Mary Wollstonecraft

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CL AUDIA L . JOHNSON

Introduction

Even though Mary Wollstonecraft had little to no presence in history or literature curricula as recently as a generation ago, she has never exactly been a minor figure. Some, certainly, have wished her so. A dauntless advocate of political reform, Wollstonecraft was one of the first to vindicate the “rights of man,” but in her own – brief – lifetime andever since, she achieved notoriety principally for her championship of women’s rights. And while some of this notoriety took the particular form of scandal of the sort that often attends women directly involved in public affairs, some of it she directly sought in her writing and in her conduct. Controversy always inspired Wollstonecraft, always sharpened her sense of purpose. Whether writing abouteducation, history, fiction, or politics itself, she was always arguing – even her travelogue, written as a series of letters to her faithless lover, is an ongoing argument. And in turn, Wollstonecraft always inspired controversy. A revolutionary figure in a revolutionary time, she took up and lived out not only the liberal call for women’s educational and moral equality, but also virtually all ofthe other related, violently contested questions of the 1790s – questions pertaining to the principles of political authority, tyranny, liberty, class, sex, marriage, childrearing, property, prejudice, reason, sentimentality, promises, suicide, to mention only a few. Clearly, she struck many a raw nerve. Although her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), for example, at first received fairlyrespectful reviews as a tract on female education,1 after England and France declared war, it was increasingly (and correctly) read against the backdrop of its broader progressive agendas on behalf of liberty. Thereafter, efforts to vilify Wollstonecraft, though sometimes marked by an air of puerile jocularity, were hysterically intense. Horace Walpole famously called the champion of women’s rightsa hyena in petticoats; Richard Polwhele arraigned her as the foremost among modern-day unsexed females; and the Anti-Jacobin Review of 1798 went so far as to index her under “P” for Prostitute, presumably because no woman could conceivably wish to criticize standards and practices of female modesty unless she wanted to
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Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006

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breach them with impunity.2 No one could possibly arouse this sort of animus unless she is perceived to have posed an urgent, an important threat indeed. Vindications of this great vindicator are marked by a comparable intensity. When Blake invokes a “Mary” persecuted by “foul Fiends,” or later in the nineteenth century when Elizabeth Robins Pennell likens her to Saint Vincentde Paul and to Joan of Arc, it is clear that Wollstonecraft was regarded as a formidable figure who challenged the sexual and moral norms of her society in radical ways and who was martyred as a result.3 But assailed, revered, or lamented – anything but actually forgotten, even when her memory seemed to go underground – Wollstonecraft’s celebrity rested principally on the narrative that makes upher life, particularly as it was first related in Godwin’s Memoirs of in 1798. As Cora Kaplan observes here in her compelling essay on Wollstonecraft’s legacies, Ralph Wardle concludes his path-breaking 1951 biography by fully acceding to the assumption that it has not been her writing but rather her “personality” that “has kept her memory alive,” opining that for every “one” person who plodded heror his way through A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “dozens” thrilled to the story of her courage and idealism.4 There is no denying that ever since her death in 1797, Wollstonecraft endured as a story whose outlines are both highly charged and highly conventional – a story about a passionate but difficult woman’s idealism in love (her daring affair with Gilbert Imlay) as well as in politics...