Virginia Woolf, in 1929, described Mary Wollstonecraft’s remarkable “form of immortality” through the memorable conceit that “she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.”1 A strong sense of unfinished business hovers about Wollstonecraft’s legacy – the effects of a life cut short and a political agenda not yet met, but also of something less straightforward, emanating from the combined – but disjunctive – force of her life and work as well as yoked with the seductive fiction that revolution and romance have some natural and dangerously volatile affinity. For “even now,” at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Woolf’s perception of an embodied, social and affective presence – “alive . . . among the living” – captures what has proved most enduring but also most troubling about Wollstonecraft’s reception, the aura of unreconciled emotion that hovers around her shifting reputation. Wollstonecraft remains an ambiguous symbol both of feminism and of femininity, her significance disputed most strongly by the diverse western feminisms of the last quarter of the twentieth century which have made her and her feminist peers living and legible in her own time and in theirs. Their disagreements have been productive as well as divisive; it is to the credit of Wollstonecraft’s interpreters that she remains a restive presence, who cannot be easily framed or honorably laid to rest as the distinguished foremother of modern feminism.
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft argued that women’s “virtue is built on mutable prejudices” (VRW 5:171), that fluctuation of opinion which constructs women’s understanding of what “virtue” is. “Mutable prejudice” felicitously characterizes the historical mobility of Wollstonecraft’s own reception and influence. Her mutable legacies – better thought of perhaps in the plural – have proved a rich but unstable mix of traceable influences and uncanny resemblances. In this essay I pursue some selected strands of those legacies as they have emerged in twentieth-century feminism and in the related commentary of its male fellow travelers, sketching a cognitive map through which we might begin to trace her movements and effects in the more recent history of feminism and modernity.
Curiously, for an author–activist adept in many genres – a career to which many feminists have aspired – up until the last quarter-century Wollstonecraft’s life has been read much more closely than her writing, which has sometimes seemed a mere pretext for telling and retelling her personal story. Yet now that her work too has at last received the attention it deserves there is a sense in which she seems to offer the present too much – both an emotional and sexual history whose notoriety has inhibited access to the writing, and a body of work at once so discursively emphatic and elusive that it upsets the tidy categorizations and standard narratives of social, political, and cultural history. Wollstonecraft’s standing today is at once higher and less settled than at any time since her reincarnation in the early 1970s as the origin and avatar of western feminism. Late twentieth-century feminism adopted Wollstonecraft as an icon for its success in placing women’s rights and sexual difference at the center of social and political debates, and in so doing, making the genealogy of feminist ideas in modernity of interest to a wider public. In the 1970s and 80s when feminist optimism was high, it was hoped that creating a new public forum for issues of gender and sexuality would lead to their speedy and progressive resolution, an outcome that appears less and less likely. Wollstonecraft’s legacies do not preside, in any sense at all, over a postfeminist utopia; rather it is the stubborn persistence into the new millennium of those nagging questions about gender, sexuality, and modernity first raised in the late eighteenth century by Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries that has led to the centrality of gender in the current rethinking by historians, literary scholars, political scientists, and philosophers of the mixed origins of modernity.
As a result, women’s writing and thought is now taken much more seriously as an object of study by scholars of this period. Wollstonecraft herself is now regularly discussed in relation to a much wider field of women writers and intellectuals than was true a generation ago, yet she has kept her preeminence among them – a fact that would have gratified the woman who so strongly desired to be “first” in friendship, love, and reputation. Wollstonecraft scholarship has played a leading role in a shift, which as Harriet Guest has recently noted, has moved on from “the study of the experience or writings of women as a separate category of literary or historical analysis, and toward the complex involvement of women and of gender difference in all areas of eighteenth-century life and thought.”2 Mary Wollstonecraft herself has slowly but surely become an indispensable figure for thinking through this crucial shaping moment of modernity: the tensions within and between her ideas and her life are seen as indicative of the contradictions thrown up, not just for women but for whole societies, by the entwined but often conflicting impulses of progressive politics in its various forms and the expanding market economy. The problems she posed about the future of gender in modern societies appear both actively in her work, and passively through the interpretations made by subsequent generations of what Woolf called her “experiments in living.”
Of all the questions Wollstonecraft asked, and of which she often appears to be the exemplary text, none remain so insistent or so agonistic as those that ask how or whether we should gender and moralize emotion. Increasingly human affect has come to be seen as the key to understanding a whole host of questions about eighteenth-century culture, and by implication, our own. The vocabulary of that eighteenth-century debate – sensibility, sentimentality, and sympathy – are still in such common usage today that we are often too quick to translate the eighteenth-century debates into our own meanings and values. Yet although their context and meaning have altered, there are striking continuities. Sentimentality in particular continues to function, rather as it did in the last decades of the eighteenth century, as a kind of moral and aesthetic watershed, the supposed dividing line between true and false feelings as they are expressed by individuals and by groups, and as they are represented in works of art. (Claudia Johnson has noted, for example, the “ritual acts of disavowal” which have prefaced critical work on the “sentimental fiction of the 1790s”, as if critics must acknowledge the aesthetic inferiority of such affect-drenched prose for their analyses to be taken seriously.3) The reactionaries and rebels of the eighteenth-century world that Wollstonecraft inhabited were engaged in lengthy, nuanced discussions about the character, causes, and consequence of human affect. Rousseau pinned his hopes of a free and just society on its supposed asymmetry in men and women; the young Edmund Burke hung his influential aesthetic theories on just such a lop-sided psychology, while Adam Smith made the affinity between self-love and sympathy the basis of both the social bond and the rivalrous commerce that he thought would ensure the wealth and coexistence of nations. These old arguments continue to mutate and resonate, so much so that while not every revaluation of Wollstonecraft’s work and reputation in the twentieth century makes the question of emotion central, we can in retrospect see that most biographical and critical comments do address her shifting perspective on gendered feeling.
This essay will focus on Wollstonecraft’s mixed reception and complex influence in the late twentieth century but her treatment in the early twentieth century provides a necessary and revealing starting point. Woolf’s celebration of Wollstonecraft, for example, is one decisive sign of the positive turn in her reception by feminists. Wollstonecraft had provided a lifeline as well as a foil for nineteenth-century feminism, which sometimes chose to promote its legitimacy through a vociferous disavowal of her scandalous life. When her rehabilitation began, in the later part of that century, it was painfully slow. Rediscovery by twentieth-century feminists whose agendas placed sexual and emotional freedom among the most important rights of woman radically shifted the terms in which she would be received. It is not surprising to see that Wollstonecraft is a heroine for such disparate sexual radicals as Virginia Woolf and Emma Goldman,4 appropriated by them for the very different iconoclasms of Bloomsbury and international anarchism, but it is striking that for each of them Wollstonecraft’s life is the more enduring and interesting text.5
Goldman’s imagination was most taken with Wollstonecraft’s tragic passion for Imlay, rather than the “sweet and tender camaraderie” of her liaison with Godwin, whom she credits with being “the first representative of Anarchist Communism.”6 She puts the priority of biography at its most extreme: “Had Mary Wollstonecraft not written a line, her life would have furnished food for thought” (Goldman, “Tragic Life,” 256). Woolf, too is gripped by Mary’s unhappy love affair with Imlay, and she cannot resist interpreting its dynamic, rather even-handedly too, with sympathy for both parties, but her identification is, predictably, with Wollstonecraft’s companionate and intellectually egalitarian alliance: Wollstonecraft’s relation with Godwin was her “most fruitful experiment” (Woolf, “Four Figures,” 163). Neither Goldman nor Woolf in their short essays dwell on the specifics of Wollstonecraft’s feminism as expressed in her writing. For them, what had become standard, if by no means fully realized, demands for educational and legal parity seemed to need no further glossing or scrutiny – “their originality has become our commonplace” says Woolf (“Four Figures,” 158) – and each felt quite free to reinvent Wollstonecraft as their contemporary. Goldman’s Mary is a universalist, a vanguard figure very much in Goldman’s own image, fighting as she did, as much for the affective and sexual “freedom for the whole human race” as for its civil and economic rights; Mary/Emma is the pathfinder and pioneer, whose life “proves that economic and social rights for women alone are not enough . . . to fill any deep life, man or woman.”(Goldman, “Tragic Life,” 251) The moving rhetoric of romantic radicalism slips too easily into the hackneyed language of sensation fiction. In an unconscious parody of Wollstonecraft’s own intermittent resort to an overripe language of sensibility, Goldman endows Mary with a “burning, yearning soul,” a spirit which “reached out to great heights” and which also “drained the cup of tragedy.” (250–1) For Goldman, Wollstonecraft’s life represented the extreme difficulty, perhaps the ultimate impossibility, of combining high passion and political and intellectual work, of living successfully at the edge of feeling. Goldman’s idealization of Mary’s near fatal passion for Imlay rather than for the more politically sympathetic Godwin, reflects her own mixed experience of liaisons within the anarchist movement, and her limited success in persuading leading male figures in the movement as a whole that the cause of sexual freedom should be high on their agenda. In an oblique rebuke to their skepticism she exalts such passion as an extreme example of libertarian thinking, giving a kind of nobility to not surviving “the tempest” of “infatuation” and unrequited love. Almost glorying in Mary’s defeat in “the struggle between her intellect and her passion,” Goldman interprets her relationship with Imlay as a high moment of reckless but sublime excess that her life with Godwin could not repair or replace (256). Choosing a therapeutic figure, at once maternal and asexual, Goldman imagines the liaison with Godwin as “a cold hand upon a burning forehead” (256). A further and more final cooling follows. Wollstonecraft’s death becomes, for Goldman, fortuitous and exemplary, as well as a fate that waits for romantics of any period or gender, since “he who has ever tasted the madness of life can never again adjust himself to an even tenor” (256).
Writing some years later, Woolf implicitly associates Mary with the profound changes wrought by World War I, so that her essay begins with the general comment that “Great wars are strangely intermittent in their effects,” leaving the lives and attitudes of some individuals untouched, but utterly transforming others (“Four Figures,” 156). In Wollstonecraft’s case the “Revolution . . . was not merely an event that had happened outside her; it was an active agent in her own blood,” a catalyst, Woolf thought, for an already rebellious spirit. In Mary, a lifelong revolt, “against tyranny, against law, against convention” joins personal and political revolt, and finds an “eloquent and daring” expression in her two Vindications (158). It is particularly interesting how “war” and “revolution” as motors of progress and experiment become elided in Woolf’s account. The social and political revolution that England did not have in the 1790s, and the First World War whose upheaval effected social change but whose overt politics were hardly progressive, are cleverly merged in Woolf’s essay, just as her evocation of the sexually egalitarian coteries of the London intelligentsia in the time of the French Revolution seem like costume versions of their early-twentieth-century incarnations. That “party of ill-dressed, excited young men” with “middle-class names” and a woman “with very bright eyes and a very eager tongue” called simply by her surname “as if it did not matter whether she were married or unmarried, as if she were a young man like themselves” which met in Somers Town “over the tea-cups,” Woolf’s vignette of dissenting circles in North London in the 1790s, calls up the social and intellectual milieu of Gordon Square, in the Bloomsbury of her own time, its middle-class young men and women also deep in those scandalous conversations and experiments which they hoped would demolish the last vestiges of the late Victorian and Edwardian conventions of their parents. (156–7) Wollstonecraft’s implied androgyny – “as if she were a young man” – even evokes Woolf’s gender-bending protagonist Orlando in her 1928 novel of the same name. As Woolf reimagines Wollstonecraft, it is the “contradictions” in her life and work that fascinate rather than her ideologically driven agenda, however daring, for Mary, says Woolf, was “no pedant, no cold-blooded theorist.”(159) Woolf’s essay pinpoints those key moments when theory and practice conflict: the pity Mary unexpectedly felt on seeing the Louis XVI that she had reviled in her work on his way to the National Assembly, her incompatible desires both for free love and emotional security. The moment of Louis’s downfall, when Wollstonecraft “saw the most cherished of her convictions put into practice – and her eyes filled with tears” is for Woolf the exemplary instance in which the true complexity of life and the limits of utopian politics are revealed: the point at which the rationality of political belief is undercut by an experience that produces an upsurge of feeling (159). This, perhaps, is Woolf’s most interesting insight, but also the one which, as we will see, would become most contested, as Wollstonecraft’s tears are reinterpreted as mere sentimentality.
Wollstonecraft’s urgent plea to her own and future generations of women in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her repeated insistence that women must train and exercise their “understanding,” is only one strand in her legacy for twentieth-century feminism, and perhaps, taken alone, misleading. More accurate is her opinion that “the most perfect education . . . is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart” (VRW 5:90). The emphasis she placed on education, independence, and rationality was, even at the beginning of the twentieth century, already incorporated into a broadly based agenda for women’s emancipation. Much more equivocal – then as now – was the role of “the heart,” or affect – the whole spectrum of the emotions from maternal devotion to sexual desire in the reform and liberation of woman. What makes Wollstonecraft often seem so eerily modern to different generations of women are the recurring contexts of radical political agitation and reaction in which the sexual division of the emotions which distinguish femininity from masculinity has been debated. Goldman and Woolf used Wollstonecraft to validate the importance of women’s affective life rather than women’s equal civil status. Goldman, the activist, thought that romantic excess – “the madness of life” – was both opposed to and unsustainable within the political agendas of what we tend to think of as that most passionate of radical traditions, anarchism. Woolf brings the perspective of the novelist into her analysis, reading the expression of emotion as the beginning of real enlightenment, at the point where one intuitively acknowledges both the complexity and the limits of utopian thinking.
This reinstatement of Mary Wollstonecraft’s sexual and emotional “experiments” as the most liberating and progressive elements of her thinking spoke to a concern expressed by many women thinkers, especially women novelists, between the world wars. Getting the vote had opened the door to civil and economic equality, but while sexual mores were changing, emotional and sexual autonomy was still tantalizingly out of reach. By the 1960s and 70s, the years when Wollstonecraft studies started to take off, it was becoming clear that the road to women’s economic, social, and political, emancipation was also steeper than had been anticipated and would not be quickly solved merely by access to the polling booth. Resisting a call to return to their proper place in the home, more women were entering the workforce, and more were in white collar and professional occupations, which were nevertheless still male strongholds. The immediate postwar period, in both Britain and the United States, was marked by the resurgence of social, political, and sexual conservatism that frequently follows the more liberal and liberated regimes of wartime, a conservatism that championed the expansion of women’s education, at least in the United States, but also targeted, in the popular press and in social policy, women’s failure to find marriage and reproduction an adequate career as perverse and even pathological. This oddly contradictory stance, promoting university education for women, but preferring that its benefits equip them to be civic wives and mothers rather than independent professionals, has its parallels in Wollstonecraft’s own temperate approach to such issues in Rights of Woman. In this climate of social conservatism, with the Cold War looming but before the surging tide of postwar feminism, Wollstonecraft emerges as an inspiring heroine for postwar liberals of both sexes, her life and career evoking a kind of revolutionary golden age, newly labeled as the age of democratic revolutions to distinguish them from later, tainted socialist revolution. Mary’s enthusiasm for, as well as her critique of, the French Revolution could now be positioned as a more emotionally appealing alternative to what liberal Americans and Britons increasingly saw as the repressive, frigid post-revolutionary societies of the Soviet bloc. Reacting against, but also influenced by, this increasingly conservative national mood, a new and major biography of Wollstonecraft came out of the American midwest, written by an academic based at the University of Omaha and published by the University of Kansas Press in 1951.
Ralph Wardle’s Mary Wollstonecraft: a Critical Biography treats her writing seriously, and its final pages emphasize, rightly, the discontinuous history of feminist thought, but it ends by contradicting the evidence he provides on her mixed reception in the nineteenth century and minimizing the direct effect of Wollstonecraft’s writing on the generations that succeeded her, by arguing that although she was a pioneer, her work had “little traceable influence on the course of female emancipation.”7 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wardle thought, was an “original, if not an influential, book” but it was “Mary’s personality that has kept her memory alive. Surely dozens of readers have thrilled to her history or been fired by her example for every one who has read his way through Rights of Woman” (341). And Wardle, who had himself objected that earlier champions had made her unrecognizably into a “saintly lady” (339) sums her up, equally incredibly, in the soft-focus language of idealistic postwar Hollywood heroines, who, “once she had rid herself of the brashness displayed in the years of her first successes” became, “above all, a woman of personal charm . . . not the placid charm which rises from beauty and graciousness alone; it was the positive, energetic charm of a courageous woman eager to serve humanity” (341). The woman was never “mean” or “dull,” but Rights of Woman, Wardle implies, is still a daunting, difficult read – while the life has the appeal of popular film or genre fiction, but with an improving political message. Yet his biography does highlight Mary’s intellectual and political trajectory. Rather like Woolf, Wardle celebrates Wollstonecraft’s fusion of political, social, and emotional rebellion; like Woolf it is the persona that he in part invents rather than the texts before him that stirs his imagination.
Wardle’s interest in Wollstonecraft during the socially and politically conservative 1950s did not strike a collective chord for almost another generation, until the “second wave” of the women’s movement adopted Wollstonecraft as foremother and sometime heroine. As one critic has remarked, Wollstonecraft has been, if anything, “over-biographied” and never more so than in the 1970s when six studies of her life appeared in just six years – by Margaret George (1970), Edna Nixon (1971), Eleanor Flexner (1972), Emily Sunstein (1975), Claire Tomalin (1974), and Margaret Tims (1976) – so many indeed, that we might cynically see some of them as responding at least as much to a publishing opportunity as to a cause. Feminism sought and found an audience of women readers, but publishers eagerly built on the rarely flattering and often sensational public image of the women’s movement, to buy and commission more books by and about women in general, targeting not only an appetitive younger feminist readership, but cleverly catering for women who were anxious about the turn which postwar feminism was taking. But six biographies in as many years speak to more than commercial opportunism. Mary’s life suddenly becomes an incendiary precedent for what postwar feminism sometimes implied it was inventing anew. Her story revised the more airbrushed accounts of feminism’s history revealing its deep roots in a wider political context. But something remains disturbingly hidden in this sudden excess of biography, as if Wollstonecraft’s life must be repeated again and again, more like a symptom that conceals a fear, a symptom that must be expressed but not named, than an heroic and tragic story whose time for retelling had come.
While Wollstonecraft’s life was being introduced to a new generation of women readers the paradox that she was often seen to represent – the passionate life in apposition to the radical and rationalist agenda – was being summarized in the best-known slogan of the Women’s Movement. “The personal is political” became the gnomic catchphrase of feminism in the seventies, not, as is sometimes said, a license for unrestrained individualism or the self-indulgence of confession, but as a challenge to political discourses that were unwilling to debate the traditional divisions of labor in the home, violence against women, or the contested issues of sexuality and reproductive rights. The slogan itself spawned vigorous but also productive disagreement about what constituted a politically progressive “personal” agenda. Feminists who were at heart social conservatives shunned the sexual libertarianism of artistic and cultural avant gardes, disliked the sixties for its dangerous mix of sex, drugs, radical politics, and rock and roll, and worried that postwar feminisms were incorporating aspects of the politics of pleasure into its cultural sensibility rather than just critiquing its misogyny. But even among women who really welcomed the more emotionally and sexually expressive culture of the seventies, there were residual anxieties about the place of sexuality and emotion on the feminist agenda. Of the major strands of competing white feminisms of the seventies – liberal, radical, and socialist – both liberal feminism, with its emphasis on equality within existing capitalist democracies, and socialist feminism, with its more far-reaching analysis of the relationship between women’s oppression and free-market economics were dedicated, if in slightly different ways, to rationality as the basis for the parity between men and women. Initially at least, the equal capacity to reason was associated with feminism’s ethical claims for full civic subjectivity for women – rationality provided the imprimatur both for women’s equal footing in the existing liberal humanism of Western democracies and for their equal participation in socialist alternatives. The largely unexamined, commonsense assumption of this argument is that reason and feeling are compartmentalized aspects of mental life, that they exist in direct proportion to each other, and that a necessary balance between them is destabilized when emotion overcomes reason. Following this train of thought, too great an emphasis on sexual freedoms, including homosexuality as well as permissive heterosexuality, might act as a diversion from the main priorities and alienate just those women – and men – that they wished to persuade.
Wollstonecraft’s life, read in this context, seemed somehow to illustrate this half-recognized conundrum that continued to fascinate biographers and their readers, but it could simultaneously appall. This latter response is conspicuous in the most conservative of the Wollstonecraft biographies of this period. By 1973, in the American Penguin edition of Eleanor Flexner’s Mary Wollstonecraft, publisher and author seem at once to be exploiting Wollstonecraft’s life and distancing themselves from its supposed transgressive elements, now seen to be taken further forward by what the popular press and academic social conservatives, each identified as the “extremism” of modern feminism. Flexner, author of the groundbreaking Century of Struggle: the Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959) is quoted in the front-of-book blurb as a self-described “moderate” who “vehemently favors equal rights, equal opportunity, and equal pay for women.”8 This dry list of political and economic aims, tactically lubricated only by the adjective “vehemently,” inserted to show that the biographer too had her political passions, very deliberately excluded an endorsement of forms of sexual radicalism. Flexner’s conclusion emphasizes Mary’s advocacy of “rational thought” for men and women, and her call to conventional forms of duty – “the duty of being human, of being women – as mothers and wives as well as citizens. Mary Wollstonecraft’s own life, except for the few occasions when she strayed to the verge of aberration, exemplified that belief. It is surely not irrelevant today” (Flexner, Biography, 266). Mary’s “aberrations” are not restricted to her emotional excesses but also to her egotism – Mary’s treatment of her sisters and her adopted daughter Ann as well as her desperate attachment to Imlay are, says Flexner, hard to “explain” or “understand.” Flexner’s “psychological” portrait has it both ways, reproducing the scandal in loving detail, but moralizing Wollstonecraft’s life so that her “aberrations” can retrospectively serve both as negative examples and minor hiccups in an otherwise exemplary career. In this way she can be rewritten as an appropriate origin for a sanitized, and fairly conventional, liberal feminism. Flexner is as severe on the writing as on the life, finding A Vindication of the Rights of Woman alarmingly full of digressions, and interpreting what she calls Wollstonecraft’s inability “to follow a consistent train of thought” a sign of Mary’s lack of education. Her pedantic judgment reads like a school report: “She is incapable either of the coherent organization of ideas or of avoiding repetition” (Flexner, Biography, 164). Nor did Mary’s novels rescue her: “she had no talent whatever for writing fiction” (249). This monitory tone infantilizes Wollstonecraft, replacing the high-minded if less-than-readable stylist of Wardle’s biography, with that of an undisciplined and wayward teenager, full of grandiose plans and chaotic desires: melodramatically emotional, man-chasing, mean to her relatives, failing her lessons – in short exhibiting all those symptoms of adolescent femininity that never fail to irritate – and frighten – adults. There is an issue about class and gentility embedded in this portrait also; Mary’s lack of formal education does not, for Flexner, make her a successful autodidact, but more like a disadvantaged twentieth-century daughter, too poor to be sent to college where strict training would smooth the rough edges, fill in the intellectual gaps, and teach her an acceptable prose style. Her life and work are offered to the impressionable reader as a cautionary tale with an oblique health warning against the undisciplined rhetoric and emotion equally visible in her actions and her prose: the causal connection between the two never quite stated but always implied. There is a calculated echo here, for any reader of the second Vindication of Wollstonecraft herself, who voiced the common view among reforming women – both radicals and conservatives – that women were peculiarly vulnerable to the corrupting influence of badly written sensational fiction whose “stale tales and meretricious scenes” (cliche and inauthenticity combined) could inflame the imagination, leading readers into “actual vice” (VRW 5:256). In Flexner’s own imagination, the “aberrant” side of Mary, which includes her incoherent writings, becomes just such a “meretricious” but dangerously active text.
We cannot fully understand the nervous moralizing with which Flexner, the self-designated feminist moderate, approached the subject to which she was also so attracted without exploring further the context in which it was being composed. For in spite of the undercurrent of anxiety about the way in which emotion and sexuality were being highlighted in some parts of the women’s movement, it was clear that the time for such issues had come, and at some level they define the difference between the “first wave” of feminism that brought about the franchise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the second wave. For Flexner and those who shared her views, the supposed aberrations of Mary’s life were being writ large in the fiery polemic – and the highly colored publicity that it attracted – of the more radical tendencies within the women’s movement in the late sixties and early seventies. Feminism, it must have seemed to them, had been reborn as a politicized juvenile delinquent pursuing a scandalous celebrity, reveling both in public attention and a kind of anti-intellectual populism – at once hyper-feminine and full of “masculine” aggression. At the same time, prominent and headline-grabbing elements of feminism were launching powerful critiques of the patriarchal state and of the androcentric social arrangements fostered by liberal capitalist democracies; radical feminists in particular were highlighting abortion and sexual choice as leading issues around which to campaign. Basic demands such as equal pay, education, and equal rights before the law became indelibly associated in the public mind with the more divisive issues of reproductive rights, sexual freedom, and, most contested of all, lesbianism. A standard strategy of anti-feminist rhetoric was to imply that female autonomy would inevitably lead to heterosexual promiscuity at best and lesbianism at worst, “choices” which were seen as undermining marriage, the family, and the state, a position that is still with us today. While the debates within Anglophone feminism – about sexuality, about race, about class, about theory and practice – reached their apogee between the mid-seventies and mid-eighties, divisions within the Women’s Movement were already taking shape in the period when Flexner was reconstructing Wollstonecraft’s life and work to serve both as an origin and a warning for late-twentieth-century feminism.
It is both moving and distressing to see feminism revisit, albeit in a post-Freudian context, those questions about the gendered division of feeling and thinking that had so fascinated and troubled men and women from the middle of the eighteenth century to its close. We must ask why they have been so important in feminist thinking, so significant in shaping gender, subjectivity, and sexuality, both at that early period when capitalism and the modern nation state are taking their recognizably modern form and again when the categories of the self and of economic and political structures seem under such radical revision?
The how and why of that return can be illuminated through a brief reprise of the criticism and historiography surrounding Wollstonecraft, from the mid-seventies, when the impulse to write and rewrite her biography gives way to a more serious and detailed project aimed at analyzing Wollstonecraft’s writing in terms of eighteenth-century society and its debates – to offer historical readings which would provide a scholarly view of the lineage of modern feminism and make Wollstonecraft more significant for the eighteenth century, but perhaps less easily or happily appropriated to our own. Predictably the initial thrust of this work highlighted Wollstonecraft’s ideas on education, treating her not as a lone woman speaker but as one voice among many across the political spectrum of the late eighteenth-century advocating the moral reform of bourgeois society through the reform of middle-class women’s education.
By no means all critics of this period see Wollstonecraft’s views as particularly daring – and where they do make this claim the “life” is almost always drawn in to supplement the works. Where she is mentioned as a part of a coterie of radical writers, the supposed poor quality of her fiction demotes her; Marilyn Butler, for example who would later become a leading editor of Wollstonecraft’s work, mentions Wollstonecraft only briefly in her brilliant revisionist study Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (1981). While it was still the convention to see the radical and reactionary women as representing quite different cultural and political trajectories, in an influential essay from 1982 Mitzi Meyers argues that on many issues concerning domesticity, and the reform of wives and mothers, the views of the political radical, Mary Wollstonecraft and the conservative Hannah More were closely allied.9 A year after Meyers highlighted what she believed to be the central preoccupation of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, feminist historian Barbara Taylor, in Eve and the New Jerusalem, identified Wollstonecraft as a “feminist democrat” whose “project took her right to the limit of the bourgeois-democratic outlook and occasionally a little way past it.”10 For Taylor, Wollstonecraft and her associates in the 1790s, like Rousseau before them, “envisioned” a “new age as a time of perfect harmony between the aspirations of the individual and the collective needs of humanity as a whole,” rather than as an irreconcilable contradiction (5–6). Both that radical impulse, Wollstonecraft’s appetite for major changes not minor reforms, and the “whirlpool of excitement and controversy which lasted for decades” created by Rights of Woman made Wollstonecraft and her work a precursor of the Owenite Socialist women of later decades (Taylor, Eve, 1). Members of Wollstonecraft’s circle, including of course William Godwin, belonged to a long tradition of “utopian visionaries,” whose interest in gender egalitarianism often extended, as in Godwin’s Political Justice, to the abandonment of marriage in favor of free liaisons “based on mutual desire and affection” (Taylor, Eve, 8). The sexual heterodoxy of the Owenites as well as their utopian feminism, could be traced back, Taylor argued persuasively, to Wollstonecraft and her peers.
1983 was a bumper year for widely different representations of Wollstonecraft and her legacy. My own contribution to the debate, an essay entitled “Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism” argued that however Wollstonecraft’s views altered in later years, Rights of Woman could in no way be construed as a text promoting sexual radicalism, but rather mounted a “negative and prescriptive assault on female sexuality”; Wollstonecraft, I suggested, figured “feeling” itself, as “almost counter-revolutionary.”11 Rights of Woman, if not Wollstonecraft’s other writing, headed a long tradition of feminist moralization of sexuality that stretched from Wollstonecraft to the prescriptive and polemical writing of the feminist poet and critic Adrienne Rich.12 There was something about radical and revolutionary moments, I suggested, that simultaneously inspired open-ended explorations of “experiments in living” and its converse, the policing of desire and sexuality. A year later, in 1984, Mary Poovey’s study, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, drawing on a much wider range of Wollstonecraft’s work, but also focusing on Rights of Woman, read Wollstonecraft’s denial of female sexuality in that text as “a defense against what she feared: desire doomed to repeated frustration. Contrary to her assertions, Wollstonecraft’s deepest fear centers not on the voraciousness of male sexual desire but on what she fears is its brevity.”13 Exploring the ideologies of gender and sexuality in both Vindications, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Norway, Denmark and Sweden and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, Poovey argues that the distinctions that Wollstonecraft was attempting to make between forms of sensibility and sentiment, do not add up to the full scale critique of “sentiment,” because sentiment provided the structure that supported an individualism Wollstonecraft could not jettison. “Wollstonecraft’s refusal to abandon the ideal of ‘true sensibility,’ even after she had recognized that the romantic expectations endemic to such sensibility were agents of the very institutions she was trying to criticize, reflects her persistent yearning for some connections between spiritual values and real, everyday experience” (Proper Lady, 108). “Perhaps,” Poovey continues “the two most fundamental problems with sentimentalism’s solution to this longing lay in its celebration of immaterial, romantic rewards and in its emphasis on individual feeling” which, substitute for or sublimate “more ‘real’ – because more socially effective goals” (109).
Looking back on these assessments almost a generation later, it is revealing to see how profoundly at odds Taylor, Poovey, and I were on questions of affect and imagination and the place they held in Wollstonecraft’s life and work. Both Taylor and Poovey, for example, highlighted the centrality of the imagination for Wollstonecraft and her time, but for Taylor this placed Wollstonecraft at the head of a neglected tradition of utopian socialist feminism, while for Poovey its overemphasis left Wollstonecraft stranded in the world of individualized, bourgeois desire. All three of us were writing within a socialist-feminist paradigm, but on questions of fantasy and desire, of the imaginative anticipation both of a future society or future personal relationships we “heard” Wollstonecraft saying very different things in relation to a set of questions that modern feminism continued to frame as discrete alternatives. Was the erotic and affective imagination, gendered or universal, a blessing or a curse for women? Was it indispensable to radical consciousness, irrefutably a part of human psychic life, or was it something that could and should be jettisoned or retrained? If gendered identity was largely a matter of social construction, as most of the feminists I have been citing believed, then could a brave new world reconstruct its unconscious as well as its conscious wishes? These ambitious questions were being asked by all varieties of feminism with a special kind of urgency in the early to mid-1980s.
In the nineteen eighties, contention about Wollstonecraft’s legacy came to be implicated in a cluster of related debates within feminism, on the reading of popular romance, on pornography and on lesbian sado-masochism that focused on the politics of the sensual and sentimental imagination, debates known in the history of modern feminism as “the sex wars.” Wollstonecraft’s almost material presence inhabits the return, in the early 80s of the debate about the corrupting effect of romantic and sensational fiction on women readers, an issue extensively addressed by Wollstonecraft as well as by more conservative or conventional figures, such as More and Austen. There is a direct parallel between the anxieties generated by the expansion of female literacy and the sentimental fiction written for and by women in the 1780s and 90s and the democratization of reading in the post World War II period, when the fear is that unrestrained access to print culture and Hollywood cinema, rather than family, church, and education will socialize young women into transgressive femininity. While eighteenth-century commentators on the spread of literacy often used the just-literate servant girl as the reader who would be most easily corrupted by sensational tales, writers from Wollstonecraft to Austen worried more about what women of their own class were reading. In the twentieth century there is a distinct elitist bias to the debates about mass culture and its female audience. Women often “stand in” in cultural analysis from the left and right sides of the political spectrum for all peculiarly vulnerable and impressionable readers and viewers. Although they are undoubtedly related, there is crucial difference between this general anxiety and the specifically feminist struggle for the hearts and minds of women both within and beyond the educated middle classes who formed its primary constituency. Feminism worried that fast-food romantic and sentimental narrative was the not so secret addiction of women of all classes, blunting their intellectual appetites and absorbing their psychic energy, its emotional seductions leading women down the garden path to the wrong kind of utopian thinking. The debate at first naively assumed that women readers naturally and exclusively identified with the heroines of romance – an odd view, if one thinks about it, for the largely literary trained academics in the debate to hold. Ann Snitow led the attack with an essay provocatively titled “Mass-market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different”; her argument frames the case against such reading in terms of its reproduction of women’s subordination, and their psychic abjection. Loving With a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women (1984), Tania Modleski’s interpretation of romance reading, as providing a way for women to imagine revenge and autonomy, gives the individualism that romantic and sentimental narratives encourage a more sympathetic feminist spin, while Janice Radway’s fascinating sociological exploration of a group of mass-market romance readers, Reading the Romance, is more ambivalent about the individualism that the private act of reading and fantasizing engenders, but she is sure that it cannot be the route to mobilization for any kind of collective resistance to the public forms of patriarchal power.14 The narrative and rhetorical structures of romance reading and the fantasizing it induces, are, in these accounts the affective routes through which female subjectivity is shaped or distorted. The debate itself was underpinned by an under-argued and sometimes only half-articulated assumption that the psychic economies of affect have fixed limits as well as strict forms of distribution – too much sexual fantasy, not enough rationality, ergo not enough political activism.
The link between sentimental and erotic fantasy and political transformation (or the lack of such a link) gave even these very scholarly exchanges on romance reading a certain polemical tone in the early 1980s. Not so the debates on heterosexual pornography and lesbian erotica which escaped the pages of academic books and journals, spilling over into angry public confrontations and eventually, in the case of pornography, into contested legislative moves. These “sex wars” within feminism were at their most intense in the early to mid 1980s, in a period which, while still characterized by optimism about feminism’s capacity to change laws, manners, and morals, was threatened by the general move towards more conservative social attitudes and policy in Britain and America with the elections of Republican and Conservative governments. Calls for, and passionate resistance to, the moralizing and gendering of imagination and fantasy were therefore raised in the waning moments of what was sometimes called, with more rhetorical optimism than absolute accuracy, “a revolutionary moment.” We should see both responses as part of that “revolutionary” consciousness, exemplifying equal if opposed visions of the kinds of social subjects and social relations that might emerge from a period of fundamental and rapid change. Feminism argued vigorously on both sides of the question: condemning popular romance as a harmful drug which keeps women in abjection; defending it as a site of fantasy which allows women to identify across gender and imagine themselves otherwise; targeting pornography for men as the theory of which rape is the practice; defending the whole spectrum of representations of sexuality on the grounds that censorship can only rebound on women’s right to expression; damning anything that smacks of the perverse in lesbian sexuality and its representations as the willful reenactment of the violence of the heterosexual imagination; praising it as exemplary of consensual, liberating, experimental acts. The sex wars within feminism did not just generate heat and light: they put the assumptions of each side under close intellectual scrutiny. By the mid-90s the arguments on both sides of these questions had become more nuanced and complex. If still unresolved, they were no longer such urgent or contested issues on feminism’s agenda, in part because the optimistic dreams of social transformation that had fueled them seemed ever less achievable.
The debate about psychic life and gender within feminism was symptomatic of a shift in the way affect in general, and in its particular instances, were being theorized and historicized from the late 80s, a shift which would have a profound impact on Wollstonecraft scholarship from that period forward. Psychoanalytic feminism had strongly queried the model of human consciousness which divided the rational and the feeling self; so too, although from slightly different premises, did other strands of theory – poststructuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism. An interest in the “history of the affections” was also reemerging in the work of male and female historians and critics, more skeptical about psychoanalysis but whose socialist inflected humanism saw complementarity not impasse between individual affection and revolutionary passion.15 This was particularly true for male commentators, friendly to feminism, and sympathetic to Romanticism’s privileging of affect, who come to the topic with less personal and political investment in the way the gendering of affect had historically subordinated women.
What would become emotion’s more positive role in Wollstonecraft’s fin-de-siècle incarnation is adumbrated in Richard Holmes 1987 Penguin Classics edition of Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark 16 and Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman, the first Wollstonecraft’s most popular publication in her own lifetime, the second the book which undid her influence and reputation for almost a century. In bringing these, the most affective texts of the couple together, Holmes attempts a retroactive rapprochement between Godwin’s revelations with Wollstonecraft’s legacy, embracing them both as new forms of “confessional” literature, enacting a “revolution in literary genres,” transforming both travel literature and biography (Holmes, Introduction, 16). Calling them “forgotten classics of English eighteenth-century non-fiction” Holmes judges these “short, factual, readable and, in different ways, intensely passionate” works as “the best books that either wrote” (9). Through them Wollstonecraft and Godwin together become founding figures of literary and political Romanticism. A Short Residence in particular had, Holmes believes, a direct influence on the romanticism of his own biographical subjects, Coleridge and Shelley. Holmes reminds us that to Wollstonecraft and Godwin’s radical contemporaries, as well as to “the larger body of liberal opinion, and to many of the younger writers of the day” their liaison was “a kind of culmination: a consecration of that New Sensibility in which the rational hopes of the Enlightenment were catalyzed by that element of imagination and personal rebellion which we now know as Romanticism. . . . They were seen as transitional figures, pointing towards a freer life and a more just society, and the new ‘empire of feeling’” (15). Positioning them thus, Holmes incorporates and indeed echoes Woolf’s admiration for Wollstonecraft’s “experiments in living”; without glossing over the “intense disruption” of “hope and feeling,” the “pain, discontent and frustrated happiness” in both texts he avoids the kind of moralizing that we have seen so easily attached itself to Wollstonecraft’s life and work (16). Against feminism’s rebuke to Godwin for aligning Wollstonecraft with the intuitive rather than the rational, Holmes, the neo-Romanticist, mounts a spirited and detailed defense of the Memoir’s appreciation of Wollstonecraft’s intellectual achievements, which he believes, celebrates “Imagination” not simply as the gendered complement of rationality but the sine qua non of the creative faculty. Obliquely countering censures of Wollstonecraft’s writing for style or content, Holmes puts a strong case for that literary innovation – Wollstonecraft’s and Godwin’s – which successfully marries fact and affect. But if Wollstonecraft/Godwin as reread by Holmes become an eighteenth-century avant-garde double-act, at least in literary terms, Holmes’s focus on the Imlay–Wollstonecraft–Godwin triangle locks Wollstonecraft back into the heteronormativity from which postwar feminism had partly liberated her. And by aligning himself unapologetically with the Romanticism he believes they represent, Holmes reproduces rather than resists the old gendered binary between reason and feeling which still remain, in his essay, symbolized respectively by Godwin and Wollstonecraft. While Holmes defends Godwin against charges of sexism in his characterization of Wollstonecraft’s talents, his own choice of adverbs betrays his identification with a gendered division of style: Holmes admires the “wildness and richness of emotional rhetoric” in A Short Residence which is matched by the “frankness and understatement” of Godwin’s Memoirs (16).
Holmes’s essay is the harbinger of a positive turn in Wollstonecraft’s reception which would become more marked in the decade to follow. Looking back one can see that the energy with which some feminists disidentified with Wollstonecraft in the 1980s was symptomatic of the unreconciled elements that affected most Western feminisms – their origins and sensibilities so normatively assessed as a product of bourgeois and liberal ideologies but their aims so often linked to radical communitarian and sometime revolutionary dreams. World events in 1989 were to destabilize that fragile equilibrium between identities and aims further, and to have a profound effect on Wollstonecraft studies. The fall of the Berlin wall between East and West Germany and the crumbling of communist and socialist regimes across Eastern and Central Europe signaled the triumph of democracy and capitalism, revealing the history and significance of Western revolutions and the role of their founding figures in a new light. To Western observers the power of public feeling against corrupt and repressive regimes, the engine behind the bloodless transformation of Europe and the former Soviet Union, was perceived as miraculous and uplifting, giving new ethical value to the association of “sensibility” and revolution, even as it quenched, finally, hopes for a return to socialism in the West. The after-shocks of 1989, which have included the resurgence of violent nationalisms and the brutal effects of unregulated capitalism have been more sobering. And for historians of all persuasions, as for the general public, the past, present, and future of social and political radicalism, including feminism in all its manifestations, has required fresh scrutiny, perhaps especially in terms of the politics of affect. In the last part of this essay I want to look at the implications of this new perspective on Wollstonecraft’s reception and legacy.
Virginia Sapiro’s A Vindication of Political Virtue: the Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft published in 1992, the two hundredth anniversary of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, makes the post 1989 context of her reappraisal explicit in her introduction, as she writes of tuning in to “the latest news from Eastern Europe” while reading about the fall of the Bourbon’s in Wollstonecraft’s An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution. In her mind, she says, the tyrannical Bourbons and Romania’s brutal communist leaders, Nikolai and Elena Ceausescu “fell at the same moment . . . so that it would have been strange had the political questions these events raised not become entangled.”17 Sapiro highlights an issue that she never quite pursues. But the implications of the altered political landscape are drawn out, if only obliquely, in other work on Wollstonecraft in the 1990s and following.
Gary Kelly’s Revolutionary Feminism: the Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft, also published in 1992, is the first of these.18 Building upon and integrating the new social and cultural analysis of the previous two decades, especially the work of feminist scholars, Revolutionary Feminism is a dramatically revisionist study, refuting or jettisoning many of the debates and divisions that were its ground. Kelly’s Wollstonecraft becomes the figure through whom a series of political and philosophical oppositions which in past decades fueled the struggle over Wollstonecraft’s legacy, are seemingly reconciled including the disjunction between reason and feeling which Kelly brings together persuasively under the inclusive category of “mind.” Kelly argues that “Sensibility” in its role as a formal category of the period “appealed particularly to those who were socially marginalized” and this possibility, he suggests “gave Sensibility a revolutionary potential” (Revolutionary Feminism, 41), as did Wollstonecraft’s rejection of the “gendering of subjectivity.” Yet these initiatives were all too soon undermined, he argues, by a ruthless masculine hegemony that appeared in the early years of the nineteenth century.
There is however an analytic and political price to be paid for Kelly’s desire to downplay, even submerge, the conflicts and contradictions between affective desires and political aspirations of which Wollstonecraft herself was so conscious, and which drove her own thinking forward. Even more puzzling is his move to cordon off Wollstonecraft’s lasting contribution from the realm of the political, claiming her permanent influence on the “cultural revolution that founded the modern state in Britain” (1). He explains that while “the ‘Revolutionary’ feminists of the 1790s advocated the rights and claims of women within an intense debate over a sudden and violent revolution” it was the “less sudden” revolution in which “gender difference was a major issue, deeply implicated in other major revolutionary issues and in the struggle to define and lead the classes by and for whom the cultural revolution was being carried out” (2). Kelly’s “cultural revolution” at first looks like a hold-all phenomenon in which progressive and conservative aims are not only entwined but almost undifferentiated, merged in the relentless process of modernization that is eventually realized in the dominant middle-class ideology of State and Nation, the triumph of liberal capitalism, exemplified in the late twentieth century by selfish and elite competition, “where feminisms contend for leadership among themselves largely within the dominant professional culture” and “most women, like other subordinated groups” are left to their own devices to improvize resistance in “the bricolage of everyday life” (228). This bleak judgment, sounding the death knell of any progressive politics that reaches out to the poor beyond middle-class aspiration, is a familiar response of some radical scholars to the triumph of liberal capitalism that 1989 was seen to represent. It erupts almost without warning at the end of a study that overtly offers a nuanced understanding and celebration of Wollstonecraft, at odds with the downbeat tone of these final pages, which describe a limited and short-lived emancipatory project generating a legacy hardly worthy of mourning or recovery. In this conclusion Wollstonecraft seems suddenly to become a condensed and displaced figure for a more generalized despair at the defeat and/or retrospective irrelevance of any utopian agendas that stand outside the competitive demand of market societies, making her modern influence seem an ignoble footnote to a long-lost cause.
Pessimism however, is only one response to the seismic shift in Western political culture, and a more mixed response dominates eighteenth-century scholarship over the last decade in which work has been further enriched by the contributions of lesbian, gay, and queer as well as feminist critics and historians. Wollstonecraft studies has contributed to and profited from the increasing centrality of gender and sexuality to history and criticism, especially as it has encouraged writers to address the question of affect, subjectivity, and politics through a deeper and less tendentious exploration of what G. J. Barker-Benfield has termed the “culture of sensibility” of the late eighteenth century. A spate of work from the mid-80s through the early 90s give the debates over the rights and wrongs of affective thinking greater scope as a discourse through which the great changes in the societies that bordered the Atlantic were interpreted, critiqued, and legitimated.19 The rise and fall in the reputation of that imagined figure, the man and woman of feeling, and the fictional, philosophical and polemical texts in which they were both created and dissected, has been shown as indissolubly bound at once to the definition of civic virtue and aesthetic value and the gendered identities that commodity culture required. In these analyses scholars overcome the twentieth century’s intellectuals’ almost phobic response to “sentiment” and the sentimental, seeing the gendered rhetoric of both sentiment and sensibility as driving the language of politics, articulating the deep structure of economic as well as social change, as a language of self and other appropriated simultaneously and in turn by both radicals and conservatives.
This perspective has resulted in fascinating work on Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries. I want to conclude by looking at just two examples of how Wollstonecraft is rewritten within this evolving paradigm. Claudia L. Johnson, exploring the writing and careers of Wollstonecraft in tandem with her contemporaries, Ann Radcliffe and Fanny Burney, writers whose careers she argues “are organized around the nexus of politics, affectivity, and gender” relishes and rehabilitates the fiction of the last decades of the eighteenth century so ritually relegated for its “over the top” emotional rhetoric, hearing in its sentimental excesses a deadly serious debate about the politics of feeling (Equivocal Beings, 15). So Johnson, looking at Wollstonecraft’s theorization of sentiment and sensibility across the two Vindications and in both her novels, Mary, A Fiction and the unfinished Wrongs of Woman suggests that Wollstonecraft’s polemic against the sentimental in men and women, especially her stinging critique of sentimental masculinity, runs alongside a fantasy of same-sex attachment that cannot be fully imagined in a period where the gendered divisions of sentiment are represented as a reformed heterosexuality which has become the keystone of conservative and radical politics. Nevertheless, Johnson argues that the peculiarly restrictive logic of these categories produces some unforeseen, ironically capricious effects. It leads Wollstonecraft to her scornfully homophobic characterization of Burke as an “equivocal being” – his corrupt sentiment becoming a dangerously polymorphous subjectivity. This critique, as Johnson suggests, is extended and elaborated in her fiction in the negative portraits of feminized and sentimental males. But the strictures which governed the moralization of gender and sentiment meant that all cross-gendered identifications became suspect, forcing Wollstonecraft to imagine her own eccentric femininity in the same hybrid and ambiguous terms.
My second example, Harriet Guest’s Small Change: Women, Learning Patriotism, 1750–1810, also asks how masculinity and femininity were imagined within the period’s rhetoric of feeling, focusing on those emotions seen as necessary to the making of modern market economies. Her exploration of how educated British women came to imagine themselves as political subjects in a culture increasingly visualized through the lens of commerce takes up an issue which Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries thought of great importance. The last section of her study on the 1790s reads Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, and Mary Hays in apposition. Guest suggests that these writers reacted to the impossible demands commercial culture makes on femininity by recourse to the language of professionalization, which they use to reclaim respectability for the notion of virtuous femininity (287). The public world in which this virtue is to be practiced is also, however, depicted by them as saturated in affect. When Wollstonecraft suggests “The world cannot be seen by an unmoved spectator, we must mix in the throng, and feel as men feel” (VRW 5:170) she voices something that will strike a chord with feminism down the centuries, its last phrase echoed almost word for word in Jane Eyre’s cry from the rooftops, and in every text thereafter that takes the extra-domestic (which must also necessarily be, in part, the tainted world of commerce) as the sphere that women must enter to imagine themselves active and “free.” The contradiction embedded in this view is made explicit as Guest turns to that “touchstone” question in Wollstonecraft studies, Wollstonecraft’s attack on sensibility in early works and her recourse to it in the brief period from Short Residence to the end of her life. Reading this shift in terms of the counter-revolutionary mood and collapsed “revolutionary”’ possibilities of the late 90s, Guest suggests that in this political climate it is increasingly difficult to distinguish a virtuous sensibility that women might hold as separate from the commercial world with its morally muddied affect. The libidinized emotions necessary to commodity culture, the seductive language of the successful merchants whose materialism Wollstonecraft decries in the Short Residence, are simulacra therefore of the restless and forceful desire which evokes what Wollstonecraft eloquently calls the “imperious sympathies,” those draw humans willy-nilly out of isolation into social life, and which may fuel ambitions of all kinds.20 The problem, Guest concludes, is that “the domestic and intimate world of sensibility is folded into that other sphere, those other elements of modern society, not just by the presence in that world too of men who rule. It is also folded in, I suggest, because for women to think of themselves as modern subjects necessarily involves a refusal of the exclusion, the division, fundamental to modernity: it involves thinking of themselves as modern because their desires are structured and articulated as those of commercial agents and political citizens” (Small Change, 312).
Johnson’s and Guest’s Wollstonecrafts no less, for example, than Woolf’s and Goldman’s, are hostage to the hopes and fears of their own moment. From our present political perspective at the opening of the twenty-first century we seem to have a special sympathetic resonance with the dilemmas faced by Wollstonecraft and her radical contemporaries in the conservative modernity of the late 1790s. Mary Wollstonecraft and her peers seem not a ghostly but a living presence in an ongoing struggle to wrest a more fluid language of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity from the grip of a still determining hetero-normative discourse. We seem uncannily to echo them when we ask whether it is possible to dream of and work for a just society by harnessing the affective rhetoric we must of necessity share with the languages of the global market. Feminism at the opening of the new millennium is accordingly less likely to chide Wollstonecraft for not having an uncompromised critique of her world, but this greater tolerance is also a function of the times – and may pass. The less moralized, more nuanced Mary Wollstonecrafts who have been slowly emerging from the scholarship of the last decade are figures whose complex relationship to the discourses of feeling of her day and ours offers us new perspectives on the historical limits and possibilities of the political imagination, but they no more than their earlier incarnations stand outside the moods and concerns of their construction, a reminder that the analytic impulse itself always has, perhaps must have, a blind spot or two. Wollstonecraft, the iconic representative of modern feminism’s multiple narratives, has at times in the last quarter century suffered a harsh and judgmental scrutiny, infantilizing her as if she were the wayward child of an over-exacting feminism rather than its revered and chosen ancestor. This suspicious turn of the genealogical impulse, one which disinherits itself of the inheritance it also claims, is typical just now of the uncertain status accorded to the founding figures of any grand historical or political narrative, for those narratives often seem in their present scarcity and vulnerability, at once utterly fallible and peculiarly precious.
Wollstonecraft’s personal history as a radical story still holds an abiding fascination for us, as the success of Janet Todd’s impressive recent biography that unashamedly calls itself A Revolutionary Life attests.21 I have tried to argue throughout this essay that Wollstonecraft’s particular treatment by her critics and biographers must be read in counterpoint to the shifting terms of feminist debates about the sexual and affective imagination, debates that were of critical importance to Wollstonecraft’s work and world and centrally implicated in its wider politics – and ours. As for Mary Wollstonecraft, as novelists used to say, we are unlikely to have heard the last of her. Her virtues, like those of women themselves, will continue to be revised through the “mutable prejudices” of the future. Her story in its broadest definition, as legacy and reception together, seems more complicated and unfinished than ever, offering just now the kind of open-ended anti-moral narrative that, if we think about it, is as sentimental in its own way as the more conventional ones that we have cast aside. Luckily for her admirers and detractors alike, Wollstonecraft is too volatile and too evasive a figure to become even a fixed point of unstable reference, and will go on to act as a constant provocation to her interlocutors.
1. Virginia Woolf, “Four Figures”, The Common Reader, 2nd Series, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), 163. The individual essay on Mary Wollstonecraft collected in 1932 with three others under the title “Four Figures” was first published in the Nation and Athenaeum, 5 October 1929 and reprinted in the New York Herald Tribune, 20 October 1929.
2. Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2.
3. Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s, Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1.
4. Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was an eloquent speaker as well as an anarchist activist imprisoned for her radical activity and deported from the United States in 1919.
5. Neillie notes that Woolf’s reading for the essay was largely biographical, including Godwin’s Memoirs and C. Kegan Paul’s William Godwin and his Friends and Contemporaries (London, 1876).
6. Emma Goldman, “Mary Wollstonecraft: Her Tragic Life and Her Passionate Struggle for Freedom” Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston, 2nd edn. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988), 256.
7. Ralph M. Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft: a Critical Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1967), 341.
8. Eleanor Flexner, Mary Wollstonecraft: a Biography (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973), frontispiece.
9. Mitzi Myers, “Reform or Ruin: ‘A Revolution in Female Manners,’” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 11 (1982), 199–216.
10. Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983), 6.
11. Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), 35.
12. Signs; Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5/4, 631–60.
13. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 74.
14. Ann Snitow, “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983); Tania Modleski, Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women (Hamden: York: Archon Books 1984); Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (London: Verso, 1987).
15. At least one strand of this tradition in social history should be traced back to the work of E. P. Thompson, especially The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Golancz, 1963).
16. Richard Holmes, Introduction, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, A Short Residence in Sweden and Memoirs of the Author of The Rights of Woman (London: Penguin Books, 1987). Note that Holmes uses the short title, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
17. Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: the Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), xvi.
18. Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: the Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Macmillan, 1992).
19. See, for example Janet Todd, Sensibility: an Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986); John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: the Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: the Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
20. See this citation from Letters in the context of Guest’s analysis, Small Change, 309–10.
21. Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: a Revolutionary Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000).