In Search of Mary (24 page)
Authors: Bee Rowlatt
Can I bear it? It’s not only that I’m being a chicken – although that’s certainly a factor. It’s that the whole effort, the point and the meaning of all this travelling and writing – it has all been about bringing her to life. Resurrecting her. So at what point must I look deep into her slow and untimely annihilation? What possible good can it bring? Can’t I pretend it didn’t happen and only stay in the warm places, the vivid moments, the true sound of her living voice?
I know there is no good in it, but despite myself I look anyway. Holding the book, my dearest old battered book with the smooth and neglected death section, unwanted, close to the end, I turn to these dreaded back pages, brace myself and look inside. The spine isn’t even cracked. No aging notes, scraps or bookmarks fall out of this part. The text itself appears smaller, and the language more dusty since all my supersized Californian capering, but oh, it’s good to be back with her. Even here.
Wollstonecraft has done Paris, done Norway, returned to London and been finally rejected by Imlay. She has tried to die once more, continued with her writing and publishing, and embarked on a love affair with the radical philosopher William Godwin. This last is the most golden, but also the shortest episode in her story. Theirs is a “friendship melting into love”. Their letters are tender, and the relationship is one of equals.
Godwin is kind: he brings thoughtful gifts to young Frances, and he thinks the world of Wollstonecraft and her “unvanquishable greatness of soul”. They become an item, to the dismay of London society. Only when she gets pregnant do they cave in and get married, to protect their unborn child from the social fury their unconventionality provokes. They marry in St Pancras Old Church, where, a few short months later, she will be buried.
The “last fatal scene of her life” cannot be better conveyed than by William Godwin’s own words. Neither is his account matched anywhere as a blueprint for how Revolutionary Man can get it so perfectly right, in the ultimate moment of domesticity.
Now heavily pregnant with the author of
Frankenstein
, she “was taken into labour on Wednesday the thirtieth of August”. Being Wollstonecraft, she will of course have none of the customary medics and attendant fuss. She only wants a midwife and is cheerfully sending off notes here and there throughout the day, as her pains get stronger.
About two o’clock in the afternoon, she went up to her chamber – never more to descend.
The child was born at twenty minutes after eleven at night. … I was sitting in a parlour, and it was not until after two o’clock on Thursday morning that I received the alarming intelligence that the placenta was not yet removed, and that the midwife dared not proceed any further, and gave her opinion for calling in a male practitioner. I accordingly went for Dr Poignand, physician and man-midwife to the same hospital, who arrived between three and four hours after the birth of the child. He immediately proceeded to the extraction of the placenta, which he brought away in pieces, till he was satisfied that the whole was removed. In that point however it afterwards appeared that he was mistaken.
The period from the birth of the child till about eight o’clock the next morning was a period full of peril and alarm. The loss of blood was considerable, and produced and almost uninterrupted series of fainting fits. I went to the chamber soon after four in the morning and found her in this state. She told me some time on Thursday that she should have died the preceding night, but that she was determined not to leave me …
What had passed however in the night between Wednesday and Thursday had so far alarmed me that I did not quit the house, and scarcely the chamber, during the following day. But my alarms wore off as time advanced. Appearances were more favourable than the exhausted state of the patient would almost have permitted me to expect …
Saturday was a day less auspicious than Friday, but not absolutely alarming.
Sunday, the third of September, I now regard as the day that finally decided on the fate of the object dearest to my heart that the universe contained. Encouraged by what I considered as the progress of her recovery, I accompanied a friend in the morning in several calls, one of them as far as Kensington, and did not return till dinner time. On my return, I found a degree of anxiety in every face, and was told that she had had a sort of shivering fit and had expressed some anxiety at the length of my absence… I felt a pang at having been so long and so unseasonably absent, and determined that I would not repeat the fault.
In the evening she had a second shivering fit, the symptoms of which were in the highest degree alarming. Every muscle of the body trembled, the teeth chattered, and the bed shook under her. This continued probably for five minutes.
And so it continues. On Monday they call more doctors in. On Tuesday they discuss operating.
Wednesday was to me the day of greatest torture in the melancholy series. It was now decided that the only chance of supporting her through what she had to suffer was by supplying her rather freely with wine…
…About ten o’clock on Thursday evening, Mr Carlisle told us to prepare ourselves, for we had reason to expect the fatal event every moment… She did not die on Thursday night.
Good God, how long – how long can this carry on?
She was affectionate and compliant to the last. I observed on Friday and Saturday nights that, whenever her attendants commended her to sleep, she discovered her willingness to yield, by breathing, perhaps for the space of a minute, in the manner of a person that sleeps, though the effort, from the state of her disorder, usually proved ineffectual…
… On Saturday morning, I talked to her for a good while of the two children. In conformity with Mr Carlisle’s maxim of not impressing the idea of death, I was obliged to manage my expressions. I therefore affected to proceed wholly upon the ground of her having been very ill, and that it would be some time before she could expect to be well, wishing her to tell me anything that she would choose to have done respecting the children, as they would now be principally under my care. After having repeated this idea to her in a great variety of forms, she at length said, with a significant tone of voice: “I know what you are thinking of,” but added that she had nothing to communicate to me upon the subject…
At six o’clock on Sunday morning, September the tenth, Mr Carlisle called me from my bed to which I had retired at one, in conformity to my request, that I might not be left to receive all at once the intelligence that she was no more. She expired at twenty minutes before eight…
This light was lent to me for a very short period, and is now extinguished for ever!
In his diary that night, shattered Godwin writes only the words “twenty minutes before eight”, followed by three straight lines of his pen.
Still grieving, Godwin begins writing the biography that will unleash a storm. In a bitter twist, he will be accused of causing another death: that of her reputation. The world is not ready for her experimental life – the affairs, the illegitimate pregnancies.
Enemies pick over his work with howling glee: proof irrefutable that she was a whore and a bitch. Former friends back away, shaking their heads. Onto the historical scrapheap she is thrown. It took her ten days to die – the death of her reputation was more effective. And
this
is why Mary Wollstonecraft isn’t as famous as she should be.
Godwin’s account of her doomed fight for life is agony. The tears keep on flooding my eyes. Doctors have messily introduced the fatal infection with the attempted placenta removal, and I can scarcely stand the part where they apply puppies to her breasts to reduce the engorgement. What the
fuck
. She’s trying her best to live. We lost one of the greatest women – we lost her young, and for no reason at all. The unnecessary, lingering loss is more enraging than if she’d slipped and fallen down a hole. It is a trivial, preventable, commonplace and utterly stupid death. She dies a
woman’s death
.
Something I share with Wollstonecraft, and would very much prefer not to, is that I too had a retained placenta after the birth of my second daughter. I’ve always given the topic a wide berth, not out of squeamishness, but because of the war-correspondent tone that these conversations take. They tend to be less than sisterly:
“I was in labour for twenty hours.”
“Twenty hours? I was in labour for three days and had thirty stitches.”
“Thirty stitches? My womb fell out.”
“Mate, you got off lightly…”
There’s quite enough of that placenta banter going round. So suffice to say that two years after the event itself, I’m at a party with helium balloons. Everyone starts inhaling, and squeaking in comedy voices. I too inhale a deep gasp, but suddenly everything flashes straight back to the gas and air used in labour. I can taste and smell that moment, and immediately feel my imminent and certain death.
Everything shuts down. I’m unable to breathe or talk. I silently sink down to the floor. I think I’m there for quite some time – it’s hard to know. Sooner or later I start breathing again, and then get myself up off the floor, and eventually I become able to talk again. Standing there, confused and smitten with fear. It’s pretty freaky, and I wholeheartedly do not recommend it. Where did this come from?
From the manual removal of the placenta. Briefly, then: the birth was just the usual pulsing, primeval madness: wild clawings, donkey noises, you know. The widening pool of blood was strangely hypnotic as it sped across the floor, but it was way too fast for me to register any danger. After all, the baby was out, and she was fine. So surely everything was ok? But suddenly it wasn’t. Manual removal of the placenta. In these words is the nightmare. It was the cursed placenta that did me in. Not even the baby – just its lumpen used-up afterbirth.
Manual removal doesn’t sound like much. And perhaps there’s a way of doing it well. But in this case it involves
being punched repeatedly in my already shattered vagina by a male registrar who is shouting: “
DO YOU WANT ME TO GET THIS OUT OR NOT? GIVE HER MORE GAS
.” Followed by stitches, thrombosed haemorrhoids and panic attacks. Followed by years of not telling anyone about it. Not until now anyway.
Of course, I was massively lucky: I survived and my baby survived. And we’ve thanked god for the NHS an infinite number of times during the having of all these babies. Yet that weird, strangling terror was able to crash into my life at random. The panic attack, or whatever it was, came back to me a couple more times until I had another baby. This baby politely made her entrance in a much more safe and unkilling manner, and that seems to have been the cure.
Wollstonecraft, however, never got another chance. How many women still die in childbirth today? Too many. If it takes you an average five hours to read this book, in the same period of time one hundred and sixty women around the world will have died like this. Each cut down at her toughest moment, each leaving an orphan or devastated family behind. Retained placenta is still life-threatening. Death in childbirth remains widespread.
We lost her all too early, with her unfinished works and projects still in a heap. And her unfinished children, who suffered the loss so much harder than anyone. What else could she have crammed into even just a few years more? Could Mary Wollstonecraft have sustained that hurricane existence over a full lifetime?
We don’t even know what we lost.
Here we are, Will and I, in the heart of the world’s super-power, nestled among the wealthy techno-future, and a woman screams in raw terror, unsupported in her most basic of human needs. Oh, Wollstonecraft, I never should have taken my eye off you! When I was swanning around that literary lunch back in west London, you felt odd and old-fashioned, and I feared you might recede from view. And sure enough, here among these generous Californian beaches and people, I confess I forgot you a little. While all the time I was standing on the shoulders of your shortened but gigantic life.
Revolutions, France, old Europe – they all feel so far away from here, like a 1940s BBC voice on a crackling wireless. But they are very much closer than I thought. “Good evening. The Olden Days calling here, from London. We regret to report that certain women are bleeding to death in childbirth. However the magnificent men of the future will see to that, just as soon as they’ve made the flying automobile.”
There’s a passage in her fictional work
The Wrongs of Woman
. This is the last book that Wollstonecraft wrote and if you dig around, everything is here. The politics of the
Vindication
meets the more personal, inward voice of
Letters from Norway
. In the story a woman is imprisoned, “buried alive” in a lunatic asylum by her husband, who has also taken away her daughter. From her “darkened cell” the woman writes a letter to her child.
She could just as well be writing to the future, to centuries of daughters and great-granddaughters; to me. If it’s not too much of a Gothic leap, I like to read it as Wollstonecraft’s
voice from beyond the grave – as her manifesto and permanent legacy.
She is
… a mother, labouring under a portion of the misery, which the constitution of society seems to have entailed on all her kind[.] It is, my child, my dearest daughter, only such a mother who will dare to break through all restraint to provide for your happiness, to ward off sorrow from your bosom. From my narrative, my dear girl, you may gather the instruction, the counsel, which is meant rather to exercise than influence your mind. Death may snatch me from you before you can weigh my advice or enter into my reasoning. I would then, with fond anxiety, lead you very early in life to form your grand principles of action, to save you from the vain regret of having, through irresolution, let the spring tide of existence pass away, unimproved, unenjoyed. Gain experience – ah, gain it! – while experience is worth having, and acquire sufficient fortitude to pursue your own happiness; it includes your utility, by a direct path… Had I not wasted years in deliberating, after I ceased to doubt, how I ought to have acted – I might now be useful and happy.
