On Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: The First of a New Genus 9780231556385

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On Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

COR E K NOWLED GE

COR E K N O WLED GE

The Core Knowledge series takes its motivation from the goals, ideals, challenges, and pleasures of Columbia College’s Core Curriculum. The aim is to capture the intellectual energy and the stimulus to creative thinking that is a fundamental ideal of such courses as Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization. In the spirit of Core teaching, the books are intended to reflect on what the featured works can be if approached from different or unusual vantage points; how they may inform modern experience, and how they are to be viewed not as sources of plain fact, certainty, and assured beliefs but as provocations to the imagination that help us to see differently, experimentally, and with a spirit of intellectual adventure. EDI TORI A L B O AR D

Sarah Cole Jeremy Dauber Eleanor Johnson Matthew L. Jones Elisabeth Ladenson David Quint Nadia Urbinati Gareth D. Williams

Published in the Core Knowledge series On Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Gareth Williams On John Stuart Mill, Philip Kitcher

On Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman The First of a New Genus Susan J. Wolfson

Columbia University Press / New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2023 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wolfson, Susan J., 1948– author. Title: On Mary Wollstonecraft’s A vindication of the rights of woman : the first of a new genus / Susan J. Wolfson. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2023] | Series: Core knowledge | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022040890 (print) | LCCN 2022040891 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231206242 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231206259 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231556385 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759–1797. Vindication of the rights of woman. | Women’s rights—Great Britain. | Women—Education—Great Britain. | Women’s rights in literature. Classification: LCC HQ1596.W6 W655 2023 (print) | LCC HQ1596.W6 (ebook) | DDC 305.420941—dc23/eng/20220914 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040890 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040891

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Lisa Hamm Cover image: © National Portrait Gallery, London

To my grandmother, Naomi Harris Wolfson, Suffragist, New York City, 1910–1914 and all her sisters, agitators and protesters, in the movement

j

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

ix xi

My Texts, Abbreviations, and Short Titles

xiii

Prologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication?

1

“The Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman” 1 Scandal 8 Feminist Before “Feminism” 14

1. How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman” 19 A Pertinent Chronology

33

2. Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft: The Right Woman 3. “An Amazon stept out”: A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)

59

Events in France 60 Burke “Reflects” 62 Wollstonecraft Reacts

65

39

viii | Contents

4. “revolution in female manners”: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792)

79

No “Revolution” for Women 79 Revolution by Education: An Appeal to Citizen Talleyrand 83 What Kind of Book Is This? 89 The “historical page” and Literary Pages: Introduction and Chapter I 93 “the prevailing opinion of a sexual character discussed”: Chapters II–III 99 Print and Imprint: Rendering, Degrading, Inscribing: Chapters IV–VI 111 A New Conduct Manual: Chapters VII–XI 118 “Utopian dreams”: Chapters XII–XIII 124 Resexed / Unsexed / No Sex 132

5. Dystopian Nightmare: Paris, December 26, 1792

137

6. “bastilled . . . for life”: The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria; a Fragment (1798)

143

Epilogue: “we hear her voice” 155 Brief Glossary of Recurring Names Notes

167

Further Reading and Bibliographies Index

163

181

173

Illustrations

Figure 1. Mary Wollstonecraft, Painted by John Opie (1790–1791)

40

Figure 2. Mrs. Wollstonecraft, stipple engraving oval by William Ridley from John Opie’s painting, published in the Monthly Mirror, January 1796

40

Figure 3. Oil painting of Mary Wollstonecraft by John Williamson (c. 1791)

41

Figure 4. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, by John Opie, June 1797, engraved by James Heath for the frontispiece of William Godwin’s Memoirs of Wollstonecraft, January 1798

41

Figure 5. Mrs. Godwin, engraved by John Chapman “from an original painting” (source unknown), frontispiece for a review, “Memoirs of Mrs. Godwin,” in The Monthly Visitor, and Pocket Companion 3, no. 2 (February 1798)

42

Figure 6. David Levine, “Mary Wollstonecraft,” New York Review of Books, November 2, 1972, p. 8

42

Figure 7. David Levine, “Mary Wollstonecraft,” New York Review of Books, February 19, 1976, p. 39

43

Figure 8. Jane Austen, charcoal sketch by Cassandra Austen, c. 1810

43

x | Illustrations Figure 9. stewy (London street artist), life-size stencil, Unitarian Church, Newington Green (London), appearing on International Woman’s Day, 2013 44 Figure 10. Maggi Hambling, Statue for Mary Wollstonecraft, unveiled on Newington Green, November 10, 2020

44

Figure 11. A Vindication of the Rights of Men (anon.), title page, November 29, 1790 60 Figure 12. A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 2nd edition, title page, December 18, 1790

60

Figure 13. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, title page, January 1792

80

Figure 14. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), xv–xvi: Table of Contents

90

Figure 15. Lady’s Magazine; and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge, vol. 1, December 1, 1792, frontispiece, engraving by the firm of Thackara & Vallance, Philadelphia

156

Acknowledgments

David Quint, who invited me into this project, supported it throughout, and read with exquisite care and expertise Garrett Stewart, for timely fine attentions, savvy advice, hearty encouragement John Bugg for careful attention, smart questions, encouragement Jennifer Crewe, for sage advice and counsel Gareth David Williams, for care, encouragement, and material support Duncan Wu, for warm support and expert attention Eileen Hunt, for reliable expertise and generosity Rob Fellman, for impressive attention, courtesy, and efficiency in copyediting Ron Levao, for everything, and more

My Texts, Abbreviations, and Short Titles

My Texts A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 2nd edition. London: Joseph Johnson, December 1790. Published three weeks after the first, Wollstonecraft’s name on the cover. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1st edition. London: Joseph Johnson, January 1792. In-text citations to MW’s roman-numeral chapter are given in arabic numerals, cited by chapter and page (for example, 2:16). The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria; a Fragment. London: Joseph Johnson, 1798, cited by chapter and page. Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 4 volumes, ed. William Godwin. London: Joseph Johnson, 1798. The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. I change Todd’s italics back to MW’s scriptive underlining. Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. London: J. Johnson, 1796. Memoirs of The Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by William Godwin. London: Joseph Johnson, 1798.

xiv | My Texts, Abbreviations, and Short Titles John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1674; cited by roman Book and line(s). Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language. London: Longman, 1755. Open access at https:// johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/.

Abbreviations and Short Titles AR

Analytical Review (for Wollstonecraft’s periodical articles)

DEL

Dictionary of the English Language (Samuel Johnson)

L

Letters of Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd

M

Memoirs, by William Godwin

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

PL

Paradise Lost, by John Milton

PW

Posthumous Works

VRM / Rights of Men

A Vindication of the Rights of Men

VRW / Rights of Woman

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Wrongs

The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria

On Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Prologue Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication?

“The Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman”

A

prolific late-eighteenth-century writer, adept in many genres, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) might have sat in our library catalogues as a capable but not extraordinary woman of letters. Her renown is chiefly for two productions: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and the daughter who became “The Author of Frankenstein,” its second edition (1823) unveiling the anonymous author of 1818 as “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.” The landmark Vindication haunts the imagination of this epochal science fiction. Rights of Woman addresses the “prevailing opinion,” around the globe and through the ages, that regards one half of humanity as inferior on the prejudice of sexual difference. Frankenstein delivers a Creature of anomalous body to vicious prejudices that doom him to abuse, loneliness, and existential misery. Wollstonecraft’s last (uncompleted) project, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (which Shelley was reading just before she wrote Frankenstein), has an inset narrative of a serially abused female bastard that reads like a precursor-text for Frankenstein’s Creature. Woman’s Rights and Woman’s Wrongs mapped the world as Wollstonecraft saw it.

2 | Prologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication?

What is a Vindication? A “defence; assertion; justification,” says Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), citing John Milton’s purpose, in his seventeenth-century epic Paradise Lost (about the Fall from Eden), to “vindicate the ways of God to man” (Vim + dicere: speak with force, a militant genre). Johnson confused Milton’s phrase, “justifie the ways of God to men” (1.26), with Alexander Pope’s upgraded verb in Essay on Man (1.16). Vindicate was the word Wollstonecraft wanted. In 1790 she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men, a white-hot defense of the principles the French Revolution of 1789. This made her name. What made her fame was the sequel, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a biting, often bitter polemic on the sex exclusiveness of the Revolution’s vaunted universal, Men. The French brand—Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité—turned out to be a fraternity after all, leaving women pretty much back in the ancien régime. Not much was different in England—or anywhere. “She considered herself standing forth in defence of one half of the human species, labouring under a yoke which, through all the records of time, had degraded them from the station of rational beings, and almost sunk them to the level of the brutes,” said William Godwin about his wife’s courage in the teeth of the controversies roiling British public opinion (M 79). Radical then, her two “eloquent and daring” vindications, remarked Virginia Woolf on October  5, 1929, to readers of The Nation (fifteen months after English women achieved full suffrage), spoke “theories and convictions” which “are so true that they seem now to contain nothing new in them—their originality has become our commonplace” (14). Dauntless, defiant, well informed, inspired, Wollstonecraft was a remarkable visionary. Equally remarkable is the brief span of her lifetime publications: just a decade. Her first book, January 1787, was Thoughts

Prologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication? | 3 on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct, in the more important Duties of Life, a sensible market-genre work, written to settle debts from the failure of her school for girls. Her last book, January 1796, was Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, a blend of vivid picturesque scenes, lyric meditations, astute cultural commentary, and heart-aching appeals to her faithless lover, Gilbert Imlay.1 She died, quite unexpectedly, in 1797. In 1798, Godwin saw into print a four-volume Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, including several more letters to Imlay (vols. 3–4) and the unfinished Wrongs of Woman (vols. 1–2). As the Authormarker makes clear, the work of consequence was Rights of Woman. This is how she is named on her tombstone, too (M 194). When William Wordsworth proposed that “the Child is Father of the Man,” he was speaking a spiritual genetics. This phrase is part of his epigraph for Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1815). As the unfurled title may suggest, the soul’s home is Heaven; clouds of its glory trail into early childhood, then fade into the light of common day. The poet’s memory of how the world seemed in the spiritual lights of early childhood intimates the father-fount of metaphysical identity, beyond the world of time and history. Wollstonecraft argues a social genetics, with no such sanctifying: the girl is mother of the woman, girls “made women, almost from their very birth” (5:180) by what they are told; how they are shaped and formed, and kept throughout their lives in time and history in a state of virtual girlhood (2:34). “It is time to effect a revolution in female manners,” she declares, time to treat women as “part of the human species” who “by reforming themselves” will “reform the world” (3:92– 93). The “Conclusion” to Rights of Woman repeats this in capital letters: “a revolution in female

4 | Prologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication?

manners” (13:447). She means “manners” in the eighteenthcentury sense: a cultural ethos, vast and deep. Paradise Lost (channeling scriptural authority into every patriarchy) says female inferiority is the design of a “God” who created “woman” (she is irritated to say) as a soft-brained creature valued for beauty and “docile blind obedience” (2.33), a formation prized in the conduct literature of Wollstonecraft’s day as a model for daughters and wives. Refuting Milton’s story (and “theology”), Rights of Woman invokes a rational “Supreme Being” who has endowed all human beings with rational capacity. Speaking the Enlightenment spirit of her day and putting it into her literary activism, Wollstonecraft dared rational men to disagree. In her own manner of life, she was determined to be a new form of woman. Deciding at age twenty-eight to live by her pen, she put it plain to her younger sister Everina on November 7, 1787: I am . . . going to be the first of a new genus—I tremble at the attempt . . . I should have written before but I wait till I was determined what course to pursue . . . This project has long floated in my mind. You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track—the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on. (L 139–40)

Men have “an opportunity of exerting themselves with dignity, and of rising by the exertions which really improve a rational creature,” she’ll say in Rights of Woman; but When do we hear of women who, starting out of obscurity, boldly claim respect on account of their great abilities or daring virtues? Where are they to be found? (4:122)

Prologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication? | 5 There were some pathfinders in the 1780s: most important, historian Catharine Macaulay (b. 1731), then poet and woman of letters Anna Barbauld (b. 1743), poet and essayist Hannah More (b. 1745), novelist and poet Charlotte Smith (b. 1749), novelist Frances Burney (b. 1752), and a contemporary, born the same year as Wollstonecraft, poet and woman of letters Helen Maria Williams. Among this vibrant cohort, Wollstonecraft was the first to be professionally salaried, the first and only one to call herself a “new genus”—“first” but not, she could hope, the last to head off the beaten track into a career of writing. Her peculiar bent led to vigorous vindications but also into erotic paths that proved, until her happiness with Godwin, exhausting, humiliating, and nearly fatal. The woman of letters was also full-hearted, “high-handed and hot-blooded”; her life was “an experiment from the start, an attempt to make human conventions form more closely to human needs,” said Woolf in her essay for The Nation, with a sense of her own heterodox bent (15). Ten years earlier, Ruth Benedict hit the same key in her opening paragraph for a chapter on Wollstonecraft that she was writing for a book she wanted to call Adventures in Womanhood: For her, life had no axioms, its geometry was all experimental. She was forever testing, probing, forever dominated by an unwillingness to accept the pretense, the convention in place of the reality. She reasoned because she must; because a passionately intellectual attitude toward living was her essential tool.2

In the life-laboratory of “forever testing,” many Wollstonecrafts took shape: educator, storyteller, journalist, reviewer, political

6 | Prologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication?

philosopher, ethical philosopher, historian, travel-writer, novelist. The roles she lived were just as multiple: caretaker of sisters and younger brothers, affectionate friend and mentor, enlightened governess, businesswoman, passionate but suffering lover, single mother, and, finally, happy wife and new parent with a good man. Above all, “Author.” “I am an Author,” she wrote at age twenty-eight (L 129), proud of that 160-page pamphlet, Education of Daughters, written to lift her spirits and raise some money. It brought her ten guineas (£10.5, about $2,000 in purchasing power today) at a time when a schoolmistress made £12 per year. Its publisher Joseph Johnson, impressed by her conversational plain style and good sense, invited her to send more work. Wollstonecraft’s next venture was Mary: A Fiction, the mirror-named protagonist invested with the hope that “a genius will educate itself ” (September 1787; L 136). By September 1790, with four books, a translation, and several reviews in print, she tells Everina, “I could not now resign intellectual pursuits for domestic comforts” (L 178). She was officially a “spinster,” her shelf-life for the marriage market having expired. Originally denoting an occupation for both sexes, “spinster” narrowed in the seventeenth century to refer to a woman unmarried by age twenty-eight, deemed good for nothing else other than spinning thread or yarn. It became a legal she-designation in the eighteenth century and was not abolished in England until 2005, when it was replaced by “single.” The spinster-stigma did not bother Wollstonecraft. She felt the truth of sixteenth-century essayist Francis Bacon’s maxim that “the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men” (“Of Marriage and the Single Life”). Quoting this sentence in Rights of Woman,

Prologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication? | 7 she adds in a heartbeat, “I say the same of women” (4:136). By November 1790, she had written over 250 articles for Johnson’s monthly Analytical Review, from brief notices to substantial reports, on a wide variety of subjects: poetry and novels, biography, education, sermons, economy, travel, and politics. New genus to genius, for Wollstonecraft: restless, inventive, generative. This was the same month that, incensed by Edmund Burke’s reactionary Reflections on the Revolution in France, she burned out her first Vindication, a rapid-response, 150-page polemic addressed to this revered, long-serving member of Parliament who had been associated with many liberal causes. Literate, passionate, caustic, trenchant, A Vindication of the Rights of Men commanded attention. Within weeks, it had a second edition, now signed (the first wasn’t) “Mary Wollstonecraft,” a she-surprise to many. Its success emboldened her to an extreme pledge, “I shall live independent or not live at all” (L 183). She wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman the next year, its emphatic singular, Woman, stamping a class grievance. To reform manners, she stressed sexual equality and social respect for both sexes, from family life to the “body politic” (12:411). Her visionary horizon was free, coeducational national day-schooling with a curriculum stressing intellectual pursuits and physical exercise. She argued the social benefits: wives who would be interesting companions rather than childish amusements, frivolous fashion plates, or household drudges; robust mothers who would be rational mentors and models. In the 1790s, given “the mistaken notions that enslave my sex,” such a prospect shimmers as “Utopian dreams” (2:72). Just undoing these notions “with indignation” was work enough.

8 | Prologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication?

Scandal How surprising, then, that this advocate of rational female education instead of “accomplishments” for the marriage market, of physical vitality in disdain of affected “delicacy,” of moral circumspection over coquetry, of chastity (sexual abstinence before marriage and fidelity within marriage), of modesty and cleanliness, of school uniforms over sartorial vanity, of the value of “intellectual beauty” over “sensuous homage”—how surprising that this Wollstonecraft could go dim for nearly a century under a cloud of disgrace. It wasn’t Rights of Woman. Except for a few reactionary screeds piqued by its “revolution” rhetoric, most of the first reviews hailed a sensible treatise on female education and social mores. Monthly Review (June 1792) offered such “copious extracts” as to be a virtual readers’ digest, with just a peep wishing that the female pastime of decorative needlework had been spared censure. A second London edition was published in 1792, and it was soon out in Paris, Dublin, and the United States. If its political language was more of an irritant after England and France went to war in 1793, Gentleman’s Magazine’s obituary (1797) described no firebrand. It eulogized a “woman of uncommon talents and considerable knowledge” along with this softening appeal: Her manners were gentle, easy, and elegant; her conversation intelligent and amusing, without the least trait of literary pride or the apparent consciousness of powers above the level of her sex; and, for soundness of understanding, and sensibility of heart, she was perhaps, never equaled. (894)

Prologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication? | 9 That was October. A few months on, another “Wollstonecraft” was born: a menace and a monster, an atheist, a slut, a pathology, and a castrating threat to male authority. The midwife, astonishingly, was Godwin. In a wash of grief-work (she died suddenly from complications in the birth of Mary), he immersed himself in writing Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (published January 1798). His title and the first paragraph designated this signature work, the name “Mary Wollstonecraft” not even given until the third one (3–4): political prestige over person. In his final sentence, Godwin said he had “put down the leading traits of her intellectual character” (199). In between the opening and the close, however, he had put down so much more: her alleged crush on a married artist, Henry Fuseli; two out-ofwedlock pregnancies; two suicide attempts from a tumultuous affair with Imlay (that lover prior to Godwin, in 1793); intimate medical details of the fatal illness, during which (moreover) “not one word of a religious cast fell from her lips” (190). The ready antagonists of 1798 (anarchist philosopher Godwin a target, too) were delighted, leaping on the red meat. “Wollstonecraft” now stood for social disruption, and with influence. Analytical Review (her home-base) treated the details that scandalized her antagonists as “eventful and touching”; what it castigated was what Godwin had left “deficient”: no “correct history of the formation of [her] mind . . . her favourite books, her hours of study . . . her attainments in languages and philosophy” (March 1798, 27:238). Recognizing some misjudgments, Godwin issued a “corrected” edition in August, softfiltering the scandals and contouring a sentimental heroine in

10 | Prologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication?

“agony indescribable” (M 112). But the damage was done. The “Hand of Providence is visible, in her life, her death, and in the Memoirs”: “she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes,” sermonized Reverend Richard Polwhele with brutal glee in his satirical poem, The Unsex’d Females (29– 30n). Posthumous Works (published some weeks after Memoirs) made things even worse. Volumes 3 and 4 printed some of Wollstonecraft’s letters: to her radical publisher Johnson (sixteen on matters personal and professional); then, most damaging, seventyseven passionate missives to faithless Imlay. Godwin again tried to sentimentalize: written in “glowing imagination” and from a “heart penetrated with the passion” that she describes, Wollstonecraft was a female “Werter” (Preface to Letters; PW 3). The epithet alludes to J. W. von Goethe’s sensationally popular novel, published in English in 1779 as The Sorrows of Young Werther, its hero agonized to suicide by unrequited love. Wollstonecraft’s “superiority over the fiction,” said Godwin, was her authenticity. But if this genuine experience was a credit for him, to others it was a stigma. No help was Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (volumes 1 and 2). Written to display “the miseries and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society” (Preface; PW 1.1), Wrongs also vindicated a woman’s right to adultery: Maria’s romance with a fellow prisoner in the madhouse to which she was remanded by her odious, tyrannical husband. Hannah More, a conservative scourge who detested the whole idea of “The Rights of Woman,” was outraged that Wollstonecraft would extend this to sexual license, with vindication: “A direct vindication of adultery was for the first time attempted by a woman, a professed

Prologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication? | 11 admirer and imitator of the German suicide Werter. The Female Werter, as she is styled by her biographer, asserts, in a work intitled ‘The Wrongs of Women,’ that adultery is justifiable, and that the restrictions placed on it by the laws of England constitute one of the Wrongs of Women” (Strictures 1:48). In her sputtering rage, she didn’t care that she mistitled the offense. The entire dossier pretty much incinerated Wollstonecraft’s reputation and her signature cause. Anti-Jacobin Review, founded by government agents to extirpate radical politics (Jacobins were the radical faction in France and government of the Terror), branded Rights of Woman the “philosophy of a whore” (July 1798), with this unique listing in its Index for “prostitution”: “See Mary Wollstonecraft” (859). Its essay arraigned her “jacobinical religion” and “jacobin morality”: “whether by precept or example,” her life was treason to domestic, political, and civil society (95–100). With a circulation of 3,500 and a readership in many multiples, this view was widely influential. In 1803, an anonymous Defence of the Character and Conduct of the Late Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (likely by her disciple, Mary Hays) was futile. Back in 1793, Hays could say that “the rights of woman, and the name of Woollstonecraft [sic], will go down to posterity with reverence, when the pointless sarcasms of witlings are forgotten” (Letters and Essays, 21). A decade on, there was no place for her in Hays’s six-volume Female Biography, or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of all Ages and Countries. Hardly alone among Wollstonecraft’s dismayed admirers, (then) radical poet Robert Southey lamented the fallout that was all too apparent by 1804: “indeed indeed my flesh is not made of such Quaker fibre, nor my blood of such toad temperature as not to be irritated by these recollections,” he fumed at Godwin’s

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carelessness, lambasting “the odium which it brought upon the best principles & the best cause, & the want of all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked, as he did, & such a wife.” In History of an Enthusiast (1830), a novella by spirited woman of letters M. J. Jewsbury, a friend of the proxy-heroine (a celebrity poet and solo adventurer), worries, in cooler blood, about the hazards of being thought “a second Mary Wolstonecroft” [sic] (170). When Jewsbury considered writing a new biography of Wollstonecraft, she would make clear her disapproval of her personal life. This was the ritual disavowal for almost everyone in the nineteenth century. Even so, Jewsbury held her respect for the Rights of Woman and pondered “remodelling” it in a way that “would not fail to become again attractive, and . . . useful” (Elwood, 2:153). Useful it was to liberal philosopher and parliamentarian John Stuart Mill, whose Subjection of Women (1869) pretty much states Wollstonecraft’s case on its first page: That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to another—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a system of perfect equality, admitting no power and privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.

Wollstonecraft could have drafted this later sentence: “What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing— the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others” (38–39). But Mill wouldn’t name her, even though he was completely familiar with her Vindication. His

Prologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication? | 13 uncredited collaborator, wife Harriet Taylor Mill, knew it well and had given it to her daughter (by her first husband), Helen Taylor. After her mother’s death (1858), Taylor helped Mill edit Subjection, which reached immediate international success. How telling that in 1879 publisher C. Kegan Paul’s long prefatory “Memoir” to his edition of her letters to Imlay could lament the paradox that while Wollstonecraft’s “opinions have become in many particulars the commonplaces of our own day” (Woolf would say so again), “she who was first to proclaim what is now held innocently was forgotten or assailed” (lxiii). In 1855, George Eliot at least mentioned Rights of Woman in an essay on Margaret Fuller’s Wollstonecraft-themed Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Noting that Rights “is now rather scarce” (it had a few reprints in the 1840s), she defended it against “a vague prejudice that it is somehow . . . reprehensible.” It “is eminently serious, seriously moral,” she declared, “nothing if not rational” (988). By the 1890s, the decade of the “new woman” and suffragist politics, Rights of Woman was reborn to a new generation. Biographer, political philosopher, and suffragist Millicent Fawcett wrote a thirty-page introduction for a centenary edition (1891). While she was a champion of Mill, it was Wollstonecraft whom she credited for “the first systematic attack” on the “old system”: “the women’s rights movement in England and America owes as much to her as modern Political Economy owes to her famous contemporary, Adam Smith” (30; Fawcett was also a political economist). Influential as her essay was—her edition had sixteen printings by 1929—it was not until 1927 that Rights of Woman again got published separately, in a modest edition of seven hundred. Its editor, W. Clark Durant, made a plea to librarians to

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index it under “Wollstonecraft,” not “Godwin, Mrs.  Mary” (“Advertisement,” ix, xi).3 Finally, in 1929, Everyman’s Library put Wollstonecraft and Mill together in one volume (no. 825), an affordable global publication. Progress was erratic, however. In 1959, the Fawcett Society laid a wreath on Wollstonecraft’s grave at St.  Pancras Old Church on the bicentenary of her birth. But this didn’t stem the attacks, which continued into the 1970s, with preening scientists and professors pathologizing Wollstonecraft to fuel satires and disparagements of “women’s liberation” (then so called), especially its incursions into academe. Even well-meaning feminist champions could indulge exaggerations of her tumultuous love life.4

Feminist Before “Feminism” In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft contemplates a remark that she heard made of the eighteenth-century genius Isaac Newton: he “was probably a being of a superior order, accidentally caged in a human body.”5 She cagily summons this accident as analogue to an intellectual being in a female body under “the galling yoke of sovereign man.” Imagine (she invites her readers) that “the few extraordinary women who have rushed in eccentrical directions out of the orbit prescribed to their sex, were male spirited, confined by mistake in a female frame” (II:68). She links “extraordinary” and “eccentrical” off the beaten track, where male may transfer from sexed body to the spirited minds of both sexes. This is a revolution in

Prologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication? | 15 language and conception. A male spirit in a female frame: no monstrosity, but a rational new genus. A genus needs independence from what is “prescribed” and “confined.” In 1929, the author of A Room of One’s Own (Woolf) put it this way to readers of The Nation: “Independence was the first necessity for a woman” (13). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was a “feminist declaration of independence,” wrote historian Miriam Brody in 1975 on the first page of her introduction (7). Frequently echoed, feminist needs historicizing. As Elizabeth Pennell, who in 1884 wrote the first full-length biography of Wollstonecraft after Godwin’s, takes pains to point out in her centenary edition of Rights of Woman (1892), “A hundred years ago . . . people were still horrified by the doctrine that all men had claims as human beings” (Preface, vii). And all women? In 1792, there was no such noun, let alone identity, as “feminist,” no systematic critique named “feminism” (neither word in DEL), let alone a movement or class consciousness. The word feminist appeared only in the negative forms of antifeminist satire, a misogynist literature from way back. Just for the newly scrubbed adjective feminist, “of, relating to, or advocating the rights of women,” the first entry in OED is 1852, sixty years after Rights of Woman. The nominative (for the advocator) would take another thirty-five years. In the 1790s, female suffrage was so fantastic, so sheerly notional, as to elicit ridicule. “I may excite laughter, by dropping an hint,” writes Wollstonecraft in Rights of Woman, “that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government” (9:335). It is not clear from this

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phrasing whether her “hint” is for representatives for women’s interests or whether women might themselves be such representatives. If this last possibility is so remote that Wollstonecraft has to imagine “laughter,” she’ll still float it. Critical Review (which issued the only immediate attack on Rights of Woman, for twelve pages) guessed she really meant it (4:393). It also (rightly) gauged that her language of “Revolution” was no rhetorical flourish but substantive. And she wasn’t even proposing election to civic offices, admission to universities, leadership in business and industry. Wollstonecraft’s radical move in the 1790s was to treat gender keywords—masculine, feminine— as no emanation of “Nature” but as a cultural language with historically contingent value investments. This notion may seem second nature to us now, but the thought that gender and “woman” are social, cultural, economic, and textual formations was revolutionary for her generation. Dictionaries are records of usages but also agents of use, and the sex-gender lexicon is still a hot-point as a structure and disrupter of understanding. On April 25, 2022, the New York Times reported a man arrested for sending messages to Merriam-Webster threatening to kill every employee and bomb its offices for defining female as “having a gender identity that is opposite of male,” male as “having a gender that is the opposite of female,” and gender identity as “a person’s internal sense of being male, female, some combination of male and female, or neither male nor female.” “There is no such thing as ‘gender identity,’ ” raged the protester; lexicographers who would so “degrade the English language and deny reality” should “be hunted down and shot.” On June 15, the Times reported that some organizations—from Planned Parenthood to NARAL

Prologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication? | 17 Pro-Choice America to the American Medical Association to city and state health departments—liberally erased “women” into a sex-neutral, trans-inclusive language of “people with vaginas” and “pregnant people.” The identifier “Woman” was effectively depoliticized into body parts and functions. Such a strange reworking of the Rights of Woman during the very season that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled women could be enslaved to unwilled, possibly fatal pregnancies. Some legislators are now ready to treat pregnancy termination (including nonviable, lethal ectopic pregnancy) but also IUDs and abortifacients as actionably homicidal; even spontaneous miscarriages (about 20 percent of pregnancies end this way) might be subject to criminal inquiry. And pregnant women attempting escape from one state to another could be arrested by bounty hunters, who would return them to state control. Wollstonecraft entered the world, wrote anarchist political activist Emma Goldman in 1911, “at a time when her sex was in chattel slavery: owned by the father while at home and passed on as a commodity to her husband when married” (para. 7). A class polemic, Vindication of the Rights of Woman became a work of international consequence. It was a political argument and a political event. Placing this work at the center of my book, I illuminate it with the 1790 prequel, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, and, at the decade’s end, the sequel, Wrongs of Woman: a parallel-titled triptych of promise and oppression on Men, Woman, Rights, Wrongs, unfolded across the 1790s. While my core chapter is on Rights of Woman, the chapters arranged “about it” are also “about it” in orbits of thesis and themes, in echoes, throughlines, and refractions. Wollstonecraft’s critical practice is to quote and show, reading into and against the grain. I read

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her texts this way, how she writes what she argues. I’m fascinated and impressed by her adeptness in highlighting gender in the infrastructure of her political critique, with sharp analyses of received ideas and their literary manifestations, of charged keywords and their webs of metaphor. Close reading, she soon grasped, is the skill that fine-tunes her critical acumen and the method of her arguments, from wordings to emblematic scene, parable, and vignette. Such is the verve and nervous system of the first systematic analyst of women’s situation in history, culture, and social existence— and not without complexities and complications.

1 How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman”

S

he was destined for this, from home oppressions: the tyranny of a spendthrift, despotic, alcoholic, violent father; a helpless, uneducated mother; a favored first son and neglected junior siblings (M 7). The French Revolution “was not merely a thing that had happened outside her; it was an active agent in her own blood,” said Virginia Woolf in 1929; “She had been in revolt all her life—against tyranny, against law, against convention” (Nation, 14). Drawing on Godwin’s Memoirs (9–10), she compared Mary Wollstonecraft to England’s darling author of timeless remove from hotbed politics: “If Jane Austen had lain as a child on the landing to prevent her father from thrashing her mother, her soul might have burnt with such a passion against tyranny that all her novels might have been consumed in a cry for justice” (13). The soul of the girl is the soul of the Vindicator. Mary was the second of seven children in a middle-class family of declining fortunes. Denied the education invested in her older brother, her lively intellect found resources in sympathetic neighbors and families of school friends. One friend, Fanny Blood, impressed her with her “masculine understanding, and sound judgment” (early 1780; L 25). This was the character she

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would develop for herself. Wollstonecraft is “a Lady of masculine masterly Understanding,” said U.S. vice president John Adams. He still would use the class(y) term “Lady” for “woman” and stop short of including this “masculine” intellect into “our masculine system of government.” Wollstonecraft was smart, and restless. Should such a masculine and masterly Lady want to “come out in the fashionable world,” be marketed into marriage? Nothing is more “indelicate” for those taught to prize “delicacy” (she says in Rights of Woman) than “to bring to market a marriageable miss,” her “person . . . taken from one public place to another, richly caparisoned” like a show-horse (12:392– 93). The fated fetterings of marriage were repulsive to her. Yet the economic opportunities for what she would call “a single life with dignity” (2:63) were meager. In 1778, not yet twenty, she escaped home for hire as a live-in companion and personal assistant to a wealthy, temperamental widow, who had burned out several predecessors in this office. While this new life could be irksome, it wasn’t marriage, and it was interesting. Her four years with Mrs. Dawson brought her to Bath, Bristol, and Southampton, where she met educated women and witnessed reams of inanity in the worlds of “fashionable life.” In late 1781, she was called home to nurse her fatally ill mother. Her father remarried the next year, left for Wales and his brood to shift for themselves. First-born Ned, now a London lawyer, refused any help. In desperation, Eliza quickly married Meredith Bishop, only to suffer cruelty, brutish sex, exhausting childbirth, and postpartum depression. Mary moved in to care for her and then hatched a cure: flight in a hired carriage, leaving the infant daughter behind. This may seem heartless, but fathers would have legal custody in any separation, and Eliza

How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication” | 21 was tormented by this self-saving necessity as she furiously “bit her wedding ring to pieces” (L 43, Mary’s emphasis to their sister Everina). Eliza would never again see her daughter (then five months), who died within a year. She secured a legal separation, remaining “Mrs. Bishop” and ever bitter about Mary’s failure to maintain her or secure her desirable employment. Wollstonecraft’s new venture was a girls’ school in Islington, which she opened, with loans, in 1783. Her aim was to offer an intellectual alternative to the “smattering of accomplishments” (RW, 8-9) then taught by “finishing” schools for young “ladies”— decorative needlework, parlor singing, piano playing, potterypainting, graceful dancing, polite manners, and light conversation. Such “accomplishments” (as these were called) would magnetize sarcasm in Rights of Woman and Austen’s novels, and were already getting punned and scorned in Wollstonecraft’s letters as “a heap of rubbish miss-called accomplishments” (1786; L 88). “So wrong a system” (88) wasn’t just trivial. Misses “weakly educated” who failed the marriage market could be left (as near-spinster Charlotte Lucas fears in Pride and Prejudice) “dependent on . . . the bounty” of a brother (if she has one). If he marries, his wife may regard a sister as a financial drain and “intruder” and want her gone. “These are matters of fact, which have come under my eye, again and again,” Wollstonecraft reports (VRW 4:140–41). The school was set up in a house on Newington Green, where Fanny Blood and her sisters became instructors. Also in Newington was London’s oldest dissenting church, led by Dr. Richard Price, fiery advocate of liberty and equality, of the American Revolution of 1776, of the republic established in 1783, and of the French Revolution of 1789. The 1780s was a decade of political optimism, reform seeming not just possible but

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unstoppable. When John Adams arrived in London as the first U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, it was Price’s Unitarian congregation that he and his wife, Abigail, joined, not (as expected) the main Anglican one. Price took to Wollstonecraft and became a de facto tutor, introducing her to the radical writings of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Priestley, and French political philosophers Condorcet, Voltaire, and J. J. Rousseau. In 1784, one of Price’s friends introduced her to the progressive publisher Joseph Johnson and then to esteemed Dr.  Samuel Johnson, who addressed her “with particular kindness and attention.” Such a treat for her, long an admirer! Their “long conversation” must have been a treat for him, too. Although ailing and failing, he asked her “to repeat her visit often” (M 45; he died before this was possible). Wollstonecraft’s school lost one resource in January  1785, when Fanny Blood moved to Lisbon to marry Hugh Skeys (to whom she had been long engaged). Though frail, she was soon pregnant. In November, Wollstonecraft undertook a perilous sea voyage to help out. Fanny delivered a son the day she arrived. Too weak to nurse and failing fast, she was dead by the end of the month, the boy a month later. The agonies of Eliza and Fanny sharpened Wollstonecraft’s aversion to marriage and the looming death penalty of pregnancy, soon or later, as the blessed event headed into double digits. (Austen could tell this fatal story in relation to her several sisters-in-law, the sole survivor a childless one.) Returning to London, Wollstonecraft found her school failing from mismanagement and loss of patronage by parents wanting better finishing for their daughters. To acquit her debts, she tried another mode of schooling, the printed word, and began Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. She then

How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication” | 23 accepted a position at £40 per year (a decent salary, better than the going rate) as governess to the daughters of the wealthy Viscount and Viscountess Kingsborough (the Kings) of Cork, Ireland. On the way, she stopped for a close prospect of Eton College (one of the Kings’ sons there would travel to Cork with her) and its vicious schoolboy culture. By the time she arrived in October 1786 at the family’s lavish, remote estate, more than 160 miles southwest of Dublin, her spirits, initially stoic, hit rock bottom: “I entered the great gates with the same kind of feeling as I should if I was going into the Bastile [sic],” she wrote to Everina on October 30 (L 84), citing the notorious Paris prison and seeming ready to follow beloved Fanny to the grave. Although her letters swelled with melancholy loneliness, the Irish “Bastile” turned out to have a good library, and she found time at night to read, study, learn French, and write. Her letters began to add literary riffs and allusions, and reports of goingson that read like paragraphs in an Austen novel. She wrote to Joseph Johnson about publishing Thoughts. She planned Mary: A Fiction. Not quite “a novel” (the genre term had yet to consolidate), this was an experimental hybrid of autobiography and tragic romance, with a new genus of heroine, “a woman, who has thinking powers,” said the Advertisement. Godwin was willing to say that it alone was sufficient “to establish the eminence of her genius,” and he recognized what was, in effect, yet another new genus: “The story is nothing” but “the feelings are the truest . . . species of imagination” (M 59– 60). Increasingly perceptive about female social fate, Wollstonecraft’s mirrornamed protagonist decides to “work” rather than be a “slave” in marriage (chap. 22). With determined self-education, Mary finds society with older philosophic men (chap. 8).

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Such a swerve from the marriage plot of the popular fictions of the day. But where, ultimately? In the 1780s, there is “no place” off the beaten track. Mary can only die in (and out of) the marriage plots of the material world, cheered by the “thought [that] she was hastening to that world, where there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage” (chap. 31, Wollstonecraft’s italics). Said another way: no ownership of her body; no marriage-plot novel, either. What a spin on the promise of resurrection, when, released from the laws of earth, transformed beings “neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matthew 22:30), equal subjects in spirit. As had her term with Mrs. Dawson, life with the Kings took Wollstonecraft to the cosmopolitan world and into female society, which she found variously learned and witty, vulgar and dissipated, and often just plain silly. In Dublin for the winter season of 1787, she was relieved to find “plenty of books” there, too, including “philosophical lectures and metaphysical sermons,” and “Blairs lectures on genius and taste &c &c” (L 105).1 Reading into the night was salvation but not risk free; it could seem antisocial, discontented (L. Gordon, 114). And “Lady  K.,” devoted to her luxurious baths in rosewater and milk, to hours of dressing and preening, was no sister in spirit. She inspires an appalling satire in Wollstonecraft’s letters to Everina: “her companions” are “not her children, but her dogs.” “To see a woman without any softness in her manners caressing animals, and using infantine expression” is “very absurd and ludicrous—but a fine Lady is new species to me of animals” (October 30, 1786; L 85). Creature of her own new species, Wollstonecraft was not a happy fit. Her unorthodox bent, the daughters’ attachment to her company and counsel (especially the bright eldest one,

How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication” | 25 who long remembered her influence), and her sense of dignity above that of a mere servant grew ever more irksome to Lady K., who dismissed her in the summer at Bristol, where the family was enjoying this resort, just before a Grand Tour of the Continent. Back to London Wollstonecraft went. Here she was: unmoored, no prospects of employment, no marriage even to consider, no savings and several debts from her failed school, no letter of reference. With a knack for turning dead ends into new paths, she sought out Johnson, who had published Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in 1787 and was hospitable to both Mary and Mary. This was a turning point. He offered her lodging in some rooms above his shop and became a sounding-board for her prospects at “near nine-andtwenty years.” On September 13, she asked him about finding a professional “habitation”: I often think of my new plan of life . . . I am determined!— Your sex generally laugh at female determinations; but let me tell you, I never yet resolved to do, any thing of consequence, that I did not adhere resolutely to it, till I had accomplished my purpose . . . (L 134)

—accomplished my purpose riffing on those feminine “accomplishments.” “Whatever Mary undertook, she perhaps in all instances accomplished,” Godwin said in Memoirs (38). She soon settled into a little house on a street near Blackfriars Bridge, amid a bustle of publishers and printers, bookshops and book talk. With Mary now in production, she began a volume of instructive “Stories from Real Life.” Impressed by her potential and commitment, Johnson hired her as a translator, reader, and

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writer for his new monthly, Analytical Review, soon the most notable oppositional periodical of the day. He valued her as an “Author” who happened to be female, and she regarded him as the brother and father, mentor and confidant, she longed for. “I am my dear Girl, once more thrown on the world” to “earn my own subsistence,” she wrote to Everina, November 7; “to this determination I will adhere.” How finely double is her underscored will: volition charged with reiterated determination, a word pressed against sex determination. “Mr Johnson . . . assures me that if I exert my talents in writing I may support myself in a comfortable way” (L 139). Support myself: an alternative to the dependence of marriage. In summer 1790, though suffering in poverty and illness, she curtly refused a marriage proposal presented by an “impertinently officious” go-between, offering financial security. Pestered a second time, she burned back a reply etching the “insult”: the “bare supposition that I could for a moment think of prostituting my person for a maintenance; for in that point of view does such a marriage appear to me,” let alone the insult from one “who could so grossly mistake my character” (L 173– 75). Prostitution-marriage will be a recurring trope in both Vindications and Wrongs. In the practice of the day, reviews were unsigned (or just initialed) and voiced in corporate-consensus, ungendered plurals (we, our). Liberated by gender opacity, Wollstonecraft’s reviews in the Analytical took up books regarded as “men’s” subjects: politics, independent travel, science, and boxing. This work was also an ongoing education. She also wrote about a shelfload of novels, bristling at what we’d call chick-lit: “an artless welleducated female, destitute of beauty, attracts the attentions of a worthy man.— so far so good but why is virtue always to be

How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication” | 27 rewarded with a coach and six?” (AR 5:216). She’s alluding tartly to Samuel Richardson’s wildly popular, best-seller conduct novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). One book she adored was the publication of her hero Richard Price’s Discourse on the Love of Our Country (soon after he delivered this lecture, on November 4, 1789). Price drew a line from Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 into the general progress of “LIBERTY” (all caps) and the recent events in the United States and France. Wollstonecraft gave it a glowing, sixpage notice in the December  1789 Analytical (5:471– 75), and then was shocked, like many, by Edmund Burke’s attack on Price in his Reflections on the Revolution in France the following November (1790)—this, from the MP (Member of Parliament) who endorsed the logic of the U.S. revolution. Not lost on Burke (or on Wollstonecraft) was the big picture: the mirror of France’s ancien régime in contemporary Britain. “The gentlemen of the Revolution Society,” he cautioned, “appear to be strongly of opinion that there is some scheme of politics relative to this country” (Reflections 78). Burke not only defended but celebrated an inherited monarchy as the foundation of national unity and glossed over social inequality. Eager to defend Price, Wollstonecraft may have asked to review Reflections. If so, she quickly found that no mere review, even a long one, would be sufficient to the “indignation . . . roused by the sophistical arguments” that Burke proffered as “natural feelings and common sense” (so she opens A Vindication of the Rights of Men). She “seized her pen in the first burst,” Godwin put it (M 75), her “pages . . . swelling imperceptibly to a considerable size” (RM iii). Published just weeks after Reflections, printed in economic octavo, priced at one shilling 6 pence,

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her Vindication sold out; a second (now signed) edition came in mid-December. For this to “emanate from a woman was like a bomb explosion, unheard of before,” anarchist activist Emma Goldman exclaimed in 1911 (para. 17). Wollstonecraft knew she had an audience. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman followed early in 1792, a market-ready six-shilling octavo; it, too, had a second edition and wide reprinting in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the United States. In the world of letters, an emerging alternative for patronage and the upscale salons hosted by aristocratic ladies was publishers’ investments in authors. Johnson was such an entrepreneur. No hoity-toity salon, his establishment became a democratic hub for artists, writers, orators, philosophers, scientists, the antithesis for Wollstonecraft of the vapid flutter of Lady Kingsborough’s drawing rooms. His bookstore was a library for this circle, and his dinner parties were serial seminars at a time when bright women had no access to universities. Virginia Woolf, irked by her exclusion from Oxford, conjures a feminist romance: There was also a woman present with very bright eyes and a very eager tongue, and the young men, who had middle-class names, like Barlow and Holcroft and Godwin, called her simply ‘Wollstonecraft,’ as if it did not matter whether she were married or unmarried, as if she were a young man like themselves. (Nation, 13)

Much virtue in as if: Wollstonecraft was an honorary “young man.” While some women came by (including essayist and poet Anna Barbauld), Woolf was right about the general fraternity: poet, painter, and political visionary William Blake; political

How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication” | 29 poet Joel Barlow; artists Henry Fuseli and John Opie (he found a fine subject in Wollstonecraft); journalist Godwin; atheist activist Thomas Holcroft; chemist and political radical Joseph Priestley— and everyone’s champion, Tom Paine. Johnson hosted a party for Paine on November 13, 1791, in honor of The Rights of Man, his rebuke to Burke (published a few months after Wollstonecraft’s). Godwin, yet to publish any book, wangled an invitation. Eager to converse with Paine, he was as frustrated by Paine’s reticence as he was irked by Wollstonecraft’s talkativeness and her failure to defer to him. He knew who she was, but was so uninterested that he “had barely looked into” her Rights of Men (a self-ironizing recollection in Memoirs, 94). Fuseli was put off by her practical black stockings and casual coif: she looked like a “philosophical sloven” (Tomalin, 85). Wollstonecraft apparently didn’t register this. Excited by “the rich torrent” of his conversation and wanting to “unite” herself with his “mind” (L 205), in the fall of 1792 she proposed joining his household as a Platonic companion. Madame Fuseli refused, and the artist shrugged. Devastated and embarrassed, a cure for her “distempered mind” (M 100) appeared when Johnson proposed sending her to Paris to report on the Revolution. France had a new National Assembly, a rational constitution, and a limited, ceremonial monarchy. The monarchs proved increasingly untrustworthy as new patriots, and in August 1792, the monarchy was overthrown, and king and queen arrested for treason. Violent purges and ferocious massacres ensued (the onset of “The Terror”). Wollstonecraft would still go. Arriving in December, eager to join up with Paine, Revolution-enthusiast Helen Maria Williams, and the moderate Girondins (M 102– 3), what she found was bloody, daily terrors in the streets.

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Things brightened in April 1793 when, at Paine’s house, she met a charismatic American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay, and was soon in her first real love affair. In June, they moved to a village just outside Paris (no safe place after France and England declared mutual war in February). Imlay often left for long stretches, going to London “on business.” She went back to Paris to work on An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. It was a serious, cogent analysis, especially of the bloated, decadent monarchy. John Adams read it twice (in 1796 and 1812), thinking her “an American” in her political soul and annotating it with about 12,000 words (more than any other of his books).2 She was someone to contend with, to argue with, to admire. She and Imlay even discussed emigrating from France to the American frontier. By July she was pregnant, and by January it seemed best for “Mrs. Imlay” (so she named herself, for safety and in hope) to go to Le Havre, on the coast across from England. There she finished her history by March and gave birth to a daughter on May 14, 1794, naming her Francoise, a nominal honor to France and private honor to beloved Fanny Blood. Her daughter was always called “Fanny.” Infant and mother returned to Paris later that year. Impatient at Imlay’s long delay, Wollstonecraft returned to London in April  1795, to find him living with another woman. Heartshattered, she set on suicide with laudanum but was restored by her maid, who reminded her of Fanny. Imlay gave her further purpose by sending her to Scandinavia on a business trip. She wrote him reams of letters, as dutiful in her assignment as she was pained in her soul. Back in London, she found him with yet another woman. “My entire confidence in Mr. Imlay plunged me” into “difficulties,” she told Godwin (L 357); she used the

How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication” | 31 same verb when, humiliated again and despairing of a future with the cad, she soaked her skirts and resolved, on October 10, 1795, to “plunge into the Thames” (L 327), only to be rescued by some fishermen. Ever resourceful, she retrieved her letters to Imlay and put together a book blending immersive picturesque description, melancholy, lively curiosity, cultural observation, and eversharpened political analysis. Her first letter reports: “my host told me bluntly that I was a woman of observation, for I asked him men’s questions” (13, her italics). Published January 1796, Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark proved her most popular lifetime title. Samuel Taylor Coleridge loved it; so did his brother-in-law, Robert Southey, writing in 1797 to his own brother, “She has made me in love with a cold climate & frost & snow, with a Northern moonlight.” It positively warmed Godwin. Put off by her manner in 1791 and the persona of her Vindications, he would tell everyone that Letters “irresistibly seizes on the heart”: The occasional harshness and ruggedness of character, that diversify her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, here totally disappear. If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration. (M 129)

While he was not the “man” on her calculus, he felt he could have been— or could be.

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Already “in love” with the proxy, he met the author again on January  8, 1796 (via the hospitality of a mutual friend Mary Hays), and they took to each other. He was touched by her sufferings: “sympathy in her anguish, added in my mind to the respect I had always entertained for her talents” (M 149). She respected his more recent, much admired political-literary activism: his philosophical, anarchist work, Political Justice (1793); his courageous defense of reformers being tried for treason (1794); and his venture into the genre of political novel with Caleb Williams (1794). On her initiative, they began to keep regular, increasingly intimate company—“friendship melting into love,” as Godwin put it (M 153–54). For the woman who back in 1792 contended that the best male-female friendships “checked their passion”—“love and friendship” are incompatible, the latter corrupted by “the winds which fan the flame of love” (VRW 4:159–60)—this was new. Loving Godwin was Wollstonecraft’s last great experiment: intellectual, passionate, professional, with Fanny gaining an affectionate and engaged father. By August they were lovers. When she became pregnant at the end of 1796, they set aside principle (“we did not marry,” said Godwin, M 154) and married on March 29, 1797, in order to secure legitimacy for Fanny and their coming child. Having styled herself “Mrs. Imlay,” what she entered in the church register was “Mary Wollstonecraft, spinster.” It was now evident that “Mrs. Imlay” was a fiction and that Fanny was illegitimate. Many of their friends in “polished society,” including renowned actress Sarah Siddons and popular novelist Elizabeth Inchbald, ostracized them, with a keen “pang” to Mary (M 161–63). “I am . . . thrown out of my track, and have not traced another,” she sighed to Godwin (L

How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication” | 33 423). What a rupture for one who had declared ten years before, “I am not born to tread in the beaten track” (L 140). Many other friends stayed true, however, and she persisted. She and Godwin kept separate residences so that they could work during daytime. She was already writing The Wrongs of Woman. Her “talents,” said Godwin, “roused her faculties to grapple” with the subject. Unlike the propulsive Vindications, this was “written slowly” and with a “mature consideration” that had her revising “again and again” (M 171– 72). She worked through her pregnancy. She was healthy. She expected to come down to dinner the day after delivery (she had been up and about the day after Fanny’s birth). Ten days on, Mary Wollstonecraft, age thirtyeight, died in agony from septicæmia (poisoning) inflicted by her doctor’s botched removal of an incompletely expelled placenta.3

A Pertinent Chronology [MW: Mary Wollstonecraft / JJ: Joseph Johnson / WG: William Godwin]

1756 1757 1759

1761 1762

MW’s parents marry, live in London. WG born. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. April 27, MW born, second of seven children: Ned, 1757; Henry, 1761; Eliza, 1763; Everina, 1765; James, 1768; Charles, 1770. J.-J. Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloise, widely adored. Rousseau’s influential “progressive” education tract, Émile, with a chapter on training a woman for obedience and subordination to her husband; MW would read the translation by William Kenrick as Emilius and Sophia: or, A New System of Education.

34 | How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication” 1763 Trying to establish as a gentleman farmer, MW’s father –1774 keeps relocating the family. 1766 Reverend James Fordyce’s influential Sermons to Young Women. 1772 Lord Mansfield rules there is no justification for slavery in England. 1774 Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, a sentimental sensation of suicidal passion. MW, age fifteen, is befriended by a neighboring clergyman and his wife, who assist her education. 1775 MW meets Fanny Blood, soon an intimate friend; U.S. Revolution. 1776 Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations disputes the economic justifications for slavery; U.S. Declaration of Independence; Richard Price, On Civil Liberty and the War with America. 1778 MW, age nineteen, is hired as a companion to Mrs. Dawson of Windsor and Bath. 1780 MW returns to London to nurse her mother. 1781 The captain of the Zong ejects 133 weak and diseased slaves into shark-infested waters, in order to save the rest of the “cargo.” British surrender to the army of the United States. 1782 April: MW’s mother dies. MW moves to Fanny Blood’s family, helps support them with eye-straining, soul-killing needlework. Eliza marries Meredith Bishop. 1783 August: Eliza’s daughter born. MW meets Dr. Samuel Johnson. The abolitionist Olaudah Equiano brings the Zong atrocity to national attention. 1784 MW goes to Eliza, suffering postpartum breakdown and an unhappy marriage. MW plots her escape, leaving behind the infant daughter, who dies within the year. MW opens a school in Islington, then with Fanny Blood and Eliza moves it to Newington Green; Everina joins the faculty. MW meets Richard Price. Treaty of Paris officially ends the British war against the United States.

How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication” | 35 1785

February: Fanny Blood goes to Lisbon to marry Hugh Skeys and is soon pregnant. MW visits to assist with childbirth (premature) and care. Neither Fanny nor the child survives. 1786 MW returns to London; her school is failing. Meets JJ. Writes Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. Helps her sisters find positions as teachers; becomes governess to the elder daughters of the Kings, aristocrats in County Cork, Ireland. Visits Eton on the way. 1787 JJ publishes Thoughts. Dismissed by Lady King, MW returns to London. JJ employs her for several professional tasks. Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade founded. 1788 spring: JJ publishes Mary: A Fiction; a book for children, Original Stories from Real Life (with six woodcuts by then unknown illustrator William Blake); and a translation of The Importance of Religious Opinions, by Jacques Necker, moral philosopher, Louis XVI’s finance minister (and Mme de Stael’s father). JJ establishes the Analytical Review; hires MW. 1789 May: French National Assembly forms, repudiated by Louis XVI. Inspired by the U.S. Bill of Rights, its Declaration of the Rights of Man abolishes feudalism and limits the monarchy. July 14: the fall of the Bastille prison. October 6: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette arrested at Versailles and taken to a Paris palace. November: Church lands seized. November 4: Price’s Discourse on the Love of Our Country, championing France, reviewed by MW in the December Analytical. Equiano’s Interesting Narrative details the atrocities of slavery, reviewed (mixed) by MW. Under a male pseudonym, she publishes The Female Reader. 1790 July 12: French clergy put under subordination to the state. July 14: Fête de la Fédération in Paris celebrates the Revolution’s first anniversary, the monarchs on ceremonial display. Helen Maria Williams’s Letters from France

36 | How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication”

1791

1792

1793

(summer). November 1: Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. November 29: MW’s anonymous reply to Burke, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, widely noticed, favorably reviewed. December 18: the second edition bears her name. Catharine Macaulay writes to compliment her; also publishes her own Letters on Education. John Opie paints MW. Original Stories, second edition. September: MW begins A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. November 13: meets WG and Tom Paine (The Rights of Man just published). Olympe de Gouges issues Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne. French Jacobins (at first liberal, then radical) gain power. Louis XVI is discovered fleeing France in disguise, to ally with counter-Revolutionaries. January: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman published. February: MW meets French minister of education Talleyrand. MW falls hard for Henry Fuseli. May: after publishing Rights of Man part 2, Paine is charged with sedition, escapes to France (where he’s a hero). In France: August: monarchy overthrown; September: National Convention establishes a Republic; the Church (as institution) is attacked and all its establishments (places of worship, monasteries, abbeys, etc.); Radicals storm prisons and kill thousands of suspected counter-revolutionaries, 12,000 in Paris alone (activists, ordinary criminals, clergy, aristocrats, servants). Burke’s Sketch of a Negro Code outlines gradual abolition and emancipation. December: MW goes to Paris as foreign correspondent. Trial of Louis XVI for treason begins on the twenty-sixth. January 21: Louis XVI guillotined; England and France declare mutual war. February/March: MW falls in love with charismatic American writer/businessman/ frontiersman Gilbert Imlay. Girondin moderates fall; Maximilien Robespierre’s Jacobins install the Revolutionary

How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication” | 37 Tribunal, Committee on Surveillance, and Committee on Public Safety. Imlay registers MW as his “wife” at the U.S. embassy for her protection. By late summer she’s pregnant; he goes abroad, leaving her in Neuilly, a village west of Paris. His novel The Emigrants (an American frontier romance), written with MW’s likely help, is published. Trials and executions continue, including Marie Antoinette (October 16) and de Gouges (November 3). WG’s Political Justice, a critique of government institutions, makes WG famous as an “anarchist” philosopher. Hannah More’s anti-Revolution pamphlet Village Politics is produced in thousands. Paine’s Rights of Man reaches sales of 200,000. 1794 January: MW joins Imlay at Le Havre. May 14: Fanny is born. July 27: Jacobins are overthrown and executed; the Terror ends. MW publishes An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. National Convention abolishes slavery in France’s colonies. September: Imlay goes to London; MW and Fanny return to Paris. WG’s political novel Caleb Williams. 1795 MW returns to London, finds Imlay with another woman; attempts suicide by laudanum (tincture of opium). Imlay rescues her and sends her on a business trip to Scandinavia. Traveling with Fanny and a maid, MW ably pursues her assignments. Returning in September to find him with yet another lover, she tries to drown herself but is rescued. 1796 January: MW retrieves her letters to Imlay and adapts them for Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. March: meets Imlay for the last time. WG reads Letters with new interest in MW. They reacquaint in the winter; she calls on him April 14; they are lovers by August. MW begins The Wrongs of Woman. JJ issues a third edition of VRW. December: MW is pregnant. 1797 WG and MW marry (March 29) to give legitimacy to Fanny and an expected “son” (already named “William”).

38 | How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication” June: John Opie paints her portrait. August 30: daughter Mary born. September 10: MW dies of postpartum sepsis. WG begins Memoirs, drafted by November. Anti-Jacobin Review is launched. 1798 January: Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, March: Four-volume Posthumous Works, including The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. July: Anti-Jacobin attacks MW. August: Memoirs second edition. 1815 Napoleon defeated at Waterloo; long war ends. Restored monarchies enact reactionary legislations. 1816 Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (living with her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley in Geneva) begins Frankenstein. October: MW’s daughter Fanny, age twenty-two, commits suicide in despair and loneliness. December: Shelley’s wife Harriet (mother of their two children) commits suicide in despair and loneliness. He and Mary Godwin marry. 1818 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus published anonymously, dedicated to WG. Reviews assume a male author. 1823 The title page of a new printing names the author as “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.” 1831 In her “Introduction” to a new edition of Frankenstein, Shelley refers to her illustrious mother, not naming her, except by the imprint of her own middle name. 1833 VRW republished in New York. 1845 In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Margaret Fuller renders a positive appreciation of the marriage of MW and WG as an experiment in “intellectual companionship.” 1868 U.S. Suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. –1869 Anthony republish VRW.

2 Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft The Right Woman

I

n pictures no less than in print, Wollstonecraft would present herself as a serious woman. With her growing fame, her image escaped her management, to be refracted and filtered by others with various agendas. This gallery presents some highlights and lowlights in these visual imaginations. Wollstonecraft was a person of plural personae. William Hazlitt, a London man of letters, met her in 1797 or so and years on remembered her volleying quarrels “with quite a playful, easy air,” a manner that Samuel Taylor Coleridge admired, too, “powers of conversation” with “imagination exercised over . . . mere intellect” (30–31). What she would not abide is an “abject . . . picture” of “submissive charms” (a sneer on Milton’s Eve; PL 4.498), or any “portrait of an accomplished woman, according to the received opinion of female excellence” (VRW 2:65). The best known of the early portraits (c. 1790–1791) is an oil by John Opie (a friend of her publisher), who asked to do it. Opie stages the professional at work, sober dress, hair held by a practical scarf, looking up impatiently, as if interrupted. “I will humble my Beauty I will not dress fine,” William Blake imagines her voice in his poem “Mary” (29). No nonsense, no patience, no time for posing with a smile, the pages in her hand, the writing

Figure 1 Mary Wollstonecraft, Painted by John Opie (1790–1791). Courtesy of Tate Gallery, London [no. 1167].

Figure 2 Mrs. Wollstonecraft. Stipple engraving oval, by William Ridley from John Opie’s painting (fig. 1). Source: Monthly Mirror 1, no. 4 ( January 1796).

Figure 3 Oil painting of Mary Wollstonecraft by John Williamson (c. 1791). Source: © Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool [no. 1541].

Figure 4 Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, by John Opie, June 1797. Engraved by James Heath for the frontispiece of William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman ( January 1798). Source: Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

Figure 5 Mrs. Godwin. Engraved by John Chapman, “from an original painting” (source unknown). Frontispiece for the lead article, “Memoirs of Mrs. Godwin,” The Monthly Visitor, and Pocket Companion 3, no. 2 (February 1798). Source: © National Portrait Gallery, London. [NPG D7842].

Figure 6 David Levine, “Mary Wollstonecraft,” New York Review of Books, November 2, 1972, 8. Source: © Matthew and Eve Levine.

Figure 7 David Levine, “Mary Wollstonecraft,” New York Review of Books, February 19, 1976, 39. Source: © Matthew and Eve Levine.

Figure 8 Jane Austen, c. 1810. Charcoal sketch by Cassandra Austen, around the time that Sense and Sensibility was published. Source: © National Portrait Gallery, London. no. 3630.

Figure 9 Street artist STEWY’s life-size stencil on the outside wall of the Unitarian Church, Newington Green (London), debuting on International Woman’s Day, 2013, to bring support for the statue in Figure 10. Source: Image and permission generously supplied by https:// www.stewy.uk.

Figure 10 Maggi Hambling, Statue for Mary Wollstonecraft. Commissioned by “Mary on the Green” campaign, unveiled on Newington Green, November 10, 2020. Source: Courtesy of Wikimedia.

Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft | 45 desk, inkwell and quill, marking an active circuit of reading and writing. No surprise that a popular engraving of it a century on (1898) by Timothy Cole was the frontispiece of the February  1899 American Century Magazine (57.4:482), just as Wollstonecraft was being hailed as the godmother of the “new woman” and suffragist politics. The first engraving of Opie’s portrait appeared in the Monthly Mirror, January 1796. Its founder and publisher, Thomas Bellamy, had appealed to Joseph Johnson for appreciations, along with any image. When he proved uncooperative, Bellamy enlisted the prolific William Ridley for an engraving (fig. 2) and flaunted it just below the issue’s masthead: Embellished with An expensive and valuable engraved Portrait of a celebrated female Writer.

“Mrs Wollstonecraft” is the lead article (131). This “e xquisite portr ait,” leaved in after page 132, seems to have become a keeper.1 Most striking, whether by accident or design, is the sharpened level gaze. You might almost fancy Wollstonecraft irritated by and pressing against the Mirror’s aesthetic refashioning of her, oval-cropped miniature-style, further graced with a tissue cover. The aesthetic cropping, moreover, cut out the book, the desk and inkwell, and added a name of spinster courtesy (she was almost thirty-seven), “m rs wollstonecr af t.” The article that followed hailed “the vast additions she has made to the literature of the present age in general, and to the exaltation of the female character in particular.” From the

46 | Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft

“strength and vigour of her intellect, the force of her reasoning, the variety of her arguments, and the bold delivery of her sentiments,” Wollstonecraft is “the champion of the rights of her se x,” with “endeavours to expunge from the catalogue of modern affection” the insults of “nonsensical cant” (132). That Bellamy was a propagandist for the slave system (whether as hack or apologist) seemed not to dent his esteem for abolitionist Wollstonecraft, who routinely invoked the analogy of slavery to female oppression.2 Around this time, William Roscoe (an abolitionist and another friend of Johnson) commissioned a portrait of her in 1791 from John Williamson (fig. 3). Wollstonecraft was fresh from the fame of A Vindication of the Rights of Men, and the gendering, when disclosed in the second printing, was no little sensation. “The rights of men asserted by a fair lady! The age of chivalry cannot be over, or the sexes have changed their ground,” smirked Gentleman’s Magazine, February 1791 (151), mocking Burke’s famous lament in Reflections that “the age of chivalry is over!”3 The ridicule had been seeded by Roscoe’s own satire of Burke’s vanquishing by a warrior woman: And lo! an Amazon stept out, One Wolstoncraft her name ..................... An oaken sapling in her hand, Full on the foe she fell, Nor could his coat of rusty steel Her vig’rous strokes repel.

Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft | 47 When strange to see, her conq’ring staff, Returning leaves o’erspread, Of which a verdant wreath was wove, And bound around her head. (p. 7)

Burke’s unmanly “reverence” for chivalry is “the rust of antiquity,” Wollstonecraft had leveled him in Rights of Men (9). In Roscoe’s staging, her rhetorical weaponry sprouts the leaves, punning her pages, for a laureate head-wreath, a match for the no-nonsense scarf that Opie’s portrait bound around her hair. On October 6, 1791, Wollstonecraft writes in this spirit to Roscoe about his commission: it will be shortly forthcoming. I do not imagine that it will be a very striking likeness; but, if you do not find me in it, I will send you a more faithful sketch—a book that I am now writing, in which I myself, for I cannot yet attain to Homer’s dignity, shall certainly appear, head and heart. (L 190)

The book is Rights of Woman, faithful to head and heart. “I myself ” is split between the I-brain, I-displayed, and I to come. Williamson’s Wollstonecraft, if not a striking likeness, is as much a gender-bender as the epithets of Roscoe’s “Amazon.” Not transvestite “masculine,” she is also “not-feminine.” Miming an eighteenth-century man of letters, she strikes a pose, hair powdered and curled, elegant neckcloth, a serious demeanor, no smiling, no flirtatious gaze, no jewelry or ornament beyond those dress-up lacey cuffs and a little rouge. The sober black garb,

48 | Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft

pursed lips, and tensed hands even seem a bit campy about the oscillation, arch about the theatrics. The portrait was kept as a Roscoe family treasure, was not even identified as Wollstonecraft until the 1950s.4 As for Opie’s working-woman portrait: this would recede until 1879, when C. Kegan Paul set a rectangle-crop engraving (by A. L. Merritt) for the frontispiece to his edition of her Letters to Imlay. Truer than the Monthly Mirror’s oval crop, this at least showed her hand on her pages and her steely gaze, but it also erased the markers of work: desk, inkpot and quill. Mary Shelley’s heirs gave the original to London’s National Gallery in 1884, where it was displayed the next year, the working woman at last recovered. The obscurity of this portrait was due in part to its eclipse by two other portraits rendered in the late 1790s. The first (fig. 4) is a wistful, pregnant wife (also by Opie), titled “Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.” Paul put it in his edition of her letters to Imlay as an epitaph-bookend (208). In production is a baby, not a book. Her hair is tucked into a dark velvet matronly cap, her garb as plain as plain can be, practical muslin. Again sentimentally framed in oval, her gaze is contemplative, unknowable. In the shimmer of chiaroscuro, Wollstonecraft seems suspended in limbo. When she sat for it in June 1797, no one guessed that it would be the final lifetime portrait. It would be engraved posthumously by James Heath, for the frontispiece to Godwin’s Memoirs. An advertisement for Memoirs in the Morning Chronicle on December 23 promoted this engraving, now a cherishable elegiac memento (time-compressed to “painted a few weeks before her death”).5 The portrait itself hung above the fireplace in the Godwin home as a virtual shrine, to loom over her

Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft | 49 namesake daughter, who could not help but imagine herself in fatal gestation. It was held by the family until 1899, then given to the National Portrait Gallery. Ruth Benedict remembers seeing it there as a girl: “the woman in the little frame arrested me, this woman with the auburn hair, and the sad, steady, light-brown eyes, and the gallant poise of the head.” She saw, in effect, Wollstonecraft of two aspects, the woman who had “saved her soul . . . it looked out from her steady eyes unafraid,” and the woman who had paid the “price . . . life had demanded of her.” So she ends her essay on Wollstonecraft, the woman who bestowed “a guarantee, a promise” on her: “I still spell out her life” (519). Not for Benedict alone, “Wollstonecraft” was a mirror for uncanny self-reading, personal and cultural. Pondering this same portrait in 1929, one year after British women gained full suffrage, Woolf scanned a figure of “contradictions”: “her face, at once so resolute and so dreamy, so sensual and so intelligent . . . the life of such a woman was bound to be tempestuous” (Nation, 14). James Heath’s engraving of this portrait went transatlantic in the suffragist movement, featured front and center in the New York Times Book Review, July 11, 1915, in an article on the cause “Started by Mary Wollstonecraft More Than a Century Ago” (the subtitle, 249). The twin from the late 1790s is the antithesis of dreamy. This is John Chapman’s refraction of Heath’s engraving into a Jacobin sloven (fig. 5), a coal-eyed frump, hair disheveled with a mannish Jacobin-like fedora, tipped left, in no English decency. It was published in early 1798 with the Monthly Visitor’s two-part article on Godwin’s Memoirs.6 Strangely, the article it fronts is not the takedown seemingly heralded. Briefly noting Wollstonecraft’s “checquered existence” (109), the writer took pains to say

50 | Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft

that the cartoon did not “resemble” the character in Memoirs (109n). The article would also distinguish her philosophy from Godwin’s, implying that Godwin had Godwinized a less radical Wollstonecraft to disadvantage. It readily endorsed her critique of “regulations she deemed derogatory to her sex” and admired her “high genius”—with a caution that it would take a country of women of her caliber to insure that her doctrines would not “overturn the present basis of every civilized state.” Most crucially, it refused to indulge the “narrow comprehension” that equated her personal “deviations in propriety” with her “principles for action” (3:242). Well, that was the prose. The image spoke more loudly, with independent effect, and those “principles” fell in value as France collapsed into fresh tyrannies. In early 1795, novelist, historian, and MP Horace Walpole smirked to an anti-Wollstonecraft pal, poet, playwright, and essayist Hannah More (who refused to read Rights of Woman) that she was a “Hyæna in petticoats” (Letters 9:452).7 The AntiJacobin’s hyena attack on Memoirs (July 1798) feasted eagerly on Jacobin horrors. Cultural cop of patriarchal order, Reverend Richard Polwhele retailed it all in the verbal portrait gallery of his tirade on The Unsex’d Females (1798)—an unnatural, unfathered spectacle of outlaws: Survey with me, what ne’er our fathers saw, A female band despising Nature’s law, As “proud defiance” flashes from their arms, And vengeance smothers all their softer charms, I shudder at the new unpictur’d scene, Where unsex’d woman vaunts the imperious mien (pp. 6– 7)

Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft | 51 The quotation is from someone in Wollstonecraft’s critical focus in Rights of Woman, poet Alexander Pope, describing a horde announced by the Trump of Slander in The Temple of Fame (343). Soon following is Polwhele’s iconic picture in this unpictur’d scene:

See Wollstonecraft, whom do decorum checks, Arise, the intrepid champion of her sex; O’er humbled man assert the sovereign claim, And slight the timid blush of virgin fame. (p. 13)

Undergirding Polwhele’s survey in fifty or so Popean neoclassical couplets are fifty-seven footnotes (pp. 25– 30, many quoting Memoirs), some so expansive as to make the poetry seem a scaffolded pretext.8 Polwhele’s title, The Unsex’ d Females, slant-alludes to Lady Macbeth as the godless godmother of this novel clan, crying to the spirits of the night, “unsex me here” to steel herself for regicide (Macbeth 1.5.48). This is the sole example for unsexed in Dr.  Johnson’s Dictionary, and it means de-sexed in the sense of radically unfeminine: “to make otherways than the sex commonly is.” In 1801, a poet signing himself “C.  K.” refueled the Anti-Jacobin machine with a double portrait of sexual disarray:

Her husband, sans-culottes, was melancholy, For Mary verily would wear the breeches— God help poor silly men from such usurping b— —s.

52 | Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft

Man-pants-usurping Mary leaves Godwin moping in French Revolutionary garb (sans-culottes wore trousers rather than gentleman’s breeches). Winking to “polite” society, the blanks solicit readers to supply the letters elided. So, too, the next verse, describing Rights of Woman as “scripture, archly fram’d, for propagating w— —s.” Infuriated by such misogynist bile, Blake hit the politics of language, “Some said she was proud some calld her a whore” (Mary, 17): She went out in Morning in plain neat attire And came home in Evening bespatterd with mire. (35– 36)

Imaging her assault by “Faces of Scorn & with Eyes of disdain” (41), Blake blazons Mary as a martyr to narrow times (Emma Goldman’s essay of 1911 expands the trope): And thine is a Face of sweet Love in Despair And thine is a Face of mild sorrow & care And thine is a Face of wild terror & fear That shall never be quiet till laid on its bier. (45–48)

This closing quatrain verges on one rhyme, descending from Despair to dead-end bier. If Blake’s “Mary” finds quiet in the grave, the attacks wouldn’t die. While Millicent Fawcett was certain in 1891 that her “memory has been . . . thoroughly vindicated from the contumely that was one time heaped upon it” (29; she cites Walpole), it was

Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft | 53 still possible in 1947 for “professionals” to cite Wollstonecraft as a textbook case of psychopathology and sexual deviance. Such is the smug “science” of Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham’s Modern Woman: The Lost Sex.9 Fast-forward twenty-five years, to 1972, as the then-called “woman’s liberation movement” was moving into academe, and you’ll find grown men of letters chirping schoolboy misogyny in the mainstream media, to impugn both Wollstonecraft’s character and her cause. On November 2, the New York Review of Books presented David Levine’s caricature of a sour glowerer (fig.  6), as if to rebut Woolf ’s regard of Wollstonecraft as “no pedant, no cold-blooded theorist” and to refresh Godwin’s concession that some passages in Rights of Woman had “a stern and rugged feature” (M 82).10 This cartoon accompanied V. S. Pritchett’s review of Eleanor Flexner’s biography, Mary Wollstonecraft, in which he dismissed this dubious “pioneer of feminism” as a warped “neurasthenic” (8). For a front-page notice of Claire Tomalin’s important biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, on September 6, 1974, TLS ran a bold-letter headline, “Radicalism and wreckage” (941), and a triptych banner: Chapman’s cartoon-sloven (called a “portrait”) was front and center, flanked by the portraits of Williamson and Opie ’97, as if these were secondary reflections. The reviewer, Richard Cobb, scoffed at Wollstonecraft’s force as a theorist or even a pedant; “unattractive, tiresome,” and “always silly . . . almost always egotistical . . . generally envious, rancorous, and meddlesome.” Her work is just resentment and grievance, “mediocre and ill-written, or appallingly gushing, polemical and hysterical” (note the folding of polemical into pathology), while her behavior amounted to serial home-wrecking (941). Appalled that

54 | Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft

a school or college at Oxford might be named for her, the don protested, “Mary’s very surname has about it an unmistakable ring of crankiness, ungainliness, and discomfort, a promise of puritanism.” (So pleased was he with his unmistaking ear for euphony that he seemed deaf to the joke-potential of the surname “Cobb,” a desiccated stump.) Reprising the antagonism to women’s rights in the 1790s, the misogynies of the 1970s wielded “Wollstonecraft” to impugn feminism as despicable, ludicrous, dismissible. By 1976, Levine had a fresh inspiration and recast Wollstonecraft (fig. 7) for the February 19 New York Review of Books, paired to an essay by Ellen Moers (author of the landmark Literary Women) titled “Vindicating Mary Wollstonecraft,” about several recent publications (nine editions, five biographies). Levine ’76 is a cocky woman, deadpan gaze and an unflappable pose. It looks a bit like a mash-up of Chapman’s Jacobin and Cassandra Austen’s sketch of plain Jane Austen, circa 1810, around the time she was writing her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811): selfpossessed, same pose, same gaze, folded arms. This was the image that NYRB chose for her Author Mug in a product line featuring thirty-three of “Levine’s most arresting and iconic caricatures.”11 Ever the case with “Wollstonecraft,” however, tides ebb and flow. Reviewing Janet Todd’s Mary Wollstonecraft: a revolutionary life for TLS, April 21, 2000, Rosemary Ashton twice burns “monstrous” into Wollstonecraft’s temper and behavior (the hidden self, apparently, in the same-page display of Opie’s late portrait). The best she’ll say of the writing is that it is “by no means . . . great,” just having the good luck of gender, genetics, and the times (36). In the next decade, the reception swung the

Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft | 55 other way. To draw support, spiritual and financial, for a statue on Newington Green, innovative street artist stew y extended Opie’s 1797 portrait to a full-body stencil (fig. 9). He wanted to produce “a life-like ghost” that would have “immediate impact,” to “make a younger generation aware of the past and important female icons.” On International Women’s Day, March 8, 2013, this graffiti debuted on the sidewall of the Unitarian Chapel that Wollstonecraft attended. “This is a mysterious apparition of the mother of feminism,” said Reverend Andy Pakula, “a daring figure who continues to inspire us in the fight for freedom and justice for all people”; her “spirit has been with us always. Now her image is as well!”12 How wonderfully this reiterates the last sentence of Woolf ’s essay in New York Herald Tribune (Opie’s working-woman portrait was set to the left): “we could swear that she is not dead. Surely we have met her only a night or two ago” (6). stew y ’s twenty-first-century Wollstonecraft sets her gaze on the horizon of her time and ours. The commissioned “Statue for Wollstonecraft” (fig. 10) was unveiled on November 10, 2020, three days after Kamala Harris was declared the first female vice president of the United States. Sculptor Maggi Hambling claimed that the naked desexualized androgyne at the tip-top of an epic swirl of silver heroized Wollstonecraft symbolically. But the metallic verticality became yet another lightning rod for controversy.13 Some beholders admired the abstract apotheosis; many more lamented a radical betrayal of Wollstonecraft’s valuing of mind over body by this hood-ornament nude—stripping her naked (as Robert Southey put it on reading Godwin’s Memoirs) all over again, now with flagrant intent. The motto that Hambling etched on the plinth—

56 | Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft “I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves.”

—sounds like an anthem. No little implication was Hambling’s pride of power. Yet this sentence is no anthem in its source, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It is an embedded critique of the zero-sum scale of sex differentiation in J.-J. Rousseau’s widely admired, influential education treatise Emilius (the English translation), with its odious chapter against sexual equality in education: ‘Educate women like men,’ says Rousseau, ‘and the more they resemble our sex the less power will they have over us.’ This is the very point I aim at. I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves. (VRW 4:134)

Wollstonecraft shreds Rousseau’s balance-sheet, despises it in the core of her soul. Too much brainwork for women, he advises, takes them “out of the station assigned them by nature” (134). “Rousseau declares that a woman should never, for a moment, feel herself independent, that she should be governed by fear,” she fumed in an earlier chapter. He would train a girl to be “a coquetish slave in order to render a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, whenever he chooses” (2:47, her italics). Sweeter to him, but sour sauce to any selfrespecting woman. Wollstonecraft lived the consequences of such

Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft | 57 regimentation. Back in the 1880s, Elizabeth Pennell made plain the experiential basis for her turn against Rousseau: Had she not seen for herself the unspeakable misery caused by the intellectual and domestic degradation of women, she would not have been so quick to discern the flaw in the reasoning of Rousseau and his French and English disciples. Her book gains in force when it is realized how entirely her arguments and doctrines are based on experience. (viii)

Pennell is thinking not only of Émile but also Du Contrat Social (The Social Contract), Rousseau’s influential argument, in 1762, about liberty, keyed to the rights of man and cooperative government by a male-community. Based on experience: this is what draws so many to Wollstonecraft, on the fuel of their own experience: “power . . . over themselves” is as much a cause in 2023 as in 1792, and Hambling’s statue has become an interactive site for solidarity.14 It is clear that “Wollstonecraft” is now more than a historical person. She is an icon for the new genus that she embodied and broadcast. At the same time, the persistently multiple facets of “Wollstonecraft” reflect her resistance to secure or stable framing. Picturing Wollstonecraft is no finished project.

3 “An Amazon stept out” A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)

T

he quotation is William Roscoe’s praise of Wollstonecraft’s debut as a political philosopher of the French Revolution. This explosion astonished everyone. It “gave a fundamental shock to the human intellect through every region of the globe,” said Godwin in 1798, in no exaggeration (M 74). A generation on, his son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley was still registering the shock waves. It “overthrew the hierarchy, the aristocracy and the monarchy, and the whole of that peculiarly insolent and oppressive system on which they were based,” he wrote in 1820 (A Philosophical View of Reform). He knew A Vindication of the Rights of Men intimately and read it with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The first edition this Vindication was unsigned. A soonfollowing second one set Mary Wollstonecraft’s name full out, with no polite-polish of “Mrs.” If you read A Vindication of the Rights of Men after you’ve read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, you can see its incubation not only of the political logic of the second one but literally in lines of argument, paragraphs, literary riffs, turns of phrase, keynote allusions, pungent metaphors, all primed for export. These are sibling texts, accidentally in Burke’s coparenting, his Reflections becoming Wollstonecraft’s sequential muse first for one, then the other.

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Figure 11. A Vindication of the Rights

Figure 12. A Vindication of the Rights of

of Men, title page, published (anon.), November 29, 1790.

Men, 2nd edition, title page, December 18, 1790, with Mary Wollstonecraft’s name.

Source: Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

Source: Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

Events in France Paris was a hub of high culture and learning and the seat of a monarchy that enforced brutal inequalities and injustice. Of its three Estates—nobles, clergy, commoners— only the last was taxed, and had few rights and scant political power. To

“An Amazon stept out” | 61 fund their luxuries, the monarchy relentlessly raised taxes, even on the desperately poor; dissidents were imprisoned without trial. After the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, the new National Assembly scheduled a series of reforms and on August 26 issued A Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Moderate liberals and enlightened nobility were glad to curb a decadent, corrupt, inefficient, spendthrift regime. France was a tinderbox, and it sparked English hearths. A “pamphlet war” erupted, volleying celebrations and denouncements in rival historiography (how “history” is narrated): villains and victims, heroes and barbarians, catastrophes and hopes, icons and iconoclasms. With a tradition of liberty and a reflexive suspicion of Catholic France, English opinion was at first mostly favorable. Even a conservative Hannah More could say in retrospect (1793), “What English heart did not exult at the demolition of the Bastile . . . triumph in the warm hope, that one of the finest countries in the world would soon be one of the most free?” (Remarks, 7). One of the first to exult was Dr. Richard Price. No conservative, he addressed the Revolution Society on November 4, 1789, drawing a heartfelt line from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (which enhanced parliamentary power and wrote a Bill of Rights) to this apocalyptic climax: What an eventful period is this! . . . I have lived to see the rights of man better understood than ever, and nations panting for liberty, which seemed to have lost the idea of it.— I have lived to see thirty millions of people, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice. After sharing in the benefits of One Revolution,

62 | “An Amazon stept out” I have been spared to be the witness of two other revolutions, both glorious— —. (49)

He was also talking about the American Revolution. The dash is a pregnant pause of punctuation. Writing for the December 1789 Analytical Review, Wollstonecraft cheered Price’s “animated sentiments of ardent virtue,” closing with a fuller passage of my excerpt (471– 75). Helen Maria Williams’s Letters from France, published November  1790, opened with an ecstatic description of her arrival on the first-anniversary Fête de la Fédération (July 14), a spectacle uniting all the former estates, with even the king and queen on ceremonial display.

Burke “Reflects” Taking the pulse of domestic unrest and reform agitation, Burke saw otherwise. Denouncing Price in Parliament in February, he began Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. No pamphlet, this was seriously developed political science, a work of 370 pages, published on November 1. “I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman,” Burke insisted (7), but undoing a millennial monarchy was ruination for France, with alarm for civilized Europe. He vigorously defended Britain’s aristocratic system and inveighed against the dissenters’ calls for reform. As learned as it was passionate, commanding reams of hard facts and analyses, priced at five shillings, Reflections sold quickly, 5,500 copies in the first three weeks, ten editions within a year. It astonished everyone, not

“An Amazon stept out” | 63 only with its erudition and narrative flair but also for coming from a celebrated Whig liberal who had argued for the gradual emancipation of slaves and the end of the trade, who had endorsed the grievances of the American colonies and criticized the corrupt governing of India. His anchor-word Reflections is a sheer misnomer, if you’re expecting contemplative musing. Burke flashed a furious attack on philosophers and theorists, “Jews and jobbers” (alliterative metonym for speculators) (88), a “gang of assassins” (100), a band of “practical zealots and furious fanatics” (212). This sounds hysteric, but when the Terror emerged in 1792, Burke’s alarm was deemed prophetic. Reflections is still prized by conservatives today as a north star. Burke savvily clothes the ancien régime with the magic of romance, a sublimity dispelled by the new “barbarous philosophy” (114). Here is his famous cri de coeur, in epochal lament: All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life . . . are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off . . . to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. On this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman. . . . All homage paid to the sex in general as such . . . is to be regarded as romance and folly. Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege are but fictions of superstition. (114)

Ever the aesthetic philosopher, Burke idealizes vast social differentials into a harmony of different shades, tarnished by spurious enlightenment and brutal reason, a “false light” that is

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antithetical to “austere and masculine morality” (54). Ever the political philosopher, he renders a chivalric romance of national consensus, spun from recollected clouds of glory: It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision . . . glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! (112)

Burke deftly transvalues the timely word “revolution” for this aesthetic affect. A semi-divine queen at once fronts and sanctifies the “mixed system of opinion and sentiment” that constitutes the system of power. To explode this is to commit a quadruple crime of sexual assault, regicide, parricide, and sacrilege (113). With the “heart” of a valiant chevalier, Burke exclaims, as if he were an eyewitness: little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.—But the age of chivalry is gone.— (112–13)

Not every Englishman lamented. An as-yet-unknown poet, William Wordsworth, eager to make his mark as a voice of

“An Amazon stept out” | 65 “indignation” in the liberal press (he signed himself “A Republican”), scorned Burke’s “philosophic lamentation over the extinction of Chivalry” as the “delusion” of an “infatuated moralist.”1 Burke was no naïve sentimentalist, however. Knowing that the mystique of power works through language and theater, he staged demystification as a villainous catastrophe: “The glory of Europe is extinguished for ever!”

Wollstonecraft Reacts Wollstonecraft could not have hoped for a better windfall. Her pen vibrating, her reply to Burke was the first one in print. Indignant at his rancor toward Price, she burned out a Vindication of the Rights of Man and (with a few halts) gave it to Johnson by the end of November 1790. At 150 pages (45,000 words) and far fewer words per page than his crowded pages, it was readerready. Burke framed Reflections as a letter to a young gentleman in Paris. Its ornate Latinate syntax and frills of Latin itself coded his audience: male-educated, elite, allied with the professions, the government, the institutions of power, the ecclesiastical establishment. (Latin was an international man’s language, taught sex-exclusively.) Wollstonecraft frames Rights of Men as a letter to Burke, but in no Latin code. She writes plain vernacular for plain British reading. He defends the system of monarchy; she writes of principle, English-tuned to France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man. Her values were broadly republican (anti-monarchical), but this was not her flag.2 It was rights— specifically, the rights of laborers to develop, protect, and earn from their property, including their bodies; the right to justice

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for crimes committed against them and a fair trial for charges against them. Burke would “style” himself “a friend of liberty”; she restyles him as “the champion of property” (20). “Security of property! Behold, in a few words, the definition of English liberty . . . it is only the property of the rich that is secure” (24); for every other man, “he has neither liberty nor property” (25). Her address “To” Burke is sheerly nominal; her real aim is British opinion. At once polemical and pedagogical, her tactic is to arrest Burke’s master-tropes and value-systems for forensic trial. With zings of sarcasm at his style no less than his sentiments, she smartly summons Burke against himself: his “servile reverence for antiquity” ought to have supported slavery (he didn’t) as an “inherited” system of “property” (23–24). Wielding his title-word reflections and the brand of his fame-making Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), she tars him with his own lexicon: his “reflection” supplies no “profound” nurture to the mind (4); this “short-sighted philosopher” (150) falls short, far short, of the “truly sublime” (6). He also falls short on manliness. Previewing a critical move in Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft detaches gender from any guarantee of sex. On the measure of “reason,” Burke’s chivalric laments are “unmanly” in manner (20), swooning, aptly, over a regime “emasculated by hereditary effeminacy” (97). The Vindicator will wield “manly definition” (2), “sober manliness of thought” (47), “manly plainness” (84). Pricking his pride of oratory, Wollstonecraft deflates Burke’s fervor as a foppery of “ornamental feelings” to please “the Ladies” of “the fashionable world,” who, in turn, adopt his flourishes into their voices, to

“An Amazon stept out” | 67 “repeat your sprightly sallies, and retail in theatrical attitudes many of your sentimental exclamations.” In this audit, Burke speaks and writes not only to Ladies but as one of them. His truest reflection is the she-coded “manie of the day” (5): “all your pretty flights arise from your pampered sensibility” and “dispel the sober suggestions of reason”; “reflection inflames your imagination, instead of enlightening your understanding” (6). Her voice is un-Ladylike, unforgiving, caustic, funny. I like Eileen Hunt’s remark that Wollstonecraft’s “command of satire, sarcasm, irony, and understatement” places her “among the great wits of the eighteenth century” (Hunt, ed., 11). Archly polite about her “manly” mode, the Vindicator tells Burke that she fears “to derange your nervous system by the bare mention of a metaphysical enquiry” (28), the last noun another jab at his Philosophical Enquiry. She’ll be gallant about the debility: “it would be something like cowardice to fight with a man who had never exercised the weapons with which his opponent chose to combat” (9). She cajoles him (and her readers): “Quitting now the flowers of rhetoric, let us, Sir, reason together” (6), her ironies in the fire, heated for combat. Reflections open on her desk, Wollstonecraft refutes it point by point. Meeting Burke on his chivalric ground, she nets him into the system he venerates: “the gorgeous drapery in which you have enwrapped your tyrannic principles” (88) is just “pretty jargon” (123). So self-entranced is he by his rhetoric that he misses the wrinkle in his overproductive figure of “decent drapery”: it disguises what is indecent. She’ll use such a figure in Rights of Woman to talk about men “concealing” vice “under gay ornamental drapery” of “polished manners” (I:26–27). Burke’s illusion of “power gentle” masks tyranny; the paradox of “obedience liberal”

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tacitly hints that if “devoted subjection” (52) is not freely (liberally) given, power will become ungentle. In language that struck the soon vindicator of the rights of woman, Burke casts the oppressed poor as virtual women, who “must be tractable and obedient” and “must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice” (359; quoted in these italics in VRM, 143). Divine justice in the next world, she parries, is invoked to justify the injustices of this world. “Must be taught” already conceded irrational coercion. Mistaught, she’ll say of such obedienceschooling in Rights of Woman, where the oppressor is men’s books. Turning Burke’s master lexicon—nature, liberty, sublime, masculine, feminine, gallantry, chivalry—inside out here, she fumigates his keywords, tropes, and metaphor-systems to expose “scattered artificial flowers,” “turgid bombast” (65), “empty rhetorical flourishes” (67), and “sentimental jargon” (68). One of Burke’s most celebrated passages is the Revolution’s second storming, the arrest of the king and queen at the palace of Versailles, and their forced transportation to Paris. “History will record,” he intones in a voice of objective neutrality for the record, that on the morning of the 6th  of October  1789, the King and Queen of France, after a day of confusion, alarm, dismay and slaughter, lay down under the pledged security of public faith, to indulge nature in a few hours of respite, and troubled melancholy repose. From this sleep the queen was first startled by the voice of the centinel at her door, who cried out to her to save herself by flight. . . . A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with an hundred

“An Amazon stept out” | 69 strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked. (105– 6)

Hardly objective, this is an episode in a gothic novel, swelling with “sensibility” and pathos, in a scenario of drapery indecently denied to a Queen in a violence luridly coded as rape.3 Not falling for, let alone doing Burke the favor of rehearsing, his genre, Wollstonecraft quotes only his sequel (106), the parade back to Paris, leveraging it into mordant commentary: ‘Whilst the royal captives . . . were slowly moved along, amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women.’ Probably you mean women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetable or fish, who never had had any advantages of education. (67–68)

An armed march of seven thousand starving commoners, coursing seventeen miles from Paris to Versailles to seek a reduction in the price of bread, were refused audience. In desperation, they forced their way into the palace and were fired on by those sentinels. In self-defense, the Parisian contingent killed two. Audience denied, the next move was to take the unpitying royals to a comfy palace in Paris, amid the misery of those they ruled. Wollstonecraft hits Burke’s class contempt. Resetting his melodrama of pitiable queen and she-fury commoners into an economic calculus of vicious luxury and bare subsistence, she peppers questions at him and his seduced readers:

70 | “An Amazon stept out” What were the outrages of a day to these continual miseries? . . . Did the pangs you felt for insulted nobility, the anguish that rent your heart when the gorgeous robes were torn off the idol human weakness had set up, deserve to be compared with the long-drawn sigh of melancholy reflection, when misery and vice are thus seen to haunt our steps, and swim on the top of every cheering prospect? (151–52)

With one last jab at Burke’s signature genre, reflection, she puts it under the sign (and affective “sigh”) of “melancholy”: not the eighteenth-century cult of preened sensibility but a visceral political grievance. The pace of our steps tracks in rhetorical time into England and commands her countering of Burke’s theatrical anguish with her own dramatic halt on page 153: Such misery demands more than tears—I pause to recollect myself; and smother the contempt I feel rising for your rhetorical flourishes and infantine sensibility. –

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The “contempt” remains in her wording for readers to reflect on, as she pauses her text for two page-lines of dashes. Rending his trope of “decent drapery,” Wollstonecraft retorts, with strategically apposite italics, that this “gentleman of lively imagination must borrow some drapery from fancy before he can love or pity a man” (26). Burke’s prescription of “humility, and submission to the will of Heaven” is “contemptible hard-hearted sophistry” wrapped in the cant of faithful patience. She’ll state with polite exasperation, “It is, Sir, possible to render the poor

“An Amazon stept out” | 71 happier in this world, without depriving them of the consolation which you gratuitously grant them in the next” (144). On his divine pieties, she imposes political justice. And so it goes: quote and critique, from words to deep logic. Quoting his veneration for “those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals” (Reflections, 128), she asks: “From whence do they come? How were they bred?” Not lost on her is the contradiction to his stance on abolition: “Were these inbred sentiments faithful guardians of our duty . . . when slavery was authorized by law to fasten her fangs on human flesh, and the iron eat into the very soul?” (74). When human beings are treated as property, the social body is corrupted: “men of rank” become “monsters in human shape” (103); sons and male underlings are trained to “unmanly servility, most inimical to true dignity of character” (50); and the “pernicious effect on female morals” has daughters “sacrificed to family convenience” and taught, in no decent drapery, to “coquet” to secure the best match (47). To barter children for mercenary benefit (a family’s acquisition and consolidation of property) is “to do violence to a natural impulse and run, into legal prostitution” (45); prostitution is the term Wollstonecraft spat at that unwanted suitor and a trope that she will invoke throughout Rights of Woman with visceral disgust. Such commodifying is scarcely to be distinguished from slavery, and however “convenient,” slavery is “degrading” both to “the master and the abject dependent” (RW x–xi). In Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft is already abolitionizing on marriage. This should be a contract of “mutual respect, and not a commercial treaty”; she invokes Milton for this case: “Among unequals there can be no society”

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(92), so he allows Adam to petition God for a partner, to remedy his lonely solitary rule; “friendship and intimacy . . . can only be enjoyed by equals,” she argues (12). The fuller passage, from Paradise Lost Book VIII, will get extended treatment in Rights of Woman. In Rights of Men, her compounds of “fellow-men” and “fellow citizens” orbit with “fellow-creatures.” Rights of Woman expands the lexicon to include “fellow creatures” and “human creatures,” leaning on the adjectives to argue a foundational equality under a rational Creator (not Milton’s “God”). Burke’s Reflections summons an “entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers” (47, his italics), referring to the system by which property is transferred from generation to generation, on male primogeniture (only to the eldest son, or failing this, the eldest male relative), to keep the family’s political power concentrated. Against this notion of inheritance, the Vindicator of the Rights of Men cites the “rights which men inherit at their birth, as rational creatures, who were raised above the brute creation by their improvable faculties . . . receiving these, not from their forefathers but, from God” (22). Her “God” is an ideal father, “not less amiable, generous and kind, than great, wise and exalted” (M 33). The kicker: “prescription can never undermine natural rights” (RM 22). Moral virtue is “promoted by the more extensive cultivation of reason” in both sexes, she contends (75). In place of the Christian deity, France established the goddess La Raison. If Wollstonecraft won’t risk such heresy, she will invoke a reasonable God as the endower of mental beauty, leaving Burke, in effect, to be the atheist on this score. Wollstonecraft has more than Reflections to settle scores with. In Burke’s appeal to the tender sensibilities of “the Ladies” (5),

“An Amazon stept out” | 73 she will expose a callous undergirding. Twanging a chord at the heart of his Sublime and the Beautiful, Burke’s alignment of female beauty and endearing weakness, she intervenes in Rights of Man as deadpan cultural critic: “ladies may have read your Enquiry” and, “convinced by your arguments, have laboured to be pretty, by counterfeiting weakness” (111–12).4 Burke would argue a specious logic of “Nature” and divine command: You may have convinced them that littleness and weakness are the very essence of beauty; and that the Supreme Being, in giving women beauty in the most supereminent degree, seemed to command them, by the powerful voice of Nature, not to cultivate the moral virtues that might chance to excite respect, and interfere with the pleasing sensations they were created to inspire. Thus confining truth, fortitude, and humanity, within the rigid pale of manly morals, they might justly argue, that to be loved, women’s high end and great distinction! they should ‘learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, and nick-name God’s creatures.’ (112)

To cross-examine “Nature” as a “voice” is to identify an ideological fiction fabricated to legitimize an unnatural social practice toward female beings excluded from, and by, a “rigid pale of manly morals.” This is going to be the way Wollstonecraft addresses badly educated, badly formed “Ladies” in her next Vindication, again using Hamlet’s voice of contempt. She previews it here with a scathing satire of Burke’s gender-aesthetics, for which Hamlet, every man’s sensitive soul-brother, fronts the misogyny. Burke neglects to mention that (without quotation) he is echoing Hamlet’s scorn of Ophelia as a tool for her father

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and King Claudius (3.1), in affectations that Burke is happy to call amiable. Lady K. clearly took such lessening, the tutelage of women “to turn all their attention to their persons, systematically neglecting morals to secure beauty” (VRM 112). Any “idea of beauty independent of reason,” Wollstonecraft retorts, is one that assumes “that one half of the human species, at least, have not souls; and that Nature, by making women little, smooth, delicate, fair creatures, never designed that they should exercise their reason” (113). Not only women are demeaned by this advice, she’ll say, but also the men who use it. And in over-using it, Burke may descend, she suggests, to unmanly flatteries, at one with the “effeminacy” of the aristocratic class he so admires and emulates. Manly reason is needed to counter this effete, if psychologically powerful, dreamworld and to expose the world as it is beneath the veils of illusion. Making this case in Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft has the seedbed for the Rights of Woman, which she begins by differentiating between “Woman” and “Ladies,” and between “Men” and “manly,” so that the whole society can become more rational. Quite early in Rights of Woman, she divorces the presumed voice of Nature from “the historic page” and reams of written books. She knows better about this spurious ground of authority: af ter considering the historic page, and viewing the living world with anxious solicitude, the most melancholy emotions of sorrowful indignation have depressed my spirits, and I have sighed when obliged to confess, that either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the civilization

“An Amazon stept out” | 75 which has hitherto taken place in the world has been very partial. I have turned over various books written on the subject of education, and patiently observed the conduct of parents and the management of schools; but what has been the result?—a profound conviction that the neglected education of my fellowcreatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore; and that women, in particular, are rendered weak and wretched by a variety of concurring causes, originating from one hasty conclusion . . . a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men . . . considering females rather as women than human creatures.

So opens her introduction (1–2). The “historic page” is culture’s virtual library, not an historical inevitability. How subtly punning is her phrasing turned over various books written . . . by men. These men, moreover, are not just the predictable scolds but “men of genius” (3) and sometimes the heroes of political liberals (Milton, Rousseau), all the more potent for this fiber. Wollstonecraft has read the various books and will overturn them to figure a “revolution” in how to read them. Her melancholy is rational and political, spoken in the teeth of the critique that “it is masculine for a woman to be melancholy” (2:66). In the policing code, masculine indicts a failure of faithful female patience. Throughout Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft will transvalue masculine into a badge of honor for women who refuse this “false system.” A Vindication of the Rights of Men blazed out three thousand copies, with acclaim.5 Wollstonecraft sent it to Richard Price, who, though mortally ill, replied on December 17, 1790, to say that he was not surprised to learn that this admired work had

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been hers.6 She also sent it to another hero, historian and political polemicist Catharine Macaulay, who wrote back to say how “pleased” she was “at the attention of the public to your animated conversations” and how delighted she was to learn that the writer of such “powers and talents” was a woman. Returning her own Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke on the Revolution in France (1790), she hoped they might continue to correspond and make “a personal acquaintance” (L 185–86, n416). Analytical Review, Wollstonecraft’s home court, bruited the gender chagrin (twofold) in its December issue. While Burke might have expected male opponents, the she-replies, it said, were something else: “how deeply it must wound the feelings of a chivalrous knight, who owes the fealty of ‘proud submission and dignified obedience’ to the fair sex, to perceive that two of the boldest of his adversaries are women!” (8:416, quoting Reflections, 113). Burke could be humiliated not only by the sex-reveal of these antagonists, but even more, by their pointedly “unfeminine” style. A month on, the English Review was cheering Wollstonecraft’s un-Burkey “strength and plainness”: The language may be thought by some too bold and pointed for a female pen; but when women undertake to write on masculine subjects, and reason as Miss Wollstonecraft does, we wish their language to be free from all female prettinesses, and to express with energy and perspicuity, the ideas they mean to convey. (January 1791, p. 61)

What is the gender of “language”? How is language used by “women” related to what is “thought” about “female” character?

“An Amazon stept out” | 77 Some censors bristled at women’s failing to stay in their own lane and transgressing into “masculine subjects” and polemic. Said Gentleman’s Magazine in February  1791, barely suppressing a “horse-laugh,” “we were always taught to suppose that the rights of women were the proper theme of the female sex” (151). Right they were. A woman’s pen free from “female prettinesses” is primed for a subject to be prosecuted with no “feminine” restraint about what is “taught” and “supposed”: this is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft began to write it in earnest by June 1791 and by autumn was working at full heat. On January 3, 1792, she gave the last pages to Johnson, for a 450page book that would be published a few weeks on—a call for a sequel revolution that would itself become a revolution.

4 “REVOLUTION in female manners” A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792)

No “Revolution” for Women No Thoughts on or Letters on for Wollstonecraft. This is A Vindication and a call for “a revolution in female manners” (447). Not just a polemic, it is a political education—and not just this either: it’s a political event, addressing a liberal era in which women still had few rights and no legal standing. “When . . . I call women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense,” says the Vindicator (12:386). If reformers would abolish the enslavement of racial bodies, why endorse the slavery of sexed bodies? “What nonsense!” she exclaims, “when will a great man arise with sufficient strength of mind to puff away the fumes which pride and sensuality have thus spread over the subject!” (2:47–48). In the interim, she’ll do it. No easy task. In 1772, Lord Mansfield ruled that slavery was illegal in England, but he didn’t include wives, arguing that marriage was a “civil contract.” By Common Law, a wife was under coverture, a notion that William Blackstone spelled out in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765): her “very being or legal existence . . . incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.” With no “separate existence,” her belongings, her

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Figure 13 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, title page, January 1792. Source: Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

inheritance, her earnings are a husband’s, even her person. He may chastise her as he would a child, restrain her liberty, rape her.1 He could beat her, starve her, confine her, deny her visitors and even medical care, have her arrested if she attempted flight. If she even attends “the theatre or public games without [his] knowledge and consent,” he may divorce her (441–45). In this “absurd unit of a man and his wife,” comments Wollstonecraft, he is solely “responsible,” she “reduced to a mere cypher” (9:331),

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 81 a nonentity. Blackstone sugarcoats these practices as “for the most part intended for her protection and benefit. So great a favourite is the female sex of the laws of England” (445)—a maddeningly routine thesis (even today) that restricts woman’s freedom as a benefit to her health and safety. Witnessing a wedding in 1768, teenage Frances Burney felt a spasm of horror: “how short a time does it take to put an eternal end to a woman’s liberty!” (Diary, 1:16). “Obedience” was the marriage vow, right up to Princess Anne’s, in 1973, to commoner Captain Mark Phillips (they divorced in 1992). In Wollstonecraft’s day, the tyranny of fathers and husbands was no metaphor. It was material life. Catharine Macaulay tartly remarked that the “abject slavery” of women in “the barbarous ages of mankind” has merely been gilded over in the supposedly civilized ages (Letters on Education, 206). A rebellious daughter (refusing, say, her father’s selection of her husband) could be held in house arrest, beaten, starved, sent to a nunnery or an asylum, disowned, cast out. For a wife, all this was licensed, with the addition of mandated sex. Only a husband could sue for divorce, and he would retain all property as well as any children (a prime reason many wives stayed in abusive marriages). It wouldn’t be until 1839 that the Custody of Infants Act would grant a mother her children under age seven. It wouldn’t be until 1853 that the Assaults Act could prosecute a husband or father, not until 1857 that a wife could cite abuse as ground for divorce. When in 1853 social activist and author Caroline Norton sued for access to her earnings to settle her bills, earnings claimed by a “vicious, profligate tyrannical” husband (13) from whom she had been separated for nearly two decades, the court found for him. “I have no rights, I have only wrongs,” she raged in 1855 in

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Wollstonecrafted words (Perkin, 113). This sentence has been so often quoted that it became a slogan. It wasn’t until 1870 that the Married Woman’s Property Act let a wife keep her earnings; not until 1882 could she keep what she owned before marriage or acquired during it. This Act also gave a woman legal identity, the right to enter contracts and to sue in courts. Back in 1776 (March 13), Abigail Adams urged her husband and the other Founding Fathers to “Remember the Ladies” in writing the new laws: “we are determined to foment a Rebelion [sic] and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation” (2). She devoured A Vindication of Rights of Woman as soon as she had it (published in the United States in 1793). In February 1794, she declared herself a “Pupil of Woolsoncoft [sic].” Her appeal to John Adams was issued before the French Revolution. No surprise that the old guard dug in against the spectacle in Paris of female participation. Edmund Burke’s Reflections conjured the National Assembly acting “with as little decency as liberty,” a chamber of horrors echoing with the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame, who, according to their insolent fancies, direct, control, applaud, explode them; and sometimes mix and take their seats amongst them; domineering over them with a strange mixture of servile petulance and proud presumptuous authority . . . they have inverted order in all things . . . (102)

— as if an unmixed, gender-scaled “order” were ontological, foundational, immutable. This “obscure throng,” Wollstonecraft retorted in Rights of Men, “knew more of the human heart and

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 83 of legislation than the profligates of rank, emasculated by hereditary effeminacy” (97), briskly inverting the linguistic order to re-gender hereditary authority as no manly formation. A painful distress to women such as herself and Abigail Adams was the fraternity of revolutionary men who could sing Burke’s anti-feminist tune, or at least hum its grammar, while opposing him on every other political ground. Wollstonecraft would embarrass them with the contradiction. She mirror-titles A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to reflect her first Vindication and the French declaration of The Rights of Man. Just as crucial is her subtitle, With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. “Strictures” may sound disciplinary; she means it in the eighteenth-century sense: “a slight touch upon a subject, not a set discourse” (an evolving topic). Nor is “moral” a prudery: it denotes ethical reasoning and behavior (DEL for both). No slight touch, political is the anchor of subjects, this last word denoting topics, with a hint of women as civic subjects.

Revolution by Education: An Appeal to Citizen Talleyrand Like the address of Rights of Men nominally to Burke and rhetorically at the British public, the Rights of Woman casts a public letter under its nominal address “To M. Talleyrand-Périgord, Late Bishop of Autun.” Late, because this Republican resigned his office of bishop in January 1791 and was soon excommunicated. Now minister of education, Citizen Talleyrand’s Rapport sur l’instruction publique to the National Assembly in September  1791 treated female education as training for subservience

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(he had Rousseau’s “Sophy” in Émile as a blueprint). Wollstonecraft’s “Dedication” is a strategically loaded honor “to induce” his “attention” (iii). Conversing with him in London in February  1792, she had failed to get him to rethink his policy on woman; “pardon my frankness,” she now writes, “but . . . you treated it in too cursory a manner, contented to consider it as it had been considered formerly” (iv). From the honed pun frankness (frank: French), she politely shames his view of “woman” as kin to the ancien régime’s contempt for the rights of man. The “progress of knowledge and virtue” and true patriotism, she argues, should recognize the “rights of woman” to an education to make her a “companion of man,” both in domestic life and in a society of “fellow-citizens.” Her plea, she makes plain, is not just “for my sex” but for “the moral and civil interest of mankind” (iv–viii). A categorical “masculine education” is her agenda for both sexes (4:169). Addressing the minister who would specialize rather than standardize, who would discriminate rather than democratize, she tactically summons an antonym to rights, oppression, in tandem with unjust policies presented as justice. This is a politics of language, in language. From her propositional Consider, she leverages her key questions: Consider, I address you as a legislator, whether . . . it be not inconsistent and unjust to subjugate women, even though you firmly believe that you are acting in the manner best calculated to promote their happiness? Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him the gift of reason? In this style, argue tyrants of every denomination from the weak king to the weak father of a family; they are all eager to

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 85 crush reason; yet always assert that they usurp its throne only to be useful. Do you not act a similar part, when you force all women, by denying them civil and political rights, to remain immured in their families groping in the dark? (ix–x)

How savvy to call system a “style” and its defense something to “argue” with. Stylistic analysis is her method, for literary texts and social texts alike. First the grammar: Women’s inferiority is the effect of subjugation, not a logic for it, Wollstonecraft contends, fortified with a lexicon dear to revolutionaries: unjust, subjugate, tyrants, usurp, force, rights, immured. A “tyrannic . . . system of slavery” (II:64) begins in their very girlhood to “enslave” females “by cramping their understandings” (40). It irritates her no end that abolitionists who waved the “the rights of man” banner could waive the analogy of female lives. Thickly packed, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, this nominal “Dedication” is more accurately an agenda. Wollstonecraft probably wrote it last (such tributes often are), because in fewer than 1,670 words she loads her argument, every theme, keyword, master-trope, and rhetorical practice. Consider the stage-setting that she’ll call the prevailing notion respecting a sexual character (viii). A character can be recast, rewritten (one definition in Johnson’s Dictionary: “manner of writing”); a notion may be reconsidered; what is prevailing is merely contingent. She presses the prefix “pre-” as a critical fulcrum. As females are prepared for subservience by prejudices, prejudices become prevailing. Burke celebrated “prejudice” as an intuitive disposition that feels noble and proper. Noting this mystique (“*Vide Mr.  Burke”), Wollstonecraft unmists it: “prejudice is a fond obstinate persuasion for which

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we can give no reason,” no more than “moss-covered opinions . . . indolently adopted” (5:253–54). Her Dedication sharpens the attack on pre- with two polemical moves: that appeal to consider, and an allied syntax of if, both mobilized into questions: Consider, Sir, . . . you observed, ‘that to see one half of the human race excluded by the other from all participation of government, was a political phænomenon that, according to abstract principles, it was impossible to explain.’ If so, on what does your constitution rest? If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of woman, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test: though a different opinion prevails in this country, built on the very arguments which you use to justify the oppression of woman—prescription. (viii–ix)

Add prescription (literally, pre-written): “Rules produced and authorized by long custom; custom continued till it has the force of law” (DEL). Custom to law: this is a structural analysis and, as such, a framework for dissent. “As a philosopher, I read with indignation the plausible epithets which men use to soften their insults; and, as a moralist, I ask what is meant by such heterogeneous associations, as fair defects, amiable weaknesses, &c?” (2:67). In the double persona of philosopher and moralist, Wollstonecraft works her pedagogy. “Let us examine this question” is her method (2:47): quote a text, test its construction. “To clear my way, I must be allowed to ask some plain questions,” she opens Chapter I, advising that her “answers will probably appear as unequivocal as the axioms on which reasoning is built” (15). She summons the word appear strategically, in order to shade the usual sense of “seem” into “make an impression of being.”

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 87 On her horizon is Rousseau’s influential romance of female formation in Emilius and Sophia (her English translation): “a state of dependence being natural to the sex, they perceive themselves formed for obedience,” he says of women. “This is begging the question” (setting a false premise), retorts Wollstonecraft, hitting the contradiction of natural and formed to expose ideology filtered through “nature” (5:182). Girls are “rendered dependent— dependence is called natural” (3:84): not just “rendered dependent” (a tightly linked assonance) in the causal sense, subjugated and infantilized, but also “rendered” in the sense of “constituted naturally as.” She stresses what is called as a partisan discourse, coded into named, termed, told: Women are told from their infancy . . . Thus Milton . . . tells us (2:33) insipid softness, varnished over with the name of gentleness (2:50) innocence, as ignorance is courteously termed (3:90) weakness under the name of delicacy (3:96) what some may call beautiful, the understanding is neglected (5:178– 79) I may be told, that . . . knowledge . . . is sometimes purchased at too dear a rate. I can only answer . . . (5:252) the honour of a woman, as it is absurdly called (8:311)

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The accomplices in this discourse: are made, are degraded, are enfeebled, are taught, are rendered, are designed, are formed, are treated as—and most acutely, are created. Terms wielded by those in power, said Tom Paine, “are like circles drawn by the magician’s wand, to contract the sphere of man’s felicity. He lives immured within the Bastille of a word” (16). Women, Wollstonecraft painfully knows, live immured in the Bastille of men’s words. If language makes the world go round, critical language can make a revolution. Wollstonecraft counters with a discussion of reasoning, her rebellion on the field of language. A potent paragraph in her introduction assails told with tart satire, and a pivot on but: . . . from every quarter have I heard exclamations against masculine women; but where are they to be found? If by this appellation, men mean to inveigh against their ardour in hunting, shooting, and gaming, I shall most cordially join in the cry; but if it be against the imitation of manly virtues, or, more properly speaking, the attainment of those talents and virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character, and which raise females in the scale of animal being, when they are comprehensively termed mankind; —all those who view them with a philosophical eye must, I should think, wish with me, that they may every day grow more and more masculine. (4)

So much depends on, depends from, if. Her first If satirizes the code of “masculine” as trivial macho pursuits; the next if wrests “virtues” from an exclusively “manly” claim (virtue is etymologically wound with manliness in the deep root, vir: man). On this inflection she calls for a rational “masculine” character,

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 89 to which women may aspire without stigma and for which men may not always qualify. Some men (she’ll soon say) are so debauched as to be “scarcely men in their outward form” (II:39), the very signifier of sexual difference. Her long game is to supersede manly with gender-inclusive human. Intervening against the voices that inveigh against, Wollstonecraft promotes (and performs) a Republic of Reason. At the end of her more-than-Dedication, she declares to Talleyrand that “if women are to be excluded, without having a voice . . . this flaw in your NEW CONSTITUTION, the first constitution founded on reason, 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” (xi). Her call is for a new draft to repair “the Rights of Woman,” which she issues in matching upper-case flare: “reason calls for this respect, and loudly demands JUSTICE for one half of the human race” (xiv).

What Kind of Book Is This? A Vindication of the Rights of Woman unfolds over thirteen chapters. The Table of Contents (xvii–xix) is both a preview and a display of interwoven themes and keywords, of intersecting chapter titles—a virtual argument at the outset, on a polemical cascade. This is a load-bearing table, every chapter connected, in relay: cultural prejudice and its network of education, political structure, policies of subjection and oppression, and the languages that normalize, naturalize, idealize it all. Chapter I confronts the age of revolutions, to reset “the rights of man” for comprehensive mankind. Chapters II and III frame up the distinction

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Figure 14. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, January 1792, pp. xv–xvi: Table of Contents. Source: Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

of sexual character as a “prevailing opinion,” to be discussed. Chapters IV through VI plumb female degradation in relation to family training, early education, and books—not just advice manuals but also a groaning shelf of admired novels and poetry. Cross-examined are Shakespeare’s Hamlet (as we’ve seen); Adam’s wavering and God’s incoherence in Paradise Lost; the smugly tidy couplets of Alexander Pope’s “Of the Characters of

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 91 Women”; and the heart-tugs of widely, wildly popular novels: Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Rousseau’s Julie. These covert, virtual didacts collaborate with the overt advice of Rousseau’s chapter in Emilius on “Sophia” (her name codes “wisdom”), Reverend James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women, and its fraternal twin, Dr. John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters. Chapters VII through IX spin a revolution in manners: modesty in both sexes, not as self-effacement but self-respect; moral behavior as distinct from public reputation; human worth defined by “talents and virtues” rather than rank or other “artificial distinctions.” Chapters X through XII extend manners to systemic reform: the family as a micro-republic (“every family might also be called a state”), free of tyranny and sexual discrimination; a national system of education modeled like a republic to produce rationally capable citizens (411). The final chapter (XIII) resumes Wollstonecraft’s satire, melancholy and principled, of “the present state of society,” with a plea to men for reforms that the rights of woman might naturally be expected to produce. Here, she renovates the potent word naturally, wresting it from the ground of Rousseau’s sex-limited ideal state and from Burke’s factitious harmony of class inequality, to define an organic logic of progress. The auxiliary might is just as critical, however. It is forecast into an unknown future. Now, those who’ve read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman cover to cover might naturally be expected to murmur that my orderly unfurling was hardly their experience. Mine neither. This book baffles sequential argument. Miriam Brody called it an “earthquake” at its foundation, erupting into a “prose tempest” (70). We feel the heat of Wollstonecraft’s darting into digressions, recursions, anecdotes; we follow her through a

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genre-jumble of literary criticism, satire, didactic vignettes, cultural narrative, political manifesto, philosophical flights, and dramatic apostrophes. There are nearly two dozen footnotes (some for pages), a script of afterthoughts, supplements, extensions. Even adoring Godwin found it “eminently deficient in method and arrangement” (M VI, 83). Wollstonecraft’s centennial champion Elizabeth Pennell reiterates the concession: “without system, without method . . . full of useless repetitions . . . forever neglecting the main argument for trifling side issues,” even “incoherent in places” (xx). George Eliot, keen on the cause and no slouch on weighty matters, had to say that it is “withal rather heavy” reading (988). At nearly 85,000 words of freighted thinking, including large blocks of quotation, it’s no page-turner. I won’t contest the tenor of the complaints. Rights of Woman is packed, overpacked: progressive and recursive, repetitive and instructive. The tone swings from precise analysis and reasoned appeal to passionate exhortation, sometimes strident, sometimes melancholy, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes cajoling, sometimes impatient. What I want to propose is the significance of these effects. Every subject, chapter-head aside, tugs at a macrotext, any keyword opening a door to the whole argument. A “deficient” method, maybe; or the symptom of an encyclopedic flood of materials, in tides of accumulating analytical force. Wollstonecraft’s text is a hybrid, polyphonic experiment. We experience her thinking it out as she writes it up, crazed along angles and overlaps, plumbing the cultural sedimentation, zigzagging across the toxic lexicon that writes (and wrongs) the text of “woman.” Method is beside the point. A technological revolution would catch up two-hundred years on, with hypertext links, a webwork rather than a path. How

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 93 indexical are such remarks: “It is wandering from my present subject, perhaps, to make a political remark; but, as it was produced naturally by the train of my reflections, I shall not pass it silently over” (2:42–43); “To return from this apparent digression” (3:96); “I must descend to the minutiæ of my subject”; “A wild wish has just flown from heart to my head” (4:120– 21). Digressions are centripetal, purposeful. “I come round to my old argument” (4:135); “I must again repeat . . .”; “The comparison . . . still occurs to me” (138); “These observations all branch out of a general one, which I have before made, and which cannot be too often insisted upon” (166). What a revelatory exercise it would be to attempt an index! If eighteenth-century philosopher David Hartley theorized the mind as a store of associations, this text is such an archive. A store of ideas and facts, “once taken in” (explains Wollstonecraft), gets activated by “some fortuitous circumstance” that “makes the information dart into the mind with illustrative force. . . . Like the lightning’s flash are many recollections; one idea assimilating and explaining another, with astonishing rapidity” (6:260). This is the best description ever not written about her own compositional process, sparks of information coalescing into electric clarity. More than the sum of its specified topics, Rights of Woman illuminates a mainframe.

The “historical page” and Literary Pages: INTRODUCTION and Chapter I Wollstonecraft’s writing about education is also an event of education. She starts local, but as with all her local starts, the reach is long. Her precision of political analysis is intimate with precise literary criticism, especially of words that gild oppression

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(delicate, innocent) and justify subjection (natural, formed for). Her opening lesson savages the prized system of compliment to women as lovely flowers. This, she says, is no more than a hothouse horticulture of “sickly delicacy” that vitiates rather than vitalizes: “strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty,” on the way to a “maturity” of “barren blooming.” Flower-girls are “made ridiculous and useless when the short-lived bloom of beauty is over”; “enfeebled by false refinement,” they wind up as no part of the “human species,” if this is to be distinguished from “brute creation” by “improvable reason” (1:2–3, 9–10). From flower-girls to male bodies: while men’s bodies are generally stronger, Wollstonecraft concedes, she refuses to accept this as a logic for oppression (2– 3).2 Honing a politics of style, she speaks to women to reform them from men’s dubious praises. “My own sex, I hope, will excuse me if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces” (her italics mimic flattery) “and view them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood,” a view puffed with praises for “susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste,” which are “almost synonymous with epithets of weakness.” Such “soft phrases,” Wollstonecraft cracks, is a cajolery “men use to soften our slavish dependence” (6–7). Setting her better if I treat them against their as if they were, she unmasks compliment as insult and chivalry-gilded predation. Catharine Macaulay had thus exposed the “polite and gallant” Lord Chesterfield in her Letters on Education (1790): “Women are only children of larger growth. . . . A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them” but never engages “them in serious matters” (209). Philosopher Wollstonecraft adds her zing: “Men, indeed, appear to me to act in

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 95 a very unphilosophical manner when they try to secure the good conduct of women by attempting to keep them always in a state of childhood” (VRW 2:34). To say woman was “created to be the toy of man” is no point of pride for either sex (66). The “debauchery” makes men “only overgrown children”— or mere boys, in degraded equality with a child-woman (39). Just four paragraphs into Chapter I, “the rights and involved duties of mankind considered,” she draws if from her rhetorical toolbox and leans on it for intervention: “from the exercise of reason, knowledge and virtue naturally flow, is equally undeniable, if mankind be viewed collectively” (16). Here is a partial if-roster just from “the prevailing opinion of a se xual char acter discussed”: if it be allowed that women were destined by Providence to acquire human virtues . . . (34) if virtue has only one eternal standard . . . if I reason consequentially . . . (49) If they told us, that in a pre-existent state the soul was fond of dress, and brought this inclination with it into a new body, I should listen to them with a half smile, as I often do when I hear a rant about innate elegance.— But if [such tutors] only meant to say that the exercise of the faculties will produce this fondness—I deny it.—It is not natural (53) If all the faculties of woman’s mind are only to be cultivated as they respect her dependence on man . . . let her grovel contentedly (62)

96 | “REVOLUTION in female manners” If there is but one criterion of morals, but one archetype for man . . . (67) Surely there can be but one rule of right, if morality has an eternal foundation . . . (70) if they are really capable of acting like rational creatures, let them not be treated like slaves; or, like the brutes who are dependent on the reason of man. (71)

You can see the hypertext quality of this Vindication. A thread of if ripples a vast tapestry, one point implicating many more. In “despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel” (7), Wollstonecraft’s Introduction hardly needs to tag the Burke-coding of these “libertine notions of beauty” (9). I shall disdain to cull my phrases or polish my style . . . wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, nor in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings . . . anxious to render my sex more respectable members of society, I shall try to avoid that flowery diction which has slided from essays into novels, and from novels into familiar letters and conversation. (7–8)

In this critique of style, Hamlet, sneering at Ophelia (3.1), gets a callback from Rights of Men to lay bare the contempt: “they act as such children may be expected to act:—they dress; they

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 97 paint, and nickname God’s creatures.” How can such a childwoman be expected to “govern a family with judgment”? Wollstonecraft again issues a mordant equality. “I presume that rational men will excuse me for endeavouring to persuade them to become more masculine and respectable” (9–10); them: both men and women. The stage is set for Chapter I. The last word of its banner title, “Considered,” is critical, a rhetorical wedge to dislodge “deeply rooted prejudice.” Wollstonecraft iterates prejudice four times in the first pages of her argumentative build (15–17). If “Reason” is “man’s pre-eminence over the brute creation” (15), prejudice codified into “prescription” deprives “men (or women) of their natural rights” to its exercise (17–18). The parenthesis is crafty. On the mainstream syntax of the natural rights of men, she floats women. If reformist men will complain of the illegitimacy of any system that holds “of the utmost importance” hereditary honors, riches, “rank and titles . . . before which Genius ‘must hide its diminished head’ ” (18), what of diminished women? Her quotation is not incidental. It is from a political complaint that Milton lodges in Satan’s crabbing about the sun that shines “like the god / Of this new world, at whose sight the stars / Hide their diminished heads” (PL 4.33–35). Wollstonecraft de-Satanizes the phrase for a rational dissent, in line with republican Milton. Under the wraps of his republican prestige, Milton’s ways to women often got a pass (or worse, endorsement) from some of Wollstonecraft’s reformist contemporaries. So too Rousseau, the philosophe who gave a foundation to the French Revolution and whose Émile (in French and then English) romanced, with great acclaim, anti-institutional modes of education. She will question “his arguments in favour of a state of nature” as an inherent

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good, with civilization deemed a categorical corruption. Digging in with if, she exposes the false logic of the primitive ideal: “But if . . . there were to be rational creatures produced, allowed to rise in excellence by the exercise of powers implanted for that purpose . . . if man was so created as to have a capacity to rise . . . if these feelings were not set in motion to improve our nature” (1:21–22), the “apotheosis of savage virtues” can make no rational sense, let alone such uncivilized practices as infant exposure, slavery, slaughter for entertainment. If she and Rousseau might agree about the “vestiges of barbarism” in modernity’s “arbitrary . . . regal power” (23–24), she coils this spring for her big anti-Rousseau If. 3 “But, if . . . I may be allowed to doubt whether woman was created for man” (5:173). It is a short span from this doubt to the egalitarian fuel of the French Revolution: “the more equality there is established among men, the more virtue and happiness will reign in society” (1:25). Tracing out the common structure of Burke’s mystique of monarchy and Rousseau’s ground of “nature,” she arraigns as “despotism” any system (barbaric or modern) and any “profession, in which great subordination of rank constitutes its power” (26). Before turning her discussion to female subordination, Wollstonecraft makes a sly point about men feminized in social power-grids. Burke’s and Rousseau’s failures of reasoning qualify for feminizing, in their sense of the gender. Arguing structurally, she will include standing armies, these men (no less than Burke) “inspired” by “romantic notions of honour,” “polished manners,” “gay ornamental drapery,” and an “air of fashion” (1:25–27). Just like “the fair sex,” the only distinction is that “the business of their lives is gallantry” rather than coquetry. “Where then is the difference, when the education has been the same?”

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 99 (2:42–44), she asks of this “school of finesse and effeminacy” (9:332). A “badge of slavery” (1:27) is also a clergyman’s, trained in “blind submission” and obsequious manners (Austen’s novels are not shy of these satires). Even kings and their cohorts, weakened by self-indulgence, “stifled by flattery” (25), with no need for moral reasoning, are no real men. This is a systemic argument about gender, witty and true. As “the character of every man” is “formed by his profession” (1:28), so are the formations, and deformations, of “woman.” It is by “false refinement, and not by an endeavour to acquire masculine qualities,” contends Wollstonecraft, that females “have been drawn out of their sphere” of rational capacity (2:37– 38). She argues the logic again in Chapter II, then in Chapter III with God on her side: the divine endowment to all humanity is an “immortal soul, not restrained by mechanical laws and struggling to free itself from the shackles of matter” (98). Summoning the metaphysics of body/soul dualism, she makes the case for body/mind, to map a general course correction for social existence: “intellect will always govern”—the closing words of her Introduction (11).

“THE PREVAILING OPINION OF A SEXUAL CHARACTER DISCUSSED”: Chapters II–III What isn’t a keyword here? Prevailing opinion names contingency, not ontology; character is artifact, not biology. And sexual is annoyed by its status as female sex only, as if the “male sex” did not also have a “character.” “Womankind; by way of emphasis” is the second definition of sex (commonly called the

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sex) in Johnson’s Dictionary. The chapter’s title is a construction site, and the character “Man” is not exempt from Wollstonecraft’s satire: “In the present state of society, a little learning is required to support the character of a gentleman.” Had she deleted the first a, the report would level with her grievance about “the education of women,” the main subject to be discussed (2:41). “I like to use significant words,” she’ll soon say (4:120). Her method is to scour “ingenious arguments” that “account for, and excuse the tyranny of man” (2:32). The lessons in causal logic are critical. Ingenious, Wollstonecraft remarks, implies no brilliance, just expedient reverse-engineering. The malefactors are legion in literature and education tracts and have insinuated their way into the everyday culture of compliment, advice, and value judgment. Female incapacity, she contends, is begged question, an effect adduced as a cause: women “are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name of virtue” (32). Readying her readers for the extended “Animadversion” in Chapter V on the book-culprits, she begins here with words. She’s already satirized delicate as a gilded fetter, polished up as a natural quality; she’s already claimed masculine as a term to praise women. Her target here is innocent. To say that this is a keyword for Wollstonecraft is nearly to understate the toxicity. She puts the question right at the top of Chapter II. “If . . . women are not a swarm of ephemeron triflers, why should they be kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence?” (32)—the two prepositions, in and under, sharpened to hit the negatively prefixed nouns: a flattery of innocence (lack of harm) locked on to ignorance (lack of knowledge). Leaning into the second definition of innocent in Johnson’s

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 101 Dictionary, “a natural; an idiot” (she’ll say imbecility and infantine in Chapter IV:133), she rebukes, with theatrical brio, the he-satirists of women’s “follies and caprices”: “—Behold, I should answer, the natural effect of ignorance!” (2:32– 33), women’s enforced ignorance, that is. Would any man take innocent as anything other than a smirk about worldly inexperience or cluelessness? Children “should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness,” she states the case, again with a sly syntax: first the embarrassment to men, then women drawn into the negative spin. Keeping them “innocent” really means “in a state of childhood” (2:34), a monstrous deformation. The famous maxim in Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” is “where Ignorance is Bliss, / ’Tis Folly to be wise” (99–100). Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) retraces this into darker accounting: innocence may be bliss, but it is also vulnerably delusive ignorance—and not just looming post-childhood (Gray’s shade) but in childhood’s very worlds. Wollstonecraft genders this binary to upend the romance of ignorance. Those Eton lads get to go to college, while their sisters are left in the gilded cage of ignorance and trivial preening. Refuting the lore that knowledge is corruption, she exclaims, “Ignorance is a frail base for virtue!” (4:134). Linguistic caging, she notes, begins in girlhood, wrapped in maternal counsel: a little knowledge and an affectation of inferiority, they are told, are all that’s needed to gain “the protection of man”—then a snap: “and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives” (2:33). When beauty wears off, what’s left is a target for scorn and satire. “It moves my gall” (she says) to hear Reverend Fordyce purvey insults in florid

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compliments to “the British fair, the fairest of the fair” for attending to fine dress (5:210). Satirizing this marriage-market value against Jesus’s account of the resurrection (summoned, with social point, at the end of Mary), she now writes it plain: “How women are to exist in that state where there is to be neither marrying nor giving in marriage, we are not told” (2:65). Frail is a thorn in this linguistic bouquet. Hamlet (again) voices the equation, “Frailty, thy name is woman” (Hamlet 2.1). “Thus Milton describes our first frail mother,” Wollstonecraft adds (2:33). The existence of Paradise Lost was no little convenience for her. Contesting Scripture was profanity, but a proxy war with a poem wasn’t. If Milton’s hadn’t written it, she’d have had to.4 Grappling with mortal misery and the darkness visible of his blindness, Milton would “justify the ways of God to men” (PL 1.26). Yet to “justify the ways of Providence respecting” women, “by pointing out some irrefragable reason for thus making such a large portion of mankind accountable and not accountable,” quips Wollstonecraft, “would puzzle the subtilest casuist” (3:93). And so her resolve: unjustifying “the ways of God” to Woman. She renders an extended lesson on the text of his “Eve,” starting with rational headshaking for her readers’ endorsement: when Milton “tells us that women are formed for softness and sweet attractive grace, I cannot comprehend his meaning” (she affects), unless “he meant that we were beings only designed . . . to gratify the sense of man when he can no longer soar on the wing of contemplation” (2:33). Scoring formed as Milton’s sorry fiction, she skewers the oxymoronic notion of “sweet attractive grace”—attractive to men, that is, grace reduced from spirit to flesh. This is the verse she has in mind:

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 103 For contemplation he and valor formed, For softness she and sweet attractive Grace He for God only, she for God in him. (PL 4.297– 99)

Not just Milton’s sweetness and blight, this is the measure that populates a bookshelf of Eve-imprinted advice. Fordyce cited these very lines in his Sermons to Young Women. The dark side of “sweet attractive Grace” is exposed by the only other she in Paradise Lost, Sin, who allures both angels and Satan with “attractive graces” (2.762). On line 299 (Book IV, above), Milton’s eighteenth-century emender, Richard Bentley, positively choked: “A shameful error to have pass’d through all the Editions; the Author gave it, He for God only, She for God and Him.” Yet for all Bentley’s corrected idolatry, it doesn’t alter Eve’s subordination in the male chain of command. Wollstonecraft calls up Francis Bacon to spell the shame: “man is kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature” (2:34). So, too, any woman. By such God-lights, Milton is publishing “Atheism,” the title of the essay by Bacon that hosts his sentence.5 Parsing “Milton’s Eve,” Wollstonecraft invents what we now call feminist literary critique: reading against the grain to expose the warps in the pretense of a disinterested account on “sexual character.” No small matter that Eve’s curiosity and itch for some independence from Adam are blamed in Scripture (and by Milton) for the Fall into mortal misery. Wollstonecraft will dismiss this as “Moses’s poetical story” (2:49), with a lean into satire: “were an angel from heaven to tell me that Moses’s beautiful, poetic cosmogony, and the account of the fall of man, were literally true, I could not

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believe what my reason told me was derogatory to the character of the Supreme Being” (5:173– 74). Invoking reason is a brilliant move, at once dismantling the story of Genesis and aligning rational intellect with the “Supreme Being” who created human beings, with egalitarian love. Throughout Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft rescues this rational endowment from Milton’s ambivalent clutches. A tacit ally is her admired Dr. Johnson, who noted the contradiction that “they who most loudly clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it.” “Milton’s character in domestick relations,” Johnson noted, “was severe and arbitrary”: His family consisted of women; and there appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferiour beings. That his daughters might not break the ranks, he suffered them to be depressed by a mean and penurious education. He thought woman made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion. (Prefaces, 2:143–44)

Although Wollstonecraft doesn’t take this remark on board in Rights of Woman, she is as savvy as ever about the leverage of contradiction. She had applied this to Burke’s “sophisms” in Rights of Men: “putting the numerous contradictions I observed in opposition to each other,” she put Burke in “effectual refutation” of Burke (153). Calling Milton to the docket in Rights of Woman Chapter II, she presents two contradictory passages (no coincidence that twentieth-century feminist critics cite the same ones). It “would be difficult,” she bristles, “to render two passages which I now mean to contrast, consistent”—not forgoing a quip that assigns Milton to the female formation that men like

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 105 to satirize: “But into similar inconsistencies are great men often led by their senses” (35). In Book VIII Milton has Adam make a reasonable request for an equal; the result presented in Book IV, where we first see Eve—a confection of sweetness, beauty, submission, and reverence for Adam’s authority— suggests that Milton’s hierarchist God over-ruled Adam’s logic. Tracing this contradiction for her readers, Wollstonecraft’s lesson follows the narrative order, turning first to Book IV (634– 38), her italics cueing her lesson: ‘To whom thus Eve with perfect beauty adorned: My Author and Disposer, what thou bidst Unargued I obey; so God ordains; God is thy law, thou mine; to know no more Is Woman’s happiest knowledge and her praise.’

“These are exactly the arguments that I have used to children,” she says, “but I have added, your reason is now gaining strength, and, till it arrives at some degree of maturity, you must look up to me for advice—then you ought to think, and only rely on God” (2:35). Milton has Eve call Adam her “Author.” Author Wollstonecraft has already etched the tyrannical alignments of men and their God, and she will do so again. The “adamantine chain of destiny,” she puns it some pages on (70), then extends this chain to present politics: “The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is to be hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger”; only “the narrow-minded” will “rail with thoughtless vehemence at innovation” (3:83). “A spirit of innovation” was Burke’s reiterated slur on the French Revolution (47, 96). For Satan, who in Book IV has overheard

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Eve, it’s a no-brainer to see how to tempt this creature, not only formed as frail but also enforced to ignorance and subjection.6 Wollstonecraft’s second passage (2:35–36) summons the (historically prior) egalitarian Adam of Book VIII, recalling to Raphael his initial petition to his Author and Disposer. For all the divine right given to him on earth, it was lonely at the top. Wollstonecraft deftly sets this up. “Milton seems to coincide with me; when he makes Adam thus expostulate with his Maker”: ‘Hast thou not made me here thy substitute, And these inferior far beneath me set? Among unequals what society Can sort, what harmony or true delight? Which must be mutual, in proportion due Giv’n and receiv’d; but in disparity The one intense, the other still remiss Cannot well suit with either, but soon prove Tedious alike: of fellowship I speak Such as I seek, fit to participate All rational delight—’ (VIII.381– 91)

This is the sole instance of the word unequals in Milton’s entire epic. How inconsistent, says Wollstonecraft, to see the “formed” characters in Book IV so at odds with the tenor of Adam’s petition. It is not only Republican in spirit but also a Wollstonecrafty improvement on the deficient French Revolution. If, in her eyes, the author of Paradise Lost zigzagged, she’ll pit Adam against his Author. She was the first to juxtapose these two

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 107 contradictory passages for critical commentary, a doublet that is now a routine reference in discussions of Milton’s sexual politics.7 Milton the hierarch is the Uber-umpire of the rules against which Wollstonecraft protests, summoning the “authority . . . of reason.” Not only have “the rights of humanity” been “confined to the male line from Adam downwards,” she notes (5:194), but any deviation is criminalized as uxoriousness, with severest sentencing. An ominous irritant is Milton’s script for Adam’s passionate swoon over Eve. “Only ‘absolute in loveliness,’ the portion of rationality granted to woman, is, indeed, very scanty,” Wollstonecraft sighs at the top of Chapter IV (110), with a sly pun on “divine” design: “it is scarcely possible to divine what remains to characterize her intellect.” The phrase she quotes (PL 8.547) previews Adam’s gush of doting (549–54), which she displays more fully, with italics, some pages on (127): ———“That what she wills to do or say Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best; All higher knowledge in her presence falls Degraded. Wisdom in discourse with her Loses discountenanc’d, and, like Folly, shows; Authority and Reason on her wait.”—

Milton deputizes Archangel Raphael to chastise such confusions of Folly for Wisdom, with Reason’s authority left for naught (560 ff.). Wollstonecraft adds her two cents: “And all this is built on her loveliness!” she exclaims of the superlatives (4:127). If Raphael admonishes Adam to man up, she exposes the faultlines of misogyny: no surprise, she writes, that when Eden falls,

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Adam will gripe about this “Feminine” creature as a “fair defect / Of Nature” and rant about the perversity of a Creator who didn’t repeat the Heaven-plan of “Spirits Masculine” or find “some other way to generate / Mankind” (10.888–95). This is true divinity, not even a masculine woman needed. Across the pages of Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft, a “masculine woman” on principle, heaps scorn on Adam’s postlapsarian oxymoron “fair defect,” not least for its still potent cultural currency. Pope tropes it in his “Moral” essay, Of the Characters of Woman: “Fine by defect, and amiably weak!” (44), Wollstonecraft’s added exclamation point (4:132). Pope’s analogy is to flowers weakened into ephemeral beauty by viruses, the horticultural delicates that Wollstonecraft’s “Introduction” satirized as dubious compliments to women. Pope’s damning with faint praise emerges a mere ten lines on, in a sneer about men degraded by female defect to “love or lust.” Wollstonecraft gives Pope’s iconic couplet an inset display in Chapter II (50), tagging its misogynist plurals (our/we) as speaking for “the whole male sex.” ‘Yet ne’er so sure our passion to create, As when she touch’d the brink of all we hate.’

Nothing amiable here. Pope’s double-dealing is on the same “historic page” as Milton’s unsteady Eve, Burke’s contradictory political positions, and a bit further on, Rousseau’s contradictions on female “nature” and the need for training, enforced by men’s “natural” authority—a tyranny (says Wollstonecraft) “so puerile as not to merit a serious refutation” (3:84). Chapter III, unapologetically on “the same subject,” elaborates paths already marked. Women’s minds, no less than their

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 109 bodies, need to be “emancipated from the slavery to which the pride and sensuality of man . . . has subjected them” (90). As a reader and reviewer of rafts of novels, Wollstonecraft knew how to load a character sketch, sometimes with a sting that echoes antifeminist satires. Had she cared to, I think she could have written a novel of manners in this vein. One cartoon bids fair as a virtual blueprint for Austen’s Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park: a “weak woman of fashion . . . more than commonly proud of her delicacy and sensibility,” who affected “puny appetite” as “the height of all human perfection, and acted accordingly,” happy to “recline with self-complacency on a sofa, and boast of her want of appetite as a proof of delicacy,” while neglecting “all the duties of life,” including care for her children. Or you can see a twin to Emma Woodhouse’s casual insult to spinster Miss Bates at the Box Hill picnic (in Austen’s Emma) in Wollstonecraft’s sketch of a woman of “exquisite sensibility,” yet able to “insult a worthy old gentlewoman, whom unexpected misfortunes had made dependent on her ostentatious bounty, and who, in better days, had claims on her gratitude” (88–89). Two other vignettes are contrast tales of widows, “Spirited . . . exhibits” that were called out for admiration in Monthly Review (200–2). The first is an avatar of Eve, “trained up to obedience” and dependence. Left the sole parent, she’s grossly incompetent. Having learned only to coquet, she endeavors “to obtain another protector” in a marriage market in which her waning shelf life is encumbered by the addition of her children (99–100). Wollstonecraft spins a chapter outline of moral satire: What is then to become of her? She either falls an easy prey to some mean fortune-hunter, who defrauds her children of their

110 | “REVOLUTION in female manners” paternal inheritance, and renders her miserable; or becomes the victim of discontent and blind indulgence. Unable to educate her sons, or impress them with respect . . . she pines under the anguish of unavailing impotent regret. The serpent’s tooth enters into her very soul, and the vices of licentious youth bring her with sorrow, if not with poverty also, to the grave. (101)

The weak, witless, literally un-fortunate widow bottoms out, finding no relief in immortality, suffering like King Lear the serpent tooth of her sons’ ingratitude and censure. As her “innocent daughters” become her “rivals” on the marriage market, “the mother will be lost in the coquette” (102). Flash fiction extraordinaire. The second vignette is a model of positive, rational preparation. A maiden of developed “understanding” and a body of “full vigour” is ably prepared for “the moral duties of life.” She marries from rational affection rather than the “flame” of “ardent affection” (103–4). Widowed, her sorrow softens into resignation, and she “turns to her children” with “heroic” devotion. Forgoing any quest for new “passion,” she sets her “brightest hopes beyond the grave” (104–5). Wollstonecraft waxes visionary at this family portrait (105–6): I think I see her surrounded by her children, reaping the reward of her care . . . as they grow up the cares of life are lessened by their grateful attention. She lives to see the virtues which she endeavoured to plant on principles, fixed into habits, to see her children attain a strength of character sufficient to enable them to endure adversity without forgetting their mother’s example.

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 111 The task of life thus fulfilled, she calmly waits for the sleep of death, and rising from the grave may say—behold, thou gavest me a talent—and here are five talents.

The unmarked allusion is to the parable (Matthew 25) that haunted Milton in his blindness, to assure himself that he was still serviceable. Wollstonecraft summons it for the passionless, rational mother. This is a new mode of “Virtue Rewarded” (Richardson’s subtitle for Pamela). No great material for a novel of sensation, it’s the moral vision she wants for female heroism.

Print and Imprint: Rendering, Degrading, Inscribing: Chapters IV–VI As her title for Chapter IV, “observations on the state of degr adation to which woman is reduced by various causes” indicates, Wollstonecraft is ready to sum up and extend her survey. The keywords are in place. A state is a situation, not a legitimacy, let alone inevitable; is reduced is a reversible process, especially with the lexically affiliated educed, or education. These chapters are a forensic analysis of texts of miseducation—not just by men (her chief quarry) but also by women who distressingly voice “the language of men.” A “fear of departing from a supposed sexual character, has made even women of superiour sense adopt the same sentiments” (112–13), she sighs, irked by the contradiction with their stature as professional women of letters. Exceedingly painful for her is brainy Anna Barbauld, whom she knew from Johnson’s circle and with whom she agrees on the abolition of slavery. Choking on

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Barbauld’s early praise of women as delicate flowers in “To a Lady, with some painted flowers,” she sputters, “How could Mrs. Barbauld write [such an] ignoble comparison?” (113n).8 She is relieved, a few pages on, to cite her delivering a better adage: “In beauty’s empire is no mean, And woman, either slave or queen, Is quickly scorn’d when not ador’d.”9

“But the adoration comes first, and the scorn is not anticipated”— so Wollstonecraft tweaks the balance (119), glancing at Adam’s postlapsarian scorn of adorable prelapsarian Eve in Paradise Lost. Chapter IV is sort of a review session on “the false system of female manners”: Eve as “the first fair defect in nature”; “women made slaves”; the cant of “innocence”; “graceful” weakness and “fragile . . . imbecility”; “fine ladies” polishing “sensibility” but “teeming with capricious fancies”; women so led to ruin by sweet talking, predatory men as to be disqualified even for the legal prostitution of marriage, and left to fall into the actual commerce. She may have been the first person to apply this shocking term to marriage. “I shall not boggle about words, when their direct signification is insincerity and falsehood,” she says in Chapter V (188), animadversions on some of the writers who have rendered women objects of pit y, bordering on contemp t. Such a great anchor word, animadversions. Literally, “the turning of the mind and soul against,” ad-version figures Wollstonecraft’s reading revolution: reading against the grain, especially when the grain is glossed with gallantry and

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 113 matter-of-fact affectation. At nearly ninety pages (170–258), this chapter is far and away the Vindication’s longest, a virtual inset anthology opened for cross-examination. Writing in the mode of her Analytical Review essays on works that annoy her, Wollstonecraft shows her readers how to unboggle what they’re told. “I have quoted this passage, lest my readers should suspect that I warped the author’s reasoning to support my own arguments” (173). “Some of the Writers” is a strategic exhibit of prestigious authorities, the home-front bookshelf of authorities on making girls into women: celebrated Rousseau, revered James Fordyce, fatherly Dr. John Gregory. In excerpts ranging from a few choice words, to a few hundred, to many multiples, interwoven with pungent commentary, Wollstonecraft makes them represent “all the writers who have written on the subject of female manners . . . in the same strain” (225). First up: Rousseau’s Emilius (1762). Wollstonecraft’s aim is to “attack . . . in a more circumstantial manner” the “artificial structure” of “opinions” that “woman was created for man” (171–73). For this, Rousseau dreamed up an entire chapter on the education of Sophia. Soaked in Milton’s Eve, Sophia stands for “the sex” and the “evils it hath caused us,” hence the penalty of subordination (181). Blowing away the fog of Rousseau’s romance of female power over adoring man, Wollstonecraft exposes the “pernicious tendency of those books, in which the writers insidiously degrade the sex, whilst they are prostrate before their personal charms” (204). Actual power is none: by restraint, subjugation, suppression, girls are trained to obedience. No hard task, advises Rousseau, because “a state of dependence” is “natural to the sex” (182); even when “injustice” is evidently suffered, she must “learn . . . the necessity of forbearance” (184). So much

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discipline for what is “natural”!— another of those “unintelligible paradoxes” (198). Aaron Burr, for one, admired her critique of Rousseau on female education: it “contains more good sense than all the other criticisms upon him which I have seen put together” (Davis, ed., 1:363). Wollstonecraft certainly hoped that British Friends of the French Republic would blush to see their hero Rousseau in Burke’s party of adducing inequality from “nature.” Nothing is more “grossly unnatural” than “the character of Sophia,” she fumes: this is a freak not only in “the superstructure, but the foundation of her character, the principles on which her education was built” (2:45). The paradigm of foundation (or base) and superstructure is axiomatic in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (1859). Wollstonecraft precedes him on the political economy of female “character.” “Rousseau would carry his male aristocracy still further” (194), right into slavery: I would have a young Englishwoman cultivate her agreeable talents, in order to please her future husband, with as much care and assiduity as a young Circassian cultivates her’s, to fit her for the Haram of an Eastern bashaw. (190)

Circassian parents sold their daughters into this. That Circassia is in (Russian) Georgia by lexical accident evokes Georgian England: Englishwoman is how William Kenrick translates Française in Emilius and Sophia (the translation Wollstonecraft had). No coincidence that femme in French denotes both woman and the destiny wife. Leveraging the evident contradiction between nature and training, Wollstonecraft exposes a psychopathology of everyday

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 115 life. Rousseau himself concedes that a woman’s life is “reduced, by our absurd institutions, to a perpetual conflict with herself ” (181). And so: “Every wife ought to be the same religion as her husband: for though such religion should be false, that docility which induces [her] to submit to the order of nature, [will] take away, in the sight of God, the criminality”—Wollstonecraft quotes him, in indignant italics (193). This sheer irrationality is scarcely improved by Rousseau’s urging a woman to “reflect” from time to time, so that a “man may not yawn in her company, when he is tired of caressing her.” Another contradiction: after “cramping a woman’s mind, if, in order to keep it fair” (Wollstonecraft intervenes), “would it not be a refinement on cruelty only to open her mind to make the darkness and misery of her fate visible?” (196, her italics again). “Darkness visible” (she counts on readers to know) is the Hell to which Milton assigns Satan (PL 1.63). “Yet, these are his sensible remarks,” she snaps, with a sarcasm that discredits all sense (196). Rousseau’s “errors in reasoning” spell a “sensibility” (202) in fraternity with Milton’s contradictions and Burke’s passions: they are all unmanly this way and even in line with what they call “female” deficiency. Such a men’s club includes Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women, which she grills in the next section. Part of “a young woman’s library” (206) ever since 1766, by the late 1790s, this imperious tome would be shredded by Austen into satire in the draft that became Pride and Prejudice. When divinity hack Mr. Collins attempts to charm the Bennet sisters with an after-dinner reading of Sermons, he meets blank stares, yawns, and titters (1:14). Wollstonecraft’s scorn focuses on style and substance. Fordyce’s “affected style,” full of “declamatory periods” and “florid appeals,” spins a “most sentimental rant” with “lover-like phrases of pumped

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up passion” (208–10), a nicely sardonic alliteration. Especially galling is his scolding of young women about “manly exercises” (“never graceful”). What he wants, states Wollstonecraft flatly, is a “house slave,” sweetly submissive, forbearing, and obedient. “Such a woman ought to be an angel—or she is an ass,” she smirks, finding no “trace of the human character” (213–14). She’s gentler at first with Dr. Gregory (sect. iii), who wrote A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters after the death of his wife and in “paternal solicitude” amid his own mortal illness.10 This allowed, she won’t “silently pass over arguments” that are “baneful to the morals and manners of the female world” (215). One is his advice for husband-nabbing: appeal to male vanity by not displaying “good sense,” let alone any learning or “cultivated understanding” (218–19); suppress physical vitality as immodest, even libertine. Be willing to marry against your sentiments. No slow burn for Wollstonecraft: it is a “system of dissimulation . . . I despise”: “Women are always to seem to be this and that—yet virtue might apostrophize them, in the words of Hamlet— Seems! I know not seems!—Have that within that passeth show!” (220– 21). Hamlet again (1.1), this time hissing at his mother in words that Wollstonecraft appropriates for female reform. These are the three books of consequence, in order of influence, but Wollstonecraft pauses again to complain of intelligent women who travel “in the same track as men,” purveying “the sentiments that brutalize them”: Dr.  Johnson’s friend, Mrs. Piozzi, sermonizing “by rote” that “all our attainments, all our arts, are employed to gain and keep the heart of man” (227– 28); Mme de Stael praising Rousseau’s satire of women who seek rights; Mme Genlis’s stories instilling narrow prejudice in girls. Their ally is that darkest advisor, Lord Chesterfield, filling his

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 117 son with cynical maxims in service to an “unmanly, immoral system” (sect. v; 236). To expose a subtly pernicious textual operation, Wollstonecraft turns the topic of Chapter VI to The Effect which an Early Association of Ideas has upon the Character, her title alluding to John Locke’s late-seventeenth-century theory of mind as a tabula rasa imprinted by experience, developed by David Hartley’s psychology of association.11 Association sediments into a social system, or social text. By this point Wollstonecraft’s questions are flagrantly rhetorical. Educated in the enervating style recommended by the writers on whom I have been animadverting; and not having a chance, from their subordinate state in society, to recover their lost ground, is it surprising that women every where appear a defect in nature? Is it surprising, when we consider what a determinate effect an early association of ideas has on the character . . . ? (259, the opening paragraph)

With a “cruel association of ideas,” she argues, “every thing conspires to twist into all their habits of thinking, or . . . feeling.”12 This “ductile” process, “seldom . . . disentangled by reason,” is what today we’d call subject-formation. “One idea calls up another, its old associate, and memory, faithful to first impressions . . . retraces them with mechanical exactness,” is how she puts it. The imprint of books and the impression of associated ideas forge female bondage. Early on, then by “habitual association,” this is how females are “made women of when they are mere children” (262– 63). If a child-woman seems grotesque, Wollstonecraft gives the “determinate” social logic and extends it to a reciprocal grotesque: the woman-child.

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Her cure is a new code of conduct, for manners, morals, and politics: “it is the right use of reason alone, which makes us independent of every thing—excepting the unclouded Reason— ‘Whose service is perfect freedom’ ” (272), the last words of Chapter VI. Wollstonecraft boldly inserts “Reason” for “God” in the sentence from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.13

A New Conduct Manual: Chapters VII–XI This is a second “inset book”: a new conduct manual for selfrespecting, self-effacing modesty; for distinguishing moral character from the artifice of “good reputation”; for valuing talents and virtue over class and rank; for rational parenting as a basis for civic virtue. Chapter VII, “modesty.— comprehensively considered, and not as a se xual v irtue,” begins by appropriating the verse at the top of Paradise Lost Book III, as Milton turns from Hell to Heaven: Hail holy Light, ofspring of Heav’n first-born, Or of th’ Eternal Coeternal beam May I express thee unblam’d? (1– 3)

Wollstonecraft hails “Modesty” as a rational divinity that implicitly contrasts Milton’s blameable Eve: Modest y! Sacred offspring of sensibility and reason!—true delicacy of mind!—may I unblamed presume to investigate thy nature . . . modulate for me the language of persuasive reason,

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 119 till I rouse my sex from the flowery bed, on which they supinely sleep life away! (273)

Having early named “personal reserve” as one of the “pillars of modesty” for both sexes (vi–vii), having insisted on “one criterion of morals” (2:67), Wollstonecraft resumes the subject. With no prevailing mode in force, she writes dialectically: how it has been “miscalled” (7:283), equated to self-abasing “humility” (rather than “sober chastity”); to “timidity” and “bashfulness” (rather than mature temper); to “the coyness of ignorance” (rather than “delicacy of reflection”). A vivid binary is the “shameless behaviour of the prostitutes, who infest the streets,” lost even to affectations of modesty: “these poor ignorant wretches never had any modesty to lose, when they consigned themselves to infamy” (274– 76). Not only does prostitution infest marriage; it is also (we’ve seen) Wollstonecraft’s recurrent trope for marriage. In Chapter IX (and again in Wrongs), she will revise to rectify her figural disgust into indignant political solidarity with such desperate fellow-creatures, the abject extreme of systemic oppression. At the other end of the spectrum from the prostitute is the erotic voluptuary (female and male) of aristocratic luxury and selfishness. Rational modesty, argues Wollstonecraft, requires disciplined self-government and self-denial. That’s her logic, but its gradations can take sober advice to extreme conclusions. A passionless marriage is best for child-focused parenting and home economics; a passion-free widow the best mother of all. Sexual pleasure is coolly denied—though Wollstonecraft is tacitly conscious of the fatal risk of pregnancy. Her spoken logic involves “anxious” concern about youngsters’ anatomical and

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sexual curiosity, and experiments in masturbation—especially in boarding schools, dens of “indecent tricks” that seed the manhood of the “lewd joker who sets the table in a roar,” primed “coolly to bring forward, without a blush, indecent allusions, or obscene witticisms.” Even girls in nurseries and convent schools may learn the “nasty habits” and “jokes and hoiden tricks” that Wollstonecraft has seen “knots of young women” indulge (7:282, 290–91). In cryptic hints, as lurid as they are moralizing, we are to imagine what’s unsaid. Some twentieth-century feminist-liberated critics were quick to tsk-tsk at an uber-puritan pathology.14 The elements are there, for sure; but this is not 1972, the dawn of free love and trustworthy birth control. The scene is 1792, when free love could entail social ruin, or worse. Blake may hail the sexual body for energy and delight and satirize its policing by “Reason” (the theme of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, early 1790s), but no man had to fear a life-ruining, sometimes life-ending, pregnancy. Wollstonecraft’s discipline of the body (passionate or indolent, dressed or distressed) was no abjectly internalized policing. It was philosophical, and political. “Still harping on the same subject, you will exclaim,” she writes to Imlay (and readers of Letters from Scandinavia), “—How can I avoid it, when most of the struggles of an eventful life have been occasioned by the oppressed state of my sex: we reason deeply, when we forcibly feel” (Letter XIX, p. 214). She saw it everywhere. The deepest chaos (we shifted to confessional I) is sexual passion. “I will endeavour to suffer in silence,” she pledged to Johnson when her crush on Fuseli blew up, with a few ashes left for confessional diagnosis: “There is certainly a great defect in my mind—my wayward heart creates its own misery” (L 206).

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 121 It’s not that Rights of Woman is required to right Wollstonecraft Philosopher with Wollstonecraft Impassionata. She knew the score because she knew the conflicts. Writing into the contradictions, she doesn’t sort it all out. Chapter VIII turns from immodesty to social depravity, again thesis-titled: “morality undermined by sexual notions of the importance of a good reputation.” The artifice of “Reputation” is nothing good. “If the honour of a woman, as it is absurdly called, be safe, she may neglect every social duty; nay, ruin her family by gaming and extravagance; yet still present a shameless front—for truly she is an honourable woman!” (312). With deft literacy, Wollstonecraft tropes Marc Antony’s devastation of Brutus’s high principles of regicide: “sure he is an honorable man!” (Julius Caesar 3.2). Truly honorable men ought to maintain any “women whom they have seduced” and any illegitimate children, whether by hapless victims or socially victimized prostitutes (8:317). This chapter holds several vignettes, with iconic characters, loaded scenes, and compressed symbolic narratives punctuating Wollstonecraft’s argument. Drawing on what she saw during her turn as companion and governess, she adds new pages to her virtual drafts of a novel of manners: a “woman of quality, notorious for her gallantries,” insulting a poor “seduced” neighbor girl, whom her lothario at least married. The “intrigues of married women, particularly in high life,” artfully reversing couverture into “the convenient cloke of marriage” for libertine adventures (8:300–1). The “dissipation” is not only these “gallantries” but also the neglect of “every domestic duty” and squandering “away all the money which should have been saved for their helpless younger children,” while the truants “plumed themselves” with

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impunity (302). Plumes decorate “sensual gust,” women fashioning themselves into “the slaves of casual lust . . . standing dishes to which every glutton may have access” (314). Such good copy for nom de plume satire, rhyme-readied with gust and lust! Chapter IX, “of the pernicious effects which arise from the unnatur al distinctions established in societ y ”: depravities of social structure, lurid metaphors ready. It “is in the most polished society that noisome reptiles and venomous serpents lurk under the rank herbage,” writes Wollstonecraft, deftly punning social rank into fetid state (320); “vices and follies . . . proceed from a feculent stream of wealth that has muddied the pure rills of natural affection” (330) and the natural rights of talents and virtue. In such a state, fashionable wives, “absolutely dependent on their husbands,” learn to be “cunning, mean, and selfish” under a “fawning fondness of spaniel-like affection” (333). Their men deserve no better than this illegitimate empowering, as they persist in “dragging from one scene of dissipation to another the nerveless limbs that hang with stupid listlessness, and rolling round the vacant eye which plainly tells us that there is no mind at home” (321–22). This would be hilarious satire were it not so dead sober. Arguing that there “must be more equality established in society, or morality will never gain ground,” Wollstonecraft surveys France’s Declaration of the Rights of Men on English soil. Her sentence continues: “and this virtuous morality will not rest firmly . . . if one half of mankind be chained” (9:321). In a protomarxist way, she links and extends the “specious slavery which chains the very soul of woman, keeping her for ever under the bondage of ignorance,” to “the whole system of British politics, if system it may be courteously called”: taxes that “grind the poor

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 123 to pamper the rich” and the “abominable traffick” of African slavery (328–29). She puts the foundational question to systemapologists: “Is sugar always to be produced by vital blood?” (referring to the fatal horrors of sugarcane plantations and factories). She then maps this system of oppression onto women: “Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to the prejudices that brutalize them?” (330). If women have any “representatives” in this “despotism,” it isn’t in Parliament. It is in alliance with “a numerous class of hard working mechanics” whose taxes “pay for the support of royalty” when they can hardly feed their children, “whose very sweat supports the splendid stud of an heir apparent, or varnishes the chariot of some female favourite who looks down on shame.” Who would not but murmur grievance at this “gothic grandeur” (335– 36)? Toward the end of the chapter, Wollstonecraft gives a curriculum to renovate female education: “study politics” to discern “the broadest basis” for benevolent action; read history rather than romances, and not the history of particular men, but “the character of the times” to see opportunities for “political improvements.” Prepare for business: managers of shops or farms, midwives and physicians—all to avert the abjections of governessing, needlework, the “legal prostitution” of marriage, or (now with sympathy) sinking “to the level of those poor abandoned creatures who live by prostitution” (337–38). She presses her case to “reasonable men,” on whom she would “prevail . . . to weigh dispassionately the whole tenor of my observations.—I appeal to their understandings; and, as a fellow-creature claim, in the name of my sex, some interest in their hearts.” Prevail now speaks a voice of reason, not prejudice. Potential for “better

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citizens” has to be planted, however. Home is where the heart of the reform is: a family of “rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience” (341–42). The chapters that comprise this inset conduct manual close in on a doublet: “parental affection” (X) and “dut y to parents” (XI). As with Modesty, this ideal has to be sifted from negative realities: tyrannical fathers, foolish mothers, children stunted, sullen, conniving where “slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind” (10:354). If parents will be affectionate teachers of reason and independence, children will respond with rational “filial duty” (10:348), “respectful affection,” and “gratitude” (11:349). The elementary school of home is Wollstonecraft’s ground for national co-parenting, the subject of her most fully detailed utopia, a determined counter-report to Citizen Talleyrand’s partial plans.

“Utopian dreams”: Chapters XII–XIII “Utopian dreams” is both a fantasy genre and a political strategy: an imagining in the mode of fictive possibility. Wollstonecraft delivers her political vision as a pedagogical romance: public education to “form . . . good citizens” (12:373). With a practical plan of conduct, curriculum, and social probability, she conceives nationally funded coeducational schools (utopian for her; in retrospect, prophetic) as a transitional family form, a simulacrum of a republic where “boys and girls, the rich and poor, should meet together”; be “dressed alike” (to efface class distinctions and discourage frivolous attention); “submit to the same discipline”; get plenty of physical exercise

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 125 (387–88); and learn how, by guided inquiry, to become “moral agents” and “enlightened citizens” (413, 380). This is also a model for social relations between the sexes, in effect, a potential mixer for marriage based on companionship rather than marketing (381). As she had with modesty and moral behavior, Wollstonecraft renders a rueful satire of the present state: not education but tricks of rote recitation that pass as learning. Schoolmasters rival each other with “lures, to catch the attention of vain fathers and mothers, whose parental affection only leads them to wish, that their children should outshine those of their neighbours” (12:376). The close quarters of school “confinement” is a virtual penal culture that extends from classroom terrorism to dormitory “hot-beds of vice and folly” and “libertinism” (363). No coincidence that in 1790 Wollstonecraft used the same phrasing for the wealthy in Rights of Men (52) and would again, in 1794, for ancien régime Paris (French Revolution, V, sect. IV, p.  494). In England’s seedbed-schools, “boys become gluttons and slovens” at the expense of “cultivating domestic affections” (12:363) and learn untold “nasty indecent tricks” when they “pig together in the same bedchamber” (379). Girls learn their share, while cultivating weakness and delicacy to become ridiculous “ladies” of accomplishment. Boys train in their schedule of “accomplishments” to learn how to act the “gentleman.” Yet “treated like men when they are still boys,” they are just as deformed as girls made into women. The lads “become vain and effeminate” (364– 65). Or worse: they are allowed to behave like pipsqueak tyrants at home, preschool training for “the system of tyranny and abject slavery” known as fagging or beasting, or in the United States, hazing, with

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ultimately “fatal effect” on the body social (366–67). Here, too, you sense Wollstonecraft could have written a sensational, even gothic, novel on miseducation. The remedy is a system of “proper day-schools” (12:374). The curriculum: “botany, mechanics, and astronomy. Reading, writing, arithmetic, natural history, and some simple experiments in natural philosophy” [that is, science], “elements of religion, history, the history of man, and politics”—with teaching by “conversations, in the socratic form” rather than one-way delivery. Both bodies and brains will benefit from interludes of “gymnastic plays in the open air” for both sexes (388). Now with a jab at Rousseau’s default as a parent, she makes this last point: I have, probably, had an opportunity of observing more girls in their infancy [childhood] than J. J. Rousseau—I can recollect my own feelings, and I . . . will venture to affirm, that a girl . . . will always be a romp . . . I will go further, and affirm, as an indisputable fact, that most of the women, in the circle of my observation, who have acted like rational creatures, or shown any vigour of intellect, have accidentally been allowed to run wild. (3:87–88)

Run wild: Wordsworth could not have put it better for the wild boys of Lakeland (himself included). Or for girls such as young Wollstonecraft, who disdained she-assigned “amusements” and “felt a much greater propensity to join the active and hardy sports of her brothers” (M 12–13), a twin to Austen’s Catherine Morland in chapter 1 of Northanger Abbey, before she undertakes required social “training.”

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 127 In the paradise of Wollstonecraft’s National Education, the student body divides at the age of vocation not by gender but by class: After the age of nine, girls and boys, intended for domestic employments, or mechanical trades, ought to be removed to other schools, and receive instruction, in some measure appropriated to the destination of each individual, the two sexes being still together in the morning; but in the afternoon, the girls should attend a school, where plain-work, mantuamaking, millinery, &c. would be their employment. The young people of superior abilities, or fortune, might now be taught, in another school, the dead and living languages, the elements of science, and continue the study of history and politics, on a more extensive scale, which would not exclude polite literature. (12:388–89)

As “destination,” this sounds a bit Burkean, refinements for those of financial “fortune,” vocational education for the less fortunate, all floated on evasive passives: “intended for” and “designed for” (392). Unfortunate boys finish off as mechanics, unfortunate girls in the very needlework that Wollstonecraft reviles as minddeadening and just a cut above prostitution—though she hopes they won’t be confined “to their needle” (391) and that mechanics may be trained for skill rather than oppressed for brawn. A super-Utopian glint is that “superior abilities” in both sexes might open opportunities. This was the best she could plot out in 1792, a first step beyond female “finishing.” Not even a work in progress, this is just a vision in progress. “My observations

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on national education,” she concedes, “are obviously hints” (401)—in the eighteenth-century sense, “faint notices,” “distant insinuations,” “intimations” (DEL). She figured out some things, but did not, could not, figure out everything. One of her visions is boys and girls together studying “elements of anatomy and medicine” (12:410) and “the modern system of botany” (7:277), with attention to sexual organs. Scourge of The Unsex’d Females, Polwhele sputtered at the prospect: With bliss botanic as their bosoms heave, Still pluck forbidden fruit, with mother Eve, For puberty in sighing florets pant, Or point the prostitution of a plant; Dissect its organ of unhallow’d lust, And fondly gaze the titillating dust. (8– 9)

His heated imagination is a nice match for Wollstonecraft’s critique of hotbeds of vice. No fewer than four outraged footnotes accompany his porno-couplets. The first one, scandalized at “boys and girls botanizing together,” fumes in disbelief at how “the study of the sexual system of plants can accord with female modesty” (8). The second note is a virtual inset essay: 140 words to gloss forty words of alarmed verse on the latest avatar of Eve’s original sin. Outraged at Wollstonecraft on the “false delicacy” of avoiding a discussion “of the organs of generation,” Polwhele advises that any woman who “does not blush” at this indecency is soliciting young ladies to “exchange the blush of modesty for the bronze of impudence” (9). He was just as outraged at the idea

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 129 of girls running around outdoors (15n). On such overdrive, he missed how an unfurling of Wollstonecrafted scandals can inadvertently make a Wollstonecrafted case: each little artifice discard, No more by weakness winning fond regard; Nor eyes, that sparkle from their blushes, roll, Nor catch the languors of the sick’ning soul, Nor the quick flutter, nor the coy reserve, But nobly boast the firm gymnastic nerve; Nor more affect with Delicacy’s fan . . . (14–15)

These are pretty much her points versified. In her “concluding reflections on the moral improvement that a revolution in female manners might natur ally be e xpected to produce” (Chapter XIII), Wollstonecraft transvalues Burke’s keywords, Reflections / Revolution, for a summary reflection in both senses: a meditation, and a bending back to major themes. Once again: toxic novelists, also fortunetellers retailing false narratives, vanity of dress, inanity of women as “overgrown children” (429) deformed “from their cradles” (438). Hopeful that women may become “rational,” “useful members of society” (445), she calls for “a revolution in Female Manners” as a natural remedy for unnatural times (447). This, too, is visionary: “till the manners of the times are changed and formed on more reasonable principles” (she conceded in Chapter II) “for this epoch we must wait” (38).

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The leveraged if clauses that I surveyed from Chapter II and marked in some after-cases roll across Rights of Woman on a path of plausible reform into more tenuous possibility: if strength of body be, with some shew of reason, the boast of men, why are women so infatuated as to be proud of a defect . . . ? (3:78) if it be granted that woman was not created merely to gratify the appetite of man, nor to be the upper servant . . . (3:80) if the page of genius has always been blurred by the prejudices of the age, some allowance should be made for a sex . . . (3:85) if woman be allowed to have an immortal soul, she must have, as the employment of life, an understanding to improve . . . or she was born only to procreate and rot (4:135) if they are moral beings, let them have a chance to become intelligent (4:146) if virtue, to deserve the name, must be founded on knowledge, let us endeavour to strengthen our minds (5:204) Why subject her to propriety—blind propriety, if she be capable of acting from a nobler spring, if she be an heir of immortality? (9:330)

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 131 Tyrants would have cause to tremble if reason were to become the rule of duty in any of the relations of life (10:344) if women were led to respect themselves, if political and moral subjects were opened to them . . . (12:391) if they will not improve women, they will deprave them! (12:406)

Then, in Chapter XIII: I have not attempted to extenuate their faults; but to prove them to be the natural consequence of their education and station in society. If so, it is reasonable to suppose that they will change their character, and correct their vices and follies, when they are allowed to be free in a physical, moral, and civil sense. (450)

The very last if of Rights of Woman is a sarcasm, both rueful and angry: Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated, or justify the authority that chains such a weak being to her duty.—If the latter, it will be expedient to open a fresh trade with Russia for whips. (451)

Whips literalize, and satirize, the system of subjection, sited in Russian patriarchy but with a pretty transparent unpretty

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application to global slavery. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman concludes as an abolition polemic for woman.

Resexed / Unsexed / No Sex At the beating heart of a “revolution in Female Manners” is that “new genus” of woman. For such a genus to emulate the virtues of man is a provisional, liberal curriculum, but it is not Wollstonecraft’s ultimate linguistic goal. In the intermediary stage, there were still stigmas to deflect. Dismissing as “libertine” lore the advice “that woman would be unsexed by acquiring strength of body and mind,” Wollstonecraft says bluntly, “I am of a very different opinion” (12:394–95). Dissent is a first step. The next is unsexing the very lexicon. This is her linguistic utopia—or, by another name, “Catharine Macaulay.” Macaulay’s last work, Observations on the Reflections of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France (1790), like the first imprint of Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Man, was anonymous. One reviewer, detecting the hand of a “celebrated female historian,” at least felt compelled to code-switch: “the same masculine turn, both of thinking and expression. . . . She is a bold and nervous writer” (Impartial Review, December 1790, 543); the first definition in DEL for nervous is the eighteenth-century sense, vigorous. Inspiring Wollstonecraft’s lexical politics, Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790) had pressed against gender assignments. Taking as a premise “one rule of right for the conduct of all rational beings,” she contended that the “imperfections” of “female character” blithely ascribed to “sexual causes” are more accurately “the effects of situation and education” (201–2).

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 133 Letter XXII, titled No characteristic Difference in Sex, points the case with defamiliarizing wit. She begins by citing the convention: a “more than ordinary energy in the female mind” gets complimented as “masculine; and hence it is, that Pope has elegantly said a perfect woman’s but a softer man”—a line in Of the Characters of Women (1753), the source of that epithet, “fine by defect,” that irritates Wollstonecraft no end. Mindful that softer would register no compliment to a man, Macaulay flips the scales: “we must either agree with Mr.  Pope, or we must reverse the proposition, and say, that a perfect man is a woman formed after a coarser mold ” (204, her italics). In the spirit of such witty reversals, and with a wish that Macaulay’s intervention “might have been carried much farther,” Wollstonecraft opened her November  1790 review of Letters (one of her longest) by giving Macaulay the benefit of Macaulay: here is a “masculine and fervid writer” with “very superior powers of . . . mind” (AR 8:241). Another code-switch, two years on, comes in a tribute to Macaulay in Chapter V of Rights of Woman (that Animadversion on pernicious writers), where she refuses to gender her terms of praise: “I will not call her’s a masculine understanding, because I admit not of such an arrogant assumption of reason”; in such writing “no sex appears” (235)—that is, no indicator that the author is of female “sex.” Recall that no less an authority than Dr.  Johnson’s Dictionary defines “the sex” as “womankind.” Wollstonecraft’s move is to undo the scandal of “Unsex’d Females” and issue a revolutionary transvaluation of the negative descriptor. I think feminist critic Mary Poovey misses this point when (in the 1980s) she says that Wollstonecraft “rejected a female speaking voice” (79) because of her discomfort with

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female sexuality. Writing as well as speaking in 1792, Wollstonecraft deliberately refuses any sex-marking in order to advance the measure of “reason.” It is beyond poignant to see her tribute to Macaulay closing on an elegiac sigh, “no more!” (236). When Macaulay died in June 1791, Wollstonecraft mourned a vital subtraction from the new-genus womanhood that she hoped would emerge in the 1790s. Even so, with fuel from Macaulay’s prestige, reforming the gendered lexicon of esteem was becoming a more focused subject in this decade. Charlotte Smith—also destined for Polwhele’s hit-list of “Unsex’d Females” (pp.  17–18)—protested in the Preface to her political novel Desmond (1792) the censure of women “as affecting masculine knowledge if they happen to have any understanding” (45), a sentence to match to Wollstonecraft’s on Macaulay. Was gendering even necessary? The Monthly Review’s article on Rights of Woman, agreeing with her that “the mind is of no sex,” declined any sex-gendering when it came to writing: “the author of this treatise—whom we will not offend by styling, authoress” (198). The reviewer (her admirer, William Enfield) went on to wish that “beside the sexual appellations of man and woman, we had some general term to denote the species, like ŻೇՓ‫›݆ׅ‬դْ [Anthropos: people] and Homo in the Greek and Roman languages”; he thought that “the want of such a general term is a material defect in our language” (209). He is keenly aware of how lexical defects can infect material culture. Without coming up with an alternative, Mary Hays’s “Memoirs of Wollstonecraft” (1800) at least stresses a relative discourse, “what is termed a masculine tone” (421, 423).15 Wollstonecraft’s persistent revolution in language was to unfix the lexicon of gender—masculine, feminine, manly, unmanly—from

“REVOLUTION in female manners” | 135 sex and to protest any unorthodox woman’s being “hunted out of society as masculine” (3:67). The sex-gender code is not the only problem, she makes clear. It is the gravitational pull of society and its attack squads, if a woman is seen “turning out of her sphere” (102). Do her twinned phrasings of out of hint at a possible alternative to socially inscribed spheres? She leaves the conclusion to Vindication of the Rights of Woman open-ended. As a vision, its grammar is vindication; as a vindication, it is cast to unknown reception. “I know that it will require a considerable length of time to eradicate the firmly rooted prejudices” (3:96). A Vindication was a first uprooting and an influential field-clearing. Rejoicing in this “work full of truth and genius,” with such a “spirited support of the just and natural rights of her sex,” Mary Hays sent a fan letter to her and urged their mutual friend Joseph Johnson to host them both at a breakfast. She was delighted to find Wollstonecraft’s “conversation, like her writings . . . brilliant, forcible, instructive, and entertaining,” and with no little awe: “She is the true disciple of her own system, and commands at once fear and reverence, admiration and esteem” (Love-Letters, 5). This was someone to listen to—but not always easily. In a preface to a book of letters and essays that Johnson had encouraged from her, Hays thanked him profusely for the “honour.” Reading this over and despising the ritual of abjection by female authors, Wollstonecraft rapped Hays’s knuckles: the honour of publishing, the phrase on which you have laid a stress, is the cant of both trade and sex: for if really equality should ever take place in society the man who is employed and gives a just equivalent for the money he receives will not behave

136 | “REVOLUTION in female manners” with the servile obsequiousness of a servant. (November 25, 1792; L 209)

Cut the cant of pleading excuse for “disadvantages of education &c,” she says. Any disadvantage should be addressed and managed before venturing into print, because “when weakness claims indulgence it seems to justify the despotism of strength.” Nor should Hays cite the support and praise of men of note; such “friends will still treat you like a woman.” Wollstonecraft’s best advice: “Rest, on yourself—if your essays have merit they will stand alone, if not the shouldering up of Dr this or that will not long keep them from falling to the ground.” All this “requires great resolution,” she advises (210–11). Resolution to Revolution: “Supposing, however, for a moment, that women were, in some future revolution of time, to become, what I sincerely wish them to be . . .”; “Were women more rationally educated, could they take a more comprehensive view of things . . . ,” Wollstonecraft muses in Rights of Woman (6:268– 69). In her core, she knew that revolutions were more than visionary agenda. They are uneven developments. When she arrived in Paris, alone, in the middle of December 1792 to witness the Revolution of the present time and to write home about its state and prospects, she confronted dismaying contradictions to her ideals—in acute shock to her system.

5 Dystopian Nightmare Paris, December 26, 1792

A

Vindication of the Rights of Woman came out in January 1792 and was appreciated, especially by reform-minded women. Wollstonecraft polished a second edition and kept up with article writing. Joseph Johnson thought she might go to France to witness the new political order, assess women’s rights there, and write “Letters from the Revolution” on the model of Helen Maria Williams’s Letters from France. Williams had disembarked on the Fête de la Federation (the first anniversary, 1790) at the height of optimism, and felt extraordinarily blessed to be there. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!” William Wordsworth recalled of being there the next summer, 1791, reviving the very sensation as he wrote it out in 1804. The “whole Earth” seemed full “of promise”: “France standing on the top of golden hours, / And human nature seeming born again” (The Prelude 6.339–40). Yet as he wrote this in 1804, after a decade of war, civil and imperial, he also felt a lost romance. When the verse was first published, it was under the title French Revolution, as it appeared to enthusiasts at its commencement (“enthusiasts” are propelled by passion over reason).1 Wollstonecraft’s encounter was more than three years after this commencement. After a venture to France with Johnson and

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the Fuselis in the summer of 1792 was halted by news of civil violence, she set out again on November 12. “I shall” go “alone, neck or nothing,” she told her friend William Roscoe (L 207). Neck means guillotine, and English friends of the moderate Girondins were not safe. Even so, she was famous: “perhaps no other female writer ever obtained so great a degree of celebrity throughout Europe,” said Godwin in 1798 (M 73), himself no minor star from Political Justice. Her letters from France, both she and Johnson were sure, would get attention. So she took the venture and the hazard. Expecting a long residence, she packed her bags and gave away her cat, arriving in December. Eager to join the Girondins, what she found was hell on earth. When Wordsworth returned to Paris during these weeks, late October 1792, that’s what he saw too. “The scenes which I witnessed,” he wrote decades on, “come back on me with appalling violence” (March 30, 1835, Letters, Later Years, 3:39)—not just as a memory, but with present visceral wrench. Summer 1792 had become a national bloodbath. British champions of the golden hours tried to rescue high principles from disastrous sequels, as street mobs wrought wanton murder, and the Revolutionary Tribunal held quick trials for treason and condemned thousands to execution. In September, the monarchs tried to escape from France. Intercepted and arrested, they were indicted for treasonous collaboration with external enemies. Wordsworth left just before the king-no-more’s trial began (the day after Christmas). In behavior that would have appalled Wollstonecraft, and uncannily prophetic of her treatment by Imlay, he abandoned his devoted lover, Frenchwoman Annette Vallon and their newborn infant daughter. He would not see

Dystopian Nightmare | 139 either again for nearly a decade, and only then to tell Annette of his upcoming marriage to an Englishwoman. Writing a letter to Johnson on December 26, 1792, Wollstonecraft unfolds a virtual one-paragraph gothic novel (L 216–17). Her hostess was out of town, and she was alone in a six-floor manse, without a command of French, let alone the streets of Paris. The time was out of joint. All those French names for days and hours she learned in Ireland had been rewritten by the new government into strange allotments of hours, days, weeks, and months. Her hope, she tells her “dear friend,” was at least to write on a day “not stained with blood”: Indeed the prudent precautions taken by the National Convention to prevent a tumult, made me suppose that the dogs of faction would not dare to bark, much less to bite, however true to their scent; and I was not mistaken; for the citizens, who were all called out, are returning home with composed countenances, shouldering their arms. About nine o’clock this morning, the King passed by my window, moving silently along (excepting now and then a few strokes on the drum, which rendered the stillness more awful) through empty streets, surrounded by the national guards, who, clustering round the carriage, seemed to deserve their name. The inhabitants flocked to their windows, but the casements were all shut, not a voice was heard, nor did I see any thing like an insulting gesture.—For the first time since I entered France, I bowed to the majesty of the people, and respected the propriety of behaviour so perfectly in unison with my own feelings. I can scarcely tell you why, but an association of ideas made

140 | Dystopian Nightmare the tears flow insensibly from my eyes, when I saw Louis sitting, with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach, going to meet death, where so many of his race have triumphed. My fancy instantly brought Louis XIV before me, entering the capital with all his pomp, after one of the victories most flattering to his pride, only to see the sunshine of prosperity overshadowed by the sublime gloom of misery.

Louis’s prison was close to her lodgings. From the attic she watched his daily route to and from the court. Her letter begins by describing an orderly city, though surreal: empty streets, state guarded, closed casements, silence. She tries to feel it all as an awe-inspiring solemnity, the trial a sad necessity. She writes as a spectator of national theater, principles driving events. This paradigm is soon unsettled by a pang of sympathy for the person on trial. She can’t help but conjure Louis XIV, the ancestor “sun king” who built Versailles, as foil to this fall. She claims a composure, yet before she can finish her sentence, its elements, so vivid as to seem alive in her head, disintegrate into dread: “though my mind is calm, I cannot dismiss the lively images that have filled my imagination all the day.” This is imagination with a vengeance, and it soon blends into a city awful in no dignity, just sheer gothic terror: lifting my eyes from the paper, I have seen eyes glare through a glass-door opposite my chair, and bloody hands shook at me. Not the distant sound of a footstep can I hear.—My apartments are remote from those of the servants, the only persons who sleep with me in an immense hotel, one folding door

Dystopian Nightmare | 141 opening after another.—I wish I had even kept the cat with me! 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.

Not even cat for comfort; just a candle for darkness visible, her horrified “eyes” mirrored against the “eyes” glaring in at her, hands bloodied from the guillotine circus. Death is freshly delivered from mortal Adam’s severest vision in Paradise Lost, “many shapes / Of Death” (XI.467–68). If Adam is spared the sight of Hell, Wollstonecraft is not. It’s not what she expected to narrate, but what she had to: everyday/everynight shocks of horror and despair, eviscerating her hopes for the Revolution, testing her faith in its principles against the pathos of its victims. Beyond the philosophical failure of the Revolution to grant equality for women was its failure on “Liberty,” in a wash of Terror, civil war, then international war. Louis went to the guillotine on January 21; France declared war on Britain February 1 and beheaded Marie Antoinette in October. English opinion, struggling with these events, began to vindicate the prophetic force of Burke’s alarm back in 1790, leaving champions of Liberty to defend the principle in abstraction from France. Wollstonecraft had been certain that “Liberty is the mother of virtue,” convinced of this political maternity: “as sound politics diffuse liberty, mankind, including woman, will become more wise and virtuous” (VRW 2:74). On February 15, she sent Johnson the first of her formal reports, sorrowful that “the perspective of the golden age, fading before the attentive eye of observation, almost eludes my sight” (PW 4:45). What was in sight was heartbreaking. “She saw the most

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cherished of her convictions put into practice— and her eyes filled with tears,” writes Woolf, scarcely a decade beyond another Great War that gave thousands of shapes of death to England itself (Nation, 1929). Including woman: this was the Revolution’s first failure. Without liberty, thwarted by tyranny, virtue is a fragile ideal, eroded by material challenges and desperations. Next stop, the end of the line: The Wrongs of Woman.

6 “bastilled . . . for life” The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria; a Fragment (1798)

T

he fame of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft told her sister, “has afforded me an opportunity of settling very advantageous in the matrimonial line.” This asset is no sooner gaged, however, than dismissed: “but entre nous—a handsome house and a proper man did not tempt me” (February 23, 1792; L 198). As early as age fifteen, she “resolved never to marry from interested motives, or to endure a life of dependence.” A half year before she and Godwin agreed to marry, she was adamant about her independence, “getting the money I want, by my writings, or go to sleep for ever” (September 4, 1796, L 357–58). It was a momentous calculus. Either this world could host a new genus or the new genus would check out. In the “Advertisement” in Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft mentions plans for a volume on “the laws relative to women”— all classes. In Rights it was ladies of rank and riches who drew her scorn and satire, and the dissipations of “polite” society that had her delivering the word “vulgar” from the prejudice of lowerclass assignment. Her core address, both politically and rhetorically, was to an educable middle class, though she hoped the poor and the laboring classes would be treated more humanely, and that national education could prepare the ablest for a better

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life. She never did write this sequel. Or she did, in another genre: a novel. This seems a surprising turn for such an acid censor of “stupid novelists” (13:425). Yet everyone was reading novels. Godwin got this when he decided to render his political philosophy in Caleb Williams (1794). The genre was quite open to women, with Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, and Frances Burney finding both critical and financial success. In the 1790s, twentyyear-old Jane Austen, alert to this hospitality and fueled by her own genius, was writing the first drafts of Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice, both conceptions accented with Wollstonecraft’s social criticism. Wollstonecraft’s first experiment (and argument) in the genre, Mary, was no great success, though Godwin admired it. At the end of Rights of Woman, she kept the door open: “when I exclaim against novels, I mean when contrasted with those works which exercise the understanding and regulate the imagination” (13:427). Might a rationally inspired novel promote such exercise? Ever the professional, she tested the genre’s political currency in a last experiment. She had the skill, not only from reading a raft of novels for Analytical Review but also from writing Mary and those novel-ready vignettes in her Vindications, advancing her arguments with a case caught in a character, a history caught in a scene: vulgar aristocrats, oppressed tenant farmers, desperate poachers, coquettes, girl-women, dog-doting mothers, idealized mothers, tyrannical or negligent husbands, calculating suitors, effeminate soldiers. The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, as Wollstonecraft’s title makes clear, is a polemic first, its heroine a case of the “history . . . of woman” (“Author’s Preface”). One of my colleagues has students read Wrongs first (short, suspenseful, provocative)

“bastilled . . . for life” | 145 before turning to the twice-as-long, unplotted abundance of Rights of Woman. More readable though it may be, Wrongs of Woman is packed and overpacked in its own way: historical fiction, gothic novel, political tract, slant autobiography, psychosexual analysis. Published in the season of Godwin’s Memoirs, Maria Venables’s life story, readers could see, mirrors Mary Wollstonecraft’s: a tyrannical, often violent father; a weak mother with scant care for daughters yet constantly calling on their service; then a romance with a captivating but somewhat dubious adventurer. Mary released the heroine from the marriage plot with an exit into death; Wrongs of Woman upends the marriage-plot novel itself. Marriage “had bastilled me for life,” says Maria in blunt carceral accounting (10:34), making a rigid participle of the Parisian prison. That an English wife could be bastilled was no trope; it was a material fate: “fettered by the partial laws of society, this fair globe was to me an universal blank,” grieves Maria (34), adding to bastilled an echo of Milton’s lament over the prison of his blindness (PL 3.45–50). Milton utters personal grievance about the ways of God to him; Wollstonecraft writes categorical grievance about God’s ways to woman, with legal fettering. “Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?” Maria exclaims early on (1:14). The question is aimed at reformist men, who might blush at this sex-sorted contradiction to liberty. In gothic novels, imprisoned women, from girls to widows, suffer male tyranny in scenarios of dire escapes and feral pursuits, ruses, captures, madhouses and prisons. Wrongs of Woman turns this into at-home gothic politics. No exotic fiction at the outposts of civilization (remote castles, mountain dungeons, foreign prisons), these nightmares are everyday life for Englishwomen.

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Young women are sold into marriage, sometimes brutally, sometimes with benevolent intentions, and as wives are forced into sex as the bargain for their subsistence. They have no civil protection from abuse, no property rights, no claim on their children, even a newborn. Two years on from Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft was meditating on the vast web of relations of law and power, from the assumption that “a king can do no wrong” to the prohibition to a woman of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: who will coolly maintain, that it is just to deprive a woman, not to insist on her being treated as an outcast of society, of all the rights of a citizen, because her revolting heart turns from the man, whom, a husband only in name, and by the tyrannical power he has over her person and property, she can neither love nor respect, to find comfort in a more congenial or humane bosom? These are a few of the leading prejudices, in the present constitution of society, that blast the blossoms of hope, and render life wretched and useless. (French Revolution, 224–25)

The word “revolting” is double packed for visceral revulsion and political righteousness. Conceived in 1796, The Wrongs of Woman takes up the tyranny of the law over woman, and accumulates a series of inset life-stories under this banner. A lens as much as a character, Maria is an intimate political witness to multiple injustices, including her own. A sister of her nurse suffers serial wrongs: after her husband is impressed (kidnapped) into naval service (another slavery), she attempts to hold on, only to lose her home and all her belongings; the laundry she has taken in

“bastilled . . . for life” | 147 for the most menial labor is stolen, and she falls to begging and prostitution. Another landlady is beaten by her husband, who squanders their income on drink. A proprietor of a boarding house who married a footman is robbed by him as he absconds with a hustler, returning only to steal more, even her clothes, leaving her, too, to begging and prostitution. “Necessity never makes prostitution the business of men’s lives,” Wollstonecraft argues in Rights of Woman (naively, but that’s what she saw), “though numberless are the women who are thus rendered systematically vicious” (4:156). In systemic desperation, some women become complicit with wrongs, betraying other women at the behest of their husbands or to gain fragile advantage. On this score, Wrongs of holds a double grammar, juridical and behavioral: the wrongs done to women and the wrongs done by them, in one savage system of oppression. Maria’s is the master-narrative. Sold into marriage as a teenager (the dowry of a kindly uncle hoping to remedy her miseries at home), she soon finds a fresh hell in her husband’s serial cruelties, confinements, and abuses. Although some of the women she meets (landladies) sympathize and try to help her escape, they are manipulated or forced by their husbands into betraying her back to her husband. The latest insult to Maria was her husband’s attempt to prostitute her to settle his debts (having spent her dowry, he’ll now spend her person). She escapes with their infant daughter. He has her arrested and drugged, grabs the baby, and puts her in the madhouse where she is found at the novel’s opening, a scene that Wollstonecraft renders in the language of gothic fiction, only to make the point that this is no fiction at all but actual female fate:

148 | “bastilled . . . for life” Abodes of horror have frequently been described, and castles, filled with spectres and chimeras, conjured up by the magic spell of genius to harrow the soul, and absorb the wondering mind. But, formed of such stuff as dreams are made of, what were they to the mansion of despair, in one corner of which Maria sat, endeavouring to recal her scattered thoughts! (1:1)

Wollstonecraft’s technique of free indirect style weaves into Maria’s consciousness the magician Prospero’s farewell to life and art in Shakespeare’s late “romance” The Tempest (4.1), a play of trial and testing that ends in the happy marriage of his daughter and the father’s sad pain at feeling his mortality: We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. . . . I am vex’d; Bear with my weakness; my, brain is troubled

Maria’s brain is troubled in the way, Wollstonecraft’s twist on Shakespeare implies, that only a mother’s could be. This is a brilliant, untagged allusion on Wollstonecraft’s part, a stunning way to begin a story of real-world horror. One dilemma for Wollstonecraft in this system is “sensibility,” a sentimental value that is also potentially a toxin. In Mary, sensibility is the heroine’s moral distinction. In Wrongs, it is Maria’s heart-throbbing refinement and a capacity for compassion but also the faculty that has her misjudging a tyrant in knightly armor, or not discerning the weak fiber of a seeming soul-brother. Wollstonecraft finds herself contending with a

“bastilled . . . for life” | 149 psychosexual problem, with political dimensions. Even her admired Dr. Johnson is no help (she is pained to say in Rights of Woman): And what is sensibility? ‘Quickness of sensation; quickness of perception; delicacy.’ Thus is it defined by Dr. Johnson; and the definition gives me no other idea than of the most exquisitely polished instinct. . . . intellect dwells not there. (4:135)

In Rights of Man, she satirized Burke’s unmanly manie of sensibility. Rights of Woman oscillates. On the one hand: degraded flatteries, shallow sympathies with fictional sufferings, and indifference to real ones index the fatuous faculty “delicately termed sensibility” (4:129), a “parade of sensibility” set for ridicule and censure (5:209). On the other: a grammar of affect for social altruism and benevolence (valued as “feminine”) in contrast to the brutal pragmatism and self-interest of the man’s world. Maria is the latest sufferer of this conundrum. Does Wrongs of Woman set its turns in a critical perspective, or do these turns expose contradictions that baffle Wollstonecraft’s management? The question had her testing it beyond her circle of supporters. In April 1797, she sought out Godwin’s friend George Dyson. He was unimpressed. “I am vexed and surprised at your not thinking the situation of Maria sufficiently important,” Wollstonecraft replied, evidently stung, then pricks back: “you are a man.” She answers as a woman: For my part I cannot suppose any situation more distressing than for a woman of sensibility with an improving mind to be

150 | “bastilled . . . for life” bound, to such a man as I have described, for life—obliged to renounce all the humanizing affections, and to avoid cultivating her taste lest her perceptions of grace, and refinement of sentiment should sharpen to agony the pangs of disappointment.

Such a heroine, she supposed, a sensible man might warm to, an entry-level proxy for “the wrongs of different classes of women”—all “equally oppressive, though from the difference of education, necessarily various.” Godwin thought this letter important enough to present in the Preface to Wrongs. Wollstonecraft wanted to “converse . . . on the subject” with Dyson, particularly about “Jemima’s story,” which he saw only as “vulgarity” (L 412). Analytical Review took the pulse of both problems. “We think that Maria is too easily impressed,” it said, but it saw the powergrid of Jemima’s story: “just sentiments, forcefully expressed” (March 1798, p. 241). Jemima is a warden in the madhouse that claims Maria, who strategically, then sympathetically, befriends her. Writing Jemima’s backstory, Wollstonecraft makes amends for the meager cast of lower-class women to whom she mostly condescended in Rights of Woman: square-elbowed family drudges (4:145), “ignorant servants” purveying superstitions and “very nasty tricks” to girls (7:287), prostitutes as social contagions. Jemima’s history holds drudge, servant, prostitute, and more. The longest of the life stories, it takes up all of Chapter V. Feeling “herself, for once in her life, treated like a fellow-creature” by Maria (IV:76), Jemima shares a history that concentrates all the wrongs of woman. Get ready. Her mother, a servant, was seduced by a fellow-servant; finding herself pregnant, she knew she was “ruined.” The seducer abandons her, and their employer insists that she keep working,

“bastilled . . . for life” | 151 before she is remanded to a “wretched garret” to fend for herself during the pains of labor. “Wretched” and “wretch” are recurring words in Jemima’s story, involving material abjection with cruel social judgment. Her mother dies nine days after giving birth, and the cad lodges her with the cheapest wet-nurse he could find. Wee Jemima barely survives in the cellar apartments, “left in dirt, to cry with cold and hunger.” Her father marries and, to save expense, eventually brings the rickety child back as a household servant. Wollstonecraft may have been aware that masters who raped their slaves sometimes brought their daughters into the house as servants. Martha Washington’s servant was such a half-sister. More like a domestic slave, little Jemima is overworked, starved for affection, fed garbage, “treated like a creature of another species.” At age eight, she is bound out as an apprentice (another slavery), with her new mistress calling her wretch and bastard, as she starves and abuses her. Having to filch her food, she has “Glutton, Liar, or Thief, written on [her] forehead,” her new names, branded like Cain. In her budding teens, she is ferociously raped by her master, deemed solely culpable by the wife, and evicted. She medicates a horrible abortion, turns to begging, pickpocketing, and prostitution. To escape the brutal street trade, she accepts an offer to join a brothel, where, despite the “yoke of service,” she is well fed, her health improves, and she acquires the polish of manners and civility of speech—cultural capital that gains an offer from one of her patrons to become his housekeeper and mistress. In this new situation, Jemima poignantly gets to be a sort of Wollstonecraft: time to read, to feed her “inquisitive, active mind,” invited to preside at the gentleman’s sociable dinner table to hear “discussions, from which, in the common course of life, women are usually excluded.” She becomes a valued interlocutor

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for his literary endeavors. But he dies suddenly, neglecting to leave her any bequest, and his heirs throw her out on the streets without “a character” (a letter of recommendation, but the term evokes more). She returns to London, barely surviving various horrible situations, “condemned to labour, like a machine.” A tradesman takes a shine to her and would have brought her home, but for a servant girl with a child by him. Jemima schemes to oust this rival, and when she discovers the desperate girl has committed suicide, she realizes that she herself has become “a monster” in this system of strife and struggle. This new man leaves, and she’s on her own again. With a sharpened philosophy of “the rich and poor as natural enemies,” she becomes “a thief on principle.” She is arrested, jailed, and assigned to a work gang, another slavery. The overseer, seeing some quality in her, hires her as a warden at his madhouse at £40 per year— decent pay (Wollstonecraft’s salary as a governess), but she’s never been treated by anyone as “a fellow-creature” until she meets Maria. Wollstonecraft’s coda: “Thinking of Jemima’s peculiar fate and her own,” Maria “was led to consider the oppressed state of woman, and to lament that she had given birth to a daughter” (6:128). Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary (still Godwin) was reading Wrongs of Woman in 1816, as she was writing Frankenstein, the story of “a creature of another species” who, like Jemima, is a victim of prejudice, called a wretch, branded monster before committing any monstrosities. With no mother and a despicably absent father, repeatedly refused compassion despite generous gestures, the Creature is fated by physical peculiarity and brutally ejected from all society. Frankenstein is a gothic extreme, but the structure of prejudice and abuse is analogous to what Wollstonecraft says about being born female.

“bastilled . . . for life” | 153 Chapters VI through XIV of Wrongs unfold a letter Maria has written to her lost infant daughter, narrating her life up to her mad-housing, in hopes that her story will convey “instruction” and “counsel” (VII). This is Wollstonecraft’s bleak counterpart to Dr. Gregory’s Legacy to His Daughters. The first readers are Jemima and a fellow prisoner, Henry Darnford. Jemima is compassionate, and Henry seems an ideal recipient, not only in sympathy but with a pledge (implicit proxy for Wollstonecraft’s male readers) to “restore her to liberty and love.” In turn, Maria “received him” as “her husband” (15:127). Hostile reviewers battened on this. A plot-twist has the trio escaping the asylum to set up in town, with hopes that Maria can secure her kind uncle’s bequest without her husband’s legally grabbing it. Darnford leaves for Paris on a venture to secure some property due to him. Maria’s furious husband sues him for seduction and adultery, a corruption of his wife-property. In his absence, Maria conducts Darnford’s defense, “instruct[ing] his counsel to plead guilty to the charge of adultery; but to deny that of seduction” (17:143) on the grounds of her rational consent. She writes “a paper, which she expressly desired might be read in court” (145)—in effect, a sequel to her letter to her daughter, recasting into a legal case her history of abuse, oppression, and imprisonment. This situation is already a utopian fantasy: a woman in the role of defense counsel, a female voice allowed to testify, and the assertion of female will in a criminal converse suit between men. In this fictive courtroom, Maria’s “defense” of Darnford morphs into a self-defense and then into a fresh vindication of the rights of woman, now to voluntary adultery. Maria’s goal, amid “the rigid laws which enslave women” (146), is a separation or, better, a

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divorce and “the liberty of enjoying, free from molestation, the fortune left to me” (153). Mindful of the opening of divorce laws in Revolutionary France, the judge refuses such “new-fangled notions” as “French principles,” ruling that Maria not only has no legal standing but has a legal duty to obey her husband (155). Staging this verdict as the final wrong, a legal fiction with legal authority in the style of male tyranny, Wollstonecraft projects Maria’s statement beyond the novel to its readers, an extranarrative court of appeal for another verdict. This is utopian. In 1792, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman could at least imagine a revolution in female manners. By 1796, writing from Scandinavia, she felt the prospect of a new genus fading into “anxiety” about the world awaiting her daughter. Reflecting “on the dependent and oppressed state of her sex,” she could only “dread lest she should be forced to sacrifice her heart to her principles, or principles to her heart. . . . I dread to unfold her mind, lest it should render her unfit for the world she is to inhabit. Hapless woman! what a fate is thine!” (Letter VI). By 1797, dread had become a melancholy field report. The darkest, deepest “sensibility” of The Wrongs of Woman is that the system of oppression is so pervasive, from hearth to court, that nothing can be done, beyond casting hope, in the form of a letter and a paper, to unknown future generations. What survives, lasts, lives on?

Epilogue “we hear her voice”

A

Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in Boston and Philadelphia and widely discussed; by 1800 it was in more U.S. households than Paine’s Rights of Man (May and Lundberg, chart 5). Having admired Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men, Aaron Burr “made haste to procure” Rights of Woman as soon as he heard of it, in February 1793, and spent almost the whole night of the fifteenth reading it. “Be assured that your sex has in her an able advocate,” he told his wife. “It is, in my opinion, a work of genius” (Davis, ed., 1:363). He wanted to instill their daughter Theo with its principles. And for iconic inspiration, he was avid to procure a copy of Opie’s 1797 portrait (Cameron, 328– 32). There were three Philadelphia editions between 1792 and 1794, more than in any other city in the world (Botting, “US Newspapers,” 273). One of these publishers also issued Lady’s Magazine and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge, its December 1792 frontispiece imaging goddess Liberty being presented with Rights of Woman, then a long, praising, nine-page article within. In the United Kingdom it wasn’t Lady Liberty but Amazon that was the figurehead. Recall William Roscoe’s “an Amazon stept out.” This was a cheer, but also an extreme. “All women

Figure 15 Lady’s Magazine; and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge vol. 1, December 1, 1792, frontispiece, engraving by the firm of Thackara & Vallance, Philadelphia. “Genius of the Lady’s magazine.” Liberty, with a sash of 13 stars representing the United States, receiving The Rights of Woman from (allegorical “Genius”) Mary Wollstonecraft, with the laurel crown of achievement waiting for her, in the hand of the third figure. Source: Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

Epilogue | 157 possess not the Amazonian spirit of a Wolstonecraft,” wrote Mary Anne Radcliffe in 1799, in a polite appeal just for respectable employment opportunities for women, The Female Advocate; or An Attempt to Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation (xi). She understood the persona that was needed: “unremitting oppression is sometimes a sufficient apology for their throwing off the gentle garb of a female, and assuming some more masculine appearance” (xi). And her sentence shows a bit of Wollstonecraft spirit: female and masculine as performances, not essences. But Amazon had baggage: “a race of women . . . so called from cutting off their breasts [a-maz: lacking] to use their weapons better. A warlike woman, a virago” (Johnson’s Dictionary). Conceding a “somewhat amazonian temper,” Godwin called it a rhetorical persona, the “muscular, raw-boned virago” of the polemics, a “character pro tempore.” He insisted the person herself was “lovely . . . feminine in her manner” (Memoirs, 82–93). By the time he made this case, there was another term: “a Wollstonecraft.” In 1793, Burr could refer to someone not yet widely known in the United States as “a Miss Woolstonecraft” (Davis, ed., 1:363). A decade on, “a Wollstonecraft” was a genre, the new genus a recognized paradigm. Anti-Jacobin’s review (1800) of Mary Hays’s sequel to Wollstonecraft, titled more politely Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women (1798), sussed the genetics: “the pen of . . . a Wollstonecraft” (151). Poet, actress, and once the mistress of the Prince of Wales, Mary Robinson (writing as Anne Frances Randall) summoned the eponym in Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799): it would take “a legion of Wollstonecrafts to undermine the poisons of prejudice and malice” and prevail

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with “philosophical reasoning” (2). With no little prejudice and plenty of malice, Edmund Burke had hissed the eponym to Mrs. John Crewe (August 11, 1795): “the Mrs. Woolstencrofts,” eponym for “all that Clan of desperate, Wicked, and mischievously ingenious Women” (8:304). By the late 1790s, England was Burked, and the Amazon brand too toxic not to exploit. Policeman Polwhele branded it into The Unsex’d Females (1798), to name a monstrous “Amazonian band” (6n). The spawn were “a Wollstonecraft” or “a Wollstonecraftian” (16n, 20n). Maria Edgeworth’s novel Belinda (1801) sports a “man-woman” named Harriet Freke (vol.  2, chap. XVI:139), a delicacy-disdaining, cross-dressing, female-dueling bully, racist trickster, a coarse buffoon, bellowing “Vive la liberté . . . I’m a champion for the Rights of Woman” (XVII, titled “Rights of Woman,” 162– 63). No new genus here, just vulgar travesty. There were better imprints. While Austen did not use Wollstonecraft’s vocabulary (let alone cite her), her novels abound in Wollstonecraft’s themes: insipid female accomplishments and frivolities, desperate marriage-marketing, foppish men, predatory suitors, patriarchal tyrants, indolent or incapable mothers. In 1825 socialist visionary William Thompson, out to liberate women from domestic and political slavery, did acknowledge Wollstonecraft, to wish that she had gone further, right down to the foundations. True, her “banner . . . unfolded boldly,” with key tropes (especially women as slaves) that he would reiterate, but her politics were “marred” by “narrow views” with “narrow usefulness,” liberalizing rather than revolutionizing the social structure (“Introductory Letter,” vii, the sole mention of “Wolstonecroft” in his strident Appeal).

Epilogue | 159 It took time to get to Virginia Woolf ’s summation in 1929: “one form of immortality is hers undoubtedly: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living” (Nation, 15). It’s no stretch to advance Woolf ’s present tenses to our century, where “prevailing opinions” about “woman” undergird oppression, not only in the Taliban’s medieval discipline but also in the United States, where the prospect of a female president is still remote, where women’s control over their very bodies is contending with an onslaught of post-Roe legislation and its posses of enforcement. Barbara Taylor has objected to such “presentism” (measuring the past by present standards): “Every feminist generation,” she complains, “reinvents” Wollstonecraft to suit themselves. “Then vanishes into now in an appropriative gesture that strips both life and ideas of historic meaning, the life becoming emblematic of the dilemmas of contemporary womanhood, the ideas evaluated as if they were present-day precepts” (10–11). Tip this complaint at an angle and you might see that no small part of Wollstonecraft’s historical meaning is that this “present-day” keeps happening, with irrefutable traction beyond the 1790s, from generation to generation. That’s not a stripping away but a force forward. My students’ reactions have ranged from perplexed (this is feminism?) to astonished (oh, this is feminism!). Sophisticated gender/women’s studies veterans are often surprised at the modesty of Wollstonecraft’s agenda: better first-level education, to produce better wives and mothers; sexual self-control rather than liberation; just hints about roles outside the home; nothing about civic participation, let alone suffrage, or theorizing same-sex affiliations as an alternative to heterosexual patriarchy. I mention

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that my mother and all my aunts were born before women had the vote in the United States. In 1792, a woman such as myself—a voter, a professor with many female colleagues—was impossible. The practical “rights of woman” is a very recent formation and still vulnerable. Even Wollstonecraft on our syllabi is new. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was missing in my classes at UC Berkeley (no less). A revolution in our resources was Carol Poston’s Norton Critical Edition in 1975, only four years after Swiss women got to vote. By the 1990s, Wollstonecraft was migrating out of women’s studies and into innovative period anthologies: Duncan Wu’s Romanticism: An Anthology, Anne Mellor and Richard Matlak’s British Literature, 1780–1830, my and Peter Manning’s The Longman Anthology: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries. Historically distanced and not gender named, period courses provide a safe space for students (both sexes) allergic to “women’s studies” and “feminist” theory. Comments on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in my Romantic-period classes often begin, “I’m no feminist, but . . .” (and then a feminist point). This is often the guys’ first encounter with sex-gender critique, and they grasp the register for themselves, especially in the “man” codes of college “culture,” and with a sharpened awareness of the lives of their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers. Women from patriarchal cultures at home and abroad, sometimes the first generation in their families to go to the United States for college, find completely recognizable Wollstonecraft’s discussion of “the prevailing opinion of the female character,” of social and domestic sexism, and the linguistic codes pulsing through it all, voicing what they registered in their own lives. Reading

Epilogue | 161 Wollstonecraft also helps sharpen our focus on questions of gender and sexuality in other works on our syllabus. I usually start with a few questions for general reflection. Have you ever been in a restaurant with sex-differentiated menus (with and without prices), or where the tab is automatically presented to a man? What attitudes are implied? What did private academies for girls used to be called? What about the equivalent schools for boys? What’s implied and what’s at stake in finishing school versus prep school? Rights of Woman arrays the grammar: “men in their youth are prepared for professions,” while young women are finished “to marry advantageously” (4:127). “Finishing schools” were cultural establishments in the eighteenth century, often run by finished women, and surviving well into the twentieth century. In 1836, Charles Dickens referred to “Minerva House, conducted under the auspices of the two sisters” as “a ‘finishing establishment for young ladies,’ where some twenty girls of the ages of from thirteen to nineteen inclusive, acquired a smattering of everything, and a knowledge of nothing” (“Sentiment,” Sketches by Boz). Gender polarities, as Dickens’s wit makes clear, could also stigmatize men. When coaches want to demean men for not having enough game, what do they call them? Why is it hilarious when men masquerade as women, yet not usually so when women impersonate men? What does “man up” mean? What does this imply about the place of a woman? If (as Polonius advises his son Laertes in Hamlet) “clothes make the man,” how do “clothes also make the woman”—or remake her? How is costume a metaphor for all kinds of custom, from behavior to language? From the press of these questions today, we pivot back to the forms and formations in Wollstonecraft’s day.

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In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she would be the militant William Roscoe hailed: “I wish to sum up what I have said in a few words, for I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues, not excepting modesty” (3:106). Writing to Mary Hays in April 1797 (she would not see another spring), she summed it up again, for herself and beyond her day: Those who are bold enough to advance before the age they live in, and to throw off, by force of their own minds, the prejudices which the maturing reason of the world will in time disavow, must learn to brave censure. We ought not to be too anxious respecting the opinion of others.—I am not fond of vindications.—Those who know me will suppose I acted from principle.—Nay, as we in general give others credit for worth, in proportion as we possess it—I am easy with regard to the opinions of the best part of mankind—I rest on my own. (L 410)

Not “fond of vindications,” she couldn’t help but write two landmark ones. How winning the rhyming wit of her underscored best and rest. If A Vindication of the Rights of Woman did not effect immediate changes in social policy, it accomplished much in literary activism, by planting ideas and desires. More than 230 years on, “Wollstonecraft,” worth her self-titling as “the first of a new genus,” is a name of global consequence for still revolutionary aspirations. “The Rights of Woman” is a work in progress, even now, ever more important.

Brief Glossary of Recurring Names

Jane Austen (1775–1817): In the 1790s, this esteemed novelist drafted manuscripts that would become Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Northanger Abbey (1817), both reflecting the unfortunate, deformed, or abject situations of women, especially on the marriage market, described by MW in VRW.

William Blake (1757–1827):

Poet and engraver, artist and printmaker,

political activist, supporter of the revolutions in France and the United States, part of the publisher Joseph Johnson’s circle, notable for Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), and the Wollstonecraftinspired Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793): He illustrated MW’s Original Stories from Real Life (2nd ed., 1791).

Edmund Burke (1729–1797): Irish British economist, political philosopher, aesthetic theorist, member of Parliament (1766–1797), firm critic of the French Revolution, most relevant to Wollstonecraft for two treatises, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757, written at age nineteen) and Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834): A radical political journalist, champion of the French Revolution, and minor poet in the 1790s, he became famous for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and “Kubla Khan” (1816).

James Fordyce (1720–1796):

Scottish Presbyterian minister, irritating

Wollstonecraft with his influential conduct manual Sermons for Young Women (1766), ridiculed in Pride and Prejudice (1813).

164 | Brief Glossary of Recurring Names

William Godwin (1756–1836):

Journalist, anarchist philosopher (An

Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, February 1793, just after the execution of Louis XVI in France), political novelist (Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, 1794); met MW in Joseph Johnson’s circle in 1791. They met again in 1796, began an affair, and married in 1797. He published Memoirs of MW just months after her death (January 1798).

John Gregory (1724–1773): Scottish moral philosopher, most famous for A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, written in 1761 as a private communication; it was published after his death, by his son, in 1774, going on to be an influential bestseller. MW criticizes this advice manual for telling young women to dissemble and play weak and dumb in order to secure the affection of men and a husband.

Mary Hays (1759–1843):

MW’s contemporary; essayist, poet, novelist,

biographer, friend of Godwin and MW, whom she reintroduced in 1796. Her most evidently Wollstonecrafted novel is Victim of Prejudice (1799). She remained loyal through the scandals and wrote a fiftypage tribute to her for the Annual Necrology for 1798.

Gilbert Imlay (1754–1828): American adventurer, businessman, speculator, gun runner. Met MW in Paris; began an affair with her; registered her as his wife at the U.S. embassy to protect her from the Terror; fathered their daughter, Fanny. Jilted MW more than once. He had no interest in their daughter at all, who committed suicide in 1816.

Joseph Johnson (1738–1809):

Influential London publisher and book-

seller; promoter of many new writers and of liberal work; founder of Analytical Review, a lively oppositional monthly. MW’s mentor and friend, publisher of all of her works, he hired her at AR, where she published frequently.

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784):

Esteemed man of letters, poet, moralist,

essayist editor of Shakespeare, brilliant intellect, creator of the first substantial dictionary of the English language, admired by MW, whom he met and enjoyed conversing with in 1784.

Catharine Macaulay (1731–1791):

English republican (anti-monarchical)

historian, prolific woman of letters, antagonist of Burke’s Reflections

Brief Glossary of Recurring Names | 165 on the French Revolution, admirer of MW, who was influenced by her Letters on Education (1790).

John Milton (1608–1674): The most important English poet, especially for Paradise Lost (2nd ed., 1674), an epic based on the brief account in Genesis of the Fall of man from Eden and the culpability of Eve, tempted by Satan. He was part of the parliamentary government that executed Charles I and went into hiding when the monarchy was restored. The gender hierarchies and prejudices in Paradise Lost are a recurring point of reference and contention for MW.

Tom Paine (1737–1809): Internationally important philosopher and activist revolutionary. His forty-seven-page pamphlet Common Sense (1776) galvanized support for the U.S. Revolution. His reply to Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, titled The Rights of Man, published early in 1791, a few months after MW’s VRW, was an international sensation. Regarded as treasonous, it resulted in a warrant for his arrest, issued early in 1792. He fled to France, where he was a hero. He met MW in 1791, met her again in Paris in 1793, and introduced her to Gilbert Imlay.

Richard Polwhele (1760–1838): This clergyman and poet produced a tirade against activist liberal women in 1798, a heavily footnoted poem in heroic couplets titled The Unsex’ d Females, with MW in a starring role. He also wrote for MW’s scourge, The Anti-Jacobin Review.

Richard Price (1723–1791): Nonconformist minister and radical republican supporter of the revolutions in the United States and France. A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, an address to the Revolution Society in November 1789, soon published with several editions in the 1790s, focused Edmund Burke’s attack on him and the French Revolution in Reflections (1790). Price mentored MW when he met her in 1784 and introduced her to Joseph Johnson (her publisher) and through his friends, to Samuel Johnson.

William Roscoe (1753–1831):

Abolitionist, poet, admirer of MW, and

commissioner of one of the first formal portraits of her.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778): Genevan political philosopher and educational theorist, first admired by MW for his political

166 | Brief Glossary of Recurring Names philosophy in his Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract (both giving a foundation to the French Revolution), then bitterly critiqued for the treatment of women in his sentimental novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) and his education tract Emilius and Sophia (1762). His posthumously published Confessions (1782; 1789) introduced a new secular form of this term of religious autobiography, with revelations of his immoral behavior, especially in youth toward a servant girl whom he framed for theft, and then, later, toward his several children whom he abandoned to an orphanage.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1853): Daughter of William Godwin and MW (who died from complications of delivery); married radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816, the year she conceived and began to write the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818.

Helen Maria Williams (1759–1827): MW’s contemporary, a novelist, poet, and most relevant to MW for Letters written in France (published in distinct volumes, 1790–1796), eyewitness reporting on the French Revolution and the course of the new regime, from promise to Terror. She hosted salons for the moderate Girondins. MW met her in France.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941): Woman of letters, avant-garde novelist, with an important essay on MW and a book of feminist philosophy, A Room of One’s Own (1929).

William Wordsworth (1770–1850): One of the most important poets of the nineteenth century, and poet laureate. His first important work was Lyrical Ballads (1798), with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Like MW, he was an enthusiast for the French Revolution and went to France in 1791–1792; he left as the Terror made France perilous for an Englishman. The Terror appalled him and radically cooled his enthusiasm for the Revolution and even his optimism about political remedies for injustice.

Notes

Prologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication? 1. After Letters was published in January, she wrote seventeen more reviews for Analytical Review (vols. 23–24, February 1796 to May 1797), from a few sentences to several pages. Her very last publication was on Mary Robinson’s 950-page novel Hubert de Sevrac, a Romance of the Eighteenth Century— a bookend, in effect, to the first review of this run, February 1796, on Robinson’s Angelina, a Novel, in a Series of Letters, at a mere nine hundred pages. Of these seventeen articles, twelve are on novels, a form she was studying for content, style, and structure. 2. In 1919, Benedict sent this chapter to Houghton Mifflin as a prospectus for her book; the publisher declined the offer. See Babcock, “ReReading Ruth Benedict.” It was finally published in 1959. 3. This husband-naming was becoming a standard way to list her works. The copy of the Letters from Scandinavia at New York Public Library (originally from the Astor collection at the turn of the century) shows “Godwin” penciled in after Wollstonecraft’s name on the title page, although she scarcely knew, let alone married, him at this point. 4. In 2001, Elaine Showalter (a pioneer of twentieth-century feminist criticism) celebrated Wollstonecraft in the opening chapter of Inventing Herself as the founding, “epic feminist intellectual” in English letters. Telling a humane story of a life that embodied and predicted

168 | Prologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication? “virtually all of the contradictions between theory and practice that would challenge the women who came after her” (21– 22), Showalter can still report a “series of unhappy love affairs” (21; see also 24), when there was only one, with Gilbert Imlay. 5. Deidre Lynch’s edition of VRW (38n6) cites a poem that Wollstonecraft knew: Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–1734), Epistle II: “Superior beings, when of late they saw / A mortal Man unfold all Nature’s law, / Admir’d such wisdom in an earthly shape” (31– 33).

1. How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman” 1. Her reference is to Hugh Blair’s widely admired Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). 2. Adams, “Comments.” See also Gordon, 461n55. 3. That was then, but in 2012 Savita Halappanavar contracted lethal septicæmia from a nonviable, miscarried fetus. The doctor in Ireland refused an abortion on the grounds that the fetus still had a heartbeat. The mother died in futile agony. This is not an unlikely peril in the United States after the overturning of Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. Doctors are reporting that even medical care for less dire miscarriages could be denied and investigated, with increasing peril to the untreated mother.

2. Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft: The Right Woman 1. Some copies I examined lack the portrait, suggesting its excision for private framing or sale. Below the portrait in the Google Books copy, some hand wrote, “I am told very like.” 2. In 1789, Bellamy wrote a playlet, The Benevolent Planters, for the West India planters’ lobby and performed by leading actors at the Theatre Royal. (Any ills were represented as due to bad masters, not the system).

3. “An Amazon stept out” | 169 3. In Borderlines (11–12), I give a fuller account of Wollstonecraft’s sexinflected reception. 4. Roscoe’s descendants bequeathed the portrait in 1950 to the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk /arti fact /mary-wollstonecraft. 5. Botting, Portraits I:24 and 115. 6. Tomalin dates it post-1795 (plate 6, caption). I think 1798, noting its sibling satire of 1797 Opie. 7. Walpole, a Whig constitutionalist who, like Burke, supported abolition and U.S. independence, was provoked by the disparagement of Marie Antoinette in Wollstonecraft’s Origin of the French Revolution. His epithet would often be echoed. 8. The couplets run to about 3,050 words, the notes to about 5,750, some commanding so much page-space that only one or two couplets sit at the tops of sixteen out of thirty-five pages. 9. Lundberg and Farnham, Modern Woman, 144–45, 159– 63, even mistitling VRW. 10. Carol Poston’s Norton Critical Editions of VRW (1975, 1988) include this caricature and an excerpt from Lundberg and Farnham, both canceled in Lynch’s next edition (2009), a regrettable loss of these punctuations in a hostile reception history. 11. Advertisement, New York Review of Books, February 10, 2022, 35.4, hailing Levine’s world-acclaimed “wit, commentary, and virtuoso technique”; thirteen of the thirty-three faces are women. 12. Hackney Post, March 14, 2013. 13. See Botting, Portraits, II:653–54. 14. Annabel Barry, “Stripping Wollstonecraft Naked.”

3. “An Amazon stept out”: A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) 1. “A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff” (c. 1793) was Wordsworth’s first sustained piece of writing (Prose Works, 1:35– 36). His elder brother advised him not to publish it.

170 | 3. “An Amazon stept out” 2. While echoing “republican analysis to attack the injustice of all inherited privilege,” neither she nor Price were “full republican” (Todd, Life, 206). The two so-named “Republics” in Europe, Geneva and Venice, were no standard by a long shot, ruled by an economic elite with no philosophy of general rights. Radical philosophers, such as “anarchist” Godwin and “social contract” Rousseau, saw all governments and their institutions as tyranny and oppression. 3. Paine must have noted her satire of this passage. In Rights of Man he does his own turn on this epitome of Burke’s “horrid paintings” (28) for several pages, and offered a counter-narrative of the Parisian march as mostly a peaceful demonstration with compelling grievances (38–46). 4. She is quoting from and alluding to Burke’s Sublime and the Beautiful, Part III, Sect. IX (“Perfection not the cause of BEAUTY”), XII (“The real cause of BEAUTY”), XIII (“Beautiful objects small”), XIV (“Smoothness”), XVI (“Delicacy), and a recapitulation in XXVII. 5. VRM would soon be eclipsed by Paine’s Rights of Man, crisped with plain style and memorably pithy phrasing: “he pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird,” he zinged at Burke’s veneration for distressed royalty in neglect of the starving country; “His hero or his heroine must be a tragedy-victim expiring in show, and not the real prisoner of misery, sliding into death in the silence of a dungeon” (7th edition [1791], 25– 27). VRM cost 1 shilling, sixpence; Paine’s pamphlet, 3 shillings. VRM would not be published again separately until 1960. 6. Gordon, Vindication, 143; Todd, Life, 167.

4. “REVOLUTION in female manners”: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792) 1. Marital rape was legal in the United Kingdom until 1991; in the United States, until 1993. It is still legal in India. 2. Endorsing this license as the “law of nature”—“the male pursues, the female yields” (4)—Wollstonecraft winced, and took out this sentence in the second edition. Childbirth, she knew acutely, was not for the

4. “REVOLUTION in female manners” | 171 weak, and the mortality rate of mothers exceeded that of men on the battlefield. 3. She stays silent about a couple of appalling revelations in Rousseau’s posthumously published Confessions (1782; 1789): his framing of a fellow servant girl for his theft of a ribbon and his abandonment of his five illegitimate children (with his mistress) to orphanages. 4. Voltaire quipped about God, “Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer [If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him]” (Epistle to the Author of “The Three Impostors,” 1769). 5. Bacon, Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (1625), Essay XVI. 6. This is William Empson’s brilliant argument on behalf of Eve’s rebellion in Milton’s God. 7. The inconsistent passages have drawn a lot of critical discussion. One of the best is Ronald Levao’s. 8. Barbauld, Poems, 1773. Wollstonecraft cuts her no slack for idealizing this “false system.” 9. An old shepherd is consoling a lovelorn lass (Song V; 1773 Poems). 10. Published posthumously in 1774, it sold six thousand copies by 1776 and remained popular well into the nineteenth century. 11. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) gave Hartley an epistemology for Observations on Man (1749), this disseminated by Joseph Priestley’s Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, on the Principle of the Association of Ideas (1775, reissued by Joseph Johnson, 1790). 12. As pedagogical theorist, Anna Barbauld would call this process “the education of circumstances—insensible education” (Monthly Magazine 5 [March 1798]: 168). She means an osmosis of positive values and ideas, but the grammar sustains the negative sedimentation that Wollstonecraft discusses. 13. While I don’t agree with Carol Poston that Wollstonecraft avoids “blasphemous” risks and is “overly rational,” I owe to her this reference as well as to Macaulay’s use of it in Letters on Education (Norton 2nd ed., 121n6). Whig Republican Macaulay adds, “the empire of religious sentiment, and the empire of reason, is the same” (Letter IX, 422– 23).

172 | 4. “REVOLUTION in female manners” 14. Cora Kaplan is typical: with a “violent antagonism to the sexual” in general and a “most profound anxiety about female sexuality” in particular, Rights of Woman issues “a puritan sexual ethic with such passionate conviction that self-denial seems a libidinized activity” (Sea Changes, 341, 336). See also Mary Poovey on Wollstonecraft’s antierotic ethic of “modesty” (78). Neither of these 1980s feminists takes up the consequence of a ruinous pregnancy, especially out of wedlock. 15. Pages later, Hays reverts to the customary labels and binaries, describing a “feminine sensibility and tenderness, united with masculine strength and fortitude” (458), the manner of her brief obituary in Monthly Magazine, September 1797, naming (without any “what is called”) her “masculine tone of understanding” (4:232).

5. Dystopian Nightmare: Paris, December 26, 1792 1. These lines appeared first in his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s periodical The Friend, October  26, 1809, 63, then in Wordsworth’s 1815 Poems (2:69– 71).

Further Reading and Bibliographies

Some Other Editions of Wollstonecraft’s Works and Letters Collected Letters. Ed Ralph Wardle. Cornell University Press, 1979. Mary, a Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, ed. Michelle Faubert. Broadview, 2012; with contextual materials. The Vindications: The Rights of Men / The Rights of Woman, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Broadview, 1997; contextual materials and early reviews. A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Ed. and intro. Eleanor Louise Nicholes. Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1960. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 3rd Norton Critical Edition, ed. Deidre Lynch. Norton, 2009. 2nd edition, ed. Carol Poston. Norton, 1988. Variant contextual materials and critical essays. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Eileen Hunt Botting. Yale University Press, 2104. Includes critical essays and a census of the global imprints from the nineteenth century to 2015. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd. Vol. 7 (Wollstonecraft’s known or likely contributions to Analytical Review). New York University Press, 1989.

Biographies (Chronological) Godwin, William. Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Joseph Johnson, 1798. Annotated and contextualized, ed. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker. Broadview, 2001.

174 | Further Reading and Bibliographies Tomalin, Clare. The Life & Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Moore, Jane. Mary Wollstonecraft. Oxford University Press, 1999. Todd, Janet. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. Oxford University Press, 2000. Franklin, Caroline. Mary Wollstonecraft, a Literary Life. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Gordon, Lyndall. Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Harper, 2005, 2006.

Reception: Early Reviews, Representations, Transmissions, Images (Chronological) Analytic Review 8 (1790): 416–19, on VRM. Analytical Review 27 (March 1798): 235–40, on Godwin’s Memoirs; on PW: 240–45. English Review 17 (January 1791): 59– 61, on VRM. Gentleman’s Magazine 61, no. 1 (February 1791): 151–54, on VRM. Roscoe, William. The Life, Death and Wonderful Atchievements of Edmund Burke: A New Ballad. 1792; “by the Author of the Wrongs of Africa” (1792), his abolitionist poem, 1787–1788. Critical Review n.s. 4 (1792): 389– 98; 5 (1792): 132–41; on VRW. Monthly Review n.s. 8 (June 1792): 198– 209; on VRW. Hays, Mary. “Letter III.” In Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous. T. Knott, 1793. “Mrs. Wollstonecraft.” Monthly Mirror (January 1796): 131– 33. Gentleman’s Magazine 67, no. 2 (October 1797): 894, obituary of MW. Monthly Visitor and Pocket Companion. Published “By a Society of Gentlemen.” 3, no. 2 (February 1798), “Memoirs of Mrs. Godwin.”; continued 3, no. 3 (March 1798). Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 1 (July  1798): 94–102; on Godwin’s Memoirs. Polwhele, Richard. The Unsex’d Females: A Poem. Cadell and Davies, 1798. Radcliffe, Mary Anne. The Female Advocate; or, An Attempt to Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation. Vernor and Hood, 1799.

Further Reading and Bibliographies | 175 [Robinson, Mary] / Anne Frances Randall. Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination. Longmans, 1799. Hays, Mary. “Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft.” In Annual Necrology for 1797– 8 (1800): 411– 60. [Sharpe, Charles Kirkpatrick] C. K. “The Vision of Liberty.” Anti-Jacobin Review 9 (1801): 518. Blake, William. “Mary.” (Pickering Ms., c. 1802). Complete Poems & Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. Anchor, 1982. Janes, R. N. “On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 293– 302. Kaplan, Cora. “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Reception and Legacies.” In The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. C. Johnson., 246– 70. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hunt, Eileen. Portraits of Wollstonecraft. 2 vols. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 2nd ed., 2023. Encyclopedic, beautifully produced.

Further Reading and Bibliography Adams, Abigail. Letter to John Adams, March 31, 1776. Massachusetts Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc. Adams, John. “Comments on Mary Wollstonecraft’s French Revolution.” Bulletin of the Boston Public Library, Series 4/5, no. 11 (1923): 4–13. See also Adams Family Correspondence, 382. Babcock, Barbara. “Re-Reading Ruth Benedict.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 12, no. 3 (1992). Barry, Annabel. “Stripping Wollstonecraft Naked: Defaced Monumentality.” Paper presented at the NASSR/BARS Convention, August 2022. Benedict, Ruth. “Mary Wollstonecraft” (c. 1914–1917), in An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict, ed. Margaret Mead, 491–519. Houghton Mifflin, 1959. Bentley, Richard. Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Tonson &c, 1732. Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765.

176 | Further Reading and Bibliographies Botting, Eileen Hunt. “Making an American Feminist Icon: Wollstonecraft’s Reception in US Newspapers, 1800–1869.” History of Political Thought 34, no. 2 (2013): 273– 95. Brody, Miriam. Introduction to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 7– 74. Penguin, 1975. Burke, Edmund. Correspondence. Ed. Thomas W. Copeland. 10 vols. Cambridge University Press, 1958–1978. ——. A Philosophic Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. J. Dodsley, 1759. ——. Reflections on the revolution in France, and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event. In a letter to have been sent to a gentleman in Paris. J. Dodsley, 1790. Burney, Frances. The Early Diary, 1768–1778. Ed. Annie Raine Ellis. 2 vols. George Bell, 1889. Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Shelley and His Circle. Volume 1. Harvard University Press, 1961. Cobb, Richard. “Radicalism and Wreckage.” See TLS. Davis, Matthew L., ed. Memoirs of Aaron Burr, With miscellaneous selections from his Correspondence. 2 vols. Harper, 1836– 37. Durant, W. Clark, ed. Godwin’s Memoirs. Methuen, 1927. Edgeworth, Maria. Belinda. Joseph Johnson, 1801. Eliot, George. “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft.” The Leader 6, no. 290 (October 13, 1855): 988–89. Elwood, [Anne Katherine] Mrs. “Mrs. Mary Wollstonecroft [sic] Godwin.” In Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of England from the Commencement of the Last Century, 2:125–53. Henry Colburn, 1843. Empson, William. Milton’s God. New Directions, 1961. Fawcett, [Millicent] Mrs. Henry, ed. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. “New Edition, with an Introduction.” T. Fisher Unwin, 1891. Ferguson, Frances. “Wollstonecraft Our Contemporary.” In Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman, 51–62. Basil Blackwell, 1989. Goldman, Emma. “Mary Wollstonecraft: Her Tragic Life and Her Passionate Struggle for Freedom.” Unpublished manuscript, 1911.

Further Reading and Bibliographies | 177 https://the anarchistlibrary . org / library /emma - goldman -mary - wo llstonecraft-her -tragic -life - and -her -passionate - struggle -for -free dom. Hackney Post, March 14, 2013: “There’s something about Mary,” by Rachel Bayne. https:// hackneypost.co.uk /theres-something-about-mary. Hazlitt, William [W. H.]. “My first Acquaintance with Poets.” The Liberal 3 (1823): 23–46. Hays, Mary. Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women. 6 vols. Richard Philips, 1803. ——. Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous. Knott, 1793. ——. The Love-Letters, ed. A. F. Wedd. Methuen, 1925. Wedd is Hays’s great-great niece. Jewsbury, Maria Jane. The History of an Enthusiast. In The Three Histories. Westley and Davies, 1830. Johnson, Claudia L. “Mary Wollstonecraft.” In Equivocal Beings, 23– 69. University of Chicago Press, 1995. ——. Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia L. Johnson, 1– 6. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Johnson, Samuel. Prefaces, biographical and critical, to the works of the English poets. London, 1779. Kaplan, Cora. Sea Changes. Verso, 1986. Kegan Paul, C. Introduction to Mary Wollstonecraft: Letters to Imlay. C. Kegan Paul, 1879. Levao, Ronald. “ ‘Among unequals what society’: Paradise Lost and the Forms of Intimacy.” Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000): 79–107; also in Reading for Form, ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown, 99– 128. University of Washington Press, 2006. Levine, David. See New York Review of Books. Lundberg, Ferdinand, and Marynia Farnham. Modern Woman: The Lost Sex. Harper & Row, 1947. Macaulay, Catharine [Graham]. Letter XXII, in Letters on Education, 203– 9. C. Dilly, 1790. May, Henry F., and David Lundberg. “The Enlightened Reader in America.” American Quarterly 28 (1976): 262– 93.

178 | Further Reading and Bibliographies Mellor, Anne K. “A Revolution in Female Manners.” In Romanticism and Gender, 31– 39. Routledge, 1993. ——. Introductions to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Anne  K. Mellor, Noelle Chao, and Susan  J. Wolfson. 1–13, 235–41. Pearson/Longman, 2007. Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary (2022). http://www.merriam-webster .com. Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women. Longmans &c, 1869. Moers, Ellen. “Vindicating Mary Wollstonecraft.” New York Review of Books, February 19, 1976, 39. More, Hannah. Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont. Thomas Cadell, 1793. New York Review of Books, November  2, 1972, 8–11. V. S. Pritchett, “The Strength of an Injured Spirit” (on Eleanor Flexner’s Mary Wollstonecraft and Diane Johnson’s The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives), with a caricature by David Levine. New York Review of Books, February 19, 1976, 39. Ellen Moers, “Vindicating Mary Wollstonecraft,” with caricature by David Levine. New York Times, April 25, 2022. Alyssa Lukpat, “Gender Definitions Engender Threats.” New York Times, June 15, 2022. Michael Powell, “A Vanishing Word in Abortion Debate: ‘Women.’ ” Pennell, Elizabeth. “Prefatory Note” [dated October 25, 1891] to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Elizabeth Pennell, vii–xxiv. Walter Scott, 1892. Perkin, Joan. Victorian Women. J. Murray, 1993. Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. University of Chicago Press, 1984. Price, Richard. A Discourse on the Love of our Country. T. Cadell, 1789. Pritchett, V. S. “The Strength of an Injured Spirit.” Review of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Eleanor Flexner, and The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, by Diane Johnson. New York Review of Books, November 2, 1972, 8–11.

Further Reading and Bibliographies | 179 Showalter, Elaine. “Amazonian Beginnings / Mary Wollstonecraft.” In Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage, 21– 39. Scribner, 2001. Smith, Charlotte. Desmond. G. G. and J. Robinson, 1792. Southey, Robert. Collected Letters of Robert Southey. http://Romantic-circles .org/editions/southey_ letters. To Thomas Southey, April 28, 1797; Part 1: Letter 213. To William Taylor, July 1, 1804. Part 3, letter 958. Taylor, Barbara. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Thompson, William. Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Then in Civil and Domestic, Slavery. Longman &c, 1825. Times [London] Literary Supplement, September 6, 1974, 941–44. Richard Cobb on MW, “Radicalism and Wreckage.” ——. April 21, 2000, 36. Rosemary Ashton on Todd’s biography, “A heart that scorned disguise.” Tomaselli, Sylvana. Mary Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, Politics. Princeton University Press, 2021. Walpole, Horace. Letters. Ed. Peter Cunningham. 9 vols. Henry Bohn, 1861. Williams, Helen Maria. Letters written in France in the Summer of 1790. T. Cadell, 1790. Wolfson, Susan J. Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism. Stanford University Press, 2006. Includes discussions of Wollstonecraft. ——. Romantic Interactions. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Includes chapters on Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft, Mary. An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution; and the Effect it has Produced in Europe. J. Johnson, 1794. Woolf, Virginia. Essays. Vol. 5: 1929–1932. Ed. Stuart N. Clarke. Hogarth, 2010. ——. “Mary Wollstonecraft.” The Nation & Athæneum, October 5, 1929, 13–15.

180 | Further Reading and Bibliographies ——. “Mary Wollstonecraft.” New York Herald Tribune, October 24, 1929, section XII (Books): 1 and 6, embellished with John Opie’s “woman of letters” portrait. ——. “Mary Wollstonecraft.” In The Common Reader, Second Series, 156– 63. Hogarth, 1932. Wordsworth, William. Prose Works. Ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane W. Smyser. 3 vols. Clarendon Press, 1974.

Index

Adams, Abigail, 22, 82–83 Adams, John, 20, 22, 30 “Amazon,” 46–47, 59, 155, 157–58, 62, 76, 144, 150

Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England, on female coverture, 79–81 Blake, William, 28; on sexual

Analytical Review, 7, 9, 26– 27

liberation, 120; works: “Mary,”

Anti-Jacobin Review, 11, 157

39, 52; Songs of Innocence, 101

Austen, Jane, 22, 23, 158; on female “accomplishments,” 21; on Fordyce’s Sermons 115; portrait

Blood, Fanny (close friend), 19, 21– 22, 30 Burke, Edmund, 108, 114, 129; on

of, 43, 54; Virginia Woolf on,

chivalry, 46–47, 64; as

19; works: Emma, 109;

effeminate/unmanly, 66– 67, 74,

Northanger Abbey, 126, 144;

115, 149; and Hamlet, 73– 74; and

Mansfield Park, 109; Pride and

Macaulay, 132; on Marie

Prejudice, 144

Antoinette and Versailles, 64, 68– 70; and Paine, 29, 170n3, n5;

Bacon, Francis: on atheism, 103; on independence, 103 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 5, 28, 111–12 Bastille, prison in Paris, 61; as trope, 23, 88, 145

Roscoe’s mockery of, 46–47; on VRM, 62– 76; on MW, 157–58; on women, 68, 73– 74; works: A Philosophic Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 66, 96, 170n4;

Bellamy, Thomas, 45–46, 189n2

Reflections on the Revolution in

Benedict, Ruth (anthropologist), 5,

France, 7, 27, 29, 46–47, 59, 82,

49, 167n2

83, 85, 91, 98, 104–5, 141

182 | Index Burney, Frances, 5, 81, 144

chap. 3; the Terror, chap. 5.

Burr, Aaron, on VRW, 114, 155, 157

See also Bastille Fuller, Margaret, 13

Chapman, John (caricaturist), 42, 49, 53–54

Fuseli, Henry (painter), 9, 29, 120, 138

Chesterfield, Lord, on women, 116–17 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, on MW, 31, 39 Critical Review, on VRW, 16

Gentleman’s Magazine, on Wollstonecraft, 46, 77 Goethe, J. W. von, The Sorrows of Young Werther [sic], 10 Godwin, William., 48, 170n2; on

Dickens, Charles, satire of female accomplishments, 161

the French Revolution, 59; on Mary, 23, 144–45; meets MW 28– 29, meets her again and

Edgeworth, Maria, “Harriet

marriage, 131– 33; satirized, 52;

Freake” in Belinda, 158

on VRM, 17; on VRW, 53, 92,

Eliot, George, on VRW, 13, 92

138; on Wrongs, 33, 150; works:

Empson, William, on Milton’s

Caleb Williams, 32; Political

Eve, 171n6 English Review, on VRM, 76 Eve (Genesis), 128. See also Milton

Justice, 32; Memoirs of MW, 2– 3, 9–10, 19, 25, 42, 48–51, 55, 157 Goldman, Emma (anarchist philospher and activist), 17, 28, 52

Fawcett, [Millicent] Mrs. Henry (19th-c. suffragist), 13–14, 52 Fordyce, Rev. James, Sermons to

Gray, Thomas, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, 101 Gregory, Dr. John, A Father’s

Young Women, 91, 101– 3,

Legacy to his Daughters, 91, 113,

115–16

116–17, 153

French Revolution: and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, 2, 19, 21, 59, 83, 98, 106; and divorce laws, 154; MW, A Historical and Moral View of . . . the French Revolution, 30, 125, 146, 169n7; MW vs. Burke,

Hambling, Maggi, statue for Wollstonecraft, 44, 55–57 Hartley, David, on association of ideas, 93, 117, 171n11 Hays, Mary, 11, 32, 135– 36, 172n15; Appeal to the Men of Great

Index | 183 Britain, 157; “Memoirs of Wollstonecraft,” 134 Hazlitt, William, on MW, 39

Marie Antoinette (Queen of France), 29; Burke on, 63– 63, 68– 69 Marx, Karl, 114

Imlay, Fanny (daughter), 30, 32, 33 Imlay, Gilbert, 3, 9–10, 13, 30– 32, 168n5

Merriam-Webster dictionary (2022), gender-lexicon, 16 Mill, John Stuart, The Subjection of Women, 12–14

Jewsbury, Maria Jane, 12 Johnson, Joseph, 6– 7, 10, 22, 23, 25– 26, 28– 29, 65, 77, 135, 137–41, Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 22, 104, 149

Milton, John: Adam, 71– 72, 105–8, 112, 141; blindness, 111, 145; Eve (and “Woman”), 39, 87, 102– 9, 112–13, 118, 171n6; Paradise Lost: theology, 2, 4, 72, 118; political

King, Lady (Viscountess Kingsborough), 23– 25, 74

liberalism, 75; Satan, 97, 105– 6, 115 Monthly Mirror, 40, 45

Lady’s Magazine (Philadelphia), 155–56

Monthly Review, on VRW, 8, 109, 134

Levao, Ronald, 171n7, 218

Monthly Visitor, 42, 49

Levine, David (caricaturist), 42–43,

More, Hannah, 5, 50, 61;

53–54, 169nn10–11 Locke, John, on mental formation, 117, 171n11 Louis XVI (of France), trial and

Strictures on Female Education, 10–11 Moses (as author of Genesis), 103–4

execution, 140–41 Lundberg, Ferdinand, and

Newton, Isaac, 14

Marynia Farnham, Modern

Norton, Caroline, 81–82

Woman: The Lost Sex, 53,

Norton Critical Editions of VRW,

169n9

historical importance, 160, 169n10

Macaulay, Catharine [Graham], 5; Letters on [female] Education,

Opie, John (portraitist), 29,

81, 132– 34, 171n13; reply to

39–41, 45, 47–48, 53– 55, 155,

Burke, 76, 132

169n6

184 | Index Paine, Tom, 29, 88, 155, 170n3 Pennell, Elizabeth, 15, 57, 92 Polwhele, Richard, The Unsex’d Females, 10, 50–51, 128– 29, 158 Pope, Alexander, 51; Of the Characters of Women, 90– 91, 108, 133, 168n5 Price, Richard, 21– 22; A Discourse

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, 1 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 59 Showalter, Elaine, 167– 68n4 slavery: African, and the slave trade, 63, 66, 71, 111–12, 122– 23, 131– 32, 151; domestic and

on the Love of our Country, 27,

political, for women, 7, 17, 23,

61– 62, 65, 75– 76, 170n2

46, 56–57, 79, 81, 85, 96, 108– 9,

prostitution, 127, 147, 150–51; marriage as, 26, 45, 112, 123; the

116, 122, 145–46, 153–54, 158; harem slaves, 114; political 61,

trade, 119, 121, 123, 127; MW as

98– 99, 125– 26. See also

prostitute, 11

prostitution Smith, Charlotte, 5, 144; Desmond,

Radcliffe, Mary Anne, The Female Advocate, 157 Richardson, Samuel: Clarissa,

134 Southey, Robert, 11–12, 31, 55 STEWY (street artist), 44, 55

90– 91; Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, 26– 27, 111 Robinson, Mary, Letter to the Women of England, 157–58, 167 Roscoe, William, 46–48, 59, 138, 155, 162

Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de (French Minister of Education), 83–89, 124 Thompson, William (social reformer), 158

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 75, 126, 171n3; Émile (Emilius and

Walpole, Horace, 50, 52, 59n7

Sophia), 56–57, 83–84, 87, 91,

Williams, Helen Maria, 5; Letters

97– 98, 108, 113–16

written in France in the Summer of 1790, 29, 62, 137

Shakespeare, William: Hamlet, 73– 74, 96– 97, 102, 116, 161; Julius Caesar, 121; Macbeth, 51; The Tempest, 148

Williamson, John (portraitist), 41, 46–47, 53 Wollstonecraft, Mary: An Historical and Moral View of the

Index | 185 Origin and Progress of the French

ch. 3 and 2, 7, 27– 29, 31, 46–47,

Revolution, 30, 125, 146;

74, 82–83, 96, 104, 125, 132, 149,

Jemima’s narrative 150–53; the

155; Wrongs, chap. 6 and 1, 3, 10,

law and women, 143, 145–47,

11, 17, 26, 33, 119, 142

153–54; Letters Written during a short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, 3, 31– 32, 120, 154, 167n; Mary, A Fiction, 6, 23– 25, 102, 144–45, 148; PW, 3, 10–11, 17; sensibility, 148–150;

Wollstonecraft’s sisters: Eliza, 20– 2; Everina, 4, 6, 26 Woolf, Virginia, essays on MW, 2, 5, 13, 15, 19, 28, 49, 53, 55, 142, 159 Wordsworth, William: on early boyhood, 3; on the French

Thoughts on the Education of

Revolution, 64– 65, 137– 39,

Daughters, 2– 3, 6, 22, 25; VRM,

169n1, 172n1