For a reader coming to the life and work of Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time, one of the most compelling aspects of her career is its power to unsettle the homosexual/heterosexual split that the twentieth century made so rigid. This unsettling occurs partly because Wollstonecraft, like all eighteenth-century writers, had no words like “homosexual” or “heterosexual” in her vocabulary. Sexuality had no language of its own in the eighteenth century. Instead, writers understood sexual roles through the vocabulary of gender: certain modes of sexual behavior were the supposed prerogatives of masculinity; others, of femininity.1
What is so interesting about the eighteenth century is that neither “masculinity” nor “femininity” was a fixed category. When eighteenth-century writers argued about virtually anything (education, aesthetics, law, natural philosophy, religion, politics), they usually did so in loudly gendered terms. However, gender definitions were not necessarily the same in each discourse; they were as likely to differ as to complement one another. Consequently, eighteenth-century writers like Wollstonecraft could set different definitions against each other, using those from one discourse to criticize those in another. For example, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft creatively adapts gender definitions from the political discourse of civic humanism to counter the stereotypes of female conduct books, as when she prefers to judge women by what had traditionally been seen as the “manly” quality of virtue rather than by the angel-like traits idealized by conduct-book writers. Criticizing James Fordyce’s comparison of women to angels, she notes that for him women “are only like angels when they are young and beautiful; consequently, it is their persons, not their virtues, that procure them this homage” (5:164).2 Since all gender definitions suggested differing possibilities for relations between and among the sexes, a simple homo/hetero binary rarely does justice to eighteenth-century writing.
For Wollstonecraft, the topic that encouraged the most experimentation with sex and gender roles was that of genius. Genius as a category received an enormous amount of attention from eighteenth-century writers in general and from Wollstonecraft in particular. Nevertheless, at first glance, it may seem an odd topic for an essay about sexuality. Many readers have learned to think that if an author is truly a genius, his or her work will transcend the particulars of sexual behavior. I want to argue instead that genius, as understood by eighteenth-century writers, helps to explain the most salient characteristics of Wollstonecraft’s thoughts about sexuality: her deep mistrust for conventional forms of erotic relationships and her profound doubt about lasting love in a world that victimizes women who have any sensitivity whatsoever. In much of her writing, Wollstonecraft’s project was less to be homosexual or heterosexual, feminine or masculine, than to understand the consequences of linking the category of genius to the category of woman. The results, however, were some of the most daring and unconventional treatments of sexuality in all eighteenth-century literature.
The biographical tradition about Wollstonecraft has largely masked such daring. While writers admit that she experimented with gendered behavior and sexual relationships, a counter narrative usually runs through their work to suggest that she really was not as startling as she seemed and that, when all is said and done, she only wanted a good marriage. This counter narrative makes its case by reading her life in terms of a movement from youthful proto-lesbianism, perceived as vaguely distasteful, to adult heterosexuality, perceived as healthy or at least sympathetic. It also treats her eventual marriage to William Godwin as the real goal of her life, thereby ignoring the expansive, unconventional, and sometimes rocky modes of heterosexuality that Wollstonecraft experimented with in her relations with Henry Fuseli, Gilbert Imlay, and Godwin himself. This tidying-up of Wollstonecraft’s sexuality dates back to the first biography of her, Godwin’s Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, which is worth examining in some detail because of its immense later influence.
Godwin’s discussion of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman initiates the biographical tradition of both acknowledging Wollstonecraft’s daring and mistrusting it. While he claims to like her “very bold and original production,” he immediately backtracks: “There are also, it must be confessed, occasional passages of a stern and rugged feature.”3 His clause “it must be confessed” flows from him all too easily. In his eyes, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is an embarrassment because of its supposed lack of feminine grace: Wollstonecraft’s authorial character has a “rigid, and somewhat amazonian temper.” The result: “Many of the sentiments [in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman] are undoubtedly of a rather masculine description” (Memoirs, 231). Evidently, masculinity in a woman necessarily leads to violence: Wollstonecraft “repels the opinions of Rousseau, Dr Gregory, and Dr James Fordyce” and she “explodes the system of gallantry” that oppresses women (231).
For eighteenth-century writers, female masculinity of the kind that Godwin described could point in two directions: asexuality and lesbianism. Although they are quite different modes of sexual behavior, they could quickly blur into each other because both set women against the presumed norm of bourgeois heterosexuality. If relations between the sexes presupposed the belief in their mutual sexual desirability, the possibility of a woman who either was not interested in sex or was not interested in men was threatening because she forced relations between men and women to assume an entirely new footing. Godwin’s discomfort reveals how deeply sexuality was supposed to determine the female character. If Wollstonecraft’s masculinity “explodes the system of gallantry,” then it was not clear how a man might behave toward such a woman.
Not only was Wollstonecraft masculine; according to Godwin, her early love interests were homoerotic. Specifically, as a young woman, she fell in love with Fanny Blood, “for whom,” Godwin writes, “she contracted a friendship so fervent, as for years to have constituted the ruling passion of her mind” (Memoirs, 210). For the most part, Godwin is neutral or even admiring in his treatment of Wollstonecraft’s love for Blood; when he interjects notes of disapproval of Blood’s character, they usually come from Wollstonecraft’s own comments. Only one small revision to the Memoirs suggests some concern on Godwin’s part that her relation with Blood might foreground her troubling masculinity. He omitted in the second edition a sentence describing their first meeting: “The situation in which Mary was introduced to [Blood], bore a resemblance to the first interview of Werter with Charlotte” (Memoirs, 210). Given Werter’s fame as a paragon of all-consuming love, the comparison may have made too obvious a link for Godwin between Wollstonecraft’s masculinity and her love for Blood.
In the larger course of his narrative, Godwin neutralizes Wollstonecraft’s masculinity by showing that it vanished after Blood’s death in childbirth. Instead of turning to other women, Wollstonecraft fell in love with a series of men: Fuseli, Imlay, Godwin. According to Godwin, the affair with Imlay was so powerful that it eradicated her masculinity altogether:
Her whole character seemed to change with a change of fortune . . . She was playful, full of confidence, kindness and sympathy. Her eyes assumed new lustre, and her cheeks new colour and smoothness. Her voice became chearful; her temper overflowing with universal kindness; and that smile of bewitching tenderness from day to day illuminated her countenance.
(Memoirs, 242)
Loving Imlay, according to Godwin, makes Wollstonecraft a real woman: the Amazon suddenly becomes the model heterosexual partner. He describes her so vividly that one might think he had seen this transformation himself. Actually, this supposed change occurred when she was in Paris, when we have no reason to believe that he had any contact with her. But Godwin’s lack of first-hand knowledge does not stop him from lavishing attention on this fantasy. His description is all the more remarkable given the affair’s miserable outcome: we might have expected him to be more reserved when describing a relationship that turned out terribly for Wollstonecraft. Instead, he halts his narrative to devote an entire paragraph to the marvelously beneficial effects of loving a man on the female character. In Godwin’s fairy tale, the love of a handsome man (Gilbert Imlay) turns the ugly duckling (stern, rugged, harshly masculine Wollstonecraft) into a beautiful swan (confident, bewitching, beautifully feminine Wollstonecraft).
Godwin thus fits Wollstonecraft into one of the master plots of female development in Anglo-American literature: the movement from same- to opposite-gender attachments as a metaphor for the movement from youth to maturity. This master plot was hardly new to the late eighteenth century: it can be found in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and appears in a sexually explicit version in John Cleland’s pornographic Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. It undercuts the mystique of opposite-gender attraction as an unspeakable, forbidden love by admitting that women might desire other women, but only when they are young and immature. Real life supposedly begins once they leave other women and turn to men.4 In Wollstonecraft’s case, according to Godwin, she came to value heterosexual attachment as an ultimate good: “She set a great value on a mutual affection between persons of an opposite sex. She regarded it as the principal solace of human life” (Memoirs, 235). He strategically forgets Wollstonecraft’s relationship to Blood in order to make her a prime spokesperson for love between men and women.
In a few cases, Godwin’s contemporaries ignored his treatment of Wollstonecraft and represented figures based on her as more or less openly desiring other women. The most notorious is the character of Harriot Freke in Maria Edgeworth’s novel Belinda, although Freke should be understood as a representation less of Wollstonecraft than of the sexually uncontrolled woman that she was supposed to embody. Freke dresses in men’s clothes, aggressively pursues other women, and cries, “Vive la liberté . . . I’m a champion for the Rights of Women.”5 Nevertheless, for the most part, Wollstonecraft’s biographers have not made her into Harriot Freke. On the contrary, they have largely accepted Godwin’s account of her, complete with its mistrust of the supposedly masculine traits in her character.
An example of the durability of Godwin’s account is the extraordinary afterlife of his derogatory adjective “amazonian” as a shorthand for the twinning of asexuality and lesbianism in Wollstonecraft’s character. Claire Tomalin chose “The Amazon” as the chapter title for the section in her biography dealing with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.6 Emily Sunstein’s biography contrasts two portraits of Wollstonecraft: in the first, commissioned by William Roscoe, she is an “intellectual Amazon,” while in the second, by John Opie, she is “a woman of more graceful tenue and a deeper, subtler look, with soft cheeks and an almost tender mouth.” Sunstein’s de-sexualizing adjective “intellectual” prepares for Wollstonecraft’s later emergence into conventional feminine sexuality: “She felt she had been too rigid, frugal, and self-denying, and in a fashion she had never before permitted herself, transformed her appearance, enhanced her femininity.”7
Richard Holmes in his biographical essay on Wollstonecraft in Footsteps also contrasts the Roscoe and Opie portraits to make their sexual associations more explicit. According to him, the first shows her in “her Amazonian phase,” while the second “shows her as a thoroughly romantic femme de trente.” He adds, with sigh of relief, that the differences between them “belie any suggestion of mannish coldness or lesbian hauteur.”8 His phrases are classic examples of the doubling of lesbianism (“mannish,” “lesbian”) and asexuality (“coldness,” “hauteur”) in the treatment of women who do not fit conventional sexual categories. Like Godwin, he is relieved to absolve Wollstonecraft from both charges by noting that she eventually abandoned her crypto-lesbianism for a “romantic” (i.e., heterosexual) character. Even less openly homophobic critics of Wollstonecraft still read her life in terms of the erotic sequence first mapped out by Godwin: Fanny Blood, Henry Fuseli, Gilbert Imlay, William Godwin. They thereby retain his master plot (Wollstonecraft’s movement from homoerotic to heteroerotic relationships) by suggesting that affairs with men ultimately dominated her life.
Some of this master plot’s durability arises from a historical accident: more of Wollstonecraft’s letters to men have survived than her letters to women. For example, while many painful letters to Imlay exist, albeit in heavily edited form, not until quite recently has it become known that Wollstonecraft actually corresponded with Catharine Macaulay, whom she singles out in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as her most admired female author.9 Biographers can easily analyze her relationships with men because they took place partly through writing, especially those with Imlay and Godwin (her letters to Fuseli were destroyed). Yet if we look not only at Wollstonecraft’s correspondents but also at her day-to-day life, it is clear that she spent most of her time with women: her sisters, Eliza and Everina; her daughter Fanny; her maids, especially Marguerite, who accompanied her to Scandinavia; and the intellectual women of Paris and London, such as Mary Hays, Ruth Barlow, Madeleine Schweizer, Ann Cristall, Amelia Alderson (later Opie), Sarah Siddons, Maria Reveley, and others. Whereas biographers give her affairs with men lots of space, these ties to women fade into the background because less written evidence survives about them. Admittedly, these women were family members, employees, or social acquaintances, not lovers, and I am not suggesting that Wollstonecraft had affairs with them, or even liked many of them. My point, rather, is that by following the accidents of the written record and paying so much attention to Wollstonecraft’s affairs with men and so little to her relations with women, her biographers have hyper-heterosexualized her.
Even in the treatment of Wollstonecraft’s heterosexual relations, biographers use the fact that she eventually married Godwin to imply that, throughout her life, she was really just waiting to settle down in an ordinary marriage. Her experimental, daring relation to heterosexuality is dismissed sneeringly as sheer naivete. For example, her desire to live with Fuseli as a spiritual rather than as a sexual partner has not been treated kindly. Tomalin is typical in calling it an “absurd and innocent request.”10 Yet, given the brilliance with which Wollstonecraft dissected the brutal effects of the sex/gender system on women in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her search for a different kind of relationship with Fuseli could be seen not as absurd but as a risky, innovative attempt to live out her own principles. Similarly, her resistance to marriage and her insistence that she and Godwin live in separate houses even after their marriage reveal an effort to separate heterosexuality from its stifling associations with bourgeois domesticity that deserves more respect than it often has gotten from Wollstonecraft’s critics.
To take account of the full range of experimentation in Wollstonecraft’s relation to sexuality, I want to return the discussion to an eighteenth-century context. I will argue that the eighteenth-century language of genius and its consequences for sexual roles provided Wollstonecraft with an alternative to the increasingly restrictive roles being foisted on women by novels, conduct books, medical tracts, and religious sermons. Throughout her authorial career, Wollstonecraft used the role of genius as a means of reinventing possibilities for the woman writer and her sexuality.
Today, “genius” as a label has been applied so often and so loosely that it is virtually meaningless. In literary criticism, it has faintly conservative associations as a means of preserving standards of quasi-divine achievement. In the eighteenth century, however, genius was far more exciting. Its attraction was simple: it could shatter the traditional hierarchies of artistic achievement because anybody could potentially be a genius, not just the upper-class, university-educated men who ruled the literary establishment. Shakespeare was the prime example of a man with (supposedly) little education and humble lineage who, by virtue of his genius, had become a great writer. Eighteenth-century audiences were fascinated by examples of “natural” genius: authors like Robert Burns and Ann Yearsley who seemed to have miraculously overcome their supposed lack of education to become distinguished poets. For writers who came from classes or groups that traditionally had no place in the English literary market, genius was a wedge into a hitherto closed system. Not surprisingly, many members of the radical circles in which Wollstonecraft moved in the 1790s were deeply invested in the category of genius. Wollstonecraft’s friend, the poet Mary Robinson, composed an elaborate ode celebrating its power; William Godwin devoted the first several issues of The Enquirer to an inquiry about its roots; and William Blake repeatedly hailed it as the only source of great poetry.
Wollstonecraft herself first became interested in genius during her time as a governess in Ireland. While there, she read “Blairs lectures on genius taste &c &c [Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres],” in which Blair defines genius as a capacity that “imports something inventive or creative; which does not rest in mere sensibility to beauty where it is perceived, but which can, moreover, produce new beauties, and exhibit them in such a manner as strongly to impress the minds of others.”11 Suddenly, “genius,” a term that does not appear in Wollstonecraft’s earlier letters, crops up frequently in her writing. It gave her a weapon of self-assertion when, as a governess, she was feeling the effects of a hierarchical class system most painfully. In her early fragment “The Cave of Fancy,” she wrote proudly: “The genius that sprouts from a dunghil [sic] soon shakes off the heterogeneous mass” (CF 1:196). In her letters, she tried to prove that she was shaking off the mediocre heterogeneity around her. For example, she found that her employer, Lady Kingsborough, had an understanding that “could never have been made to rise above mediocrity.” She added, “I am very well persuaded that to make any great advance in morality genius is necessary–a peculiar kind of genius which is not to be described, and cannot be conceived by those who do not possess it.”12 Although she did not quite identify herself as having such genius, her criticism of Lady Kingsborough was possible only if she had what her employer lacked.
Even as Wollstonecraft borrows the idea of genius from Blair, she also revises it. Blair, like most other eighteenth-century writers, argues that genius differs from taste because genius involves production, whereas taste involves consumption. The genius produces new works of art, new scientific discoveries, great speeches, and so forth.13 For Wollstonecraft, however, genius loses its productivity. In her essay “On Poetry,” she defines genius against Blair as “only another word for exquisite sensibility” (OP 7:9). There is a gendered edge to Wollstonecraft’s downplaying of genius’s productions: if geniuses are expected always to be creating, then few women would ever be able to demonstrate genius. Even women like Wollstonecraft, who were professional authors, would not have had much opportunity to show their “exquisite sensibility” in a way that anyone would take seriously. While Wollstonecraft was hardly unproductive, relatively little of her work, such as her reviews or translations, offered an outlet for the kind of genius that she described in “On Poetry.” A woman needing to write for a living had to write what would make money rather than what would demonstrate the originality supposedly characteristic of genius.
But if woman’s genius was not productive, what good was it? Men could point to concrete results of their genius in their works. A woman, however, might possess exquisite sensibility, but she would have a difficult time in demonstrating it or, more seriously, making it useful. The fear haunts Wollstonecraft’s work that genius in a woman is a waste of time. It distinguishes a woman in potentially dangerous and unhelpful ways by making her discontent with ordinary femininity, but leaving her powerless to realize her distinctiveness. The result for the female genius is the danger of perpetual solitude, given the difficulty of finding any outlet for her abilities.
Nevertheless, Wollstonecraft found positive aspects in appropriating genius for women that counterbalanced its potential deficiencies. Most obviously, genius was potentially free from restrictive gender associations.14 As Christine Battersby has demonstrated, although eighteenth-century writers assumed that geniuses were men, they tended to describe them as feminized ones: “Before the eighteenth century there had been a direct link between the word ‘genius’ and male fertility; now ‘genius’ was presented as both an expression of, and a threat to, maleness. Genius was seen to feminise the male body and mind.”15 For example, in An Essay on Original Genius, William Duff describes the poetic genius as metaphorically female: “A glowing ardor of Imagination is indeed . . . the very soul of Poetry. It is the principal source of INSPIRATION; and the Poet who is possessed of it, like the Delphian Priestess, is animated with a kind of DIVINE FURY.”16 Drawing on a long tradition associating femininity with loss of self-possession and control, he compares the genius to the inspired priestess at Delphi. Duff’s genius inherits a mode of femininity that the proper bourgeois femininity of the eighteenth century strove to erase: femininity as monstrous, uncontrolled, undisciplined, and excessive. At the same time, as Battersby notes, genius was still supposed to belong to biological males, even though they might have feminized traits.
Proof of geniuses’ gender deviance, for eighteenth-century theorists, was that they were supposedly unsuited for marriage. Duff refused to believe that geniuses could be tied down by any conventions: “Every species of original Genius delights to range at liberty . . . This noble talent knows no law, and acknowledges none in the uncultivated ages of the world, excepting its own spontaneous impulse, which it obeys without control.”17 While he does not mention marriage specifically, the absence is itself telling: genius has no need for domesticity. Isaac D’Israeli’s Manners and Genius of the Literary Character made explicit what was implicit in Duff: “I remark that many of the conspicuous blemishes of some of our great compositions may reasonably be attributed to the domestic infelicities of their authors.”18 Marriage, by imposing trivial cares and anxieties on the genius, led to “blemishes” on what otherwise would have been even more perfect works.
The freedom of genius from conventional class hierarchies, gender categories, and marriageability meant that the category offered Wollstonecraft a rare space for experimentation with sexual roles. The result was her extraordinary novel Mary, A Fiction, the first attempt by anyone to represent a female genius. Wollstonecraft was quite plain that the heroine of her novel was meant to be a genius. In her letter to the Reverend Henry Dyson Gabell, she explains that she wrote it to illustrate “that a genius will educate itself.”19 She borrowed this thesis from Rousseau and indicated her further indebtedness to his treatment of genius with her novel’s epigraph by him, “L’exercise des plus sublimes vertus élève et nourrit le génie” [The exercise of the most sublime virtues elevates and nourishes genius]” (M 1:3). Throughout the novel she makes clear that her heroine Mary is meant to embody this genius: “Her joys, her ecstasies, arose from genius” (M 1:16); “Genius animated her expressive countenance” (M 1:33); “The exercise of her various virtues gave vigor to her genius” (M 1:35); “Her genius, and cultivation of mind, roused his curiosity” (M 1:60).
As her Advertisement to the novel emphasizes, Wollstonecraft is quite aware of how daring she was in representing a female genius: “In delineating the Heroine of this Fiction, the Author attempts to develop a character different from those generally portrayed . . . In a fiction, such a being may be allowed to exist; whose grandeur is derived from the operations of its own faculties, not subjugated to opinion; but drawn by the individual from the original source” (M 1:5). Mary, in other words, possesses originality, the most distinctive trait of genius. Wollstonecraft registers this originality partly by distinguishing Mary from the female character as “generally portrayed.” Wollstonecraft satirizes such a conventional female character in her treatment of Mary’s mother: “Her voice was but the shadow of a sound, and she had, to complete her delicacy, so relaxed her nerves, that she became a mere nothing” (M 1:7). Mary, the female genius, is the opposite: her original voice is loudly heard, and she acts with an energy and decisiveness that prevent anyone from dismissing her as a nothing.
Consequently, just as the male genius of the eighteenth-century theorists is feminized, so Wollstonecraft’s female genius is masculinized. In letting Mary take on the gender-questioning status of genius, Wollstonecraft revises the long misogynistic tradition of female masculinity.20 In eighteenth-century satire, female masculinity was a convenient and seemingly inexhaustible satirical target in the person of the virago, who was usually characterized by excessive and violent behavior, somewhat like Wollstonecraft-as-Amazon in Godwin’s Memoirs. In some cases, as in Samuel Richardson’s Mrs. Sinclair in Clarissa or Henry Fielding’s representation of Mary Hamilton in The Female Husband, such women were associated with desire for other women, but female masculinity never automatically signaled same-gender desire. It could also suggest asexuality (lack of interest in any sexual activity) or, in some cases, hyper-sexuality (a frenetic desire for partners of any stamp). Throughout the century, male satirists endlessly abused female masculinity and female same-gender desire in tones ranging from the amused to the outraged. In Mary, Wollstonecraft uses female genius to turn this long tradition on its head.
Specifically, Wollstonecraft reinvents female masculinity as a positive trait. In the novel, Mary’s positive masculinity is established by contrasting her energy and decisiveness with the passivity and sickliness of her love objects, Ann and Henry, who are both invalids. For example, when Henry tries to convince her that she might one day be reconciled with her husband, she responds with a force and certainty not found in traditional eighteenth-century heroines: “My opinions on some subjects are not wavering; my pursuit through life has ever been the same: in solitude were my sentiments formed; they are indelible, and nothing can efface them but death–No, death itself cannot efface them, or my soul must be created afresh, and not improved” (M 1:46). At this moment, Mary’s masculinity resides not in dressing like a man or in violently assaulting men but in having strong, original opinions to which she adheres in the face of conventional wisdom.21
Since one of Mary’s original opinions is that she has no obligation to endure the masquerade of a loveless marriage, the novel supports eighteenth-century theorists like Duff and D’Israeli in treating marriage as completely inadequate to genius. Mary is trapped by her parents into an arranged marriage and soon finds it to be “a dreadful misfortune” and a “heavy yoke” (M 1:22). Wollstonecraft is not simply making a point about the oppressiveness of marriage. She is entering into the familiar eighteenth-century insistence that marriage enchains genius. As many critics have noted, the real focus of Mary’s passion is not her conventionally loveless relation to her husband but her unconventional love for her friend Ann: “Her friendship for Ann occupied her heart, and resembled a passion” (M 1:25). Wollstonecraft’s message is plain: the passion of geniuses exceeds the boundaries imposed by common practice, and a female genius is more interested in loving another woman than in settling down to a bourgeois marriage.
Although some critics have tried to lessen Wollstonecraft’s daring by arguing that a female–female attachment was not remarkable in the eighteenth century, Wollstonecraft’s novel suggests otherwise.22 Faced with Ann’s declining health, Mary despairs to a group of “fashionable ladies”: “I have no other friend; if I lose her, what a desart will the world be to me.” When they drily respond, “Have you not a husband?” Mary “shrunk back, and was alternately pale and red. A delicate sense of propriety prevented her replying; and recalled her bewildered reason” (M 1:32). The ladies’ question brings Mary up short by confronting her with the social unacceptability of her feelings for Ann. In the face of their assumption that care for a husband takes precedence over care for another woman, Mary remains silent, pointedly refusing to affirm their standards of feminine feeling and behavior.
As Claudia Johnson has demonstrated, Mary’s love for Henry, which develops after the death of Ann, does not reject her love for another woman but continues it.23 The narrative explicitly aligns her feelings for Henry with her feelings for Ann, as when Mary tells Henry: “Talk not of comfort . . . it will be in heaven with thee and Ann” (M 1:67). Both loves are illicit because neither Henry nor Ann is Mary’s husband. In accordance with the traditional eighteenth-century characterization of genius, marriage is the last place in which a genius will be able to find true partnership. Even when Mary is involved in a heterosexual relationship, it still struggles against the restrictions of bourgeois convention. For the female genius, sexuality is inherently transgressive because the mores of society are completely inadequate to her desires. The gender of the object of desire may be less important than the impossibility of containing that desire within acceptable social forms.
After Mary, when Wollstonecraft turned to political writings, her approach to genius and its encouragement of unconventional sexual roles changed dramatically. Genius was less useful to her in these writings because she needed to describe ordinary men and women so that she could make broadly applicable political arguments. Often, she downplayed the language of genius because, as she recognized, a belief in it could have dangerous political consequences in the wrong hands. For example, in her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, she admits that “there is a superiority of natural genius among men” and that “in countries the most free there will always be distinctions proceeding from superiority of judgement.” Yet she goes on to argue that even though only a few have such natural genius, the state nevertheless must educate everyone because “the advantages of civilization cannot be felt, unless it pervades the whole mass” (HMV 6:220). She counters the position that education belongs only to those with genius because, in her eyes, everyone is “susceptible of common improvement” (HMV 6:220). To concentrate on genius would depoliticize her work or make it antidemocratic because she would be seeming to argue for qualities possessed only by a few. Even as she wishes to identify herself as belonging to that few, she is concerned that such a privileging of genius would leave the ordinary person without education or rights.
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft similarly concentrates on the average mind rather than the exceptional one and therefore, for the most part, avoids the vocabulary of genius: “I have confined my observations to such as universally act upon the morals and manners of the whole sex” (VRW 5:145). Yet she cannot let genius go altogether. For example, when she is about to discuss the importance of educating even ordinary minds, she pauses for a short rhapsody:
The understanding, it is true, may keep us from going out of drawing when we group our thoughts, or transcribe from the imagination the warm sketches of fancy; but the animal spirits, the individual character, give the colouring. Over this subtile electric fluid, how little power do we possess, and over it how little power can reason obtain! These fine intractable spirits appear to be the essence of genius, and beaming in its eagle eye, produce in the most eminent degree the happy energy of associating thoughts that surprise, delight, and instruct. These are the glowing minds that concentrate pictures for their fellow-creatures; forcing them to view with interest the objects reflected from the impassioned imagination, which they passed over in nature.
(VRW 5:185–6)
Although Wollstonecraft attributes these traits to “the man of genius” (VRW 5:186), her use of the first-person pronoun in this passage suggests she believes that they apply to her as well. Throughout her description of “the essence of genius,” she is careful to follow the eighteenth-century convention whereby genius unsettles obviously gendered language. She skillfully sets off feminized characteristics like the “warm sketches of fancy” with masculinized descriptions like “intractable spirits” so that no one gender has a monopoly on genius’s traits. She also uses biological and scientific phrases like “animal spirits” and “subtile electric fluid” to avoid locating genius obviously in one gender. As she describes it, genius has the privilege of avoiding all conventions of categorization.
The sexual implications of Wollstonecraft’s identification with genius in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman surface only at the margins of her argument. For example, in a footnote, she lists female geniuses whom she admires because they received a “masculine education”: “Sappho, Eloisa, Mrs Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Madame d’Eon, etc.” (VRW 5:146). The list is quite a remarkable one in terms of sexuality: it begins with a woman famous for loving other women and ends with a male-to-female transvestite. Except for Mrs. Macaulay, the sexuality of all these women is characterized by the same association with illicit, extra-marital love that characterized Wollstonecraft’s heroine Mary. The footnote is a little flash of the sexual daring that Wollstonecraft’s understanding of genius licenses, but it is one that she hides throughout most of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.24
Wollstonecraft recognizes that the identification with genius will not help her argument, which has to be about ordinary women and ordinary love. Much as she admires the genius’s gender-bending status and sexual freedom, she insists on clearly marked gender roles for men and women in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman because she hopes that doing so will prevent the wrong kinds of gender-crossing and sexuality that supposedly come from moral corruption. In her eyes, society has been ruined by the growth of tyrannical women, who represent the very mode of female masculinity that she was revising in Mary, and effeminately sensual men, who “attend the levees of equivocal beings, to sigh for more than female languor” (VRW 5:208). She pushes her rejection of genius so far that A Vindication of the Rights of Woman rejects sexual desire. For Wollstonecraft, rational friendship should replace love: “Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time. The very reverse may be said of love” (VRW 5:142).25 In moving from the private arena of Mary to the public one of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft discovers that genius shares too much with forms of sexuality that she needs to stigmatize to be useful to her.
After this politicized rejection of genius, however, Wollstonecraft returned to the category and its possibilities for sexual experimentation in her great unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman. In it, she politicizes genius in a way that she had not done either in Mary or in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by using it to characterize women’s relationship to sex. As in Mary, she is indebted to the eighteenth-century theorists of genius, but, also as in Mary, she takes their ideas in entirely new directions. Among politically progressive writers, it was a commonplace that genius depended on liberty. In his Lectures on Rhetoric, Hugh Blair paraphrases Longinus to argue that oratory flourishes only in a free state: “Liberty, he remarks, is the nurse of true genius; it animates the spirit, and invigorates the hopes of men; excites honourable emulation, and a desire of excelling in every art.” He adds that “all other qualifications . . . you may find among those who are deprived of liberty; but never did a slave become an orator; he can only be a pompous flatterer.”26 In The Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft adapts Blair to make his politicization of liberty matter to female sexual experience.
To do so, she alters her understanding of genius from something belonging only to an exceptional individual to a capacity available to all who can exercise their minds at liberty. Whereas Mary was always a genius, Maria experiences an influx of genius only when she briefly frees herself from an oppressive situation. In general, Maria is “a woman of sensibility, with an improving mind” (WWM 1:83), but not an exceptional genius, and she lacks the masculine traits that characterized Mary. Her oppression instead is meant to be typical of all middle-class women; the novel’s message depends on the possibility of generalizing from Maria’s experience to larger political claims. This typicality might seem to demand avoiding genius as a category, much as Wollstonecraft did in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Instead, Wollstonecraft connects genius to liberation from constrained heterosexual relations.
In a climactic scene, Maria vows to leave her husband after discovering that he is planning to sell her body. In front of him, she removes her ring and swears to leave his house forever. We might imagine that a woman in such a situation would worry about her future: a place to live, means of support, concern about her reputation. While Maria eventually has to face those worries, her first reaction is quite different. Rather than troubling about details, she rhapsodizes:
“Was it possible? Was I, indeed, free?” . . . How I had panted for liberty -liberty, that I would have purchased at any price, but that of my own esteem! I rose, and shook myself; opened the window, and methought the air never smelled so sweet. The face of heaven grew fairer as I viewed it, and clouds seemed to flit away obedient to my wishes, to give my soul room to expand. I was all soul, and (wild as it may appear) felt as if I could have dissolved in the soft balmy gale that kissed my cheek, or have glided below the horizon on the glowing, descending beams. A seraphic satisfaction animated, without agitating my spirits; and my imagination collected, in visions sublimely terrible, or soothingly beautiful, an immense variety of the endless images, which nature affords, and fancy combines, of the grand and fair.
(WWM 1:152–3)
It would be easy to dismiss this passage as one more sentimental effusion so common in late eighteenth-century texts, but doing so would miss the point. This passage is not a stock bit of sentiment but a demonstration that aesthetic capacities depend on political ones. While subject to “ignoble thraldom” (WWM 1:156) in the form of her tyrannical husband, Maria’s imaginative abilities wither. As soon as she frees herself, she feels less that she has taken the moral high ground than that she has soared to imaginative heights. Rather than being a genius, like Mary, Maria experiences a moment of “true sensibility, the sensibility which is the auxiliary of virtue, and the soul of genius” (WWM 1:163).
The passage is memorable because it is virtually the only moment of real happiness that Maria experiences. It is also, metaphorically, the best sex she has in the whole novel. Evidently, the “soul of genius” is a highly erotic one. Having just rejected the empty sexuality to which her husband would have sold her, she experiences the figurative sexuality of genius, which is far more complete. Feeling her soul expand, she longs to dissolve in the gale that kisses her cheek, glide on descending beams, and enjoy “seraphic satisfaction.” It is especially notable, given Wollstonecraft’s mistrust of passion in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that Maria emphasizes that her spirits are not agitated. While in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft could recommend only a passionless friendship between men and women, the “soul of genius” in The Wrongs of Woman experiences passion that carries none of the dangers of heterosexual romance. Instead, a “calm delight” is “diffused” through Maria’s heart, a far cry from the bitterness and suffering produced by her husband or the tumult caused by Darnford. No man can offer the erotic satisfaction that Wollstonecraft suggests that nature can give to a woman inspired by genius.
In this scene, Wollstonecraft translates the politics of genius into the concrete situation of women’s relationship to sex. Sex with men in The Wrongs of Woman is uniformly a disaster because it is fundamentally unfree and therefore chokes a woman’s capacity for genius. Much of the pathos of the passage describing Maria’s vision is that she will never again experience the erotic transport she here describes. She is soon locked in a madhouse by her husband, where she becomes a prey to desperation and melancholy, and consequently turns to the untrustworthy Darnford. When describing Maria’s affair with Darnford, Wollstonecraft is careful to emphasize that “true sensibility” is not at work but a deluded, fevered imagination: “The heart is often shut by romance against social pleasure; and, fostering a sickly sensibility, grows callous to the soft touches of humanity” (WWM 1:177). The fragility of Maria’s possession of genius allows Wollstonecraft to demonstrate the fundamental lack of freedom that conditions normative sexual relations in her society.
It is also a reminder that men, and even other people, are hardly necessary to provide women with satisfactory erotic experience. A woman of genius may find, as Maria does, that her own liberated imagination provides more satisfaction than does the seeming romantic hero Darnford. Wollstonecraft revises the asexuality sometimes associated with masculine women into this erotically fulfilling fantasy of a transfigurative relationship to nature. The tragedy of the novel is that women are not allowed to enjoy this liberated imagination for long because the forces conspiring to imprison them are so powerful. But in this one passage, Wollstonecraft glimpses a utopian sexual possibility, an eroticism that is genuine but not implicated in the impossible tangles of human relations. Genius has its own sexuality that refuses to fit into ready patterns of social acceptability.
The challenge of bringing together “woman” and “genius” thus leads Wollstonecraft to reject the privileging of bourgeois marriage as the only acceptable mode of sexuality. In Mary, she suggests that a female genius is as likely to favor a female object of desire as a male one; in Wrongs of Woman, she suggests that women can experience genius only when they have escaped the bondage of men, and that doing so provides more erotic satisfaction than physical sex. More subtly, in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she suggests that she herself aspires to the gender-questioning authority of genius and the sexual freedom that accompanies it, even as she recognizes the need to ground her argument in firm gender distinctions and sexual roles. Although there is no discourse of sexuality to which Wollstonecraft responds, the discourse of genius leads her to treatments of sexuality quite unlike those of any other eighteenth-century writer.
For later women writers, Wollstonecraft made it possible to take seriously a woman who claimed the authority of genius. With this claim came new experimental possibilities, especially in relation to female sexuality. As the bourgeois couple became ever more normative in the nineteenth century, the character of the female genius became virtually the only site through which women writers could seriously question the assumed inevitability of marriage. This questioning had a cost: female geniuses rarely lived happily ever after, or, if they did, they usually had to give up some of the qualities that made them seem like geniuses. Yet, as Wollstonecraft had also shown, a woman writer was not obliged to strive for happy endings. She would have agreed with another writer who claimed genius for himself, Oscar Wilde, that such endings were terribly unfair, especially for women whose abilities gave them the right to expect something more than conventional domestic happiness.
1. For useful backgrounds to eighteenth-century sexuality, see Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668–1801 (London: Scarlet Press, 1993); Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Michael McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy: the Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (1995), 295–322; Lisa L. Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–21; Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
2. For this analysis, see Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s, Wollstonecraft, Radcuffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 23–46.
3. Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of The Rights of Woman (published together with Mary Wollstonecraft, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark), ed. Richard Holmes (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1987), 231.
4. See Valerie Traub, “The (In)significance of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Early Modern England,” Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 150–69; Elizabeth Susan Wahl, Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
5. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 229. For discussion, see Moore, Dangerous Intimacies, 75–108.
6. Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, rev. edn. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1992), 121–30.
7. Emily Sunstein, A Different Face: the Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 203–4.
8. Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985), 92–3.
9. Bridget Hill, “The Links between Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay: New Evidence,” Women’s History Review 4 (1995), 177–92.
10. Tomalin, Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, 151–2.
11. Wollstonecraft, letter to Everina Wollstonecraft, 12 February 1787, in Letters, 138; Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Philadelphia: James Kay, 1844), 3 vols. (facsimile edition; New York: Garland, 1970), 1:52.
12. Wollstonecraft, letter to Everina Wollstonecraft, 3 March 1787, Letters, 140.
13. See Blair, Lectures, 1:52–3.
14. The argument in the next two paragraphs is indebted to my discussion of genius in Romantic Genius: the Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), chapter 1.
15. Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 86.
16. William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius, ed. John L. Mahoney (facsimile edition; Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 1964), 171.
17. Ibid., 283.
18. Isaac D’Israeli, An Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character (facsimile edition; New York: Garland, 1970), 58.
19. Wollstonecraft, letter to Rev. Henry Dyson Gabell, 13 September 1787, Letters, 162.
20. On eighteenth-century female masculinity, see Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), chapter 2.
21. For more on Mary’s masculinity and her relationships with Ann and Henry, see Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 48–58, and Ashley Tauchert, “Escaping Discussion: Liminality and the Female-Embodied Couple in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary, A Fiction,” Romanticism on the Net 18 (May 2000), June 10 2000 <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/18tauchert.html>.
22. See in particular Gary Kelly, who notes, “Such homosocial intensity was and is not uncommon, was licensed to a degree by social convention at that time, and was indeed encouraged in the culture of Sensibility” (“[Female] Philosophy in the Bedroom: Mary Wollstonecraft and Female Sexuality,” Women’s Writing 4 [1997], 143–53; 148).
23. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 56–7.
24. See Tauchert, “Escaping Discussion.”
25. On heterosexual desire in Wollstonecraft, see Cora Kaplan, “Pandora’s Box: Subjectivity, Class, and Sexuality in Socialist-Feminist Criticism,” British Feminist Thought: a Reader, ed. Terry Lovell (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 345–66.
26. Blair, Lectures, 2:180.