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| ISBN-13: | 9781783086863 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
WILLIAM GODWIN'S MEMOIRS OF THE AUTHOR OF "A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN" (1798): A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Most scholars agree that Godwin's biography of Wollstonecraft is biased and unreliable.
In 1981 Mitzi Myers notes this and also observes that, even after two centuries, his biography "remains the substratum on which even the newest lives erect their varying portrayals" of Wollstonecraft ("Godwin's" 299). It continues to be so; Memoirs is quoted more than any other source for information about Wollstonecraft as if it is the definitive biography. Since Godwin was Wollstonecraft's husband, the assumption is that he knew her better than anyone else, but the truth is the time that Godwin spent with Wollstonecraft was very short and sporadic. Furthermore, as Myers argues, the biography is more an autobiography by Godwin than a biography of his wife (310, 313).
Godwin joined Joseph Johnson's coterie on November 13, 1791, having received an invitation to a dinner party to honor Thomas Paine. From all accounts, he and Wollstonecraft struck an instant dislike for each other. They might have seen each other on a few additional occasions at Johnson's table, but they were barely acquaintances before Wollstonecraft left for Paris and fell in love with Gilbert Imlay. Wollstonecraft does not mention Godwin in any of her extant letters prior to their sexual relationship. After Wollstonecraft returned to Londonwith Fanny, Mary Hays schemed to get her two friends together and finally convinced both Godwin and Wollstonecraft to come to her home for tea on January 8, 1796. That setting proved to be more successful than earlier meetings. By February 13, Godwin was romantically interested in Wollstonecraft as he called upon Rebecca Christie in the hopes of finding Wollstonecraft there, but she was out of town visiting a friend (L. Gordon 291). After taking new lodgings close to him in Somers Town, now known as King's Cross, Wollstonecraft called on him at his home on April 14 (293). That a single woman alone would visit a single man at his home, who was also alone, was a brazen act. Was it her experience with the French Revolution "that made it seem a matter of no importance whether she put on her cloak and went to visit Godwin in Somers Town, or waited in Judd Street West for Godwin to come to her?" Woolf wonders (198). This reflects a similar suggestion printed in the Anti-Jacobin Review, except that the latter is full of sarcasm and accuses Wollstonecraft and Godwin of "Jacobin morality" (178). "The fate of the Vindication," Jean Grimshaw theorizes some seventy years after Woolf,
cannot be separated from views of Mary's personal life, nor from the fate of radical political ideas in the wave of repression and political reaction that dominated English politics in the years after the 1792. Mary's name and her work were tarred with the brush of French-style liberty, free thought, free love, irreligion, the undermining of family life, and all those things that were anathema both to conservative political orientations and to nineteenth-century evangelicalism. (9)
After Godwin made public his wife's private life, she became considered: a Jacobin in the eighteenth century, a fallen woman in the Victorian period in England, a champion of women's rights to the American suffragettes, perhaps a historical footnote during the first half of the twentieth century, an advocate of free love in the 1970s, an icon for feminists after that and whatever-you-want-her-to-be ever since. Whatever she was and is, very few readers and scholars are willing to separate Wollstonecraft from Godwin's image of her.
They became a couple, and their "intimacy increased, by regular, but almost imperceptible degrees," writes Godwin (Memoirs 103). He went on a short excursion in July, at which time they both realized that they could no longer bear to be parted. By the following January, she was pregnant, and they decided to get married. They exchanged vows at St. Pancras Churchon March 29, 1797, and shortly afterward set up an unconventional living arrangement: They took a three-story house, known as the Polygon, on Werrington Street, but Godwin rented separate quarters for himself some twenty doors away. They would live separately through the day, with Godwin returning to the Polygon by four or five, when they would dine together or spend time with other people, but they did not live as a couple. Thus, they kept their distance so that they could each work and avoid what Godwin referred to as "excessive familiarity" (110). After five months of "married life," Wollstonecraft was dead. They "knew" each other as a couple with well-defined boundaries that separated them, for only 18 months.
There was so much that Godwin did not know about Wollstonecraft that after her death, he had to write letters of inquiry to her friends and relatives in order to amass enough information to write his brief biography. Nonetheless, Harriet Jump calls his research "meticulous," as he "numbered letters and contacted friends" ("Fond" 6). Florence Boos considers Memoirs "an excellently written tribute to his wife's character which combines his own recollections of her with what she had told him of her childhood and whatever information he could gather from friends and contemporaries" ("Biographies" 6). She also thinks that Memoirs is "a beautiful work in itself" — the memoirs "narrate an unconventional life with remarkable honesty, and very nearly preclude the need for any additional biography of Mary Wollstonecraft" (6). However, Boos also thinks that what Godwin had learned about Wollstonecraft from Wollstonecraft was "incomplete" and "inaccurate" because of her own questionable recollection of the past and because of Godwin's access to only a minimal number of his wife's voluminous letters. Boos concludes that there is more to say about Wollstonecraft (6). This was Boos's assessment in 1973. Because of the gaps in biographies and criticism to that point, scholarship on Wollstonecraft would burgeon afterward, but most of it would repeat Godwin's inaccurate statements.
When Haskell House republished Memoirs in 1927, the brilliant W. Clark Durant offered a preface that includes something of an apology for Godwin's rendition of Wollstonecraft: "Give this lady's brilliant genius a possible chance to arise from those dark troubled waters of the River Lethe in which it has been for so long undeservedly submerged. Remove that false label!" (xi). He also makes a point to refer to Wollstonecraft as Wollstonecraft instead of Mary Godwin and attacks those who did and do otherwise (xi).
Indeed, Memoirs is drastically flawed by errors and incomplete data. Janet Todd's research revealed that although there were many letters between Wollstonecraft and Fanny Blood, none were preserved. Most likely Everina destroyed letters that might have contained revealing information (x). The lack of availability of such letters accounts for some of the misinformation in Memoirs, but the greater problem is that Godwin often manipulated what information he did have to further his own agenda. Pamela Clemit, who co-edited the Broadview edition of Godwin's Memoirs, concurs, arguing in her article on Godwin's autobiographical writings that much of Godwin's writing was autobiographical (including his Memoirs of Wollstonecraft) and for the purpose of "the commemoration and vindication of his social and political ideas," which he felt increasingly compelled to proclaim after the disappointing outcome of the French Revolution ("Self-Analysis" 176). His objective for writing Memoirs was not to present a fair and accurate portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Supposedly Godwin was shocked by the acerbic and vehement outrage that followed his publication (Jenkins 405). Was Godwin really so naïve to think that society was going to tolerate such blatant defiance of social conventions? Did he really have no idea that by proffering his own agenda in writing Wollstonecraft's story the way he did would effectively bury Wollstonecraft's work with her, which is exactly what happened? His own public defiance of social and moral conventions expressed in Memoirs also "led to a concerted campaign to discredit his ideas" (Clemit, "Self-Analysis" 174).
Several critics have absolved Godwin of any complicity in damaging Wollstonecraft's reputation. One defender is Tilottama Rajan (2000), who argues that Godwin's Memoirs is not about Wollstonecraft. Instead, Godwin is deliberately working out what Rajan terms, his own "historiography" about her life, but in so doing, contemplates his own genius and what it means to be a genius (512). Equally conciliatory, Jane Darcy (2013) considers Memoirs an experiment in biography: Godwin "earnestly attempts to present Wollstonecraft's powerfully intuitive nature as an exemplar for a new post-revolutionary age of openness and equality" (2). Clemit theorizes that his "innocuous" exposure of himself and Wollstonecraft came out of his Calvinistic upbringing, which encouraged public "self-scrutiny" (166–67), but after the fallout from Memoirs, he became "skeptical about the political efficacy of universal truth-telling" (174).
However, Myers (1981) emphasizes that Memoirs was not the first biography Godwin wrote, so he ought to have known what private information should have been kept private ("Godwin's" 307). Furthermore, Godwin expresses in Memoirs his awareness of how scathing society's opinion was about Wollstonecraft's illegitimate pregnancies (Godwin 105–6), so he could not have believed that his exposé would escape censorship (Myers, "Godwin's" 309). How ironic that, of all the men in her life, the one Wollstonecraft found the most congenial with her worldview and aspirations to change the world was the most efficacious in silencing her voice, devaluing her work and erasing her identity.
Godwin did this not only by publishing information about her alongside his social subversion, but also by overriding her belief systems with his own and by flagrantly disregarding facts about her life, which resulted in debasing it and her works. A Victorian who reviewed Paul's Letters to Imlay questions "the peculiar constitution of mind which induced Godwin to lay bare to the world the wrongs and agonies of his wife," and in 1879 was grateful for Kegan's more informed and sympathetic treatment of the "unfortunate writer." Jump (2000) supposes that twentieth-century readers would think Godwin's "tender, frank and lucid" account is a "model of all that a biography should be" ("Fond" 6).
Godwin does try to honor his wife. His first attempt is by describing her as "distinguished in early youth, by some portion of that exquisite sensibility, soundness of understanding, and decision of character, which were the leading features of her mind through the whole course of her life" (45). How does he know this? He did not know her in her youth. His statement is followed by the since widely referenced, "She was not the favourite of either of her father or mother" (45), as if her childhood experience of rejection was what produced her "exquisite sensibility, soundness of understanding, and decision of character" (45). However, he does not explain how one resulted from the other, nor does he explain how he knows this about Wollstonecraft. Is it something she shared with him? Or does he simply deduce it from his reading of Mary, a novel to which he refers immediately afterward, saying, "The mother's partiality was fixed upon the eldest son" (45), which is nearly a quote from Mary (87)? This statement established a precedent for future Wollstonecraft biographers and critics — that is, the free application of details from Wollstonecraft's fictional works to her life, as if both novels were copiously autobiographical.
Godwin continues with more commentary about Wollstonecraft's childhood. Nearly every biographical work on Wollstonecraft, whether blurb, sketch, essay or book, hereafter includes this anecdote about Wollstonecraft's father:
Mary would often throw herself between the despot and his victim, with the purpose to receive upon her own person the blows that might be directed against her mother. She has even laid whole nights upon the landing-place near their chamber-door, when, mistakenly, or with reason, she apprehended that her father might break out into paroxysms of violence. (46)
Although Godwin does not have much to say about Wollstonecraft's father, Edward Wollstonecraft did uproot his family many times due to his chronic business failures. That he might have vented his frustrations on the women in his life, who could not fight back, is credible. From Godwin's perspective, to publicize the father's abusive treatment of his family was an advantageous allegation in the hands of a social reformer who was, as the Anti-Jacobin Review worded it, "anti-hierarchical."
Since the father was ineffective as a reliable provider or leader for the family, "Mary was ever ready at the call of distress," Godwin assures his readers, and "to promote the welfare of every member of her family" (53). Again, her entire family would not have agreed with this statement. Bess had very little to say to her sister once Wollstonecraft began making money from her writing — after she had promised her sisters that they would be able to quit their positions as governesses and come to live with her. Once Bess learned that her sister was apparently married to Imlay, she expected that he would take care of her as well. Although it was Wollstonecraft's dearest dream that Imlay and she would have a new beginning in America, and that Wollstonecraft's siblings would join her and no longer have to suffer from the class divide in England, it just did not happen (Todd, CL 243, 282). However, Wollstonecraft did manage to set up her brother Charles on a farm in America and acquire a commission at sea for her brother James. She also paid for Everina to live in Paris for a year so that she could become proficient enough with French to be able to teach it as a governess. All of this was confirmed in a letter to Godwin from Johnson on the day that Wollstonecraft was being buried at St. Pancras. Johnson speculated that Wollstonecraft had spent at least £200 on her brothers and sisters, and that she was always sending money to her father.
Wollstonecraft's father died in 1803, leaving a horse and some cows, but also an old will that asked his eldest daughter to pay off his debts (Tomalin 254). Her brother, Ned, died in 1807, and the only comment about the effect of Memoirs on him was written by Claire Tomalin. Apparently, the notoriety was so bad for his children that they "grew up into strait-laced conservatives" and resettled in New South Wales (255). When Memoirs went public, Everina and Bess were terrified that their association with a scandalous sister would lose them their positions at schools in Dublin. Everina was running a boarding school for girls, and Bess was running one for boys (L. Gordon 414). Everina wrote to her sister that she was suffering a "paroxysm of despair" and proposed that they both emigrate to America to escape the publicity (Sunstein 350), but both weathered the storm and kept the schools until Bess-died in the early 1830s. After that, Everina lived in London and "continued to denounce Godwin whenever she got the chance, up to her death" (Jacobs 287) in 1843 (Tomalin 255). Wollstonecraft's daughter, Fanny, committed suicide when she was 22, leaving behind a letter that clearly evidenced that she had suffered immeasurably because of the public exposure of her mother. Fanny writes:
I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain; but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as [ ...]. (quoted in Dowden 328)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Betwixt and Between"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Brenda Ayres.
Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Abbreviations,
Chronology of Wollstonecraft's Life,
Introduction: The Betwixt and Between Life of Mary Wollstonecraft,
1 William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1798): A Political Philosopher's Autobiography,
2 Mary Hays's "Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft" (1800): The Second of a New Genus,
3 C. Kegan Paul's Mary Wollstonecraft: Letters to Imlay, with Prefatory Memoir by C. K. Paul (1879): The Victorian Gentleman,
4 Elizabeth Robins Pennell's Mary Wollstonecraft (1884): A Victorian Feminist,
5 Ralph M. Wardle's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (1951): Rosie-the-Riveter Wollstonecraft,
6 Eleanor Flexner's Mary Wollstonecraft (1972): The Very Insensible Wollstonecraft,
7 Claire Tomalin's The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974): Wollstonecraft with Sparkle,
8 Emily Sunstein's A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (1975): Not-so-liberated Woman,
9 Margaret Tims's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Social Pioneer (1976): Wollstonecraft's Life: The Stuff of Novels,
10 Gary Kelly's Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (1992): A Literary Revolutionary,
11 Janet M. Todd's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (2000): The "Impudent and Imprudent" Wollstonecraft,
12 Miriam Brody's Mary Wollstonecraft: Mother of Women's Rights (2000): A Befitting Betwixt and Between Biography,
13 Diane Jacobs's Her Own Woman: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (2001): Never Just Her Own Woman,
14 Caroline Franklin's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Literary Life (2004): "The Education of an Educator",
15 Lyndall Gordon's Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (2005): Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue,
16 Julie A. Carlson's England's First Family: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (2007): "Con/fusions of Fact and Fiction",
17 Andrew Cayton's Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793–1818 (2013): "A Subject of George III",
18 Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter (2015): Like Mother, Like Daughter,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
What People are Saying About This
“This book offers a fascinating perspective on more than two centuries of Wollstonecraft biography. Ayres writes with a scholarly eye, tracing the different versions of Wollstonecraft that have emerged over the years and interrogates the evidence on which they are based.” —Jane Hodson, Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Sheffield, UK
“Betwixt and Between is a bracing critical survey of how frequently biographers distort or even discount facts when depicting the life of Mary Wollstonecraft. In its desire to set the record straight, this book adds to our knowledge of Wollstonecraft’s complicated life, and charts her changing significance over the course of two centuries to scholars whose deep investments in her life tell a history of its own.” —Julie A. Carlson, Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA