Flesh in the Age of Reason (41 page)

Her masterpiece,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, berated for the servitude of her sex politicians, parents, preachers, schoolmasters and -mistresses, tutors and governesses, and such sexist authors as Rousseau, Dr Gregory, Dr Fordyce and Lord Chesterfield. Its social and political proposals ranged from civil and political rights for women down to the details of the school curriculum.

Women must learn autonomy, mastering skills to support themselves and their children. Marriage, she argued, ought to be based on friendship rather than sexual attraction (or, as she now characteristically put it, ‘mere animal desire’). What made women’s position in the existing social order so radically disadvantaged and unsatisfactory was that they were encouraged (by men; that is to say, by the system) to play the coquette, which, by bringing to the fore qualities that were sex-specific and eroticized rather than human, won them short-term attention. Society would have them flaunt their charms as ‘alluring
mistresses’, by inducing them to behave in childish, kittenish or flirtatious ways.

A vitiated model of female modesty was thus exploited in which chastity – or the reputation for possessing it – was all-important, and this in turn made conquest supremely enticing to predatory men. Women, in other words, had been reduced to coveted sexual challenges and catches, pawns in a game of seduction, resistance and conquest. The status progress trumpeted by Alexander, Kames and Millar was merely a sham: in actuality, modern marriage was no better than ‘legal prostitution’. A woman might thus exercise a fleeting sexual power but overall the role was degrading, setting centre-stage as it did an animal passion which would be temporary and should be subordinate. Wollstonecraft wanted something better for her sex: ‘I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.’

Encouraging the giddy girl and the spoilt and pettish coquette, sexual power weakened and cheapened women. In her didactic works and later fiction, Wollstonecraft censured the married woman – her main model was Lady Kingsborough, to whose children she had served as governess between 1787 and 1788 – who divided her time between her mirror and the salon, succumbed to every fad, and was flirtatious and unfaithful in thought yet too timid to risk her reputation by taking a lover. Having farmed out her infants to wet-nurses, such a creature showed no true interest in them on their return, fearful lest her daughters should outshine her; she could not concentrate long enough to improve herself by reading; she affected physical frailty, feigned illness to gain attention, lacked all decorum before her husband, children and servants, and feared not God but the loss of her looks. Dependent upon men’s favours, such women were no friends to their own sex. From her own mother onwards, she had seen far too much of such frailties all her life.

In her bid to reform her sisters, Wollstonecraft could not sufficiently stress the ephemeral and overrated nature of sex and romance: ‘Love, considered as an animal appetite, cannot long feed on itself without expiring,’ she explained:

when even two virtuous young people marry, it would, perhaps, be happy if some circumstances checked their passion… If sexual desire is part and parcel of a human’s life it should ideally lead rather quickly to the state of considered reflective, rational friendship between the male and the female.

The romanticization of women, regarded by Alexander, Kames and Millar as a kind of empowerment (they would, wouldn’t they?), in reality thrust two qualities – or rather vices – to the fore. First, ignorance: it was the uneducated and irrational woman who gratified male wants. What was to blame here was ‘a false system of education’ put about by

men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers; and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition.

That defect was to be countered by the rational education of girls on a basis of history, biography, geography, science, domestic physiology and true morality, to which end Wollstonecraft did her didactic bit with her high-minded
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
.

The other great vice – itself the product of irrationality and encouraged by men – was vanity, that is, preoccupation with ‘person’ or appearance. This gave women the reputation – alas, all too richly deserved – of being the ‘frivolous sex’. ‘They spend many of the first years of their lives in acquiring a smattering of accomplishments,’ Wollstonecraft priggishly lamented,

meanwhile strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty… And this desire making mere animals of them, when they marry they act as such children may be expected to act: – they dress; they paint, and nickname God’s creatures. – Surely these weak beings are only fit for a seraglio!

The pitiful marriage of ignorance and vanity produced an ‘artificial weakness’ in ladies which encouraged in them ‘a propensity to tyrannize, and gives birth to cunning, the natural opponent of strength’.

Preoccupation with ‘person’, and the cultivation of alluring appearances dictated by fashion, could, furthermore, be detrimental to health. Like Thomas Beddoes (as discussed in
Chapter 13
), Wollstonecraft told of women who prided themselves upon their weakness and pallor, so as to gain celebrity. ‘I once knew a weak woman of fashion,’ she claimed,

who was more than commonly proud of her delicacy and sensibility.… I have seen this weak sophisticated being neglect all the duties of life, yet recline with self-complacency on a sofa, and boast of her want of appetite as a proof of delicacy that extended to, or perhaps, arose from, her exquisite sensibility.

The solution to this obsession with ‘person’ or the body was the cultivation of the mind. For ‘in what does man’s pre-eminence over the brute creation consist? The answer is as clear as that a half is less than the whole; in Reason.’ Rationality in women was all too often scanted, even by the high-minded. Milton, she complained, ‘tells us that women are formed for softness and sweet attractive grace’ – ‘I cannot comprehend his meaning,’ she spat, ‘unless, in the true Mahometan strain, he meant to deprive us of our souls, and insinuate that we were beings only designed by sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratify the senses of man when he can no longer soar on the wing of contemplation.’ Perhaps that was what Milton meant when he wrote, of ‘our first parents’: ‘He for God only, she for God in him’.

The avidity of her sex’s absorption in the physical, their preference of body over mind, grieved Wollstonecraft. In truth, everything which drew attention to the flesh was potentially ensnaring for them. In a passage with an almost hysterical ring, she exposed the evils of schoolgirls sharing washing facilities or a common bedroom:

In nurseries, and boarding-schools, I fear, girls are first spoiled; particularly in the latter. A number of girls sleep in the same room, and wash together. And, though I should be sorry to contaminate an innocent creature’s mind by instilling false delicacy… I should be very anxious to prevent their acquiring nasty, or immodest habits; and as many girls have learned very nasty tricks, from ignorant servants, the mixing them thus indiscriminately together, is very improper.

The result was that, from childhood onwards, women grew too preoccupied with matters of the flesh: ‘women are, in general, too familiar with each other, which leads to that gross degree of familiarity that so frequently renders the marriage state unhappy.’

Foundations were thereby laid in youth, she continued in a highly charged and rather misogynistic passage, for that seductive but fatal absorption in the bodily which entrapped women as inferiors. ‘Nasty customs’ resulted ‘which men never fall into’:

Secrets are told – where silence ought to reign; and that regard to cleanliness, which some religious sects have, perhaps, carried too far, especially the Essenes, amongst the Jews, by making that an insult to God which is only an insult to humanity, is violated in a beastly manner. How can
delicate
women obtrude on notice that part of the animal oeconomy, which is so very disgusting?… After their maidenish bashfulness is once lost, I, in fact, have generally observed, that women fall into old habits; and treat their husbands as they did their sisters or female acquaintance.

Through such over-familiarity, women discovered they could insinuate themselves into men’s affections with ‘bodily wit’ and similar ‘intimacies’. In short, she concluded, ‘they are too intimate. That decent personal reserve which is the foundation of dignity of character, must be kept up between woman and woman, or their minds will never gain strength or modesty.’

Not least, the pervasive physicality of a girl’s upbringing readily led to the evil of masturbation and other ‘nasty indecent tricks’ learnt from each other, ‘when a number of them pig together in the same bed-chamber’. Like many in her day, Wollstonecraft believed that
self-abuse became compulsive, thereby rendering women reliant upon sexual gratification in a way sure to encourage an unhealthy dependency upon male attentions. The sex thus made chains for itself.

Wollstonecraft, it must be stressed, was no prude. Since the supreme duty of a woman was to be mother to her children – in a social capacity, mother to the nation – she wanted girls to be educated with a rational awareness of the biological essentials for rational motherhood, including a knowledge of the facts of life: ‘Children very early see cats with their kittens, birds with their young ones, &c. Why then are they not to be told that their mothers carry and nourish them in the same way?… Truth may always be told to children, if it be told gravely.’

If there is an element of ‘the lady doth protest too much’ in all this it is because of the deep tensions between precept and practice in Wollstonecraft’s life (Boswell offers a parallel). For the author who warned against the perils of sexual passion was also the woman who thrust her attentions upon the married Henry Fuseli and flung herself at the adventurer Gilbert Imlay (and twice attempted suicide after he rejected her).

The dilemmas of Mary Wollstonecraft also epitomize the paradoxes of female identity. Should a woman be just like a man? Were women in some crucial way different? Should such differences be cultivated or obliterated? Should the relations between the sexes be based essentially upon high-minded friendship? Should sex be discounted – in effect, as her husband William Godwin wished, disappear? Did they possess finer sensibilities? What, in short, did women want?

No conclusive answers emerged. What is abundantly clear, however, from the musings and meditations of such women as Mary Wollstonecraft is that women had never before set their own agenda. The perennial and unquestioned despotism of men – in scripting women’s roles – must end. They must henceforth be the mistresses of their own destinies. Women could never control their bodies until they first took possession of their minds.

How provoking it must have been when Thomas Hobbes noted, as we have seen, that our word ‘person’ was derived from the Latin for ‘Mask or Visard… So that a
Person
is the same that an
Actor
is’. For actors had never been held in good odour – it was on account of the ‘immorality’ of the stage for such reasons that the Puritans had closed the theatres down. More broadly, the status of ‘acting’ or ‘playing a part’ had always been deeply dubious in Judaeo-Christian (and above all Protestant) cultures desperately fearful of idolatry and similar abominations. Edward Gibbon was amused to quote from his aunt’s favourite writer, William Law, ranting about the evils of the theatre: ‘The actors and spectators must all be damned: the play-house is the porch of Hell, the place of the Devil’s abode, where he holds his filthy court of evil spirits: a play is the Devil’s triumph; a sacrifice performed to his glory, as much as in the Heathen temples of Bacchus or Venus &c. &c.’ Amateur theatricals would soon prove the downfall of the sexual morals of the younger Bertrams in Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park
.

On the stage, the subversive implications of ‘playing a part’ have always been explored and exploited through the devices of disguise and mistaken identity, transformation, the classic bed-trick, and such like. Theatrical make-believe revealed how temptingly easy it was to slip out of one part and into another (all it needed was a change of mask and costume); Boswell might actually become Macheath. It also brought to prominence the disturbing reality of illusion: now one saw Hamlet, now one saw Garrick. All these worries had, of course, long been harped on by preachers and moralists eager to expose not just theatres as such but the great ‘theatre of the world’. And they were especially voiced in the emergent post-Restoration
pleasure society in London and the provinces, in which drama flourished and the tricks of the stage seemed to be pervading the wider world, not least through that abomination of abominations, the masquerade, where everyone could act whatever part they liked, masked and in disguise, for an evening.

If fundamentalists, steeped in the Old Testament, were particularly disturbed by the lies and blasphemy of the stage, even the business of telling one’s own story was not unproblematic within Christian values (in popular speech, ‘telling stories’ remains a common euphemism for lying). For were not pride and vanity – blowing one’s own trumpet – among the most heinous vices?