ABSTRACT
Ever since the private details of Mary Wollstonecraft’s life were made public posthumously by her husband William Godwin in Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1798), attacks on her works have echoed a consistent theme: her ideas are irrelevant or compromised because based wholly in the events and beliefs of her own life. Even though the central rhetoric of rights and freedoms places Wollstonecraft wholly within the liberal, republican ideology of the Enlightenment, her project remains dissonant to that ideology because of its implicit challenge to the distinction between public and private required by liberal politics.1 Contemporary invective was generally based on the inconsistent morality of Wollstonecraft’s life, as in Benjamin Silliman’s attack in Letters of Shahcoolen (1802), “She indeed professes a high regard for chastity; but unfortunately the practice of her life was at war with her precepts. She admitted one sentimental lover after another, to the full fruition of her charms, and proved the attainments of reason, to be, in her view, sources of pleasure, far inferior, in value, to the pleasures of sense.”2 The mid-twentiethcentury contribution of Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham chose a different target, clothing a psychoanalytic derivation of Wollstonecraft’s writing over a dismissal of feminism because of its basis in private, not public, issues, “That Mary Wollstonecraft was an extreme neurotic of a compulsive type there can be no doubt. Out of her illness arose the ideology of feminism, which was to express the feelings of so many women in years to come.”3 Eminently rational public discourse-the comparison of precepts with actions, the scientistic diagnosis (“there can be no doubt”)—radically excludes the private sphere. Astell’s phrase summarizes Wollstonecraft’s critique: the abstract notion of the freedom of man eliminates by virtue of its very abstraction the specific lack of freedom suffered by women. Defenders of Wollstonecraft, however, have tended to respond to these public-sphere attacks along the same lines; they muster the private life as defense against the less
appealing ideology of much of the Vindication. In Emma Goldman’s words, “Had Mary Wollstonecraft not written a line, her life would have furnished food for thought.”4 If, as Claudia Johnson has enumerated, contemporary feminists are disappointed by Wollstonecraft’s “suspicion of sexuality, her bourgeois conceptions of motherhood, [and] her commitment to masculinist enlightenment values,” they can still have recourse to the radical nonconformity of the events of Wollstonecraft’s biography and semiautobiographical fictions.5 We may conclude from the fact that both sides of the twohundred-year-old debate appear to have a stake in arguing Wollstonecraft’s life against her writings that much in the latter at least was invested in problematizing the distinction between public and private. For Wollstonecraft herself, the relationship between public and private was not to be resolved simply by collapsing one into the other. Placed within the context of Milton’s and Rousseau’s rewritings of Genesis, the Vindication can be seen to mobilize the distinction between public and private as a primary component of its utopian vision. The disconcerting way in which Wollstonecraft oscillates between ad hominem attacks and textual readings questions the way the Miltonic Genesis translates private issues into public ideology. Her reception of Rousseau equates the man and the philosopher, while adapting the key Rousseauan term of transparency as a central component in her own utopian poetics. In Wollstonecraft’s Puritan vision, only a transparency between public and private will be able to eliminate the inequitable treatment of women. Wollstonecraft’s rewriting of Genesis takes the form of a feud with Milton’s and Rousseau’s versions that is simultaneously personal and philosophical. It is no accident that she takes on two of the most prominent republicans of the previous hundred and fifty years; she does so because she identifies with their programs but rebukes them insofar as they have left out “one-half of the human race.” Wollstonecraft advocates autonomy for women in precisely the same terms that Kant had defined it for men in “Was ist Aufklärung?”: not necessarily so that women can move out of the private and into the public sphere, but in order that men may be involved more fully in the private one. One of her main objectives was enlightened parenthood. In her view, enlightenment must start at home; otherwise, the enlightenment of society at large would be compromised. The main obstacle to the realization of her utopian vision-and the subject of the Vindication-is the situation of women in society. As the debate around her writings suggests, the introduction of gender into political debate has an important consequence. If the only available subject position in the public sphere is that of the free individual, then women are necessarily speaking from the untenable position of the private sphere and are thus subject to its concerns. Although Wollstonecraft argues for maintaining the liberal separation of spheres, her political vision challenges the consequent argument that the individual can be genuinely himself only in private. Her new politics are to be uniformly implemented in the private and public worlds of the new citizenry. She introduces a new dimension into the enlightenment dream of an aesthetics of transparency: There are to be no double standards, and what is advocated in politics is to be practiced at home. Wollstonecraft’s political vision is a totalizing one: All constitutive parts, be they private or public, male
or female, aesthetic or political, and, of course, religious or moral, must be governed by the same principles, even when they remain generically distinct, if not actual, antitheses. In the utopian program outlined by Wollstonecraft in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, there emerges a guiding search for unity whereby the rhetoric of the presentation or form would mirror the image of an ideal society. The correspondence between her poetics and the content of her utopian vision is the basis for the organic and totalizing view of society which she proposes. The protagonists of the new utopia are the middle class, which she has chosen “because they appear to be in the most natural state.” The rich are excluded because they are “weak, artificial beings, raised above the common wants and affections of their race, in a premature unnatural manner,” who “undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through the whole mass of society!”6 The resulting aestheticization of middle-class ideals remains consistent with the determining assumption of her argument: an aesthetics of decorum-“the middle way.” This chapter explores Wollstonecraft’s utopian vision through an analysis of the detailed aesthetics she develops in the text. The first part is devoted to the version of Genesis Wollstonecraft writes through Milton and Rousseau. The search for the origin of evil-that is, a theodicy-leads Wollstonecraft to formulate a fall that is both spiritual and class-bound: women begin to live for this world and not for the next once they are considered “ladies” (p. 74, her italics). Unlike Rousseau or Milton, however, Wollstonecraft shies away from an unambiguous rewriting of Genesis as the means of formulating a utopian vision. She ends up with one nevertheless, because her diagnosis of unnatural society and the identification of its chief symptom, inequality, make an etiology of the malady indispensable. She does not attack Rousseau or Milton on the basis of their political writings, however, but explicitly in terms of their new renderings of J’s version of Genesis, which she dismissively terms “Moses’ poetical story” (p. 95). She thus shows herself to be fully aware of the sort of authority and legitimation attached to these appropriations of God’s word, seeking to refute them once and for all as “irreligious.” At the same time, however, she appropriates the traces of P’s version in these rewritings-the prophetic voice and their desire for equality-for her own rewriting. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the utopian vision of this rewriting as Wollstonecraft presented it in the Vindication through a poetics politically divided between allegory and mimesis-the modes with which she identifies the conflicting social orders of the ancien régime and the bourgeoisie, respectively. Mary Wollstonecraft’s running argument with Rousseau and Milton is set up very early on in the text by a number of polarities that allow her to map out her position and theirs with an increasing degree of complexity. Wollstonecraft shapes her view by way of oppositions that are in turn subsumed into larger oppositions which are eventually resolved into the two manifestations of the divine: beauty and truth. Wollstonecraft’s aesthetics are grounded in the distinction between naturalness and artificiality that runs throughout the Vindication. For Wollstonecraft, that which is artificial is the product of an unnatural society, while that which is natural is the manifestation of “true civilization.” Naturalness is identified with realistic and mimetic representation, while “artificial,” ornate and circumlocutory styles such as allegory are made to represent an unnatural
society. Allegory is associated with the ancien régime, while mimesis is linked to the emerging bourgeoisie; thus the aesthetic and the political mirror each other in Wollstonecraft’s text. Even more importantly, the polarization is also reflected on the moral level.7 In Wollstonecraft’s view, human nature is only able to emerge in the course of civilization. More particularly, civilization is defined by reason, which as the vehicle of human perfectibility must be the true goal of civilization, or natural society, as she also calls it. The ideals advanced by the French Revolution are the first manifestations of the natural society to come in which, once egalitarianism has purged social relations of arbitrary and artificial distinctions, the true nature of humanity will be allowed to emerge.8 This is one of the main differences between Wollstonecraft and both Milton and Rousseau. For Milton, Eden is the state now lost, on which ideal society should be modeled, while for Rousseau, the state of nature is likewise an initial state, now lost, that can be recaptured only as second nature. Both Milton and Rousseau believe in an initial state that must be recovered in one form or other in order to attain a perfect new state. Wollstonecraft works within a more linear model: she rejects an original state that would be the prototype of future society and contends instead that perfection lies wholly in the future as a goal. Hers is a model deeply influenced by an ideology of progress. By making reason the means to true civilization-that is, “nature”—Wollstonecraft is closer to Milton; she rejects the Janus character of reason and culture that is central to Rousseau’s thought. Her belief in reason is simple and unambivalent: if for Rousseau reason can lead to the highest good but can also be self-destructive, for Wollstonecraft, reason is the only way to perfection. With her deep-seated mistrust of the senses and belief in the need to dominate and control nature, Wollstonecraft remains, like Milton and Kant, more traditionally Christian and “enlightened” in her views.9 In this respect, Wollstonecraft separates herself from Rousseau; both rejected present society, but she sees their responses as diametrically opposed. Consequently, although Wollstonecraft agrees in theory with Rousseau’s critical analysis of contemporary society, she is equally determined to demonstrate his errors and limitations in order to further her own project:
But the nature of the poison points out the antidote; and had Rousseau mounted one step higher in his investigation, or could his eye have pierced through the foggy atmosphere, which he almost disdained to breathe, his active mind would have darted forward to contemplate the perfection of man in the establishment of true civilization, instead of taking his ferocious flight back into the night of sensual ignorance. (p. 87)
The poison is civilization and the antidote is reason.10 Her contention against Rousseau is his alleged rejection of society. The metaphor of the “foggy atmosphere” that crystallizes Wollstonecraft’s series of images recurs throughout the text as the sign of an imperfect, corrupt, or mediocre society. Wollstonecraft unwittingly shares with Rousseau an aesthetics of transparency (to borrow Starobinski’s language) that encompasses everything from government,
education, and morality to art. The following passage illustrates the dynamic of transparency and enlightenment to which she subscribes:
[T]aking refuge in the darkness, which, in the language of sublime poetry, has been supposed to surround the throne of Omnipotence, they dare to demand that implicit respect which is only due to His unsearchable ways. But, let me not be thought presumptuous, the darkness which hides our God from us, only respects speculative truths-it never obscures moral ones, they shine clearly, for God is light, and never, by the constitution of our nature, requires the discharge of a duty, the reasonableness of which does not beam on us when we open our eyes. (p. 225)
That which is evil is tainted or opaque, while that which is good is surrounded by light; this light can penetrate the most hidden recesses until all becomes explicit or manifest. The opposition between darkness and light determines the moral dimension of Wollstonecraft’s choice of aesthetics, whereby mimesis is light and allegory darkness. Furthermore, this dualism is also reflected in reason and sensuality, respectively, and is central to Wollstonecraft’s account of the origins of inequality between the sexes. Wollstonecraft’s utopia emerges as a totalizing structure intent on the coherency between all its parts defined by an ideal of translucence. In this worldview, evil is defined as all that interrupts or hinders vision and light, as, for example, in her critique of the mediated relationship between women and God in Milton’s poem, discussed later. By placing herself in opposition to Rousseau, Wollstonecraft is able to give shape to her own universal religio-historical perspective. As she succinctly puts it, “Rousseau exerts himself to prove that all was right originally: a crowd of authors that all is now right: and I, that all will be right” (p. 84). The extremes of her historical progression are clear: at one end, we have “sensual ignorance” or “barbarism,” and at the other, “true civilization.” In the middle, we find the “is” state of the late eighteenth century, at which time the French Revolution had, according to Wollstonecraft, displayed signs of moving a step forward towards the natural society. Wollstonecraft bypasses the traditional Christian eschatological view of history, wielding instead a blend of prophetic vision and the more linear empiricism of the day.11
