‘real evidence’ Hodson demands can be found in the links established since the 1770s between the writers orbiting Johnson’s publishing house and the intelligentsia in Paris, where linguistic projects partook of an atmosphere of formal philosophical and empirical enquiry. Since the first stirrings of political rebellion in the 1780s, sociétés de pensée had been formed to facilitate investigation into language p ­ lanning

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and semiotic innovation. In the years leading up to the Revolution, many French thinkers had come to regard simplifying and standardising the French language as a moral and political imperative.23 In 1782, Condorcet used his reception speech at the Académie française to argue for a rationalised lexis adapted to social regeneration and moral progress.24 His views were shared by other prominent Revolutionaries who influenced Wollstonecraft’s view of the Revolution, including Brissot and Rabaut, and many maintained that the ruling elite were using arcane political and metaphysical terminologies to protect the Ancien Régime. After the fall of the Bastille, the levelling of social classes was reflected in the abolition of hereditary titles and the indiscriminate use of tutoiement and the title ‘citoyen’.25 Towns and institutions were renamed to pay homage to the prevailing patriotic and republican sentiments; in Paris, for instance, the Palais Royal became the Jardin de l’Égalité. Abbé Sieyès’ best-selling pamphlet, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État? (What Is the Third Estate?) (1789), which informed Wollstonecraft’s French Revolution, suggested that investing words with Revolutionary meanings could spontaneously create new Revolutionary entities.26 In November 1791, Urbain Domergue, the Jacobin ‘grammarian patriot’, turned the Journal de la langue française into a société aimed at regenerating language, particularly the political lexicon.27 In this utopian climate, Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy first used the term ‘idéologie’ to describe the analysis of ideas developing within a system of signs. Inspired by selective interpretations of Condillac and Locke, he and his fellow idéologistes aimed to trace the meaning of abstract terms back to the origins of thought and language in sensory experience. Their goal was simple terminology that would be ‘universally understandable’ and oust misconceptions covering the self-interest of power-holders.28 This drive towards transparency was part of a collective Revolutionary effort to ward off false consciousness. Hodson’s claim that British radical writers were not cognisant of their linguistic innovation is untenable in light of their intellectual links with Revolutionary France. Most were aware of the pitfalls of inherited terminology and made a concerted effort to sidestep them. Despite his partisanship in the Revolutionary debate, Christie, who published a detailed review of Condorcet’s works in the Analytical, is adamant that his fellow reviewers should avoid polemic in favour of ‘impartiality, objectivity and universality’.29 Even after the Terror disillusioned many British radicals, Godwin undertook a perfectibilist analysis of the English language, which he judged to be constantly improving: ‘Of English Style’ (1797) typifies the linguistic works of the 1790s in its somewhat naïve insistence that ‘style should be the transparent envelop of our

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thoughts’.30 In Rights of Man, Paine criticises hereditary privilege by exposing the emptiness of its terminology and equates linguistic equivocation with abuse of power: ‘Through all the vocabulary of Adam, there is not such an animal as a duke or a count; neither can we connect any certain idea to the words’.31 In Paine’s account, ‘the substitutive logic of metaphor […] conceals, but is also symptomatic of, a primary scene of substitutive violence which is the origin of monarchy’.32 In other words, metaphors can be understood as euphemisms replacing frank representations of seizure of power or property. In the case of the word ‘monarchy’, the violent origins of regal supremacy are obscured and legitimised over time as the word comes to connote a divinely ordained representative of the public good. Similarly, the ‘right of war and peace’ is ‘said to reside in a metaphor’ – the Crown – which is, in fact, ‘no more than a hat or a cap’.33 The writer who calls a cap a cap, Paine infers, will bring equivalent transparency to his political dealings. It is clear that the radicals and Dissenters involved in the intellectual exchange between St Paul’s Churchyard and Revolutionary Paris partook of an ideology of transparency. But since language can never be what it represents, even uniform adherence to the ideal of plain speech obviously could not produce an absolute equivalence of language and reality. The 1790s radicals faced the same compositional problems as their philosophical forefathers who, despite their allegiance to the discourse of reason, were ‘fully aware of the problematic nature of language’.34 Locke, Berkeley and Hume attempted to organise the thoughts of both philosopher and reader according to the rules and categories of reason, which was supposed to present an object or situation in its true colours. However, this vaunted transparency was by turns disingenuous and acknowledged as in some measure unrealisable. The philosophical text became ‘a special kind of event that calls attention to its own inadequacy and lack of transparency’, while reserving some rhetorical surprises in the form of tropes, wit and (in the case of Hume) sentiment.35 In the same vein, the determination amongst Wollstonecraft and her coterie to demystify abstractions belies an acute fascination with the way language can shape our perceptions of reality. As Steven Blakemore observes, ‘to write the Revolution’s history was to participate concurrently in the creation of its meaning’.36 Despite their heightened awareness of the ideological implications of their style and vocabulary, radical writers were not always willing to achieve the transparency to which they laid claim, especially as factional disputes intensified and the need for compelling polemic increased.37 Nonetheless, they recognised that a given stylistic manifesto could support or handicap a political cause and, given their intellectual connections with Paris, they almost certainly took heed of

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the linguistic theories and practices of their French contemporaries when they embarked on their own writing. Wollstonecraft was no exception. In Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft’s denunciation of Burke involves an explicit commitment to transparency in language. ‘I have not yet learned to twist my periods’, she writes, ‘nor, in the equivocal idiom of politeness, to disguise my sentiments, and imply what I should be afraid to utter’ (V, 7). She goes on to claim that Burke uses ‘sophisms’ to obscure social injustice: ‘Words are heaped on words, till the understanding is confused by endeavouring to disentangle the sense, and the memory by tracing contradictions’ (50). The antidote that Wollstonecraft recommends and claims to espouse is linguistic ‘simplicity’, which she links rather naively to ‘truth, in morals’ (7). Her preference for simplicity reflects a broader enthusiasm, amongst writers and literary critics of the period, for literature that seemed to express original thought in unstudied language. It was often assumed that the measure of an individual’s sincerity could be gauged by the degree of congruence between their inner self and its expression in language. Especially in the literature of sensibility, directness and spontaneity in speech and writing were thought to indicate moral goodness, a notion Wollstonecraft undoubtedly espoused. In Rights of Woman, she laments: Out of the abundance of the heart how few speak! So few, that I, who love simplicity, would gladly give up politeness for a quarter of the virtue that has been sacrificed to an equivocal quality which at best should only be the polish of virtue. (156)

Her stylistic strategy appears to be conceived along similar lines, for she declares defiantly: ‘I shall be employed about things, not words!’ (76) With this declaration, she presents her text as comprising of words closely related to their referents and definitions grounded in concrete realities. Like Paine, she not only repudiates the abstractions of analytical prose, she identifies the misuse or corruption of words with social injustice and moral confusion. Condemning the sexual double standards of the period, she laments that ‘insincerity’ has been ‘termed a virtue’ and ‘modesty, strangely miscalled’ (153–4, 195). Where ‘virtue’ is narrowly defined as chastity, women’s moral lives are divorced from social appearances, so that it becomes more important to perform modesty than to develop a moral commitment to it. In short, she recognises that language usage plays a crucial role in shaping the ideology of female virtue. Wollstonecraft connects language that enforces such pernicious ideologies with the abstractions of the educated elite and the highly wrought jargon of polite society. This condemnation of ­ over-sophisticated language owes a debt to Rousseau, who famously condemned the ­

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­ olitesse of the Parisian upper classes, although Wollstonecraft finds him p equally guilty, at times, of resorting to the ‘deluding charms of eloquence and philosophical sophistry’ (110). In French Revolution, she follows both Rousseau and her radical contemporaries in putting a linguistic spin on unjust political hegemony. Depicting elaborate language as a sign and symptom of specious arguments, she lays much of the blame for political oppression at the door of ‘the systematizing of pedants, the ingenious fallacy of priests, and the supercilious meanness of the literary sycophants of courts, who were the distinguished authors of the day’ (VI, 115). The discourse of the elite is made up of verbal showpieces, impressive but meaningless displays designed ‘to perplex and confound the understandings of unlettered men’ (115). But French Revolution does not simply divide language usage along class lines; Wollstonecraft’s integration into French society attunes her to terminology indicative of factional divisions in the Nouveau Régime and alerts her to the risk of its exploitation for political capital. She responds, therefore, to contemporary French works urging a swift and ethical transformation of public discourse, and analyses the impact of linguistic modes and contemporary usage on the political trajectory of 1790s France.

Revolutionary Language and the Terror The works of Rousseau undoubtedly influenced the linguistic ideas explored in French Revolution, not the least of which is that the elite use elaborate language as an instrument of political and social control.38 Rabaut expresses these concerns in his Précis historique de la Révolution française (1791), in which he warns that power-holders sustain their grip on authority with rhetorical bombast: Mais, outre qu’il est barbare de tirer avantage de l’ignorance d’un peuple que le gouvernement même sous lequel il vivoit rendoit ignorant […] il est aisé de voir que les maîtres des hommes ne tiennent ce langage que parce qu’ils aiment l’autorité.39 But, apart from it being barbarous to take advantage of the ignorance of a people which the very government under which they live rendered ­ignorant […] it is easy to see that the masters of men only keep using this language because they like authority.

For many Revolutionaries, the success of their political project did not simply depend on demystifying the language of the ruling elite; it also necessitated communicating with the illiterate and under-informed members of the general populace. Inspired in part by Rousseau, who

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argued that ‘establishing a community of shared meanings and discourse is essential to […] making freedom, authority and virtue compatible’, Revolutionaries across factional divides were zealous in their project to ‘fix’ the meanings of words.40 By clarifying the language of the Revolution, they hoped to communicate its guiding principles, uniting the populace in collective resistance to tyranny and unanimous support for the Nouveau Régime.41 As factional disputes grew more heated, concerns about the imprecise correlation between words and things were exacerbated. Opposing groups accused each other of exploiting ambiguous definitions to gain political ground. The more social and moral disorder appeared traceable to ill-defined abstractions, the more transparent representation became synonymous with political and moral virtue. The neologisms and negative verb forms that entered common usage in the period reflect this atmosphere of fierce political dispute. There was vehement anticlericalism (‘décatholiser’); factionalism (‘sans-culottes’); paranoid fears for the safety of the new order (‘contre-révolution’, ‘antirépublicain’); and an extreme distrust of hereditary privilege discernible in the inflation of the word ‘aristocrat’ to connote all political enemies.42 As Williams jubilantly explains: ‘Every thing tiresome or unpleasant, “c’est une aristocracie!” and every thing charming and agreeable is, “à la nation”’.43 With the Jacobins in the ascendancy, the linguistic stakes in the Revolutionary power struggle were raised higher than ever. In the paranoid climate of the Terror, ‘a special facility with words was increasingly taken as a sign that one had something to hide’.44 In reality, of course, many Jacobin deputies were powerful orators in their own right; they had to be in order to reduce the complexities of the Revolution to Robespierre’s uncompromising vision. The period was therefore marked by a concomitant distrust of language and an effort to control it, as key political players simultaneously denounced the abus des mots and strove to co-opt mass audiences to their political vision. The Jacobins conceptualised the world in dichotomous terms: vice and virtue; aristocracy and people; patriot and traitor. By presenting other forms of expression as invalid, unnecessary or signs of counterrevolutionary intent, they denied the possibility of valid alternatives to their repressive party line. What began as an effort to accelerate the progress of public discourse towards consensus evolved into a chilling determination to create the illusion of a General Will. To this end, they made concerted efforts to impose a standardised form of French on the entire nation. As they agonised about the potential discrepancies between word and thing, word and intention, and intended meaning and interpretation, their linguistic ­policies acquired decidedly anti-cosmopolitan overtones. They

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grew wary of communication reliant on mediation or translation and increasingly distrusted minority languages, dialects and patois, considering the latter two dangerous vestiges of feudalism liable to harbour Ancien Régime prejudices and counterrevolutionary plots.45 Wollstonecraft’s sources for linguistic commentary come from the Girondist side of the political divide. She draws heavily on Rabaut and shares his concern that the language of a democratic and republican government should be comprehensible to the populace: ‘the improvement of governments does not now depend on the genius of particular men; but on the impetus given to the whole society by the discovery of useful truths’ (VI, 109). Convinced that the success of the Revolution depends on eliminating the obfuscatory language of the elite, she works to discredit the nobility by returning factual meaning to phrases which have long acquired a metaphorical gloss. The ‘french nobility’, she writes, ‘considered the people as beasts of burden, and trod them under foot with the mud’ (75). She goes on to explain that this image of a downtrodden populace is ‘not a figure of rhetoric; but a melancholy truth!’ For it is notorious, that, in the narrow streets of Paris, where there are no footways to secure the walkers from danger, they were frequently killed, without slackening, by the least emotion of fellow-feeling, the gallop of the thoughtless being, whose manhood was buried in a factitious character. (75)

Similarly, Wollstonecraft describes Louis XVI as a man who is able to ‘impose on the credulous’ because he is ‘versed in the language of duplicity’ (203). Her vilification of the king’s character depends on exposing his language, as well as that of his courtiers, as disingenuous. Describing the opening of the Estates-General, she declares that the king speaks ‘without throwing dust into any one’s eyes’ (56), but nonetheless goes on to dismantle his rhetoric: He afterwards alluded to the spirit of innovation, that had taken possession of the minds of the people, and the general discontent that agitated the nation: but, in the true cant of courts, dictating whilst complimenting, he assured them, that he depended on their wisdom and moderation; concluding with the words of course, the humble servant of kings, a declaration of his attachment to the public welfare. (57)

The ‘cant of courts’ makes one system – tyranny – seem like a very different, quite innocuous state of affairs. By italicising ‘the humble servant of kings’, Wollstonecraft signifies the irony of describing the king’s self-naming as ‘a declaration of his attachment to the public welfare’. Exposing the epithet as a mere figure of speech, she undermines its

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r­ elationship to any verifiable reality. The tyranny of the monarchy and the upper classes is exacted, she implies, through linguistic trickery: the king constructs a version of events for his subjects which is understood as the only possible reality – in modern critical terms, an ideology. As Chapter 4 demonstrated, although Wollstonecraft ostensibly focuses on the genesis of the Revolution, her commentary implicitly takes aim at the Jacobin administration whose Reign of Terror overshadowed her residence in France. She claims that, after the fall of the Bastille, a failure of communication between the people and their representatives, and between Assembly deputies of varying social status, led them to an impasse where legislative consensus was impossible. Significantly, Wollstonecraft is sceptical about the outcomes of language reform, suggesting that new Revolutionary terms intended to bring greater clarity to political debate have been used as buzz-words by cynical pragmatists to corral the populace and – as in the Ancien Régime – levy power and influence. The nobility, she claims, put forward motions in the National Assembly geared to ensure their popularity rather than a stable democratic republic. In doing so, they ‘inflamed the foibles of the multitude, by flattering them […] tickling the spirit they could not tame’ (136). This self-interested strategy applies equally to their use of language: ‘Thus also we have seen the desperate leaders of factions selecting ingeniously the terms sans-culottes, citoyen, and égalité, in order to cajole the minds of the vulgar’ (136). This language lays claim to transparency but is, in fact, ‘highly seasoned’, and the consequences are grave and disquieting because ‘the power of ruling has descended to the most desperate and impudent of the smatterers in politics’ (136). Recurring to her concern with false patriotism, Wollstonecraft notes that those ‘leaders of the national assembly’ who are guilty of ‘a vain desire of applause, or deep schemes of emolument’, are ‘guided by the vulgar import’ of the word ‘patriot’, a desire to make their nation and its leaders shine on the world stage regardless of the moral costs and political consequences (141). Similarly, she laments: ‘Liberty was the constant watch word; though few knew in what it consisted’ (196). This failure to consolidate the meaning of key terms leaves ‘popular assemblies’ vulnerable to ‘the fascinating charms of eloquence’, which is liable to lead them astray (164). For this reason, Wollstonecraft believes that ‘the principles of governments’ should be ‘simplified’ and ‘disseminated’ as a matter of urgency, because ‘as it is possible for a man to be eloquent without being either wise or virtuous, it is but a common precaution of prudence in the framers of a constitution, to provide some check to the evil’ (164–5). In her eyes, it is imperative to develop a linguistic system that will transmit to uneducated people both the theory of government

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consecrated in their new constitution and the issues at stake in the National Assembly. Accordingly, she offers definitions of contentious terms rooted in political and social realities. In the case of the word ‘patriot’, she relates the proper application of the term to strong principles and philanthropic actions: By real patriots, I mean men who have studied politics, and whose ideas and opinions on the subject are reduced to principles; men who make that science so much their principal object, as to be willing to give up time, personal safety, and whatever society comprehends in the phrase, personal interest, to secure the adoption of their plans of reform, and the diffusion of knowledge. (141)

In short, patriotism should connote an altruistic, resolute and principled commitment to public service – a Pricean love of country. Just as Wollstonecraft often denounces French culture as shallow and insincere, so she perceives duplicitous tendencies in the French language and its literary tradition: ‘The arrangement of sounds, and the adjustment of masculine and feminine rhymes, being the secrets of their poetry, the pomp of diction gives a semblance of grandeur to common observations and hackneyed sentiments’ (228). She attributes the breakdown of communication in Revolutionary France partly to the lack of distinction between the common language of everyday life and inflated literary language, which enfolds layers of meaning, invites multiple interpretations and often works to heighten emotion: ‘the french language, though copious in the phrases that give each shade of sentiment, has not, like the italian, the english, the german, a phraseology peculiar to poetry’ (228). For Wollstonecraft, the French have not established sufficient distinction between literary language and the discourse of reason she considers appropriate to political science. French speech and writing are characterised, she observes, by ‘happy turns, equivocal, nay even concise expressions, and numerous epithets, which, when ingeniously applied, convey a sentence, or afford matter for half a dozen’ (228). The brevity so often associated with plain speech is linked, in this passage, with equivocation and wit. From this perspective, the so-called plainspeaker is as liable as the courtier to sacrifice clarity to their own brand of ‘oratorical flourishes’ (228). In Wollstonecraft’s eyes, these patterns of everyday speech are partly to blame for the continual conflict in the National Assembly before the ascendancy of the Jacobins. Describing the French as ‘the most eloquent people in the world’, she complains that they do not stop to consider whether their ‘sentiments […] have any thing to recommend them to notice, beside a happy choice of expressions’:

‘Gleams of Truth’    143 And as the slightest contradiction sets them on fire, three parts out of four of the time, which ought to have been employed in serious investigation, was consumed in idle vehemence. Whilst the applauses and hisses of the galleries increased the tumult; making the vain still more eager to mount the stage. Thus every thing contributing to excite the emotions, which lead men only to court admiration, the good of the people was too often sacrificed to the desire of pleasing them. (156)

The references to the ‘galleries’ and the ‘stage’ equate the language of the National Assembly with the language of the theatre, in the sense that it seeks to unite the audience in instant and collective gratification. Regrettably, this verbal dexterity stimulates emotional volatility (‘the slightest contradiction sets them on fire’), vanity and sycophancy (they are ‘eager to mount the stage’ and ‘court admiration’) and an immoderate love of pleasure (the ‘good of the people’ is ‘sacrificed to the desire of pleasing them’). These are characteristics Wollstonecraft usually associates with Ancien Régime nobles. As we have seen, she also attributes them to the self-interested passions anathema to Price’s philanthropic form of patriotism. Implicitly, Wollstonecraft warns that, if a linguistic revolution does not take place in France, the political Revolution is doomed to failure. Via the corrupt terminologies structuring their thought processes, the leaders of the Assembly will slide into old linguistic habits that inhibit communication and underwrite corruption. Fearing that linguistic change and cultural renewal will come too late to halt the cataclysmic progress of political events, Wollstonecraft turns her attention to modes of communication likely to have a more immediate impact. And once again, the shadow of Rousseau looms large in her analysis.

Rousseauvian Demagogues Inspired by Rousseau, Revolutionary discourse tends to suggest that subjection to the particular wills of monarchs and nobles could be ended by mutual and consenting dependence between citizens. Since the autonomy of Natural Man could not be recaptured in a socialised state, a sense of universal freedom could only be accomplished by giving each citizen a vested interest in creating and maintaining an egalitarian body politic.46 Supporters of the Revolution often depicted a united people calling for political change. Entranced by the spectacular Fête de la Fédération staged on the first ever Bastille Day in 1790, Williams described an ‘immense’ and ‘exulting multitude’.47 Similarly, her poem, ‘The Bastille, A Vision’ (1790), evokes ‘millions with according

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mind, \ Who claim the rights of human kind’.48 But of course, the General Will of the French citizenry could not be expressed univocally in any literal sense; they needed representatives. During the Revolution, the ideal of univocity was quickly transmogrified into a competition of discourses, each of which claimed to find meaning in the events of the Revolution by correctly interpreting and mediating the will of the people. The will of the people is best understood, therefore, as a set of beliefs constructed when they are acted on by the linguistic performances of Assembly deputies and their associates. In the new democratic Republic, ‘power was in the hands of those who spoke for the people’, and their varying abilities to manipulate language became weapons in the struggle for political authority.49 In French Revolution, sweeping overstatements describe the ‘will of the people’ expressing a single united front (VI, 121), resisting any suggestion of dissent from Revolutionary ideals: ‘With one voice, however, the whole nation called for a constitution, to establish equal rights, as the foundation of freedom’ (53). Wollstonecraft’s imagery homogenises the  public mind, transforming the mass of individual citizens into a single natural phenomenon. ‘The agitation of the public mind’ becomes ‘a troubled sea; which, having been put in motion by a raging tornado, gradually swells, until the whole element, wave rolling on wave, exhibits one unbounded commotion’ (82). In other words, Wollstonecraft describes the populace united by their collective consciousness and overwhelming desire for political and social change. Significantly, however, their univocity also recalls her description of the French theatre, where she observes that ‘a highly wrought sentiment of morality, probably rather romantic than sublime, produces a burst of applause, when one heart seems to agitate every hand’ (19). Insight and profundity were hallmarks of the sublime, whilst ‘romantic’ tended to denote all that was fanciful and extravagant – in Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft has the term denote ‘false, or rather artificial, feelings’ (V, 29). Betsy Bolton argues that, like many of her contemporaries, Wollstonecraft uses theatrical spectacle as an image of the state, in which each individual became part of a single-minded collective;50 but in her guarded description, ‘one heart’ only ‘seems to agitate every hand’. As we have seen, in French Revolution she alternates between celebrating the French people’s united front against tyranny and doubting the sincerity of their commitment to Revolutionary ideals. In this passage, their apparent sentimental concord and its concomitant univocity are ‘romantic’ delusions, brought on by the performance of the actor. These moral sentiments are ‘highly wrought’, the products of art rather than nature, and the extravagant pitch of their enthusiasm suggests it will be difficult to sustain over time.

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As in her conjectural narrative of human socialisation, Wollstonecraft conceptualises linguistic change in terms of teleological progress. By this perfectibilist standard, language is an ideological tool which, if correctly designed, could contribute to human enlightenment. But she also portrays the historical development of language as a gradual fallof-Babel into imperfect communication. This apparent contradiction is explicable in light of her enthusiasm for Rousseau who, in his Essai sur l’origine des langues (Essay on the Origin of Languages) (1781), describes the development of civilised, abstract language in terms of gradual alienation from an instinctual language integral to the freedom of Natural Man. This instinctual language, he suggests, had its origins in the desire or need to communicate, and contributed to human socialisation. Imagined as onomatopoeic and lacking in the grammatical structures needed for generalisation, this language was universal in the sense that it expressed emotions which, because they were part of human nature, guaranteed the intelligibility of the language that communicated them. In both the Essai and his Discours sur les sciences et les arts (Discourse on the Arts and Sciences) (1750), Rousseau argues that, at a later socially decadent stage, language became incapable of mediating genuine human feeling, instead enabling dissemblance and deception.51 His influence is perceptible in Wollstonecraft’s vision of early nomadic tribes ‘growing into nations’ and ‘spreading themselves over the globe’, in which discord stems from the formation of ‘different languages, which producing different interests, and misunderstandings, excite distrust’ (VI, 146). According to this vision, human thought and behaviour evolves in tandem with language. The qualities in a given language can produce ‘different interests’, which means that the language of the people can affect the General Will. Yet although Rousseau writes with primitivist nostalgia of the instinctual language of our ancestors, he also recognises the (potentially enlightening) capacity of civilised language to abstract general ideas from particular circumstances and communicate important truths – but only if it remains intelligible to the uneducated masses. In spite of her perfectibilism, Wollstonecraft shares Rousseau’s scepticism about the ability of rational argument to inspire an entire people to comply with ideas of political justice.52 As Gregory Dart observes, this ‘contemplation of the perceived inertia of reason did lead her to entertain – if only briefly – the notion of a careful manipulation of public opinion through civic religion, even if she did not, in the end, indulge it’.53 What she did indulge – and practise – were the powers of eloquence. Famously arguing in The Social Contract that the successful legislator must persuade without convincing, Rousseau applauds eloquence

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which inspires a non-rational desire in a listening audience to imitate the orator and coincide with his judgements.54 Eloquence, understood as the art of rhetorical persuasion practised by a virtuous demagogue, depends on inducing shared feelings in the listening citizens, appealing to their common humanity. For Rousseau, such language is sonorous, poetic and harmonious because it develops, not to baffle the people, but to capture and retain their hearts and minds. This kind of eloquence, he claims, is unheard-of in despotic regimes, in which persuasion is unnecessary for effective rule.55 Just as Wollstonecraft’s mother-educators wield authority over their unreasoning charges, so she conceives of patriotic French deputies guiding the unenlightened citizenry towards a rational form of government designed to guarantee their human rights. Like Rousseau, she recognises that, however plausible the discourse of reason, its ‘emotional thinness’ allows it to ‘touch the intellect and not the will or heart’.56 This means that ‘even when individuals discover the “meaning” of a moral term, they are not persuaded to act upon it’.57 Such language convinces, in Rousseau’s formulation, but does not persuade. The Rousseauvian account of eloquence offers Wollstonecraft a positive model for the theatricality of Revolutionary language, as distinct from the empty theatricality or ‘sheer declamation’ she criticises (VI, 228). Viewed in this light, the rhetorical performance of the virtuous demagogue, or Assembly deputy, does not distort the listening citizens’ perception of ‘things as they are’. On the contrary, it recreates a scene of ancient oratory in which the assembly hears its own voice in the words of the demagogue. The scene of oratory is indicative of a shared community of sympathy, in which feelings and ideas common to all human subjects are articulated in ways that render them universally intelligible. Unlike the language of the Jacobins, this persuasive language cannot become pernicious as long as it remains self-reflexive – that is, as long as its persuasiveness lies in its ability to speak to a sense of ‘things as they are’ innate in each member of the audience. It is one of Rousseau’s signature paradoxes that the virtuous demagogue employs rhetorical devices which seek to make the audience feel certain truths as self-evident, even as he abandons the albeit vain attempt to make his language co-extensive with reality. Wollstonecraft’s recognition of this paradox is evident in her works as early as 1790. She wrote approvingly in the Analytical of Georg Joachim Zollikofer’s Predigten ueber die Würde des Menschen (Sermons on the Dignity of Man), commenting that he ‘seems never to have forgotten that the greater number of men have not been accustomed to think, and therefore must be instructed in a manner adapted to their languid unexercised faculties’ (VII, 263). She pays the customary homage to his

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‘manly plainness’ of style, but also emphasises that, ‘a sudden glow of eloquence fastens on the affections, and sinks the instruction deeper than dry arguments ever can’ (263). Her response to this impassioned prose has much in common with her response to poetry in which she detects ‘the genuine enthusiasm of genius’ (V, 29). In Rights of Men, she writes that such poetry ‘naturally addresses the fancy, and the language of passion is with great felicity borrowed from the heightened picture which the imagination draws of sensible objects concentred by impassioned reflection’ (29). She claims that this kind of ‘impassioned reflection’ – far superior to ‘stale tropes and cold rodomontade’ – was more common in the ‘infancy of civilization’ before artificial practices drove a wedge between authentic feeling and literary production (29). In her essay On Poetry, published in the Monthly Magazine in 1797, Wollstonecraft again claims that ‘poetry written in the infancy of society, is most natural’, which ‘is merely to say, that it is the transcript of immediate sensations, in all their native wildness and simplicity, when fancy, awakened by the sight of interesting objects, was most actively at work’ (VII, 7). ‘At such moments’, she continues, ‘sensibility quickly furnishes similes, and the sublimated spirits combine images, which rising spontaneously, it is not necessary coldly to ransack the understanding or memory’ (7). For Wollstonecraft, then, the ‘natural’ state is one of simplicity, a salient characteristic of the ideal of plain speech. Like Rousseau, however, she also considers figurative language ‘natural’ where it captures and conveys ‘immediate sensations’, reflecting the dual action of sentiment and imagination.58 These very same qualities characterise the extemporising of the virtuous demagogue or Rousseauvian Legislator, whose oratorical success depends, in part, on arresting sentiments moving and uniting the listening audience. When Wollstonecraft condemns Burke’s Reflections, she claims that neither his ‘heart’ nor his ‘reason’ is ‘at home’, which in turn means that he has strayed far from nature (V, 28). Similar convictions inform French Revolution, in which she insists that the French were ‘so refined by art, that they had lost the zest for nature’ (VI, 186). Their habit of theatre-going has given them ‘an ear for the harmony of language, and a fastidious taste for sheer declamation, in which a sentimental jargon extinguishes all the simplicity and fire of passion’ (228). French linguistic sophistication indicates that the people have distanced themselves from nature and the authentic moral sentiments associated with it. Their social system has developed contra truths accessible through language which expresses a just equilibrium of reason and passion, the equilibrium essential to Wollstonecraft’s ideal of cosmopolitan patriotism. The unfortunate consequence of this linguistic and moral degeneration has

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been that, when the Revolution finally happened, the ‘hearts’ of the French ‘had been too long sophisticated, to suggest the best mode of communicating freedom to millions’ (166). One exception to this damning indictment is Mirabeau, who was held up as one of the fathers of the Revolution until his untimely death in 1791. Rather like Rousseau, Mirabeau was a mercurial personality with a notorious love-life; but he was also a brilliant orator. Despite favouring a constitutional monarchy, he stood firm against royal interference in the Estates-General and passionately defended Revolutionary principles in the National Assembly. In a letter to Imlay, Wollstonecraft teases him that she ‘will make love to the shade of Mirabeau’ if he does not return to her soon.59 Associating Mirabeau with ‘sentiment’, she is keen to stress that he was not thereby ‘devoid of principles’, concluding: ‘if I had not begun to form a new theory respecting men, I should, in the vanity of my heart, have imagined that I could have made something of his – it was composed of such materials’.60 Combining sentiment with principle, Mirabeau comes closest to embodying the patriotism Wollstonecraft finds lacking in many Assembly deputies. Throughout French Revolution, her praise of him combines with her linguistic ideas to present an alternative model of linguistic performance distinct from the ‘sheer declamation’ of the theatre. His oratory, she suggests, might show an audience some ‘gleams of truth’ – heralds of the ultimate success of the Revolution (228).

‘Gleams of Truth’: Mirabeau’s Eloquence Like many members of the eighteenth-century literate classes, Wollstonecraft supposed that the unschooled speakers of provincial dialects or ungrammatical French would struggle to generalise ideas, comprehend abstract terms or understand the key debates and decrees of the Revolution. In The Social Contract, Rousseau famously stated that the language of the wise was not the language of the people.61 And yet Wollstonecraft accords with the majority of French Revolutionaries in her belief that power should reside in the will of the people rather than the sceptre of a privileged minority. Reflecting on the role of print culture in the fomentation of the Revolution, Rabaut feels encouraged that some Revolutionary works ‘étoient écrits dans un langage populaire qui les mettoit à la portée des dernieres classes de la société’ (were written in a popular language which placed them within reach of the lowest classes of society).62 But in French Revolution, Wollstonecraft laments that ‘the scanty diffusion of knowledge’ has so far made it impossible for ‘the body

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of the people to participate in the discussion of political science’ (VI, 17). The task before supporters of the Revolution, then, is to win over a public divided between the disillusioned and the reactionary. Influenced by her reading of Blair and Rousseau, Wollstonecraft compares the Revolutionary debate to a long tradition of dema­ goguery.  But in typically perfectibilist style, she also insists that the number of ‘demagogues’ in Paris may have ‘exceeded’ those of Ancient Greece: It had long been the fashion to talk of liberty, and to dispute on hypothetical and logical points of political economy; and these disputations disseminated gleams of truth, and generated more demagogues than had ever appeared in any modern city. – The number exceeded, perhaps, any comparison with that of Athens itself. (228)

In this passage, eloquence comprehends the capacity of a gifted speaker to move ‘the just passions of a civic assembly’.63 Wollstonecraft insists that demagogic oratory ‘disseminated gleams of truth’ which, while scarcely forming the dazzling beam of total enlightenment, nonetheless lit the way to a fairer system of government. Concomitantly, when she speculates about the qualities of Natural Man, she associates eloquence with a ‘savage state’ related to ‘rational liberty’. This state is lost only with the advent of hereditary distinctions and unjust governments: In a savage state man is distinguished only by superiority of genius, prowess, and eloquence. I say eloquence, for I believe, that in this stage of society he is most eloquent, because most natural. For it is only in the progress of governments, that hereditary distinctions, cruelly abridging rational liberty, have prevented man from rising in his just point of elevation, by the exercise of his improveable faculties. (220)

According to this formula, the eloquence of the demagogue – as epitomised by Mirabeau – is quite different from the artificial ‘cant of courts’ because it is a natural attribute (57). Moreover, it mobilises each of the ‘improveable faculties’ – reason, feeling, imagination – and thereby forms part of the demagogue’s effort to perfect themselves and the societies they construct. For Wollstonecraft and her peers, with all their ideas for pedagogical reform, tempering the inculcation of reason in their untutored readership with persuasive eloquence presented obvious ethical dilemmas. In French Revolution, Wollstonecraft explains the widespread Revolutionary fervour in France partly by the influence of the Enlightenment philosophes, whose works were notable for their eloquence as well as their insights. The problem, she claims, was that their works ‘had a­ wakened

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the spirit’ of the deputies, but had also ‘a little inebriated their brain’ (55). For Wollstonecraft, such inebriation is ‘the baneful effect of eloquence’, which sometimes persuades without ever convincing (55). Ultimately, though, she appears to have been swayed by the urgent need to communicate the events and principles of a Revolution which, with every instance of bloodshed, threatened to blight her hopes for political justice and moral reform. Where she modifies her ideal of plain speaking, she does so in the expectation of a moral and intellectual pay-off from the emotional impact of figurative language. Hodson claims that, for Wollstonecraft, spontaneous emotional ‘effusions’ brought ‘honesty and eloquence’ to a text.64 As we have seen, however, Wollstonecraft prefers a model in which reason and feeling are interdependent, considering the passions ‘necessary auxiliaries of reason’ (V, 16). In French Revolution, she advocates combining a rational argument with imagery that appeals to the non-rational part of the reader’s psyche and seeks, pace Rousseau, to both persuade and convince: Perhaps, the great advantage of eloquence is, that, impressing the results of thinking on minds alive only to emotion, it gives wings to the slow foot of  reason, and fire to the cold labours of investigation: Yet it is observable, that, in proportion as the understanding is cultivated, the mind grows attached to the exercise of investigation, and the combination of abstract ideas. (VI, 61)

Wollstonecraft is critical of ‘minds alive only to emotion’, rather than rational minds with an emotional dimension. Crucially for our purposes, eloquent language is considered, not as a dangerous weapon for deluding the populace, but as a trump card in the quest to convey Revolutionary principles to uneducated citizens. Wollstonecraft implies that such language is dispensable once the ‘understanding is cultivated’; but in the absence of understanding – or what Rousseau would call ‘conviction’ – it is eloquence that stokes the ‘fire’ of righteous indignation in the downtrodden populace. Lest her criticism of the verbal arts of Louis XVI seem incompatible with her enthusiasm for eloquent dispute, Wollstonecraft compares the language of the King’s advisor, Calonne, with that of Mirabeau. The comparison illustrates the different conceptions of eloquence at work in French Revolution. Each man excels at his craft, but whereas Calonne uses language to deceive, Mirabeau emerges as a virtuous republican demagogue in the tradition of Demosthenic oratory, his eloquence dispelling aristocratic cant and rallying the Third Estate. Calonne, Wollstonecraft claims, ‘possessed the showy talents necessary to procure

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instantaneous applause in a popular assembly – a deceiving, rather than a commanding eloquence’ (124). This is eloquence devoid of wisdom or virtue, which she considered an ‘evil’ to be checked by the ‘framers of a constitution’ (165). She contrasts this ‘deceiving’ eloquence, linked to the ‘showy’ language of the theatre, with that of Mirabeau: Mirabeau, on the contrary, seems to have had from nature a strong perception of a dignified propriety of conduct; and truth appearing to give earnestness to his arguments, his hearers were compelled to agree with him out of respect to themselves. Leaving then plausibility far behind, he always stood forth as the sturdy champion of reason; even when, laying down his club, he loitered to dally with the imagination. (124)

Wollstonecraft turns unrepentantly to figurative language in her description of Mirabeau’s speech-making, sanctioning his tendency to ‘dally with the imagination’ as a tactic in the service of reason. The route to reason is not via ‘plausibility’ but authenticity; Mirabeau is compelling because ‘truth’ gives ‘earnestness to his arguments’, and for Wollstonecraft, the way to that truth opens up when the languages of reason and imagination combine. Wollstonecraft’s portrait of Mirabeau’s eloquence recalls Blair’s description of ‘Vehement’ language, which by his account is distinguishable not only by its combination of ‘strength’ and ‘Simplicity’, but also by its ‘peculiar ardour’.65 It is ‘a glowing Style’, Blair writes, ‘the language of a man, whose imagination and passions are heated’.66 This kind of passionate and imaginative language ‘belongs to the higher kinds of oratory; and indeed is rather expected from a man who is speaking, than from one who is writing in his closet’.67 The important distinction here is not between writing and speech, but between isolation and sociability, solipsism and mutual sympathy. The persuasiveness of Mirabeau’s eloquence lies in its capacity to express sentiments innate (if previously dormant) in the listening Assembly. His ‘hearers [are] compelled to agree with him out of respect to themselves’, in the same way that the ancient assembly identified with the Demosthenic orator. Throughout French Revolution, Wollstonecraft quotes extensively from Mirabeau’s speeches, sometimes transcribing several pages in order to fortify her arguments. After one such lengthy quotation, she connects his ‘burst of eloquence’ both with the particular resources of the French language and the actual scene of oratory (174). It is ‘impossible’, she claims, ‘to do justice’ to the speech ‘in a translation’ (174). This is partly because the translation is at a remove from the emotional appeal of the orator, which inspires a mutual sympathy that supersedes reason: ‘the most energetic appeals to the passions always lose half their dignity,

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or, perhaps, appear to want the support of reason, when they are cooly perused’ (174). Her ensuing analysis reverses – or confuses – Rousseau’s definitions of ‘conviction’ and ‘persuasion’. She claims that ‘nothing produces conviction like passion’, apparently associating ‘conviction’, in this passage, with the effects of demagogic eloquence (174). By contrast, although she considers Mirabeau’s ‘address to the nation […] a masterpiece’, she comments that ‘being written to persuade, and not spoken to carry a point immediately, and overwhelm opposition, there is more reasoning in it; and more artful, though less forcible, appeals to the passions’ (174). Terminology aside, Wollstonecraft’s analysis owes much to Rousseau, but also draws on Blair’s description of the mutual sympathy excited by passionate rhetoric. Indeed, she comes close to confessing a personal susceptibility to this kind of eloquence and a concomitant distrust of its effects: ‘something like a fear of having been betrayed into folly clings to the mind it has most strongly influenced; and an obscure sense of shame lowers the spirits that were wound up too high’ (174). Scrutinising Mirabeau’s language for signs of mendacity, Wollstonecraft concludes that, ‘from the whole tenour of this speech it is clear, that Mirabeau was in earnest’ (174). His spontaneity functions as a guarantor of his sincerity, so that his eloquence illuminates ‘gleams of truth’: In this extemporary flow of eloquence, probably the most simple and noble of modern times, mixed none of the rhetoric which frequently entered into his studied compositions; for his periods were often artfully formed; – but it was the art of a man of genius. (174)

In Wollstonecraft’s accounts of National Assembly debates, Mirabeau brings wayward deputies into line with passionate expositions of Revolutionary principles. ‘Mirabeau, with his usual fervour’, she writes, ‘animated them to action, by a lively picture of their situation’ (78). At the critical moment when the Third Estate first defies the King’s command, it is Mirabeau who delivers a searing indictment of subjection to the regal will: It is difficult to conceive the ardour inspired by this prompt eloquence. It’s fire flew from breast to breast, whilst a whisper ran round, that what Mirabeau had just uttered, gave a finishing stroke to the revolution. (67)

For Wollstonecraft, Mirabeau’s brand of eloquence inspires the ‘ardour’ that serves as an auxiliary to reason. This fire imagery, so often linked to the imagination in Wollstonecraft’s work, gives form to Mirabeau’s ‘glowing style’, which seems to make manifest the ideas fuelling the Revolution. The performativity of Mirabeau’s utterances, the apparent

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co-extensiveness of his ‘prompt eloquence’ with the ‘finishing stroke’ of the Revolution, suggests that Wollstonecraft makes little distinction between material reality and language regarded as ‘natural’ in Rousseauvian philosophy. By extension, the language choices of a speaking or writing subject are indicative of their interiority. Wollstonecraft appears to accept Blair’s belief, supported by his knowledge of Rousseau, that ‘in order to be a truly eloquent or persuasive Speaker, nothing is more necessary than to be a virtuous man’.68 Hence ‘Art and Imitation will not avail. An assumed character conveys nothing of this powerful warmth’.69 In other words, it is impossible to feign the innate goodness required to stage an eloquent performance that will move and persuade the assembled audience. The distinction that Wollstonecraft makes between the ‘deceiving’ eloquence of Calonne and the ‘commanding’ eloquence of Mirabeau seems to depend on a similar belief in the co-extensiveness of the subject’s inner self and the language they bring to an eloquent performance. To an extent, therefore, the figure of Mirabeau destabilises the polarisation of linguistic performance and the language of genuine sentiment. But in her depiction of the reactions of Mirabeau’s listeners, and of his evident responsiveness to his audience, Wollstonecraft acknowledges that the link between language and material reality is not direct and unproblematic. The ‘gleams of truth’ that emanate from a ‘glowing style’ are most perceptible when the virtuous orator engages with an audience, so that ‘truth’ is communicated, not by ‘commanding’ eloquence as such, but by the sympathetic mutual responsiveness of the orator and the listening audience. For Wollstonecraft, Mirabeau’s eloquence does not prevail when his actions signify a degree of personal corruption. When he disappoints her by opposing a loan to the National Assembly, she declares that ‘with all his great talents and superiority of genius, he could not avoid envying inferiour abilities, when they attracted the least popularity’ (152). Suddenly Mirabeau’s name is linked with the negative brand of theatricality, or ‘parade’, that she has previously associated with effeminate courtiers and inadequate Assembly deputies (152). Accordingly, his language becomes ‘calculated to dazzle’ rather than to convey moral and political truths (152). Whether his language at this juncture differs substantially from previous performances is debatable; but Wollstonecraft’s assessment of it certainly does. His eloquence is evidently designed to deceive, she claims, and is therefore indicative of self-interest. In her eyes, this fall from grace indicates ‘pretended disinterestedness, or false patriotism’ – the unphilanthropic love of country generated by selfish passions (152). Mirabeau’s desire for self-glorification, by focusing on

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personal gain rather than the wellbeing of the state, jeopardises the stability of the Republic, just as the private intrigues of courtiers and courtesans corrupted the Ancien Régime. French Revolution is a ‘history’ with the topical immediacy of journalism and a corresponding sensitivity to the urgent need for clarity in language. But Wollstonecraft also politicises the language of feeling. Such language is not simply opposed to the pitiless ideology of the Jacobins; it also represents a link between an innately sympathetic human self and the eloquent language of Mirabeau who, in his association both with Demosthenic oratory and the Rousseauvian Legislator, often represents the possibility of an ultimately successful democracy, in which the will of the people is cogently expressed and enacted by virtuous representatives. Wollstonecraft is convinced that Revolutionary violence has erupted, in part, because of the Assembly deputies’ failure to communicate clearly with the French people. Her urgent call for linguistic transparency suggests that distinguishing between the ‘deceiving’ eloquence of Calonne and the ‘commanding’ eloquence of Mirabeau requires a degree of perception lacking in the French populace, a deficiency attributed, in part, to their penchant for wordplay and theatrical declamation. But perfecting a transparent language of reason will take time, and the on-the-ground reality of Revolutionary France demands a swifter means of communication with the people. For Wollstonecraft, the ideal Revolutionary language would both persuade and convince, at once mobilising and enlightening the populace. Underlying her enthusiasm for Mirabeau’s ‘commanding’ eloquence is her apparent acceptance of Rousseau’s claim that such eloquence expresses truths of human existence immediately recognisable to the listening citizens. Appealing to this shared community of sympathy demands emotional sincerity, the affective correlative of plainspeaking and a guarantor of integrity. As the tool of such a demagogue, eloquence is a self-fulfilling sign of certain deeply felt truths, an essential part of a Revolutionary language that is understood, by Wollstonecraft, as a perfectible instrument of human progress.

Chapter 6

‘Imperious Sympathies’: Wollstonecraft’s Philanthropic Traveller

The blow dealt by the Terror to Wollstonecraft’s political and moral ideals found its personal counterpart in the slow death of her love affair with Imlay. In February 1794, they moved from the outskirts of Paris to Le Havre, a suitable location for trade. Their daughter, Françoise ‘Fanny’ Imlay, was born in May and registered as legitimate. Shortly afterwards, traces of anxiety appear in Wollstonecraft’s letters as she staves off fears that Imlay’s love for her is cooling. Increasingly drawn to money-making ventures that promised instant fortune, Imlay departed frequently on business, which eventually took him to London. His dealings seem to have been, if not illegal, at least morally dubious, and they troubled Wollstonecraft’s conscience. As doubts about Imlay’s integrity stole into her mind, she swore that commerce was corrupting his character: ‘How I hate this crooked business! This intercourse with the world, which obliges one to see the worst side of human nature!’1 For Wollstonecraft, the simple agrarian life extolled in Imlay’s published works seemed infinitely more appealing than ‘commerce, which debases the mind, and roots out affection from the heart’.2 As time wore on, her disquiet intensified. Yet despite the pain of prolonged separation and the unrest in France, she was alarmed when Imlay urged her to join him. Evidently her homesickness had given way to an outright rejection of her native land: ‘am I only to return to a country, that has not merely lost all charms for me, but for which I feel a repugnance that almost amounts to horror, only to be left there a prey to it!’3 During Wollstonecraft’s residence in France, the Pitt government had declared war against the French Republic. Thirty members of her radical coterie had been arrested for sedition and three of them brought to trial on illfounded charges of high treason. Acutely aware of British hostility to her ideological convictions, Wollstonecraft was to all intents and purposes a voluntary exile, preferring to invest her hopes in the Thermidorian Republic than to contend with the reactionary climate of her mother

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country. She also argued that Fanny would be ‘freer’ growing up in France,4 probably alluding to the legalisation of no-fault divorce, as well as legislative changes designed to secure state-run support for unwed mothers and inheritance rights for their children.5 By contrast, women in Britain were bound to their husbands even in cases of violence or chronic infidelity, while the stigma of illegitimacy drove many to desperate measures, all issues Wollstonecraft would later address through the plot and characters of Wrongs of Woman. Wollstonecraft knew that her private sorrows should pale in comparison to the ‘barbarity and misery’ of the Terror, but the implosion of her political ideals amplified and reinforced them.6 Now that Imlay seemed incapable of the moral sentiments he once appeared to embody, she struggled to resist a bleak vision of human moral potential. There was much more at stake in the failure of her relationship than a broken heart: Imlay had personified for her the progressive and egalitarian principles of the revolutions in France and America, and his waywardness struck at the very core of her already shaken faith in the progress to justice and philanthropy. Entirely at odds with the moral framework of his published works, his acquisitiveness and probable philandering also exemplified the selfish passions she habitually condemned. She ‘wondered how theory and practice could be so different’, and the disjunction played out, at the domestic level, the violent implementation of the Revolutionary principles she had espoused in the name of universal benevolence.7 In April 1794, she finally joined Imlay in London. Her worst fears of his infidelity were quickly confirmed, and she made a suicide attempt thwarted only by his timely arrival. Shortly afterwards, Imlay gave Wollstonecraft a mission, perhaps partly to distract her from their troubled relationship, but also because he was in dire need of help from his ‘best friend and wife’.8 Her task was to trace a cargo of French silver – probably spoils of the Terror – which Imlay had shipped in exchange for the sought-after commodities of grain, gunpowder and alum. During the Revolutionary Wars, the British blockade and the Traitorous Correspondence Bill (1793) made trade with France a capital crime, but canny entrepreneurs like Imlay could ship goods to France under the neutral flags of the Scandinavian nations. Imlay’s cargo was carried by the Maria and Margarethe, captained by one Peder Ellefsen, but although the ship reached Norway in 1794, some mysterious doublecross deprived Imlay of his share of the profits. Although Wollstonecraft disliked his wartime profiteering, she seems to have cherished hopes of a reconciliation if only she could get compensation from Ellefsen. In June 1795, she sailed to Sweden with her maid Marguerite and toddling daughter Fanny. They landed on the Onsala Peninsula and went north to

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Gothenburg, travelling to the border town of Stromstad before crossing into Norway. Wollstonecraft left Fanny in Halden with Marguerite and sailed across the Skaggerak strait, staying for several weeks at Tønsberg and going west as far as Risør. She then travelled through Christiana (now Oslo) and, having re-joined Fanny and Marguerite, headed south to Denmark, where she stayed in Copenhagen and Hamburg (then a Danish city). Throughout this commercially motivated tour of the Scandinavian nations, Wollstonecraft enquired eagerly into the social and political systems she encountered, demonstrating a nascent receptivity to cultural differences. She was also enchanted by the Norwegian fjords, but her Scandinavian mission was often a lonely endeavour. She missed Fanny terribly, and lamented to Imlay that she was a traveller with ‘no home – no resting place to look to’.9 His letters failed to console her and she spiralled ever deeper into a depression that left her determined to end her life. Short Residence was inspired and informed by Wollstonecraft’s travels. Forged from the raw material of her private letters, it is also an allusive literary and philosophical text that draws on a complex range of British and Continental frameworks for interpretation.10 When it first appeared, Robert Southey wrote excitedly to his publisher: ‘She has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow, with a northern moonlight’.11 Southey’s enthusiasm finds its modern scholarly counterpart in early critical approaches to the text, which designated Short Residence as a work of proto-Romanticism.12 It is easy to see why: the text is replete with passages that draw aesthetic inspiration from intense feeling and Wollstonecraft’s epistolary persona is at one with a natural world that offers fleeting moments of transcendence. Unapologetically subjective, this persona flaunts her real-life genesis, signing herself ‘Mary’ in the final letter – but she is also widely acknowledged to be a Rousseauvian literary construct (VI, 345).13 Re-examining this much-discussed connection between the ‘Mary’ of Short Residence and the Solitary Walker, I argue that Wollstonecraft adapts the free-flow of thought Rousseau called ‘reverie’ to portray a new kind of philanthropic subjectivity. By turns introspective and expansive, reverie draws Wollstonecraft’s mind up towards God and outward into the natural world,14 but it also furnishes her with a means of imaginative communion with humankind, illuminating the cosmopolitan aspect of the Reveries that modern scholars have begun to explore. Whereas the Solitary Walker always retains a degree of solipsism, however, Wollstonecraft seeks solace from others. Shifting often in her reveries from pantheistic abstraction to sense memories of erotic and maternal love, she makes human affections not simply the ground from which benevolence can germinate, but also a means

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i­ nstinctively to apprehend love of humankind. In Short Residence there is none of the sublimated eroticism of Mary but a frank avowal of consummated love that propagates new ties of sentiment, from the intimacy of maternal devotion to an imagined bond with the entire human family. Nussbaum claims that the ‘type of imaginative engagement society needs […] is nourished by love’.15 In the context of patriotism, this ‘love’ is erotic insofar as it denotes a desire for union with a nation perceived as unique and at one with its citizens and often personified in the mind’s eye. ‘Love matters for justice’ because it is this erotic connection that inspires the subject to make demands – and sacrifices – in the service of those identified with the loved one. It follows that, in nations whose self-definition incorporates world citizenship, patriotism can motivate a cosmopolitan love of humankind. Shaped by the cycle of letters to the errant lover, Short Residence derives its philanthropic ethos from an erotic source but – most likely because of Britain’s patriarchal laws and reactionary politics – the letter-writer’s love bypasses her country and expands to embrace a broader transnational community. Identifying her personal suffering with that of female outsiders from otherwise alien cultures, Wollstonecraft constructs an epistolary voice that is at once compassionate and distinctively gendered, wholly unlike the lazy stereotype of the eighteenth-century elitist touting a totalising and detached universalism. In fact, the letter-writer comes to embody what Stan van Hooft calls an ‘ethic of caring’, a philanthropic commitment to the wellbeing of others that stems from sentiment but can be reconciled with the principles of justice.16

Philanthropic Reveries For much of the eighteenth century, the term ‘reverie’ was used pejoratively to describe formless or irregular patterns of thought, often connoting impracticality, fancifulness or even delusion.17 The publication of Rousseau’s Reveries marked a shift towards an idea of reverie as ‘a space for consciousness to escape the societal noise that generally consumes it’.18 This psychological retreat has a moral purpose: ‘The idea is to allow one’s thoughts to coalesce and combine on their own, without the presuppositions of a philosophical system, so that the universal voice of conscience can be heard once again’.19 Many of Rousseau’s contemporaries questioned the value of philosophical reflection without criteria or methodology, arguing that subjective misapprehensions would inevitably result from poorly defined analytical parameters. Rousseau ignored these criticisms largely because

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he believed in the essential benevolence of human nature: the solitary subject who subdues their faculty of reason in reverie is not thereby left vulnerable to harmful passions but more receptive to their benevolent inner self – and, by extension, to the essential benevolence of human nature. Paradoxically, therefore, although reverie enables imaginative retreat from society, it also has the potential to revive philanthropic feeling. According to Neidleman, in reverie, ‘Rousseau discovered what he had previously believed to be highly unlikely: a sentimental pathway to a cosmopolitan love of humankind’.20 Rousseau considers fellowfeeling innately human, making no exceptions for race or culture, and this conviction roots his practice of reverie in cosmopolitan ground. But although he finds in free and expansive cognition ‘a new path toward compassion, openness and a “communion des coeurs” (communion of hearts)’, the discovery depends on removing himself from social relations which, in his philosophical system, make humanity’s civilised face so difficult to love.21 Admittedly, then, Rousseauvian reverie does nothing to make universal benevolence a lived reality. What it does offer is ‘a spiritual or psychological alternative’ to the reality of a divided world, ‘one grounded in the universality of original goodness rather than the particularity of amour propre’.22 In Short Residence, reverie provides Wollstonecraft’s epistolary persona with a conduit to fellowfeeling lacking in the cut-and-thrust of commerce and the emotional famishment of her personal life. This is not to say that she follows Rousseau in considering reason corruptive; but she finds in reverie a complementary mode of cognition which renews her emotional investment in the progress of humankind. The sheer number of similarities between Short Residence and the Reveries suggests that Wollstonecraft was not simply inspired by Rousseau but deliberately inviting comparisons with his final work. Mary A. Favret calls attention to the letter-writer’s enthusiasm for botany, her Linnaean references, her melancholic contemplation of a family of cottagers, and a boat ride where, like Rousseau on the Lac de Bienne, she allows herself to drift with the current, ‘indulging a pleasing forgetfulness, or fallacious hopes’ (VI, 281).23 Like the Solitary Walker, Wollstonecraft presents herself as a persecuted innocent clinging to her integrity. Here it is worth recalling Dart’s observation that this distinctive narrative posture also characterises the works of those French contemporaries of Wollstonecraft who bore witness to their experiences of the Terror, including Manon Roland’s posthumous political autobiography, Appel à l’impartiale postérité (Appeal to Impartial Posterity) (1795), written from her cell as she awaited execution. Biographers are divided as to whether Wollstonecraft ever met Roland, but through Williams

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she would certainly have been apprised of her behind-the-scenes political role and later victimisation. Johnson issued an English translation of the Appel and Claire Tomalin speculates that Wollstonecraft may have reworked it for a second edition around the time of her Scandinavian journey.24 If so, she cannot have failed to notice Roland’s ‘explicit use […] of the tropes and techniques of Rousseau, his confessional rhetoric and his fictional topoi’.25 The significance of Wollstonecraft encountering Rousseauvian images of solitude in narratives of exile and imprisonment will be apparent later in the chapter. For now, we should note that she likewise depicts herself as estranged from human society, ‘a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind’ (249). In common with the Solitary Walker, she attributes this alienation to the incompatibility of her ideals with her lived experience: ‘How illusive, perhaps the most so, are the plans of happiness founded on virtue and principle; what inlets of misery do they not open in a half civilized society?’ (298). Crucially, Wollstonecraft does not simply mimic Rousseau’s response to solitude, she also critiques it. Favret argues persuasively that her use of the letter form constitutes an explicit and ideologically charged departure from Rousseau’s solipsistic dialogue-with-the-self.26 Nancy Yousef goes further, declaring that ‘much of the intellectual and emotional power’ of Wollstonecraft’s travelogue ‘is lost if we fail to appreciate that hers is a subjectivity explicitly wrested from fantasies of solitary self-fashioning, one shaped by vulnerability and acknowledged dependence on others’.27 And as Karafili Steiner rightly suggests, the letter-writer’s subjectivity is more than a literary inscription of Wollstonecraft’s lived experience. On the contrary, ‘Mary’ also constitutes a quasi-philosophical reflection on the view of human nature that runs through Wollstonecraft’s works, in which moral development demands the ‘synergetic expansion of feeling and thinking’ at the dynamic heart of real and imagined communities of sympathy.28 The Solitary Walker cultivates isolation, declaring that happiness consists in ‘rien d’extérieur à soi, de rien sinon de soi-même et de sa propre existence’ (nothing beyond ourselves, nothing foreign to our own existence), and in rejecting ‘toutes les impressions sensuelles et terrestres qui viennent sans cesse nous en distraire et en troubler ici-bas la douceur’ (those sensual and earthly affections which perpetually disturb and imbitter our terrestrial felicity).29 Wollstonecraft’s epistolary persona differs by presenting ‘a repertoire of intense – and divided – reactions to her solitude’.30 Although she can revel in solitary communion with nature, she also needs the psychological sustenance of companionship. Witness her thoughts on returning to Tønsberg: ‘I was to enter without

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lighting-up pleasure in any eye –’ she laments, ‘I dreaded the solitariness of my apartment, and wished for night to hide the starting tears, or to shed them on my pillow, and close my eyes on a world where I was destined to wander alone’ (298). Wollstonecraft’s anguish underlines the tension in her work between her self-construction as a Rousseauvian solitaire and her moral and emotional investment in fellow-feeling. Taylor reads this tension in terms of the push-and-pull between self-absorption and sympathy characteristic of the literature and culture of sensibility: ‘the individual susceptibilities on which [the sympathetic subject] drew for its other-directed responses were ineluctably subjective’, and their ‘tendency, especially in people of acute sensibility like Rousseau and Wollstonecraft, was to draw individuals away from the crude and bruising insensitivities of “the world”’.31 In Short Residence, Wollstonecraft’s epistolary persona is just such a sensitive maverick. In the course of the letters, she nurtures increasingly dark fantasies of sanctuary from mortal pain, making it possible to see in her Rousseauvian self-construction a disillusion so profound that it overwhelms her impetus to philanthropy. At the same time, her reveries enable not simply imaginative retreat but also imaginative flights to heavenly bliss. Indeed, in their respective descriptions of reverie, both Wollstonecraft and Rousseau use the term ‘imagination’ almost interchangeably with ‘soul’, revealing the near-sacred properties they invest in it. Despite her impulse to withdraw from society, Wollstonecraft finds philanthropic potential in this transcendent aspect of reverie. The first explicit instance of reverie raises this prospect of transcendence, but also foreshadows the dark turn of Wollstonecraft’s thoughts towards the end of the letters. Evoking the sunlit stillness of a Swedish summer evening, she writes: Eternity is in these moments: worldly cares melt into the airy stuff that dreams are made of; and reveries, mild and enchanting as the first hopes of love, or the recollection of lost enjoyment, carry the hapless wight into futurity, who, in bustling life, has vainly strove to throw off the grief which lies heavy at the heart. (252–3)

In combination with the idea of ‘eternity’, the term ‘futurity’ evokes an  afterlife untainted by ‘worldly cares’ and ‘grief’. The Solitary Walker  likewise figures death as a longed-for haven, writing in the Third Walk: Cessant donc de chercher parmi les hommes le bonheur que je sentais n’y pouvoir trouver, mon ardente imagination sautait déjà par-dessus l’espace de ma vie, à peine commencée, comme sur un terrain qui m’était étranger, pour se reposer sur une assiette tranquille où je pusse me fixer.

162    Mary Wollstonecraft Despairing, therefore, to find happiness among mankind, my ardent imagination leaped over that space of my existence which I had yet scarcely entered on, as over a strange inhospitable soil, wishing to fix my abode in a more tranquil asylum.32

A similar image of the spirit transcending its earthly constraints appears in the Fifth Walk: Délivré de toutes les passions terrestres qu’engendre le tumulte de la vie sociale, mon âme s’élancerait fréquemment au-dessus de cette atmosphère, et commencerait d’avance avec les intelligences célestes dont elle espère aller augmenter le nombre dans peu de temps. Delivered from all earthly passions which are engendered by the tumults of society, my soul would frequently bound above its atmosphere, and anticipate its communion with those celestial intelligences whose number it shortly hopes to augment.33

There are striking semantic similarities between several of Wollstonecraft’s letters and these passages of the Reveries. In Letter XV, which describes a cascade near Frederikstadt, the natural sublime inspires an imaginative flight to celestial asylum: The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent from the dark cavities which mocked the exploring eye, produced an equal activity in my mind: my thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery? Still the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited, were pleasurable; and, viewing it, my soul rose, with renewed dignity, above its cares – grasping at immortality – it seemed as impossible to stop the current of my thoughts, as of the always varying, still the same, torrent before me – I stretched out my hand to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come. (311)

The letter-writer feels her ‘soul’ rising ‘with renewed dignity’, but her consolation comes in the form of an ominous fantasy of death. Life shrinks to a ‘dark speck’ in her mind’s eye and the vicissitudes of daily existence become so many chains, recalling Rousseau’s famous image of social man’s metaphorical captivity.34 Faced with such passages, it is tempting to read Wollstonecraft’s reveries as imaginative renunciations of human society. We might conclude that the shadow of Rousseau looms large in this text because, in espousing his introversion, Wollstonecraft begins to replicate what many have read as the anti-cosmopolitan thrust of his corpus, a longing for the enclosed agrarian societies of ‘the golden age’ or for retreat from humanity altogether.35 What such a reading overlooks, however, is that Wollstonecraft also makes reverie a conduit to imaginative sympathy. As well as ­acknowledging the possible connection with her reading of Roland’s

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prison memoir, I am inclined to support Yousef’s ‘tentative’ suggestion that Wollstonecraft’s tendency to associate ‘serenity and solitude’ with the prospect of death ‘obliquely articulate[s] the possibility that the self cannot and does not sustain itself alone’.36 Yousef brilliantly illuminates the sense of risk and vulnerability that accompanies Wollstonecraft’s recognition of her insuperable attachment to others. In this chapter, however, I want to bring to light the many instances where she unfolds and enhances the philanthropic potential of Rousseauvian reverie. Take the embryonic instance of reverie in the first letter: Wollstonecraft finds communion with nature restorative but, crucially, the experience is bound up with the kindness of Swedish locals: Amongst the peasantry, there is, however, so much of the simplicity of the golden age in this land of flint – so much overflowing of heart, and fellowfeeling, that only benevolence, and the honest sympathy of nature, diffused smiles over my countenance when they kept me standing, regardless of my fatigue, whilst they dropt courtesy after courtesy. (246)

Wollstonecraft’s receptivity to ‘golden age’ fantasies fluctuates in the course of her letters, but here she uses the term to portray a relatively enclosed settlement where human nature, flourishing uncorrupted, proves innately compassionate. Immediately after this experience, she takes time to appreciate the beauty of the Onsala Peninsula: How silent and peaceful was the scene. I gazed around with rapture, and felt more of that spontaneous pleasure which gives credibility to our expectation of happiness, than I had for a long, long time before. I forgot the horrors I had witnessed in France, which had cast a gloom over all nature, and suffering the enthusiasm of my character, too often, gracious God! damped by the tears of disappointed affection, to be lighted up afresh, care took wing while simple fellow feeling expanded my heart. (247)

The ‘rapture’ Wollstonecraft experiences here arises partly from ­contemplating unspoiled nature, but it also comes from meeting the Swedish peasantry, whose ‘overflowing of heart, and fellow-feeling’ had already stimulated feelings of ‘benevolence’ and ‘honest sympathy’. The language of the passage conflates the natural world with human nature, giving the man-made horrors of the Revolution power to ‘cast a gloom over all nature’, but also giving the coastal scene power to dissipate it. When Wollstonecraft returns to the idea of ‘fellow feeling’ in the final clause, she seems to recall her encounter with the peasantry but also attributes her ‘expanded […] heart’ to her ‘rapture’ at the scene before her, which heightens and abstracts her innate ‘enthusiasm’.37 In Letter VIII, Wollstonecraft connects a more explicit instance of reverie with a similar affirmation of love of humankind. Recounting

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one of her frequent visits to the ruins of an ancient Norwegian fort, she evokes a pantheistic fantasy of diffusion into the natural world: With what ineffable pleasure have I not gazed – and gazed again, losing my breath through my eyes – my very soul diffused itself in the scene – and, seeming to become all senses, glided in the scarcely-agitated waves, to the  misty mountains which bounded the prospect, fancy tript over new lawns, more beautiful even than the lovely slopes on the winding shore before me. (280)

Karen Hust argues that, in such passages, Wollstonecraft ‘frames the complex web of identity and difference that flows between her environment and her self as a dynamic in which mind and world are interdependent’.38 This is a quintessentially Rousseauvian susceptibility to the symbiotic rhythms of thought and nature. Shifting in the same passage from pantheism to an image compatible with Christian worship, Wollstonecraft connects the experience of reverie at once with youthful innocence and religious communion: ‘imperceptibly recalling the reveries of childhood, I bowed before the awful throne of my Creator, whilst I rested on its footstool’ (280). Fusing imaginatively with a transcendent God who is also immanent in the Scandinavian landscape, she portrays reverie as a means to sensual apprehension of the divine spark in every human soul – the source, for both Wollstonecraft and Rousseau, of humankind’s innate benevolence. Despite the philanthropic potential in contemplating human goodness, however, the Solitary Walker’s love of humanity is ‘too abstract to yield affection for actually existing human beings’.39 It can only ever have theoretical value because it subsists through an almost total – and privileged – separation from the rest of humanity. Rousseau claims to take immense pleasure in doing good, but confesses that his pleasure depends on retaining a sense of freedom. Where benevolence is spontaneous, it fills him with delight; if it originates in duty or obligation, it fails to charm, exemplifying his belief in the human need for liberty (or a convincing illusion of the same). By contrast, Wollstonecraft does not make reverie a substitute for human relations. In fact, in Letter VIII her description of reverie precedes a sudden vindication of her propensity to form strong bonds of love: You have sometimes wondered, my dear friend, at the extreme affection of my nature – But such is the temperature of my soul – It is not the vivacity of youth, the hey-day of existence. For years have I endeavoured to calm an impetuous tide – labouring to make my feelings take an orderly course. – It was striving against the stream. – I must love and admire with warmth, or I sink into sadness. (280)

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Portraying bonds of affection as essential to her wellbeing and authentic sense of self, Wollstonecraft emphatically rejects Rousseau’s claim that happiness is best achieved in self-contemplation that precludes and excludes human contact. This imperative to connect is integral to Wollstonecraft’s self-construction as a gendered and situated cosmopolitan subject, whose erotic and maternal attachments enable her instinctively to apprehend love of humankind. This recognition of the interrelatedness of erotic and philanthropic love also characterises the work of Staël, another ardent Rousseauist whose cosmopolitanism has long been considered a defining feature of her oeuvre and finds expression in the love affair between her Anglo-Italian heroine, Corinne, and the British Lord Oswald Nelvil. Wollstonecraft died before Staël published Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807) and her other major cosmopolitan works, and in her review of her Letters on the Works and Character of J. J. Rousseau she criticised Staël’s attempts to resolve his signature paradoxes (VII, 136–7), referring to the work again in Rights of Woman to lambast its apologia for Rousseau’s gender politics (V, 172–3). On this evidence Wollstonecraft appears dismissive of Staël, but there is no question that their views overlap when it comes to the intimate origins of benevolence. Claiming Julie as a moral novel despite its heroine’s controversial sexual agency, Staël argues that love directed towards a worthy object conduces to virtue because it promotes ‘cet abandon de soi-même, ce mépris pour tout ce que la vanité fait rechercher’ (the neglect of ourselves, the contempt for every thing sought after by vanity).40 Having identified this selfless aspect to erotic attachment, Staël suggests that it prepares the psychological ground for ‘la bienfaisance & l’humanité, la douceur & la bonté’ (beneficence and humanity, mildness and goodness): ‘On s’intéresse aux malheureux; le cœur est toujours disposé à s’attendrir: il est comme ces cordes tendues, qu’un souffle fait résonner’ (We feel for the wretched; the heart is always disposed to tenderness, and resembles a string of a musical instrument, from which a breath of air produces a sound).41 In Corinne, Staël would represent erotic love as the catalyst for intercultural rapprochement and mutual compassion, albeit this utopian state proves unsustainable. Analogously, in Short Residence the letter-writer represents her attachments to her wayward lover and their child as conducive to broader cosmopolitan sympathies. While Rousseau’s vaunted solitude was notoriously achieved by a­bandoning his five infant children, Wollstonecraft’s epistolary persona is often sustained by her maternal sentiments. In Letter I, she contemplates her sleeping child, ‘innocent and sweet as the closing flowers’:

166    Mary Wollstonecraft Some recollections, attached to the idea of home, mingled with reflections, respecting the state of society I had been contemplating that evening, made a tear drop on the rosy cheek I had just kissed; and emotions that trembled on the brink of extacy and agony gave a poignancy to my sensations, which made me feel more alive than usual. (VI, 248)

Beset by competing thoughts and impressions, in which questions of social justice seem to overlay and reflect her intimate experiences, Wollstonecraft is neither weakened nor overcome but feels ‘more alive than usual’. Crucially, these vivifying emotions are not self-regarding but rooted in and conducive to maternal tenderness (a kiss for her daughter). Exemplifying the philanthropic potential of the mother–child bond, which for the sentimentalists testified to both the naturalness and narrow scope of human altruism, Wollstonecraft’s attachment to Fanny is an ‘involuntary sympathetic emotion’ that stimulates cosmopolitan fellow-feeling: What are these imperious sympathies? How frequently has melancholy and even mysanthropy taken possession of me, when the world has disgusted me, and friends have proved unkind. I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind; – 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 – (248–9)

The spark of sympathy ignited by Wollstonecraft’s love for her child (and, implicitly, the child’s father) seems to rekindle her sense of belonging to a broader human community. As Kipp has demonstrated, maternal tropes were often politicised to ‘naturalize a cosmopolitan world view’, as the ‘permeability of the borders between the body of the pregnant or breastfeeding mother and her child’ offered ‘an ideal metaphor for political structures that transcended the dynamics of the individual nation-state’.42 In Short Residence, maternal love at once symbolises and actualises Wollstonecraft’s connectedness to the ‘mighty whole’. Significantly, she describes the conversion from intimate bond to universal connectedness as a mechanism determined by the laws of matter and not, therefore, dependent on the exercise of reason. And yet, by taking her image of human interdependency from the natural sciences, she also connects maternal instincts to natural laws susceptible to rational explication and (for many) divinely ordained. The trope implies that sympathies are ‘imperious’ not only because they are powerful, but also because they stem from imperatives dictated at the atomic level and guided by the hand of God. Wollstonecraft’s maternal sentiments may have the instinctiveness of a reflex, but they are not thereby relegated to animality; on the contrary,

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they inspire the philanthropic sentiments that she connects throughout her works with perception or knowledge of the divine. This is not to say, however, that she eschews the distinctive sensuality of the Reveries. Meena Alexander has observed a Rousseauvian turn of phrase in her description of ‘moments of bliss’, in which ‘the imagination bodies forth its conceptions unrestrained, and stops enraptured to adore the beings of its own creation’ (286).43 The corporeal imagery tacitly acknowledges that, as in Rousseau’s confessional writings, these ‘beings’ could just as easily be erotic fantasies as ideals of virtue. Yet they all signify human connectedness without – as Wollstonecraft had put it in Mary – ‘the alloy that earthly infirmities mix with our best affections’ (I, 46). She had long depicted erotic love as ‘the emotional ground from which transcendent love arises’.44 In Short Residence, she repudiates her earlier model of the female philanthropist, whose love of humankind is predicated on sublimating sexual feeling and for whom emotional autonomy prefigures celestial reward. Drawing on her private letters to Imlay, she invests erotic love with moral potential, constructing a cosmopolitan subjectivity in which the imagination transmutes ‘imperious sympathies’ into philanthropic sentiments. In Letter VI, Wollstonecraft reflects on the sentiments excited in communion with nature: Nature is the nurse of sentiment, – the true source of taste; – yet what misery, as well as rapture, is produced by a quick perception of the beautiful and sublime, when it is exercised in observing animated nature, when every beauteous feeling and emotion excites responsive sympathy, and the harmonized soul sinks into melancholy, or rises to extasy, just as the chords are touched, like the aeolian harp agitated by the changing wind. (VI, 271)

Although ‘nature’ is ostensibly the object of Wollstonecraft’s ‘responsive sympathy’, the source of her bleaker emotions is the lost lover, whose desertion represents for her unsavoury truths about human nature. But despite suffering ‘misery’ and ‘melancholy’, in the same letter she insists that her sentiments are ‘difficult to eradicate [...] when an affection for mankind, a passion for an individual, is but the unfolding of that love which embraces all that is great and beautiful’ (271). The syntax implies that the phrase ‘a passion for an individual’ reformulates ‘an affection for mankind’, presenting particular and universal sympathies as near-synonymous sides of the same capacity for moral sentiment. With this syntactical peculiarity Wollstonecraft represents philanthropic and erotic forms of love as mutually reinforcing, each with a moral component stemming from human apprehension of the divine, ‘that love which embraces all that is great and beautiful’.

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In the ensuing paragraph, Wollstonecraft relates her experience of love to the imagination, which invests its depth and endurance with moral significance: ‘When a warm heart has received strong impressions, they are not to be effaced. Emotions become sentiments; and the imagination renders even transient sensations permanent, by fondly retracing them’ (271). Wollstonecraft’s ‘warm heart’ absorbs its heat from memories of the lover, ‘the fire of whose eyes, tempered by infantine tenderness, still warms [her] breast’ (272). She grants this erotic stimulus inspirational power to equal that of the natural world: ‘even when gazing on these tremendous cliffs, sublime emotions absorb my soul’ (272). These images of warmth and fire recur frequently in her private letters to Imlay, and they reflect her invocations of the Prometheus myth in her published works to describe passion fuelling a creative imagination. In one such letter, she refers to Imlay’s ruddy complexion as ‘the hue of love’ and ‘the rosy glow’, evoking an erotic blush that spreads like fire: ‘fancy has spread it over my own cheeks, I believe, for I feel them burning’.45 In a subsequent letter, she returns to the Prometheus myth to argue for the importance of the imagination in building sentimental community. ‘The impulse of the senses, passions, if you will, and the conclusions of reason, draw men together’, but working in isolation, they fail to generate moral sentiments productive of the common good.46 By contrast, the i­magination  – ‘the true fire, stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay’ – transmutes sensual impulses into ‘all those fine sympathies that lead to rapture, rendering men social by expanding their hearts’.47 We know that the cosmopolitan mindset requires extraordinary feats of imagination. In Short Residence, Wollstonecraft conceptualises erotic love – and its outgrowth, maternal sentiment – as fuel to the Promethean fire in her own breast. As we shall see, these ‘imperious sympathies’ move her to extrapolate beyond particular objects of love to feel intense compassion for a boundless community of strangers.

Wollstonecraft’s ‘Ardent Affection for the Human Race’ As a ‘fallen’ woman alienated from her homeland, Wollstonecraft identifies her suffering with that of Scandinavian women in different but related circumstances. Her sympathies reach across the social spectrum as well as national boundaries, so that her imaginative participation in their troubles acquires cosmopolitan as well as feminist significance. In many respects, Wollstonecraft is what Patrick H. Vincent, referring to the eponymous heroine of Staël’s Corinne and other incarnations of the ‘romantic poetess’, calls a ‘decentred, empathetic self’, a cosmopolitan

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subject alert to particular exigencies and individual feeling.48 Vincent claims that, after the publication of Corinne, women writers began to create literary identities shaped by personal loss and, in doing so, endorsed an ‘ethic of sympathy’ in which ‘sublimated suffering could be recuperated as public sympathy with the suffering of others’, even across national divides.49 It seems clear, however, that the feminine persona who translates melancholy into an expansive form of compassion appears earlier than he suggests. In Letter VIII, Wollstonecraft contemplates the plight of an unmarried Norwegian mother. This woman ‘receives only twelve dollars a year’ working as a wet-nurse and ‘pays ten for the nursing of her own child’, whose ‘father had run away to get clear of the expense’: There was something in this most 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 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. (VI, 283)

By renaming the unmarried mother’s predicament ‘widowhood’, Wollstonecraft aligns her suffering with that of a socially acceptable equivalent, suggesting that both women merit equal compassion as victims of systemic injustice.50 Identifying the plight of this foreign other with her own ‘painful’ experience, she extends the compassion born of a ‘heart writhing with anguish’ across the barriers of language and culture. In Letter XVIII, Wollstonecraft is equally moved by the plight of a woman at the opposite end of the social scale, the ‘unfortunate Matilda’ (321). This is the notorious Queen Caroline Matilda of Denmark, sister of King George III of England. Married at 15 to the mentally unstable Christian VII of Denmark, she began an affair with her husband’s liberal-minded physician, the German philosopher and statesman Johann Friedrich Struensee, and bore him a daughter. With the king incapacitated by mental illness, Struensee and Matilda presided over an ambitious reformist regime for over a year until, in 1772, a coup masterminded by the Dowager Queen and the young Prince Frederick led to their arrest and Struensee’s execution. Matilda was imprisoned in Kronborg Castle in Helsingør and her marriage dissolved. She was later able to escape Denmark for Celle Castle in Hanover, but was forced to leave her two children behind. She never saw them again, meeting an early death from scarlet fever at the age of 24. ‘Poor Matilda!’ Wollstonecraft expostulates, ‘thou hast haunted me ever since my arrival; and the view I have

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had of the manners of the country, exciting my sympathy, has increased my respect for thy memory!’ (321–2). Wollstonecraft deplores Matilda’s treatment, defends her maternal practices and insists that her ‘attachment’ to Struensee ‘did not disgrace her heart or understanding’ (322). Making philanthropy rather than sexual probity the index of Matilda’s virtue, she deflects the charge of adultery by suggesting that it was her interference in politics that made her enemies plot her downfall: I am now fully convinced that she was the victim of the party she displaced, who would have overlooked, or encouraged, her attachment, had her lover not, aiming at being useful, attempted to overturn some established abuses before the people, ripe for the change, had sufficient spirit to support him when struggling in their behalf. (322)

As Dart points out, Wollstonecraft ‘seeks to identify herself’ with Matilda’s ‘reforming instincts’, depicting both herself and the late queen as Cassandras whose desire to do good is matched only by the scepticism of those around them.51 Matilda ‘probably ran into an error common to innovators’, she concludes, ‘in wishing to do immediately what can only be done by time’ (322). Despite her introspection, Wollstonecraft’s epistolary persona meets Vincent’s criteria for an ‘ethic of sympathy’. For the purpose of examining her cosmopolitan credentials, however, it is more useful to consider how she espouses Van Hooft’s ‘ethic of caring’, which ‘embraces all those actions that we perform for the benefit of others out of feelings such as love, affection, concern, sympathy, loyalty or compassion’, but also ‘advocates a willingness to assist others in need simply because they are human beings’.52 Van Hooft accords caring special status because, although a cosmopolitan worldview demands justice on a global scale, ‘caring leads us to see why that matters’.53 While acknowledging the difficulties of extending caring beyond close personal relationships, he takes inspiration from Nussbaum to argue that caring can have a universal scope comparable to the framework of justice. Nussbaum insists that, ‘since compassion contains thought, it can be educated’.54 Drawing on the sentimentalist belief in innate human benevolence, Van Hooft supports her claims that we can ‘extend our strong emotions and our ability to imagine the situation of others’.55 In the right conditions, he suggests, most of us are capable of cosmopolitan altruism: ‘My feelings of sympathy and compassion, my caring about the fate of others, and my concern for their well-being are inherent in my nature as a human being’.56 We have seen that Wollstonecraft portrays ‘feelings of sympathy and compassion’ as innately human, that she is often the subject of

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such feelings and that she connects them with the desire for political change to redress injustice and reduce human suffering. On the other hand, because she tends to focus primarily on women whose suffering mirrors her own, there is no escaping the self-interested roots of her sympathies. Consequently, her letters can easily be read as mere reflections of her ‘partial’ and ‘jaundiced’ viewpoint (331). Some critics see Wollstonecraft’s epistolary persona as merely self-absorbed, commenting that she often patronises or aestheticizes foreign and lower-class people, or deploys their cameo appearances instrumentally to reflect her emotional state.57 Arguably, this is the customary solipsism of the sentimental traveller, who sheds tears for virtue in distress but does nothing to address the cause or unburden the sufferer.58 From this point of view, Wollstonecraft’s ‘imaginative engagement with the lives of others’ is primarily self-serving, and she fails to achieve the ‘inner grasp of their full and equal humanity’ that could motivate public-spirited action.59 Yet Wollstonecraft’s marginalised perspective not only makes her express compassion for women in comparable circumstances, it also provokes commentaries on the justice meted out when shame drives women to social exclusion or even crime. Hence in Letter VII she praises the Danish Prince Royal for pardoning ‘a girl condemned to die for murdering an illegitimate child’, explaining that she is ‘since married, and become the careful mother of a family’ (274). ‘This might be given as an instance’, she reflects, ‘that a desperate act is not always a proof of an incorrigible depravity of character; the only plausible excuse that has been brought forward to justify the infliction of capital punishments’ (274). Thus, Wollstonecraft speaks from her subjective position to broader principles of justice, presenting her personal experiences as symptomatic of structural inequalities that transcend the boundaries of nation and culture. Moreover, if she responds particularly to fallen women, her compassion is not limited to them. In Letter XVIII she is overwhelmed by empathy for the ‘poor families’ of Copenhagen left homeless after fire destroyed ‘at least a quarter of the city’ (319). Wandering among the ruins, she finds ‘much to afflict the benevolent heart’: I could not take refuge in the thought; they suffered – but they are no more! a reflection I frequently summon to calm my mind, when sympathy rises to anguish: I therefore desired the driver to hasten to the hotel recommended to me, that I might avert my eyes, and snap the train of thinking which had sent me into all corners of the city, in search of houseless heads. (319–20)

Wollstonecraft’s retreat from the spectacle of suffering seems to put her own ‘anguish’ centre-stage, the homeless families setting off her

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self-portrait as a displaced woman of feeling to full advantage.60 If her emotions are extreme, however, her benevolence is equally so, moving her to relieve the homeless in ‘all corners of the city’. The following day, she returns to the ruins to investigate the causes of the fire, and to consider how ‘exertions on the part of government’ and ‘private charity’ can ‘alleviate the misery which obtrudes itself at every turn’ (320). Significantly, she attributes the scale of the crisis to a lack of ‘public spirit’, specifically the refusal of certain inhabitants to tear down their houses ‘before the flames had reached them’ (320). What begins as an exercise in compassion ends in an indictment of the regime that makes each citizen prioritise themselves at the expense of the whole. In line with Van Hooft’s cosmopolitan ethic of caring, Wollstonecraft’s compassion has a broad purview and compels her to evaluate how particular systems of government or cultural practices might increase or mitigate suffering. As she travels along the coast to Risør, Wollstonecraft’s ‘philanthropic imagination’ carries her expansive sympathies beyond her historical moment to future generations.61 Reflecting on ‘the future improvement of the world’, she casts her mind forward ‘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’: 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. I was soon to be in a smaller one – for no other name can I give to Rusoer. (294–5)

Karafili Steiner draws attention to the influence on this passage of Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon’s Les Epoques de la Nature (The Epochs of Nature) (1778), in which he predicted the earth’s climate growing hostile to human life, as well as the Scottish philosopher James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1794), which also forecast the failure of planetary resources and the collapse of the human ecosystem.62 Equally persuasive, however, is Angela Keane’s interpretation of Wollstonecraft’s distress as a symptom of trauma. Keane points to the ‘spectre of children abandoned by fathers, and mothers imprisoned by insufficient resources’, but the image of a ‘vast prison’ also raises the ghost of the political prisoners Wollstonecraft visited during the Terror.63 Later in the text, she wishes for an opportunity to see the leader of a peasant revolt confined to the prison fortress in Christiana.

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This was almost certainly Christian Jensen Lofthuus, who came to be viewed as a patriot freedom fighter symbolising resistance to Danish rule. Revealingly, Wollstonecraft inclines to sympathise with him and to suspect injustice, despite admitting she ‘could not obtain a clear account of the affair’ (305).64 Personal friends such as Paine and Williams were released after the coup that toppled Robespierre, but not before Wollstonecraft’s Parisian circle had been decimated by the guillotine. She told Godwin that her ‘anguish’ at the news of Brissot and his coterie dying on the scaffold was ‘one of the most intolerable sensations she had ever experienced’, and she was no doubt shaken by the execution of prominent women such as Roland, whose suffering would have been fixed in her mind by the Appeal as well perhaps as Williams’s poignant account of her final days.65 Karafili Steiner calls Wollstonecraft’s bleak, proto-Malthusian ecological vision ‘a nightmare without exit’, suggesting that she veers radically from her perfectibilist narrative to imagine a future in which ‘an earth rendered inhospitable through man’s improvement causes the huis clos of civilization’.66 So much is true; but what is literally a prophecy of climate catastrophe also functions figuratively to project the sufferings of the Revolutionary generation into a dystopian future. Overwhelmed by the ‘rocky coasts’, Wollstonecraft connects the topography simultaneously with imprisonment and cultural insularity: ‘Talk not of bastilles! To be born here, was to be bastilled by nature – shut out from all that opens the understanding, or enlarges the heart’ (295). The chain of associations triggers somatic symptoms of claustrophobia, manifesting Wollstonecraft’s dread of narrow and exclusionary mentalities: I felt the confinement, and wished for wings to reach still loftier cliffs, whose slippery sides no foot was so hardy as to tread; yet what was it to see? – only a boundless waste of water […] I felt my breath oppressed, though nothing could be clearer than the atmosphere. (295)

As she contemplates a blighted future, the shadow of the Bastille expands to incorporate all earthly existence, making the world seem ‘a vast prison’ designed rather to sever than establish social bonds. Critics have been struck by the maternal allusion in Wollstonecraft’s use of the verb ‘fasten’, denoting a nursing child’s latch, to describe the persistence of her nightmarish thoughts.67 According to Keane, this imagery testifies to residual trauma: ‘the imagination is figured pathologically, beyond the control of reason’, spawning devastating fantasies of exponential reproduction.68 In a subsequent letter describing her journey to Korser, Wollstonecraft’s expansive sympathies afflict her with a comparable experience of unshakable distress, not for the unborn, but

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for sufferers long dead. Delayed for ten hours, she regrets not packing refreshments: This mistake occasioned much vexation; for the child, at last, began to cry so bitterly for bread, that fancy conjured up before me the wretched Ugolino, with his famished children; and I, literally speaking, enveloped myself in sympathetic horrours, augmented by every tear my babe shed; from which I could not escape, till we landed, and a luncheon of bread, and bason of milk, routed the spectres of fancy. (334)

Wollstonecraft refers here to Ugolino della Gherardesca, one of the medieval Italian Guelph leaders whose conflict with the Ghibelines inspired Mary Shelley’s novel Valperga (1823). Immortalised by Dante, Ugolino was imprisoned and left to die of hunger with his two sons and two grandsons. Once again, images of incarceration, starvation and parental distress seize on Wollstonecraft’s imagination. This is the dark potential of her maternal feelings which, in expanding to embrace the global community, multiply their objects of compassion and – where she can find no means to alleviate suffering – subject her to unremitting distress. Though the starving children of the future ‘fasten’ on her breasts, her milk, like the earth’s resources, is depleted and insufficient. When her child sheds tears for want of a ‘bason of milk’, the cries of Ugolino’s grandchildren echo through history. In light of this allusion to our capacity for inhumanity, and given Wollstonecraft’s frequent references to Macbeth, one wonders if the famine she has in mind concerns a lack not only of essential sustenance but also the milk of human kindness. From this point of view, it is significant that the ‘bastilled’ inhabitants of Risør are constrained to make a living from ‘a contraband trade’ that ‘dries up all the generous juices of the heart’ (295–6). Read metaphorically, Wollstonecraft’s ‘nightmare’ of planetary decay is without ‘exit’ because humanity’s very nature – our fear of alterity, our capacity to inflict pain even on the innocent, our preference for profit over care – keeps us perpetually unfree and self-destructive. And yet, for all her melancholy, Wollstonecraft’s textual persona represents an alternative to this despondent vision. Conjuring images of a divided and desperate humanity, the letter-writer performs the sympathies essential to her cosmopolitan ideal of benevolence, finding an imaginative connection with nameless others which counteracts the Solitary Walker’s instinct for seclusion. Comparing Short Residence with Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795), Karafili Steiner argues that Wollstonecraft ‘bequeaths a different cosmopolitan ethos predicated not on justice, but on suffering from a moral love for mankind’, and that her cosmopolitanism ‘commands attention not for its formulation of cosmopolitan law,

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but for its readiness to see and partake in suffering’.69 Unquestionably, the compassionate persona of Short Residence apotheosises the emphasis on philanthropy at the heart of Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan ethic. What can this ethical position offer, though, if its defining vision is one of global misery and planetary decay? Wollstonecraft’s ‘sympathetic horrours’ feed into the rising anguish of the letters. Judging by the final dejected missive, one might conclude that her cosmopolitan inclinations lead only to a sense of rootlessness, manifest in her gloomy homecoming: ‘I have only to tell you, that, at the sight of Dover cliffs, I wondered how any body could term them grand; they appear so insignificant to me, after those I had seen in Sweden and Norway’ (345). The linearity of the travels gives way to a chronic circularity which seems to preclude any kind of progress either for the letter-writer or the society to which she has returned, and she finds herself at an ideological impasse: ‘My spirit of observation seems to be fled – and I have been wandering round this dirty place, literally speaking, to kill time’ (345). For all this, I resist the notion that Wollstonecraft is not concerned in Short Residence with the framework of justice. Although the final letter closes the epistolary narrative somewhat abruptly and in a mood of despair, the subsequent Appendix strikes an unexpectedly positive note, subordinating Wollstonecraft’s personal suffering to a more generally evaluative and sweeping sketch of human development. She has seen in the Scandinavian nations ‘increasing knowledge and happiness’, even though ‘innumerable evils still remain […] to afflict the humane investigator, and hurry the benevolent reformer into a labyrinth of errour, who aims at destroying prejudices quickly which only time can root out, as the public opinion becomes subject to reason’ (346). Although Wollstonecraft’s dispirited letter-writer might be identified by turns with the afflicted ‘humane investigator’ and the erring ‘benevolent reformer’, the paratextual ‘Wollstonecraft’ reasserts her faith in the possibility of universal justice: An ardent affection for the human race makes enthusiastic characters eager to produce alteration in laws and governments prematurely. To render them useful and permanent, they must be the growth of each particular soil, and the gradual fruit of the ripening understanding of the nation, matured by time, not forced by an unnatural fermentation. 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. (346)

In this closing analysis, the blame for precipitate and sometimes disastrous reforms lies with ‘ardent affection for the human race’, but if

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Wollstonecraft seems gently to reprove over-zealous reformers, such as Matilda and Struensee, there is no question that their philanthropic sentiments reflect and intensify those of the letter-writer. This philanthropic feeling may have been the unwitting cause of violent backlash and innocent suffering, but it has also been represented repeatedly as the motive force for the ‘useful and permanent’ change that is ‘gaining ground, with accelerating pace’. In the stark juxtaposition of the letterwriter’s melancholia with the perfectibilism of the Appendix, we can see that compassionating with distant and foreign others is not an end in itself – neither structurally nor ethically – but the precondition for identifying and implementing the principles of justice that ‘produce alteration in laws and governments’ and ‘diminish the sum of human misery’. Karafili Steiner sees in Short Residence ‘a critique of the Enlightenment faith in universal improvement’, but this is not Wollstonecraft’s final word. On the contrary, her cosmopolitan ethic of caring, manifest in her ‘imperious sympathies’, represents the attitude of mind requisite to ‘carry mankind forward’ to the ultimate goal of universal justice. Through her appropriation and transformation of Rousseau’s model of reverie, Wollstonecraft’s textual persona amplifies the underlying cosmopolitanism of his philosophy and attains imaginative union with what she regards as the benevolent essence of humanity. By virtue of its detachment from the tumult of social existence, however, as a mode of cognition reverie may be ‘too detached […] to permit a return to civic life’.70 Counteracting this abstraction are Wollstonecraft’s interconnected erotic and maternal feelings, which root her moral sentiments in human intimacy even as they also inspire a philanthropic love for the race as a whole. These bonds of love are part of Wollstonecraft’s self-construction as a gendered cosmopolitan subject whose experiences move her to connect imaginatively with other ‘fallen’ women from different classes and cultures, even if she does not always recognise and communicate their ‘full and equal humanity’. Yet she also extends her compassion and moral commentary beyond those in similar circumstances, taking pains to examine the different political and social systems responsible for their suffering. The letter-writer thus enacts a cosmopolitan ethic of caring which supports her principles of justice but is driven by heartfelt moral sentiments. The emotional trajectory of the letters can make this ethic seem both vital and agonising as the letter-writer partakes of suffering she is seemingly powerless to dispel, ending in a state of total alienation both from her lover and her country. In the Appendix, however, Wollstonecraft sets the particular experiences of ‘Mary’ against the backdrop of a broader narrative of

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progress. This narrative is impervious to her anguish, but it is also grounded in a perfectibilist vision of justice, a framework strengthened and upheld by the ethic of caring her textual persona persistently embodies.

Chapter 7

‘The Growth of Each Particular Soil’: Authenticity and Diversity in Wollstonecraft’s Narrative of Progress In the Advertisement to Short Residence, Wollstonecraft acknowledges the effects of her shifting emotions and acute sensual responsiveness on  her view of the Nordic societies she encounters.1 This subjectivity is offset, however, by the measured reflections of the p ­ aratextual ‘Wollstonecraft’. In the Advertisement, she comments retrospectively  on  the emotions excited by her voyage, while her Appendix offers  a ­sanguine prospect of human progress entirely at odds with the final letters. There are also times when the letter-writer echoes her ­paratextual counterpart, as in Letter XIX where she explains that her philosophical goals are to ‘trace the progress of the world’s improvement’ and to ‘take such a dispassionate view of men as will lead [her] to form a just idea of the nature of man’ (VI, 326). From this totalising perspective, her observations on Scandinavia bring new dimensions to an ever-evolving but fundamentally universalist portrait of humankind  which, in many passages, underpins a teleology of progress to ­universal rights. Yet Wollstonecraft’s travels also make her question how these rights should manifest in specific national and cultural c­ ontexts. Moreover, her affective responses emphasise that every ‘universal’ is articulated from a particular and contingent subject position. Neither the emotive ‘Mary’ nor the paratextual philosopher can be reconciled entirely with the authorial signature on the title page, but their juxtaposition presents the reader with a dual perspective on Wollstonecraft’s epistemological project and its relationship to her cosmopolitan ethic. Short Residence is shaped by two discrete – and distinctively ­cosmopolitan – models of progress. One is a universalist model in which general ‘truths’ transcend national and cultural boundaries. Claiming that all human subjects have developmental potential, Wollstonecraft regards ‘national character’ as a political and social construction, a product of external factors susceptible to change. From this ­constructivist ­perspective, there is no such thing as an inferior

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people, only underdeveloped socio-political institutions. And yet whole races, she complains, ‘have been characterized as stupid by nature’, and others ‘brought forward as brutes, having no aptitude for the arts and sciences, only because the progress of improvement had not reached the stage which produces them’ (266). With this argument, which recalls the (often prejudiced) abolitionist rhetoric circulating in the period, Wollstonecraft defends the right of all races, nations and cultures to be counted as part of the same global community. In doing so, however, she implies that some are lagging behind in the race to enlightenment. Amongst these stragglers are the Scandinavian peoples, whom she often ranks low in a universalist cultural hierarchy. In the course of Short Residence, however, her teleology of progress jockeys with a second model which calls that hierarchy into question. Confronting relatively uncharted cultural territory, she perceives benevolence thriving in notionally backward Nordic communities and identifies distinctive  merits in the Scandinavian nations. An incipient relativism reshapes her cosmopolitan ethic, indicating her willingness to accommodate diversity as well as her growing resistance to economic and cultural imperialism. Present-day cosmopolitan theorists have sought to evacuate the ideals of world citizenship and cross-cultural concord of their links with the homogenising, elitist and violent impulses of Western imperialism.2 These include not only attempts to impose Western culture through military might or misguided do-gooding, but also the mindset that downgrades or misconstrues foreign cultures when bias masquerades as ‘truth’. What David Hollinger dubs ‘the new cosmopolitanism’ – the spate of revisions to the alleged universalism of its Enlightenment p ­ redecessor – attempts ‘to indicate that cosmopolitanism can deliver some of the goods ostensibly provided only by patriots, provincials, parochials, populists, tribalists and above all nationalists’.3 The ‘challenge’, he claims, ‘is to take a realistic account of the ethnos as well as of the species, and to assess existing and potential solidarities according to their capacity as viable instruments of democratic-egalitarian values’.4 This is the terrain Wollstonecraft navigates on her Scandinavian journey, attempting to wrest her diverse cultural encounters into a broader view of the ‘nature of man’ compatible with her democratic politics. Hollinger distinguishes between ‘a universalist will to find common ground and a cosmopolitan will to engage human diversity’, but in fact, many proponents of this ‘new’ cosmopolitanism retain some qualified emphasis on universality.5 One of the most renowned is the liberal philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose seminal essay ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’ advances a model of human psychology in which universalism coexists symbiotically with

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narrower allegiances. Appiah makes it clear that some moral values should surpass small-scale loyalties – ‘there are some values that are, and should be, universal, just as there are lots of values that are, and must be, local’ – but he also concedes that ‘humans live best on a smaller scale’.6 He sees this fact of human psychology as reason, not to reject world citizenship, but to cultivate ‘a rooted cosmopolitanism, or, if you like, a cosmopolitan patriotism’, in which philanthropic love for the race as a whole grows from and accommodates national and cultural affiliations, as well as embracing instances of ‘cultural hybridization’.7 I have no wish to claim for Short Residence such an advanced and explicit cosmopolitanism; at times Wollstonecraft dismisses or clumsily aestheticizes the cultures and people she encounters, as well as balking at some instances of cultural cross-fertilisation. Nor do I align her unreservedly with Appiah’s liberalism; the contradictions that arise from sticking the ‘liberal feminist’ label on Wollstonecraft are well documented.8 He provides a useful point of reference, however, because towards the end of her life, Wollstonecraft tempers her philosophical universalism with some recognition of the value of culturally specific modes of living. But unlike Appiah and in common with Rousseau, she puts a premium on cultural authenticity, which she considers a barometer for the moral integrity of a nation. Refining her cosmopolitan worldview, she envisages the core principles of the Revolution crossing the boundaries of language and culture, at once absorbed by and adapted to the ‘particular soil’ of individual nations (346).

Primitivism and Progress For centuries popular mythology has represented ‘the north’ as an unreachable, ever-receding frontier.9 In Wollstonecraft’s era, the term could denote anywhere from Northern Britain to the North Pacific and, when writing of Scandinavia, British writers often lumped Sweden and Denmark–Norway together with Finland, Russia and Poland. Wollstonecraft is no more precise. More than once in Short Residence, she conflates North America and Scandinavia in her imagination. In Letter IX, she comments to her absent lover: ‘You have probably made similar reflections in America, where the face of the country, I suppose, resembles the wilds of Norway’ (VI, 288). Similarly, having reviewed John Meares’s account of his Voyages made in the year 1788 and 1789, from China to the North West Coast of America (1790),10 she aligns her impressions of Norway with his descriptions of America’s natural beauty and simplicity:

‘The Growth of Each Particular Soil’    181 I could almost fancy myself in Nootka Sound, or on some of the islands on the north west coast of America. We entered by a narrow pass through the rocks, which from this abode appear more romantic than you can well imagine; and seal-skins, hanging at the door to dry, add to the illusion. (293)

In this ‘corner of the world’, Wollstonecraft finds in the Norwegians ‘a kindness in their desire to oblige – how superior to the apish politeness of the towns!’ (293). This backhanded compliment, in which she praises one set of lower-class Norwegians by reducing another to the level of beasts, reveals the mindset driving her imprecision: it matters less where she is than how her surroundings support her preconceptions about human behaviour in rural and urban environments. The problem with this approach is that most philosophers of cosmopolitanism consider that an ethical practice of world citizenship entails meaningful engagement with diversity. For Appiah, cosmopolitanism ‘celebrates the fact that there are different local human ways of being’.11 Nussbaum, whose position is so often caricatured as bloodless universalism, concurs with him that ‘the cosmopolitan ideal includes a positive delight in the diversity of human cultures, languages, and forms of life’.12 Thomas Bender rejects the old adage that cosmopolitans are ‘at home in the world’, but he does represent them as ‘open to the unease of forming a new understanding of both one’s self and of the world when invited by the confrontation of difference’.13 Faced with difference, Wollstonecraft is often intrigued, invigorated, introspective – in short, ticking many of the requisite boxes for cosmopolitan self-fashioning. But ethical cosmopolitanism is not easy, and it is important first to confront the passages of Short Residence where her perceptions of Scandinavia appear filtered either by a sense of Western European superiority or, as above, by preexisting theories or literary discourses.14 In the eighteenth century, as in the present day, northern lands were often depicted as remote and uncivilised,15 but by the time Wollstonecraft set out for Scandinavia, they had also been invested with fantasies of noble primitivism, becoming choice destinations for jaded or starry-eyed travellers seeking alternative ways of living. British travellers sought a near-extinct Celtic system of honourable values in northern Scotland, their fascination reflecting widespread disillusionment with the overrefinement and Francophilia of the moneyed classes. James Macpherson’s Ossian catered to this public appetite, provoking a deluge of popular novels, and James Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited the Highlands and Western Isles in pursuit of ‘a system of antiquated life’.16 In Short Residence, Wollstonecraft often draws on such literary precedents in her descriptions of Scandinavia. The significance of these representations

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varies, however, alternating between genuine – if imperfect – attempts to valorise cultural differences, and the instrumentalization of ‘primitive’ Nordic societies as foils for her standard of progress. Wollstonecraft’s value judgements about the relative advancement of the Nordic states frequently place them at the lower end of a cultural hierarchy that privileges ‘civilised’ nations such as Britain and France. These judgements call forth many of the cultural and social prejudices associated with travellers of her ilk and era. These prejudices in turn feed into a providentialist take on human history, in which the race advances towards enlightenment precisely because certain peoples remain low in the pecking order of civilisation. In her first letter from Sweden, she describes the peasantry as ‘men who remain so near the brute creation, as only to exert themselves to find the food necessary to sustain life’ (245), and in Letter IX, she uses a similar term to comment on the utility of Norwegian farm labourers: It is very fortunate that men are, a long time, but just above the brute creation, or the greater part of the earth would never have been rendered habitable; because it is the patient labour of men, who are only seeking for a subsistence, which produces whatever embellishes existence, affording leisure for the cultivation of the arts and sciences, that lift man so far above his first state. (288)

There are echoes here of Young Grandison, in which Dr Bartlett’s providentialist justification for poverty snuffs out a spark of social conscience in his charges. For Wollstonecraft, because these Norwegian farmers devote their lives to ‘seeking for a subsistence’, they retain an appealing cultural simplicity lacking in their urban counterparts. By linking this simplicity to humankind’s ‘first state’, however, she locates Nordic agrarian communities in a primitive stage of development, doing the literal groundwork for human intellectual growth. Consigned to the past, the people of these communities become curiosities for casual observation rather than living human subjects with whom one might engage, connect and form ‘a new understanding of both one’s self and of the world’.17 Pursuing this logic, Wollstonecraft argues that, for travel to be educative, the itinerary should stage a kind of time-travel through human history: ‘the northern states ought to be visited before the more polished parts of Europe, to serve as the elements even of the knowledge of manners, only to be acquired by tracing the various shades in different countries’ (327). As well as witnessing conjectural history’s stages of economic and social organisation, the traveller would find case studies in natural history demonstrating the shaping effects of climate and

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topography on human subjects. Like most eighteenth-century intellectuals, Wollstonecraft was familiar with Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois (1748) and she had also reviewed an abridgement of Buffon’s encyclopaedic Histoire Naturelle, as well as Samuel Stanhope Smith’s Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787). These works gave her a firm grasp on theories of environmental determinism. As Anka Ryall has demonstrated, Buffon’s influence is particularly apparent in Wollstonecraft’s forays into the discourse of natural science, which has a similar distancing effect to her historical metaphors.18 In Letter V, for instance, she investigates the correlation between the Swedish climate and national character. Stockholm frustrates her efforts to find reliable data on ‘varieties in the [Swedish] species’ – ‘the inhabitants of the capital are all of the same genus’ – and she concludes she must head into rural areas ‘where the habitations of men are so separated as to allow the difference of climate to have its natural effect’ (259). According to Buffon, extreme heat or cold generated excess or dysfunction, and he held chilly northern climates responsible for what he called ‘inertia’, a failure to evolve or fulfil potential. Apparently accepting this thesis, Wollstonecraft remarks that the ‘severity of the long swedish winter tends to render the people sluggish’, depicting the peasantry stuck in a primitive state reflected and influenced by the landscape they inhabit (257).19 Scanning the rugged coastline, she slips from the discourse of natural philosophy into poetic language that conflates time and space. The ‘huge, dark rocks’ are ‘like the rude materials of creation forming the barrier of unwrought space’, a backdrop situating the Nordic peoples not simply at an earlier stage in human history but at the beginning of time itself (245). These images of the uncivilised north may have appealed to Wollstonecraft partly because they put the French – culturally so distinct from the Scandinavians – near the top rung on the ladder of human progress. As in French Revolution, this developmental scale reflects a self-fulfilling logic of progress whereby cultural and intellectual sophistication proceeds eventually to political justice. From this perspective, the Revolution is the harbinger of worldwide enfranchisement and the Terror a glitch in the relentless ‘progress of the world’s improvement’ (326). With a somewhat ghoulish allusion to the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Wollstonecraft remarks that the Revolution has ‘rendered all the crowned heads more cautious’, implying that France has struck a blow against tyranny which reverberates across national borders (255). Despite perceiving the Swedes as uncultivated, she reports appreciatively in Letter III that rights-based discourse has infiltrated their absolutist, monarchical nation:

184    Mary Wollstonecraft Besides, the french revolution has […] so decreased every where (excepting amongst themselves) a respect for nobility, that the peasantry have not only lost their blind reverence for their seigniors, but complain, in a manly style, of oppressions which before they did not think of denominating such, because they were taught to consider themselves as a different order of beings. (255)

Wollstonecraft here represents the Revolution as the fulcrum of a global movement towards political justice. She may, however, be overstating its role in inspiring Swedish resistance to aristocratic tyranny. Although Sweden’s constitutional monarchy was in practice autocratic, in the previous decade, Gustav III’s social reforms had ‘formally sanctioned and henceforth encouraged a rise in the status and prosperity of the nonnoble orders’.20 If Sweden was ‘highly susceptible to the new impulses from France’, it was partly because they resonated with those already present within the nation.21 Wollstonecraft paints a universalist cosmopolitan picture of general truths crossing national borders, but she places the Swedes on the periphery as beneficiaries rather than architects of political justice. In French Revolution, Wollstonecraft had depicted French culture fostering selfish passions and suppressing fellow-feeling, so that many so-called patriots were readier for self-promotion than philanthropy. Fuelled by vanity, their efforts to effect seismic constitutional change merely replicated the courtly excesses they professed to abhor and made stable government impossible. In such passages, Wollstonecraft portrayed the French as a degenerate people refined and indulged beyond the reach of civic virtue; but as she travelled through Scandinavia, the rougher elements of Nordic cultures cast the French in a kinder light. Towards the end of her journey, she concludes: ‘I believe I should have been less severe in the remarks I have made on the vanity and depravity of the french, had I travelled towards the north before I visited France’ (326). This newfound forbearance is the culmination of numerous supercilious observations on Scandinavian cultures. She finds the Norwegians ‘a sensible, shrewd people, with little scientific knowledge, and still less taste for literature’ (274). If this means allotting them a lower rung on the developmental ladder, however, she offers the patronising reassurance that ‘they are arriving at the epoch which precedes the introduction of the arts and sciences’ (274). Avowedly a curious traveller, Wollstonecraft is inhibited by her inability to speak Scandinavian languages, but in Letter VIII, she blithely concludes: ‘I am persuaded that I have formed a very just opinion of the character of the norwegians, without being able to hold converse with them’ (282). Carrying on a ‘conversation of gestures’, she enjoys their company, but arrogantly gives them little credit for intelligence: ‘As their minds were totally

‘The Growth of Each Particular Soil’    185

uncultivated, I did not lose much, perhaps gained, by not being able to understand them; for fancy probably filled up, more to their advantage, the void in the picture’ (283). In such passages, Wollstonecraft’s tone is indistinguishable from that of a Grand Tourist, taking its hauteur as much from class prejudice as cultural elitism. Most of these supercilious judgements derive from attempting to fit people to a preconceived narrative of progress. This is evident in Letter VII when Wollstonecraft observes that the ‘uncultivated’ Norwegians ‘love their country, but have not much public spirit’ (274). Clarifying her position in a footnote, she recurs to the model established in her political works for transforming instinctive attachments into philanthropic sentiments: ‘The grand virtues of the heart particularly the enlarged humanity which extends to the whole human race, depend more on the understanding, I believe, than is generally imagined’ (274). Jan Wellington rightly reads this line as confirmation that, for Wollstonecraft, ‘true public spirit is global, a product of the understanding we gain through science, art, and politics’.22 We have seen that her epistolary persona apprehends love of humankind through sentimental bonds and freeform cognition, but here she places the emphasis on developing reason, presuming that Norwegians are yet incapable of the ‘understanding’ requisite to extend compassion beyond particular attachments. Remarking that their ‘exertions are, generally speaking, only for their families’, she surmises that this ‘will always be the case, till politics, becoming a subject of discussion, enlarges the heart by opening the understanding’ (274). She concludes confidently that, ‘the french revolution will have this effect’ (274), emphasising the Norwegian potential to participate in ‘humanity’s progress toward a larger sympathy’.23 This is not the abstract theorising of the conjectural historian; Wollstonecraft writes as a cosmopolitan radical promoting democratic-egalitarian values as a spur to philanthropy that transcends national borders. She thereby seeks to establish the universal relevance of Revolutionary principles, but in doing so, she also constructs a dissemination narrative that relegates Scandinavia to cultural immaturity. Disgruntled by an excessive bill, in Letter X Wollstonecraft reiterates her claim that Norwegians have yet to acquire an idea of justice that accords equal moral status to all human subjects: Indeed they seem to consider foreigners as strangers whom they should never see again, and might fairly pluck. And the inhabitants of the western coast, insulated, as it were, regard those of the east almost as strangers. Each town in that quarter seems to be a great family, suspicious of every other, allowing none to cheat them, but themselves; and, right or wrong, they support one another in the face of justice. (291)

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As we have seen, for Wollstonecraft, privileging kindred over outsiders betrays the stunted capacity for sympathy that delimits fellow-feeling and makes universal benevolence impossible. Faced with the insularity of rural Scandinavia, she revises her view of the French, who now appear to bear the hallmarks of a rapidly advancing people: We talk of the depravity of the french, and lay a stress on the old age of the nation; yet where has more virtuous enthusiasm been displayed than during the last two years, by the common people of France, and in their armies? I am obliged sometimes to recollect the numberless instances which I have either witnessed, or heard well authenticated, to balance the account of horrours, alas! but too true. I am, therefore, inclined to believe that the gross vices which I have always seen allied with simplicity of manners, are the concomitants of ignorance. (326)

While Wollstonecraft’s letters never downplay the violence of the Revolution, she also suggests that the cultural conditions that triggered political change were in some respects conducive to public spirit (even if they also held back the formation of stable government). In this passage, the adjective ‘virtuous’ modifies the term ‘enthusiasm’ so often d ­ enotive of ungovernable affects in French Revolution; acknowledging the ‘­ horrours’ of the Terror, Wollstonecraft nonetheless suggests that French cultural maturity has also cultivated moral sentiments. Concomitantly, she downplays the moral potential of fellow-feeling in underdeveloped societies: But, when visiting different climes, a momentary social sympathy should not be allowed to influence the conclusions of the understanding; for hospitality too frequently leads travellers, especially those who travel in search of pleasure, to make a false estimate of the virtues of a nation; which, I am now convinced, bear an exact proportion to their scientific improvements. (327)

Implicitly, without progress in reason there can be no guarantee of enduring benevolence. In her efforts to support her perfectibilist teleology, Wollstonecraft subscribes to a universalist hierarchy of civilisation that sets her above the Scandinavian people. This narrative of progress offers her a bolt-hole of ideological simplicity in uncertain times, but it can also make her unreceptive to Nordic cultures and brings her to an epistemological impasse. So far, it seems that Wollstonecraft risks fulfilling the Enlightenment stereotype of the cosmopolitan dilettante, dabbling in foreign cultures whilst judging them by speciously universal standards. But this is only one aspect of her complex text, which also forefronts the depression and disillusionment that shook all her ideological certainties to the core. In Letter IX, she appears at first to argue for the inevitability of

‘The Growth of Each Particular Soil’    187

human progress, declaring: ‘The world requires, I see, the hand of man to perfect it; and as this task naturally unfolds the faculties he exercises, it is physically impossible that he should have remained in Rousseau’s golden age of stupidity’ (288). In the next line, however, Wollstonecraft gives way suddenly to existential turmoil: ‘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). As Chapter 4 has demonstrated, her on-the-ground experiences of the Terror made her perfectibilism difficult to sustain, and in Short Residence, her contempt for ‘Rousseau’s golden age of stupidity’ softens periodically into wistful fantasies of noble primitivism in the agrarian societies of the far north. Entirely at odds with her teleology of progress, this longing for a place of refuge draws Wollstonecraft to sentimental and picturesque discourses that situate Scandinavia in the realm of the pastoral. Danish men from the labouring class are described in picturesque terms as ‘swains’, while the ‘country girls’ have the ‘kind of arch, hoyden playfulness which distinguishes the village coquette’ (337). Wollstonecraft’s literary preconditioning structures her perceptions, the bucolic imagery romanticising the peasantry to the point of belittlement. This literary mode takes her no further towards cultural understanding than the natural philosophy depicting Nordic cultures in a state of inertia or the conjectural history placing them at an earlier stage of development than the commercial powers of Britain and France. Yet in some of her letters, Wollstonecraft represents her Scandinavian journey as a quest for a society capable of unlocking the dormant benevolence in human nature. The far north offers the unseen but imagined fulfilment of that quest: You will ask, perhaps, why I wished to go further northward. Why? not only because the country, from all I can gather, is most romantic, abounding in forests and lakes, and the air pure, but I have heard much of the intelligence of the inhabitants, substantial farmers, who have none of that cunning to contaminate their simplicity, which displeased me so much in the conduct of the people on the sea coast. (308)

Wollstonecraft’s idea of a simple agrarian society uncontaminated by commerce reflects a commonly held fantasy of the untutored wisdom of peoples untouched by the beau monde or the rising capitalism of the era. This longing for primitive insights was central to the appeal of Ossian, in which Macpherson’s Caledonians combine warrior-like nobility with softer sentiments compatible with the culture of sensibility.24 In her descriptions of Norwegians living ‘further northward’, Wollstonecraft

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turns these unseen farming communities into self-enclosed Ossianic utopias: The description I received of them carried me back to the fables of the golden age: independence and virtue; affluence without vice; cultivation of mind, without depravity of heart; with ‘ever smiling liberty;’ the nymph of the mountain. – I want faith! My imagination hurries me forward to seek an asylum in such a retreat from all the disappointments I am threatened with; but reason drags me back, whispering that the world is still the world, and man the same compound of weakness and folly, who must occasionally excite love and disgust, admiration and contempt. (308–9)

Wollstonecraft takes pains to stress that her description, ‘though it seems to have been sketched by a fairy pencil’, came from ‘a man of sound understanding, whose fancy seldom appears to run away with him’ (309). Whilst she acknowledges her idealism – ‘reason drags me back’ – the idea of a ‘golden age’ society clearly holds potent appeal. This is a retreat to literary fantasy, but it also represents an effort to sustain her cosmopolitan ‘faith’ in human benevolence, even if she can only imagine it thriving in communities cut off from the wider world. In the course of Short Residence, Wollstonecraft seesaws between two incompatible ideals of virtue – one the fruit of enlightened civilisation and the other of primitive simplicity – without finding lasting satisfaction in either of them: My thoughts fly from this wilderness to the polished circles of the world, till recollecting its vices and follies, I bury myself in the woods, but find it necessary to emerge again, that I may not lose sight of the wisdom and virtue which exalts my nature. (289)

One thing is clear: the Terror and the Revolutionary war, together with the vices she perceived in commercial societies, had d ­ estabilised Wollstonecraft’s conception of the European cultural ­hierarchy. Consequently, as the next section will demonstrate, alongside her unfortunate caricaturing of Nordic cultures, she often perceives them as sources of inspiration for alternative models of social justice and begins to disrupt her universalist narrative of progress with an appreciation of diversity.

Diversity and Authenticity We have established Wollstonecraft’s investment in human rights as a cornerstone of her cosmopolitan ethic, as well as her support for the Revolution as a milestone on the road to their global recognition. In Short Residence, she charts the passage of Revolutionary principles into

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the social and literary systems of the Scandinavian nations, which in their different ways were still ruled autocratically.25 As the previous section demonstrated, she equates these principles with a universal standard of justice, and the degree to which they are absorbed into a given society often influences where she places it in her cultural hierarchy. Yet while she celebrates democratic-egalitarian values gaining traction beyond the American and French republics, she also sees value in other culturallyspecific modes of living. Appiah’s liberal cosmopolitanism serves as a yardstick for comparison, emphasising our moral obligation to protect individual human rights within and beyond the nation, but also presupposing that ‘we neither expect nor desire that every person or every society should converge on a single mode of life’.26 The value Appiah places on ‘the variety of human forms of social and cultural life’ distinguishes his cosmopolitanism from the universalism so many theorists have scrambled to refute: We do not want everybody to become part of a homogenous global culture; and we know that this means there will be local differences (both within and between states) in moral climate as well. So long as these differences meet certain general ethical constraints – so long, in particular, as political institutions respect basic human rights – we are happy to let them be.27

Wollstonecraft is likewise averse to cultural homogeneity. In the course of her travels, she encounters three distinct societies: Sweden, nominally a constitutional monarchy; Denmark, an absolutist monarchy; and Norway, a colony of Denmark. In practice, however, because Denmark–Norway was ruled by an enlightened despot, the Crown Prince Frederick, ‘subjects of the absolutistic Danish monarchy enjoyed far greater civic liberty – above all, freedom of expression – than those of the Swedish constitutional monarchy, which had evolved into a kind of ad hoc dictatorship’.28 Denmark initially enforced its colonial rule of Norway with linguistic and cultural prohibitions, mirroring the outlawing and denigration of Celtic languages and cultural practices in the British Isles. By the 1770s, however, ‘the Danish Crown had become aware of Swedish designs on Norway, and treated its Norwegian subjects with the utmost caution, avoiding anything that might jeopardize their loyalty’.29 Although the Norwegians were technically subjugated, remote rural communities had ‘age-old traditions of self-rule’ and considered their monarch ‘sympathetic to the plight of the common man’.30 While Wollstonecraft is not always satisfied that Scandinavian societies meet her criteria for basic human rights, she recognises the e­ galitarian tendencies of certain longstanding customs and practices, finding liberty prospering in backwaters where she least expects it or taking root

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despite despotic or colonial rule. Moreover, in her portraits of different Scandinavian peoples, she tends to connect public spirit with cultural authenticity, which often appears as a guarantor of moral soundness. Cumulatively, her observations on each society advance a model for the moral health of a nation which gives equal weight to its cultural distinctness and the free circulation of democratic-egalitarian ideas within and across its borders. Even as the north was crystallising in the eighteenth-century imagination as a site of primordial wisdom, once-peripheral northern cultures began to represent viable alternatives to the dominant cultural powers of Western Europe. In some cases, a northward journey could indicate the progressive ideological bent of the traveller. Conversely, sophisticated metropolitan centres such as Rome and Paris had come to represent coercive papal authority and an elitist, degenerate aristocracy. Consequently, travelling to northern climes, ‘either of one’s own volition or as a preferred place of exile’, could ‘mark a break with an inherited cultural practice’ and an appreciation of new ideas.31 In this vein, Wollstonecraft makes it clear that she welcomes unfamiliar cultural experiences: Travellers who require that every nation should resemble their native country, had better stay at home. […] The most essential service, I presume, that authors could render to society, would be to promote inquiry and discussion, instead of making those 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. (VI, 266)

Wollstonecraft identifies such ‘dogmatical assertions’ as ‘materials for the compilers of universal histories’, who have mistaken poorly understood markers of cultural difference for innate national characters and have therefore advanced misguided theories on the nature of humankind (266). Her avowed receptivity to cultural difference is part of an effort to debunk these histories, replacing them with a constructivist account of human development. The political stakes of this endeavour were high because conclusions drawn about human nature were used to define natural law and, by extension, human rights. In Short Residence, as in her reviews, Wollstonecraft criticises travel-writers who, in their eagerness to ‘give a national character’, are ‘rarely just, because they do not discriminate the natural from the acquired difference’: The natural, I believe, on due consideration, will be found to consist merely in the degree of vivacity or thoughtfulness, pleasure, or pain, inspired by the climate, whilst the varieties which the forms of government, including religion, produce, are much more numerous and unstable. (266)

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Wollstonecraft’s point is that national character is an artificial construct liable to alter in response to political and social reforms, and should not be used to define any single race of people as inferior to another. In the course of her letters, she brings her observations to bear on a progressive critique of environmental determinism calculated to give Scandinavian cultures credit where it is due. As Ryall has demonstrated, although Buffon claimed that organisms were apt to degenerate in the harsh climates of northern countries, Wollstonecraft’s observations of the storm-ravaged landscapes tell quite a different story, in which ‘the need to struggle [...] may produce strength and vitality’.32 In a letter describing the Norwegian pine forests, she comments that the ‘profusion with which nature has decked them, with pendant honours, prevents all surprise at seeing, in every crevice, some sapling struggling for existence’, and observes that ‘roots, torn up by the storms, become a shelter for a young generation’ (310). Ryall quite rightly draws a feminist inference from Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on the invigorating effects of challenging environments and the adaptive potential of apparently fragile forms of life. From a cultural perspective, however, her revision of Buffonian categories is equally significant, for it suggests that organisms evolving in northern climates could have culturally specific strengths and virtues lacking in their southern counterparts. In Letter XIII, she declares that ‘the sweetest summer in the world, is the northern one’: The balance of happiness, with respect to climate, may be more equal than I at first imagined; for the inhabitants describe with warmth the pleasures of a winter, at the thoughts of which I shudder. Not only their parties of pleasure but of business are reserved for this season, when they travel with astonishing rapidity, the most direct way, skimming over the hedge and ditch. (301)

Wollstonecraft pays tribute to a foreign people whose cultural practices have evolved to meet the challenges of their environment. She also acknowledges her perceptual limitations as an outsider barely habituated to her surroundings. Throughout the text, similar observations fray at the edges of the literary, historical and philosophical discourses that impede her cultural understanding. These observations underlie an effort to distinguish the effects of governmental and social structures from invariable external factors such as climate and topography in order to marshal evidence for reform. Sweden and Norway were both principally agrarian, but Wollstonecraft finds the condition and demeanour of the peasantry remarkably d ­ ifferent in each country. In Sweden, reforms initiated by the late Gustav III had increased the number of freeholders, but many

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farmers were still s­ truggling tenants, whereas in Norway, farmers typically had ownership of their land or held tenancies that entitled them to farm commercially.33 Wollstonecraft’s knowledge of the relative unfreedom in Sweden seems to inform her response to expressions of courtesy, in which she detects an accent of servitude: ‘the swedish, rendered more abject by misery, have a degree of politeness in their address, which, though it may sometimes border on insincerity, is oftener the effect of a broken spirit, rather softened than degraded by wretchedness’ (317). By contrast, the Norwegians have a ‘rough kind of frankness’, which she relates to them being ‘mostly independent’ (317). Despite their similar modes of subsistence, then, the Swedes and Norwegians have developed different patterns of behaviour in response to their respective opportunities for self-government. To some extent, Wollstonecraft’s impressions of them tally with her longstanding belief in the relationship between liberty and moral character. She paints a more complex picture, however, because although the Norwegians enjoyed practical freedoms, they were nonetheless colonial subjects. In French Revolution, she had tied the ethical framework requisite for political justice and philanthropy to the intellectual and moral refinement of a mature and independent civilisation. In Norway, however, she finds this model disrupted when she witnesses disinterested benevolence and radical politics thriving amongst colonial subjects who fall short of her standards for refinement. If Wollstonecraft repeatedly depicts the Norwegians as the epitome of cultural simplicity, she also details with pleasure their investment in the democratic-egalitarian values she associates with advanced societies. Defying any rigid taxonomy, she creates a nuanced portrait of a country where the people marry staunch loyalty to the absolutist Danish Crown with a strong investment in the principles of political liberty: They sing at present, with great glee, many republican songs, and seem earnestly to wish that the republic may stand; yet they appear very much attached to their prince royal; and, as far as rumour can give an idea of a character, he appears to merit their attachment. (274)

Eagerly recounting several instances of the Crown Prince’s benevolence, Wollstonecraft judges Denmark–Norway, not by its political structure, but by the ‘happiness of the people’, whom she declares ‘the least oppressed people of Europe’ (276). She may depict Norway as culturally immature, but in the same breath she disrupts the cultural hierarchy that supports her claims. For instance, she avers rather condescendingly that the Norwegians’ ‘improving manners will introduce finer moral f­ eelings’, then immediately turns to describing their zealous support for the French

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Republic as well as their opposition to imperialist ­expansion  – both indications, in her previous works, of philanthropic feeling: They begin to read translations of some of the most useful german productions lately published; and one of our party sung a song, ridiculing the powers coalesced against France, and the company drank confusion to those who had dismembered Poland. (297)

As well as siding with the French Republic in the Revolutionary War, the Norwegians condemn the rulers of Russia, Prussia and Austria, dominant powers which had divided Poland between them in successive treaties. The Norwegian opposition to these acquisitive foreign policies is suggestive of a cosmopolitan belief in extending political liberty to all nations.34 Finding parity in the ideological climates of France and Norway, Wollstonecraft compares both countries favourably with Britain. In French Revolution, she had bestowed qualified praise on Britain’s parliamentary democracy, but in Short Residence, she strikes a more critical note, commenting that in ‘England, that boasted land of freedom’, treatment of the lower orders ‘is often extremely tyrannical’, and that ‘aristocracy and fanaticism seem equally to be gaining ground’ (254, 288). Her appreciation of Norwegian culture thus amounts to a repudiation of national loyalties, a sideswipe at the British government waging war on what she still regards as the dearly bought liberties of the French Republic. At the same time, she complicates the cultural hierarchy set up elsewhere in the text by presenting Norway as a case-study in right-minded principles of political justice flourishing in the supposedly unsophisticated colony of an absolutist monarchy. This is not to say that Wollstonecraft accepts uncritically Denmark’s absolutist regime or its colonial hold over Norway. On the contrary, she retains her distaste for imperialism, which she aligns with ­acquisitive passions anathema to philanthropy. In a letter from Christiana, she sees ‘the cloven foot of despotism’ in the Danish colonial officials, whom she calls ‘political monsters’ guilty of nepotism and corruption (305). With another subtle dig at the English, she observes that, ‘though the n ­ orwegians are not in the abject state of the irish’, they are still ‘deprived of several natural advantages to benefit the domineering state’ (305). And yet, perhaps by virtue of their removal from the centre of power, the Norwegian people seem to her to have escaped the negative effects of colonial rule, an impression reinforced by her encounters with the Danes in Copenhagen: I looked in vain for the sprightly gait of the norwegians, who in every respect appear to me to have got the start of them. This difference I attribute to their having more liberty: a liberty which they think their right by i­nheritance,

194    Mary Wollstonecraft whilst the danes, when they boast of their negative happiness, always mention it as the boon of the prince royal, under the superintending wisdom of count Bernstorff. (325)35

From Wollstonecraft’s republican perspective, the flaws she perceives in the Danish national character are side-effects of unfreedom, whereby happiness is granted by a benevolent overlord rather than enjoyed as a human right. By contrast, despite their loyalty to the Danish Crown, the Norwegians root for the French Republic: ‘So determined were they, in fact, to excuse every thing, disgracing the struggle of freedom, by admitting the tyrant’s plea necessity, that I could hardly persuade them that Robespierre was a monster’ (302). Karafili Steiner claims that Wollstonecraft here ‘decries the inefficacy of the Norwegian daily press to promote the cosmopolitan solidarity owed to the victims of Jacobin Terror’, but I read her tone rather as one of indulgent exasperation than outright disgust.36 If she finds limited evidence of philanthropy in Norway, she nonetheless acknowledges the peculiar merits of this colonial nation, and identifies potential avenues for the growth of more expansive public spirit. By the time she reached Denmark, Wollstonecraft had seemingly rejected the ‘golden age’ fantasy, regretfully reporting that the ‘picture frequently drawn of the virtues of a rising people has [...] been fallacious’ (326). This fantasy was superseded, however, by a growing appreciation of tangible social and cultural peculiarities. Not only does she find progressive attitudes in supposedly backward northern societies, she also finds points of contact between their cultural mores and those of more ‘civilised’ European nations. One case in point is the sexual liberalism of Scandinavian law and custom. From Wollstonecraft’s feminist perspective, the Swedish divorce laws are more humane than their British equivalents, tallying with the progress made in France in the early years of the Revolution: ‘The swedes are in general attached to their families; yet a divorce may be obtained by either party, on proving the infidelity of the other, or acknowledging it themselves’ (317–18). Wollstonecraft also approves of the financial protection given to unmarried mothers under Swedish law: ‘The father and mother, if the father can be ascertained, are obliged to maintain an illegitimate child at their joint expense’ (283). Tacitly arguing for a compassionate attitude to unwed mothers and illegitimate children, she outlines the social benefits of eliminating the stigma attached to them: ‘accidents of this kind do not prevent their marrying; and then it is not unusual to take the child or children home; and they are brought up very amicably with the marriage progeny’ (283–4). Similarly, while she sees nothing in Denmark to

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alter her conviction that ‘men are domestic tyrants’, she does perceive a degree of sexual equality in Danish courtship customs (326). She learns with interest that there is a ‘kind of interregnum between the reign of the father and husband’ (326), in which both men and women have carte blanche to enjoy sex out of wedlock: Young people, who are attached to each other, with the consent of their friends, exchange rings, and are permitted to enjoy a degree of liberty together, which I have never noticed in any other country. The days of courtship are therefore prolonged, till it be perfectly convenient to marry: the intimacy often becomes very tender: and if the lover obtain the privilege of a husband, it can only be termed half by stealth, because the family is wilfully blind. (326)

Adding that it ‘happens very rarely that these honorary engagements are dissolved or disregarded’, Wollstonecraft reassures her readers that Danish broadmindedness has few negative social consequences (326). Under autocratic regimes, then, she finds more liberal social practices than in her native land with its celebrated parliamentary democracy. As in French Revolution, Wollstonecraft relates progress towards political justice to freedom of speech and the free circulation of texts: ‘They translate any of the french publications of the day, deliver their opinion on the subject, and discuss those it leads to with great freedom, and without fearing to displease the government’ (276). Through translation, literate Danes and Norwegians gain access to ideas fomenting in other European countries, expanding their intellectual horizons and engaging in tolerant public debate that bespeaks the nation’s progress in reason. Even more significantly, they can discuss the Revolution without fear of reprisals, effectively engaging in a transnational debate which brings the Revolutionary discourse of political liberty into conversation with Danish–Norwegian discourses of egalitarianism and social reform. Through her buoyant descriptions of the Norwegian support for the French Republic, Wollstonecraft depicts a remote Nordic culture absorbing ideas of justice which are at once foreign and, from her perspective, universally applicable. While this transmission between ideological and literary systems evidently meets with her approval, however, she responds differently to signs of French courtly culture infiltrating Scandinavian urban communities. Arguing that the Nordic peoples should cleave to their indigenous languages and heritage, she interprets their mimicry of French manners and aesthetics, not as the fruits of cultural cross-fertilisation, but as capitulation to cultural imperialism. In Wollstonecraft’s eyes, imitation is as undesirable in society as it is in art, the hallmark of an artificial people whose integrity has been lost

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in showiness, pretension or convoluted etiquette. Hence, she remarks gladly that rural Norway ‘is not the place for imitation’ (293). Finding a ‘sort of individual taste’ in a humble Norwegian home, she connects this individuality with the ‘kindness’ of the inhabitants (293). In such passages, the unaffected people of rural Norway come to represent not only the benevolence always central to Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan ethic, but also her increasing insistence on cultural integrity in the face of homogenising external forces. By contrast, urban centres are often inauthentic locales where French cultural hegemony has brought an artificial sameness to upper-class modes of conduct and expression. ‘The well-bred swedes of the capital’, she observes, ‘are formed on the ancient french model; and they in general speak that language’ (255). While she praises the Swedes for their linguistic proficiency, she expresses concern that their use of the French language ‘prevents the cultivation of their own, and any considerable advance in literary pursuits’ (255). This literary inertia is a loss, not simply to the arts, but to the cultural life of the nation. In French Revolution, Wollstonecraft had identified literary and aesthetic endeavour as a crucial stage in the progress to an advanced state of enlightenment. By virtue of their proximity to cultural and commercial hubs, Swedish city-dwellers have readier access to potentially invigorating foreign influences, but according to Wollstonecraft, they are not thus spurred to ideological debate and literary innovation. Instead, they surrender their cultural uniqueness in pursuit of a Francophilic standard of refinement. In this case, inertia stems, not from environmental factors, but the deadening weight of cultural imperialism. As Karafili Steiner points out, it is in this spirit that Wollstonecraft rejects Cooper’s claim, in Some Information Respecting America, that the American literary system should depend primarily on reprinting European texts. Her logic is that the ‘reflection necessary to produce a certain number of even tolerable productions, augments, more than he is aware of, the mass of knowledge in the community’ (255–6). Wollstonecraft recommends ‘vernacular literature’ because it ‘activates national resources by producing local knowledge’.37 Without these efforts, she claims, not only America but any nation would develop an ersatz literary system reliant on ‘consuming and recycling hegemonic productions’.38 This state of affairs would stymie the intellectual and moral development of the people because the works available to them would be devoid of any insights inspired by the unique features of their locality and therefore less able to gain purchase on their minds: ‘we must have an object to refer our reflections to’, Wollstonecraft insists, ‘or they will seldom go below the surface’ (256). If she finds herself

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ideologically adrift from her homeland, then, she does not promote rootlessness as a cosmopolitan ideal. On the contrary, she advocates transmitting principles of justice through the interaction of distinct and authentic cultures. Wollstonecraft’s stance probably owes something to Rousseau’s Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne (Considerations on the Government of Poland) (1782), in which he identifies a ‘nefarious trend’ towards cultural homogeneity and advocates small, self-sufficient states which take pride in their cultural uniqueness.39 Advising against international commerce, which he regards as ‘a poisonous source of inequality and corruption’, Rousseau promotes national identity so fervently that some scholars claim him as ‘a founder of modern nationalism’.40 Whilst I resist pigeon-holing Rousseau in this way, one sees his influence in Wollstonecraft’s tendency to equate cultural authenticity with the moral health of a nation. There is no conclusive evidence that she read the Considerations, but during her residence in France, it was reissued as part of a new edition of the Social Contract which, as she  points out in French Revolution, inspired or consolidated the ­political convictions of many leading Revolutionaries. Given her enthusiasm for Rousseau, it is probable that she would have engaged with influential works circulating amongst her peers, especially in view of her interest in the political fate of Poland and her distaste for Russian ­imperialism. Considering Wollstonecraft’s commitment to her cosmopolitan ethic, we certainly should not perceive in Short Residence a shift towards the nationalism often associated with the Romantic era; but she does value cultural authenticity which, as in her analyses of personal ­authenticity, she connects with moral soundness. Consequently, she suggests that, far from inhibiting receptivity to universal principles  of justice, preserving the distinctive characters of individual nations would help those principles take firmer root in ‘each particular soil’ (346). We have seen that Wollstonecraft vacillates between a teleology of progress, in which Nordic nations trail behind their Western European counterparts, and a partial move towards cultural relativism. In the final pages of Short Residence, neither model gains the ascendancy. In her Appendix, Wollstonecraft ostensibly signals the ‘correct’ ideological conclusion to be drawn from a text resistant to easy resolution; but the awkward formal shift from the open-ended epistolary narrative to the paratext also draws attention to the ontological gulf between them. This structural peculiarity amounts to a comment on the intellectual conflicts of the text, highlighting the difficulty of reconciling any grand universalist narrative with specific cultural, historical and personal

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e­ xigencies. Nonetheless, it is worth looking again at this crucial paratextual statement: An ardent affection for the human race makes enthusiastic characters eager to produce alteration in laws and governments prematurely. To render them useful and permanent, they must be the growth of each particular soil, and the gradual fruit of the ripening understanding of the nation, matured by time, not forced by an unnatural fermentation. 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. (346)

Wollstonecraft argues that ‘change is gaining ground, with accelerating pace’, but cautions against untimely reforms. She appears thus to suggest that separate cultures are not only evolving at different rates, but also in different – and equally legitimate – ways. Throughout her oeuvre, the progress to global political justice is founded on universal principles, and it would be excessive to claim that she abandons the perfectibilist teleology which this universalism informs: when she asserts that ‘the ripening understanding of the nation’ should be ‘matured by time, not forced by an unnatural fermentation’, she implies that certain cultures are progressing to a state of maturity that others have already reached. Yet this progress is figured, not only as ‘gradual fruit’, but also as ‘the growth of each particular soil’. The imagery suggests, not simply different timescales, but also different standpoints rooted in particular social and cultural contexts, as well as their distinctive languages and literary systems. Wollstonecraft appears to acknowledge, then, that human subjects reason their way to universal ‘truths’ from a culturally situated perspective and that broadly universal principles must be inflected by indigenous ways of life. Despite Wollstonecraft’s tendency to fit the Scandinavian peasantry to historical and philosophical categories, her on-the-ground observations disrupt the standard taxonomies. Her readership encountered Scandinavian societies in which well-read Nordic peoples espoused Revolutionary principles and took a frank and progressive attitude to sexuality. As Wollstonecraft attempts to mediate between her philosophical universalism and the cultural diversity of a pluralist Europe, she begins to adapt her teleology of progress to incorporate incipient relativism, reshaping the internal logic of her perfectibilist narrative. She leans towards a model of national self-definition in which each nation also remains open to ideological dialogue and cultural interaction with others. The universal value of Revolutionary principles is confirmed by their integration into colonial Norway. At the same time, however,

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Wollstonecraft registers dismay at signs of French cultural imperialism. Echoing Rousseau, she claims that cultural inauthenticity stems from imitative practices invariably associated with moral decline. Consequently, she argues for the preservation of cultural differences. Paradoxically, it is in part by drawing on nationalist elements in Rousseau’s works that she develops a cosmopolitan worldview hospitable to diversity in which broadly universal principles of justice are disseminated by localised and culturally specific means of integration. In practical terms, this involves both the literal translation of texts and ideological translation resulting from contact between distinct nations and cultures. Portraying national character as a mutable construct, she suggests that social reforms and a public sphere amenable to debate can create conditions favourable to moral regeneration. This regeneration is contingent, however, on the moral integrity of the citizenry, which depends on their capacity to balance pride in their culture with receptivity to outside influences. Consequently, although Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitanism stems from her belief in human commonality, in Short Residence, her moral universalism is modulated by a nascent appreciation of cultural differences and a recognition that love of humankind must grow in different forms from the ‘particular soil’ of individual nations.

Coda ‘Out-Laws of the World’: Cosmopolitanism in The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria When her ship docked in Dover, Wollstonecraft knew she had returned to an island nation literally at war with her political ideals and hostile to her feminism. Shortly afterwards, she discovered Imlay’s continued infidelity and made a second, more determined suicide attempt. Rescued from drowning in the Thames, she resolved to live for her daughter, but her long expatriation had entrenched her sense – apparent from her earliest extant letters – of being ‘an exile’, ‘a sojourner in a strange land’ and a ‘Solitary Walker’, and her final semi-autobiographical persona, Maria Venables, explicitly rejects national allegiances.1 Her transnational perspective had also given her insight into the ways different political and social systems and gender norms can strengthen or snuff out human benevolence. In Wrongs of Woman, she depicts British society as a corrupt and iniquitous patriarchy that turns women and the poor into second-class citizens liable to turn on their compatriots. Railing against the laws that have ‘bastilled’ her in marriage (I, 146), Maria complains that ‘the laws of her country – if women have a country – afford her no protection or redress from the oppressor’ (149). Women are ‘the out-laws of the world’, grappling even in their homelands with the legal invisibility and personal vulnerability that typically afflict outsiders (146). It should be clear by now, however, that Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitanism cannot be defined simply in negative terms as a rejection of her mother country, although her disgust with Pitt’s government and the biases written into English law inoculated her against the rising nationalism of her war-torn era. As we saw in the quotation from Woolf’s Three Guineas in the opening pages of this book, emancipation from national loyalties can enable a different sense of belonging to an imagined global community. When Wollstonecraft died in September 1797 from complications following childbirth, she had been struggling to draft her final novel, constantly rewriting it as her physical discomfort increased. The notes

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and fragments that Godwin assembled offer only an imperfect insight into the ethical framework she was seeking to construct, but many critics see in the text a total disillusionment with politics in the wake of the Terror and consequent reorientation towards the private sphere. One much-rehearsed argument is that Wollstonecraft intended Maria to establish an all-female family unit at the end of the novel, and was thereby effectively recommending self-enclosed communities of sentiment in the absence of systemic reform.2 The draft version available to us suggests that the main action was confined to England. At first glance, this is not the outward-looking narrative of a cosmopolitan. But given that Wollstonecraft believed that love of humankind had its origins in intimate bonds, we can look for traces of her cosmopolitan ethic in the four significant relationships that shape Maria’s life and character development. I suggest that the details and symbolic function of these relationships convey Wollstonecraft’s ongoing preoccupation with the mechanisms that cultivate philanthropy and the ethical imperative to world citizenship. With a heavy-handed political metaphor, Wollstonecraft depicts Maria’s parental home as a microcosm of hereditary autocracy. In line with the model of human psychological development outlined in her Vindications, she attributes the lack of fellow-feeling between family members to unequal power dynamics stoking self-interested desires for domination and control. Maria’s father demanded ‘passive obedience’; her mother was afraid to challenge her husband’s ‘absolute authority’; her eldest brother, the ‘heir apparent’, was ‘the deputy-tyrant of the house’ (124). Indulged until ‘he only thought of himself’, this brother progressed from ‘tormenting insects and animals’ to become ‘the despot of his brothers, and still more of his sisters’ (124). Like Wollstonecraft’s other personae, however, Maria’s defining trait is compassion and a corresponding desire to redress injustice. Wollstonecraft explains this moral superiority to the rest of the family through Maria’s formative relationship with her uncle, a well-travelled man of ‘liberal education’, and it is hard to avoid seeing in her sketch of his character an allusion to Rousseau and his pivotal influence on her thought (125). A misanthrope whose early experience of romantic love and betrayal leaves him ‘disgusted with mankind’ (125), Maria’s uncle has the legislator’s ‘forcible manner of speaking’ and the Solitary Walker’s ‘impressive wildness of look and gesture’ (126). Paradoxically, Maria claims that his attempts to prove ‘that nothing which deserved the name of love or friendship, existed in the world’ inspired her with ‘animated pictures’ of these very same sentiments (126). Wollstonecraft might as well be describing a readerly response to Julie, in which the heroine insists on the transience

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of erotic love even as she and Saint-Preux prove themselves the living embodiments of an intense and enduring passion. Maria admits that her uncle gave her the ‘romantic’ turn of mind that led to her ill-advised marriage, but he also ‘inculcated, with great warmth, self-respect, and a lofty consciousness of acting right, independent of the censure or applause of the world’ (126). At his knee she learned to value the moral independence that makes disinterested benevolence possible. It is ironic to say the least, then, that he coaxes her into a marriage which robs her of the very independence he prizes, leaving her with no legal identity, no right to property and no claim to her child. Chief amongst the ‘wrongs’ that afflict Maria is her marriage to George Venables, whose profligacy, intemperance and repeated infidelities are insufficient grounds for divorce under British law. Significantly, her youthful infatuation stems from a mistaken belief in his ‘disinterestedness’, ‘generosity’ and ‘humanity’ (127). He seals his hold on her heart when she collects charitable donations to support her old nurse’s sister, Peggy, whose sailor husband falls victim to a press-gang and dies in battle, leaving her a widow with two young children. Their predicament stems from social inequality repackaged as patriotic self-sacrifice: a ‘common misfortune’, Maria comments sardonically, because ‘the poor are bound to suffer for the good of their country’ (128). When Venables discreetly hands her a guinea for Peggy, she perceives this impromptu gesture as proof of his ‘delicacy’ and ‘benevolence’: ‘I trembled with emotion – now, indeed, I was in love. […] I felt in my pocket every five minutes, only to feel the guinea; and its magic touch invested my hero with more than mortal beauty’ (131). Maria’s imagination leads her astray but, in Wollstonecraft’s ethical system, the error is pardonable because it stems from the moral sentiment of compassion and her investment in the ideal of benevolence. Critics have rightly observed that Maria’s compassion has its limits, failing to extend – in her memoirs, at least – to the ‘wantons of the lowest class’, whom Venables takes for his mistresses, even if she does condemn his habit of abandoning them to poverty when his eye roves elsewhere (139).3 At the same time, she proves capable of impressive feats of philanthropy, as when she seeks out Venables’ neglected illegitimate child and provides what financial support she can for her. Venables is self-interest incarnate and, as such, he symbolises the false patriotism Wollstonecraft condemns throughout her political works.4 ‘He one time professed patriotism’, Maria scoffs, ‘but he knew not what it was to feel honest indignation; and pretended to be an advocate for liberty, when, with as little affection for the human race as for individuals, he thought of nothing but his own gratification’ (151).

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Maria’s definition of patriotism takes its form from Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan model, at once dependent on particular intimacies and conducive to ‘affection for the human race’. When Venables tries to prostitute her to an acquaintance, Maria abjures her marriage vows and leaves his house. Terrified at the prospect of losing her fortune, he has her drugged, separated from her nursing baby and manacled in a lunatic asylum. Even before this Gothic turn, however, his callousness reveals the fraudulence of his political posturing according to Wollstonecraft’s philanthropic standard. His opposition to Maria’s charitable inclinations and his serial abandonment of mistresses and children reveal a mind consumed by selfish passions and therefore incapable of genuine public spirit. Enriching himself ‘by a violation of the laws of his country, as well as those of humanity’, Venables deploys the rhetoric of patriotism to camouflage a cold heart incapable of fellow-feeling (151). Scrivener argues that Maria’s ‘self-authorized divorce’ has ‘cosmopolitan meaning’ because, when she resists being bound to Venables against her will, ‘she is claiming a violation of her human rights and not of British law, which leaves her without any recourse’.5 Significantly, her best chance at freedom comes with an abortive project of expatriation. Her uncle, who dies before they can put the plan into action, promises ‘“a journey to Italy, leaving the fogs and cares of England far behind”’ (165). When Maria later seeks an official divorce, a bigoted English judge condemns her as an adulteress actuated by ‘“French principles”’, which he hopes ‘“no Englishman would legalize”’, alluding to the widespread conception of Revolutionary France as anarchic, lax and licentious (181). These references to other nations refer to frameworks of justice independent of the British system and raise the prospect of critical dissent.6 Read metaphorically, Maria’s decision to leave her husband constitutes a rejection of the nation where patriarchal laws and prejudices keep her oppressed. The judge defends these laws as ‘“evidently for the good of the whole”’ (181), but as Kipp observes, Wollstonecraft ‘recognized that women have little say in what constitutes “the good of the whole”’, and she could see no means for them to flourish unless their nation acknowledged ‘the full and equal status of women as citizens’.7 With no hope of imminent legal reform, however, Maria embarks on a project of symbolic expatriation. But where can she go? In Kipp’s interpretation, Wollstonecraft portrays women as ‘citizens of the universe’, not because they can connect with others beyond their narrow sphere of existence, but because they are ‘out-laws’, at home nowhere in the world (146).8 I suggest that Maria’s love affair with her fellow asylum inmate Henry Darnford – a textual version of Imlay – can be read metaphorically as part of her search for

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an alternative homeland. When he lends her his books, her interest is piqued by his marginalia, along with a fragment of prose expressing democratic and republican principles through ‘a comparative view of the politics of Europe and America’ (93). Ostensibly representing an egalitarian alternative to British hereditary power, Darnford’s politics and former expatriation connect him with the American Republic and its political ally, Revolutionary France. But it is his marginal annotation to ‘an impassioned letter’ from Julie that clinches Maria’s attraction to him: ‘“Rousseau alone, the true Prometheus of sentiment, possessed the fire of genius necessary to pourtray the passion, the truth of which goes so directly to the heart”’ (96). It is by now well established that Maria constructs Darnford as ‘her personal St Preux’, a romantic fantasy frequently read as part of a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of u ­nrestrained sentiment.9 Wollstonecraft’s allusion to Prometheus suggests, however, that she wanted to create in Darnford, not a two-dimensional rake, but a flawed republican patriot in whom love inspires altruism and egocentricity in equal measure. In his marginal comment on Julie, Darnford functions as the mouthpiece for Wollstonecraft’s vision of human passions firing a creative imagination capable of purifying and refining them. The image recalls the connection established in Short Residence between erotic love and the socially cohesive effects of ­sympathy, whereby imagination transforms animal impulses into ‘all those fine sympathies that lead to rapture, rendering men social by expanding their hearts’.10 By having Darnford articulate this idea, Wollstonecraft links Maria’s faith in him to his apparent belief that erotic love can inspire enduring bonds of sentiment, the intimate counterpart to the ‘public culture of compassion’ integral to political justice.11 Wollstonecraft was considering five possible endings for the novel, but her notes and drafted fragments suggest that all of them would involve the devastating revelation of Darnford’s infidelity. He thus comes to embody both the philanthropic and the self-serving potentialities of patriotic love in the Revolutionary era. Of course, there are warning signs all along if one knows where to look for them. For a start, Darnford is yet another child raised without strong bonds of affection. His parents ‘had a visible dislike to each other, continually displayed’, and sent him and his brothers to boarding schools as soon as possible (100). Interpreting the text depends at this juncture on Godwin’s interpolations, but Wollstonecraft appears to suggest that lack of sympathetic community in Darnford’s childhood prevented him from developing patriotic sentiments. When he joined ‘a new-raised regiment, destined to subjugate America’, his decision was purely pragmatic (101). Captured and converted to republican

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principles by ‘the hospitality of the Americans’, he presents this epoch of his life as one of moral awakening (101). But anyone who understands Wollstonecraft’s psychological model for the formation of a cosmopolitan patriot will perceive that Darnford’s commitment to liberty rests on insubstantial foundations. Moreover, his life-story sits out of joint with her cosmopolitan ethical framework. On one hand, Darnford’s claim that commerce has injured the American national character echoes Wollstonecraft’s views about the moral degradation of capitalist societies – and, indeed, Imlay’s complaint in Topographical Description that ‘the rights of men have been shamefully profaned under the crude idea of the aggrandisement of commerce’.12 Depicting the Americans on the East Coast as a people obsessed with ‘commercial speculations’, Darnford asserts that their ‘national character exhibited a phenomenon in the history of the human mind – a head enthusiastically enterprising, with cold selfishness of heart’ (101). Not only does he speak a language of liberty and equality, he appears to accord considerable value to human sympathies. Yet he keeps slipping up. Claudia L. Johnson points out that he ‘blunders’ when he admits he ‘was taught to love by a creature [he is] ashamed to mention’ (100–1) and visited ‘women of the town’ even after his alleged moral conversion (102).13 According to Wollstonecraft’s moral system in this latter stage of her career, the error is less that he confesses to promiscuity (although this is never endorsed), but rather that he dehumanises sex workers who represent yet another ‘exploited class’.14 Darnford also claims that the Native Americans ‘who hovered on the skirts of the European settlements had only learned of their neighbours to plunder, and they stole their guns from them to do it with more safety’ (102). This is entirely out of keeping with Wollstonecraft’s earlier portrait, in Elements, of the altruistic Native American warrior who saves the life of a European soldier. One cannot rule out that she had since heard tales from Imlay of attacks on European settlers – indeed, the heroine of The Emigrants becomes an ‘erotic spectacle’ of virtue in distress when she is abducted by Native American marauders.15 Even so, Darnford’s demonisation of indigenous people sounds a discordant note in Wollstonecraft’s extant work. We have seen that she often patronised non-white people or deployed stereotypes strategically, but she did not contribute to the colonial discourse of Native American savagery that would be used to justify the near-annihilation of their way of life. One useful, if indirect, point of comparison is her review of François Le Vaillant’s New Travels into the interior Parts of Africa (1796). Written around the time she was drafting Wrongs of Woman, the review condemns the effects of colonial trade and conquest on the

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benevolent natives of the Cape of Good Hope, connecting the capitalist ethic with the moral crimes of European i­mperialists. Comparing the ‘just and affectionate’ characters of the Khoekhoe people of southwestern Africa with those of ‘rapacious’ Dutch settlers, ‘from whose bosoms commerce has eradicated every human feeling’, Wollstonecraft describes ‘the invaders of newly discovered countries’ as ‘half civilized men’, and implies that, where acquisitive passions extend to a foreign land and its people, the capitalist mindset reverses human progress (VII, 480–1). In this light, Darnford’s othering of women driven to sell their bodies and Native Americans protecting their land reveals that, despite his pretensions to egalitarian principles, he lacks the philanthropy requisite for cosmopolitan patriotism. Assuming that Darnford represents America, we must conclude that no republican society promises lasting asylum for the stateless heroine. As his discourse hints at his unreliability from the start, we certainly cannot regard his every word as a reflection of Wollstonecraft’s worldview, but when he claims to have grown ‘heartily weary of the land of liberty and vulgar aristocracy, seated on her bags of dollars’ (I, 102), he recalls her jeremiad in French Revolution against the ‘aristocracy of wealth, which degrades mankind’ (VI, 233) and her warning in Short Residence that ‘the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank’ (309). This disillusionment represents a marked shift in her attitude to America from the idealism of her earlier work. The breakdown of her relationship with Imlay and the lethal consequences of false patriotism in Terrorist France had dispelled once and for all her utopian vision – shared by so many radicals of the period – of achieving ‘a Rousseauesque return to nature in the pristine wilderness of the New World’.16 Crucially, however, Maria’s fantasies of Darnford are cast, not as merely delusional, but as testament to the ‘creative power’ of her ‘affectionate heart’ (I, 93). Moreover, the narrator implies that, through sheer warmth of sentiment, she succeeds in moulding him temporarily to her moral ideal: We see what we wish, and make a world of our own – and, though reality may sometimes open a door to misery, yet the moments of happiness procured by the imagination, may, without a paradox, be reckoned among the solid comforts of life. Maria now, imagining that she had found a being of celestial mould – was happy, – nor was she deceived. – He was then plastic in her impassioned hand – and reflected all the sentiments which animated and warmed her. (173)

The image of Darnford as ‘plastic in [Maria’s] impassioned hand’ complicates any attempt to characterise him straightforwardly as a villain

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because it partially legitimates the ideal fashioned by her imagination. Instead of condemning Maria outright, Wollstonecraft seeks to illustrate her belief that ‘objects chosen by reason and enlarged by the imagination are real existing entities’.17 Maria finds rational reasons to love Darnford – his politics, his literary opinions, his compassion for the supposed loss of her child – and enlarges on them imaginatively, building a false idol incarnating all that is just and virtuous. So far, so clichéd – but what is significant is that Darnford attempts for a time to measure up to her fantasies. In French Revolution, the legislator’s eloquence, embodied in Mirabeau, wins over his audience with its emotional authenticity, which is coextensive with moral truth. In Wrongs of Woman, Darnford is not simply an actor delivering seductive lines, he is also the listening audience in thrall to Maria’s sentimental legislator.18 Refined and purified by her imagination, her sentiments have a ‘creative power’ that bends him to her will. Led by a real cosmopolitan patriot, the republic seems briefly to promise a brighter future. Yet given Darnford’s probable infidelity, it seems that Wollstonecraft sought once again to distinguish between sentimental persuasion and enduring moral conviction. However genuine the zeal of an impassioned moment, without principle it ebbs away. Still, Wollstonecraft depicts Maria’s imaginative investment in Darnford’s virtues as a vital spur to her moral development. Her experience of ‘real affections’ manifests in growing tolerance for foibles and idiosyncrasies, a willingness to engage meaningfully with others in recognition of ‘their full and equal humanity’ (176).19 We learn that ‘Maria found herself more indulgent as she was happier, and discovered virtues, in characters, she had before disregarded, while chasing the phantoms of elegance and excellence’ (177). If Darnford represents a republican nation, we might conclude that Maria’s experience of expatriation has brought her closer to a love of humankind that embraces difference – a mindset compatible with the cosmopolitan ethic delineated in Short Residence. This receptivity to ‘characters, she had before disregarded’ is clearest in her growing friendship with her asylum wardress, Jemima, an unlikely alliance across class boundaries that proves resilient and salutary. Jemima – ‘Wollstonecraft’s angriest literary creation’ – is not only illegitimate, she is also a rape victim who survived homelessness and destitution working as a streetwalker and a kept mistress.20 As Taylor points out, ‘whereas standard reform narratives maintained a sharp boundary between the pitiable whore and women of virtue, in Wollstonecraft’s novel no such line is drawn’.21 Moreover, as Johnson observes, Jemima’s inset tale of selling sex to survive corrects Darnford

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and Maria’s ­dismissal of prostitutes as degenerates sunk below ordinary humanity.22 Wollstonecraft thus constructs a sentimental paradigm for extending benevolence, not only beyond instinctive loyalties, but also across the yawning divides of the social hierarchy. The unusual friendship between Maria and Jemima represents, not a retreat from politics to the private sphere, but a model for cosmopolitics resistant to the local prejudices and limiting legal frameworks that frustrate human altruism. Wollstonecraft had long regarded moral independence as a prerequisite for virtue, and with the British system stacked against women, she questioned whether and how they could develop a patriotic mindset that might expand into love of humankind. Jemima is a case study in the early suppression and ultimate flowering of philanthropic sentiment. Drawn sympathetically but without the clichés of Magdalen caricature, she owes her ‘stern aspect of selfish independence’ to the deadening effects of poverty and brutality on human sympathies (91). She claims that compassion originates in ‘the grand support of life – a mother’s affection’, but as an illegitimate orphan, she had no loving parent or guardian and faced poverty and persecution from birth (110). In the absence of early bonds of sentiment, her self-interest predominated, and she ‘despised and preyed on the society by which she had been oppressed, and loved not her fellow-creatures, because she had never been beloved’ (91). When she tells Maria her life story, she makes a similar observation: “I was despised from my birth, and denied the chance of obtaining a footing for myself in society. Yes; I had not even the chance of being considered as a fellow-creature – yet all the people with whom I lived, brutalized as they were by the low cunning of trade, and the despicable shifts of poverty, were not without bowels, though they never yearned for me.” (110)

Jemima suffered, not because her fellow citizens lacked compassion (they were ‘not without bowels’), but because they were incapable of extending sympathy beyond their narrow circles. They did not care for Jemima because they conceptualised attachment in possessive terms, and she never ‘belonged’ to them. Having endured social alienation from the cradle, Jemima has no model or impetus for benevolence: ‘“Still what should induce me to be the champion for suffering humanity? –”’ she demands, ‘“Who ever risked any thing for me? – Who ever acknowledged me to be a fellow-creature?”’ (119). Her resulting self-interest, compounded by the very real threat of starvation, leads to the death of a pregnant woman who commits suicide when Jemima seduces the father of her child and convinces him to abandon her. Patriarchy and social injustice preclude philanthropy: women turn on each other to survive male domination and economic inequality.

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Attributing her misfortunes to the loss of her mother, Jemima implies that maternal tenderness exemplifies and cultivates the affective ­mechanisms essential for benevolence. Likewise, Maria accords special status to ‘a mother’s tenderness, a mother’s self-denial’ (85). However essentialist this portrait of maternal sentiment, it enables Wollstonecraft to examine the instinctive foundations of philanthropic feeling. Jemima’s cold exterior begins to thaw when she learns that Maria’s ‘child, only four months old, had been torn from her, even while she was discharging the tenderest maternal office’ (88). Sympathy stirs Jemima’s dormant compassion, which strengthens over time into feminist solidarity. Wollstonecraft’s view of maternal sentiment thus implicitly critiques that of Rousseau, for whom feminine sympathies were not so easily directed to philanthropic ends. Julie’s maternal tenderness makes her the beating heart of Clarens, but her self-sacrifice also catalyses her deathbed confession to Saint-Preux, which finally gives erotic love the upper-hand in its long-held conflict with social duty. By contrast, Wollstonecraft builds on her self-construction in Short Residence to depict Maria as a desiring subject in whom maternal sentiments and erotic love coexist and ignite philanthropic feeling. Jemima softens still further when she witnesses the burgeoning love between Maria and Darnford, participating in their temporary idyll where ‘every sense was harmonized to joy and social extacy’ (106). Moved by their ‘accents of tenderness’, she feels an unexpected ‘tear of pleasure trickling down her rugged cheeks’, and Maria responds with ‘eager solicitude’ suggestive of enhanced fellow-feeling (106). A far cry from the naval-gazing romantic derided in Rights of Woman, Maria is ‘a happy being wishing to impart to all nature its overflowing felicity’ (106). When Jemima confesses this is her ‘first tear’ shed from ‘social enjoyment’, she gives the doomed affair between Maria and Darnford a status beyond infatuation, confirming the socialising powers of their ostensibly exclusive and illusive form of love (106). With the same ‘irresistible warmth’ that initially inspires Darnford (120), Maria convinces Jemima to help trace her daughter, appealing to their shared understanding of the importance of early bonds of affection: ‘“With your heart, and such dreadful experience, can you lend your aid to deprive my babe of a mother’s tenderness, a mother’s care?”’ Maria promises to teach her daughter to consider Jemima ‘“her second mother”’, diminishing the significance of blood ties and putting their shared humanity and maternal sentiments before the social structures that once divided them (120). Johnson is one of many critics to emphasise the unprecedented feminist step Wollstonecraft took in establishing ‘fellowship’ between women ‘based on a rational recognition of shared complicity in a system of male privilege as well as on

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their shared s­ usceptibility to the “humanizing affections” regardless of class’.23 What these ‘humanizing affections’ also signify, though, is our capacity to meet alterity with the compassion conducive to disinterested benevolence (83). Putting altruism before the relative security of her first respectable employment, Jemima engineers an escape from the asylum. As she urges Maria to seize her chance at freedom, she reveals that, in her eyes, what is at stake is not simply economic security but the revival of her dormant love of humankind: ‘“I have perhaps no right now to expect the performance of your promise; but on you it depends to reconcile me with the human race”’ (174). When Jemima joins forces with Maria, she reinvests symbolically in an ethical framework that obligates her to care for others because we are all ‘part of a mighty whole’ (VI, 249). In one possible ending for the novel, this cosmopolitan outlook saves Maria’s life. Wollstonecraft’s notes suggest that Maria miscarries Darnford’s child when she discovers his infidelity. As she has already been told (perhaps falsely) that her infant daughter died, the miscarriage amounts to the loss of a second child. In the bleakest plan for the novel, Maria is driven to suicide by grief for her wayward lover, her dead children and her unrealisable humanitarian ideals. In the most detailed drafted passage, however, Wollstonecraft offers a more hopeful conclusion. Maria takes an overdose of laudanum, but her life is saved when Jemima, suspecting Venables lied about the death of Maria’s daughter, tracks the child down and reunites them: ‘“I snatched her from misery”, Jemima declares, “and (now she is alive again) would you leave her alone in the world, to endure what I have endured?”’ (I, 184). Jemima effectively enjoins Maria to jettison self-interest and commit to an ethic of caring. In the ‘agonizing struggle of her soul’ that follows, Maria passes from self-regarding despair to a reaffirmation of maternal selflessness: ‘“The conflict is over! I will live for my child!”’ (184). Whereas Julie’s exquisite sensibility ties maternal self-sacrifice to the confession of long-repressed erotic love, Maria’s maternal sentiments carry her to an altruistic resolution. As objects of desire and exchange bound to charm and pacify male overlords, women frequently refuse compassion to their female competitors. Through the solidarity between Maria and Jemima, however, Wollstonecraft depicts two ‘stateless’ women committing to an ethic of caring which, although confined to an enclosed sentimental community, crosses class boundaries, represents the human capacity for philanthropy and palliates wrongs perpetrated under a British legal system demonstrably at variance with the universal framework of justice. If Wollstonecraft seems to despair of imminent systemic reform, she constructs in this version of the denouement a philanthropic microcosm that

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gives Maria’s daughter and unborn child a chance to form the bonds of affection that foster cosmopolitan love of humankind.

Conclusions Engaging critically with a range of European writers, Wollstonecraft acquired and promoted the transnational perspective that informs her cosmopolitanism. Even in works without an obvious political dimension, it is striking how frequently she broadens the scope from particular and provincial to nationwide and global. Her interventionist translation and her travel writing are intent on enriching her native literary system with fresh moral insights and aesthetic innovations from foreign nations. Every work engages to some extent with Rousseau, whose influence manifests not only in her political, pedagogical and linguistic philosophy, but also in her intertextual self-portraiture and her showcasing of subjectivity and paradox. Her on-the-ground experience of the Revolution leaps from the pages of her later works. Above all, however, and regardless of the scene of writing, her cosmopolitanism manifests in an ethical framework that informs her entire oeuvre and evolves in response to her experiences of travel and expatriation. Evincing Price’s theological mentorship as well as her vexed appreciation of sentimental philosophy, Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan ethic rests on her belief in universal principles of justice perceptible through our interdependent capacities for reason, imagination and moral sentiment. These divine gifts are innate in every human subject but everywhere held back by unjust hierarchies and faulty systems of education. Her conviction that principles of justice apply universally, without reference to race, culture or creed, informs her arguments for the ultimate viability and inevitable spread of democratic politics. This is why she clings so fervently to her Revolutionary principles which, even after the Terror, she sees expanding the recognition of human rights embedded in the American constitution and the Déclaration des droits and slowly taking root in less developed European nations. Correspondingly, she denounces the many phenomena holding back the march of justice, attacking what she regards as Burke’s venal defence of property and blinkered love of country, as well as military expansionism, colonial violence, international commerce and the entire blood-soaked superstructure of the slave trade. As her vitriolic rhetoric often attests, Wollstonecraft had her fair share of prejudices, but she did recognise that violating human rights relies on representing racial and cultural

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others as innately inferior or even sub-human. Drawing persistent moral analogies between small-minded patriots, aggressive imperialists and unscrupulous money-makers, she depicts love of humankind as a casualty of the race to enrich self and homeland. From her first published work to the end of her career, Wollstonecraft rarely appeals to principles of justice without invoking the sentiment she variously calls ‘philanthropy’ (IV, 24), ‘goodwill to all the human race’ (44), ‘a more enlightened moral love of mankind’ (VI, 21) and ‘(ardent) affection for the (whole) human race’ (V, 65; VI, 346). These phrases express not only her faith in humankind’s benevolent potential, but also her recognition that implementing any framework of universal justice depends on people feeling their kinship with an imagined global community. In common with Rousseau – and, indeed, with modern theorists of cosmopolitanism like Nussbaum – she regards human subjects as both capable of altruism and unlikely to practise it, unless inspired by some up-close-and-personal object of love or imagined incarnation of a unique and reciprocal solidarity. In Wollstonecraft’s eyes, human beings are creatures of instinct with divine potential, and their psychology presents her with a fascinating paradox of frustrating limitations and exhilarating possibilities. On one hand, she frets constantly about the pitfalls of self-regarding or unleavened emotion. Laying claim to philosophical detachment, she nonetheless recoils with projective disgust from smitten lovers and cooing mothers, and laments the ferocious ‘enthusiasm’ that led to the Jacobin Terror. On the other hand, her calls for reason and transparency do not prevent her acknowledging the moral potential of intense and heartfelt emotion. From nursery to National Assembly, her authority figures compel and persuade in the absence of reason (although never at variance with it). Regardless of her mode of proceeding, however, Wollstonecraft consistently distinguishes philanthropic moral sentiments from ‘selfish passions’ and ‘narrow affections’. Unrefined by the interdependent faculties of reason and imagination, these latter manifest in possessiveness and attempts to dominate and control. Wollstonecraft advocates political and pedagogical reform, not to diminish human sympathies, but to root out these narcissistic tendencies. This process begins with her holistic model of day-school education, which strives to associate the instinctive bonds of childhood with affectionate mentorship in an egalitarian community of equals. Mentorship recedes, however, as children grow in moral independence, their selfish passions transformed into eudaimonistic emotions conducive to philanthropy. Wollstonecraft’s Rousseauvian textual personae highlight the moral potential of compassion to expand beyond the local and particular

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into philanthropic sentiments. Just as she reworked his legislator to construct in Mrs Mason a female authority figure who cultivates disinterested benevolence, so she transforms the Solitary Walker into a female cosmopolitan subject whose intense emotions ignite a broader love of humankind. Her personae enact a cosmopolitan ethic of caring ­impervious to the boundaries of class and culture. This ethic of caring supports the principles of justice but increasingly stems either from non-rational modes of cognition, such as reverie, or from interconnected erotic and maternal sentiments. Whereas there is no example in Wollstonecraft’s earlier works of erotic fulfilment coexisting with philanthropy, by the end of her life she was according ever greater significance to affective responses often thought to challenge our sense of responsibility to the global collective. Despite the pervasiveness of her cosmopolitan ethic, her writing at times performs the difficulty of perceiving ‘full and equal humanity’ across political, cultural, racial or social divides, and the ease with which we misrepresent, belittle or aestheticize alterity. Like Rousseau, Wollstonecraft flaunts the contingency and subjectivity of her texts. Scrutinising his complex thought, she unearths both its cosmopolitan and nationalist elements and deploys them strategically to reflect on the paradoxes of her ethical position. At the same time, her later sentimental personae model imaginative participation in the lives of others and critical engagement with the causes of their suffering. Her self-constructions thus perform the human capacity to expand our communities of sympathy beyond family and tribe, faction and nation. Wollstonecraft consistently regards the principles of political justice as a universal good but realises that, to take root across the globe, they need to adapt to the native soil of individual nations. This realisation is complicated by her ongoing desire to square her every observation with the perfectibilist teleology structuring so much of her thought and affirming her faith in humankind’s progress to universal benevolence. She is nonetheless moved by her experiences on the road to disrupt the cultural hierarchies she had once taken for granted. The Rousseauvian link she makes in her earlier works between authenticity and moral integrity resurfaces in her distaste for hegemonic cultural productions. As she faces into an era of nationalist entrenchment, she advocates translation and cross-fertilisation between literary systems, but she also suggests that fruitful transnational exchanges take place where local and vernacular cultures have space and encouragement to flourish. This growing emphasis on diversity sets Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan ethic apart from the universalist Enlightenment stereotype, but it also makes room for a self-reflexive form of patriotism anathema to imperialist

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nation-building and surely inspirational to the second generation of Romantic writers.24 If Wollstonecraft rejected unthinking allegiance to her homeland, she could nonetheless imagine an ardent but distinctively cosmopolitan love of country inspired by an equally ardent love of humankind.

Notes

Acknowledgements 1. William Godwin, ‘To [Thomas] Holcroft, 20 September, 1797’, in The Letters of William Godwin: Volume 1: 1778–1797, ed. by Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 237.

Introduction 1. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989), I, 49. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text. 2. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas [1938], in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ and ‘Three Guineas’, ed. by Michèle Barrett (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 234. 3. Ibid., p. 205. 4. Ibid., p. 234. 5. For an excellent summary of these developments, see Gillian Dow, ‘Translation, Cross-Channel Exchanges and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century’, Literature Compass, 11.11 (November 2014), pp.  691–702. See also: Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever eds., The Literary Channel: The Inter-national Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 6. See Hilary Brown  and  Gillian Dow, eds.  Readers, Writers, Salonnières: Female Networks in Europe 1700–1900 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011); Anke Gilleir,  Alicia C. Montoya and  Suzan van Dijk, eds.  Women Writing Back/Writing Women Back: Transnational Perspectives from the Late Middle Ages to the Dawn of the Modern Era  (Leiden: Brill,  2010); Gillian Dow, ed.  Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers ­1700–1900 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007). 7. Galin Tihanov, ‘Cosmopolitanism in the Discursive Landscape of Modernity: Two Enlightenment Articulations’, in Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism, ed. by David Adams and Galin Tihanov (Oxford: Legenda, 2011), pp. 133–52 (p. 135).

216    Mary Wollstonecraft 8. Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, in The Cosmopolitanism Reader, ed. by Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), pp. 1–14 (p. 1). 9. Sylvana Tomaselli, Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), p. 65. 10. For an analysis of the evolving meaning of the term ‘cosmopolitan’ in ­eighteenth-century Europe, see Ingvild Hagen Kjørholt, ‘Appropriations of the  Cosmopolitan in Early Modern French Literature’, Forum for Modern Languages Studies, 51.3 (2015), pp. 287–303 (pp. 294–300). 11. See Thomas J. Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought: Its Form and Function in the Ideas of Franklin, Hume, and Voltaire, 1694–1790 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), pp. xi–xiii, 1–24; Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), pp. 1–47; Jonathan Israel, ‘Preface’, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. v–vii. 12. Newman, pp. 46, 50. 13. See Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 2. 14. Schlereth, p. 47. 15. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 [1992], 2nd paperback ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 16. Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: the Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 1–3. 17. See Newman, pp. 14–17, 71–7. 18. See Newman, p. 146; Colley, pp. 24–5. 19. Esther Wohlgemut, Romantic Cosmopolitanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 2. See also: Michael Scrivener, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), p. 1; Margaret C. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 135. 20. Jacob, p. 122. 21. Ibid., pp. 122–3. 22. Janet Polasky, Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in  the  Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 9–10. 23. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Collected Letters [2003], ed. by Janet Todd (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 140. 24. Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, in Immanuel Kant: Political Writings [1970], ed. by H. S. Reiss, trans. by H. B. Nisbet, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 41. 25. For a useful summary of Johnson’s role in Wollstonecraft’s success as a professional writer, see David Fallon, ‘Joseph Johnson’, in Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, ed. by Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 29–37.

Notes    217 26. See Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979), pp. 84–8, 135–41; Helen Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 91–5; John Bugg, ‘Introduction’, in The Joseph Johnson Letterbook, ed. by John Bugg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. xix–lxii ­(pp. xlvii–li); Angela Esterhammer, ‘Continental Literature, Translation, and the Johnson Circle’, Wordsworth Circle, 33.3 (Summer, 2002), pp. 101–4. According to Esterhammer, Johnson’s ‘choices of Continental books to publish in English translation […] show some distinctive patterns that are independent of the most popular trends’ (p. 101). 27. Thomas Christie, ‘Advertisement’, The Analytical Review, or History of Literature, Domestic and Foreign, on an Enlarged Plan, 1 (1798), pp. i–vi (p. v). 28. See Wollstonecraft, Works, VII, 190, 226, 282, 342, 346, 418, 484. 29. Gary Kelly, p. 78. 30. See Ian Dyck, ‘Local Attachments, National Identities and World Citizenship in the Thought of Thomas Paine’, History Workshop Journal, 35 (1993), pp. 117–35; Thomas C. Walker, ‘The Forgotten Prophet: Tom Paine’s Cosmopolitanism and International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, 44 (2000), pp. 51–72; Jason D. Solinger, ‘Thomas Paine’s Continental Mind’, Early American Literature, 45.3 (2010), pp.  593–617; Robert Lamb, ‘The Liberal Cosmopolitanism of Thomas Paine’, The Journal of Politics, 76.3 (2014), pp. 636–48. 31. Thomas Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. by Philip S. Foner, 2 vols (New York: The Citadel Press, 1945), I, 146. 32. Ibid., II, 256. 33. Adriana Craciun, British Romantic Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 1. Even beyond these radical circles, many female-authored works evince a cosmopolitan consciousness which promotes interracial and intercultural contact as well as subtly questioning the British imperialist project. See Anne K. Mellor, ‘Embodied Cosmopolitanism and the British Romantic Woman Writer’, European Romantic Review, 17.3 (2006), pp. 289–300. 34. Richard Holmes, ‘The Feminist and the Philosopher: A Love Story’ [1987], in Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer [2000] (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), pp. 199–266 (p. 234). 35. See Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, ‘Introduction: Some Answers to the Question: “What is Postcolonial Enlightenment?”’, in The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. by Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 1–33; Robert Fine, ‘Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism: Western or Universal?’, Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism, ed. by Adams and Tihanov, pp. 153–69. 36. On the class-based tensions in Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, see Schlereth, pp. 11–15. For postcolonialist critiques, see Edward W. Said, Orientalism [1978] (London: Penguin, 2003); Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

218    Mary Wollstonecraft Press, 1997); Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 37. Scrivener, p. 87. 38. Joyce Zonana, ‘The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre’, Signs, 18.3 (Spring 1993), pp. 592–617 (pp. 594, 599). 39. Samara Anne Cahill, ‘Powers of the Soul: Wollstonecraft, Islam, and Historical Progress’, Assuming Gender, 1.2 (2010), pp. 22–43 (p. 23). 40. Eileen Hunt Botting, Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 11, 159. 41. See Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty eds., Cosmopolitanism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), especially the editors’ introduction, pp. 1–14; Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture [1994], 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004). 42. See Brennan. 43. See Tihanov, pp. 134–5; David A. Hollinger, ‘Not Universalists, Not Pluralists: The New Cosmopolitans Find Their Own Way’, in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, ed. by Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 227–39 (p. 231); Thomas Bender, ‘The Cosmopolitan Experience and Its Uses’, Cosmopolitanisms, ed. by Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta (New York: New York University Press, 2017) pp. 116–26 (p. 117); Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’ [1997], Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 91–114 (p. 94). 44. Daniel Carey and Sven Trakulhun, ‘Universalism, Diversity, and the Postcolonial Enlightenment’, in The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. by Carey and Festa, pp. 240–80 (p. 279). 45. Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 77. 46. Hunt Botting, Wollstonecraft, Mill and Women’s Human Rights, p. 164. 47. For an exception to this rule, see Isabelle  Bour,  ‘Mary Wollstonecraft as Historian in  An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect it has Produced in Europe (1794)’, Études Épistémè, 17 (2010) DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ episteme.668 [accessed 12 August 2020]. 48. Vivien Jones, ‘Femininity, Nationalism and Romanticism: The Politics of Gender in the Revolution Controversy’, History of European Ideas, 16.1–3 (1993), pp. 299–305 (p. 301); Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘Introduction’, in ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Men’ with ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ and ‘Hints’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. ix–xxix (p. xvi). 49. See Richard Vernon, Friends, Citizens, Strangers: Essays on Where We Belong (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), ch. 3; Eileen Hunt Botting, Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006); Scrivener, chs. 3–4.

Notes    219 50. Enit Karafili Steiner, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Love of Mankind” and Cosmopolitan Suffering in Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark’, Studies in Romanticism, 58 (Spring 2019), pp. 3–26 (p. 5). 51. Tomaselli, Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics, p. 175. 52. Scrivener, p. 202. 53. Vernon, p. 58. 54. Ibid., p. 71. 55. Karafili Steiner, p. 5. 56. See Hunt Botting, Family Feuds, p. 147. 57. Hunt Botting, Wollstonecraft, Mill and Women’s Human Rights, p. 12. 58. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 263. Taken together, Wollstonecraft’s published works and private letters confirm through quotation, paraphrase or allusion her acquaintance with: Discours sur les sciences et les arts (Discourse on the Arts and Sciences) (1750); Discours sur l’origine et le fondement de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality) (1754); Lettre à D’Alembert sur les spectacles (Letter to D’Alembert) (1758); Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or The New Heloise) (1761); Émile, ou de l’Éducation (Emile, or On Education) (1762); Du contrat social (The Social Contract) (1762); Les Confessions (Confessions) (1782);  Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Reveries of a Solitary Walker) (1782). Through her reading of Germaine de Staël’s Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractere de J. J. Rousseau (1788), if not directly, she would have been familiar with Les solitaires (The Solitaries) (1780). Todd and Butler also attribute to Wollstonecraft a review of Charles Burney’s General History of Music (1789), which refers to Rousseau’s musical theory, and a review of the second part of the Confessions which refers to his one-act opera Le Devin du Village (1752) and Lettres de la Montagne (Letters from the Mountain) (1764) (VII, 211, 232, 234). Both reviews are signed ‘M’. 59. Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country [1789], in Richard Price: Political Writings, ed. by D. O. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 180. 60. See William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ [1798], in ‘A Short Residence in Sweden’ and ‘Memoirs of The Author of “The Rights of Woman”’, ed. by Richard Holmes (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 229; P. B. Shelley, cited in Valentina Varinelli, ‘“Accents of an Unknown Land”: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Writings in Italian’, European Romantic Review, 30.3 (2019), pp. 255–63 (p. 260). Shelley comments that ‘It is singular […] that the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft should have been translated and universally read in France and Germany, long after the bigotry of faction had stifled them in our own country’. 61. See Hunt Botting, Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights, p. 83. 62. Hunt Botting, Family Feuds, pp. 168, 171. 63. See Martina Reuter, ‘“Like a Fanciful Kind of Half Being”: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Criticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, Hypatia, 29.4 (Fall 2014), pp. 925–41 (p. 928).

220    Mary Wollstonecraft 64. See Susan Khin Zaw, ‘The Reasonable Heart: Mary Wollstonecraft’s View of the Relation between Reason and Feeling in Morality, Moral Psychology, and Moral Development’, Hypatia, 13.1 (Winter 1998), pp. 78–117 (p. 104); Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch. 2; Karen Green, ‘The Passions and the Imagination in Wollstonecraft’s Theory of Moral Judgement’, Utilitas, 9.3 (1997), pp. 271–90; Martina Reuter, ‘The Role of the Passions in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Notion of Virtue’, in The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 50–66. 65. Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 21. See also Martina Reuter, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft on the imagination’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 25.6 (2017), pp. 1138–60. 66. Khin Zaw, p. 108. See also Reuter, ‘“Like a Fanciful Kind of Half Being”’, pp. 929–30. 67. Price, p. 181. 68. Ibid., p. 191. 69. Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 3. 70. Wohlgemut, p. 24. 71. Hunt Botting, Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights, pp. 87–8. 72. Kok-Chor Tan, Justice Without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Patriotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.  1. See Tan, ch. 3; Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice [2009] (London: Penguin, 2010), chs.17–18; Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’ [1994], in For love of country? [1996], ed. by Joshua Cohen (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002), pp. 2–17. 73. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 5. 74. Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, pp. 5, 7. 75. Price, p. 180. 76. See William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice [1793], ed. by Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 192–4. 77. Vernon, p. 61. 78. Price, p. 180. 79. Ibid., p. 178. 80. Ibid., p. 181. 81. Hunt Botting, Family Feuds, p. 169. 82. Lena Halldenius, Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism: Independence, Rights and the Experience of Unfreedom [2015] (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 81. 83. Ibid., p. 81. 84. For a detailed analysis of this passage, see Hunt Botting, Family Feuds, pp. 168–9.

Notes    221 85. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790], ed. by Conor Cruise O’Brien, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 89–90, 160. 86. See Richard Rorty, ‘Justice as a Larger Loyalty’, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. by Cheah and Robbins, pp. 45–58; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [1983], revised and extended ed. (London: Verso, 2006), pp. 53, 141–2. 87. Amanda Anderson, p. 83. 88. Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, p. 15. 89. Ibid., p. 15. 90. See Tan, p. 135. 91. Martha C. Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice [2013], paperback ed. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 113. 92. Ibid., p. 157. 93. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble But Flawed Ideal (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), p. 210. 94. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, pp. 182–6. 95. Halldenius, p. 114. 96. Hunt Botting, Family Feuds, p. 147. 97. Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, p. 219. 98. Hunt Botting, Family Feuds, p. 9. 99. Martina Reuter, ‘The Role of the Passions in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Notion of Virtue’, p. 58. 100. For a comprehensive examination of Wollstonecraft’s engagement with Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, see Daniel I. O’Neill, The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), chs. 3, 5, 7. See also: Carol Kay, ‘Canon, ideology, and gender: Mary Wollstonecraft’s critique of Adam Smith’, New Political Science, 7.1 (1986), pp. 63–76; Anna Neill, ‘Civilization and the rights of woman: liberty and captivity in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft’, Women’s Writing, 8.1 (2001), pp. 99–118 (pp. 103–6); Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 173–200. For a literary analysis of Wollstonecraft’s changing response to the culture and discourse of sensibility, see Syndy Macmillen Conger, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1994). 101. Khin Zaw, p. 108. See Henri Laboucheix, Richard Price as moral philosopher and political theorist, trans. by Sylvia and David Raphael (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1982), p. 43. Laboucheix argues that Price ‘wanted to erect a system which rested only on reason and which was universal’. 102. See Michael L. Frazer, The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chs. 2–4.

222    Mary Wollstonecraft 103. On the connection Price makes between ‘heart and reason’, see Khin Zaw, p. 108. 104. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, p. 108. 105. Burke, p. 182. 106. See Virginia Sapiro, ‘Wollstonecraft, Feminism, and Democracy: “Being Bastilled”’, in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Maria J. Falco (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), pp. 33–45 (p. 35). 107. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Rêveries du Promeneur solitaire [1782], ed. by S. de Sacy (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 115; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva. Part the First. To which are added, The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, 2nd ed., 2 vols (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1790), II, 301. 108. Rousseau distinguishes between amour de soi, the primitive instinct for self-preservation, and amour-propre, self-love developed in a social context and dependent on the opinions of others. 109. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, ou de l’Éducation [1762], ed. by Charles Wirz and Pierre Burgelin (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 383; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia; or, a New System of Education, trans. by William Kenrick, 4 vols (London: printed by H. Baldwin; sold by T. Becket and R. Baldwin, 1783), II, 208. 110. See Helena Rosenblatt, ‘Rousseau, the Anticosmopolitan?’, Daedalus, 137.3 (Summer, 2008), pp. 59–67. One can read Rousseau’s oeuvre as ‘one long and elaborate diatribe against the rise of cosmopolitanism in early modern Europe’ (Rosenblatt, p. 60), but elsewhere he makes powerful statements in its favour. See also Jason Neidleman, ‘Rousseau’s Rediscovered Communion des Coeurs: Cosmopolitanism in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker’, Political Studies, 60 (2012), pp. 76–94; Matthew D. Mendham, ‘Gentle Savages and Fierce Citizens against Civilization: Unraveling Rousseau’s Paradoxes’, American Journal of Political Science, 55.1 (January 2011), pp. 170–87. 111. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’économie politique [1755], in Discours sur l’économie politique et autres textes, ed. by Barbara de Negroni (Paris: Flammarion, 2012), p. 72. My translation. 112. See Rousseau, Emile, p. 85; Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia, I, 8. 113. Neidleman, p. 79. 114. Ibid., pp. 77–9. See also Rosenblatt, p. 67; Mendham, p. 172. 115. See Hunt Botting, Family Feuds, p. 209. Hunt Botting argues that Burke, Rousseau and Wollstonecraft are comparable in their belief that ‘there is an inverse relationship between the size of a social group or locale and its ability to generate the emotional attachments necessary for the habitual practice of the social virtues’. 116. Martha C. Nussbaumn, ‘Teaching Patriotism: Love and Critical Freedom’, The University of Chicago Law Review, 79.1 (Winter 2012), pp. 215–51 (p. 218). 117. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 380. 118. Ibid., p. 380. 119. See Gillian Dow, ‘The good sense of British readers has encouraged the translation of the whole: les traductions anglaises des œuvres de Mme de

Notes    223 Genlis dans les années 1780’, in La Traduction des genres non-­romanesques au XVIIIe siècle, ed. by Annie Cointre and Annie Rivara (Metz: Centre d’études de la traduction, 2003), pp. 285–97; Gillian Dow, ‘The British Reception of Madame de Genlis’s Writings for Children: Plays and Tales of Instruction and Delight’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29 (2006), pp. 367–81; Donelle Ruwe, ‘The British Reception of Genlis’s Adèle et Théodore, Preceptive Fiction and the Professionalization of Handmade Literacies’, Women’s Writing, 25.1 (2018), pp. 5–20 (p. 5). 120. See Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. by M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 23. 121. Wohlgemut, pp. 72, 73.

Chapter 1  ‘The Most Sublime Virtues’: Wollstonecraft’s Philanthropic Personae  1. See Laura Kirkley, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, in Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, ed. by Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen, pp. 155–63 (p. 161).  2. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 114. Émile was translated into English by William Kenrick in 1762. Kenrick changed the title to Emilius and Sophia, so Wollstonecraft’s reference to ‘Emile’ suggests that she was reading the French version. Conversely, in Short Residence her prose echoes the English translation of Rousseau’s Reveries. With this in mind, I have chosen to supply eighteenth-century English versions of quoted French material so that readers can see the impact of translation on Wollstonecraft’s writing practices.  3. Michèle Crogiez, Rousseau et le paradoxe (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997), p. 30. My translation. In Ancient Greece, a paradox was a polemical stance opposed to the orthodox view.   4. See Kirkley, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, p. 156.  5. Christopher Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The “Confessions” as Political Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 46–7; see also Eugene L. Stelzig, The Romantic Subject in Autobiography: Rousseau and Goethe (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), pp. 17–18.  6. For an analysis of the gender politics of Wollstonecraft’s textual selfconstruction, see Laura Kirkley, ‘Elements of the Other’, in Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers 1700–1900, ed. by Gillian Dow (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 83–98 (p. 91).   7. See Ellen Moers, Literary Women [1963], paperback ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 228; Mitzi Myers, ‘Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children’s Books’, Children’s Literature 14 (1986), pp. 31–59 (pp. 39–53); Penny Brown, ‘“Candidates for my friendship” or How Madame de Genlis and Mary Wollstonecraft Sought to Regulate the Affections and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness’, New Comparison, 20 (1995), pp. 46–60 (p. 51); Alan Richardson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft on Education’, in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Claudia L. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 24–41 (pp. 30–1); Rebecca Davies, Written Maternal Authority and

224    Mary Wollstonecraft Eighteenth-Century Education in Britain: Educating by the Book (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 71–3.  8. Adèle et Théodore was translated into English in 1783. See StéphanieFélicité de Genlis, Adelaide and Theodore, or Letters on Education [1783], ed. by Gillian Dow (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007).  9. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 98. Original Stories is also influenced by Genlis’s Les Veillées du château [Tales of the Castle] (1784). Translated extracts in Wollstonecraft’s anthology, The Female Reader (1789), show that she had also read Théâtre à l’usage des jeunes personnes (Theatre for the Use of Young Persons) (1781), a collection of educational playlets. For more on Wollstonecraft’s debt to Genlis, see Myers, ‘Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers’, pp. 38–9, 49–50; Penny Brown. 10. Except as part of expensive multi-volume complete works, there were no English translations of Du contrat social published in Britain or Ireland from 1764 until 1791, when two separate editions appeared: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, An Inquiry into the Nature of the Social Contract; or Principles of Political Right. Translated from the French of John James Rousseau (London: G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1791) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Treatise on the Social Compact; or The Principles of Politic Law. By J. J. Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva (London: J. Murray, 1791). The latter ­reissues the 1764 translation published in London by T. Becket and P.A. de Hondt. Wollstonecraft could have read the original French, of course, but it is more likely that she first encountered the legislator figure through her reading of Emile and Julie, or The New Heloise (1761), which were widely available in Britain and Ireland; she had undoubtedly read both by 1788. By the time she issued the third edition of Original Stories in 1796, she had definitely read The Social Contract. None of her edits respond to it, perhaps because she had already created an identifiable legislator-pedagogue. 11. See Nussbaum, ‘Teaching Patriotism’, p. 222; Judith N. Shklar, ‘Rousseau’s Images of Authority (Especially in La Nouvelle Héloïse)’, in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. by Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 154–92 (pp. 155–6). 12. Nussbaum, ‘Teaching Patriotism’, p. 234. 13. Ibid., p. 222. 14. Ibid., p. 234. 15. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 378. 16. Price, p. 181; Nussbaum, ‘Teaching Patriotism’, p. 232. 17. Nussbaum, ‘Teaching Patriotism’, pp. 246, 247. 18. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse [1761], ed. by Michel Launay (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1967), p. 219. My translation. William Kenrick’s English translation removes the references to sublimity and reads: ‘the practice of virtue elevates and improves [the mind]’. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eloisa: or, a series of original letters collected and published by Mr. J.-J. Rousseau [1761], trans. by William Kenrick, 4 vols (London: printed by H. Baldwin; sold by R. Baldwin and T. Becket, 1784), II, 151. 19. James F. Jones Jr, La Nouvelle Héloïse: Rousseau and Utopia (Geneva: Droz, 1977), p. 76.

Notes    225 20. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 379. 21. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social [1762], ed. by Pierre Burgelin (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), ch.VII. 22. See James F. Jones Jr, p. 51. 23. See English Showalter Jr, The Evolution of the French Novel, 1641–1782 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 319. Showalter claims that coercive control in Rousseau’s utopias leads to the willing subsumption of individual egos into a ‘new spirit, be it patriotic fervor, esprit de corps, or mob hysteria’. 24. Ingrid Makus, ‘The Politics of “Feminine Concealment” and “Masculine Openness” in Rousseau’, in Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. by Lynda Lange (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), pp. 187–211 (p. 201). 25. Rousseau, Du contrat social, p. 68. My translation. In the Robinson edition, ‘grand âme’ is translated as ‘magnanimous and comprehensive mind’ (pp.  118–19); in the Murray edition, ‘grand âme’ is translated as ‘comprehensive genius’ (p. 67). 26. Rousseau, Émile, p. 198; Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia, I, 207. 27. Rousseau, Du contrat social, p. 44; Rousseau, A Treatise on the Social Compact, p. 29. I cite the Murray edition because the Robinson edition distorts Rousseau’s meaning, stating simply that it is ‘freedom to obey the laws’ (p. 51). 28. See Lori J. Marso, ‘Rousseau’s Subversive Women’, in Feminist Inter­ pretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. by Lange, pp. 245–76 (pp. 254–5). 29. Rousseau, Emile, p. 693; Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia, IV, 150. 30. See Rosenblatt, p. 65. 31. See Halldenius, p. 19. 32. Ibid., p. 21. 33. Ibid., p. 22. 34. Bonnie Arden Robb, Félicité de Genlis: Motherhood in the Margins (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), p. 37. 35. Moers, p. 214. 36. See Mary Seidman Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 252–5. 37. See Robb, pp. 62–3. 38. Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, Adèle et Théodore, ou Lettres sur l’éducation contenant tous les principes relatifs aux trois différents plans d’éducation des Princes et des jeunes personnes de l’un et l’autre sexe [1782], ed. by Isabelle Brouard-Arends (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006), p. 137; Genlis, Adelaide and Theodore, p. 67. 39. Genlis, Adèle et Théodore, p. 246; Genlis, Adelaide and Theodore, p. 160–1. 40. Didier Masseau, ‘Pouvoir éducatif et vertige de la programmation dans Adèle et Théodore et quelques autres ouvrages’, in Madame de Genlis: Littérature et éducation, ed. by François Bessire and Martine Reid (MontSaint-Aignan: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2008), pp. 27–40 (p. 39). 41. Genlis, Adèle et Théodore, p. 154. 42. Genlis, Adelaide and Theodore, pp. 81–2.

226    Mary Wollstonecraft 43. See Trouille, p. 253. 44. Rousseau, Julie, p. 368; Rousseau, Eloisa, III, 158. 45. Rousseau, Julie, p. 368; Rousseau, Eloisa, III, 159. 46. See James F. Jones Jr (pp. 52–3) for further analysis of this aspect of Wolmar. 47. Rousseau, Julie, p. 260; Rousseau, Eloisa, II, 231. 48. Rousseau, Julie, p. 365; Rousseau, Eloisa, III, 151. 49. In his frontispiece to the second edition of 1791, William Blake emphasises Mrs Mason’s divine aspect. Both children are wearing hats tilted at an angle to look like haloes, and one has her hands folded across her chest to form a cross. Mrs Mason stands between them in a Christ-like pose, her arms outstretched and her face serene. See Myers, ‘Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers’, pp. 50–1. 50. See Christophe Martin, ‘Sur l’éducation négative chez Mme de Genlis (Adèle et Théodore, Zélie ou l’Ingénue) in Madame de Genlis: Littérature et éducation, ed. by Bessire and Reid, pp. 51–65 (pp. 56–7); Machteld de Poortere, The Philosophical and Literary Ideas of Mme de Staël and Mme de Genlis, trans. by John Lavash (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), p. 34. See also Trouille, who demonstrates that Genlis rejected Rousseau’s belief in women’s limited intellect, but ‘remained fairly traditional in her view of woman’s proper role’ (pp. 246–8). 51. Dow observes a similar endorsement of the established order in Tales of the Castle. See Dow, ‘The British Reception of Genlis’s Writings for Children’, pp. 371–3. 52. Genlis, Adèle et Théodore, p. 75; Genlis, Adelaide and Theodore, p. 17. 53. ‘If women are by nature inferior to men, their virtues must be the same in quality, if not in degree, or virtue is a relative idea; consequently, their conduct should be founded on the same principles, and have the same aim’ (V, 94–5). 54. See Halldenius, p. 29. 55. Ibid., p. 31. 56. Ibid., p. 31. 57. Hunt Botting, Family Feuds, p. 139. 58. Using a French source text, Wollstonecraft translated and abridged Johann Casper Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (1775–1778) (See Godwin, Memoirs, p. 226). The unabridged English version was Essays on Physiognomy: Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind, trans. by Henry Hunter, 3 vols (London: John Murray; H. Hunter; T. Holloway, 1789–98). The Cave of Fancy suggests that Wollstonecraft gave credence to Lavater’s claim that one could trace an individual’s character in the lines of their face. 59. Moers, p. 228. 60. Mitzi Myers, ‘Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers’, p. 34. 61. See Davies, pp. 74–5. 62. Khin Zaw, p. 106. 63. See Anne Markey, ‘The English governess, her wild Irish pupil, and her wandering daughter: Migration and maternal absence in Georgian chil-

Notes    227 dren’s fiction’, Eighteenth-century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, 25 (2010), pp.  161–76. Markey misreads this phrase as ‘from another country’, concluding that Mrs Mason alerts the children to ‘the opportunities for benevolence provided by migration’ (p. 167). Her misreading is significant, however, because it arises from the many ‘non-English setting[s]’ of Original Stories (p. 168). These settings advance the theme of benevolence in a transnational context that reflects – as Markey skilfully demonstrates – Wollstonecraft’s experiences in colonial Ireland. 64. Iris Marion Young, ‘Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship’ [1989], in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. by Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 256–72 (p. 258). 65. Ibid., p. 258. 66. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 263. 67. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 379. 68. James F. Jones Jr, p. 66. See also: Christopher Brooke, ‘Isaiah Berlin and the Origins of the “Totalitarian” Rousseau’, in Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment, ed. by Laurence Brockliss and Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 89–98; Christophe Salvat, ‘From Literature to Politics: How Rousseau Has Come to Symbolize Totalitarianism’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas, 6.11 (2017) DOI: https://doi.org/10.13135/2280-8574/2094 [accessed: 5 July 2021]. 69. Margaret Ogrodnick, Instinct and Intimacy: Political Philosophy and Autobiography in Rousseau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 7. 70. Rousseau, Julie, p. 275; Rousseau, Eloisa, II, 264. 71. See Kirkley, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, pp. 159–60. 72. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, pp. 58, 60. 73. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, p. 108; Barbara Taylor, ‘The religious foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Johnson, pp. 99–118 (p. 113). 74. Taylor, ‘The religious foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism’, p. 113. 75. See Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, pp. 110–11. 76. John Milton, Paradise Lost [2nd ed. 1674], ed. by Gordon Teskey (New York: Norton, 2020), p. 198. 77. Rousseau, Julie, p. 157; Rousseau, Eloisa, II, 14. 78. Rousseau, Julie, p. 528; Rousseau, Eloisa, IV, 182. 79. See James F. Jones Jr, pp. 80–2; Marso, p. 270; Ildiko Csengei, Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 157; Ekaterina R. Alexandrova, ‘“This Salutary Remedy”: Female Suicide and the Novel as Pharmakon in Riccoboni’s Histoire de M. Le Marquis de Cressy and Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse’, in Death Representations in Literature: Forms and Theories, ed. by Adriana Teodorescu (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2015), pp. 97–116 (pp. 108–9). 80. Susan Moller Okin, ‘The Fate of Rousseau’s Heroines’, in Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. by Lange, pp. 89–112 (p. 96).

228    Mary Wollstonecraft 81. Wollstonecraft returns to this idea in Wrongs of Woman, connecting the heroine’s capacity for love with her creative imagination: ‘What a creative power has an affectionate heart! There are beings who cannot live without loving, as poets love; and who feel the electric spark of genius, wherever it awakens sentiments or grace’ (I, 93). 82. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, p. 112. 83. Kari E. Lokke, ‘The Figure of the Hermit in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head’, The Wordsworth Circle, 39.1–2 (Winter 2008), pp. 38–43 (p. 40). 84. Taylor distinguishes between these terms, but Julie Carlson argues that Wollstonecraft uses them more or less synonymously. See Julie Carlson, ‘Fancy’s History’, European Romantic Review, 14.2 (2003), pp. 163–76 (pp. 166–7). 85. Lokke, p. 40. 86. Carlson, p. 168. 87. See Kirkley, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, p. 161. 88. Julie Kipp, Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 26, 27. 89. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, p. 115.

Chapter 2  ‘Original Spirit’: Translating the Maternal Educator  1. See André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame [1992] (London: Routledge, 2007).   2. Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler, ‘Introduction’, in Translation and Power, ed. by Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), pp. xi–xxviii (p. xvi).   3. See Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 9–12.   4. See Julie Candler Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600–1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 142–3.   5. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition: In a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison (London: A. Millar; R. and J. Dodsley, 1759), p. 10.   6. Ibid., p. 10.   7. Alexander Fraser Tytler (Lord Woodhouselee), Essays on the Principles of Translation [1791] 2nd ed. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies; Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1797), p. 81.   8. Ibid., p. 82.   9. Ibid., p. 202. 10. Ibid., p. 203. 11. See Barbara Godard, ‘The Translator as Ventriloquist’,  Prism International, 20.3 (Spring 1982), pp. 35–6. 12. Barbara Godard, ‘Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation’, in Translation, History & Culture, ed. by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (London: Pinter, 1990), pp. 87–96 (p. 94). 13. See Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, Re-Belle et Infidèle. La Traduction comme pratique de réécriture au féminine/The Body Bilingual. Translation

Notes    229 as a Rewriting in the Feminine (Montréal: Les éditions de remue-ménage/ Women’s Press, 1991); Luise von Flotow, Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’ (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing; Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1997). 14. Godard, ‘Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation’, p. 94. 15. Simon, pp. 45–6. 16. Candler Hayes, pp. 142–4. 17. See Josephine Grieder, Translations of French Sentimental Prose Fiction in Late Eighteenth-Century England: the History of a Literary Vogue (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975), p. 40. 18. See Jennifer Wallace, ‘Confined and Exposed: Elizabeth Carter’s Classical Translations’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 22.2 (Autumn 2003), pp. 315–34 (pp. 322–5). 19. Elizabeth Carter, ‘Introduction’, in All the Works of Epictetus, Which are now Extant; consisting of His Discourses, preserved by Arrian, in Four Books, The Enchiridion, and Fragments, trans. by Elizabeth Carter, 4 vols (London: Printed by S. Richardson for A. Millar, J. Richardson and R. and J. Dodsley, 1758), I, i–xxxiv (xxxiv). 20. Elizabeth Griffith, ‘Introduction’, in Memoirs of Ninon de l’Enclos, With her Letters to M. de St-Evremond and to the Marquis de Sévigné, trans. by Elizabeth Griffith, 2 vols (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1761), I,­ ix–xii (xii). For a fuller discussion of this translation, see Candler Hayes, pp. 157–61. 21. Elizabeth Inchbald, ‘Preface’, in Lovers’ Vows, trans. by Elizabeth Inchbald (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798), pp. i–iv (p. ii). 22. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 151. 23. Ibid., p. 152. 24. Jacques Necker, De l’importance des opinions religieuses (Paris: Hôtel de Thou, 1788), p. 42. My translation in parentheses. 25. For an analysis of the gender politics of Wollstonecraft’s translations, see Laura Kirkley, ‘Elements of the other: Mary Wollstonecraft and translation’. 26. There is no evidence that Wollstonecraft corresponded with Cambon, but there was a translational exchange: Cambon published a Dutch version of Original Stories entitled Maria en Carolina, of de Opvoeding door Voorbeelden (n.d.). 27. Godwin, Memoirs, p. 226. 28. Ibid., p. 226. 29. Bonnie Latimer, ‘Leaving Little to the Imagination: The Mechanics of Didacticism in Two Children’s Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Novels’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 33.2 (April 2009), pp. 167–88 (p. 180). 30. Ibid., p. 175. 31. Ibid., p. 180. 32. Unlike Wollstonecraft, Cambon was a royalist, and may have held more conventional views about the social hierarchy than her translator. See Simon Vuyk, ‘Twee vrouwen over vaderland en voorzienigheid: Lucretia Wilhelmina van Merken (1721–1789) en Margareta Geertruid van der Werken (1734-na 1796)’, De Achttiende Eeuw, 34.1 (2002), pp. 33–48 (pp. 41–2). 33. Inchbald, p. ii.

230    Mary Wollstonecraft 34. Newman, p. 148. 35. See Newman, pp. 129–48. 36. John Andrews, A Comparative View of the French and English Nations, in their Manners, Politics, and Literature (London: T. Longman; G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1785), p. 319. 37. Alexander Jardine, Letters from Barbary, France, Spain, Portugal, &c. (London: T. Cadell, 1788), p. viii. Wollstonecraft published an enthusiastic review in the Analytical in June 1789. See Works, VII, 107–9. 38. Grieder, p. 72. 39. Ibid., p. 35. 40. The Anti-Jacobin Review, I (January 1798), cited in Syndy McMillen Conger, ‘Reading Lovers’ Vows: Jane Austen’s Reflections on English Sense and German Sensibility’, Studies in Philology, 85.1 (Winter 1988), pp. 92–113 (p. 102). 41. See Tyson, pp. 140–1. 42. See Valérie Cossy, Jane Austen in Switzerland: A Study of the Early French Translations (Geneva: Slatkine, 2006), p. 36. Cossy attributes the popularity of Swiss literary works in Britain to ‘their explicit critique of French values and their reliance on an “English model” to counter what is perceived as the superiority and the hegemony of France’. 43. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, pp. 160–1. Wollstonecraft does not mention which language she is learning, but the timing of the letter coincides with her translation of Salzmann’s Elementarbuch. Her references to cultural simplicity, which she associated with ‘northern’ cultures, also point to the German language. 44. See Godwin, Memoirs, p. 226. 45. Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, ‘Einleitung’, in Rettung der Rechte des Weibes mit Bemerkungen über politische und moralische Gegenstände, von Maria Wollstonecraft, ed. by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, trans. by Georg Friedrich Christian Weissenborn, 2 vols (Schnepfenthal: Verlag der Erziehungsanstalt, 1793), I, xii. My translation. 46. Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, Moralisches Elementarbuch nebst einer Anleitung zum nützlichen Gebrauch desselben  [1782–3], ed. by Hubert Göbels, 1785 ed. (Dortmund: Harenberg, 1980), p. xvii. All bracketed translations from the Elementarbuch are mine. 47. Ibid., p. viii. 48. For further analysis of this image, see Laura Kirkley, ‘Elements of the other’, pp. 92–3. 49. Alessa Johns, Bluestocking Feminism and British–German Cultural Transfer, 1750–1837 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014), p. 68. 50. Ibid., p. 63. 51. Salzmann, Elementarbuch, pp. 214–15. My translation. 52. Ibid., p. 159. 53. Ibid., p. 191. 54. Johns, p. 72. 55. Ibid., p. 66. 56. Ibid., p. 66. 57. Latimer, p. 179.

Notes    231 58. See Salzmann, Elementarbuch, p. 261. 59. Ibid., pp. 265–6. My translation. 60. ‘I have here also inserted a little tale to lead children to consider the Indians as their brothers, because the omission of this subject appeared to be a chasm in a well-digested system’ (II, 6).

Chapter 3  ‘Affection for the Whole Human Race’: Wollstonecraft’s Cosmopolitan Love of Country   1. See Marilyn Butler, ‘Introductory Essay’, Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 1–17.   2. See Braithwaite, p. 94.   3. For evidence of this influence, see Wollstonecraft, Works, IV, 279–80; V, 11–12, 124, 127, 174–5, 203–4, 207; VI, 166. Todd and Butler attribute to Wollstonecraft an extensive review of Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education, published in the Analytical in November 1790 (VII, 309–22). For a detailed analysis of Wollstonecraft’s intellectual debt to Macaulay, see Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain, pp. 173–87.  4. Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Introduction: Cosmopolitan Emotions?’, in For Love of Country?, ed. by Cohen, pp. ix–xiv (p. xiii).  5. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 157.   6. Ibid., p. 157.   7. Ibid., p. 157.  8. See Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Rapport sur l’instruction publique, fait au nom du Comité de Constitution à l’Assemblée Nationale, les 10, 11, et 19 Septembre 1791, par M. de Talleyrand-Périgord, Ancien Évêque d’Autun (Paris: Baudouin; Du Pont, 1791).   9. See Wohlgemut, p. 24. 10. Price, p. 181. 11. Ibid., p. 179. 12. O’Neill, p. 9. 13. Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta, ‘Introduction’, in Cosmopolitanisms, ed. by Robbins and Lemos Horta, pp. 1–17 (pp. 5–6). 14. See Bender, pp. 121–2; Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics [1993], trans. by Graham Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), ch. 3; Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition, ch. 5. See also Stan van Hooft, Cosmopolitanism: A Philosophy for Global Ethics [2009] (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 23. Van Hooft identifies Hume as the founder of this sentimentalist cosmopolitan tradition. 15. Catharine Macaulay, Letters on Education with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (London: C. Dilly, 1790; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 197, 275. 16. Fonna Forman-Barzilai, Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 13.

232    Mary Wollstonecraft 17. Ibid., p. 133. 18. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759], ed. by Ryan Patrick Hanley (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 271. 19. Burke, p. 172. 20. Ibid., p. 171. 21. See Iain Hampsher-Monk, ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’, in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke, ed. by David Dwan and Christopher J. Insole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 195–208 (pp. 200–1). 22. Burke, p. 90. 23. Hunt Botting, Family Feuds, p. 203. 24. Burke, p. 135. 25. Ibid., p. 135. 26. Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and ideas in the 1790s [1993] (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 105. 27. Hunt Botting, Family Feuds, p. 169. 28. Halldenius, p. 82. 29. Ibid., p. 83. 30. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 157. 31. See ibid., ch. 11. 32. David Bromwich, ‘The Meaning of Patriotism in 1789: Is Love of One’s Country Good for Humanity?’, Dissent 58.3 (Summer 2011), pp. 34–41 (p. 35). 33. Bromwich, p. 37; Burke, p. 181. 34. Bromwich, p. 37. 35. See ibid., pp. 35–6. 36. Burke, p. 120. 37. Ibid., p. 171. 38. See Harry T. Dickinson, ‘Burke and the American Crisis’, in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke, ed. by Dwan and Insole, pp. 156–67 (pp. 161–4). 39. Jennifer Pitts, ‘Burke and the Ends of Empire’, in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke, ed. by Dwan and Insole, pp. 145–55 (p. 150). 40. Mary Jacobus, ‘“That Great Stage Where Senators Perform”: Macbeth and the Politics of Romantic Theatre’, Studies in Romanticism, 22.3 (Fall 1983), pp. 353–87 (p. 367). 41. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 157. 42. Burke, p. 172. 43. Jacobus, p. 368. 44. For more on Wollstonecraft’s abolitionism and allusions to the slave trade in her feminist writing, see Moira Ferguson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery’, Feminist Review, 42 (Autumn 1992), pp. 82–102; Anne K. Mellor, ‘Sex, Violence, and Slavery: Blake and Wollstonecraft’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 58.3–4 (1995), pp. 345–70 (pp. 364–5); Laura Brace, ‘Wollstonecraft and the Properties of (Anti-)Slavery’, in The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Bergès and Coffee, pp. 117–34; Katie Donington, ‘Slavery and Abolition’, Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, ed. by Johnson and Keen, pp. 222–29. 45. See Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, ch. 3.

Notes    233 46. See Rabaut Saint-Etienne, Adresse aux Anglois par un représentant de la nation françoise (Paris: Desenne, 1791). Wollstonecraft reviewed an anonymous English translation printed for Joseph Johnson. 47. See Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations, calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (London: J. Johnson, 1791). 48. See Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Nouveau Voyage Dans Les Etats-Unis de l’Amérique Septentrionale, fait en 1788 (Paris: Buisson, 1791). Wollstonecraft reviewed an English translation. 49. See Nussbaum, Political Emotions, ch. 11; ibid., p. 43. 50. Ibid., p. 43. 51. Ibid., p. 43. 52. This argument carried weight with the contemporary French translator of Rights of Woman. See Mary Wollstonecraft, Défense des Droits des Femmes, Suivie de quelques Considérations sur des sujets politiques et moraux, trans. by Anon., 2 vols (Paris: Buisson; Lyon: Bruyset, 1792), II, 448–9. 53. This reference to Cato the Elder may have been inspired by Smith’s Moral Sentiments, in which the same anecdote illustrates ‘savage patriotism’ (p. 270). 54. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 157. 55. Ibid., p. 157. 56. Halldenius, p. 31. 57. Vernon, p. 68. 58. See G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 27–8; Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 23–7. 59. Vernon, p. 71. Although he overstates the influence on Wollstonecraft of Stoic philosophy, Vernon demonstrates persuasively that her feminism participates in the Stoic ‘critique of appearance and reputation’ (pp. 62–3). 60. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language [1755], 8th ed., 2 vols (London: A Millar, W. Law, and B. Cater, 1792), II, n.p. 61. See Kipp, pp. 18, 26–32. 62. Halldenius, p. 82. 63. Ibid., p. 82. 64. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, p. 76. 65. See ibid., p. 116. 66. CF: Rousseau, Julie, pp. 274–5; Rousseau, Eloisa, II, 263–4: ‘On ne s’épouse point pour penser uniquement l’un à l’autre, mais pour remplir conjointement les devoirs de la vie civile, gouverner prudemment la maison, bien élever ses enfants’ (The intent of matrimony is not for man and wife to be always taken up with each other, but jointly to discharge the duties of civil society, to govern their family with prudence, and educate their children with discretion). 67. See Hunt Botting, Family Feuds, p. 147. 68. O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, p. 190. 69. See Molly Hall, ‘Unnatural Woman: Between the Nature of the Feminine and a Gendered Nature’, in Romantic Sustainability: Endurance and the Natural

234    Mary Wollstonecraft World, 1780–1830, ed. by Ben P. Robertson (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), pp. 217–30. Hall claims that Wollstonecraft connects women with non-human animals to attack the power structures responsible for their ‘mutual exploitation’ (p. 219). This thought-provoking ecocritical analysis cannot, however, negate the derogatory import of the imagery. 70. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 380. 71. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, pp. 17, 18. 72. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, pp. 182–6. 73. Ibid., p. 184. 74. Ibid., p. 184. 75. Hunt Botting, Wollstonecraft, Mill and Women’s Human Rights, p. 201. 76. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 219. Nussbaum takes this idea from Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s Republic. 77. Hunt Botting, Wollstonecraft, Mill and Women’s Human Rights, p. 117. 78. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 11; see also Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, pp. 32–3. 79. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 11. 80. Reuter, ‘The Role of the Passions in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Notion of Virtue’, p. 60; Caroline Franklin, ‘Romantic Patriotism as Feminist Critique of Empire: Helen Maria Williams, Sydney Owenson and Germaine de Staël’, in Women, Gender and Enlightenment [2005], ed. by Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, paperback ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 551–64 (p. 553). 81. Hunt Botting, Family Feuds, p. 147. 82. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 317. 83. Ibid., p. 317. 84. Nussbaum, ‘Reply’, in For Love of Country?, ed. by Cohen, pp. 131–44 (pp. 135–6). 85. Ibid., pp. 135–6. 86. Hunt Botting, Family Feuds, p. 9. 87. See Margarita Carretero González, ‘Another Cassandra’s Cry: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Universal Benevolence as Ecofeminist Praxis’, Feminismo/s, 22 (December 2013), pp. 225–49 (p. 246). 88. Nussbaum, ‘Teaching Patriotism’, p. 222. 89. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 219.

Chapter 4  ‘A More Enlightened Moral Love of Mankind’: Philanthropy and the French Revolution   1. This trip fulfilled a long-held ambition. In 1788, Wollstonecraft wrote to Everina: ‘if I have ever any money to spare to gratify myself, I will certainly visit France, it has long been a desire floating in my brain, that even hope has not given consistency to; and yet it does not evaporate’ (Collected Letters, p. 152).  2. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 216.   3. Ibid., p. 217.   4. Halldenius, pp. 19, 20.  5. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 249.

Notes    235   6. Ibid., p. 215.  7. Godwin, Memoirs, p. 238.  8. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 221.  9. Apart from one encounter with Théroigne de Méricourt (see Lyndall Gordon, Mary Wollstonecraft: A New Genus (London: Little, Brown, 2005), pp. 188–9), there is little trace of Wollstonecraft meeting with or responding to French feminists, nor even with more conventional Revolutionary women such as Manon Roland or Sophie de Condorcet. Through Williams, she would certainly have known of the latter two, and she would surely have heard of the activism of notorious women like Gouges, as well as their practical manifestos for legislative change, legal representation and social and economic justice for women. For more on the prominent women and feminist activism in Wollstonecraft’s Paris, see: Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), ch. 4; Joan Wallach Scott, ‘“A Woman Who Has Only Paradoxes To Offer”: Olympe de Gouges Claims Rights For Women’, Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. by Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 102–20; Lesley H. Walker, ‘When Girls Read Rousseau: The Case of Madame Roland’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 43.2 (Summer 2002), pp. 115–36; Lucy Moore, Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (London: Harper Perennial, 2006); Sophie Mousset, Women’s Rights and the French Revolution: A Biography of Olympe de Gouges (London: Routledge, 2007), chs. 3–4; Sandrine Bergès, ‘Is Motherhood Compatible with Political Participation? Sophie de Grouchy’s Care-Based Republicanism’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 18.1 (2015), pp. 47–60; Sandrine Bergès, ‘Wet-Nursing and Political Participation: The Republican Approaches to Motherhood of Mary Wollstonecraft and Sophie de Grouchy’, in The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Bergès and Coffee, pp. 201–17. 10. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 249. 11. Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America; containing A Succinct Account of its Climate, Natural History, Population, Agriculture, Manners and Customs, with An Ample Description of the Several Divisions into which That Country is Partitioned, And an accurate Statement of the various Tribes of Indians that inhabit the Frontier Country (London: J. Debrett, 1792), p. 1. 12. Wil Verhoeven, Gilbert Imlay: Citizen of the World (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), p. 128. 13. Verhoeven, p. 124; Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 236. 14. Godwin, Memoirs, p. 244. 15. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, pp. 248–9. 16. Gary Kelly, p. 154. 17. See O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, pp. 193–6; O’Neill, pp. 18–19. 18. For a thorough analysis of this claim, see Harriet Devine Jump, ‘“The cool eye of observation”: Mary Wollstonecraft and the French Revolution’, in Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution, ed. by Kelvin Everest (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), pp. 101–19.

236    Mary Wollstonecraft 19. See Jane Rendall, ‘“The grand causes which combine to carry mankind forward”: Wollstonecraft, history and revolution’, Women’s Writing, 4.2 (1997), pp. 155–72; O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, pp. 190–200; O’Neill, ch. 7; Halldenius, pp. 102–3. 20. For a discussion of the derivative character of the text, see Bour. 21. Halldenius, p. 12. 22. For Wollstonecraft’s use of the term ‘false’ or ‘mock’ patriot(ism), see Works, VI, 6, 108, 152, 162, 208. 23. See O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, p. 191. 24. See O’Neill, pp. 18–19. 25. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 113. 26. See Paine, II, 361–3. 27. See Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, pp. 185–6. 28. Macaulay, pp. 271–2. 29. Ibid., p. 275. 30. Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France [1790], ed. by Neil Fraistat and Susan S. Lanser (Ontario: Broadview, 2001), p. 69. See Deborah Kennedy, ‘Benevolent Historian: Helen Maria Williams and Her British Readers’, in Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, ed. by Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 317–36 (p. 318). 31. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature [1739–40], ed. by Ernest C. Mossner (London: Penguin, 1969; repr. 1985), p. 367. 32. See Wollstonecraft, Works, VI, 6, 27, 43, 105, 123, 140, 172, 175, 196, 213. 33. See Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 115–16. 34. O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, p. 194. 35. As Todd and Butler point out, although Wollstonecraft writes the word ‘egotism’, which denoted a habit of talking constantly about oneself, she is almost certainly thinking of the French word ‘egoism’, which means excessive self-love. See Works, VI, 230, nb. 36. O’Neill, p. 244. 37. See Betsy Bolton, Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 21–4; Lisa Plummer Crafton, Transgressive Theatricality, Romanticism, and Mary Wollstonecraft (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp.  90–1; Michelle Callander, ‘“The grand theatre of political changes”: Marie Antoinette, the republic, and the politics of spectacle in Mary Wollstonecraft’s An historical and moral view of the French revolution’, European Romantic Review, 11.4 (2000), pp. 375–92 (pp. 376–80). 38. Jonathan Lamb, The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), p. 16. 39. Ibid., p. 16. 40. See O’Neill, p. 19. 41. Price, p. 179. 42. For a thorough analysis of Wollstonecraft’s intervention in contemporary debates about the economic viability and moral health of ­ commercial society, see Catherine Packham, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Cottage Economics:

Notes    237 Property, Political Economy, and the European Future’, ELH, 84 (2017), pp. 453–74. 43. Ingrid Horrocks, Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 149. 44. O’Brien argues persuasively that Wollstonecraft genders the French national character, connecting self-interest with ‘false refinement’ and ‘hyper-­ feminisation’, and relating both to the moral degeneracy associated in the period with declining civilisation (Women and Enlightenment, pp. 190–6). 45. Halldenius, p. 104. 46. Caricatures of over-sophisticated, shallow, back-biting French aristocrats appear in Wollstonecraft’s work prior to her residence in France. In a 1792 review of translations from Marmontel, she complains that some of his tales ‘contain a fantastic kind of licentiousness truly French’. Depicting a culture degraded by despotism and inequality, she reserves her greatest ire for ‘the numerous tribes of nobility’, whose ‘idleness […] generated a kind of refined gentlemanly sensuality, that rendered their taste vicious, and ever at war with nature’ (VII, 418). 47. See Sara Paston-Williams, The Art of Dining: A History of Cooking and Eating [1993], 2nd ed. (London: National Trust Books, 2012), pp. 248–62. 48. Callander, p. 379. 49. Ibid., p. 381. 50. Halldenius, p. 104. 51. See Bour; Ashley Tauchert, ‘Maternity, Castration and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution’, Women’s Writing, 4.2 (1997), pp. 173–203. For exceptions see Plummer Crafton, pp. 97–8; Steven Blakemore, Crisis in Representation: Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and the Rewriting of the French Revolution (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Press, 1997), pp. 103–9. 52. See Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983), pp. 6–7. 53. This argument for the redistribution of wealth recalls Wollstonecraft’s critique of aristocratic land monopoly in Rights of Men: ‘Why cannot large estates be divided into small farms? these dwellings would indeed grace our land. [...] Why might not the industrious peasant be allowed to steal a farm from the heath?’ (V, 57). 54. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 105.

Chapter 5  ‘Gleams of Truth’: Transparency, Eloquence and the Language of Revolution   1. Dorinda Outram, ‘Le langage mâle de la vertu: Women and the discourse of the French Revolution’, in The Social History of Language, ed. by Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 120–35 (p. 121).  2. See François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. by Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 46–51; Janis Langins, ‘Words and institutions during the French Revolution: the case of

238    Mary Wollstonecraft ‘revolutionary’ scientific and technical education’, in The Social History of Language, ed. by Burke and Porter, pp. 136–60 (pp. 137–40).  3. See Jane Hodson, Language and Revolution in Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, and Godwin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 4.  4. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ed. by Jean Starobinski (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), pp. 68–9.   5. Adam Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 2.   6. See Potkay, p. 3.   7. See James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke [1963] (London: Routledge, 2010); Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Steven Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989).   8. Olivia Smith, p. 3.   9. Ibid., p. 3. 10. Ibid., p. 21. 11. Olivia Smith, pp. 40–6; Tom Furniss, ‘Rhetoric in Revolution’, pp. 24–8. 12. Paine, II, 413; ibid., p. 414. 13. Locke on his writing style, cited in John J. Richetti, Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 33. 14. Richetti, p. 40. 15. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 3 vols (Dublin: Whitestone, Colles, Burnet, Moncrieffe, Gilbert, Walker, Exshaw, White, Beatty, Burton, Byrne, Parker and Cash, 1783), II, 33, 35–6. 16. Ibid., p. 35. 17. Olivia Smith, pp. 123–40. 18. Ibid., pp. 22–5. 19. Hodson, pp. 7, 9. 20. Ibid., p. 9. 21. See Tom Furniss, ‘Rhetoric in Revolution: The Role of Language in Paine’s Critique of Burke’, in Revolution and English Romanticism: Politics and Rhetoric, ed. by Keith Hanley and Raman Selden (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 23–48 (pp. 27, 40–41). 22. See Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology, p. 133. 23. See Sophia Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 109–22. 24. Ibid., pp. 107–8. 25. See Langins, p. 139. 26. See Abbé Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État? [1789], ed. by Roberto Zapperi (Geneva: Droz, 1970), p. 119. 27. Rosenfeld, p. 154. 28. Edward Nye, Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-Century France: From Nuances to Impertinence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 183. See also Mark Goldie, ‘Ideology’, Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. by Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson

Notes    239 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 266–91 (pp. 269–70); Rosenfeld, pp. 194–6. 29. Brian Rigby, ‘Radical Spectators of the Revolution: the Case of the Analytical Review’, in The French Revolution and British Culture, ed. by Ceri Crossley and Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 63–83 (p. 64). 30. Godwin, ‘Of English Style’, in The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1797), pp. 368–481 (p. 370). 31. Paine, II, 287. 32. Furniss, ‘Rhetoric in Revolution’, p. 28. 33. Paine, II, 283. 34. Richetti, p. 2. 35. Ibid., p. 20. 36. Blakemore, Crisis in Representation, p. 14. 37. See Furniss, ‘Rhetoric in Revolution’, pp. 40–41. 38. See J. Patrick Dobel, ‘The Role of Language in Rousseau’s Political Thought’, Polity, 18.4 (Summer 1986), pp. 638–658 (p. 651); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts [1750], ed. by François Bouchardy (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 32–3, 48. 39. Rabaut Saint-Étienne, Précis Historique de la Révolution Françoise [1791], 2nd ed. (Paris: Onfroy; Strasbourg: Treuttel, 1792), p. 187. My translation. 40. Dobel, p. 639. 41. See Rosenfeld, pp. 150–64. 42. See Langins, p. 139. 43. See Williams, Letters Written in France, p. 95. 44. Rosenfeld, p. 165. 45. See Rosenfeld, pp. 166–68. 46. See Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 235. 47. Williams, Letters from France, ed. by Fraistat and Lanser, p. 64. 48. Helen Maria Williams, Julia [1790], ed. by Natasha Duquette (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), p. 151. 49. Furet, p. 49. 50. See Bolton, p. 16. 51. See Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, p. 138; Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts, pp. 32–3, 48. 52. See Rousseau, Du contrat social, p. 64. 53. Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 101. 54. See Rousseau, Du contrat social, pp. 67–8; Christopher Kelly, ‘“To Persuade Without Convincing”: The Language of Rousseau’s Legislator’, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Critical Assessments of Leading Political Philosophers, ed. by John T. Scott, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 2006), III, 250–63. 55. See Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, p. 143. 56. Dobel, p. 647. 57. Ibid., p. 647.

240    Mary Wollstonecraft 58. See Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, pp. 68–9. 59. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 223. 60. Ibid., p. 224. 61. Rousseau, Du contrat social, p. 67. 62. Rabaut, Précis Historique de la Révolution Françoise, p. 59. 63. Potkay, p. 2. 64. Hodson, p. 100. 65. Blair, II, 46. 66. Ibid., p. 46. 67. Ibid., p. 46. 68. Blair, III, 4. 69. Ibid., p. 7.

Chapter 6  ‘Imperious Sympathies’: Wollstonecraft’s Philanthropic Traveller  1. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 274.   2. Ibid., p. 277.   3. Ibid., p. 284.  4. Ibid., p. 284. See E. J. Clery, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: A Feminist Exile in Paris’, Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature and Culture, 29.57 (July 2019), pp. 29–46 (pp. 44–5).   5. See Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 179.  6. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 283.   7. Ibid., p. 283.   8. Gilbert Imlay, cited in Gordon, p. 253.  9. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 320. 10. As well as engaging with renowned fictional voyages such as Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768), Wollstonecraft invokes: primitivist literature; relevant Scandinavian travelogues and narratives of other foreign nations such as Cooper’s Some Information Respecting America; Imlay’s geopolitical narratives; works of natural philosophy such as Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle (1749–88); the conjectural histories of the Scottish Enlightenment; and parts of Rousseau’s corpus. 11. Robert Southey, cited in Holmes, p. 233. 12. See Holmes; Mitzi Myers, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters written…in Sweden: toward Romantic autobiography’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 8 (1979), pp. 165–85. 13. For analyses of Wollstonecraft’s use of the Solitary Walker topos, see: Meena Alexander, Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 173–4; John Whale, ‘Death in the Face of Nature: Self, Society and Body in Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark’, Romanticism, 1.2 (1995), pp. 177–92 (pp. 179, 188–89); Dart, pp. 130–8; Nancy Yousef, ‘Wollstonecraft, Rousseau and the Revision of Romantic Subjectivity’, Studies in Romanticism, 38.4 (Winter 1999), pp. 537–57 (pp. 553–5); Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics

Notes    241 and the Fiction of Letters, paperback ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 104–7; Barbara Taylor, ‘Rousseau and Wollstonecraft: Solitary Walkers’, in Thinking with Rousseau: From Machiavelli to Schmitt, ed. by Helena Rosenblatt and Paul Schweigert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 211–34. 14. See Taylor, ‘Rousseau and Wollstonecraft’, p. 231. 15. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 380. 16. Van Hooft, pp. 92–3. 17. Johnson’s Dictionary defines ‘revery’ as ‘loose musing; irregular thought’. 18. Neidleman, p. 83. 19. Ibid., p. 83. 20. Ibid., p. 77. 21. Ibid., p. 77. 22. Ibid., p. 83. 23. See Favret, p. 105. 24. See Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, revised ed. (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 225n. 25. Dart, p. 123. 26. See Favret, p. 105. 27. Yousef, p. 537. 28. Karafili Steiner, p. 13. 29. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rêveries, p. 102; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, in The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, II, 283–4. 30. Taylor, ‘Rousseau and Wollstonecraft, p. 230. 31. Ibid., p. 221. 32. Rousseau, Rêveries, p. 58; Rousseau, Reveries, II, 218. 33. Rousseau Rêveries, p. 104; Rousseau, Reveries, II, 287. 34. See Rousseau, Du contrat social, p. 29: ‘L’homme est né libre et partout il est dans les fers’ (Man is born free, and yet we see him every where in chains). Translation from the Robinson edition, p. 3. The Murray edition reads: ‘Man is born free, and yet is universally enslaved’ (p. 2). 35. Rosenblatt, pp. 59–63. 36. Yousef, p. 555. 37. Here the term ‘enthusiasm’ has none of the ominous connotations attached to its usage in French Revolution. Wollstonecraft deploys it to evoke elation unleavened by reason, thereby establishing the connection between her experiences in Scandinavia and Rousseau’s experiences of reverie. 38. Karen Hust, ‘Facing the Maternal Sublime: Mary Wollstonecraft in Sweden’, in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Journey to Scandinavia: Essays, ed. by Anka Ryall and Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2003), pp. 139–63 (p. 156). 39. Neidleman, p. 91. 40. Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël, Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J. J. Rousseau [1788] ([Paris (?)]: n.pub., 1789), p. 17; Anne-LouiseGermaine de Staël, Letters on the Works and Character of J. J. Rousseau (London: G. G. J. & J. Robinson, 1789), p. 25. 41. Staël, Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J. J. Rousseau, p. 17; Staël, Letters on the Works and Character of J. J. Rousseau, p. 26. 42. Kipp, p. 11.

242    Mary Wollstonecraft 43. Alexander, p. 173. 44. Taylor, ‘The religious foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism’, p. 114. 45. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 234. 46. Ibid., p. 264. 47. Ibid., p. 264. 48. Patrick H. Vincent, The Romantic Poetess: European Culture, Politics, and Gender 1820–1840 (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2004), p. xx. 49. Ibid., p. xix. 50. See Deborah Weiss, ‘Suffering, Sentiment, and Civilization: Pain and Politics in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Short Residence’, Studies in Romanticism, 45.2 (Summer 2006), pp. 199–221 (p. 217). 51. Dart, p. 133. Wollstonecraft identifies herself with the Trojan prophetess Cassandra at the end of Letter XXIII (p. 342). 52. Van Hooft, pp. 92, 93. 53. Ibid., p. 96. 54. Nussbaum, ‘Introduction: Cosmopolitan Emotions?’, p. xiii. 55. Ibid., p. xiii. 56. Van Hooft, p. 93. 57. See Elizabeth A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 156–58; Anne Scott Sørensen, ‘“Losing My Breath Through My Eyes”: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Picturesque’, in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Journey to Scandinavia, ed. by Ryall and Sandbach-Dahlström, pp. 93–113 (p. 103); Stephanie Buus, ‘Bound for Scandinavia: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Promethean Journey’, in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Journey to Scandinavia, ed. by Ryall and Sandbach-Dahlström, pp. 221–39 (pp. 231–2). 58. See R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 82–3. 59. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 380. 60. See Horrocks, p. 156. 61. Whale, p. 187. 62. See Karafili Steiner, pp. 19–20. 63. Angela Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belongings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 126. 64. For an account of the Lofthuus uprising, which later inspired the Norwegian struggle for independence, see H. Arnold Barton, Scandinavia in the Revolutionary Era, 1760–1815 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 151–4. 65. Godwin, p. 244. See Helen Maria Williams, Letters containing A Sketch of the Politics of France, From the Thirty-first of May 1793, till the Twentyeighth of July 1794, and of the scenes which have passed in the prisons of Paris, 2 vols (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1795), I, 195–201. 66. Karafili Steiner, pp. 20, 21. 67. See Keane, p. 126; Rachel Seiler-Smith, ‘Bearing/Barren Life: The Conditions of Wollstonecraft’s Morbid Maternity’, European Romantic Review, 28.2 (2017), pp. 163–83 (p. 179).

Notes    243 68. Keane, p. 126. 69. Karafili Steiner, p. 21. 70. Neidleman, p. 92.

Chapter 7  ‘The Growth of Each Particular Soil’: Authenticity and Diversity in Wollstonecraft’s Narrative of Progress  1. In the late eighteenth century, the limited British travel-writing on Scandinavia took a taxonomical, systematising approach, including one of Wollstonecraft’s principal sources, William Coxe’s Travels in Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark (1784). The work was expanded in 1790 to include Norway, and it stood out as an authority and benchmark for comparison.   2. See Bhabha; Breckenridge et al. eds.   3. Hollinger, p. 229.   4. Ibid., p. 230.   5. Ibid., p. 231.   6. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers [2006] (London: Penguin, 2007), p. xix; Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, p. 97.   7. Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, pp. 91, 92.   8. Wollstonecraft has been called ‘liberal’ because she asserts the right of individuals to live freely within broad moral constraints and with the security of fundamental human rights. Just as often, scholars have rejected the label, not least because of her emphasis on community and collective responsibility. In a recent provocative essay, Penny Weiss argues for rethinking the category of liberalism with Wollstonecraft as one of its founding theorists, making it ‘“normal” within liberalism to advocate for autonomy and ­community, to defend equality as necessary for both individual ­development and community, to understand independence as a kind of relationship, to tie rationality to concern and affection for others, to recognize a multiplicity of hierarchies that defraud, delegitimize, and devour those on the bottom’. See Penny Weiss, ‘Feminist liberalism’, The Wollstonecraftian Mind, ed. by Sandrine Bergès, Eileen Hunt Botting and Alan Coffee (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 391–403 (p. 401). This is not the place to take up that gauntlet, but it is notable that many modern c­ osmopolitan theorists are liberal philosophers addressing the ostensible conflict between the rights of individuals and the claims of their communities.  9. See Peter Davidson, The Idea of the North (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), p. 8. 10. See Wollstonecraft, Works, VII, 332–6. 11. Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, p. 94. 12. Nussbaum, ‘Reply’, p. 137. 13. Bender, p. 117. 14. See Buus for a severe critique of this aspect of Short Residence. 15. Davidson, p. 9. 16. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1775), p. 128.

244    Mary Wollstonecraft 17. Bender, p. 117. 18. See Anka Ryall, ‘A Vindication of Struggling Nature: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavia’, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Journey to Scandinavia, ed. by Ryall and Sandbach-Dahlström, pp. 117–37. 19. See Ryall (pp. 125–7) for an analysis of Wollstonecraft’s changing perceptions of Scandinavian inertia. 20. Barton, p. 174. 21. Ibid., p. 175. 22. Jan Wellington, ‘Blurring the Borders of Nation and Gender: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Character (R)evolution’, in Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, ed. by Craciun and Lokke, pp. 33–61 (p. 55). 23. Ibid., p. 55. 24. Macpherson stressed the superiority of his Caledonians to the ‘Gothic’ peoples of Scandinavia, a distinction Wollstonecraft seems to overlook. 25. Sweden was a constitutional monarchy with colonial possession of Finland. Denmark was an absolutist monarchy with colonial possession of Norway. 26. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, p. xiii. 27. Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, p. 94. 28. Barton, p. 228. 29. Michael Bregnsbo, ‘The Scandinavian Kingdoms’, A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Europe [2008], ed. by Peter H. Wilson, paperback ed. (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), pp. 276–88 (pp. 284–5). 30. See Barton, pp. 149, 150. 31. Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 72. 32. Ryall, p. 132. 33. See Barton, pp. 23–5, 204–6. 34. See Jerzy Lukowski, ‘Poland-Lithuania’, A Companion to EighteenthCentury Europe, ed. by Wilson, pp. 244–59 (p. 257). The Polish nationalist leader, Tadeusz Kościuszko, tried to re-unite his country, and was a hero amongst political liberals in France and England. 35. Andreas Peter Bernstorf was a liberal who advocated freedom of the press and gradual social reform but remained loyal to the Danish crown. Wollstonecraft heard much of his talents and virtues but could summon only faint praise after they met: ‘He is a worthy man, a little vain of his virtue à la Necker; and more anxious not to do wrong, that is to avoid blame, than desirous of doing good; especially if any particular good demands a change’ (VI, 331). 36. Karafili Steiner, p. 11. 37. Ibid., p. 12. 38. Ibid., p. 12. 39. Rosenblatt, p. 61. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, in Discours sur l’économie politique et autres textes, ed. by Negroni, pp. 171–2, 182–3. 40. Rosenblatt, pp. 61, 62. See Rousseau, Considérations, pp. 218–20.

Notes    245

Coda ‘Out-Laws of the World’: Cosmopolitanism in The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria  1. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, pp. 91, 99, 349.   2. See Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, pp. 244–5; Kipp, pp. 85–6.  3. See Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, p. 239; Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 66–7.   4. See Kipp, p. 85.   5. Scrivener, p. 80.  6. This transnational perspective replaces the divine standard of Maria’s fictional antecedent, the eponymous heroine of Mary, perhaps because Wollstonecraft had largely abandoned conventional Christianity by the end of her life. See Godwin, Memoirs, p. 270; Hunt Botting, Family Feuds, pp. 179–83.   7. Kipp, p. 86.   8. Ibid., p. 86.  9. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, p. 232. 10. Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, p. 264. 11. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 157. 12. Imlay, Topographical Description, p. 178. 13. Johnson, p. 67. 14. Ibid., p. 67. 15. Verhoeven, p. 136. 16. W. M. Verhoeven and Amanda Gilroy, ‘Introduction’, in The Emigrants [1793] (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. ix–xlix (p. xvi.) 17. Reuter, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft on the imagination’, p. 1156. 18. Dart sees a ‘Rousseauvian législateur’ in the letter-writer of Short Residence, citing her outsider status, her ‘reforming instincts’, and her recognition that stirring emotion in her readers may be more effective than rational persuasion (pp. 132–3). 19. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, p. 380. 20. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, p. 241. 21. Ibid., p. 242. 22. Johnson, p. 67. 23. Ibid., pp. 66–7. 24. See Paul Stock, The Shelley-Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), chs. 4–5.

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Index

affect, 9, 18, 20–1, 87, 99, 104, 112, 121, 128–9, 131 affections, 13–14, 15, 16, 20, 45–6, 89, 90, 107, 157–8, 164–5 maternal love, 91–2, 97, 158, 165–7, 209, 210 parental affection, 91, 95–6 Alexander, Meena, 167 alter-egos, 22, 30, 33–4, 42, 48, 50, 67, 73 altruism, 16, 20, 21, 27–8, 33, 40, 41, 45, 47, 48, 91, 93, 106, 110, 113, 117, 170, 208, 210, 212 America, 5, 72, 74, 83–4, 100, 102–3, 180–1, 196, 204–6 American Revolution, 4, 11, 12, 108, 156 Analytical Review, 4–5, 133, 135, 146 Ancien Régime, 28, 36, 59, 76, 100, 106, 109, 111, 117, 122–3, 135, 140, 141, 143 Anderson, Amanda, 7 Andrews, John, 59 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 179–80, 181, 189 Austen, Jane, 60 authenticity, 188–99, 213

Rousseau’s ideas, 20 universal benevolence, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 28, 42, 77, 78, 79, 82, 93, 95, 107, 128, 156, 213 Berkeley, George, 136 Blair, Hugh, 126–7, 133, 149, 151, 152, 153 Blakemore, Steven, 136 Bolton, Betsy, 144 Boswell, James, 181 Botting, Eileen Hunt, 7, 8, 9, 12–13, 14, 17, 80, 94, 96 Brissot, Jacques-Pierre, 87, 102, 103, 135, 173 Bromwich, David, 82 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de, 172, 183, 191 Bürger, Gottfried August, 60 Burke, Edmund, 14, 15, 16, 19, 23, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80–1, 85, 123, 125–6, 134 selective compassion, 84–6 support for American independence, 82–4 views on patriotism, 82–3 Wollstonecraft’s criticism of, 82–6, 137, 147, 211

Basedow, Johann Bernhard, 62 Bender, Thomas, 181 benevolence, 21, 32, 39, 40, 98, 117, 156, 159, 164, 165, 186 and human sympathies, 99–100 and reason, 50

Cahill, Samara, 7 Callander, Michelle, 119 Calonne, Charles Alexandre de, 150–1, 153, 154 Cambon-van der Werken, Margareta Geertruid de, 57–8, 182

264    Mary Wollstonecraft capitalism, 115–17, 128, 205 Carey, Daniel, 7 caring, 170, 172, 176–7, 210, 213 Carlson, Julie, 47 Caroline Matilda, Queen of Denmark, 169–70 Carter, Elizabeth, 55 Catherine the Great, 115 Cato, 89 charity, 10, 16–17, 39, 40, 42, 46, 71, 95, 106 Christie, Thomas, 4, 6, 74, 102, 135 Clarkson, Thomas, 6 Cloots, Anacharsis, 5, 103 clothing, 64–6 Colebrooke, Henrietta, 56 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 60 compassion, 18, 28, 33, 38, 39, 42, 49, 71, 81, 84–5, 87, 113, 128–9, 201, 208, 209–10, 212–13 public culture of, 16, 76, 89, 204 for Terror victims, 121, 125–6 Comte, Auguste, 28 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de, 102, 103, 135 Committee of Public Education, 102 conviction, 152 Cooper, Thomas, 102, 196 cosmopolitanism, 1, 6, 9, 165, 181 cosmopolitan patriotism, 77–81, 87, 90, 95, 147, 180, 203, 205, 206 cosmopolitan philanthropy, 107–8 ethical dimension, 2 liberal cosmopolitanism, 189 models of progress, 178–9 modern cosmopolitan theory/ notions, 15, 179–80 universalist cosmopolitanism, 13, 15 Wollstonecraft’s ethic, 2, 7–8, 10–25, 26, 27, 31, 72–3, 75–7, 94, 98, 105, 109, 118, 119, 121, 126, 174–5, 176, 188, 197, 211 Crogiez, Michèle, 26

Dart, Gregory, 145, 159, 170 Destutt de Tracy, Antoine-LouisClaude, 135 diversity, 179, 181, 188–99, 213 divorce see marriage and divorce Domergue, Urbain, 135 education, 11, 17, 28, 31–6 day schools and equality, 98–9, 212 mother-educators, 63–8, 73, 88 egoism, 117–18 empathy, 21, 78 Enlightenment, 3, 6, 7, 15, 149–50 enthusiasm, 82, 110–11, 113 equality, 11–12, 16–17, 17–18, 21, 37, 77, 78, 82, 113–14 in education, 98–9, 212 eudaimonia, 77, 94–5, 99, 100 family, 80–1, 95–6, 97 Favret, Mary A., 159, 160 feminism, 9, 25, 53, 94 patriotic femininity, 88 and translation, 53, 54–5, 63, 73 footnotes, 60 Forman-Barzilai, Fonna, 79 Francophilia, 3, 181 freedom, 31, 32, 78 freedom of speech, 195 French literature, 56–60 French Revolution, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 12, 15, 17, 21, 74, 75, 82, 109, 188 Burke’s view of, 84–5 egoism, 117–18 mobilisation against the militia, 121–2 and philanthropy, 101–29 Revolutionary language and the Terror, 138–43 Tennis Court Oath, 109–10, 113 The Terror, 103–4, 110, 113, 117–18, 119, 121, 125–6, 127–8, 130, 139, 155, 156, 159, 179, 183, 186, 194, 201, 212 Fuseli, Henry, 60 gender politics, 9–10, 29, 50 of translation, 53–5

Index    265 Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de, 9, 22, 30, 38, 64, 67, 70, 73 Adèle et Théodore ou Lettres sur l’éducation (Adèle and Théodore or Letters on education), 27, 28, 33–5, 36–7, 41, 50 German literature, 60–2 Gherardesca, Ugolino della, 174 Glorious Revolution (1688), 12, 108 Godard, Barbara, 54 Godwin, William, 13, 57, 115, 133, 135, 173, 201, 204 Gouges, Olympe de, 102, 103 Grenoble, 110–11 Grieder, Josephine, 60 Griffith, Elizabeth, 55 Halldenius, Lena, 14, 16–17, 31, 37, 38, 81, 89–90, 92, 101, 104, 117–18, 121 Harris, James, 132, 134 Hayes, Julie Candler, 53, 55 Hodson, Jane, 134, 135, 150 Holcroft, Thomas, 6 Hollinger, David, 179 Holmes, Richard, 6 Hooft, Stan van, 158, 170, 172 Horrocks, Ingrid, 116 human fellowship, 23, 78, 98, 108, 114, 116 human psychology, 179–80, 212 human rights, 2, 7, 9, 11–12, 17, 77, 78, 85–6, 108, 117, 188, 189, 211–12 humanity, 15, 72, 81, 87, 90, 125 Hume, David, 3, 18, 75, 79, 111, 136 Hust, Karen, 164 Hutton, James, 172 imagination, 12, 77, 89, 99, 151, 161, 168, 211, 212 creative imagination and love, 44 imaginative sympathy, 162–3 philanthropic imagination, 172 and self-interested feelings, 94 Imlay, Françoise ‘Fanny’, 155, 156–7, 165–6 Imlay, Gilbert, 102, 103, 148, 155,

156, 157, 167, 168, 200, 205, 206 imperialism, 2, 7, 72, 179, 193–4, 197 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 55, 58, 60 indigenous peoples, 72, 205–6 itinerant revolutionaries, 4 Jacob, Margaret C., 3–4 Jacobus, Mary, 84 James II, 123 Jardine, Alexander, 59–60 Johns, Alessa, 64, 66 Johnson, Claudia L., 205, 207, 209–10 Johnson, Joseph, 4, 5, 32, 60, 74, 101, 104, 160 Johnson, Samuel, 181 Jones, Chris, 81 Jones, Vivien, 8 justice, 2, 4, 7, 9, 11–12, 13, 14, 16–17, 19, 22, 25, 75, 81, 102–3, 171 framework and principles of, 175–6, 211, 212, 213 and love, 21, 158 and philanthropy, 106, 128 Kant, Immanuel, 4, 9, 11, 78, 79, 174–5 Keane, Angela, 172, 173 Kipp, Julie, 48, 166, 203 kosmou politês (citizen of the world) concept, 13 language and eloquence, 130–54 deliberative oratory, 131 dichotomies, 132, 139 English, 135–6 feeling, language of, 154 and female virtue, 137 figurative language, 131, 150, 151 French, 135, 139–40, 142, 147 idéologistes, 135 instinctual language, 145 Latin and Greek systems, 132 linguistic change and teleological progress, 145 linguistic equivocation, 136

266    Mary Wollstonecraft language and eloquence (cont.) linguistic self-awareness, 134 metaphors, 136 Mirabeau’s eloquence, 148–54 plain style, 133, 134, 136, 142, 147, 150 powers of eloquence, 145–6, 147 Revolutionary language and the Terror, 138–43 rhetorical techniques, 134 Rousseauvian demagogues, 143–8, 149 theatrical spectacle, 144, 153 ‘things as they are’ phrase, 133, 146 transparency, 131, 135, 136–7, 141, 154 vernacular, 132, 134 Wollstonecraft’s preference for simplicity, 137, 147 words and Revolutionary meanings, 135 Latimer, Bonnie, 57 Le Vaillant, François, 205–6 Legislator concept, 22, 27–8, 29–31, 41, 64, 131, 147, 154, 213 Leonidas, 108 Lille, Abbé de, 56–7 Locke, John, 62, 133, 135, 136 Lofft, Capel, 74 Lofthuus, Christian Jensen, 172–3 Lokke, Kari E., 46, 47 Louis XIV, 112 Louis XVI, 101, 103, 123, 140–1, 150, 183 love, 14, 18–19, 21, 32, 164–5 and creative imagination, 44 divine love, 17, 40, 47 erotic love, 28–9, 41–51, 92, 158, 165, 167, 168, 201–2, 204, 213 of humanity, 17, 163–4, 167, 168–77, 185, 198, 201, 210, 212, 213 maternal love, 48–9, 91–2, 97, 158, 165–7, 209, 210 parental love, 95–6 patriotic love, 27–8 and self-regard, 91, 92 Lowth, Robert, 132

Luchet, Jean-Pierre-Louis, marquis de, 59 Macaulay, Catharine, 75, 79, 106–7 Macpherson, James, 181, 187 Makus, Ingrid, 30 Marie Antoinette, 14, 84–5, 119–20, 121–2, 183 marriage and divorce, 1, 29, 31, 36, 38, 42–3, 47, 92–3, 102, 156, 194–5, 202–3 Masseau, Didier, 34 Meares, John, 180–1 Milton, John, 44, 45–6 Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de, 9, 24, 74 and eloquence, 148–54, 207 as an orator, 131, 148 Moers, Ellen, 33, 39 Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord, 132 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de, 183 morality, 8, 22, 37, 41, 47, 50, 58, 62–73, 95, 112 moral consciousness, 82, 96 moral sentiment, 76–7, 107, 109, 111, 122, 128–9, 130, 156, 211 moral truth, 48, 87, 207 Myers, Mitzi, 39 narrative of progress, 178–99 diversity and authenticity, 188–99, 213 models of progress, 178–9 primitivism and progress, 180–8 National Assembly, 23, 102, 111, 112, 131, 141–2, 143, 148, 152 national identities and character, 3, 13, 58–9, 178–9, 190–1, 197, 199 nature, 48, 127, 147, 167, 172, 191 Naubert, Christiane Benedikte, 61 Necker, Jacques, 56, 62, 74 Neidleman, Jason, 159 Newman, Gerald, 3, 59 Nussbaum, Martha C., 13, 15–16, 21, 27–8, 29, 43, 76, 81, 85, 87, 89, 93, 94, 95, 96–7, 98, 105, 158, 170, 181, 212

Index    267 O’Brien, Karen, 111 oikeiôsis, 15 Okin, Susan Moller, 45 O’Neill, Daniel I., 78, 112 othering, 93–4 Paine, Thomas, 5, 6, 102, 103, 106, 132, 173 Rights of Man, 74, 133–4, 136 paradox, 10, 15–16, 19, 26, 50, 87–8, 99, 125, 146, 211 parents, 17, 32–3, 35, 37, 38, 88 affections, 91–2, 95–6, 97, 159, 165–7, 209, 210 authority and respect, 97–8 mother-educators, 63–8, 73, 88 Paris, 4, 6, 74, 101–2, 134, 135, 136 Wollstonecraft’s impressions of, 126–8 partisanship, 14, 16 passions, 12, 14, 36 patriotism, 8, 12, 15, 16, 17, 19, 22–3, 75, 77, 99, 129, 158, 213–14 Burke’s views on, 82–3 cosmopolitan patriotism, 77–81, 87, 90, 95, 147, 180, 203, 205, 206 ethical form of, 99–100 false patriotism, 105, 111, 141–2, 153, 202–3 love of country and philanthropy, 77–81 patriotic citizenship, 96 patriotic femininity, 88 patriotic love, 27–8 patriotic maternity, 88 patriotic republicanism, 90 Philanthropinist movement, 62–3 philanthropy, 2, 7, 13, 16, 17–18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 29, 87, 95, 125–6, 212 cosmopolitan philanthropy, 107–8 and erotic love, 41–51 and the French Revolution, 101–29 importance of to Wollstonecraft, 26, 31, 37, 41



and justice, 106, 128 and love of country, 77–81 philanthropic emotions, 77, 78 philanthropic imagination, 172 philanthropic reveries, 158–68 and reason, 77 Wollstonecraft’s philanthropic personae, 26–51 philosophy, 3 sentimental philosophy, 75, 78–9 poetry, 147 Polasky, Janet, 4 Price, Richard, 2, 4, 9, 11, 12, 13–14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 28, 50, 75, 76, 77–8, 80, 82, 87, 88, 106, 115, 143 Priestley, Joseph, 6, 74 primitivism, 180–8, 240n progress see narrative of progress projective disgust, 16, 93–4 property rights, 19, 83–4, 86 public opinion, 37, 38 Ramsay, David, 108 reason, 11–13, 18, 31–2, 37, 38, 50, 75–6, 77, 87, 89, 90, 99, 104, 105, 132, 151, 151–2, 211, 212 discourse of, 133, 146 progress of, 107–8 and self-interested feelings, 94 religion, 3, 18, 19, 39, 44, 47, 64, 67, 70–2, 81, 86, 164 Reuter, Martina, 18 reverie, 157, 176, 213 philanthropic reveries, 158–68 Revolutionary Wars, 114–15, 118, 156 Richetti, John J., 133 Robertson, William, 3 Robinson, Mary, 6 Roland, Manon, 103, 104, 159–60, 162–3, 173 Romanticism, 157 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 2, 18, 28, 33, 41, 47, 49, 62, 73, 81, 85, 113, 125, 131, 138–9, 152, 154, 165, 187, 209, 212 and benevolence, 20 Confessions, 10, 26

268    Mary Wollstonecraft Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (cont.) Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne (Considerations on the Government of Poland), 197 and cosmopolitanism, 20–1 Discours sur les sciences et les arts (Discourse on the Arts and Sciences), 145 Du contrat social (The Social Contract), 27, 29–30, 31, 145–6, 148, 197 Emile, ou De l’Éducation (Emile or On Education), 20, 26, 27, 29, 30–1, 43, 50 Essai sur l’origine des langues (Essay on the Origin of Languages), 145 gender politics, 9–10, 29, 50 influence on revolutionary discourse, 143–8 influence on Wollstonecraft, 9–10, 19–20, 22, 26–7, 29, 35, 41, 50, 137–8, 143, 145, 146, 149, 152, 159, 162, 167, 197, 199, 201, 211, 212–13 Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (Julie or The New Heloise), 29, 30, 35–6, 43–5, 47, 50, 92, 165, 201–2, 204 Legislator concept, 22, 27–8, 29–31, 41, 64, 131, 147, 154, 213 and reverie, 157, 158–9, 161, 176 Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Reveries of the Solitary Walker), 10, 20, 24, 157, 158–9, 162, 167 Solitary Walker concept, 19–20, 24, 27, 123, 157, 159, 160, 161–2, 164, 174, 200, 201, 213 and solitude, 160 women, depictions of, 43–5 Ryall, Anka, 183, 191 Saint-Étienne, Rabaut, 86–7, 135, 138, 140, 148 Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf, 9, 22, 52, 58, 59, 61, 62–73 Scottish Enlightenment, 104

Scrivener, Michael, 8, 203 self-interest, 18, 19, 20, 23, 31, 37, 83, 85, 89–90, 99–100, 105–7, 112, 120, 128, 153–4, 171, 202–3 and capitalism, 115–16 and human fellowship, 114 self-interested passions, 41, 78, 80 Sen, Amartya, 13 sentiment, 19, 20, 23, 113, 120–1, 127, 204 moral sentiment, 76–7, 107, 109, 111, 122, 128–9, 130, 156, 211 and visiting Versailles, 122–6 Sieyès, Abbé, 135 Simon, Sherry, 53 sincerity, 59–60 slavery, 2, 76, 78, 85–6, 89, 100, 116–17, 211 Smith, Adam, 18, 20–1, 75, 78–9, 81, 89, 114 Smith, Charlotte, 5–6 Smith, Olivia, 132, 133–4 Smith, Samuel Stanhope, 183 sociétés de pensée, 134–5 Solitary Walker concept, 19–20, 24, 27, 124, 157, 159, 160, 161–2, 164, 174, 200, 201, 213 Southey, Robert, 157 Staël, Anne-Louise-Germaine de, 56, 165, 168–9 Steiner, Enit Karafili, 8, 9, 160, 172, 173, 174–5, 176, 194, 196 Stoicism, 13, 15, 16, 79 sympathy, 9, 18–19, 21, 23, 69, 78, 79, 80, 81, 89, 110–11 and benevolence, 99–100 ethic of, 168–71 and experience, 114 imaginative sympathy, 162–3 and moral conscience, 96 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de, 11, 12, 75, 77 Tan, Kok-Chor, 13 Taylor, Barbara, 17, 18, 44, 45, 49, 64, 86, 92, 93, 161, 207 Taylor, William, 60

Index    269 Thelwall, John, 132 Tihanov, Galin, 2 Tomalin, Claire, 160 Tomaselli, Sylvana, 2, 8 Tooke, John Horne , 132, 134 Trakulhun, Sven, 7 translation, 52–62, 63, 75, 195 domestication, 22, 53, 58–9, 60, 61, 62 transnational exchange, 1–2, 213 transparency, 34, 35–6 Tytler, Alexander Fraser, 54 Vernon, Richard, 8, 13, 90 Versailles, 122–6 Vincent, Patrick H., 168–9, 170 virtue, 31, 33–4, 36, 38, 41, 46 and human flourishing, 94–5 tension with erotic love, 44 Voltaire, 3 Washington, George, 108 Wellington, Jan, 185 Williams, Helen Maria, 5–6, 102, 103, 104, 110, 139, 143–4, 159, 173 Wohlgemut, Esther, 12 Wollstonecraft, Everina, 4, 26, 56, 101–2, 103 Wollstonecraft, Mary attempted suicide, 156, 200 children and maternal love, 155, 156, 165–7, 174 cosmopolitan ethic, 2, 7–8, 10–25, 26, 27, 31, 72–3, 75–7, 94, 98, 105, 109, 118, 119, 121, 126, 174–5, 176, 188, 197, 211 criticism of Britain, 155–6, 193–4, 200 criticism of Burke, 82–6, 137, 147 cultural inheritance, 3, 4–6 death, 200 and diversity and authenticity, 188–99 engagement with Francophone literature, 27 epistolary persona, 24, 157, 158, 159, 160–1, 170, 171, 185 Francophobia, 6, 118

and the French national character, 118–19 Islamophobia, 6–7 and the Legislator concept, 29–41 love affair with Imlay, 102, 103, 155, 156, 165, 167–8, 200, 206 love for humankind, 17, 163–4, 167, 168–77, 185, 198, 201, 210, 212, 213 and nature, 167 in Paris, 6, 101–2, 126–8 philanthropic personae, 26–51 philanthropic reveries, 158–68, 176 and projective disgust, 93–4 religious discourse, 70–2 returns to Britain, 200 reviews, 56–7, 59–60, 86–7, 102, 108, 146–7, 165, 180–1, 183, 205–6 Rousseau, influence of, 9–10, 19–20, 22, 26–7, 29, 35, 41, 50, 137–8, 143, 145, 146, 149, 152, 159, 162, 167, 197, 199, 201, 211, 212–13 in Scandinavia, 156–7, 161–4, 168–75, 178–9, 181–8, 188–99 Shakespeare, references to, 83, 123, 174 and solitude, 160–1 textual alter-egos/self-portraiture, use of, 10, 22, 26, 27, 30, 33–4, 42, 46, 48, 50, 52, 67, 73, 94, 105, 174–5, 176, 212–13 and translation, 52–62, 63, 75 transnational influences, 8, 22 and trauma, 172–4 travel, 2, 3, 6, 155–77, 178–9, 181–8, 188–99 views on Nordic people and culture, 182–8, 190, 191–9 Wollstonecraft, Mary, works of The Cave of Fancy, 37–8, 46–7, 90 Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children (translation), 22, 52, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63–73, 205 The Female Reader, 56

270    Mary Wollstonecraft Wollstonecraft, Mary, works of (cont.) An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, 14, 21, 23, 24, 31–2, 59, 61, 72, 101, 102–3, 104–29, 130, 131, 135, 138–43, 144–5, 147, 148–50, 151–4, 183, 184, 186, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 206, 207 Of the Importance of Religious Opinions (translation), 56 Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation, 108–9 Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, 8, 9–10, 24, 51, 72, 116, 157–8, 159, 160–1, 165–8, 169–70, 171–7, 178–9, 180, 181–8, 188–99, 204, 206, 207, 209 Mary, a Fiction, 22, 26–7, 28–9, 41–51, 92, 158, 167 Original Stories from Real Life, 22, 26–7, 29–41, 50, 51, 52, 58, 64, 65, 67, 69, 72, 87, 90, 226n On Poetry, 147 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 10–11, 14, 16, 17, 53, 56, 71, 72 A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 12, 14, 18, 23, 52, 68, 74–7, 81, 82–8, 88, 92, 104, 115, 116, 122, 123, 137, 144, 147 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 6–7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 18, 22–3, 26, 37, 43, 44, 59, 63, 68, 74–7, 80–1, 87, 88–100, 104, 115, 137, 165, 201, 209

The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, 1, 24, 51, 156, 200–11, 228n, Young Grandison (translation), 57–8, 67–8, 70, 182 women, 100 affections, 89, 90 animal imagery, Wollstonecraft’s use of, 93–4 and British law, 200, 203, 210 and clothing, 64–6 education, 11, 17, 31–6, 62, 88, 98 fellowship, 209–10 as ideal citizens, 17 intellectual development, 88, 89–90 maternal love, 48–9, 91–2, 97, 158, 165–7, 209, 210 mother-educators, 63–8, 73, 88 rights, 1, 7, 9, 11, 12, 102 Rousseau’s depictions of, 43–5 sex workers, 94, 205, 207–8 total occupation with husbands, 92–3 unwed mothers, 194 Wollstonecraft’s sympathy for, 168–71 Woolf, Virginia, 1, 200 Wordsworth, William, 6, 60 world citizenship, 2, 5, 13, 15, 17, 23, 28, 77, 81, 87, 88, 98, 110, 117, 158, 179, 180, 181, 201 Young, Edward, 53–4 Yousef, Nancy, 160, 163 Zaw, Susan Khin, 17, 39 Zollikofer, Georg Joachim, 146–7 Zonana, Joyce, 6–7