gotthold ephraim lessing 1729–1781 - St. Francis Xavier University

494 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
william wordsworth would later put it in his poem “French Revolution” (1809),
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive[.] . . . What temper at the prospect did not wake
/ To happiness unthought of?” (also included in The Prelude [1805] 10.692– 707). It
was in this climate that Mary Wollstonecraft composed her Vindications. To the
promise of liberty and equality for all men, Wollstonecraft added the simple but
radical idea that women, too, had a right to develop their faculties freely, that the
laws subjecting them to fathers or husbands could be changed, and that their
existing defects (and indeed their charms) were largely a result of social conditioning,
and could be modified. By comparing women to military men— both are fond
of dress, trained in obedience, and not expected to think for themselves— she
implies that education and socialization account for more differences than does
gender alone.
At the time of writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft was
just beginning to experience the additional complications that a life of passion
could create for an in de pen dent woman attempting to live by her reason. She fell in
love with Henry Fuseli and horrified his wife by suggesting that the three of them
might live together. Soon thereafter, she went to Paris alone.
Once in France, she wrote about the French Revolution (her Historical and Moral
View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, and the Effect It Has Produced
in Eu rope was published in 1794), observed the Reign of Terror with increasing
recoil, and fell in love with a dashing American, Gilbert Imlay, who, when British
citizens were being rounded up, registered her as his wife for her protection. She
conceived a child with him, whom she named Fanny, after Fanny Blood. Though the
birth was without complications, Wollstonecraft’s life was not. Gilbert was often
absent on “business,” and on two occasions when Wollstonecraft was to join him in
London, she discovered evidence of his infidelities. She twice attempted suicide;
between attempts, she offered to journey to Scandinavia to investigate some business
dealings for Imlay, and, traveling with a toddler and an attendant, wrote letters
detailing her travels (later published as Letters Written during a Short Residence in
Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, 1796). But the relationship with Imlay was over. As
virginia woolf memorably surmised in her 1929 short essay on Wollstonecraft
(reprinted in The Second Common Reader): “Tickling minnows he had hooked a
dolphin, and the creature rushed him through the waters till he was dizzy and only
wanted to escape.”
Wollstonecraft reentered the circle of intellectuals around Joseph Johnson, and
this time she found a great deal to discuss with the forty- year- old William Godwin,
who was now at the peak of his career (having published Po liti cal Justice in 1793
and the novel Caleb Williams in 1794). Soon “it was friendship melting into love,”
as Godwin later described it. Both of them were opposed to marriage on principle—
he felt that all formal commitments violate the feelings that inspire them, and she
felt that marriage laws disadvantage women. Nevertheless, when Mary found herself
pregnant again, they married at the beginning of 1797 so that the child would
be legitimate. Ironically, many “respectable” acquaintances who had wanted to
believe that Mary was married to Imlay broke off relations when this gesture of
propriety revealed the earlier illegitimacy.
The author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was happily working on a novel
titled Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (the play— and lack of symmetry— between
universal “rights” and gender- specific “wrongs” sums up the differences between
Wollstonecraft’s treatises and her novels) while she awaited the birth of “William.”
But she and Godwin had little chance to test their marital experiment. On September
10, 1797, she died of an infection contracted during unsuccessful attempts to
remove her broken and unexpelled placenta, eleven days after giving birth to a
daughter— the future Mary Shelley, author of a Gothic novel of education (Frankenstein)
and wife of a passionate disciple of both Godwin and Wollstonecraft, percy
bysshe shelley.