Wollstonecraft

Philosophy, Passion, and Politics

Sylvana Tomaselli

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691212630
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía política

A compelling portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft that shows the intimate connections between her life and work Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, first published in 1792, is a work of enduring relevance in women's rights advocacy. However, as Sylvana Tomaselli shows, a full understanding of Wollstonecraft's thought is possible only through a more comprehensive appreciation of Wollstonecraft herself, as a philosopher and moralist who deftly tackled major social and political issues and the arguments of such figures as Edmund Burke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Adam Smith. Reading Wollstonecraft through the lens of the politics and culture of her own time, this book restores her to her rightful place as a major eighteenth-century thinker, reminding us why her work still resonates today.The book's format echoes one that Wollstonecraft favored in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: short essays paired with concise headings. Under titles such as "Painting, " "Music, " "Memory, " "Property and Appearance, " and "Rank and Luxury, " Tomaselli explores not only what Wollstonecraft enjoyed and valued, but also her views on society, knowledge and the mind, human nature, and the problem of evil—and how a society based on mutual respect could fight it. The resulting picture of Wollstonecraft reveals her as a particularly engaging author and an eloquent participant in enduring social and political concerns.Drawing us into Wollstonecraft's approach to the human condition and the debates of her day, Wollstonecraft ultimately invites us to consider timeless issues with her, so that we can become better attuned to the world as she saw it then, and as we might wish to see it now.

CHAPTER ONE

What She Liked and Loved

OF ALL THE THINGS Mary Wollstonecraft might have wished for her sisters, friends, or indeed herself and humanity, self-command or, as she would have termed it, fortitude, would be highest. She has Maria, the protagonist of her posthumous novel, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, recall her uncle defining “genuine fortitude” thus: it “consisted in governing our own emotions, and making allowance for the weaknesses in our friends, that we would not tolerate in ourselves.”¹ Control over one’s self was central to her conception of character, and it was something that she viewed as sorely missing in the world: “Most women, and men too, have no character at all,” she wrote in her first published work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life (1787).² She stressed the essential nature of control of one’s self in all her writings in one form or other. Self-command or self-governance, as Catriona MacKenzie refers to it in an important article on the subject, was the foremost virtue for her since it was the necessary condition of all the others.³ She was not alone in seeing it as the bedrock of human personality. Adam Smith (1723–1790), with whose work on moral personality she engaged, thought likewise; he spoke of the “great school of self-command” and saw it as the basis of every other virtue;⁴ so, of course, had a long line of philosophers reaching all the way back to Socrates. To be sure, all philosophers, when pressed, would agree that ultimately nothing can be achieved, no virtue exercised, without the power to will oneself to do or to forbear. Wollstonecraft made that point emphatically. She believed European society to be in particular need of being told this. Although she did see, or hoped to see, some signs of a potential moral rejuvenation in the revolution in France, she judged contemporary society to be corrupt and the bulk of her contemporaries to be degenerate in some way. While she expended much intellectual energy understanding how self-control could be taught and developed, and which social forces enhanced and which weakened it, she used most of her ink exposing what she took to be the folly of the world, its vanity, and delusions: its sheer stupidity. This is particularly true of her A Vindications of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Wollstonecraft found little to praise in either sex. Neither women, with very rare exceptions, nor men emerge unscathed from her pages or fulfill their human potential. While she certainly did not hold what is commonly referred to as a pessimistic view of human nature, much of her writing is condemnatory and her tone, cutting. Her book reviews are mostly damning when they are not dismissive, her own books rich in disapproval of nearly everything she depicted in them, likewise her correspondence. It was, to be sure, the style of the time, of the genres in which she wrote, and in many ways the product of her circumstances, but it did become her.

As a result, it would be all too easy to think of her as all denunciation and a thorough killjoy. Indeed, that is how she has been viewed, and Julie Murray has rightly challenged this.⁵ It therefore may not be amiss to begin a study such as this by evoking some of the things Wollstonecraft did appreciate or even love and wish others to relish. It is also worth noting that while she thought forms of abstemiousness often necessary and the capacity to exercise them vital to the individuals themselves, their relations, and society more generally, she did not think of self-command as equating to, or necessarily entailing, self-denial. In considering what she divulged, or appeared to be, enjoying and what she thought constituted a good life, we gain both in understanding of her as a person and comprehension of her philosophical outlook. It allows us to see and, in some cases, tease out what she deemed the philosophical challenges a reflecting mind such as hers faced, for even the seemingly most simple pleasures entailed serious considerations on her part. Most, it would appear, if not all, had to be in the service of the development of a particular kind of personality, one with character. What made for character or contributed to its making emerged in part from what she wrote of the arts.

The Theater

Wollstonecraft did value many things for the sheer enjoyment they gave her and others. This was especially evident in her youth, before “misfortune had broken [her] spirits,” as she described it when she was only twenty-two.⁶ She prized the performing arts from an early age and, in one of the earliest extant letters of 1773, expressed excitement at the prospect of seeing a play: “I am going to see the Macaroni if it be performed, and expect a great deal of pleasure.”⁷ The theater was for Wollstonecraft a lasting source of delight. She began the final of her Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark by reporting that there was “a pretty little French theatre at Altona; and the actors are much superior to those I saw at Copenhagen,” and noted that the theaters at Hamburg would soon open.⁸ Her correspondence toward the end of her life also attests to her continued enjoyment of the theater, a milieu in which Godwin and she had a number of friends, and her copious quotations show that she not only attended performances but read plays.

Pleased to be given a new edition of Shakespeare while in Dublin in 1787, she cited him frequently and throughout her life, drawing on a great many of his plays, including As You Like It, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest, and providing lengthy extracts from these in The Female Reader (1789). On seeing “some heart’s ease,” she evoked A Midsummer Night’s Dream when she wrote to Imlay that “[if] you are deep read in Shakespeare, you will recollect that this was the little western flower tinged by love’s dart, which ‘maidens call love in idleness.’ ”⁹ Her novels are infused with his words, and in a 1788 review for the Analytical Review of Essays on Shakespeare’s Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff and on his Imitation of Female Characters. To which are added, some general Observations on the Study of Shakespeare by the Glasgow Professor of Humanity, William Richardson (1743–1814), it is clear that she thought of herself as someone who, unlike many, had a genuine understanding of Shakespeare’s works.¹⁰ She agreed with Richardson’s claim that “half critics” were mistaken in thinking that Shakespeare “has exerted more ability in his imitation of male, than female characters,” though she could not concur with “the cordial praise he bestow[ed] on Ophelia.” Ophelia’s conduct in Hamlet, she maintained (unknowing what lay in her own future), “was mean and unjust; if she acted like a female we pity her weakness, but should not either praise or palliate a fault that no mistaken notion of duty could justify without confounding the distinction between virtue and vice.”¹¹

If she condemned the action of his character, Ophelia, she did not fault the playwright. She thought that, unlike most dramaturges, he had succeeded in what she considered one of the great challenges that only great art could meet, namely, finely delineating the “almost imperceptible progress of the passions.”¹² Given how little she was given to unqualified commendation, her expressed admiration for “our incomparable poet” is striking and the grounds for it of particular interest.¹³ Commenting in a review in 1789 on the number of novels being published and how very few of them were “tolerable,” she wrote of Shakespeare by contrast as follows:

Shakspeare [sic] created monsters; but he gave such reality to his characters, that we should not hesitate a moment to deliver our imaginations, and even reason, into his hands; we follow their wild yet not fantastic foot-steps through wood and bog, nothing loath—thinking them new, though not unnatural.^1...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: What She Liked and Loved
• Chapter 2: Who Are We? What Are We Made Of?
• Chapter 3: What Went Wrong? The World as It Was
• Chapter 4: What She Wished and Wanted
• Chapter 5: A Life Unfinished
• Bibliography
• Index