Wollstonecraft's Ghost

The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period

Andrew McInnes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315523156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Focusing on the ways in which women writers from across the political spectrum engage with and adapt Wollstonecraft's political philosophy in order to advocate feminist reform, Andrew McInnes explores the aftermath of Wollstonecraft's death, the controversial publication of William Godwin's memoir of his wife, and Wollstonecraft's reception in the early nineteenth century. McInnes positions Wollstonecraft within the context of the eighteenth-century female philosopher figure as a literary archetype used in plays, poetry, polemic and especially novels, to represent the thinking woman and address anxieties about political, religious, and sexual heterodoxy. He provides detailed analyses of the ways in which women writers such as Mary Hays, Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Opie, and Maria Edgeworth negotiate Wollstonecraft's reputation as personal, political, and sexual pariah to reformulate her radical politics for a post-revolutionary Britain in urgent need of reform. Frances Burney's The Wanderer and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, McInnes suggests, work as state-of-the-nation novels, drawing on Wollstonecraft's ideas to explore a changing England. McInnes concludes with an examination of Mary Shelley's engagement with her mother throughout her career as a novelist, arguing that Shelley gradually overcomes her anxiety over her mother's stature to address Wollstonecraft's ideas with increasing confidence.

1 Imagining Mary

Representations of Wollstonecraft in the works of Mary Hays and William Godwin

DOI: 10.4324/9781315523170-2

Both Mary Hays and William Godwin present very personal portraits of Mary Wollstonecraft which were, and still are, highly influential in later representations of her life and thought. Moreover, their representations of Wollstonecraft – as friend, thinker, lover – proved to be revolutionary to their own self-representations. For Hays, Wollstonecraft provided a model for how to be a woman writer; a model which she would try to live up to and celebrate in print. For Godwin, his love affair with Wollstonecraft would accelerate developments within his political philosophy, particularly a renewed emphasis on the domestic affections. Although, as Mark Philp argues,¹ Godwin may have been moving towards a reconceptualisation of the position of the private sphere in his political philosophy before his relationship with Wollstonecraft, his biography of his late wife crystallised these ideas into a precise argument which he would repeat in his novel St. Leon and his defence of his philosophy, Reply to Dr. Parr. For both writers, the nexus between representation and self-representation was the imagination, conceived as a bridge between reason and passion.

1 See Mark Philp, Godwin's Political Justice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), for his argument that Godwin's views on the domestic affections changed independently from his relationship with Wollstonecraft.

Godwin and Hays's focus on Wollstonecraft's imagination, and its effect on their own creative selves, forms part of a shift in the 1790s from Enlightenment models of subjectivity towards a Romantic understanding of the self. In Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, Barbara Taylor argues against what she sees as a later romanticising of Wollstonecraft's career, shifting emphasis back onto the eighteenth-century underpinnings of her thought, especially Dissenting religious practice.² While I am sympathetic towards Taylor's excellent exegesis of Wollstonecraft's complex engagement with religion in her life and writing, my focus on Wollstonecraft's posthumous reception stresses the significance of Romantic rereadings of her work, which tend to stress her imaginative power and creative potential. The roots of this Romantic idealisation of Wollstonecraft can be found in Hays and Godwin's original formulations of her personality.

2 See Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 282, for her footnoted dismissal of Wollstonecraft as Romantic figure.

Situated on faultlines between Enlightenment and Romanticism, private and public, reason and passion, Hays and Godwin's representations of Wollstonecraft are themselves liable to fracture. By splitting Wollstonecraft ‘between her amazonian-critical-rational and feminine-imaginative-emotional representations’³, as Nicola Trott argues, Godwin's Memoirs allowed Anti-Jacobin commentators to further feminise Wollstonecraft, coupling the details of her private life with an already existing misogynistic discourse of the prostitute in order to defuse her radical critique of the contemporary treatment of women. This split both taps into and borrows from the deepening division between the idealised Enlightenment representation of the female philosopher and her nightmarish, counter-revolutionary double, using Godwin's candid revelations to fuel reactionary abuse of the couple's life and work. On the other hand, and more positively, Godwin's divided representation of Wollstonecraft in his Memoirs also allowed women writers sympathetic to her feminist thought to draw on this split to separate Godwin's feminine ideal of Wollstonecraft from the counter-revolutionary iteration of the female philosopher, together with aspects of her political philosophy which they wished to develop in the post-revolutionary era. I argue that these later divided representations of the female philosopher caricature Mary Hays's self-representation as a thinking woman to ‘rescue’ Wollstonecraft from the counter-revolutionary opprobrium visited upon the publication of Godwin's Memoirs. These fractured versions of the female philosopher – at once terrifyingly unwomanly and rich in creative potential – feed into the later vilifications and idealisations of the feminist today.

3 Nicola Trott, ‘Sexing the Critic: Mary Wollstonecraft at the Turn of the Century’ in 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads, ed. Richard Cronin (London: Macmillan, 1998), 54.

In this chapter, I draw on the private correspondence between Wollstonecraft, Hays and Godwin to demonstrate the extent to which both writers were attempting to publicise their personal understanding of this complex woman. Hays's representation of Wollstonecraft inspires her own distinctive brand of feminist philosophy, often subordinated under Godwin and Wollstonecraft's influence in contemporary and modern criticism. Moreover, her vision of Wollstonecraft as the foremost female philosopher of the day informs both her own self-representation as a feminist, and later revisions of Wollstonecraft's influential arguments. Godwin's sometimes ambiguous celebration of his late wife offers a divided representation of Wollstonecraft to both Anti-Jacobin detractors of the couple's revolutionary philosophy, eager to besmirch the reputation of both, and more positively, a model for later women writers to separate out Wollstonecraft's troubling reputation from her inspiring arguments. In this chapter, I trace Wollstonecraft's influence on Mary Hays from her early Letters and Essays, which drew on her professional correspondence with Wollstonecraft to formulate a distinctive feminist stance on contemporary issues; to their fictionalisation in Memoirs of Emma Courtney; before intertwining Hays's memorialisation of Wollstonecraft with Godwin's biography of his wife, together with his own fictionalisation of her in St. Leon's Marguerite de Damville.

‘The rights of woman and the name of Wollstonecraft’: Letters and Essays

In August 1792, Hays began her correspondence with Wollstonecraft with what amounts to a fan letter, praising the latter's Vindication of the Rights of Woman and her ‘spirited support of the just and natural rights of her sex’.⁴ Kelly explains how Hays, after reading Wollstonecraft's second Vindication, ‘felt it to be a personally revolutionary text’ (Women, Writing and Revolution, 80). This not only explains Hays's gushing tone in her letter, but how Hays would later interpret Wollstonecraft's life and thought throughout her own published oeuvre: Wollstonecraft's revolution became Hays's personal passion.

4 The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin, 2004), 202, fn. Subsequent references, in-text.

After meeting Wollstonecraft at Joseph Johnson's house, Hays described Wollstonecraft as possessing ‘the sort of genius which Lavater calls the one in ten million. Her conversation, like her writings, is brilliant, forcible, instructive and entertaining. She is a true disciple of her own system, and commands at once fear and reverence, admiration and esteem’ (Collected Letters, 209, fn). Gina Luria Walker singles out Hays's representation of Wollstonecraft as a genius as a seminal moment in Hays's own self-presentation: from this point on, Hays would strive to occupy the role of Wollstonecraft's ‘true disciple’. Hays's realisation of Wollstonecraft's singular nature also had ramifications for the image she later constructed of her friend and mentor for posterity. In contrast, however, to Hays's enthusiasm for Wollstonecraft's genius, conversation and writings, Wollstonecraft adopted a distinctly chilly demeanour towards Hays and her literary endeavours in her critique of the Wollstonecraftian Letters and Essays.

Wollstonecraft undertakes a detailed critique of Hays's self-presentation in her preface. Mary A. Waters notes that Wollstonecraft eschews advising Hays on the content of her work but comments on exactly ‘how she should present herself to the reading public – how, in other words, to market herself effectively as a new author’.⁵ Wollstonecraft criticises Hays's obsequiousness, her false humility and her reliance on male mentors. She firstly pinpoints Hays's obsequy, overemphasising ‘the honour of publishing’ which is, in Wollstonecraft's view, ‘the cant of both trade and sex’ (Collected Letters, 209), instead stressing the need for equality over servility in relations between employer and employed. Wollstonecraft takes issue with a character trait here, which several of Hays's male mentors, including Robert Robinson and William Godwin, had also lamented.⁶

5 Mary A. Waters, ‘“The First of a New Genus”: Mary Wollstonecraft as a Literary Critic and Mentor to Mary Hays’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 37.3 (2004), 415–34, 424. Subsequent references, in-text.

6 Walker cites Robinson's refusal to accept Hays's excessive flattery in a letter of March 1785: ‘First, give me leave to tell you, yea to threaten you, that if you do not leave off complimenting me, as soon as I can write, I will spoil a quire of paper, and stretch every power I have to try and out compliment you’ (Growth of a Woman's Mind, 39).

Next, Wollstonecraft warns Hays that she is ‘going to treat you with still greater frankness – I do not approve of your preface and I will tell you why’ (Collected Letters, 209). Wollstonecraft prepares Hays for harsh but useful criticism. She scolds Hays for pleading ‘Disadvantages of education’ telling her that ‘if the writer has not sufficient strength of mind to overcome the common difficulties which lie in his way, nature seems to command him, with a very audible voice, to leave the task of instructing others to those who can’ (209). Waters comments briefly on the ‘use of masculine pronouns’ throughout this passage, which, she argues, highlights ‘the assumption that ordinarily authors, especially authors of expository prose, were male’ (‘The First of a New Genus’, 424). I contend, however, that Wollstonecraft's use of masculine pronouns in a letter between two women writers both highlights Wollstonecraft's challenge to eighteenth-century gender norms and encourages Hays to have the ‘sufficient strength’ to publish, and stand, on her own merits.

Wollstonecraft's final paragraph criticises Hays for including in her preface private words of encouragement from her male friends, declaring that these friends will ‘still treat you like a woman’, that is, with condescending acclaim in private which ‘they would be sorry openly to avow without some cooling explanatory ifs’. Wollstonecraft concludes her letter with both encouragement and warning:

In short, it requires great resolution to try rather to be useful than to please … – Rest, on yourself – if your essays have merit they will stand alone, if not the shouldering up of Dr this or that will not long keep them from falling to the ground.

(Collected Letters, 210, original emphasis)

Wollstonecraft holds out the possibility of Hays's usefulness as a writer but demands that Hays stands on her own merit, without male support. Waters concludes her own analysis of Wollstonecraft's suggestive letter by returning to this issue of self-presentation:

Her advice to this new author concludes as it began with attention not to literary or even political issues, but with guidance on self-presentation: ‘till a work strongly interests the public true modesty should keep the author in the background.’ We need hardly remark that although her implied author started out male, it is an especially feminine virtue – modesty – that spurs a writer to place the work before the self.

(424)

Resting on yourself, for Wollstonecraft, does not mean putting yourself forward, but presenting your material assertively, remaining authorially modest or neutral. In the Vindication, Wollstonecraft devotes a chapter to ‘Modesty – Comprehensively Considered, and Not as a Sexual Virtue’ in which she distinguishes between humility and modesty: ‘Modesty … is that soberness of mind which teaches a man not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think, and should be distinguished from humility, because humility is a kind of self-abasement’.⁷ Wollstonecraft's distinction between humility and modesty, rather than revealing her confused gender constructions, as Waters seems to suggest, instead illuminates her attempt to co-opt the language of neutrality – understood as a male-dominated edifice – for women writers such as herself and Hays. Wollstonecraft claims modesty as an important attribute of the philosopher, arguing that ‘I have … philosophically pursued these reflections till I inferred that those women who have most improved their reason must have the most modesty’ (Vindication, 193). Wollstonecraft's philosophical pursuit, here, is deliberately gendered neutral, even when considering ‘women who have most improved their reason’. Both modesty and philosophy, in Wollstonecraft's terms, are gender-neutral, available to both men and women.

7 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, vol. 5, eds. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989), 191. Subsequent references, in-text.

In response to Wollstonecraft's comments, Hays redrafted her original preface so that the published version quotes Wollstonecraft's argument that ‘as society is at present constituted, the little knowledge, which even women of stronger minds attain, is of too desultory a nature, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction: I’m not a female philosopher, but …
• 1. Imagining Mary: Representations of Wollstonecraft in the works of Mary Hays and William Godwin
• 2. The death of the feminist in Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray, Elizabeth Hamilton’s Modern Philosophers and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda
• 3. England in Eighteen Hundred and Fourteen: The state of the nation in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
• 4. Hideous progeny: The female philosopher in Gothic, historical and silver fork fiction
• 5. Afterword: The afterlives of the female philosopher
• Bibliography
• Index