Vindication (48 page)

A
contest for Mary Wollstonecraft's memory began with her death. On the day she died, Joseph Johnson wrote to Godwin: ‘I know her too well not to admire and love her. Your loss is irreparable. May you know the same strength of mind which…she exerted for your support.' Two days later Johnson's voice changed. He laid a claim, an undeniable claim of prior knowledge, when, on 12 September, he discovered that Godwin meant to exclude Henry Fuseli from the circle of legitimate mourners–a circle including Johnson himself, her portraitist Opie and her early adviser John Hewlett–who were to be invited to her funeral. Here is Johnson's protest:

The first of her friends
: this is about more than an invitation to a burial; it's about constructions of the past. Fuseli's spitfire speech lurks behind
Johnson's persuasiveness when he asks Godwin to grant Fuseli his part in Mary Wollstonecraft's life. Who owns the great? Who has the right to mourn and remember? Already, a struggle for possession had begun, starting with the question: what version of this woman's life will be transmitted to posterity? In his quietly firm way, Johnson reminds Godwin there had been others who had loved Mary Wollstonecraft and helped make her what she was.

On 15 September she was buried in the churchyard of Old St Pancras, where she had married five months before. Godwin did not attend. Instead, he sat brooding in Marshall's lodgings, a return to his bachelor companion. ‘I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world,' he wrote to Holcroft. He picked up
Mary
where he had left off the day she had been in labour, and read the unfinished manuscript of
The Wrongs of Woman
. Then he plunged into her letters. Those to Imlay he thought the most touching love-letters in the language. It came to him that his wife had been a female Werther, suicidal, doomed. They had read Goethe's novel
The Sorrows of Young Werther
aloud on 29 August, the night before she had gone into labour, and its arch-Romantic image of surrender to destructive emotion was presented to the public in Godwin's
Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, published in January 1798. The resilience so marked in the course of her life was somewhat obscured by Godwin's own sorrow. In the weeks following her death–while he reeled off the memoir–it was he who gave way to melancholy, finding in it a Werther sort of relish foreign to his wife's temperament. A white-faced portrait shows him in mourning at the age of forty-two, less angular than as a bachelor, and neater; his thinning hair, cut short, is parted in the centre. He looks out above his jutting chin with sombre eyes. Godwin's unaccustomed surrender to emotion was all the more dangerous for his illusion of control.

‘I love to cherish melancholy,' he confided to Mary's friend Mrs Cotton. ‘I love to tread the edge of intellectual danger, and just to keep within the line which every moral and intellectual consideration forbids me to overstep, and in the indulgence and this vigilance I place my present luxury.' His vigilance did not prevent his offence to Fuseli, nor rows with Mary Hays and Mrs Inchbald, nor his frostiness towards the Wollstonecraft sisters
which spared no thought for their status as Fanny's aunts, the only blood relatives who might one day interest themselves in the girl's welfare. Godwin's grief in the last quarter of 1797 took him out of his measured habits in ways that were to have consequences for the reputation of Mary Wollstonecraft and for the fate of her beloved Fanny.

 

When Mary Hays had visited Mary Wollstonecraft five days before her death, Godwin had not encouraged her to stay. From his point of view he had enough attendants, but all were habitués of his own circle. As Wollstonecraft's loyal friend and the one who had brought the Godwins together, Hays protested that she was ‘not altogether insignificant'.

Godwin jumped on what he mistook for vanity. ‘To speak frankly, I think you have forgotten a little of that simplicity & unpresuming mildness, which so well becomes a woman.'

To someone of spirit this smacked of ‘tyranny'. So Hays rebuked a thinker who had made tyrants his target.

Godwin said she ‘poisoned' the roots of friendship and deserved to lose him as her mentor. ‘We are at present, twin stars that cannot shine in the same hemisphere.' Despite the awful solemnity of this pronouncement, they did visit now and then. Mrs Inchbald was cast off more completely. Godwin wrote to four people on the day of Mary Wollstonecraft's death, and Mrs Inchbald was one of them. ‘My wife died at eight this morning,' he wrote. ‘I always thought you used her ill, but I forgive you.' Mrs Inchbald offered polite condolences without the intensity of regret Godwin required from a one-time friend who had snubbed Mary in public. Suddenly, control snapped.

‘I must endeavour to be understood as to the unworthy behaviour with which I charge you towards my wife,' he began. ‘I think your conversation with her that night at the play base, cruel, and insulting…I think…that you have an understanding capable of doing some small degree of justice to her merits. I think you should have had the magnanimity and self-respect to have shewed this. I think that while the Twisses and others were sacrificing to what they were silly enough to think a proper etiquette, a person so out of all comparison their superior, as you are, should have placed her pride in acting upon better principles, and in courting and
distinguishing insulted greatness and worth; I think that you chose a mean and pitiful conduct'–and so on.

Mrs Perfection was unrepentant. She needled Godwin's wound by reminding him of her reluctance to know Mary Wollstonecraft. Perfection could not, as she put it, ‘sufficiently applaud my own penetration in apprehending, and my own firmness in resisting, a longer and more familiar acquaintance'. She proceeded to put ‘an end to our acquaintance
for ever
'. This was accompanied by an offer of ‘the most perfect forgiveness of all you have said to me'. She added, ‘I respect
your prejudices
, but I also respect
my own
.'

By the time Godwin received this on 26 October, he had already determined on a public vindication of his wife. In the past he had attacked public wrong through his pen, most effectively with the collapse of the Treason Trials in 1794. At that time he had been prudent enough to act anonymously; this time he meant to use his wife's name and fame in defiance of gendered morals. He burned to express his outrage that ‘the firmest champion, and, as I strongly suspect, the greatest ornament her sex ever had to boast' had been snubbed by those who condoned ‘the dull and insolent dictators, the gamblers, and demireps of polished society'.

So a fortnight after his wife died, Godwin began to set down his version of a life he had known only in its final phase–less than two of Mary's thirty-eight and a half years. Needing basic information, especially on her early years, he turned to a man who had known Mary Wollstonecraft only at second hand, apart from her one month in Lisbon in November–December 1785. In his most formal manner, Godwin wrote to Fanny Blood's husband Hugh Skeys in Dublin. This letter appoints Skeys to question the Wollstonecraft sisters, and Skeys may have felt flattered by Godwin's dependence, but it's hardly an approach to appeal to the sisters. Only two weeks after Mary was buried, Godwin, who has not so far addressed a word to her sisters himself, fails to imagine
their
loss. Instead he makes a case for biography and for himself as biographer, a case where logic gets lost in insistence. For even as he claims to ‘know a good deal respecting every period of her life', he is forced to own, ‘I am not well prepared on the subject', and has to limit to a factual shell his surprisingly uninformed queries:

Why does Godwin not communicate directly? In part he may be sore that the sisters have not seen fit to reply. Neither they nor Godwin seemed able to heal the estrangement, and were compelled to communicate through intermediaries. The coldness during Everina's last visit to Mary in February 1797 had reappeared in Godwin's report on Everina to Mary when he visited the Wedgwoods in Staffordshire: ‘Your sister would not come down to see me last night at supper, but we met at breakfast this morning. I have nothing to say about her.' Mary had been rueful: ‘I supposed that Everina would assume some airs at seeing you–she has very mistaken notions of dignity of character.' Neither makes allowance for the inferior position of a governess meeting her employers' guests,
and Mary seems to forget her own trials of that kind. Eventually, it was Everina who crossed the barrier and wrote directly to Godwin about his ‘hurry'. By 17 October, the posthumous manuscripts were already with the press. A month after the funeral, he was not only well into the
Memoirs
, he had also performed the massive editing job required by the half-finished
Wrongs of Woman
. By 15 November, two months after the funeral, Godwin had a complete draft of the memoir. He proceeded to give it a scant four days for revision. His rationale was ‘that the public curiosity was most excited relative to an eminent person by publications that appeared in no long time after their decease'.

The Wollstonecrafts were taken aback to discover that Godwin intended a more candid and detailed life than they had been led to believe. Everina's first and just concern was biographic accuracy:

My sister Mary's life
: Everina reminds Godwin–as Johnson and Hays had tried to remind him–that he alone did not own Mary's memory. Of these protests, Everina's is the most pointed. Godwin took no notice, and
excluded his wife's sisters from the memoir, except as peripheral recipients of her largesse. He used friction between them and Mary to press his own ‘maxim' against ‘cohabitation'; and he saw fit to publish a judgement on the sisters' jealous inferiority. Another biographer might have tried to draw out their invaluable knowledge, as well as the trove of letters in their possession. He might have noted, for a start, their choice of independence over marriage, and they could have alerted him to his error in blaming the caustic note in Mary's voice on the influence of Fuseli. As her sisters would have known, that voice went back to her schooldays: ‘I have a heart that scorns disguise, and a countenance which will not dissemble,' she had said at fifteen. Godwin possessed a different Mary from what he called the ‘harsh', ‘rigid' author of the
Rights of Woman
. For Godwin had fallen in love with a woman wounded almost to death–a suicidal Dido abandoned by her sea-going lover, a ‘female Werther', a creature of ‘exquisite sensibility' in a state of intractable depression, who had come to him for help. This familiar plot–the rescue of a Fair in distress–Godwin laid like a grid over an uncategorised creature with a plot of her own in the making. That grid has fixed Mary Wollstonecraft's image in the public mind for more than two centuries.

There were two bases to Godwin's power over posterity. In positioning himself as her intimate and vindicator, he gained one form of authority; in positioning himself as a man who must tell the truth, even if it told against the wife he meant to vindicate, he gained another. And these two forms of authority reinforced each other with a conviction that continued to distract readers from the fact that some of his views are skewed. The second
Vindication
, he thought, contained sentiments ‘of a rather masculine description…There are also, it must be confessed, occasional passages of a stern and rugged feature', offset, he hastens to assure us, by passages of ‘trembling' feminine delicacy. ‘The
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
', he concludes, ‘is undoubtedly a very unequal performance, and eminently deficient in method and arrangement. When tried by the…long-established laws of literary composition, it can scarcely maintain its claim to be placed in the first class of human productions.' Such attitudes were rooted in Godwin's first clash with Mary Wollstonecraft at Johnson's dinner table in November 1791. Her rebuke of Burke still seemed to him ‘too contemptuous and
intemperate'. How dared a woman attack a ‘great man', whatever he had done? He was willing to grant that
men
of her persuasion were justifiably ‘inflamed' by Burke's desertion of human rights. Godwin is plainly speaking for himself when he reports how readers expected to find ‘a sturdy, muscular, raw-boned virago' (hardly softened in the second edition to ‘a rude, pedantic, dictatorial virago'), but found instead ‘a woman, lovely in her person, and…feminine in her manners'.