Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine

Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

This page intentionally left blank

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Ashley Tauchert

Lecturer in English University of Exeter

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine

Q Ashley Tauchert, 2002

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P OLP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0±333±96346±6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tauchert, Ashley. Mary Wollstonecraft and the accent of the feminine / Ashley Tauchert. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 0±333±96346±6

1. Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759±1797ÐCriticism and interpretation. 2. Feminism and literatureÐEnglandÐHistoryÐ18th century. 3. Women and literatureÐEnglandÐHistoryÐ18th century. 4. Sex differences (Psychology) in literature. 5. Femininity in literature. 6. Self in literature. I. Title. PR5841.W8 Z798 2001 8280 .609Ðdc21 10 9 8 7 6 11 10 09 08 07

5 4 3 2 1 06 05 04 03 02

2001036153

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

This book is written in celebration of the life and work of Barbara Elizabeth (Whenmouth) Tauchert

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

This page intentionally left blank

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: Female Embodiment and Writing The Athenic mode

1

8

Part I Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and

Fanny Blood 1 Love between Women ± Wollstonecraft's

Early Writings

17

19

Cherchez la meÁre

23

Part II

53

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) Original Stories (1788) Mary: A Fiction (1788)

Female Embodiment and the Body-Politic

26

29

33

2 Female Embodiment, Rape, and the Vindications Vindicating masculine virtue Ten thousand swords Female-embodied reason Leaving out the mother Vindicating women: the problem that is women's

writing This tumultuous passion The phantom phallus

55

58

61

63

65

Part III

81

Matrilineal Writing

3 The Pregnant Writer: Historical and Moral

View of the French Revolution The body of the people Castrated and potent maternal bodies 4 Matrilineal Writing: Letters from Sweden and

Wrongs of Woman

68

72

78

83

88

90

97

vii

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Contents

viii Contents

101

102

103

105

107

111

118

126

Conclusion: Female Embodiment and Writing

beyond Wollstonecraft Rape and intersubjectivity Fantasies of the feminist in wet skirts

131

134

139

Notes

145

Bibliography

153

Index

167

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

The story as of woman Imported into another economy . . . Women are `products' used and exchanged

by men . . . The murder of the mother results [in] the burial of

the madness of women ± and the burial of women

in madness ± Speaking-among-women/speaking (as) woman Feminist sublime where all foundations are called

into question Letters from Sweden: my babe The subject of matrilineal writing

This book could not have been produced without the support and encouragement (not to mention work) of Peter Swaab, Gill Howie, Regenia Gagnier, Jane Spencer, Raymond Tauchert, Mark Tauchert and Becky Peters, and anyone who has ever looked after my children for me or written a reference for me. And thanks to the two anonymous readers who helped to shape the argument. It is dedicated, as is everything I am and do, to the dream of a better future for Jack, Alice and Georgie, and would not have been possible without their special brand of love and wisdom. And, as ever, written for and with my dearest friend and partner, who makes everything possible . . . Earlier varations on the arguments made in this book have been published in the following journals: Women's Writing, 4.2.1977; QWERTY: Arts, LitteÂratures et Civilisations du Moude Anglophone, 9 (October 1999); Romanticism on the Net (May 2000).

ix

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Acknowledgements

If women are to be granted a position congruous with but independent of men, the female body must be capable of autonomous representation. This demands a new use of language and new forms of knowledge capable of articulating femininity and women's specificity in ways quite different from prevailing alternatives. (Grosz, 1995, p. 36) I am a woman. I am a being sexualized as feminine. I am sexualized female. The motivation of my work lies in the impossibility of articulating such a statement; in the fact that its utterance is in some way senseless, inappropriate, indecent. . . . I can thus speak intelligently as a sexualized male (whether I recognize this or not) or as asexualized. Otherwise I shall succumb to the illogicality that is proverbially attributed to women. (Irigaray, 1985a, pp. 148±9) The phrase ± `because I am a woman' ± is used by Mary Wollstonecraft in the introduction to her most famous work, and perhaps the one most compelling for feminist enquiry, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). There is a pause in the introduction to this Vindication, where the writing subject takes a moment to reflect on her status as a woman writing about women:

1

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Introduction:

Female Embodiment and Writing

2 Introduction

This qualifying statement of intent works in two apparently contradictory ways: both `just because I am a woman and `it is because I am a woman, that . . .'. The first marks Wollstonecraft's consciousness of her difference from other women, while the second indicates her consciousness of her difference as a woman from that against which `the equality or inferiority of the sex' is judged. How we choose to read this ambivalent intention informs our understanding of her Vindication, and the career it stands for. The second possible reading emphasises the difference in Wollstonecraft's style and approach, and performs a little like a 1790s version of parler-femme; while the first implies an equalising claim in itself, in spite of her intention not to agitate on behalf of equality or inferiority.1 This odd little passage arises at a moment in the Vindication engaging directly this `contested question' of `equality or inferiority'. Wollstonecraft's conscious self-identification as a woman is given voice in a passage where the argument has been suspended to deliver an authorial `opinion' to avoid `misconstruction'. It strikes a chord with the ongoing questions contained by the more contemporary `Equality or Difference' argument, foregrounded by Irigaray's work, and followed up at length in feminist theoretical debate.2 Wollstonecraft's `opinion' turns out to be that: `In the government of the physical world it is observable that the female in point of strength is, in general, inferior to the male.' The `Equality or Difference' debate hovers over the fault-line between female-embodiment and subjectivity (in Wollstonecraft's terms, citizenship). A contradiction is mobilised by feminist approaches to questions of equality, when feminism itself can be understood as a symptom of Enlightenment foreclosure of definitions of equality and citizenship, epitomised by Kant's distinction between `active' and `passive' citizenship. (Kant, 1991, p. 139) Feminism has inherited Kant's contradiction, and added a few of its own. (Caine, 1997; Whitford, 1991, p. 16) The most pressing `contradiction' for modern feminism is the one Wollstonecraft is seen struggling with in her Vindication: between a historical claim for inclusion in a model of

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Yet, because I am a woman, I would not lead my readers to suppose that I mean violently to agitate the contested question respecting the equality or inferiority of the sex . . . (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 10)

equal, rational citizenship, and the recognition that the subject in whose name rational equality is pursued was historically ± and remains structurally ± an essentially masculinist one, grounded in an exclusion of the feminine, and as such ultimately alienating of the female-embodied subject. (Salvaggio, 1988) Wollstonecraft's claim to rational citizenship for women is made in spite of her embodiment, and the late eighteenth-century writings in which she stakes this claim bear evidence of this female-embodied writing subject's struggle to transcend and elide her condition of embodied immanence. If rationality is founded on a `historical privileging of the purely conceptual or mental over the corporeal', which demands a simultaneous dependence on and disavowal of body, women are ± as de Beauvoir was so painfully aware ± disqualified before the race begins. (Grosz, 1995, p. 26) For female-embodied writing subjects, this auto-disavowal necessary to status as a rational subject of discourse is at least double, since the immanence of the body is figured female, and the immanence of the female is figured through her embodiment. (Lorraine, 1999, p. 77) The stakes are raised when we consider that modern feminism may be understood less as a logical extension of radical thought in the revolutionary late eighteenth century, than `a consequence of the new forms of discrimination which women faced at this time when they were explicitly denied rights being granted to men under bourgeois law'. (Caine, 1997, p.5) The titles of Wollstonecraft's two monumental Vindications, of the Rights of Men (1790) and of the Rights of Woman (1792), point directly to this metahistorical schism between equality and (embodied) difference that opens up as soon as women make claim to rational subjectivity in the name of `woman'. Jacobus identifies what is at stake here in her comment that Wollstonecraft of the Vindications speaks `not so much for women, or as a woman, but against them ± over their dead bodies'. (Jacobus, 1989, pp. 54±5; original emphasis) Having delivered her `opinion' regarding the relative difference in bodily strength between the sexes, Wollstonecraft pauses again to prevent `an obvious inference' of which she has become `aware', producing her infamous appeal that women should `every day grow more and more masculine', and her struggle to appropriate a definition of masculine virtue for herself, if not for women in general. She re-describes `masculinity' here as `the attainment of those talents and

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Introduction 3

virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character, and which raise females in the scale of animal being, when they are comprehensively termed mankind'. She will not `agitate violently' for `equality' for her sex, then, because that isn't the issue. The issue was for Wollstonecraft what Cavarero has described recently as the `twofold valency of the male, on the one hand male and on the other neutral or universal', which necessitates and allows `the repression of female sexual difference' not as an `exclusion' but as an `homologising, assimilating inclusion'. (Cavarero, 1992, p. 37) Wollstonecraft concludes her parenthesis on what it means for her to be a woman writing this Vindication with this appropriately bifocal observation: `I shall first consider women in the grand light of human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties; and afterwards I shall more particularly point out their peculiar designation.' The issue for Wollstonecraft, then, was the extent to which women were equal and different: leading her, in the Rights of Woman especially, to what Pateman has termed `Wollstonecraft's dilemma'. (Pateman, 1992, p. 20) Wollstonecraft's dilemma, its manifestations in her writings, and a signal towards its resolution in the later works, is the core subject of this book. Academic feminism has had a lot to say about Mary Wollstonecraft, and one can to some degree trace the rolling agenda of feminism in the three distinct waves of interest in her life and works (corresponding to three waves of feminist activism) since her death. Wollstonecraft's writing has been an important focus for feminist research and theory since a new generation of women writers and academics in the 1970s published research. Janet Todd, in particular, reclaimed Wollstonecraft from the shallows of research and teaching where she had achieved some presence as the wife of William Godwin and the mother-in-law of Percy Shelley, and from the attentions of academic gentlemen interested in salvaging her damaged reputation.3 As Todd has remarked, the biographical research and editorial work produced by feminist academics and biographers of the 1970s, while bringing Wollstonecraft's life and works more prominently to the attention of the academy, are characterised by their `stylistic date'. (Todd, 1993, p.3) Academic feminism needed a fore-mother, and found her in Mary Wollstonecraft, who combined intellectual independence and political consciousness in her engagement with, and resistance to, Enlightenment discourses; with a biography challenging to historical

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

4 Introduction

and modern models of female propriety. She had been marked out for feminist attention notably by George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, but it was only through the efforts of a feminist academic community that she was brought to the centre of discussions of literary history, political history, Romanticism, Enlightenment thought, and education.4 Almost a century earlier, First Wave feminists were claiming Wollstonecraft as a founding figure in the struggle for female suffrage. Georgiana Hill located the beginnings of the women's suffrage movement directly in Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and Millicent Garret Fawcett in 1907 described Wollstonecraft as `A Pioneer of the Movement'. The first-wave feminists emphasised Wollstonecraft's congruence with their appeal for women's rights, noting in particular her (somewhat ambivalent) reference to possible female suffrage in the Rights of Woman. They were mining an impressive precedent for their otherwise unprecedented demands.5 First-wave feminist attention to Wollstonecraft fashioned her primarily as a proto-suffragist. Academic feminist analysis of Wollstonecraft has refashioned her from time to time, in accordance with its own (necessarily) shifting focus. Scholarship produced in the late twentieth century, marking a third wave of feminist activism situated in the academy, has tended to focus less on celebration of Wollstonecraft as an inspiring past feminist icon, more on the flaws, inconsistencies, weak spots, and historical complications in Wollstonecraft's status as feminist.6 This shift is symptomatic of the identity crisis of millennial feminism. The re-fashioning of Wollstonecraft offered in this book emerges from a serious and sustained consideration of Irigaray's claim that modern Western culture replicates and amplifies abstract masculinist subjectivity as a network of exchange between hom(m)osocial subjects, in which women/the feminine subsist as commodified objects of that exchange, and as material sustenance for the abstract masculine subject.7 The consequences of this model for writing women are particularly severe, since the implication is that women who claim a speaking subject-position are forced to adopt one of three diminished routes: silence, irrationality, or imitation of masculinist forms (hysteria).8 If the only way for women to write intelligibly, then, is to adopt a crypto-masculine subjectivity, women can only write as imperfect, defected, `castrated', men. Female-embodiment casts women as deformed or incomplete men, but they nonetheless must compete

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Introduction 5

for enunciation ± for cultural space ± as masculine subjects. The race is lost before it has begun. Women writers are hysterics. However, the `hysteria' assigned to women registers symptoms of this chronic absence of a female-embodied subject position, in figures of excess or lack. Irigaray re-defines hysteria as a mode of displaced communication through mimicry and mutism, which underpins women's popular and ancient association with deception: `miming/ reproducing a language that is not its own, masculine language, it caricatures and deforms that language: it ``lies'', it ``deceives'', as women have always been reputed to do'. (Irigaray, 1985a, p. 137). Irigaray's counter-psychoanalytic frame offers an intriguing passage into our understanding of past women's writing. Are women writers always hysterics, imitating forms of masculinist discourse? What if, however, they turn that discourse upon themselves, self-affecting, allowed it to run through their fingertips, to pass through their consciousness, but also to pass through them not unaltered and return with their accent: the accent of the feminine (not yet) subject. If women write in and through the pre-established forms of masculinism, as aliens in a foreign cultural landscape, having forgotten ± or had erased for them ± a `mother' tongue more suited to their meanings, they will nonetheless do so with an accent. This accent of femininity ± the leftover, or excess, in women's appropriation of masculinist discourses ± is the `difference' in women's writing. It has been mis-read for an essential quality of `femininity' in women's writing, an unmediated expression of women's embodied difference, or the trace of women's historical oppression. I want to read evidence of this accent of femininity in Wollstonecraft rather as the receding trace of female-embodied excess or lack: the mismatch between female-embodied meanings and masculinist enunciatory forms. The accent of the feminine, then, is the excess or recession of female-embodied writing, and through this figure we can approach the question of female-embodiment representing itself under a masculinist cultural economy. Wollstonecraft knowingly shifted her writing persona from the feminine margins of literary activity (education of daughters, sentimental fiction) to the masculine mainstream of political philosophy. In this shift she struggled to adopt an appropriate writing voice to serve her claim to `equality'. The resulting writings offer strong evidence of what is at stake in this appropriation that breeds assimila-

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

6 Introduction

tion. Both Judith Butler and Irigaray offer models for perceiving a radical political subject at work in mimesis, since mimetic gestures are not static but open to modification in the performative moment. (Irigaray, 1995, pp. 124±5; Butler, 1993, pp. 36ff)9 Whitford has noted that Irigaray's concept of mimicry/masquerade connotes not only imitation and parody, but also camouflage, a mode of self-preservation in the face of `(re)assimilation and destruction by the masculine economy'. (Whitford, 1991, p. 72) Wollstonecraft's political writings offer a rich example of this turning of masculinist rational discourse by a woman back onto herself, and other women. Approaching these writings through Irigaray's frame brings into relief a shadowy figure produced by this momentary inhabitation of masculinist discourse by a female-embodied subject. Wollstonecraft's fiction, moreover, offers evidence of an embodied challenge to a perceived femininity in writing, which can be read alongside the political writings as archetypal feminist misogyny. Irigaray points out that women are such good mimics since they are never entirely absorbed by the action of mimicry; there is always something left over, an `elsewhere' that leads us to an otherwise unsymbolised feminine. In mimicry, a woman writer may `recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it'. She can `make ``visible'' . . . what was supposed to remain invisible'. (Irigaray, 1985a, p. 76) When female-embodied writing subjects appropriate masculinist forms (political philosophy, history, the Sublime are all deeply coded as masculine in Wollstonecraft's period), we can read this as a `hysterical' mode of writing; one through which that which remains unassimilated to masculinist syntax surfaces to disrupt and redirect the mimicry.10 Since something is always leftover, there is a tradition of locating `difference' in women's writing: either as aesthetic failure, evidence of gender construction, or ± more recently ± as an essentialised femininity in writing.11 While I would maintain that all of these are ± for different reasons ± inappropriate approaches to the question of women's writing, they are pointing out something very important indeed. Grosz contends that `it is only if women are ambiguously both subjects and deprived of a socially recognized subjective position, are both speaking beings and beings whose words have not been heard; and beings who have a sexuality, but whose sexual specificities are ignored, denied, or covered over that women can undertake

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Introduction 7

feminist politics'. (Grosz, 1995, p. 65) Her work on female embodiment and philosophy raises the implications of female-embodiment for writing, particularly as she offers a more positive version of the notion of women's radical alienation in patriarchal cultures. For Grosz, it is important to recognise the degree to which feminism is always already `implicated in' masculinist forms for its very existence, in a way which mirrors the simultaneous silencing and enunciatory potential of women in patriarchal discourses generally. This `(historically) necessary binding by patriarchal terms', for Grosz, offers the ground for `the very condition of feminism's effectivity in countering and displacing the effects of patriarchy.' (Grosz, 1995, p. 57) Women's writing, then, can be read for both its mimicry of masculinist forms, and as a cultural space in which the accent of the feminine (as excess, lack, hysteria) might be uncovered in this mimesis. The figures drawn by that accent in writing suggest the conditions necessary for a women's writing that is not only imitative but also productive of meaning on its own terms.

The Athenic mode patriarchy covers its tracks by attributing the justification of matricide to a woman. (Whitford, 1991, p. 114) I propose a new category for women's writing ± Athenic ± that is intended to bring into focus the argument that women under patriarchy appropriate masculinist subjectivity, because there is no other way to write intelligibly. The stress here is on the criteria governing intelligibility. In Athenic writing we find evidence of a disruption to masculinist forms in figures of excess, lack, and hysteria, which record as gestures towards a lost, and mourned, female-embodiment.12 By the phrase `Athenic writing' I indicate writing produced in the name of female-embodied subjects in accordance with a masculinist cultural economy. It is writing in which matrilineal signature is erased, and patrilineage written in its place; in which the maternal voice is eclipsed by the paternal; male-embodiment is normative, and femaleembodiment disavowed. The congruence of this argument with already familiar accounts of the many and varied ways in which matrilineage is erased in our cultures and our histories is striking,

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

8 Introduction

but it is not my intention to discuss this in any detail. Suffice it to say that the congruence itself is evidence for allowing that it is not inconceivable that writing performs and records the erasure or eclipse of matrilineal by patrilineal modes in ways that are parallel to ± for example ± the institution of marriage and the naming of children. Irigaray designates patrilineal relations as the founding model of Western cultural economies since the Greeks. (Irigaray, 1985a, pp. 170±91) Open avowal of these father±son relations, which assure `the genealogy of patriarchal power', threatens the very order itself. The suppressed signs of a Matrilineal mode in women's writings (re)surface as symptoms of incorrectness in writing, often ascribed to cultural disadvantages, but also ascribed to femininity in itself ± whether celebrated by feminist critics, or denigrated by masculinist purists. Women's bodies are leaky, open-ended, mutable and cyclical, while the trans-historical and trans-cultural sign of female fertility has long been coded as a sign of lack-of-control over the body and self. Female-embodiment represents, and is represented by, a symbology and syntax of leakiness, crossed borders, and mutability; radically other to the self-enclosed morphological signature of maleembodiment. (Battersby, 1997; Schildrick, 1997; Lorraine, 1999) This imputation of lack-of-bodily-control in women has transferred to accounts of women's writing. Writings which hover on the margins of Wollstonecraft's oeuvre (the unsigned Analytical Review pieces, the query over her authorship of The Emigrants) have been the subject of an ongoing debate that can best be described as gendered stylistics.13 The status of her posthumous publications, as well as her Letters to Imlay, in the light of Godwin's editorial decisions, raises direct questions of authorship and authority, that invite gendered definitions of Wollstonecraft's style ± particularly in contrast to Godwin's ± as `loose and informal'.14 Ralph Wardle characterises this debate in his claim that `Mary's style is indeed the woman herself'. (Wardle, 1966a, p. 99) The familiar address confirms the woman writer's position as outsider to the cabal of professional authorship. Le Doeuff's work identifies three `strategies philosophy has adopted for silencing women (and denying them the philosophical journey)': permissiveness, amateurism, and fidelity. `Permissiveness' functions as philosophy's willingness to permit certain select women to its privileged domain which `works to obscure a more subtle prohibition against women philosophising'.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Introduction 9

Research into the history of philosophy reveals that the small band of women who feature in this history shared the common experience that `their love for philosophy was . . . mediated through their love for a particular philosopher', so that `only through the mediation of a man could women gain access to theoretical discussion'. This confirmed the amateur status of women in philosophy (they are `unable to transcend or sublimate the dynamics of the transferential relation with their philosopher lovers') and ensured their fidelity.15 Wollstonecraft is amateurised by the common understanding of her political and philosophical work as mediated through her sexual relationships with male mentors: Fuseli, Godwin and ± even ± Imlay.16 `Mary' signals the mediated status of Wollstonecraft's writing, functioning as a literary version of `street remarks', understood by feminist linguists as a factor in `controlling public space and defining women as intruders within it.' (Cameron, 1992, p. 107) On the issue of `fidelity' Wollstonecraft remains unresolved: her work at its most compelling and memorable stakes an open argument with prominent male thinkers. She isn't a `dutiful daughter'.17 Athenic writing, as a mimetic mode, strives to contain signs of difference, and apparently swallows whole the implicit criteria governing proper written expression. My argument is that Athenic texts are a rich ground for uncovering the bone-beds of Matrilineal transmission, and the way in which the Matrilineal may express itself in writing nonetheless. The residual difference, if you like, when female-embodied subjects come to writing in the Athenic, the excess or the lack that is made apparent in the acts of mimesis that constitutes women's writing in the first place, preserves `that which does not speak . . . that which is not expressed in women's relation to her mother, to herself, to other women'. (Irigaray, 1985a, p. 138) Hysteria functions in similar terms to Irigaray's `double-syntax': as a mode in which women's `inarticulable relation to the desire for the . . . woman±mother' makes itself nonetheless heard. (p. 137)18 If syntax is sexuate, the `second' syntax (unconscious, feminine, Matrilineal) manifests in moments of incorrectness, where the mimesis fails. The dereliction of female subjectivity under patriarchy is rooted in this cultural burial of all signs of a matrilineal genealogy available to women. If we are women, we think back through our mothers, indeed, but that process is a ghostly, refracted and painful reconstruction. Why would we wish to identify with our mothers? This ques-

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

10 Introduction

tion is particularly acute for intellectual women, such as Mary Wollstonecraft; perhaps more so for the female academic of the twentyfirst century. Walker raises this problematic relation to the level of a critical category in her study of the difference female embodiment makes to writing. Following object-relations theory, since female-embodied subjects share morphology with the mother that male-embodied subjects do not, women enter language on different terms to men, and they consequently have a different relation to symbolisation. Walker further challenges conventional psychoanalytic understandings of castration and symbolisation. For Freud and Lacan, Schreber's birth-phantasies and concomitant `unmanning' mark a psychotic foreclosure of the paternal metaphor and hence the extreme limit of the threat of castration. For Walker, Schreber's birth-phantasies and `unmanning' mark the `pretext' of abstract masculine desire to take the place of the mother. She understands psychosis to be the normative condition of abstract masculinity, and the abject as the normative text of masculinist writing in which the mother's body is `violently foreclosed', repudiated as the grounds for the subject's self-birth. The `desire to give birth' (to a text, to oneself etc) indicates in this case a `psychotic identification with the maternal body'. (Walker, 1998, p. 60) Furthermore, for Freud, the maternal body that is foreclosed in castration is a `mutilated and impotent male body', whereas what Walker finds in Schreber's psychotic text is a desire to `appropriate the potent and creative maternal body'. (p. 61; original emphasis) The `violent foreclosure' of the maternal body that is the mark of the masculinist text is absent from women's passage into signification, and women can be expected to produce phantasies affecting as identification with, rather than repudiation of, the maternal body. (p. 62) For Walker (following Klein) the `relation between the mother's body and the child begins as a pre-linguistic one . . . prior to signification and meaning', and the maternal `remain[s] an ordering principle' after the repression of the maternal at the moment of entering the paternal Symbolic. (pp. 116, 155) Women's writing, on these terms, might be expected to `involve an attempt to recapture the sensuous experience of their own mother's body within themselves', and a woman would `experience the continuity between herself and her mother in her literary mythologies of self-birth.' (pp. 161±2) Because girls can find their mothers in the morphology of their own bodies, their early linguistic utterances will

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Introduction 11

not repeat this masculinist anxiety and its accompanying desire for mastery. (p. 180) I wish to complicate Walker's model with the category of Athenic writing, as a common mode in which women ± in spite of theoretical reasons not to do so ± perform a masculinist foreclosure of the castrated maternal body in writing. For when women writers write in the `Athenic', they indeed write in `violent foreclosure' of that shared morphology with the mother, and as a result in utter disavowal of their own embodiment. Angela Keane notes that Wollstonecraft's critique is rooted in `mind±body dualism', which produced a strong ambivalence in her work towards maternity, as that which associates women with `a low form of creation, the simple production of matter'. (Keane, 2000, p. 30) I am arguing that this ambivalence is symptomatic of the Athenic mode, and registers a struggle between Athenic and Matrilineal subjectivity. Wollstonecraft's writings follow a trajectory of evident `violent foreclosure' of the maternal body, and of any positive identification with the mother, reaching its apex in her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794), in which the writer's own pregnant body refuses to be foreclosed by the disembodied rational text. Until this moment, Wollstonecraft writes through a series of negative engagements with female-embodiment, largely marked by her renunciation of it and all its paraphernalia in the guises of femininity, answered by its displaced return in ± and substitution by ± the body of her writings. Wollstonecraft appropriates the `violent foreclosure' of the maternal body symptomatic of abstract masculinity in writing; and evident particularly in misogynist abjection of the feminine in style and content, and her dis-identification with women until the later (post-maternity) works. How does a female-embodied writer appropriate masculinist writing, given that masculinity in this formulation demands the presence of a penis to differentiate the boy-child from the repudiated maternal body? Is this appropriation a transgendering of the writer? Butler's work on incorporation, and Grosz's tentative sketch of the `phantom phallus', are drawn on to speculate an answer to this peculiar question. (Butler, 1990; Grosz, 1994) I find in Wollstonecraft's pre-maternal writings the register of an inarticulable desire for female-embodiment that locates itself as signifying representative in the writer's self-imagining as male-embodied, and her desire for an avowedly `manly' rationality. Wollstonecraft consciously writes `as a man' in spite of her

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

12 Introduction

female-embodiment, until the experience of pregnancy and birth reintroduces the figure of a potent and creative maternal body as an available presence in her writings. Athenic writing, then, can be understood as an attempt to signify female-embodied same-sex desire in terms of a desire by the femaleembodied subject for female-embodiment under cultural conditions that render that embodiment valueless and invisible except as mute and castrated object. The Athenic writer, in repudiating the castrated maternal body, establishes an imaginary transgendering of her own body in order to write at all. This double effacement of femaleembodiment results in a kind of textual mourning for female bodies. Those bodies resurface as textual disturbance, or dead objects. Lauretis has described the fetishising of traditionally masculine `accoutrements' by lesbian cultures as an appropriation of `precoded' signifiers of desire for the female body, when no femaleembodied signifiers of such desire are available. (de Lauretis, 1994, p. 263) I read Wollstonecraft's self-identifications as a `manly' writing subject in her pre-maternal writings as a displaced account of femaleembodied same-sex desire in Athenic mode. Her experience of pregnancy and birth returns to her the figure of a potent and creative maternal body, reconfigured further by her new identity as mother of a daughter, and this produces a distinctive shift in style and tone in her later works. In my last chapter I deploy Butler's figure of the `lesbian phallus' as a resolution of female-embodied writing beyond the Athenic mode. The `lesbian phallus', similar to Irigaray's `labial logic', but in direct contrast with Grosz's `phantom phallus', confounds the opposition between being and having that structures orthodox gender relations, desire configurations, and syntax under patriarchy. Through a Matrilineal re-structuring of signification, we might begin to glimpse the new cultural and relational spaces in which this non-dualistic intersubjectivity might ground itself. As patriarchy makes spaces only for relations between men (relegating women and the feminine to the object of exchange or the `universal predicate'); the (re)emergence of a Matrilineal mode would make space also for new relations between women. It is the unimaginability of embodied relations of exchange between women that produces the Athenic mode in writing. We might say, then, that the Athenic mode performs a radical displacement of female-embodied same-sex desire.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Introduction 13

This book aims at least in part to return the trajectory of Mary Wollstonecraft's writing career from a model of explicitly masculinist historical contexts, to one grounded in a paradigm of specifically female corporeality. I have structured the sections to correspond to the three broad stages ± or trimesters ± of her movement between Athenic and Matrilineal modes. The first stage (Re-membering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood) covers the period 1787±90, and includes her first three publications; Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, Original Stories and Mary: A Fiction. The writings produced in this period demand to be read in relation to the corporeal, familial, sexual and psychoanalytic conditions that gave rise to Wollstonecraft's writing voice(s). It is in this stage, I suggest, that Wollstonecraft is writing to repudiate and empty out maternal and lesbian bodies that (quite literally) haunt her writings. The second stage (Female Embodiment and the Body Politic) covers the period 1790±94 (Rights of Men, Rights of Woman) during which Wollstonecraft launches herself into mainstream political philosophy, engaging directly with the discourse of the body-politic. The Vindications produced during this period carry traces of a dialectical struggle between this female-embodied writing subject and Enlightenment constitutions of the normative human subject through argument over its rights and duties. Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) ± her first piece of political philosophy ± was a direct response to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) by a female-embodied reader who has noticed that the argument she is reading demands of her a different type of body; one that can wield a sword to defend the Queen of France. Wollstonecraft's most famous ± and for feminist academics, most important ± work (Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792), circles the problems posed by female embodiment to Enlightenment discourses of `Rights' and answers accounts of the female body in moral philosophy which deny its sexual and desiring possibilities. This Vindication was aimed at Rousseau's emphasis on the social and intellectual limitations of female corporeality in his influential educational novel, Emile (1762). Both Vindications, I argue, are founded on a female-embodied response to the rape paradigm Wollstonecraft notes in moral philosophy of the time. These texts document her struggle to achieve a writing subjectivity that can claim equality with the men whose arguments provoke her into writing. She is, in the end, unable to swallow the full implications of the foundations of moral philosophy she finds there.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

14 Introduction

The third stage (Athenic to Matrilineal Writing) covers the period from Wollstonecraft's first pregnancy, through the births of her two daughters, and ends with her own death (1794±97 ± Historical and Moral View, Letters Written During a Short Residence and The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria). The works produced during this period signal the emergence of a potent maternal body as a figurative and semantic presence in Wollstonecraft's writing. The work which followed Vindication of the Rights of Woman ± the Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794) ± elided any reference to, or association with, the writer's female-embodiment, because by then Wollstonecraft was experiencing her first pregnancy. Wollstonecraft's `philosophical foundation' meant that she `could only ask for women to be recognised as reasonable beings with the potential for genius and that they be endowed with the rights of subject despite, not because of, their reproductive capacities.' (Keane, 2000, p. 30) This is a difficult argument for a pregnant woman to sustain. The anomalous work which emerges from this pregnancy records the resurfacing of female-embodiment in a peculiarly suggestive way, fragmented and reflected in the mirrors of Versailles. Wollstonecraft's final works ± A Short Residence in Sweden (1796) and The Wrongs of Woman (posthumously, 1798) ± show evidence of an increasing presence of the Matrilineal as voice, organising frame, and point of entry for the writing. Wollstonecraft's writing career as a whole is read here for this movement from Athenic (marked by the `violent foreclosure' of the castrated maternal body) to Matrilineal (marked by an attempt at intersubjective exchange through a recognition of shared morphology with the potent and creative maternal body). This movement maps the writing subject's attempts to find a voice and a form for exchange between female-embodied subjects. The argument I propose here is a meta-historical one, since while the material conditions governing writing for Wollstonecraft are peculiar to her time, the absence of available figures for the representation of femaleembodied auto-affectation described by Irigaray and others has remained persistent and chronic through the vicissitudes of patriarchal history. Keane has argued that Wollstonecraft reproduces the `matriphobic legacy' of the Lockean position, and can only claim reason for women over her own dead maternal body. (Keane, 2000) However,

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Introduction 15

she also acknowledges that earlier accounts of Wollstonecraft foreground an equally problematic pro-maternal proto-feminism. This ambivalence is noted, since what we inherit is Wollstonecraft's struggle to speak female-embodied rational subjectivity; a contradiction in terms. This book documents the nature of that ambivalence, through an analysis of Wollstonecraft's writing that finds figures of Athenic and Matrilineal subjectivity. Wollstonecraft's writing documents both the struggle between Athenic and Matrilineal subjectivity, but also points towards a resolution of that struggle in later works. Wollstonecraft's pregnant body heralds in her writing the return of a potent maternal body that had been violently foreclosed in the Athenic subject, and heralds in turn a glimpse of a female-embodied writing subject beyond the Oedipus and `fort-da' that offer writing only on grounds of repudiating female-embodiment as mutilated, castrated, and mute. As Wollstonecraft has been considered `feminism's founding mother herself', and her Vindication of the Rights of Woman the key text in the development of a Western feminist consciousness, these arguments have very long shadows indeed. (Jacobus, 1989, p. 54) For if feminist intellectual work fits the criteria for Athenic writing, we may need to turn our attention to what lies buried beneath the Athenic discourses of Millenial feminisms, and to listen carefully for a residual accent of femininity faintly audible in those discourses.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

16 Introduction

Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

I cannot, without a thrill of delight, recollect views I have seen, which are not to be forgotten, ± nor looks I have felt in every nerve which I shall never more meet. The grave has closed over a dear friend, the friend of my youth; yet she is still present with me, and I hear her soft voice warbling as I stray over the heath. (Wollstonecraft, Letters from Sweden)

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Part I

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

This page intentionally left blank

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Love between Women ± Wollstonecraft's Early Writings

It is in and through writing that [women] seek to speak with rather than for the mother . . . (Walker, 1998, p. 162) Butler recapitulates the aspects of object-relations psychoanalysis that recognise the maternal body as the eclipsed ground on which the subject achieves signification: `repudiation of the maternal body is the condition of signification within the Symbolic'. Signification through language, according to this position, is founded on a `primary repression' of desire for the maternal body. The subject's `loss' of the maternal body establishes `the empty space out of which words originate'. (Butler, 1990, p. 68) Walker assesses the implications of female-embodiment for this psychoanalytic model of language signification. She highlights especially the impact of shared morphology between daughter and mother, which offers a different relation to the repressed maternal body than that assumed of the male-embodied subject in psychoanalysis generally. Women enter language on different terms, and under different conditions, to men. Walker characterises masculinist writing as an `attempt to symbolise the abject space' of the pre-oedipal. (p. 66) Masculinist writing, she argues, approaches signification through a psychotic gesture of foreclosing the maternal body, and taking its place (as in the fort-da scenario). She understands the abject as that which `threatens the masculine writer with a suffocating return to the archaic maternal body'. Symbolic language `intervenes' to prevent the subject's `total annihilation'. By contrast, women's `identification with the maternal body will not 19

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

1

be equivalent to (or repeat) the psychotic foreclosure typical of masculine desire'. Rather than performing a `phantasy of origins' or `a ruthless act of mastery', women's writing may be expected to offer a different mode of signification, since it records and performs a different relationship to maternal origin. However, Wollstonecraft's early writings show strong evidence of `psychotic foreclosure', and `mastery' of the mother's body as a condition for writing subjectivity. Wollstonecraft's early writings will be read here for evidence of transitional moments in her self-engendering as a writing subject. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) achieves `significant speech' through denial of maternal presence. By reconfiguring this in a preferred model of maternity, it also records the writer's attempt to negotiate and make sense of that relationship in terms that suggest an earlier loss of maternal affection. Original Stories From Real Life (1788) returns to and repeats this movement, but also remembers the writing subject's emergence into `significant speech' as a displacement of the dead mother through the figure of Mrs Mason, who revisits and heals the subject's transition through adolescence. The `original' of the title, then, can refer both to authorial novelty, and to a story of authorial origins. Mary, A Fiction (1788) records a phantasy in which the writing subject's experiential contradiction between a desire that understands itself as masculine to accommodate a femaleembodied object, and a female-embodiment that makes such a desire `impossible in the physical world', can be reconciled. By reading these early publications for traces of identificatory desires and desiring identities, we can raise into view a patterning of lost, disavowed, or forbidden female-embodiment. These writings perform a deep melancholic longing for an absent female body that is both desired and disclaimed in a repeated hysterical gesture. While evident largely by submersion, female bodies also surface to disrupt the subject's stated claim to objectivity (Thoughts); attempt at narrative (Mary, A Fiction); or the relation between the governess and her objects of discipline (Original Stories). Walker claims that women's `hysterical silence' pits itself against `man's abject voice': while abjection is productive: `of literature, himself, etc' women's `hysteria' is silent. (p. 3) This implies an imperative to produce ways to read women's silence to uncover the significance of this difference; otherwise we simply reproduce it in

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

20 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

our own accounts of women's literary history. A contemporary correlative for the negation of matrilineal inheritance is evident in recent feminist affirmation of the failed relationship between Wollstonecraft and her mother. The maternal eclipse recorded by Wollstonecraft's writing can be compounded by attempts to make sense of feminist history. In Barbara Caine's invaluable study of the history of English feminism between 1780 and 1980, vertical matrilineal transmission is elided by a focus on the educational and cultural status of fathers in middle-class English families in the later eighteenth century. This observation of the historical undermining of effective female cultural presence is reiterated, and to some extent confirmed, in Caine's acceptance of the terms of debate she is analysing. An example of this double-negation of female genealogy is evident in her discussion of the influence of Locke on educational theories and practice in this period. She comments that `the dominant educational role was that of the father' while the `mother's role' was `purely ancillary'. The mother `acted as intermediary between father and child, but had no voice of her own'. In an account of the eighteenth-century `transformation of fatherhood', she accepts without query the concomitant reduction of women's `maternal and domestic activities' to `necessary services': women `offered nothing comparable to the knowledge or education offered by men.' (Caine, 1997, p. 20; my emphasis) While this description of the increasing centrality of fatherhood in the eighteenth-century middle-class home offers an important counter-emphasis to the critical axiom that patriarchal authority had declined during this period, the terms of this analysis reproduce and reinforce the negation of the cultural transmission between mothers and daughters that it aims to describe. Later, in an argument interested in explaining the context for the emergence of eighteenthcentury middle-class feminisms, Caine accurately delineates the emerging valorisation of individualism in discourses of political economy. Women had `no part' in the discursive process whereby individualism was embedded in `civic responsibility'. (p. 21) It is no surprise when slightly later, the dereliction of Wollstonecraft's relation to Elizabeth Wollstonecraft is reaffirmed in a reference to her `anger' at `the suffering, the inadequacy, and the cruelty of her own mother'. (p. 31) As long as we accept the reduction of matrilineal transmission to `necessary services', characterised by the absence of the cultural

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 21

knowledges and skills transmitted through fathers, we will not perceive the Matrilineal as a mode of specifically female-embodied transmission. However, as a deep repression, the female-embodied relation to the maternal body might be expected to return as a recognisable symptom in women's writing. Since this relation is acutely unsymbolised by and for women, it remains perceptible only as patterns of disturbance to the formal demands of masculinist writing. The cultural repression of matrilineage produces the accent of femininity in women's writing. The relation between the maternal body and the subject is pre-linguistic, `prior to' the `secondary processes' of `grammar and syntax' introduced out of the separation. Repression of relation to the maternal body is necessary to enter the symbolic; but the repressed relation nonetheless remains an `ordering principle'. (Walker, 1998, pp. 116±17; Lorraine, 1999) For women, one way for this repressed relation to return is in figures of the lesbian relation. Wollstonecraft's pre-1790 writings reveal characteristic textual disturbances marking the resurfacing of female-embodiment as the maternal body and as the lesbian body. These disturbances have been coded as feminine excess (of sensibility) or lack (of rationality), or accounted for by the material narrative of historically oppressed womanhood. The early Wollstonecraft writings thus remain largely neglected as juvenile and unskillful attempts to intervene in public discourse. However, that which has been relegated from Wollstonecraft and from literary history more generally, as feminine, can be revisioned as a grounding account of women's emergence as writing subjects. These early Wollstonecraft writings offer to this analysis a compelling glimpse of female-embodied writing subjectivity produced by the loss of productive relationship to a disavowed and discarded maternal body. This loss is the condition for the claim to writing subjectivity for women, as it is for men. The result of the loss, however, is qualitatively different for female-embodied writers. Since the quality of the female-embodied relation to the loss of maternal origin remains unsymbolised, it remains unconscious for women. The repression itself, however, leaves trace in textual symptoms. The symptomatic map of this repression follows a specific pattern of trajectory. This book is an attempt to trace that trajectory in the writings of a single historical case. But this account of the personal performance of the conditions for female-embodied writing subject-

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

22 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

ivity in Wollstonecraft's life and work only crystallises a historical constellation of the universal condition of female subjectivity. Wollstonecraft emerges as a writing subject at a moment in European history that performs the discursive construction of the `universal' subject central to modernity. Since this macro-subject is produced through the cultural excision of the feminine (as matrilineage) characteristic of European Enlightenment thought, the micro-subjectivity performed in an instance of female-embodied writing could be expected to capture something of this repudiation. The same period which sees the consolidation of the rise of the woman writer, produces Wollstonecraft's late recapitulation of the conditions for women's rising into writing at all. Her writings reveal a paradigmatic trajectory from Athenic to Matrilineal. Her early, formative, writings capture the emergence of the Athenic voice in the narrative of the subject's attempt (always incomplete) to replace its relationship to the troublesome maternal body with writing, or to bury it in writing.

Cherchez la meÁre Prior to Todd's subtle revisionary biography of Wollstonecraft's Revolutionary Life, Claire Tomalin was widely credited with having produced the most informative and well-balanced analysis of Wollstonecraft in The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft originally published in 1974. Her carefully crafted story of Wollstonecraft begins, as any good biography should, with a brief genealogy of its subject. After three pages of colourful prose describing the resilience and hard-earned prosperity of Wollstonecraft's paternal grandfather (Edward Wollstonecraft, born 1688), we are introduced to Edward John Wollstonecraft, Mary's father, who `had married, whilst still an apprentice, a pretty young Irish wife, Elizabeth Dixon'.1 We learn that she was `indolent by nature and made a darling of her firstborn, Ned, two years older than Mary.' (Tomalin, 1992, pp. 11±14) A few pages later we hear that Wollstonecraft's stated ignorance of her town of birth is symptomatic of her mother's negligence: while `[m]ost mothers talk to their children about these things, . . . evidently Mrs Wollstonecraft did not.' (p. 15) Once the Wollstonecrafts have moved to Barking a little speculation is offered on this otherwise blank character: `Elizabeth was not a Londoner, but came from Ballyshannon on the West coast of Ireland, a pretty little town where her

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 23

family lived genteelly, doing well out of the wine trade. To her it doubtless looked easy enough for a family to move up the social ladder.' (p. 16) Aside from a brief reference to Mary's story of sleeping outside her parent's room to shield her mother from her drunken father's blows ± derived from Godwin's Memoirs but made famous by Virginia Woolf ± the biography's only interest in Elizabeth Wollstonecraft is as the excruciatingly slow to expire mother nursed by the `traditional, unpaid labour of a daughter'. (p. 34)2 Tomalin's acceptance of the negative reception of Wollstonecraft's mother is amplified by the piling of negatives in her description: `had nothing to live for apart from her children'; `able neither to manage nor combat her husband'; `no profound religious belief to support her'; `no intellectual capacity or training to occupy her as she aged'. These multiple negatives are answered by the single observation that her `whole existence had been bound up in her femininity'. (p. 34) Femininity is denoted by hyper-negativity, or lack. Todd notes that Wollstonecraft must have `felt for her mother but did not judge her less harshly. She had not been a proper parent.' (Todd, 2000, p. 39) She acknowledges Wollstonecraft's failure to `assess the life of her mother as a being separated from herself', and reminds us that `a woman who had raised at least six vigorous and healthy children, to use Darwin's words, in a disease-ridden age . . . was not negligible'. (p. 40) She has initiated here the necessary identification with the mother of a wayward daughter that must become central to our account of Wollstonecraft, if we are to avoid repeating her mistakes. Orthodox feminist accounts of Wollstonecraft's life emphasise the dereliction and failure of her relationship with her mother repeatedly circled in her personal and fictional writings. Elizabeth Wollstonecraft is credited with a kind of negative productivity in Wollstonecraft studies. Because she gave Wollstonecraft `nothing', and because she had `nothing' to give, she is passively responsible for the painful reflections leading to Wollstonecraft's proto-feminist analysis of families and society. According to many accounts, including Tomalin's, Wollstonecraft experiences more relief than grief at her mother's death. She is, however, allowed `enough tenderness for her mother' to incorporate her last words and her death scene in the fiction she writes following the death. (p. 34) The death-bed scene in Mary, a Fiction is nonetheless noted as a reconstruction in which the mother `is made to apologize for her unfair treatment of her daughter'. Kelly

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

24 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

also emphasises the mother's death as a passive trigger for Wollstonecraft's political consciousness, in characterising it in the peculiar terms of `further experience of gender difference'. He imputes to Wollstonecraft the awareness that nursing a dying mother was a `traditional female responsibility', and one made `especially onerous' in this case, since she `had tried to break her dependence on identity through the family' and `her mother was also a difficult patient'. (Kelly, 1992, p. 26) A similar occlusion is evident in accounts of Wollstonecraft's relationship with Fanny Blood. Prior to Johnson's Equivocal Beings, the proto-lesbian nature of Wollstonecraft's relationship with Blood, and its echo in the narrative representation of the relationship between Mary and Ann in Wollstonecraft's first novel, remained largely beyond critical analysis. Wollstonecraft's loss of Blood two years on from her mother's death is the refrain repeated in these early works. We may consider these losses of female-embodied love objects in the context of her emergence as a writing subject. The origins of Wollstonecraft's writing abilities are unaccounted for. She experienced very little formal education, she was not singled out as a prodigy by her father (who scorned the idea of educated women), her elder brother seemed to dislike her and offered little by way of educational handouts (she mentions in a letter to Jane Arden the trouble she had persuading her brother to mend her pens). She was taught haphazardly to read and write, according to Mary, A Fiction by an old housekeeper. She did not attend village day school until the family moved to Yorkshire when she was 9, but was a precocious letter-writer by the age of 14, and went on to publish some of the most enduring and important writings of her age. The temporal relation between Wollstonecraft's loss of her mother and of Blood over a two-year period, and the emergence of her first published writings immediately following this, demands sustained attention. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters was completed within two months of Wollstonecraft's return from burying Blood in Lisbon. This chapter revisits Wollstonecraft's early writings in the context of these losses. The writings yield evidence of a series of engagements with maternal authority, with female-embodied same-sex desire, with renegotiated relations between mothers and daughters, and with corporeal symptoms of loss and melancholia that recall and replay the apparently unresolved loss of the subject's mother and female lover.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 25

My discussion will focus on Wollstonecraft's first three complete selfauthored works: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, Mary; A Fiction, and Original Stories to consider to what extent Walker's claim that `women attempt to bridge the chasm between themselves and their mothers by writing' is evidenced in Wollstonecraft's early writings. I discuss Mary last, since it offers a more complete synthesis of the conditions for the emergence of the female-embodied writing subject sketched in the two shorter works.

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) Wollstonecraft's first publication was a book of advice concerning `education' ± in the broadest sense ± of daughters. It comprises of 21 short discussions on topics ranging from `The Nursery' and `Exterior Accomplishments', through `Dress', `The Fine Arts' and `Reading', to `Matrimony', `The Treatment of Servants' and `Card-Playing'. The `Preface' identifies the book as one of the `many treatises' which have been `already written' on the topic of `female education', and claims a space for itself within that discourse on the grounds that `much still remained to be said'.3 (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 4, p. 4) The `Preface' acknowledges that the piece is `grave', and justifies this `tone' in terms of authenticity: `I could not make them less so without writing affectedly.' (p. 5) The writing subjectivity of Wollstonecraft's first published writing is positioned as a sober and earnest intervention in the ongoing debate concerning `female education'. It claims authority through self-reflection: while clearly and openly influenced by Locke, the emphasis is on the writer's Thoughts. Written as it was in the immediate context of Wollstonecraft's Newington Green school closing down, this work has been recognised as an easy transition into writing concerned with female education from the writer's direct experience of running a girls' school. However, Thoughts is also preoccupied with the failings of the daughter's mother, and offers the author's reasoned thought as an alternative to the failed mother's negated authority. The writing is addressed to any `fellow-creature', and refers to gender-neutral `parents' and teachers. The implied audience soon reveals itself to be mothers of daughters. The argument follows a pattern of beginning from a generic point, which, in the course of discussion, reveals that the example, audience, and target, is a failed

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

26 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

maternal figure. Rousseau's comment that `no being, merely human, could properly educate a child' produces as if by default the observation that `Mamma is only anxious that they should love her best, and perhaps takes pains to sow those seeds, which have produced such luxuriant weeds in her own mind.' (p. 9) The observation that a mother `ought to suckle her children' works both as an agreement with Rousseau's stern dictum on breast-feeding opening Emile, and as an unmediated reflection of Wollstonecraft's status as the only child in her family not to have been breast-fed. (Todd, 2000, p.6) Breastfeeding produces a reflection on the mechanism of maternal affection, which reflects back on the failure of maternal affection in some mothers, since `maternal tenderness arises quite as much from habit as instinct.' (p. 7) Wollstonecraft offers enough cross-references to the absence of `maternal tenderness' in her own childhood not to doubt the record. The model for the failed mother in Thoughts is the one closest to the writer. Thoughts records this writer's reflection on the failure of maternal affection, and of maternity generally. It offers reasoned thought in the place of failed instinct; culture for nature. Through these reflections we can read Wollstonecraft's theorising of her own loss of maternal affection; theorising which returns in various forms in her later political writings, since from here her social critique unfolds. The failed mother fails because she `submits, without conviction, to a parent or husband'. She has a `temper' resulting from `that bashful aukwardness which arises from ignorance', and commits `miscarriages of conduct, and mistakes in opinion' negatively determining the writer's selfconstruction. (p. 23) The writer's self-referentiality is emphasised in her essay on `The Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably Educated, and Left Without a Fortune', where she takes her situation as an instance of the woman `well, or at least fashionably educated', but `left without a fortune'. A grain of self-awareness is evident in the claim that if such women `are not entirely devoid of delicacy, they must frequently remain single.' (p. 25) The three lamented `modes of earning a subsistence' correspond to Wollstonecraft's attempts to provide for herself and her family an independent income. The `humble companion to some rich old cousin, or what is still worse . . . strangers, who are so intolerably tyrannical, that none of their own relations can bear to live with them' echoes Wollstonecraft's brief period at the age of 18 spent as companion to Mrs Dawson, a widow living in Bath,

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 27

described by Godwin as `a woman of great peculiarity of temper.' (Godwin, 1987, p. 212) The description of a school teacher as `only a kind of upper servant, who has more work than the menial ones' refers to her own experience running the Newington Green school between 1784 and 1786. Her opinion that a `governess to young ladies is equally disagreeable' (p. 25) was yet to be tested by her experience as governess to the King family in 1786±87. The reflections on mothering daughters reflect Wollstonecraft's consciousness of herself as the daughter of a failing mother. The mother's failure is, however, justified by social conditions: revealed to be cultural rather than natural. The mother's failure is at least partly explained by her early marriage to an unsuitable partner: `many women, I am persuaded, marry a man before they are twenty, whom they would have rejected some years after.' (p. 31) Elizabeth's development was interrupted at the age of 19 by the sudden burden of domestic responsibility and motherhood (two children within two years of marriage). Women cannot `improve a child's understanding, when they are scarcely out of the state of childhood themselves'. (p. 31) Any potential for improvement in the mother is further defeated by the limited environment of the (particularly early) married state: `Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world; and this is not a woman's province in a married state. Her sphere of action is not large, and if she is not taught to look into her own heart, how trivial are her occupations and pursuits! What little arts engross and narrow her mind!' (p. 32) The failing mother that haunts this text married before she had a chance to find `for a companion a man of principle' (p. 31), and although a `sensible, delicate woman', she was `by some strange accident, or mistake . . . joined to a fool or a brute', and as a result became `wretched beyond all names of wretchedness.' (p. 32) The `little refinement' she had acquired led her `into the wilds of romance' as she was `not religious'. (p. 33) A reflection on the `woman's province' of nursing the sick reminds us of the variety of `misfortunes of life', since `it may be the lot of most of us to see death in all its terrors, when it attacks a friend'. The death-bed offers an opportunity to `exert our friendship, and try to chear the departing spirit'. (p. 35) But what does it offer a daughter of a failed mother? Thoughts focuses on writing as a positive influence on the developing mind of a young girl, writing `teaches a person to arrange their

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

28 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

thoughts, and digest them.' (pp. 18±19) This piece of writing draws attention to itself as a process of arranging and digesting the thoughts provoked by the death of a failed mother, provoked into writing perhaps by the death of a female lover. Wollstonecraft's first publication arrives out of the writing subject's attempt to make sense in writing of her own imperfect origins. Within that publication writing is foregrounded as an important reflective activity, in which the writer arranges and digests her thoughts. Thoughts vocalises a rejection of failed maternal affection, and offers reasoned reflection in its place. Jane Moore finds that Thoughts, though `not a strictly autobiographical work . . . shows Wollstonecraft attempting to make sense of her own life by subjecting it to rational enquiry.' (Moore, 1999, p. 16) The condition for its production was both the public one ± claimed in its `Preface' ± of filling in gaps in the ongoing discussion of `female education', and the private one that provides the `reasonable' model of maternity missing in her own experience. Both take the place of a failed maternal affection. It is, then, in the deeply personal sense of a private conversation between mother and daughter that we may also read the prefatory remark: `yet it occurred to me, that much still remained to be said'. (p. 5)

Original Stories (1788) While Thoughts seems to reconstitute Elizabeth Wollstonecraft as a shadowy reader, Original Stories ± Wollstonecraft's third publication ± reorientates the writing subject's authority as a direct displacement of maternal affection by rational authority. It also echoes a further formative same-sex relationship in the author's life: that between herself as governess and Margaret King, her favourite ward in the King family. Original Stories is a series of sketches, narrated by the voice of Mrs Mason, who ± the `Introduction' tells us ± agrees to tutor Mary (14) and Caroline (12) after their mother dies `suddenly' and their father, `who found them very troublesome at home', decides to send them elsewhere to be educated. (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 4, p. 361) This work is perhaps best known for the somewhat subversive illustrations it inspired in William Blake, and tends to be situated as a work for children, drawing directly from Wollstonecraft's experience as a teacher and governess. It has become commonplace to identify Wollstonecraft's self-image in the figure of the governess, Mrs Mason.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 29

(Moore, 1999, p. 8) This identification screens what otherwise appears as a split in the writing subject's self-projection onto a number of characters dispersed through the stories. While we may recognise Wollstonecraft's ideal voice in Mrs Mason, Original Stories also offers a further projection of her writing subjectivity in the eldest child, Mary. This early version of Wollstonecraft's fictional Marys and Marias can be argued to function, as the later ones do, as an `authorial spoor'. Kaja Silvermann locates women's subjective projections in film as `primary identificatory characters', revealing the `libidinal coherence' of a woman's text. (Silvermann, 1997, pp. 390±402) If we follow this `spoor' in this case, we find that the child Mary is two years older than her sister, Caroline ± approximately the same age difference as that between Wollstonecraft and her sister Eliza (Bess). Caroline is `vain of her person' because `very handsome', and due to the `inconsiderate encomiums' that had `been lavished on her beauty', while Mary `had a turn for ridicule.' (p. 361) Tomalin describes Bess as `nice-looking and polite' while her elder sister was `sharp in manner and often angry in appearance.' (Tomalin, 1992, p. 17) The train of thought followed in the earlier publication ± that a failure in maternal affection leaves daughters too much in the care of servants, and results in an absence of `decent restraint' ± is repeated in this work, since the children taken in charge by Mrs Mason are `left entirely to the management of servants.' (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 4, p. 11) When Mrs Mason appears, the girls have become `shamefully ignorant' and `had caught every prejudice that the vulgar casually instill'. (p. 361) I would argue for several temporal layers coalescing in this selfdramatising text. First, the moment in the writer's life at which she is transformed from a `shamefully ignorant' and `prejudiced' girl, to a well-educated young woman able to use reason to make sense of her place in the world. This moment of transition is marked here as the age of 14, which is the age from which Wollstonecraft's first letters (to Jane Arden) date. Secondly, the fictional Mary's mother has `died suddenly', which introduces the temporal frame of Elizabeth Wollstonecraft's death when the writer was 21, appearing here as the moment at which Mrs Mason arrives to smooth her transition to adulthood. This frame of reference is registered in the story of `Jane Fretful', when Jane's mother dies as an indirect result of her daughter's `violent, unrestrained anger', and the child laments: `Ah!

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

30 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

my poor mother, if you were now alive, I would not teaze you ± I would give the world to let you know that I am sorry for what I have done: you died, thinking me ungrateful; and lamenting that I did not die when you gave me suck. I shall never ± oh! never see you more.' (p. 382) But the most insistent and transparent frame of register remains the moment inhabited by the emerging writing subject: the book was written at the end of 1787, immediately after Wollstonecraft returned from her post as a governess with the Kings in Dublin. Mary, in this context, is also a figure representative of Wollstonecraft's `favourite' 14 year-old charge, Margaret King. King later took the title Lady Mount Cashell, and ± later still ± adopted the preferred name of Mrs Mason. (Cameron, 1961, p. 49) Original Stories captures a further incident of love between women: one caught irresolvably between the matrilineal (affective, pedagogic) and the horizontal (desire). Mrs Mason is `a woman of tenderness and discernment, a near relation, who was induced to take on herself the important charge through motives of compassion'. She is read as Wollstonecraft's selfimage because she sounds so much like the Wollstonecraft of Thoughts and of the later Vindications. But this Wollstonecraft is configured as a writing subject whose signature closes these publications. Prior to producing Thoughts there was no Wollstonecraft as a writing subject, other than the Wollstonecraft of letters, whose voice crackles with adolescent longing and pride. Thoughts was written almost immediately following the death of Blood: Wollstonecraft returned from Lisbon in early 1786, closed down the Newington Green school, and almost immediately started writing for publication. The voice that emerges is embodied in the character of Mrs Mason in Original Stories. If we accept Freud's account of melancholia, it would be appropriate to suggest that this ideal voice is at least in part an `incorporation' of Blood, whose loss for Wollstonecraft was chronic and irresolvable. Wollstonecraft had planned her future life around the prospect of setting up home with Blood, and her efforts to produce an independent income were directed towards a dream of domestic harmony with a woman she loved with `a friendship so fervent, as for years to have constituted the ruling passion of her mind'. Godwin's description of the first meeting between Wollstonecraft and Blood ± from which this phrase has been lifted ± draws attention to the writerly aspect of their relationship:

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 31

Mary, a wild, but animated and aspiring girl of sixteen, contemplated Fanny, in the first instance, with sentiments of inferiority and reverence. Though they were much together, yet, the distance of their habitations being considerable, they supplied the want of more frequent interviews by an assiduous correspondence. Mary found Fanny's letters better spelt and better indited than her own, and felt herself abashed. She had hitherto paid but a superficial attention to literature. She had read, to gratify the ardour of an inextinguishable thirst for knowledge; but she had not thought of writing as an art. Her ambition to excel was now awakened, and she applied herself with passion and earnestness. Fanny undertook to be her instructor; and, so far as related to accuracy and method, her lessons were given with considerable skill. (Godwin, 1987, p, 211) Godwin's memory of Wollstonecraft's reminiscences inform us that Blood taught her to consider `writing as an art', and that Blood was instrumental in raising Wollstonecraft's literary consciousness; their relationship took place largely in writing. It is unsurprising to find that Wollstonecraft responded to Blood's appalling death by beginning to practice `writing as an art'; and equally unsurprising to find that the writing produced under these conditions returns to Blood's death, and the earlier death of the writer's mother, in numerous constellations ± structural, narrative, and psychological. We should also consider in this context the apparent absence from biographical and critical accounts of Wollstonecraft's career of letters we know she exchanged with Blood. The missing Wollstonecraft/Blood letters remind us that absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence. The historical `indiscursibilty' of love between women described by Johnson is compounded in accounts which pass over this discursive absence. (Johnson, 1995, p. 54) One of the background characters drawn upon in Mrs Mason's teachings is a Mrs Trueman: a woman whose `voice is sweet, her manners not only easy; but elegant; and her simple dress makes her person appear to the greatest advantage'. (pp. 385±6) Mrs Trueman is a model for the girls to emulate, and contrasted with the corrupt Lady Sly. At the end of chapter VI, Mary reports to Caroline: `I wish to be a woman, said Mary, and to be like Mrs Mason, or Mrs Trueman.' (p. 389) Mrs. Trueman's daughter is given the name of `Fanny'. In

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

32 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

the first edition of the Stories, Mrs Trueman was `Mrs B' ± a hint at the Blood family later edited out. Later in the Stories Fanny's name is lent to the lunatic daughter of the unfortunate friend of Charles Tomalin (chapter X), whose habit of procrastination prevents him from saving his friend from death in a debtor's prison, and his friend's daughter from being forced to marry `an old rake whom she detested' to avoid poverty. This `Fanny' loses her reason as result of her grief and her husband's `vicious habits', and is `confined . . . in a mad-house' where Charles discovers her ± too late to be of any assistance. (pp. 402±6, esp. p. 405) The story dramatises Blood's death scene, and masculinises the lover witnessing her death: Fanny, said he, do you recollect your old friend? Fanny looked at him, and reason for a moment resumed her seat, and informed her countenance to trace anguish on it ± the trembling light soon disappeared ± wild fancy flushed in her eyes, and animated her incessant rant. (p. 405) In Original Stories, then, the writer's loss of Blood is reconfigured through an imaginary dialogue between Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret King (in the figures of Mrs Mason and Mary): a shift between the horizontal register of love between women to the vertical one of matrilineage. The `indiscursibility' of love between women which is resolved by re-casting the lover as masculine, displaces an earlier, more archaic, and equally indiscursible loss of maternal affection.

Mary: A Fiction (1788) The lie of compulsory female heterosexuality today afflicts not just feminist scholarship, but every profession, every reference work, every curriculum, every organizing attempt, every relationship or conversation over which it hovers. (Rich, 1997, p. 324) Wollstonecraft's first novel dovetails a narrative of severed maternal relations, with a narrative of love between women. It was written during 1787, while she was living with the King family as governess,

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 33

and published in the spring of 1788, following her dismissal from their service. It was produced, then, in the immediate context of Wollstonecraft defining (and defending) her identity as a woman: the time she spent as a governess ± documented in her letters of the period ± was dominated by her clash with Lady Caroline King, the mother of her charges, and her need to make sense of their differences as women.4 There has been much discussion of this clash, and of the way in which Wollstonecraft performs a self-vindication in opposition to the portrait of the heroine's mother; a character reminiscent of the failed mother of Thoughts. In the Fiction, however, the heroine's mother ± Eliza ± combines this figure of failed maternity with aspects of the aristocratic Lady King. Eliza's character is sketched in some detail in the opening paragraph of the novel: Mary, the heroine of this fiction, was the daughter of Edward, who married Eliza, a gentle, fashionable girl, with a kind of indolence in her temper, which might be termed negative good-nature: her virtues, indeed, were all of that stamp. She carefully attended to the shews of things, and her opinions, I should have said prejudices, were such as the generality approved of. She was educated with the expectation of a large fortune, of course became a mere machine: the homage of her attendants made a great part of her peurile amusements, and she never imagined there were any relative duties for her to fulfil: notions of her own consequence, by these means, were interwoven in her mind, and the years of youth spent in acquiring a few superficial accomplishments, without having any taste for them. When she was first introduced into the polite circle, she danced with an officer, whom she faintly wished to be united to; but her father soon after recommending another in a more distinguished rank of life, she readily submitted to his will, and promised to love, honour, and obey, (a vicious fool,) as in duty bound. (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 1. p. 7) This work introduces itself as a fictionalised reflection on the writer's life so far, recapitulating some of the analysis of her childhood outlined in Thoughts, and of the context out of which she became her present self, in the form of `A Fiction', which immediately identifies itself and its central character with the writer through their sharing of

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

34 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

the given name, Mary. It begins with this detailed plotting of the character of Mary's mother, as the mother's failings ± again ± are to be cited as the origins of the daughter's more rational identity. And the mother's failings ± again ± are subjected to careful rationalisation in the detailing of her origins. The merging of aspects of Elizabeth Wollstonecraft and Caroline King has been credited as an economic act of writer's vengeance: two birds with one stone. We can also find here evidence of an early analysis of the material construction of `woman' Wollstonecraft is famous for: the association of Elizabeth Wollstonecraft and Lady Caroline in Eliza arises from an observation of their unlikely similarities. The resulting composite figure embodied shared characteristics, and these are shown to result from similar material conditions common to women in spite of their contrasting class experiences. Both women married young (Elizabeth at 19, Caroline at 15), both very quickly became mothers to a number of children, both were married to husbands whose behaviour and character Wollstonecraft found lacking, and both suffered the effects of a limited experience of the wider world.5 The narrator/heroine of Mary boasts of her `wonderful quickness in discerning distinctions and combining ideas, that at first glance did not appear to be similar.' (p. 21) Similarly incongruous comparisons are forged by Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman between women and kings, and women and soldiers. (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 48) Rather than reading this `Fiction', then, as an unsuccessful novel attempting to justify the young writer's character and actions, and at the same time satisfy a grudge against her treatment by her mother and her employer, I will ask the reader to consider it as a performance of selfreflection at a crucial moment in a writing woman's encounter with her desiring and identificatory relationship to female-embodiment. Such a being may be allowed to exist The narrative pattern of Mary is two-staged, with a central transitional section based in Lisbon: it begins as a story of Mary's development from birth, the death of her parents, and her relationship with Ann up until Ann's death (chapters I±XV); it ends as a story of her relationship with Henry until his death (chapters X±XXI). The two stages of the narrative are centred on examples and analysis of Mary's `sensibility', and it is her `sensibility' that the `Fiction' is employed to represent. This `sensibility' first arises from the failure in the

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 35

relationship between Mary and her parents: `Could she have loved her father or mother, had they returned her affection, she would not so soon, perhaps, have sought out a new world.' (p. 11) This `new world', however, is discovered when `[n]eglected in every respect, and left to the operations of her own mind' she `learned to think'. (p. 10) She describes it as `a separate state', where `angels sometimes visited this earth'. As a child she talks and sings to the angels alone in the woods. (p. 10) The `new world' is accessed through Mary's acute `sensibility' which ± particularly as it is recorded in writing in `the little book that was . . . her only confidant' ± becomes the vehicle for religious, intellectual, moral, and emotional experience: It is this quickness, this delicacy of feeling, which enables us to relish the sublime touches of the poet, and the painter; it is this, which expands the soul, gives an enthusiastic greatness, mixed with tenderness, when we view the magnificent objects of nature; or hear of a good action. The same effect we experience in the spring, when we hail the returning sun, and the consequent renovation of nature; when the flowers unfold themselves, and exhale their sweets, and the voice of music is heard in the land. Softened by tenderness, the soul is disposed to be virtuous. (p. 59) This positive `sensibility' is distinguished from the negative `sensuality', which is `only moved by what strikes . . . gross senses', and cannot perceive the `delicate embellishments of nature' or `gentle and interesting affections'. This careful extended definition of sensibility ends with the impatient exclamation: ` ± But it is only to be felt; it escapes discussion'. (pp. 59, 60) In spite of the painstaking care taken by the narrator to differentiate between `sensuality' and `sensibility', these are distinguishable by degree only, deriving from the same root of bodily sensation and pleasure. The demand to differentiate arises from the writer's anxiety that those feelings and experiences she ascribes to `sensibility' will be mis-read as `sensuality'. This anxiety is well-founded, and offers the clue to reading this `Fiction' that, when followed, reveals a complex and carefully-coded encounter between female-embodiment, identification, and desire. Todd takes Mary as an instance of `the image of superior female sensibility' that permeated women's fiction of the late eighteenth

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

36 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

century. In Charlotte Smith's Emmeline (1788), Mackenzie's Julia de Roubigne (1777), Richardson's Clarissa (1747±49) and Pamela (1741), the `heroines convey their virtue through their meaningful bodies, and the most authentic emotions are signalled not by words but by tears, blushes, palpitations and fainting fits.' (Todd, 1986, p. 122) In Mary this embodied sensibility is over-privileged while being shown to verge towards `the excessive and diseased'. (p. 120) Todd identifies in conventional female protagonists of the period an overt repudiation of sexual interpretation of their sensibility. She describes this as the `anti-sexual' quality of sensibility evident in Emmeline and Julia de RoubigneÂ. In Mary, however, this strain becomes `less an underlining of purity than a neurotic recoil'. (p. 123) Todd notes that it is this `worrying at sexuality' that `renders it . . . audible' in the novel. The novel lacks a clear objective correlative for the heroine's neurosis: `sexuality provides no active threat to female purity' in this narrative as `it derives from a weak, well-meaning man and is within marriage'. (p. 123) The usual suspects of `aggressive male libertinage', and misused `parental power', are removed from the plot, but the heroine's sexual neurosis nonetheless reaches a frantic and fatal pitch. (p. 115) The object of the heroine's `forboding fears' and `passions she cannot subdue' is not made obvious by the text, but is available to analysis. (pp. 67, 58) The three male characters available for the role of sexual threat negate the role of sexual aggressor in a number of ways. The father is given a short, brutish life that serves to aid the daughter's selfeducation as a negative example and as an object of spiritual analysis, but his power exhausts itself on Mary's subdued mother, and he dies in chapter VII illustrating the dangers of a thoughtless and immoral life: `Death is indeed the king of terrors when he attacks the vicious man!' (p. 23) Charles (the enforced husband) is a shadowy, insubstantial threat; an empty sign of patriarchal authority that exercises little effective power (the `weak, well-meaning man' in Todd's acute analysis). He is introduced as a counter in the narrative demand to marry Mary against her will, but does not consummate the marriage before going on a Grand Tour with his tutor, illustrating his youth and inexperience as aspects of powerlessness which reflects his lack of sexual power too. Mary's lover, Henry, is thoroughly de-masculinised by illness and aesthetic, and offers no active sexual threat to the heroine. He is introduced as `rather ugly' and `awkward', disallowing

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 37

any imputation of seduction against the heroine's better judgement. (p. 28) His feminisation is denoted by his characterisation as a `literary' man, `a thinker', and his `invalid' condition. (p. 27) His illness is initially `pleasing' to Mary, as it provides her with `an excuse to herself for shewing him how much she was interested about him'. (pp. 36±7) It rules him out as a sexually predatory character, and it is this absence of sexual threat which leaves room for Mary to `love' him. The figure of `aggressive male libertinage' posing a threat to `female innocence and passivity' is, however, not completely absent from the narrative, but figured in the heroine herself. Wollstonecraft's `Advertisement' to the `Fiction' offers guidance in reading the narrative for those who wish to interpret it. The `Author' warns us that her heroine is `different from those generally portrayed'. She informs us she is avoiding the mistake made by many authors who try to copy `the original of great masters', and asserts that `compositions' are only able to `delight, and carry us willing captives' when `the soul of the author is exhibited'. (p. 5). This `Author' aligns herself with the `chosen few' who `speak for themselves' in `a paradise of their own creating', by presenting a heroine `who has thinking powers' ± something, she claims, which has never been represented in writing before: `[t]he female organs have been thought too weak for this arduous employment'. Her unique heroine, however, is offered as an authentic reflection of the `Author' herself: `drawn by the individual from the original source'. While this heroine can only exist `in a fiction', it is claimed as a true representation of the `Author' in whose name it is written: `Without arguing physically about possibilities ± in a fiction, such a being may be allowed to exist.' The `Fiction' exhibits Mary's `thinking powers' in several ways: in conversation with other characters, usually displaying either her difference from other women, or the admiration and respect her `thinking powers' earn her from intelligent male characters; in her behaviour, which is always motivated by courage, charity, and benevolence; and in her reflections, displayed either in the narrator's second-guessing, or in fragments from the `little book' in which she records her thoughts. Her `difference' is noted internally by three `fashionable women' (relatives of Henry) lodging at the same guest house in Lisbon. These women refer to Mary as `romantic' and a `foolish creature', and comment on `how ill she dresses.' (pp. 30, 31) Chapter XIII sketches a tableau designed to indicate the funda-

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

38 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

mental difference between Mary and `fashionable women', in a conversation following one of Mary's regular visits to churches to see `historical paintings'. While Mary actively seeks out `historical paintings', of which she is `particularly fond', the `ladies' demonstrate their ignorance and lack of interest in the subject: `they could not handle it well'. The `ladies' turn the conversation to `portraits' instead, and emphasise their improper aesthetic judgement by revealing that their interest is motivated solely by narcissism: they `talked of the attitudes and characters in which they should wish to be drawn.' (p. 34) Reynolds' Discourses on Art, a popular authority in the late eighteenth-century, detailed an aesthetic which valued the general, comprehensive view above the particular. His Discourses justified the existing hierarchy between portraiture and history painting, which largely works by associating the former with `ornamental' styles and the latter with the `sublime'. (Reynolds, 1959, p. 70; Shaftesbury, 1969, pp. 134±5; Diderot, 1995, pp. 227±8) The theoretical formulation of an aesthetic prioritising of `general' subjects (as demonstrated in the `historical paintings' preferred by Mary), above the recording of individual instances (as demonstrated in the self-portraits desired by `the ladies'), exposes a gendered dichotomy between a feminine immersion in local (and personalised) detail, and a masculine capacity for conceptualising general or abstract subjects. (Schor, 1987; Perry, 1994, pp. 18±40; Roworth, 1994, pp. 41±62) Mary associates herself here with masculine taste: a rather obvious euphemism for lesbian desire. Historical paintings fall under the category of the Sublime, as do the `ruins that remained of the earthquake', and `the sight of that magnificent [Tagus] river' Mary visits at other times in the narrative. (p. 34) Earlier in the `Fiction' the narrator makes explicit Mary's taste for the Sublime in art and nature in a passage describing her reading habits in contrast with Ann's. Mary `would frequently study authors whose works were addressed to the understanding.' (p. 19) Ann's `wonder' at Mary's taste identifies her with the Beautiful: `In every thing it was not the great, but the beautiful, or the pretty, that caught [Ann's] attention. And in composition, the polish of style, and harmony of numbers, interested her much more than the flights of genius, or abstracted speculations.' (p. 19) In a fragment on sensibility, Mary explicitly states her taste for the Sublime, as a child `Sublime ideas filled her young mind.' (p. 59, p. 11) Mary's difference as a

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 39

heroine, then, is codified as a masculine taste in the Sublime, contrasted with the feminine taste in the Beautiful exhibited by Ann and `the ladies.' This capacity to appreciate the Sublime in art and nature is that which the `Author' has warned us is not considered physically possible in women, since `female organs have been thought too weak for this arduous employment'. (p. 5) The association of our heroine with the Sublime has implications beyond her taste in paintings. As Furniss has discussed in some detail, the categories of the Sublime and Beautiful as codified by Burke have moral and political, as well as sexual, connotations. Furniss has outlined the extent to which this aesthetic distinction is underpinned by a codification of masculine and feminine qualities. He argues that Burke's Philosophical Enquiry is `written explicitly and exclusively from a male perspective'. (Furniss, 1991, pp. 65±100) Mary's taste for the Sublime performs a codified reference to her `masculine' desire, and it is this aspect of the Sublime in particular that was deemed to be quite literally not `physically' possible in women. Burke's representative image of the Beautiful is the female breast, which suggests something of the nature of the feminine and masculine as understood in relation to Burke's categories, and alluded to in Wollstonecraft's Fiction. Ann's femininity is denoted by her female-embodied `taste' in objects and scenes associated with female-embodiment; in this sense the femininity displayed by Ann refuses the `violent foreclosure' of the maternal body both in the subject's identification and her desire. For Mary, however, the beautiful is denigrated to an inferior taste, because it refuses the foreclosure of the mother's body necessary to achieve signification. Proper taste, in this context, denotes maleembodied mediated same-sex desire (i.e. subjective identification with the father's body mediated through a taste in art and nature which reiterates the characteristics of that body). Sexual desire is unmediated, and it is in this sense that we might say that Mary's desire is `masculine' in its identification with male-embodiment. As a woman, then, experiencing signs of masculine desire, Mary is an impossible heroine only allowed to exist in this Fiction. But, as the `Advertisement' makes clear, we are led to perceive in this heroine the `Author's self-reflection: `drawn by the individual from the original source.' This is indeed a Fiction of Mary: and one in which aspects of her identity deemed impossible in the physical world (embodied love between women) are `allowed to exist'.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

40 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

The two-stages of the narrative are carefully paralleled: both are centred on the heroine's developing relationship with Ann and then with Henry, and in both cases the object of Mary's affection is an `invalid'. (pp. 25, 27) Both Ann and Henry die in Mary's arms, offering her an opportunity to reflect on grave subjects. And both deaths seem to recall and refer back to the scene in which Mary `ran to support her mother, who expired the same night in her arms'. (p. 20) Thinking through this narrative structure in relation to melancholia can account for both the heroine's inappropriately `masculine' desire, and her `neurotic recoil' from sexual relations. Butler reorients Freud's account of melancholia to argue that gender formation is `a process of internalisation'. Freud's model resolves loss of the love object through incorporation, whereby the other is `sustained' through `magical acts of imitation.' (Butler, 1990, pp. 57±65) According to Butler, this `process of internalizing lost loves becomes pertinent to gender formation when we realize that the incest taboo, among other functions, initiates a loss of a [parental] love-object for the ego and that this ego recuperates from this loss through the internalization of the tabooed object of desire'. (p. 58) Gender is the result of this identification as `a kind of melancholia' in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition. The love object that is lost in a way that remains unresolved is, for Butler, necessarily an object of same-sex desire, because it is only when the two primary social taboos (against incest and against homosexuality) are working together that the object becomes fully lost and therefore internalized: `In the case of a prohibited heterosexual union, it is the object which is denied, but not the modality of desire, so that the desire is deflected from that object onto other objects of the opposite sex.' (p. 59) Same-sex desire triggers both the prohibition against incest and against homosexuality, indeed Butler argues that the homosexuality taboo is primary in this process, and triggers the heterosexual dispositions which are the necessary conditions of the Oedipal conflict that Freud found to be central to gender formation. (p. 64) When we apply this understanding of the formation of gender identity and sexual desire (which, in Butler's view, is the energy that fixes gender identity through the imposition of the incest and homosexuality prohibitions) to Wollstonecraft's first novel, it illuminates the two-stage structure of the narrative, the paradox of

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 41

what is possible in physical and fictional worlds in the `Advertisement', and the `masculine' taste of the heroine for the Sublime. The scene of the mother's death resists analysis as a figure for her `loss' as a `love object', and does not offer a narrative moment for release of the symptoms of incorporation outlined above. The scene of death is presented as one of reconciliation, where the mother begs her child's forgiveness for `not always' treating her `with kindness', and the child is given the opportunity to `forgive' her mother. (p. 20) However, love objects can be lost `through a variety of means: separation, death, or the breaking of an emotional tie', or `prohibition attended by a set of punishments'. (p. 64) Two earlier incidents enact loss of maternal affection: memory of her mother's laughter at attempts to share intimacies (`She had once, or twice, told her little secrets to her mother; they were laughed at, and she determined never to do it again', p. 12); and in her mother's `frown'. (p. 15) These maternal renunciations are followed in the narrative by Mary's immediate and absolute immersion in her love for her new friend Ann, suggesting that while the object of Mary's desire is repudiated, the modality of that desire is not. Or at least, not yet. The female figure of the love that keeps forgetting its name6 After their first meeting, Mary's new friend is represented as a substitution for maternal affection: `She felt less pain on account of her mother's partiality to her brother, as she hoped now to experience the pleasure of being beloved.' Her `hope' results in `disappointment'. (p. 13) Ann is described as having a `disposition' `very different' to Mary's, and it is in the difference of `disposition' that we gain an insight into the nature of that `disappointment': `Ann only felt gratitude' while Mary felt love. Ann's `heart was entirely engrossed' by a `young gentleman' who had since forgotten her, and Mary's `friendship could not serve as a substitute' for this. (p. 14) Ann possesses a `bewitching softness to her manners, a delicacy so truly feminine, that a man of any feeling could not behold her without wishing to chase her sorrows away'. (p. 18) Mary intervenes, particularly when she `imagine[s] that [Ann] looked sick or unhappy, when `her tenderness would return like a torrent, and bear away all reflection'. (p. 14) Mary's position as masculine suitor to Ann's virtue-in-distress is made clear: she `loved Ann better than any one in the world ± to snatch her from the very jaws of destruction ± she would have encountered a

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

42 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

lion. To have this friend constantly with her; to make her mind easy with respect to her family, would it not be superlative bliss?' (p. 20) The mother's death represents an opportunity for Mary's dream to be realised, resulting as it does in her need for a suitable female companion: `During the year of mourning they lived in retirement; music, drawing, and reading, filled up the time.' (p. 21) But far from fulfilling all her dreams, her cohabitation with Ann only compounds Mary's `disappointment': `Before she enjoyed Ann's society, she imagined it would have made her completely happy: she was disappointed, and yet knew not what to complain of.' (p. 21) The narrator reflects on this sense of disappointment, and concludes that Mary `had not yet found the companion she looked for. Ann and she were not congenial minds, nor did she contribute to her comfort in the degree she expected'. (p. 21) The dual worlds inhabited by the heroine are invoked in the face of this crisis, since as we have been fore-warned by the `Author', `happiness only flourished in paradise ± we cannot taste and live'. (p. 22) Butler offers a way to conceive of this apparent split between embodiment and desire, since the `imaginary condition of desire always exceeds the physical body through or on which it works'. (p. 71) Mary, A Fiction offers a structural coherence to accommodate this narrative incoherence. The imaginary bodily ego that emerges from the first stage of the narrative embodies masculine desire. This stage documents the origins of, and describes a libidinal `strategy' for, female-embodied same-sex desire. The second narrative stage describes the heroine's transition towards a problematic heterosexual desire for a feminised male-embodied object. The transition from the first to the second stage is triggered by the loss of Ann, which can be considered as a further unresolved loss leading to a second process of incorporation. But the problematic and conflicting desires that demand this conclusion are not resolved by it. The object it offers to Mary's errant desire is feminised to the point of death. Romantic friendship and the tender office of a nurse Chapter VII ends with the death of Mary's father, and the heroine's anxiety that this event might speed the return of her undesired husband and `prevent her putting into execution a plan she had determined on': to escape with Ann to a `more salubrious climate'. (p. 24) The very next sentence, which begins Chapter VIII, turns aside

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 43

44 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

I mentioned before, that Mary had never had any particular attachment, to give rise to that disgust that daily gained ground. Her friendship for Ann occupied her heart, and resembled a passion. (p. 25) The oddly disjointed relationship between the two sentences that begin this chapter recapitulates the narrative's structural displacement of Mary's desire for Ann, which acts also as a means to record that desire. The sentence describing her `friendship' for Ann is embedded in an otherwise entirely heterosexual understanding of desire: she goes on to describe `several transient likings' Mary had experienced for men, which `did not amount to love'. Her `friendship' for Ann offers an alternative explanation for `disgust' unavailable to the narrator, but contained in the textual movement between heterosexual and same-sex desiring possibilities this chapter records. The chapter is very short (28 lines), and covers the moment at which Mary determines to accompany Ann to Lisbon, and the exchange of letters between herself and her husband this decision provokes. Mary writes of her `love' for Ann, intimates that her life depends on the survival of this `invalid', and describes her feelings as arising from `the tender office of a nurse' producing `an affection very like a maternal one'. (p. 25) The image recalls the account of the acquisition of maternal tenderness through breast-feeding ± or `nursing' ± central to Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. Her husband's answer contains `some common-place remarks on her romantic friendship, as he termed it'. (p. 25) This odd little chapter, then, positions Ann as the object of Mary's `love' and openly hints at the sexual nature of that love. Although there existed no transparent and readily available vocabulary for love between women in the 1780s (for, as the `Advertisement' implies, it is considered by this `Author' an impossibility), yet Wollstonecraft deploys two accepted contemporary euphemisms for same-sex erotic intimacy, and immediately following a passage that positions Ann as the object of Mary's love in displacement of the need for a `particular [heterosexual] attachment' to explain her `disgust' for her husband, and describes her feelings for Ann as resem-

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

from these events to offer an account of Mary's `disgust' for her husband:

bling (i.e. similar to but not identical with) `a passion'.7 Moore notes that given the historical conditions permitting ± even expecting ± heightened emotional intimacy in female relations, that it would be `unwise' to categorise Wollstonecraft and Blood's relationship as `lesbian'. (Moore, 1999, p. 13) If this is the case, the question remains, what is it that cannot be directly spoken in this novel? What is the `impossible' desire of which it speaks? Mary's physical relationship with Ann is framed in moments of necessary intimacy between an `invalid' and her `nurse'. These moments are presented in a language of heightened physical contact coinciding with extreme outpourings of emotion. When Mary is cohabiting with Ann prior to their residence in Lisbon, one such descriptive moment occurs: An extreme dislike took root in her mind; the sound of his name made her turn sick; but she forgot all, listening to Ann's cough, and supporting her languid frame. She would then catch her to her bosom with convulsive eagerness, as if to save her from sinking into an opening grave. (p. 22) Mary's `extreme dislike' for her husband, whose name registers as nausea, is displaced by her passionate nursing of Ann's `languid frame'. The `convulsive eagerness' with which she catches Ann `to her bosom' appears as a reflex response to her disgust for her husband. In this instance, it is Ann's passive morbidity ± signified in her `cough' ± that triggers a scene of passionate female intimacy instigated by the heroine. At the time of Mary's father's death, however, the narrative shifts momentarily to Ann's consciousness of Mary's declining health, and the emotional and physical effects this produces in her: Night after night Mary watched, and this excessive fatigue impaired her own health, but had a worse effect on Ann; though she constantly went to bed, she could not rest; a number of uneasy thoughts obtruted themselves; and apprehensions about Mary, whom she loved as well as her exhausted heart could love, harassed her mind. After a sleepless, feverish night she had a violent fit of coughing, and burst a blood-vessel. (p. 23)

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 45

The sleeplessness and feverishness that keep Ann awake is the closest the fiction comes to internalizing desire in this character: at all other times, she is offered as the mute and passive object of Mary's passion. It is worth noting that this narrative attention to Ann's feelings (rather than Mary's interpretation of Ann's feelings) occurs at a moment when Mary is busy `nursing' someone other than Ann. While Mary is nursing her father to his death, Ann is presumably left alone for the first time since they started their cohabitation, and it is possible to read this scene as one encoding Ann's jealousy triggered by Mary's removal of her nursing attention. A scene which takes place immediately following Mary's first encounter with Henry during the overlapping of the two narrative stages in Lisbon offers a cross-reference for this reading of Ann's sleeplessness: When the concert was over, they all retired to their apartments. Mary always slept with Ann, as she was obliged to be supported, to avoid suffocation. They chatted about their new acquaintance in their own apartment, and, with respect to the gentlemen, differed in opinion. (p. 28) `Mary always slept with Ann' can apply to their cohabitation in England as well as to the more immediate context of Lisbon, so Mary's nursing of her father, and the resulting absence and shift of `support' away from Ann, is what triggers both Ann's feverish sleeplessness, and the narrative consciousness that she momentarily inhabits. The added ingredient of Ann's jealousy might also be cross-referenced by the difference in opinion recorded between the friends concerning `the gentlemen', one of whom becomes a new object of desire for Mary. The erotic stress audible in the `supporting' that takes place in the context of nursing between Mary and Ann is confirmed by a moment in the scene between Mary and Henry during which they discuss historical paintings and portraits. Mary cannot decide on a pose in which she would like to be portrayed, leading to Henry's interjection: Henry, with more apparent warmth than usual, said, `I would give the world for your picture, with the expression I have seen in your face, when you have been supporting your friend.' (p. 34)

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

46 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

The narrative offers two ways of understanding Henry's longing for Mary's `picture', and it is necessary I think to retain both understandings simultaneously if we are to avoid doing violence to the sexual encodings recorded here. In one aspect, Henry is expressing an appropriate approval of Mary's compassionate sensibility towards her friend, as well as indicating a latent and as yet undisclosed desire for that sensibility to take him as its object. In this reading it is Mary's sensibility that is displayed in her `supporting' of Ann, and her sensibility that is admired and desired by Henry. But, as we have already seen, sensibility in this novel, and in the genre from which it emerges and against which it defines itself, is always threatening to collapse back into the sensuality from which the narrator strains to distinguish it. The reading of the scene that the narrative denies is nonetheless called for by the insistence of images of `supporting' between Mary and Ann that encode heightened physical intimacy, and resulting in `an affection very like a maternal one.' In this reading the narrative recognises Mary's erotic relationship with Ann, or at least her erotic experience of that relationship and the physical intimacies it allows under cover of Ann's illness, as signified in the expression on her face when she is `supporting' Ann, and allows Henry to acknowledge this in desiring it for himself. If we read this as a narrative of sexual consummation between Mary and Henry ± a reading that the Fiction calls for in its worrying over adultery, and a reading that critical accounts have foregrounded and insisted upon ± then we must also read it as a narrative of sexual consummation between Mary and Ann.8 When the narrator comments on Mary's `pity' for Henry, she comments that it `might easily be mistaken for love, and, indeed, it was a temporary sensation of that kind. Such it was ± why it was so, let others define, I cannot argue against instincts'. (p. 37) Chapter XV places an emphasis on the significance of `supporting' in a tableau between Henry, Mary and Ann. During an excursion, Ann leaves the carriage and insists on walking `tho' the ground was damp': `But her strength was not equal to her spirits; she was soon obliged to return to the carriage so much fatigued, that she fainted, and remained insensible a long time.' The scene leads inevitably to Ann's death the following day, brought on by a fever caught from the damp ground. When Ann `fainted', Henry moves to offer his help:

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 47

Henry would have supported her; but Mary would not permit him; her recollection was instantaneous, and she feared sitting on the damp ground might do him a material injury; she was on that account positive, though the company did not guess the cause of her being so. As to herself, she did not fear bodily pain. (p. 38) Mary's territorial response to Henry's offer to `support' Ann has a double aspect here: it reveals her `divided attention' between Ann and Henry; and it offers an important context for the narrative of desire between Mary and Ann. The narrator's comment that `the company did not guess the cause of her being so [positive]' describes a scene in which Mary's refusal of Henry's gesture to `support' Ann is played out before a small crowd of spectators (`the ladies'). While we are given a full account of Mary's motives ± concern for Henry's well-being, which is more urgent than her own `fear of bodily pain' ± the company, we are informed, knew nothing of this generosity, and see only that Mary insists on `supporting' Ann, in place of a man who had already offered to play the role of protector. This scene, then, has a double-focus, embodied in the two audiences that witness it: the company of ladies, and the reader (who is given the added interpretation of the narrator's access to Mary's internal motivations). The double-focus offers the reader a response unavailable to `the ladies', and shared between `Author' and knowing reader. Have you not a husband? Chapter XI is primarily interested in characterising `the ladies' that form the immediate social context for Mary's behaviour in Lisbon. The `fashionable' character of `the ladies' makes them representative of social context ± mouth-pieces for the cultural moment's ideology of manners: `Their minds were shackled with a set of notions concerning propriety, the fitness of things for the world's eye, trammels which always hamper weak people.' (p. 30) Unlike the narrator and her heroine, it seems, who are not `weak people'; and by extension constitutive of a reader who is invited to reject the `fashionable' opinions embodied by `the ladies'. Later in the chapter, Mary begins `brooding over her fears', and is struck by the realisation that `Ann was still very ill.' The loss of hope this realisation engenders propels

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

48 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 49

No sooner did she determine [to seek medical aid], than she ran down with a discomposed look, to enquire of the ladies who she should send for. When she entered the room she could not articulate her fears ± it appeared like pronouncing Ann's sentence of death; her faultering tongue dropped some broken words, and she remained silent. The ladies wondered that a person of her sense should be so little mistress of herself; and began to administer some common-place comfort, as, that it was our duty to submit to the will of Heaven, and the like trite consolations, which Mary did not answer; but waving her hand, with an air of impatience, she exclaimed, `I cannot live without her! ± I have no other friend; if I lose her, what a desart will the world be to me.' `No other friend,' re-echoed they, `have you not a husband?' (pp. 31±32) Mary's emotional condition is registered by her body and her speech: she is, in both arenas, discomposed. Her appearance and `broken words' are responded to with surprise that `a person of her sense should be so little mistress of herself' and `trite consolations'. But Mary's dis-composure allows her to speak without regard to propriety, and reveals her extreme attachment to Ann (`I cannot live without her! ± I have no other friend'). The ladies' marked response (`have you not a husband?') acts to reinforce the sense that Ann's status as the object of Mary's love and concern exceeds the model of appropriate relationship available to the `fashionable' and `weak' mind. Mary's claim to her `friend' is answered by reference to a `husband'. And Mary's reaction to the ladies' comment reveals an unexpected consciousness of exceeding the mark: `Mary shrunk back, and was alternately pale and red. A delicate sense of propriety prevented her from replying; and recalled her bewildered reason.' (p. 32) When Mary comes close to communicating her passion for Ann, she falls prey to loss of reason, or incoherence. Only when she achieves a `more composed manner' can she make her enquiry and leave the room. Wollstonecraft's first novel, we might conclude, records love between women in the context of a `propriety' that accommodates it as long as it doesn't make itself conscious. Sinfield deploys Miller's

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Mary into a scene with `the ladies' in which `propriety' is forgotten under the pressure of extreme emotion:

phrase ± `open secret' ± to describe the way in which same-sex desire gets `half-heard' in `discreet discourse' in literature prior to the Twentieth century. Miller comments that the function of the open secret is `not to conceal knowledge, as much as to conceal the knowledge of the knowledge'. Sinfield continues: `The secret keeps a topic like homosexuality in the private sphere, but under surveillance, allowing it to hover on the edge of public visibility.' The secret must never be revealed fully and openly because then it `attains public recognition; yet it must not disappear altogether, for then it would be beyond control and would no longer effect a general surveillance of aberrant desire.' Mary's love for Ann we might say, using Sinfield's terminology, is `obscurely available' to the narrative. (Sinfield, 1994, pp. 62±4) Sinfield argues this is a form of `manifest discretion' which respects hegemonic boundaries. It functions by anticipating two audiences: a knowing and a naõÈve one; `one that picked up gay references and one that didn't'. (p. 64) This notion of a partial codification (recognised by a knowing audience, but passing an unknowing audience) corresponds with Trumbach's argument that `at the end of the [eighteenth] century' there is evidence that some women `sought to be sexually desirable by dressing in part as men, but who wished the eye of the knowing beholder to be a [knowing] woman's and not a man's'. (Trumbach, 1994, p. 114) The `maladies of the imagination' that plague Mary in the form of `discontent' are elsewhere figured as a fear of her self. (p. 35) When she is contemplating the journey home by sea following Ann's death, the narrator exclaims: `it was not the contending elements, but herself she feared'. (p. 43; original emphasis) The aspect of herself that causes Mary such trouble can be understood more generally as her unwieldy and unconfined desire.9 Mary's love for Ann represents an excess of desire in itself, that breaches the boundaries that are supposed to keep it in proper order. This excessive desire is figured in the `chastening illness' that plagues this novel's characters; unnamed, undisclosed, an `open secret' that will not go away. And there is little evidence that the heterosexual resolution offered to Mary in the object of Henry goes very far in satisfying this `excess of sexuality', for as the narrator finds fit to remark, `had Ann lived, it is probable she would never have loved Henry so fondly; but if she had, she could not have talked of her passion to any human creature'. (p. 55) The sentence is wonderfully ambivalent ± perhaps evidence in

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

50 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

itself for the `open secret' in this case. The first clause is pretty straightforward, and prioritises Mary's relationship with Ann (described elsewhere as the `first string . . . severed from her heart', p. 38) above her relationship with Henry. The ambiguity of the female pronoun in the second clause highlights the lexical confusion caused by love between women. Mary's happiness is not secured by her relationship with Henry ± largely because he dies before the end of the narrative ± but neither is it secured in the heterosexual desire this relationship consolidates. The narrator towards the end returns to references to another world where the kind of happiness that remains `impossible' in this physical world, becomes possible there: She forgot that happiness was not to be found on earth, and built a terrestrial paradise liable to be destroyed by the first serious thought: when she reasoned she became inexpressibly sad, to render life bearable she gave way to fancy ± this was madness. (pp. 42±3) In a reiteration of the dualism established by the `Author' in the `Advertisement', the narrator here straddles two worlds: the physical in which `happiness' cannot be found, and the world of `fancy' which, however, collapses too easily into `madness'. It is tempting here to turn to Kristeva's understanding of desire between women as symbolisable only in figures of maternity or poetics. As Butler recognises, this leaves child-free and non-poetically-minded lesbians only psychotic discourse to inhabit. (Butler, 1990, pp. 86±8) But more interesting, perhaps, is the novel's own resolution of the heroine's unruly desire in its final words: She thought she was hastening to that world where there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage. (p. 73; original emphasis) Kelly notes that it is necessary at least in part to read this as a collapse of the heroine's subjectivity into morbidity and despair (a reading that Todd emphasises in her analysis of the failures of Wollstonecraft's first novel), and a reference to the narrative's resistance to patrilineal power vectors that allow the heroine to be passed from

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Wollstonecraft's Early Writings 51

father to husband without reference to her will or her desire. (Kelly, 1992, pp. 45±6) It can also be read alongside the younger Mary's conversations with Angels. Angels have no sex, because they are not embodied creatures. Similarly, that world where there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage does not have to be death, but a phantasy that the narrator worries is leading her heroine to madness. It depends on whether we read `marriage' as a patriarchal institution that allows only some erotic encounters to be formalised, or as the arena for sexual encounters per se: while the latter reading seems difficult to sustain today, it nonetheless creeps into otherwise intelligent and sensitive critical accounts of this novel. The world in which there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage, however, might function as a predictive rather than morbid phantasy. A similar bifocation occurs in the Rights of Woman, in reference to `that state where there is to be neither marrying nor giving in marriage', immediately following an account of Swedenborg's ambisexual angels. (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 38) These moments have been understood as pointing to the realm of women's excessive sensibility. They may also be understood as signalling towards a phantasy realm suitable for our heroine's phantasmatic desire. In such a world, she would, after all, no longer be deemed `impossible'. The early writings demonstrate Wollstonecraft's struggle to engender and stabilise her writing subjectivity. They show also the condition of maternal loss central to its production. The masculinisation of the writing subject apparent in Mary as a means to accommodate a female love object is heightened in her next publication: Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). Here, the writing subject engendered by these early writings takes up centre stage in the debate surrounding the French Revolution, in a way that shows the transmutation of women's writing into the Athenic mode. This move takes place simultaneous with a strong depersonalising ± and disembodiment ± of the writing voice. It remains to be seen what is discarded in this depersonalisation, and to what extent the writing subject of Wollstonecraft's first Vindication is grounded in a further repudiation of female-embodiment.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

52 Remembering Elizabeth Dickson and Fanny Blood

Female Embodiment and the Body-Politic

[G]iven that the public sphere has historically been an almost exclusively male sphere, it has developed in a manner which assumed that is occupants have a male body. . . . It is the male body, and its historically and culturally determined powers and capacities, that is taken as the norm or standard of the liberal individual. . . . Women can achieve this standard provided that they . . . elide their own corporeal specificity. (Moira Gatens)

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Part II

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

This page intentionally left blank

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Female Embodiment, Rape, and the Vindications

That other evil, which instantly . . . runs foul of a woman's imagination . . . (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 6, p. 245) Between 1787 and 1790 Mary Wollstonecraft was a moderately successful writer of works addressed to women, her most successful publication to date a book of moral tales for children. She earned a living wage as a `hack' writer of translations and reviewer for Joseph Johnson's Analytical Review. But in 1790 she produced the first ± and one of the most significant and enduring of 60 or so ± responses to Edmund Burke's provocative Reflections on the Revolution in France published earlier in the same year. That there is a new confidence in her 1790 Vindication of the Rights of Men is unquestionable, but what triggered this move from the feminised margins to the masculinised centre of literary discourse remains contested.1 The events of the French revolution from 1789, and the subsequent culture of radical literary activism that coalesced around discussion of these events, undoubtedly politicised Wollstonecraft, as well as offering a public arena for her own developing ideas of cultural reform and public virtue. But the shift between her earlier writings and this first Vindication also marks a shift in her status as a writing subject. As a reviewer for the Analytical Wollstonecraft had embarked on a period of sustained reading of the decade's most significant publications, and it is in these reviews that we trace the emergence of her distinctive critical voice. This is a voice worrying at sexual difference and virtue, struggling to define femininity and masculinity in new ways, 55

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

2

but persistently aligning itself with the `manly' in cultural forms.2 In her time as a reviewer Wollstonecraft had encountered femaleembodiment as an object of discourse; she emerges from this period as a writing subject engaging directly with the body-politic in an argument concerning the rights and duties of its subjects in her first Vindication. Her Vindication of the Rights of Men is concerned above all else to demonstrate that `masculine' (unadorned, rational) writing is possible in a female-embodied subject. This new writing subject is defined in direct opposition to the feminised style of Burke's Reflections.3 In this sense it is an overt example of Athenic writing: consciously incorporating the masculinist voice in a `violent foreclosure' of femininity. It also performs the tension central to a claim to masculinist writing by a female-embodied subject, and signals the high costs associated with Athenic writing for women. The Vindication of the Rights of Woman that followed two years later recapitulates the arguments of the first Vindication, but now takes as its focus specifically the problem of woman as subject (in Wollstonecraft's terms, citizen.) The claim to masculine writing made in the first Vindication is extended here to a claim to `manly' or `masculine' virtue in spite of a recognition of sexual difference. This move intensifies the tensions inherent in Wollstonecraft's position as a femaleembodied writing subject, by making this the object of its analysis in an attempt to apply the argument to all women. It fails, of course, and in ways which signal the incommensurabilty of female-embodiment with masculinist writing. The first Vindication engendered an indignant response in reviews that centred on the sexual difference of the writer (disclosed by the second, signed edition). (Kelly, 1992, pp. 101±2) This wave of reaction is registered in the second Vindication as the discursive context for Wollstonecraft's arguments concerning women's rights and duties.4 The movement between the first and second Vindications ± from an engagement with Burke over the rights and duties of a generic human `mankind', to an engagement with Rousseau and conduct writers over the rights and duties of a specifically (and problematically) femaleembodied citizen ± performs a dialectic between the female-embodied writing subject and a masculinist body-politic, that does not recognise her claim for `equality'. The Vindication of the Rights of Men's critique of Burke's Reflections demonstrates the first wave of this engagement between a female-embodied writing subject and a masculinist body-

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

56 Female Embodiment and the Body-Politic

politic. This Vindication traces the location of sexual difference (as lack) in the female-embodied subject in its dramatisation of a female-embodied reader; the reader who is aware that she lacks a sword ± or the will ± with which to defend the Queen of France against the assault of the revolution. The Vindication of the Rights of Woman attempts to define rational female subjectivity, and in the process edges towards a model for female-embodied subjectivity that stresses its difference in the same moment that it claims `equality', particularly in its gestures towards female sexual identities beyond the rape paradigm she finds underpinning Rousseau's moral philosophy. My argument accepts Poovey's analysis that Wollstonecraft's `failure' lay in her unwillingness or inability to `take her challenge to its logical, radical extreme', because in the process of making her argument, she inevitably finds herself `vacillating between denying her female feelings altogether and falling hostage once more to the very categories she was trying to escape.' (Poovey, 1984, p. 48) Kaplan finds Rights of Woman a problematic work for feminism, since its claim to rationality for women rests on a denial of female sexual pleasure, and in the process establishes a fundamental dichotomy between sense and sensibility. (Kaplan, 1986, pp. 34±50; Jacobus, 1989, pp. 54±6) This banishing of `female desire' is the characteristic gesture of the Athenic writer, and is a manifestation of a prior repudiation of female-embodiment figured by the symbolic burial of the maternal body. This gesture is doomed to failure, and Wollstonecraft's second Vindication exposes the grounds for this failure in the return of figures of female-embodiment to disrupt the text. I have introduced the category of `rape' to this discussion to signal what is at stake in the Athenic/Matrilineal tension in women's writing. Wollstonecraft's Vindications take issue with Burke and Rousseau in particular, I will argue, because their arguments bring to light the rape paradigm fundamental to cultural masculinism. Her perception of rape as the key to Burke's and Rousseau's social fantasies marks the crucial point at which the Athenic mode encounters its failure. This failure allows glimpses of a specifically female-embodied desire uncontained by the rape paradigm. Since Wollstonecraft writes here in disavowal of female-embodiment and femininity (as the cultural sign of female embodiment), we can expect to find her text substituting structurally and imaginatively for the otherwise disregistered female-embodiment of the writer.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Rape, and the Vindications 57

58 Female Embodiment and the Body-Politic

Vindicating masculine virtue

I have not yet learned to twist my periods, nor, in the equivocal idiom of politeness, to disguise my sentiments, and imply what I should be afraid to utter: if, therefore, in the course of this epistle, I chance to express contempt, and even indignation, with some emphasis, I beseech you to believe that it is not a flight of fancy; for truth, in morals, has ever appeared to me the essence of the sublime; and, in taste, simplicity the only criterion of the beautiful. (p. 7) A similar pattern is foregrounded in the introductory statement to Rights of Woman, which rejects fine language and sophisticated argument in a trope of simplicity, described by Mary Jacobus as `claiming sense for women rather than sensibility'. (Jacobus, 1989, p. 54) This claim for plain-speaking `sense' is made with reference to Burke's charged terms of `sublime' and `beautiful'. Masculine `truth' is `unadorned', while feminine `cunning' is `equivocal'. Wollstonecraft's denigration of Burke recoils from the feminised aspects of his argument: disguise, insinuation, and flights of fancy. (Moore, 1989, pp. 158±61) Burke's argument is openly rejected by Wollstonecraft as `cunning'; a characteristic Rousseau credits as `a natural gift' in women. (Rousseau, 1992, p. 334; Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 95) In effeminising Burke, Wollstonecraft raises her own argument as a `manly' corrective.5 Wollstonecraft here, as in her reviews, recoils from `feminine' writing. Published anonymously in its first edition, the author of the Rights of Men's female identity was revealed in a second (largely identical) edition published three weeks later.6 The text contains no reference to the female sex of the writer. The reader, as is evident in shocked reviews of the signed second edition, would without the female signature have assumed it to be the work of a man.7 Feminist accounts of the Vindications express disappointment at Wollstonecraft's apparently uncritical acceptance of `the given perceptions of masculine and feminine' in her `symbolic cross-dressing.' (Alexander, 1989, p. 49) Feminist disappointment

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

The Rights of Men's `Advertisement' famously foregrounds a duality between plain speaking and equivocation:

rests on an identification with the Vindications, on which the major claim to Wollstonecraft's proto-feminism is based. Jacobus describes Wollstonecraft's introduction to Rights of Woman as `a feminist preface to the Lyrical Ballads'. (Jacobus, 1989, p. 54) But she is alarmed by the `alienated' result, in which `[l]inguistic pleasure (literary language) is placed on the side of the feminine; banned, like female desire'. Feminism remains caught in the Athenic mode; claiming, as Wollstonecraft does here, inclusion in masculinist definitions of `virtue', but increasingly conscious of the repudiation of femaleembodiment that grounds this claim. As a gendered polemic, then, Rights of Men argues a virile politics in opposition to the corrupt and effeminate old regime. This corresponds with Paine's claim for a `gigantick manliness' in the new French republic, and Mackintosh's description of the new politics as `original masculine thought.' (Paine, 1973, p. 379; Simpson, 1993, p. 105) These instances belong to what Simpson has described as `the long tradition of radical references to the male propriety of reason', which denigrates the old regime of France, and aristocracy in general, as effeminate, and the advance of `Liberty' and `Reason' in positive accounts of the Revolution as a virile, masculine corrective. (Simpson, 1993, pp. 10±17) For Paine the opposition between masculine and effeminate politics is a manifestation of the more fundamental opposition between `Reason and Ignorance'. (Paine, 1973, p. 379) For Wollstonecraft, this opposition is less straightforward: her femaleembodiment undermines any identification with, and championing of, a masculine rationality that is defined through exclusion of (corrupt, excessive, lacking, degenerate, cunning, eloquent) femininity. This fundamental tension has been noted in the Rights of Men as a `double vision', through which the female writer `masters the illusion of masculine authority through anonymity.' (Gunther-Canada, 1996, p. 83) Since political writing in particular is coded masculine, any claim to writing subjectivity in this genre rests on a more- or-less conscious exclusion of signs of femininity. (Pateman, 1992; Brody, 1996; Keane, 2000) A female-embodied writer alienates herself immediately she makes an argument from this foundation. Wollstonecraft deploys her awareness of rhetorical argument in her Vindications. Classical rhetorical theory was embedded in eighteenthcentury literary culture through formal education, but also through popular rhetorical studies such as Hugh Blair's enormously successful

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Rape, and the Vindications 59

Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). Wollstonecraft refers to Blair's work as `an intellectual feast' in a letter to her sister dated 1787. (Wardle, 1979, p. 138) Kelly finds Wollstonecraft deploying the rhetoric of `honest man skilled in speaking' in combat with Burke's `delator' in Rights of Men. (Kelly, 1979, 1992, pp. 86±8) Brody comments that `the agonistic struggle of argument contending with argument that had been described in the classical world as an inherently masculine enterprise still required muscular strength to bespeak the mental agility required in the law court, the senate, and the legislature'. (Brody, 1996, p. 109) This `muscular' rhetoric was particularly heightened in the `plain style' advocated by Quintilian, and claimed by Wollstonecraft in both Vindications. Quintilian's `plain style' is paradigmatically undermined when embodied by a eunuch. The problem facing Wollstonecraft, then, was `the problem of a woman who intended to write an argument', because `her body had already been defined as the agency that undermines rational discourse.' Brody finds in Quintilian's eunuch the paradigm of castration: `the body of the woman having invaded the man suggested the capacity of language to fail to represent the world it claimed to describe.' (Brody, 1996, p. 111) She locates in Wollstonecraft's `antipathy towards sexual feeling' a symptom of the textual disembodiment necessary to make her argument. In her first Vindication, then, Wollstonecraft writes in disavowal of female-embodiment in its writing subject. But that embodiment can never be fully transcended by writing, and returns to disturb the argument. Furthermore, this discussion centres on the significant difference between castrated male-embodiment (the rhetorical eunuch), and the female-embodied woman writer. It is on the grounds of this difference that Wollstonecraft stages her claim to female-embodied subjectivity beyond the rape paradigm. Wollstonecraft's claims to manliness function in several ways. She makes an overt claim to rational argument, sweeping away the feminised sentimentalism of traditionalism and prejudice. She also performs a theatrical manliness in gestures of mock gallantry, inverting the chivalric code valued by Burke in the Reflections. By picturing their debate as a duel, she claims a strength and skill in her own argument absent from her opponent's. He, in turn, is imagined as either too boyish or too effeminate to wield the necessary weapons. In either case, she lays down her arms, since `it would be something like cowardice to fight with a man who had never exercised the

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

60 Female Embodiment and the Body-Politic

weapons with which his opponent chose to combat'. (p. 10) Yet by refusing to challenge her opponent to the imagined duel, she makes a play of striking at his male honour. The duel as a means of settling arguments recognises the superiority of the more `manly' duelist. (Stone, 1990, p. 237) The challenge is repeated when she later feigns to refuse to `fight', since `in controversy, as in battle, the brave man wishes to face his enemy, and fight on the same ground'. (p. 29) Her macho stance is compounded by a repeated valorisation of the adjective `manly', and accusations of effeminacy in Burke's argumentative strategy: `Even the Ladies, Sir, may repeat your sprightly sallies, and retail in theatrical attitudes many of your sentimental exclamations.' (p. 8)8 This writer, it seems, is far from being a lady.9 Poovey identifies this stylistic machismo as a `mask' of masculinity covering the woman writer's anxiety about being a writing woman `during a period in which self-assertion was considered ``unladylike'' '. (Poovey, 1984, p. xv) This conjunction of anonymity, alongside the writer's insistence on claiming a `manly' stance, produces an implicit performance of the argument made explicitly in the Rights of Woman two years later ± that women can be subjects. It founders on the peculiar fact that subjectivity is overdetermined as masculine, and that writing subjectivity historically embodies this encoding in a repudiation of femininity. This Athenic identification produces the accent of femininity as signs of the resistance of female-embodiment to masculinist subjective forms. The point at which this failure becomes apparent, in this case, is the point at which this woman writer recognised the rape paradigm, or dirty joke, common to anti- and pro-revolutionary arguments.

Ten thousand swords Marie-Antoinette is central to Burke's anti-revolutionary argument. His most powerful prose records a transmutation of France's controversial Queen into a symbol of sacred feminine otherness. He places her centre stage of the revolution as political theatre, imagining the revolutionary forces as a pillaging mob threatening the sanctity of the heroine: I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, ± glittering like the

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Rape, and the Vindications 61

62 Female Embodiment and the Body-Politic

The revolution threatens the state in the same way that a mob threatens to `disgrace' the innocent heroine of Burke's political drama: through rape. The call to arms is taken up between `noble' men in a hom(m)osocial paradigm of male rivalry: `little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. ± But the age of chivalry is gone'. (Burke, 1969, pp. 169±70) This passage occurs shortly after Burke reconstructs the revolutionary challenge as an intimate scene of the invasion of a private bed-chamber, and the unnatural challenge to the husband's property in his wife this represents: A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with . . . blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with an hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked, and through ways unknown to the murderers had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband, not secure of his own life for a moment. (Burke, 1969, p. 164) Visual representations of this historically charged moment deploy similar imagery of the queen as woman threatened by rape. She is represented in a flimsy, white night-robe in Pellegrini's `The Persecuted Queen hurried at the Dead of Night into a Common Prison' (1795). Surrounded by dark, heavy, uniformed armed guards and cornered in a gloomy corridor, while the guards' obscene gaze is directed at the queen's vulnerabilty, she looks out of the picture, imploring protection. (See also Jones, 1992) Burke's imaging of the isolated queen open to invasion, her solitary sentinel murdered by the invaders, is condensed in the image of `piercing', which heightens the threat of rape. The success of the revolution is re-written as the

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! (Burke, 1969, p. 169)

failings of a corrupt and effeminised population unwilling, or no longer able, to protect its queen's virtue from mob rape. The image of `ten thousand swords' is the focus for many satirical responses to the Reflections.10 Wollstonecraft's, however, is set apart by her direct challenge to the rape paradigm implied by the image. Mackintosh responds with a straightforward exchange between Burke's pure heroine, and the whorish image of Marie-Antoinette available from popular engravings and pornographic material of the time, which acts to sanction the rape by undermining the `virtue' of the Queen.11 Wollstonecraft's response is directed differently, since it is grounded in female-embodiment. She perceives Burke's elevation of the Queen as the reflex of a sensualist to a coquette. (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 5, p. 18) If the revolution is figured as an innocent heroine in danger of rape unless the reader spring to the rescue of her honour with his sword, then Wollstonecraft rejects the argument primarily as one which cannot take account of her own (swordless) response. Rights of Men, then, while screening the writer's female-embodiment, can be read for political and rhetorical evasions available to the female-embodied reader. Furniss's analysis of Burke's Philosophical Enquiry as `written explicitly and exclusively from a male perspective' applies equally to the Reflections. Furniss understands Burke's endangered heroine scene as an Oedipal rape fantasy, which takes on `structural features' apparent in the `obscene joke'. These `typically involve obscenity and aggression towards a woman made unavailable through social constraints.' The `joke' depends upon `a voyeuristically inclined third person': the reader. (Furniss, 1991, pp. 79±80) This produces a `kind of complicity' between Burke and `his male radical readers through a shared aggression towards the female emblem of aristocratic society'.12 It is an aggression founded on exclusive exchange between men, marked by rivalry over a female object.

Female-embodied reason While Wollstonecraft's claim to rational subjectivity is triggered by (as reader), and in disavowel of (as writer), her female-embodiment, the claim to female reason made in the course of this Vindication gestures towards female-embodiment as a facilitator of rationality. In the course of criticising Burke for allowing his reason to be `dupe to [his] imagination' Wollstonecraft accuses him of actively silencing

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Rape, and the Vindications 63

64 Female Embodiment and the Body-Politic

. . . did you not sometimes angrily bid her be still, when she whispered that you were departing from strict truth? Or, when assuming the awful form of conscience, and only smiling at the vagaries of vanity, did she not austerely bid you recollect your own errors, before you lifted the avenging stone? Did she not sometimes wave her hand, when you poured forth a torrent of shining sentences, and beseech you to concatenate them ± plainly telling you that the impassioned eloquence of the heart was calculated rather to affect than dazzle the reader, whom it hurried along to conviction? Did she not anticipate the remark of the wise, who drink not at a shallow, sparkling stream, and tell you that they would discover when, with the dignity of sincerity, you supported an opinion that not only appeared to you with one face; or, when superannuated vanity made you torture your invention? ± But I forbear. (p. 59)13 The passage reproduces the unadorned speech/cunning eloquence dualism of the `Advertisement'. By representing reason as femaleembodiment, Wollstonecraft opens a can of symbolic worms, particularly once the reader is aware (post-second edition) that the author is a woman. The female-embodiment of reason here offers a passage by which the female-embodied writing subject can claim a direct identification with reason. Her inversion of the more orthodox gendering of reason as masculine, feeling as feminine, is condensed in an image of sexual reproduction: Sacred be the feelings of the heart! concentred in a glowing flame, they become the sun of life; and, without his invigorating impregnation, reason would probably lie in helpless inactivity, and never bring forth her only legitimate offspring ± virtue. But to prove that virtue is really an acquisition of the individual, and not the blind impulse of unerring instinct, the bastard vice has often been begotten by the same father. (p. 31) The feminine part in this process remains `inert' and `helpless' without the active `invigorating impregnation' of the masculine. Reason

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

reason's voice, and produces a long passage which insists without comment on the female-embodiment of reason:

in this Vindication, then, is not only claimed as Jacobus remarks, `over [women's] dead bodies', but as a quality of female-embodiment. (Jacobus, 1989, pp. 54±5) More accurately, it is claimed both on condition of women's symbolic dead bodies, and as femaleembodied. Reason can be said here to be that which women are, and men have: this writer wants both to be and have reason. Here we see a glimpse of the Athenic repudiation of the castrated female body (as the eunuch undermining masculinist argument), answered by the return of a productive maternal body. The productive maternal body grants the woman writer direct access to reason, unmediated by a masculinist gesture of `violent foreclosure'. These apparently contradictory impulses record the crisis in Wollstonecraft's attempt to speak female-embodied rational subjectivity; a crisis synthesised in her mimicking of the direct speech of femaleembodied reason to admonish the effeminised Burke. This writing subject, in wishing both to be and to have rationality, is situated on the cusp of sexual difference. This is a desire with far-reaching implications, as I will discuss in more detail later. The productive maternal body seen returning in images of procreative reason, offers the woman writer a symbology of Matrilineage. The argument of Rights of Men centres on this very question of matrilineal disinheritance.

Leaving out the mother Rights of Men attacks the `foundation' of Burke's `superstructure'. (p. 9) Reflections understands revolution as a centrifugal movement, an attack on the `centre of gravity' exposing the order of social hierarchy to anarchic chaos. This `centre of gravity' is embodied in the father/ king figure of patriarchy. The `foundations' Wollstonecraft excavates are the dual pillars underpinning Burke's argument: property inheritance and the power of the patriarch. This architectural vocabulary, and the terms of the argument it is deployed to make, refer directly to Locke's refutation of Patriarcha in his Two Treatises of Government (1690).14 Locke represents his critique of patriarchalism as an address to `so mighty a Structure rais'd upon the bare supposition of this Foundation.' (Locke, 1989, pp. 148±9) He describes Filmer's model of a father's `natural Right of Dominion over his Children' as `the main Basis of all his Frame.' (p. 176) Filmer's assertion of Adam's `Absolute Unlimited Sovereignty' is described as `false and frail a

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Rape, and the Vindications 65

Foundation.' (p. 190) Wollstonecraft's argument with Burke recalls this earlier anti-patriarchalist argument. The parallels are worth pursuing further. Filmer's argument assumes metonymy of fathers for kings. He locates women as the object of male-defined property, and of exchange between male subjects under the law: `There could be no law against adultery or theft, if women and all things were common.' (Filmer, 1949, p. 65) Women and property are syntactically equal: that which is owned, and therefore that which can be stolen from the owner. At the same time there is a suggestion (in the possible differentiation offered by `or' in the first clause, `and' in the second) that women are the mediators of property. That is, adultery is a crime when patrilineage operates. Burke's Reflections draws on what Pateman has termed `traditional patriarchal thought' which `assimilates all power relations to paternal rule.' In Reflections this figure is foregrounded in a concern with patrilineage, and in passages defending the father±husband's property against the anarchic Revolutionary mob.15 By the time we come to the Rights of Woman, this system of maternal disinheritance is openly avowed: `[t]he rights of humanity have thus been confined to the male line from Adam downwards.' (p. 99; original emphasis) Rights of Men remarks on `all the unnatural crimes which the laudable, interesting desire of perpetuating a name has produced', in a long discussion of the benefits of abandoning a system of primogeniture, which includes love replacing `gallantry', the removal of `[l]uxury and effeminacy' from `noble families', `women' acting like `mothers', and `the fine lady' becoming a `rational woman' in fulfilling `her part of the social compact.' (pp. 22±4) In place of patrilineage, Rights of Men offers a Lockean idea of property as `the right a man has to enjoy the acquisitions which his talents and industry have acquired; and to bequeath them to whom he chooses.' (p. 24; see also p. 15; Locke, 1989, pp. 287±8) Burke's imagining of revolutionary forces as a rape describes the Queen taking `refuge at the feet of a king and husband, not secure of his own life for a moment.' The syntactical parallel of `king and husband' is echoed in the eulogy on the death of the age of chivalry; where `king' and `father' are offered on equal terms: `a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order. . . . The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father, are only common homicide'. (Burke, 1969,

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

66 Female Embodiment and the Body-Politic

p. 171) The fear of downwards-levelling enacted in the descending syntax of the first sentence expresses anxiety over loss of order through hierarchy: `but a man . . . but a woman . . . but an animal'. It offers the specter of reductionism beyond egalitarianism, until all is collapsed to the lowest animality, and individuated humanity is lost in the process. But this striving for ordered differentiation is countered in the last sentence by an odd syntactical move which makes `king', `queen', `bishop', and `father' perform on a horizontal line of value. The inclusion of `father' in the list of differentiated victims syntactically excludes the `man' of the first sentence from the status denoted by `common homicide' in the last. Killing a father is not simply homicide. By giving the father an equality of syntactical value in the passage, Burke asserts that the father of a family serves a parallel significant function to the king. But by leaving out the mother in a parallel relationship to the queen of the first sentence, fathers alone are elevated from the familial to the divine order of being. This passage between the individual and the divine is crossreferenced in English law, where a wife accused of murdering her husband was tried for `petty treason', in a confirmation of the father/king metonymy. The penalty for treason until 1790 was burning alive at the stake.16 Wollstonecraft rewrites Burke's genealogy of power, describing the `murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop' as indeed `only common homicide', and emphasizes her `agreement'. She underlines her point, informing him that, by `leaving out the word father', she has made the `whole extent of the comparison invidious.' (p. 25; original emphasis) By leaving out the word father, Wollstonecraft denies Burke's paralleling of the function and symbolism of fathers and kings. This mirrors Locke's refutation of Filmer's interpretation of the Decalogue as authority for the power of the father as king: `Honour thy Father and Mother; but our Author contents himself with half, leaves out thy Mother quite, as little serviceable to his purpose.' (Locke, 1989, p. 145, original emphasis; Pateman, 1988, p. 22) In `leaving out the father', Wollstonecraft exposes Burke's vision of identification between paternal and royal power; an identification which has authority, according to Locke, only by `leaving out' the mother in the first place. Patrilineage eclipses matrilineage. Rights of Men, then, encapsulates Wollstonecraft's Athenic dilemma, in its claim to masculinism founded on the repudiation of the

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Rape, and the Vindications 67

feminine. Since the feminine connotes matrilineage, excising the feminine works to eclipse the productive maternal body. This body returns in images of female-embodied reason, and in the argument's recognition of the subordination of matrilineal to patrilineal inheritance. The paradox of female subjectivity under patriarchy implicit here, becomes the question pursued openly in Rights of Woman.

Vindicating women: the problem that is women's writing Kelly has analysed the hybrid style of Rights of Woman, identifying its discursive radicalism as a `quasi-treatise, a discourse that would be seen to have attributes of both ``men's'' and ``women's'' writing.' (Kelly, 1992, p. 109) This can in turn be taken as evidence of a disturbance to the Athenic claim to masculinist writing posed by the writing subject's consciousness of her female-embodiment. Female-embodiment, she has by now realised, undermines her claim to rational discourse. Since the writer of Rights of Woman aims to define female subjectivity for herself in writing, she has to adopt an Athenic position in tension with her own embodiment. The rational female subject argued for in Rights of Woman is keen to identify herself as equal to men. In the process she also identifies herself as quite different to the `majority' of women. Jacobus describes Rights of Woman as an instance of the `problem' that is `women's writing', and elevates the unfinished novel ± Wrongs of Woman ± as a more positive shift from political argument towards fiction as a `solution' to this problem. (Jacobus, 1989, p. 55)17 Johnson describes Rights of Woman as `championing a kind of masculinity into which women can be invited rather than with enlarging or inventing a positive discourse of femininity'. (Johnson, 1995, pp. 23±4) Rights of Woman also makes explicit the implicit argument of Rights of Man, in a way which intensifies the writer's embodied difference undermining her claim to `equality' in the masculine. As an arch Athenic text, we might expect the repression of productive maternal bodies. What the text offers is more surprising. Rights of Woman communicates fragments of a female sexual imaginary beyond the rape paradigm of Rousseau's moral philosophy. Wollstonecraft's desire for `masculine' rationality in this Vindication can be read as a performance of the imaginary transgendering of the female subject's desire for a female-embodied object, familiar from her first novel.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

68 Female Embodiment and the Body-Politic

The title of the second Vindication is itself a feminisation of her previous publication. This small shift in terms records a larger shift in Wollstonecraft's thinking about the utility of a generic noun (`men') to denote an undifferentiated universal human identity. She had already feminised nouns in extracts chosen for the Female Reader. (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 4, pp. 68±9) Rights of Woman follows a straightforward argument that the female is artificially excluded from definitions of the human available in writings on the rights of men. The shift from a plural to a singular noun between the two publications picks up Paine's popularisation of the phrase `Rights of Man' in his work of that title published in the preceding year, and echoes the National Assembly's Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, published in 1789. Rights of Woman openly signals itself as a work engaging with public discourse on the rights of humanity, and introduces an account of the gender differentials operating in works which discuss this subject. In her introduction, Wollstonecraft draws attention to the specific context for her argument: Talleyrand's report to the French National Assembly in 1791, proposing a new national education system. Talleyrand's proposal emphasises the domestic skills to be foregrounded in the education of females. Rights of Woman, then, locates itself in a discussion of human ethical and political rights addressing the exclusion of women from full citizenship on the grounds that they are not (fully) rational beings. By situating itself within a debate on education, Wollstonecraft's argument accepts the new orthodoxy that women's inferior social status has a causal relation to a mistaken educational tradition, rather than natural (divine or biological) hierarchy.18 The chapter plan supports this situating of her text: she moves from a general introduction discussing the `Rights and Duties of Mankind', through chapters interested in the `Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character', to a detailed discussion of influential conduct book writers, ending with chapters on parental influence and national education. Her critique of Rousseau's Emile is embedded in a chapter headed: `Animadversions on some of the Writers who have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, bordering on Contempt'. In the same chapter she discusses James Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women (1765), and John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to His Daughters (1774), among others. She makes a point of chastising women who `argue in the same track as men, and adopt the

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Rape, and the Vindications 69

sentiments that brutalize them, with all the pertinacity of ignorance'. (p. 115) She begins the chapter with Rousseau, and devotes much of its space to quoting, and then discussing, long chunks from his text. The main source of her indignation is Book Five of Emile (1762), in which, having detailed the education of the ideal young man to a point where he is ready for mating, Rousseau conjurs up his ideal mate in the character of Sophy. It is specifically this section of Rousseau's argument that Wollstonecraft is keen to expose as fallacious. Poovey contends that the author's personal struggle to free herself from the restraint imposed by feminine propriety is the key to reading Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft `claims independence, especially from the roles assigned to women.' (Poovey, 1984, p. 58) Rights of Woman, however, never directly questions the domestic and maternal duties of women in general. It does question the co-ercion Wollstonecraft has perceived in the way women are directed to these duties, which she finds both offensive and selfdefeating. Hers is a Kantian argument, that `reason is absolutely necessary to enable a woman to perform any duty properly'. (p. 72) The `duties' of a woman (sketched as staying at home, maternity, and family) are not at issue here: the `sinister methods' by which women are persuaded to fulfil these duties are. Any method leading women to `right conduct' is not enough in itself, it is the nature of the relationship between women and their duties that is the crux of the matter. Independent application of personal judgement should lead women to `right conduct', which, however, remains characterised for women by loyalty and attention to domestic and familial (maternal) duties. While Wollstonecraft's definition of virtue is a general one, her notions of `virtue' depend on a prior image of dutiful maternity. (Sapiro, 1992, p. 74) Sapiro notes that for this Vindication, women's `first duty is to themselves as rational creatures', but rationality for women is valued above all for enabling virtuous motherhood, and for offering women spiritual perfectibility. (p. 165) When Rousseau asks `how should a woman void of reflection be capable of educating her children?', Wollstonecraft answers; `How indeed should she, when her husband is not always at hand to lend her his reason?'. Her strongest argument against excessive sensibility is that it cannot offer the grounds for women to manage a family. (pp. 55±8) Women's `peculiar' duties are `speaking of the majority' mater-

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

70 Female Embodiment and the Body-Politic

nal. (p. 72) Women `cannot, by force, be confined to domestic concerns', but they can be shown how to perform those duties for the right reason. (p. 6) Once `coercion' is removed from `society', the `common law of gravity' will prevail, and `the sexes will fall into their proper places'. (p. 6) Within her aspirations for absolute virtue, Wollstonecraft recognises a differential principle operating according to the `degree' to which an individual might realise its potential: `virtues must be the same in quality, if not in degree'. (p. 30) The question of `degree' organises itself around a return to a `one-sex' model, since she valorises `masculine' virtue above all. (Laqueur, 1990) Sexual difference marks the degree to which citizens achieve their potential in `virtue', since as long as both sexes are effeminised, women are overfeminised off the scale of virtue altogether. Rights of Woman openly addresses corporeal sexual difference as a factor in this argument: `In the government of the physical world it is observable that the female, in point of strength is, in general, inferior to the male. This is the law of nature; and it does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favour of woman.' (p. 10) She is not only concerned with female inferiority, but also with the general relationship between `the constitution of . . . bodies' and the `degree of virtue' attainable: `from the constitution of their bodies, men seem to be designed by Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue'. Women's bodies are generally speaking weaker than men's, hence women are disabled in their progress towards virtue `by Providence'; but their bodies, and therefore their virtue, only differ in degree. Her argument that women and men should be educated according to the same principles, and to aim at the same standards, is qualified by this notion of relative corporeal qualities. There are hints of the construction of sexual difference through education: `Where is then the sexual difference, when the education has been the same?' (p. 27) The social `duties' of men and women are acknowledged to be different, but to be organised around `but one rule of right.' (p. 40) Women's social duties are understood here through relations `with man as daughters, wives, and mothers', and `their moral character may be estimated by their manner of fulfilling those simple duties.' (p. 30) These social duties are represented as a means to achieve `the grand end of their exertions': `to unfold their own faculties and acquire the dignity of conscious virtue.' (p. 30)

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Rape, and the Vindications 71

This `one sex' scale of corporeal potential towards a single standard of virtue allows the writing subject to stake an Athenic claim. Women's common maternal `duty' applies to `the multitude, with moderate abilities, who call for instruction, and catch the colour of the atmosphere they breathe.' (p. 78) Some women (including herself) are set aside from her discussion as `minds of a superior class' who can be `left to chance'.

This tumultuous passion Rights of Woman has been noted for its `anti-sexual stance'. (Poovey, 1984, pp. 78±80; Kaplan, 1986, p. 157; Todd, 1989, p. 247; Moore, 1999, p. 41) In discussing marriage, Wollstonecraft claims that women (as well as men) should expect less of the great passion, and more of `affections' and `friendship'. Her argument addresses the effects for women of indulging a `romantic unnatural delicacy of feeling', which leads them to expect that their husband will `love them with a fervid increasing affection every day, and all day'. The necessary disappointment of this expectation, according to Wollstonecraft, is what leads women to `try to please other men' to experience again `emotions raised by the expectation of new conquests' and hence away from her `duties'. (pp. 33, p. 37 & p. 31) She summarises her own argument as an attempt to `endeavour to restrain this tumultuous passion, and to prove that it should not be allowed to dethrone superior powers, or to usurp the sceptre which the understanding should ever coolly wield'. (p. 31) Wollstonecraft's apparent resistance to female sexuality in this Vindication derives largely from her rejection of the rape paradigm Rousseau introduces to justify `moral' relations between the sexes, by rooting these in a biologism of penetration. Rousseau argues that `[i]n the union of the sexes each alike contributes to the common end, but in different ways. From this diversity springs the first difference which may be observed between man and woman in their moral relations'. He comprehends women as the object of a male desire which is pleasurably heightened by female resistance (or at least a show of resistance): `woman is specially made for man's delight', and by her `charms' she should `compel him to discover and use his strength', since the `surest way of arousing this strength is to make it necessary by resistance'. This view of sexual union, in which the

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

72 Female Embodiment and the Body-Politic

man `should be strong and active' and the woman `be weak and passive' and `offer little resistance', is for Rousseau `the origin of attack and defence, of the boldness of the one sex and the timidity of the other'. (Rousseau, 1992, p. 322) Wollstonecraft reproduces Rousseau's description of `the union of the sexes' in a long footnote to a discussion of a woman left to care for her children alone, who is likely to have `never thought, much less acted for herself', because `she has only learned to please.' (p. 54, and n. 14) She declares that she will `make no other comment on this ingenious passage, than to observe, that it is the philosophy of lasciviousness'. (p. 55) But two chapters later she returns to the passage, and comments in detail on her opinion that `these fundamental principles lead to a system of cunning and lasciviousness'. (p. 89) Fordyce is also found to be `spin[ning] out Rousseau's eloquence'. (p. 105) His passages on `the behaviour which woman ought to assume to render her lovely' are found to be `so very sentimental, that I have heard rational men use the word indecent, when they mentioned them with disgust'. (p. 106) The passage she quotes from Fordyce reads indeed like a dramatised rape fantasy in denial. Fordyce conjures an image of `smiling innocents' who are `committed to your protection', who should be treated with `tenderness and honour', since they are `timid and want to be defended': They are frail; O do not take advantage of their weakness! Let their fears and blushes endear them. Let their confidence in you never be abused. ± But is it possible, that any of you can be such barbarians, so supremely wicked, as to abuse it? Can you find in your hearts to despoil the gentle, trusting creatures of their treasure, or do any thing to strip them of their native robe of virtue? Curst be the impious hand that would dare to violate the unblemished form of Chastity! Thou wretch! thou ruffian! forbear. . . (p. 106; Fordyce, 1770, vol. 1, pp. 99±100) When she turns to Gregory's Father's Legacy, she finds his comments `with respect to duplicity, female softness, delicacy of constitution' similar to, if `more decorous' than, Rousseau's, and comments that `it all comes home to the same point, and whoever is at trouble to analyze these sentiments, will find the first principles not quite so delicate as the superstructure'. (p. 113)

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Rape, and the Vindications 73

In place of the rape paradigm she locates in Rousseau, Fordyce and Gregory, Wollstonecraft gestures in this Vindication towards a femaleembodied sexual autonomy. In asking whether `affectation' is `necessary' to `gain the affections of a virtuous man', she again remarks that `Nature has given woman a weaker frame than man', notes that `a wife, who by the exercise of her mind and body whilst she was discharging the duties of a daughter, wife, and mother, has allowed her constitution to retain its natural strength, and her nerves a healthy tone', is expected to `condescend to use art and feign a sickly delicacy in order to secure her husband's affection.' (p. 33) In rejecting women's use of `[w]eakness' to `excite tenderness', she imagines the `lordly caresses of a protector' which will `not gratify a noble mind that pants for, and deserves to be respected'. Sexual love is for Wollstonecraft `a natural right', the `wages due' to even a `patient drudge, who fulfils her task, like a blind horse in a mill', and who is `defrauded of her just reward' if her husband finds sexual pleasure elsewhere. (p. 76) She discards polygamy as an alternative to marriage on the grounds that, according to her source, it `enervate[s]' the men `by the use of so many women', while the women are `deprived in their matrimony of that share of physical love which, in a monogamous condition would be all theirs'. (p. 80)19 While she wishes to `guard the female heart' from `romantic wavering feelings', she clearly states that she does not wish to guard their hearts from `strong, persevering passions.' (p. 85) She notices that the `sexual attention of man particularly acts on female sensibility'; a phrase which has been read to suggest that male sexuality is inspired by (acts on) female sensibility. (Barker-Benfield, 1992, p. 263) The comment is part of an explanation for why a woman `turns to a new lover', because her `husband cannot long pay those attentions with the passion necessary to excite lively emotion' ± and the woman has grown used to such `lively emotion' because `this sympathy [between sexual attention and sensibility] has been exercised from their youth'. (p. 73) The acting on is admittedly doubleedged, but in the context seems to record her opinion that female `sensibility' is stimulated by male sexual attention, rather than the other way round. Women's `sex', she exclaims, `stand[s] between them and rational converse' with men. But this is not an argument for reducing all inter-sexual relations to `rational converse'. Woll-

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

74 Female Embodiment and the Body-Politic

Rape, and the Vindications 75

With a lover, I grant, she should be so, and her sensibility will naturally lead her to endeavour to excite emotion, not to gratify her vanity, but her heart. This I do not allow to be coquetry, it is the artless impulse of nature, I only exclaim against the sexual desire of conquest when the heart is out of the question. (p. 64) Her earnest wish `to see the distinction of sex confounded in society' is qualified similarly by a sexual get-out clause: `unless where love animates the behaviour'. (p. 65) Women, she implies, achieve the power they are otherwise denied through their sexual relations with men: `whilst man remains such an imperfect being' he is `the slave of his appetites', and women `obtain[ ] most power who gratify a predominant one'. (p. 53) The `rational woman' imagined by Wollstonecraft would, however, be more sexually active, rather than less: the woman who strengthens her body and exercises her mind will, by managing her family and practicing various virtues, become the friend, and not the humble dependent of her husband; and if she, by possessing such substantial qualities, merit his regard, she will not find it necessary to conceal her affection, nor to pretend to an unnatural coldness of constitution to excite her husband's passions. (pp. 33±4; my emphasis) Her gestures towards possible female-embodied sexual futures are not only contained within marriage. She famously describes adultery as `a natural divorcement'. (p. 80) A sensual relationship is recognised between mother and child, particularly in the act of breast-feeding, which she notices women have been prevented from enjoying by `many husbands', who, `during the first effervescence of voluptuous fondness . . . refuse to let their wives suckle their children'. (p. 83) Love between women, and between women and men, is described as `only a part of that glowing flame of universal love, which, after encircling humanity, mounts in grateful incense to God'. (p. 77) Sensibility here, as in Mary, A Fiction, carries an association of female

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

stonecraft distinguishes between inter-sexual relations in general, and those between lovers:

sexuality, especially when she complains that `sexual distinction respecting modesty has proved fatal to virtue and happiness' for women, because they are `made by [their] education the slave of sensibility', and then `required, on the most trying occasions, to resist that sensibility'. (pp. 141±2) And again when she notes that Rousseau and Gregory `both desire a wife to leave it in doubt whether sensibility or weakness led her to her husband's arms'. Wollstonecraft's idea of sexual modesty demands that no woman can remain that ambivalent about her own desire: `The woman is immodest who can let the shadow of such a doubt remain in her husband's mind a moment.' (p. 142) Johnson finds Wollstonecraft's comments on the `very nasty tricks' girls learn when `too intimate' with each other, evidence that `sexuality is constantly spilling over heterosexual boundaries' in this Vindication. The `parental heterosexuality' Wollstonecraft imposes on women answers the problem of an excess of female sexuality. (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 5, p. 144; Johnson, 1995, pp. 42±3) Johnson finds that, in spite of Wollstonecraft's comment that `many women have not mind enough to have an affection for a woman' (p. 200), it is only heterosexual relationships that she `dignifies by name and recommends as such'. (Johnson, 1995, p. 42) When Wollstonecraft approaches female intimacy, however, her prose becomes strained and ambiguous, in contrast to her lucid and unabashed references to female desire with men. After describing the `nasty, or immodest habits' and `very nasty tricks' girls learn from servants and pass on in `boarding-schools', she claims that `women are, in general, too familiar with each other', and then turns to recommending `frequent ablutions' to `preserve health and beauty'. (p. 144) Girls should, moreover, `wash and dress alone' and never be assisted during `that part of the business . . . which ought never to be done before a fellowcreature; because it is an insult to the majesty of human nature'. Johnson rightly reads in these strained comments a fear of `intimacy'. She stops herself from proceeding `still further', so we never hear the fascinating promise of `some still more nasty customs, which men never fall into'. The `personal reserve' Wollstonecraft is advocating for `both sexes' is the only thing which can keep `[d]omestic affection' alive. (p. 146) Her application of the same degree of `personal reserve' in intra-sexual as well as inter-sexual domestic relations, is evidence of an awareness of sexual scenarios between women. More-

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

76 Female Embodiment and the Body-Politic

over, the disavowal of love between women underpinning the Athenic mode of women's writing would necessarily demand a repudiation of female intimacy, and also be expected to show signs of discomfort in describing female intimacy. In attempting to argue that the attainment of a singular model of virtue is dependent on an individual's degree of corporeal strength and health, a worrying over sexual difference, and a concern with the female body and desire, become inevitable. Throughout this Vindication, Wollstonecraft is interested in the nature of femininity, in what it means to have a female body, and where the borders and limitations of that body would fall, were it allowed or enabled to develop without restraints. She believes it is possible for women to become `more masculine', because `strength of mind has, in most cases, been accompanied by superiour strength of body, ± natural soundness of constitution'. (pp. 13, 43) Once again she splits herself from the category of women in general when she remarks ± self-consciously ± that `the few extraordinary women who have rushed in eccentrical directions out of the orbit prescribed to their sex, were male spirits, confined by mistake in female frames'. (p. 39; original emphasis) Gubar links this comment to Wollstonecraft's rejection (in this Vindication especially) of femininity as `weakness, childishness, deceitfulness, cunning, superficiality, an overvaluation of love, frivolity, dilettantism, irrationality, flattery, servility, prostitution, coquetry, sentimentality, ignorance, indolence, intolerance, slavish conformity, fickle passion, despotism, bigotry [. . .] which threatens ± like a virus ± to contaminate and destroy men and their culture'. (Gubar, 1995, p. 136) The `few extraordinary women' who have transcended the dreadful conditions imposed by femininity, as Gubar notes, are understood by Wollstonecraft to be `virtually transsexuals'. In the Rights of Woman, a desiring female body emerges as a challenge to the object of Rousseau's (and others') rape fantasy, in which the female body is always and only the object of masculine penetrative desire, and for whom this fantasy of the female body/object as penetrated by masculine desiring agency constitutes the foundation of women's secondary moral and social existence. It is in these images of desiring female bodies that we might catch an early glimpse of the potent and creative maternal body re-emerging from the Athenic text that demands its disavowal. That is, while Rousseau's imaginary female bodies are passive, inert and ± most importantly ± dumb (the

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Rape, and the Vindications 77

objects of masculine desiring agency), Wollstonecraft's female bodies are actively desiring. It is the dumb female body that most resembles the mute and mutilated (male) body after castration ± the desiring female body speaks back, and cannot therefore be reduced to the object of Rousseau's figurative rape (since rape turns on consent). I will return to this point in my conclusion, but first I want to consider what it is that makes Athenic writing possible.

The phantom phallus Grosz raises the phantom phallus in an essay on Paul Shilder's work on `body-image' and phantom limbs, which addresses the absence of a model for a specifically female-embodied `body-image'.20 In a discussion of the nature and implications of the `phantom limb' experienced after amputation, Grosz notes that `[t]he phantom is an expression of nostalgia for the unity and wholeness of the body, its completion . . . a memorial of the missing limb'. (Grosz, 1994, p. 73) The `phantom' appears after the loss of internal as well as external organs, and is experienced as a material, and to some degree functioning, aspect of the subject's corporeal wholeness. Yet there is no record of female patients experiencing a phantom womb after hysterectomy, or phantom clitoris after clitoridectomy, which implies that `the surgical removal of an organ . . . already designated as lacking is not registered (the lack of a lack?)'. (pp. 70±1) She raises the `general question of the status of the body image of women insofar as women are considered and consider themselves to have suffered an amputation more debilitating than most ± the amputation implied by castration', which leads her to posit the `phantom phallus' as a way to understand `the masculinity complex' in women. (p. 73) Wollstonecraft's desire for masculinity in writing ± registered in the act of writing and publishing political argument, and compounded in this argument's avowal of `manly virtue', and strong disavowal of femininity ± has been argued here to be an enactment of `the psychotic foreclosure typical of masculine desire . . . a phantasy of origins, or a ruthless act of mastery'. (Walker, 1998, p. 162) The psychotic is characterised by a disavowal of the productive maternal body (which Walker finds to be the normal condition of masculinity), and takes place in writing as `a violent foreclosure of the maternal'. (p. 67)

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

78 Female Embodiment and the Body-Politic

Wollstonecraft's repudiation of femininity, and her claim to masculine virtue (the normative condition of Athenic subjectivity), is literally a taking of the place of the mother through writing, in contrast to the model of `writing with rather than for' the mother symptomatic of the signification of the shared morphology between mother and daughter: `Against the linear, analogous and objectifying gesture of the boy's ``fort-da'' ', Walker deploys Irigaray's `gesture more consonant with the mother than against her.' (Walker, 1998, p. 180; Lorraine, 1999) Grosz contends that women carry a `phantom phallus' as nostalgia for the imaginary corporeal wholeness experienced prior to the mirror stage. Perhaps the degree to which the `phantom phallus' manifests, in conjunction with the historical specificities of the meta-historical signification of female-embodiment as castration ± answers the emergence of Athenic writing in the late eighteenth century. Wollstonecraft was writing in the context of a rush of textual and political activity concerning the `Rights of Man' ± activity which both underlined and perpetuated the social and political castration of women. Her Vindications represent Athenic writing, in which the female-embodied writing subject attempts `violent foreclosure' of the maternal body, in a gesture that functions to differentiate the writing subject from the horror of castration. This would account for Wollstonecraft's moments of disassociation from the mass of `ordinary' women, as well as for her recoil from femininity as a cultural sign of castration. The Athenic mode is founded on a prior disavowal of the castrated maternal body. Women's writing that is not Athenic does not enact this disavowal, but recognises itself in the maternal body as productive and labouring. The desire for masculinity that pervades these writings deserves a few more words. Lauretis has argued that lesbian cultural identities fetishise `accoutrements of masculine identity', as a displacement of the female subject's otherwise unsymbolisable desire for the `missing' female body. Masculinity is `precoded' to signify `sexual (genital) activity and yearning toward women'. (de Lauretis, 1994, pp. 261±3) Wollstonecraft's desire for the `manly' as a sign of rhetorical and social virtue, could also be read for a transgendered encoding of the otherwise unsymbolised and unsymbolisable longing for female bodies that correlates to images of maternal melancholia and love

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Rape, and the Vindications 79

between women in her earlier writings. Female-embodiment is the key to Wollstonecraft's Vindications, as that which problematises the writer's claim to rational subjectivity. This attempt to account for (by disavowing) the female embodiment of the writing subject, who identifies herself with the masculine (both as a writing subject and as a desiring subject), is perhaps what has subsequently been read for Wollstonecraft's `feminism'.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

80 Female Embodiment and the Body-Politic

Part III

[W]e should be cautious of adopting [the maternal metaphor in feminist work] as an emblem of defiance without considering, at length, the many ways that it may be appropriated or disarmed by phallocentric thought. [It] is important politically, aesthetically and ethically for women to adopt the maternal, despite the considerable risks of doing so. (Michelle Boulous Walker)

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Matrilineal Writing

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

This page intentionally left blank

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

The Pregnant Writer: Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution

Pregnancy is precisely about one body becoming two, two bodies becoming one, the exact antithesis of individuality. (Franklin, 1997, p. 491) In the Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft had been confronted with Rousseau's unequivocal assertion that because of their `business' in life as bearers of children, `the performance of [women's] functions' places `[t]he search for abstract and speculative truths, for principles and axioms in science, for all that tends to wide generalisation [. . .] beyond [their] grasp.' (Rousseau, 1992, pp. 324, 349) Her next publication, Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, is Wollstonecraft's reply in writing. The View was written during Wollstonecraft's first pregnancy, and can be read for evidence of the pregnant writer's anxiety about her embodied condition, and its implications for the Athenic writing subject. Fanny was born on 14th May 1794, which would mean that Wollstonecraft started work before she knew of the pregnancy, so there is no causal relation.1 Wollstonecraft would have experienced signs of the pregnancy by September 1793, and communicated her certainty to Imlay in a letter probably dating from November of that year.2 A letter to Ruth Barlow suggests she had been concerned to finish the Historical and Moral View before the birth: `I am still very well; but imagine it cannot be long before this lively animal pops on us ± and now the history is finished and everything arranged I do not care how soon.' (Wardle, 1979, p. 253) As a pregnant woman, she was confronted with a specifically female corporeal condition: both the effect of the pregnancy on her body, 83

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

3

and the effect of her pregnant body on observers. A letter to Imlay dated January 1794 ± when she was nearing the end of the second trimester of pregnancy ± mentions `the care and anxiety a woman must have about a child before it comes into the world', as well as evidence that she was confronting the impact of her pregnant body on others: `Finding I was observed, I told the good women, the two Mrs.ÐÐÐs, simply that I was with child: and let them stare! and ÐÐÐ, and ÐÐÐÐÐ, nay, all the world, may know it for aught I care! ± Yet I wish to avoid ÐÐ's coarse jokes.' (Wardle, 1979, p. 242) For a woman concerned to demonstrate the power of `generalizing ideas, of drawing comprehensive conclusions from individual observations', her pregnancy was a visible confirmation of femaleembodiment that was argued to exclude her from `the only acquirement, for an immortal being, that really deserves the name of knowledge.' (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 61) The Historical and Moral View is written as a display of the writer's disembodied rationality. Since the universal standpoint of Kantian rationality is grounded in a transcendence of embodiment in its striving for a `principle of action . . . free from all influence by contingent grounds', pregnancy ± as a specifically female-embodied condition ± fundamentally troubles the writer's claim to rationality. (Weiss, 1999, pp. 128±63) The View offers strong evidence that Wollstonecraft felt keenly the demand of reason to disembody, and that as a result her pregnant body, as arch sign of sexual difference, was elided from this text. It returns, however, to disrupt the rational voice of historical account, and in displaced figures of maternal productivity as well as castration. We can find the context for the disembodied imperative of the pregnant writer in some of Wollstonecraft's comments on Catherine Macaulay. In her Letters on Education (from which Wolltonecraft drew heavily in Rights of Woman) Macaulay includes `a power of generalising and combining its ideas, in such a manner as to apprehend truths of the most abstract kind,' as an essential faculty in `the oeconomy of the human mind.' (Graham, 1790, pt 3, pp. 382±3) Macaulay praises the few writers who manage to overcome the obstacles of prejudice and immediacy to `reason . . . on abstract subjects'. (pt 1, p. 203) Wollstonecraft describes Macaulay as `an example of intellectual acquirements supposed to be incompatible with the weakness of her sex.' Macaulay's `style of writing' is applauded as one in which `no sex appears'. (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 118) It is in

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

84 Matrilineal Writing

this passage that Wollstonecraft begins to move away from an uncomplicated invocation of `masculine' to denote a positive, active, reasoned, virtuous position (in contrast to corrupt effeminacy), when she rethinks an earlier review of Macaulay in which she had described her as `a masculine and fervid writer'.3 She suggests in the later reference that using `masculine' to denote a cluster of ideas ± including sound understanding, judgement, profound thinking, penetration, understanding, sober energy, argumentative closeness, sympathy and benevolence ± reinforces an `arrogant assumption of reason' by the masculine sex. (pp. 118±19) Having identified Macaulay as a woman who has strengthened her mind, and is able to `reason . . . on abstract subjects' in her previous publication, Wollstonecraft as a pregnant writer in the View seems to be primarily concerned to demonstrate her own ability to reason on abstract subjects in spite of her pregnant embodiment. She complains in the Rights of Woman that women are `[u]nable to grasp any thing great'. And she takes `history' as an example of this failing, lamenting that women `find the reading of history a very dry task, and disquisitions addressed to the understanding intolerably tedious, and almost unintelligible'. (p. 211)4 The View, then, offers a further instance of Wollstonecraft's dis-identification with `ordinary' women of her time; a written performance of the scene from Mary, A Fiction, where the heroine demonstrates her aesthetic superiority over `the ladies', who dismiss history in favour of portraits. The View demonstrates a grasp of `history' at its driest, most abstract, and `great.' (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol 1 p. 34) More akin to the style of her reviews for the Analytical, the View is written in the mode of a universally representative, disembodied (and hence desexed), narrator. Unlike Rights of Woman, it avoids the first person. Todd and Moore recently identified in Wollstonecraft's work an unprecedented performance of female self-reflectivity in writing. (Moore, 1999, pp. 11±12; Todd, 2000, p.ix) The View makes a strong departure from this otherwise central tendency in the development of Wollstonecraft as a writing subject. Its linear historical narration of the significant events of the French revolution is foreclosed prior to the moment of Wollstonecraft's own arrival in Paris in 1792, hence distancing the `history' of the narrative from the writer's personal experiences of, and presence in, revolutionary France. Moreover, this framing of the historical narrative succeeds in avoiding all

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

The Pregnant Writer 85

mention of the very recent execution of Louis XVI. Sapiro suggests that the View is shaped by `self-censorship', written as it was during a dangerous and fractured period of the revolution when foreigners were in danger of arrest as spies and counter-revolutionaries. (Sapiro, 1992, p. 33) Wollstonecraft remarks in a letter to Everina, that she was advised by Helen Maria Williams to `burn' the manuscript of the View for reasons of personal safety in a climate of Jacobin `suspicion', since she claims to fear for her life if the manuscript had been `found'. (Wardle, 1979, p. 250) A letter to Eliza Bishop, dated June 24th 1793, carries the blank post-script: `Do not touch on politics.' (Wardle, 1979, p. 233) The hazardous and unpredictable conditions in Paris at the time offer strong context for the View's containment of the historical narrative within a less sensitive period, 1789±92. In part the detached tone might also be understood as a response to the nasty turn taken by events in France following the violence of 1792, and the Jacobin revolution of 1793, which clearly damaged Wollstonecraft's belief in the meliorating effect of enlightened rationality on the processes and development of human government.5 The View is written against the popularity of Helen Maria Williams's Letters from France (1790), and avoids Williams's `feminine' style. (Jump, 1991, pp. 101±9; Jones, 1992, pp. 178±99) Wollstonecraft had reviewed Williams's Letters in a piece which begins with a suitably double-edged comment: `Women have been allowed to possess, by a kind of prescription, the knack of epistolary writing.' She describes Letters as `truly feminine.' (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 7, pp. 322±3) This rejection of Williams's `feminine' style for her own attempt at writing `history' results in the radically disembodied style of the View. Her turn to this disembodied `philosophical' style, in which `no sex appears', can also be read for its staged performance of the pregnant writer's ability to reason in general terms. The text's repression of the decapitation of the king offers a displaced figure for the absent and repressed maternal body of the writer. Wollstonecraft highlighted in a letter to Everina that the View was `written during my pregnancy'. (Wardle, 1979, p. 262) This writing records a moment at which the repression and burial of the productive maternal body that constituted the emergence of Wollstonecraft's writing subjectivity reaches its apex. The body that must be repressed and buried is also ± now undeniably ± her own pregnant body. This intensification of the disembodied imperative is recorded here as a

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

86 Matrilineal Writing

claim to a universal `view': an accoutrement of rationality (as the universal and abstract rather than individual and detailed). She had made reference in Rights of Woman to a general `view' as rational and masculine. (Wollstonecraft, 1995, pp. 68, 134) Her attempt to transcend pregnant embodiment to offer a historical View produces a severe crisis, manifesting as a disruptive resurfacing of the productive maternal body as a significant and signifying fracture in the Athenic text.6 Maternal thinking is understood as oppositional to abstract thought, and ± Alexander argues ± Romantic women writers often `turned away from the abstractions or high sublimity of their male counterparts, to the concrete acts of nurture and care associated with maternity'. (Alexander, 1989, pp. 67±8) Wollstonecraft's View turns away from `maternal thinking' (concrete and particular acts ± Adrienne Rich's `million tiny stitches'), to abstractions and high sublimity. Ruddick describes `maternal thinking' as `standing in direct conflict with . . . abstract principles.' (Ruddick, 1984, pp. 213±30; Alexander, 1989, p. 67) Wollstonecraft's writing of the Historical and Moral View performs a confirmation of her faculty for `generalizing ideas', or `drawing comprehensive conclusions from individual observations'. The absence of an embodied narrator from the text in this case, is not fully explained by a withdrawing from the revolution due to political context, but also signals a failed attempt to produce writing in which no sex appears. The absence of the king's decapitated body suggests a masking of castrating desire, and is also repressed by its association (as an abject figure and as a figure of castration) with the maternal body. These repressed bodies re-surface in the text's images of revolution, and the revolution itself is represented as a female, labouring, productive body in contrast to the diseased and lax body of the aristocracy it replaces. The maternal body can also be said to resurface as a rupture to the disembodied and depersonalised style by a moment of corporeal and personal reflection, which I will discuss in detail towards the end of this chapter. The body in this text, then, substitutes for the erased (pregnant) body of the writer, resulting in a piece of writing that is peppered with bodies and body-parts, a revolution that is imagined as a giant labouring body, and a disturbance of the disembodied style that attempts to transcend the pregnant embodiment of the writer through a claim to a detached View. The moment of history described in this work is described by the narrator as `pregnant with great events'. (p. 64)

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

The Pregnant Writer 87

88 Matrilineal Writing

The `people', throughout the Historical and Moral View, are spoken of as bodies, or a single `body', or as parts of a social body.7 Sapiro notes this heightened tendency to represent social forces and political events through body metaphors: `At the end of the book we are left not with the mechanical metaphors often associated with Enlightenment constructions of social phenomena, but with a most graphic organic image of a body politic maturing, sickening, and healing.' (Sapiro, 1992, p. 33) The `body of the people' is comprised of individual bodies, but these bodies have a tendency to act spontaneously in accord, as if directed by a common will, comprising a macro-body of individual bodies governed by the rules of sentiment. She describes the `citizens of Grenoble' acting in `one of those moments of enthusiasm, which by the most rapid operation of sympathy unites all hearts.' The soldiers are `[t]ouched by it' and `threw down their arms', `melting into tears'. Their conduct `quickly applauded with that glow of sensibility which excites imitation, served as an example to the whole army'. (p. 40) When outlining the process by which influential writings were circulated and produced a `change in the sentiments of the french', she depicts the people as a mass of heads and tongues `continually' exchanging information. (pp. 18±19) Ideas `fly from mouth to mouth' like a contagious disease. These images of contagious, spontaneously harmonious body affects are drawn from the discourse of sentimentalism, which offered a `model of the social body as a nervous system rather than a machine.' (Jones, 1995, p. 58) Body parts are emphasised: Rousseau's Social Contract `had been in the hands of all France', theatre audiences are a sea of applauding hands motivated by `one heart.' (pp. 61, 19) The people assembled to take the Tennis-Court Oath acted as a `whole body' actuated by `one mind'. (p. 65) These metaphorical and metonymical bodies litter the text. Hands, hearts, and eyes, grasp, feel, go cold, or are blind and then opened to the light of reason. (pp. 41±3) The `body politic' is sometimes a crowd of real bodies, sometimes a trope. The organising argument is of an ailing social body, infected by the (digestive and sexual) excesses of the king, which has been re-awoken by Enlightenment, now purging itself of its infected parts, in order to become a new, Republican, healthy body:

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

The body of the people

the people could no longer bear bleeding ± for their veins were already so lacerated, it was difficult to find room to make a fresh incision; and the emollient prescriptions, the practice of former times, were now insufficient to stop the progress of a deadly disease. (pp. 42±3) Jones describes the View's idea of social and intellectual progress as `a particularly revealing example' of Foucault's notion that the bourgeoisie in this period was concerned to `provide itself with a body and a sexuality', to `convert[ ] the blue blood of the nobles into a sound organism and a healthy sexuality.' (Foucault, 1981, pp. 125±6; Jones, 1995, p. 192) Rights of Woman offers a version of this argument, whereby `virtue' is embodied in healthy, well-regulated individuals, whose `passions' are balanced by `reason.' Rights of Woman insists on imagining virtue, or perfectibility, or reason (often interchangeable), as strong, healthy bodies: `I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body.' (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 11) In the View she hints at a labouring by the Nation, or Revolution, and more often Reason, through which a `sound organism' will be born. Hunt has observed that `the very fact that political organization can be imagined as a body leaves open the potential for erotic connotations.' (Hunt, 1992, p.1) The View is interested in the disfunction of the king's erotic body. The three kings appearing in the historical narrative are described individually as bodies characterised by physical decay, corruption, and disease, caused by various excessive appetites. The king's disgusting body is infectious, and is offered as the reason for the poor state of both the social body, and the individual bodies of the people. Louis XIV's `heated breath' ± a symptom of excessive appetite ± becomes the `depraved appetite' of the people. (p. 24) Louis XV's `[i]mpotence of body' and `indolence of mind' made him `the slave of his mistresses'. Here the route of corruption is a chain of dispersed lust, from the impotent king's `nauseous embraces', through the bodies of his mistresses, who sought out `knaves' as a kind of sexual purging of the king's bodily corruption: `Every corner of the kingdom was ransacked to satiate these cormorants, who wrung the very bowels of industry, to give a new edge to sickly appetites; corrupting the morals whilst breaking

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

The Pregnant Writer 89

the spirit of the nation.' (p. 28) This king's erotic dis-function is disseminated throughout the nation, in ever-widening chains of moral and spiritual corruption. Louis XVI's `person' is `in itself very disgusting', and `rendered more so by gluttony, and a total disregard of delicacy, and even decency in his apartments'. (p. 73) He suffers a heightened combination of his ancestor's bodily vices (`gluttony' as well as excessive lust in the form of his `kind of devouring passion' for the queen), consistent with the hereditary corruption metaphor at work in these images. In antithesis to the `impotence' of these kings, we are offered the image of English `masculine writers', whose words `rouse the sleeping manhood of the french'. (p. 28) Marie-Antoinette arrives in the View as a `young and beautiful dauphine'. (p.29) Her `person' is `very fine', her face `lovely' and `sparkling with vivacity'. (p. 72) This healthy body is soon utterly corrupted by the `luxurious pleasures' of the court, and ± more specifically ± by her intimacy with the king's diseased body.8 The king's `devouring passion' causes her to `shrink abhorrent from his embraces,' and her `empty mind' to be lost in `the most luxurious pleasures'. (p. 73) Through a process of corruption she learns to manage `the disgust she had for [the king's] person', and becomes a licentious prostitute: `she made him pay a kingly price for her favours'. (p. 74)9 The female-embodied queen is permeable to the moral and sensual contagion of the king's body. The reference to the `infamous transaction of the necklace', introduces a story steeped in what Hunt has described as `the obsessive focus on the queen's sexualized body'. (Hunt, 1992, p. 94) The queen's `heart' is hardened by `sensual enjoyments'. She becomes so effeminised, that she has the power to `emasculate' others. (p. 73).

Castrated and potent maternal bodies Reason, as in the Rights of Man, is figured here as a female, and sometimes maternal, body: a new spirit has gone forth, to organise the body-politic . . . reason has, at last, shown her captivating face, beaming with benevolence; and it will be impossible for the dark hand of despotism to obscure it's [sic] radiance, or the lurking dagger of subordinate

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

90 Matrilineal Writing

tyrants to reach her bosom. The image of God implanted in our nature is now more rapidly expanding; and, as it opens, liberty with maternal wing seems to be soaring to regions far above vulgar annoyance, promising to shelter all mankind. (p. 22)10 The `body-politic' is being organised according to the demands of `a new spirit', a phrase which seems to call forth the corporeal above the systematic inflection of `organise'. A discussion of the deficit crisis of 1787 pushes `constitution' in a similar direction: some sensible observers . . . adopted the opinion, that as the people had discovered the magnitude of the deficit, they were now persuaded, that a specific remedy was wanting, a new constitution; to cure the evils, which were the excrescences of a gigantic tyranny, that appeared to be draining away the vital juices of labour, to fill the insatiable jaws of thousands of fawning slaves and idle sycophants. (p. 32; original emphasis) The `tyranny', or `evils', `draining away the vital juices of labour', is a condensation of images: a consuming foetus (also present in the `blood-sucking minions' two pages earlier), with a labouring maternal body. Imagination also `drain[s] off the nourishment from the vital parts', causing `misery'. (p. 22) The `nation', also female, also performs glorious `labours'. (p. 72) The revolution, then, is embodied as a potent, labouring, maternal body arising to replace the diseased, effeminate, and castrated body of the aristocracy. The opposition in play here is not directly between corrupt femininity and republican masculinity; but rather between the castrated and mutilated maternal body, and the productive labouring maternal body. The castrated body of the beheaded king elided from the narrative finds a displaced figure in an odd digression when an argument that `a civilization founded on reason and morality is, in fact, now taking place in the world', turns to ancient `tragedies' as an example of a degree of `cultivation of the passions and the taste', which remained `absolutely immoral'. (pp. 111±12)11 In a passage approving of the `sublime terrour' invoked by tragedy, but lamenting its absence of `improvement', one tragedy in particular is called to mind:

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

The Pregnant Writer 91

What moral lesson, for example, can be drawn from the story of Oedipus, the favourite subject of such a number of tragedies? ± The gods impel him on, and, led imperiously by blind fate, though perfectly innocent, he is fearfully punished, with all his hapless race, for a crime in which his will had no part. (p. 112) As a figure representative of castration anxiety itself, Oedipus seems a peculiarly apt substitute for the otherwise unmentioned decapitated king. She describes Louis as `hapless', and ± true to her principles ± blames `the education of this monarch' for his character as `a sensual bigot', offering an explanation for his immorality removed from his will. (p. 74)12 Avowal of the king's decapitation, as a `symbolic substitute for castrating', would threaten retribution for the `castrating desire' of the women writer. (Butler, 1990, p. 51; Freud, 1991, p. 281) Geyer-Ryan has suggested that the resurrection of the repressed maternal body would present a `corpse lying concealed'. (Geyer-Ryan, 1994, p. 198) The repressed corpse in this text is the castrated maternal body that the pregnant writer attempts to foreclose in her claim to a universal (disembodied) View. The decapitated corpse of the king might threaten a return of this maternal corpse. However, the text provides numerous images of productive, potent, labouring maternal bodies, as instrumental to its argument of social regeneration. Walker argues that female birth phantasies differ from male birth phantasies by effecting an `identification with the maternal body, one that does not aim at the mother's foreclosure.' (Walker, 1998, p. 62) In this sense, we might read Wollstonecraft's View as a birth-phantasy, emerging from the crisis between the pregnant-embodiment of the writing subject, and the disembodied subject position she is striving to achieve. The pregnant writer here re-engenders herself as a femaleembodied writing subject in images of productive, potent maternal bodies. This takes place in a text concerned to disembody the writing voice in a claim to a rational View ± an imperative that forces a crisis in the (pregnant) writing subject. This crisis is quite literally played out in the text at a moment when the narrator's reflected body breaks the surface of the writing, and comes into view as a fragmented image, at the same time as the narrator slips for the first time into first-person narration. If the repression of any sign of the writer's

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

92 Matrilineal Writing

maternal embodiment (as associated with the castrated maternal body) is the condition for writing this text, then this passage records a forceful and sudden surfacing of the potent `maternal body'; a birth-phantasy in which the potent maternal body displaces the repressed castrated maternal body. Out of the pregnant writer's `violent foreclosure' of the castrated maternal body, then, maternal embodiment returns to the text in images of a potent maternal body birthing a social regeneration. This body remains, however, at one remove from the disembodied narrative until a crisis in the text marks the coming together of maternal imagery and the pregnant writer through the narrator's selfencounter in the mirrors of the Palace of Versailles. The passage in question begins with the declaration: `How silent is now Versailles!', and continues to describe the empty palace as a Gothic scene: The solitary foot, that mounts the sumptuous stair-case, whilst the eye traverses the void, almost expecting to see the strong images of fancy burst into life . . . Warily entering the endless apartments, half shut up, the fleeting shadow of the pensive wanderer, reflected in long glasses, that vainly gleam in every direction, slacken the nerves, without appalling the heart; though lascivious pictures, in which grace varnishes voluptuousness, no longer seductive, strike continually home to the bosom the melancholy moral, that anticipates the frozen lesson of experience. The air is very chill, seeming to clog the breath; and the wasting dampness of destruction appears to be stealing into the vast pile, on every side. The oppressed heart seeks for relief in the garden; but even there the same images glide along the wide neglected walks ± all is fearfully still . . . (pp. 84±5) The narrative then breaks into fragmented, emotive statements, reflecting on the fall from past magnificence to present neglect: Lo! this was the palace of the great king!-the abode of magnificence! Who has broken the charm? ± Why does it now inspire only pity? ± Why; ± because nature, smiling around, presents to the imagination materials to build farms, and hospital mansions, where, without raising idle admiration, that gladness will reign,

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

The Pregnant Writer 93

which opens the heart to benevolence, and that industry, which renders innocent pleasure sweet. Weeping ± scarcely conscious that I weep, O France! over the vestiges of thy former oppression; which, separating man from man with a fence of iron, sophisticated all, and made many completely wretched; I tremble, lest I should meet some unfortunate being, fleeing from the despotism of licentious freedom . . . and, if my pen is almost bound with eagerness to record the day, that levelled the Bastille with the dust, making the towers of despair tremble to their base; the recollection, that still the abbey is appropriated to hold the victims of revenge and suspicion, palsies the hand that would fain do justice to the assault, which tumbled into heaps of ruins walls that seemed to mock the resistless force of time. ± Down fell the temple of despotism; but ± despotism has not been buried in it's [sic] ruins! ± Unhappy country! ± when will thy children cease to tear thy bosom? ± When will a change of opinion, producing a change of morals, render thee truly free? ± When will truth give life to real magnanimity, and justice place equality on a stable seat? ± When will thy sons trust, because they deserve to be trusted; and private virtue become the guarantee of patriotism? Ah! ± when will thy government become the most perfect, because thy citizens are the most virtuous! (p. 85) These effusive, emotive, disjointed sentences occur immediately following a narrative of Marie-Antoinette's visit to `bribed ruffians', her incitement leading to their promise `not to sheath their swords, till France was compelled to obedience, and the national assembly dispersed.' (p. 84) After describing the ruffians' `savage ferocity', `plans of death and devastation', `orgies' and `animal spirits', the narrator pauses self-consciously, in a trope of deference to the `reader's sensibility', with a refusal to reflect `on the baneful effects of power'. Marie-Antoinette has banished all `tenderness' from `the female bosom'. (p. 84) The fracturing of the View occurs immediately following this metonymic reference to the maternal body. The narrator now catches sight of her appearance as a reflected, fragmented, `weeping', and `trembling', body. In Athenic writing the maternal body is `violently foreclosed': the Athenic subject literally takes the place of, and buries, the castrated

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

94 Matrilineal Writing

maternal body with writing. Walker has raised the question of women's writing as specifically potential space for an alternative mode of writing, one which writes with rather than for the mother's body. Johnson has described `the gaps in Wollstonecraft's prose' affording space to `the unspeakable'. (Johnson, 1995, p. 55) If, as I have argued, the `unspeakable' in the View is the writer's pregnantembodiment, in this passage the maternal body breaks the surface of the disembodied narrative, and makes herself heard and seen. At this moment the writing subject's disavowal of her pregnant embodiment is registered and undermined in the same moment. Pregnancy emphasised her embodiment of Rousseau's castrated femininity, a condition that disallows her access to rational subjectivity. This writing text records a moment of heightened paradox in Wollstonecraft's writing career, that signalled her problematic ± because femaleembodied, and moreover pregnant ± status as a rational writing subject. It is the moment at which the Athenic writer par excellence loses her grasp on masculinist historical narrative. This takes place at a moment where the narrator catches sight of herself in mirrors. The images of labouring and birth that permeate Wollstonecraft's narrative of revolution can be read for this moment of re-constituting the female-embodied writing subject in the mirror of writing as a potent maternal subject. This moment, we might say, marks Wollstonecraft's emergence as a female-embodied writing subject, through the rupture to her body-image, and to her writing, set in motion by her selfreflection as a pregnant body. The `maternal body' that is the femaleembodied subject's corporeal condition during pregnancy and lactation, is manifested in that subject's writing as a disturbance to its identity as an individual subject. Battersby has summarised feminism's problem with Wollstonecraft as one centred on the fact that `[f]or all her feminisim, Mary Wollstonecraft's writings betray no confidence in her own female strengths,' because she `equates all power with maleness.' (Battersby, 1989, p. 92) As a result, as Battersby notes, her writings are `fractured by a series of dichotomies: strong/weak; masculine/feminine; sane/ mad; sick/well; reason/sensibility; sublime/beautiful; genius/nongenius'. According to Battersby, it is only in Wollstonecraft's next publication, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, that she achieved `a literary subject which can successfully contain these tensions'. This accomodating subject, I will argue,

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

The Pregnant Writer 95

is a specifically Matrilineal one. Wollstonecraft's achievement in containing ± or transgressing ± those gendered tensions, establishes a model for female-embodied writing that is Matrilineal rather than Athenic. The View shows us the moment at which the Athenic subject is discomposed by the return of the productive maternal body. It shows us also that the maternal subject emerging from this crisis is not imagined as a castrated subject, but as a potent and creative one. It is not until this maternal subject finds a suitable interlocutor, however, that this fracturing of the Athenic text can be argued to provide a glimpse of Matrilineal writing.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

96 Matrilineal Writing

Matrilineal Writing: Letters from Sweden and Wrongs of Woman

Consequently, it is in language, not in anatomy, that my gendered subjectivity finds a voice, becomes a corpus, is engendered. It is in language as power, that is to say, in the politics of location, that I as `she-self' make myself accountable to my speaking partners, you, the `she-other' fellow feminists who are caught in the web of discursive enunciation that I am spinning as I speak. You, the `she-you', like me, the `she-I', are politically engaged in the project of redefining the gender that we are. The language cracks under the strain of this excessive genderization; the personal pronouns cannot sustain the interpersonal charge required by the feminist project. Something in the structure of the language resists; how can you express adequately what is lacking from or in excess of existing parameters? How does one invent new ways of thinking? (Braidotti, 1992, pp. 187±8) If the relationship between female-embodiment and writing is (under patriarchy) one of disturbance and fracture, then women's writing (under patriarchy) is caught between incoherence/silence and imitation (of masculinist forms). And it is an imitation at great cost, for as a direct condition of it, women are `exiled from themselves, and lacking any possible continuity/contiguity with their first desires/ pleasures, they are imported into another economy, where they are completely unable to find themselves'. (Irigaray, 1995, p. 135) Walker has argued that this occurs when, in writing, women participate in 97

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

4

the `violent foreclosure' of the maternal body grounding signification. For Irigaray, however, the repressed syntax of femininity (and hence a women's writing that would not be limited to the failures of the `Athenic' mode) cannot be defined: `what a feminine syntax might be is not simple or easy to state', and `the syntax and the meaning remain to be found'. (Irigaray, 1995, p. 135) Irigaray's hints at the `other syntax', nonetheless, offer a starting point for considering Wollstonecraft's mature works, and Walker's notion of `writing with the mother' offers the alternative ground from which to posit a Matrilineal writing. Wollstonecraft's last complete publication (Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, 1796), and the novel that remained unfinished at her death (Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, posthumous 1798), mark an important late shift in her writing voice. The multi-generic form of Letters from Sweden has been accounted for by Kelly as a style appropriate to `that paradoxical, implicitly revolutionary and avant-garde being, the ``female philosopher'' ', producing a mix of `lyrical description, apostrophe, self-reflection, political disquisition, deictic expressions, anecdotes, autobiographical allusions, literary quotations, maxims and typographical devices of expressivity', in which `modern readers have difficulty finding coherence'. (Myers, 1979, p. 166; Kelly, 1992, p. 178) Letters from Sweden has often been read for its autobiographical insights into Wollstonecraft's `marriage' with Gilbert Imlay, and the breakdown of this relationship in the pathos of the Letters' one-sided trajectory towards recognition of the end of love. The impact of this writing lies precisely in its dramatisation of the gradual realisation of the lover/interlocutor's withdrawal from the communicative space shared with the writing consciousness, and the effect of the lag between the dawning of that realisation in the reader, and its interiorisation in the writer. Most responses to Letters justifiably understand it as an autobiographical record of the dramatic close of the Imlay affair, sandwiched as it is between two suicide attempts by the author.1 Holmes describes Letters as `essentially confessional', and suggests it is `intimately linked' with Godwin's Memoirs `by the fact that they both give us portraits of Mary Wollstonecraft'. (Godwin, 1987, p. 16) The apparently multi-generic style of this writing can also be read for elements of the `repressed syntax' of Matrilineal writing.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

98 Matrilineal Writing

That `other syntax' would reiterate female-embodiment in a way that resists symbolisation under patriarchy. Because this `other syntax' is repressed by patriarchy (and as Sadie Plant notes, `the text itself is patriarchy'), and because patriarchy cannot operate without the sublation of the feminine as material, it is never fully excised but persists in dereliction. (Plant, 1997, p. 503) Traces of `feminine' syntax are always in evidence as fragmented, dis-united, in-coherent scraps which remain to gather themselves into a symbolised Matrilineal exchange. The multi-generic form of Letters from Sweden can be argued in this context to offer a glimpse of `feminine' syntax in operation. Feminine syntax becomes Matrilineal writing when we recognise that the condition for a return of the repressed syntax is the symbolisation of a Matrilineal genealogy. That is, in literary form, evidence of Matrilineal writing might be that which is perceived as lacking coherency in Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden. I offer Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden as a work in which Matrilineal writingoccurs, albeit in a form that is not recognised as such, but only in terms of a negated form, or combination of a number of conflicting discourses. Alliston has demonstrated in a recent study of eighteenth-century women's fictions, that women writers operate under `an economy of exchange rather than of passing on', which recuperates `the fragmentary as plurality.' (Alliston, 1996, p. 16) To contextualise this discussion I am drawing on feminist work on the question of a female aesthetic in recent film criticism. In this way I hope to avoid the essentialism battles still to be resolved in attempts to approach the notion of a `feminine writing' in literary criticism, while offering what appears to me to be a fruitful context in which to consider the implications of the work of women as cultural producers. The development of feminist and lesbian experimental film over the last two decades has produced some of the most exciting and challenging examples of the difference sexual difference makes to cultural practices, and I intend here to reapply these insights to the question of women's writing. Bovenschen in 1984 asked whether there is `a feminine aesthetic', and concluded: Certainly there is, if one is talking about aesthetic awareness and modes of sensory perception. Certainly not, if one is talking about an

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Matrilineal Writing 99

unusual variant of artistic production or about a painstakingly constructed theory of art. Women's break with the formal, intrinsic laws of a given medium, the release of their imagination ± these are unpredictable for an art. (Bovenschen, 1985, p. 49) Lauretis took up Bovenschen's question and noted especially the contradiction in her conclusion as a `contradiction specific to, and perhaps even constitutive of, the women's movement itself'. She identifies this as `a tension towards the positivity of politics, of affirmative action on behalf of women as social subjects, on one front, and the negativity inherent in the radical critique of patriarchal, bourgeois culture on the other'. This contradiction is played out by women in language, `as we attempt to speak as subjects of discourses which negate or objectify us through their representations'. (de Lauretis, 1997, pp. 27±8) Following the argument I have been staging throughout this book concerning the peculiar relationship between female-embodiment and writing under patriarchy, corporeal conditions and relations have been foregrounded as critical factors in coming to terms with Mary Wollstonecraft's writings. When we reach these later writings, then, it seems only appropriate to acknowledge the writer's maternity as a condition for their production. This argument is not so much staged on the negation of previous accounts of these works in Wollstonecraft studies, but to show what is gained by acknowledging the corporeal ± as sexual difference ± as a factor in writing. Critics have noted strong contradiction in Wollstonecraft, and assigned this to her `failure' as a feminist in the face of `deep conflict' between reason and feeling. (Barker-Benfield, 1992, p. 364) In the later works especially, there is evidence to suggest that this contradiction points to the condition of maternal subjectivity, rather than to evidence of authorial collapse from a desired rationality back into the immanence of sensibility. This argument accounts for the return of `sensibility' in Wollstonecraft's later works. I begin at the end, with an account of Wollstonecraft's last novel, where I find the emergence of Matrilineal writing in Letters from Sweden dramatised by this narrative. Matrilineal writing emerges as an imagined exchange in writing between estranged mother and daughter: it is incommensurate with the Athenic mode.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

100 Matrilineal Writing

Matrilineal Writing 101

Wrongs of Woman, in its reiteration of the problems posed by love and desire to the identity of the female narrator that plagued Wollstonecraft's first novel ± and degenerated here to the point that the narrative character is incarcerated throughout her narrative in an asylum ± is also justifiably read for its fictional incarnation of (and challenge to) the philosophy of the earlier Rights of Woman. This novel begins at a crisis point in its protagonist's (Maria's) story (representing also a crisis point in her identity and consciousness), after she has been kidnapped by her husband (Venables), separated from her baby (in the very act of breast feeding), and imprisoned in the `mansion of despair' (an insane asylum). While incarcerated, Maria writes memoirs for her lost daughter, and gives them to her male lover (Darnford, also wrongly imprisoned) and her female jailer/friend (Jemima) to read. They are included in the novel as a first-person account of Maria's life up to the moment recorded in the novel's opening scene. Maria's incarceration stands for the burial of the maternal body in patriarchal institutions. The novel attempts to dramatise the immurement of the feminine in masculinist culture, out of which Matrilineal writing is shown to emerge. Wollstonecraft invites this ambitious claim by describing the narrative as the story `as of woman' rather than `of an individual'. The autobiographical aspects of the narrative have been previously emphasised. (Todd, 1994, pp. 122±3) These aspects can be argued to stand in for a metahistorical account of female subjectivity under patriarchy. The autobiographical interpretation of this novel remains an incomplete account largely because ± as George noted ± Wollstonecraft was finding `personal contentment' with Godwin when she was writing a novel with an `emotional message' of female distress. (George, 1970, p. 139) Violi's work on gender and subjectivity in cultural forms centres on the model of `universal' versus particular narrative. While masculinist subjectivity partakes of a universal narrative (figured in the Oedipal myth and its innumerable variants), female-embodied subjectivity has no such `trans-individual space' in which `to identify with the collective and to inscribe . . . individual subjectivity into forms of collective subjectivity'. So while literary genres may have `provided women with forms of self-representation', these `particular'

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

The story as of woman

or `exclusive' narrative forms do not mediate a `broader sense of belonging'. As a result, the activity of generalising individual subjectivity does not take place for women, except as Athenic subjects. (Violi, 1992, pp. 171±2) Violi reminds us that `relationships between women have never been symbolized in male culture'. (p. 173) Wollstonecraft's claim that the narrative of Wrongs of Woman is the history of `woman' rather than `of an individual', invites us to read this narrative as a generalization of female experience; a female metanarrative. The character of Maria and her story bears stronger affinities with the story of Eliza Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Wollstonecraft, and Fanny Blood, than with Wollstonecraft's individual story.2 In the narrative of Wrongs of Woman, then, we should be able to identify elements of Irigaray's motifs for derelicted femininity that would reinforce Wollstonecraft's claim that she has written a narrative of `woman' (under patriarchy) rather than of `an individual'.

Imported into another economy . . . The narrative opens at the moment that Maria regains consciousness in the `mansion of despair'. (p. 85) Her incarceration, and the loss of her daughter, are intrinsically linked: Her infant's image was continually floating on Maria's sight, and the first smile of intelligence remembered, as none but a mother, an unhappy mother, can conceive. She heard her half speaking half cooing, and felt the little twinkling fingers on her burning bosom ± a bosom bursting with the nutriment for which this cherished child might now be pining in vain. From a stranger she could indeed receive the maternal aliment, Maria was grieved at the thought ± but who would watch her with a mother's tenderness, a mother's self-denial? (p. 85) For Irigaray, the daughter is `imported into another economy' at the moment she enters the Oedipal drama; at which point the matrilineal relationship of intersubjectivity is severed, and rivalry takes its place. (Irigaray, 1995, p. 135) Wollstonecraft's novel is a fictional exploration of the causes and conditions of female suffering, and repeats in various forms the refrain of a woman either estranged

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

102 Matrilineal Writing

from her daughter, or dead. Either way mothers in this narrative tend to lose control over their own and their daughters' fates. Wrongs of Woman contains a hollogrammatic series of female stories within the narrative frame of Maria's own: we hear Jemima's account of her life and how the behaviour of men resulted in her prostitution; the `lovely maniac' whose parents forced her to marry a man she didn't love, and whose madness is post-natal psychosis; the `girl' Jemima wanted to replace as a merchant's mistress, who drowns (pregnant) in a horse trough; Peggy, whose husband dies at sea, and leaves her in poverty with two small children; the mistress of Venables, who dies giving birth to his unwanted child; a woman with a despotic husband, who refuses to shelter Maria; and Maria's mother's story, married too young, preferring her son to her daughter, and dead before her time. Spencer has noted that Maria's `separation from her baby is the culmination of all those injustices to mothers and daughters,' and the `image of the baby torn from the mother's breast', which `recurs several times in the narrative', is representative of `the many ways in which society denies women the right to nourish their daughters'. (Spencer, 1992, p. 275) Maria's greatest terror throughout the narrative is that her child is motherless, alone, and exposed to suffering. This novel first and foremost narrativises the cultural estrangement of mother and daughter under patriarchy.

Women are `products' used and exchanged by men . . . When Maria's mother dies, her father ± in a recapitulation of the early narrative of Mary, A Fiction ± takes a mistress who makes her long to escape the home. It is in this context that she agrees to marry George Venables. The surrogate `good' father in the guise of Maria's uncle, however, has an important fiscal role to play in the arrangement of this marriage: It is true, that George was by no means so great a favourite of mine as during the first year of our acquaintance; still, as he often coincided in opinion with me, and echoed my sentiments; and having myself no other attachment, I heard with pleasure my uncle's proposal [for their marriage]; but thought more of obtaining my freedom, than of my lover. But, when George, seemingly anxious for my happiness, pressed me to quit my present

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Matrilineal Writing 103

104 Matrilineal Writing

This stark image of the commodification of the heroine is repeated in the story told in Maria's memoirs of her escape from, and re-capture by, her husband; his sole motive is to realise the capital gains available through Maria's person from her wealthy and generous uncle. The sexualised act of financial exchange that determines Maria's marriage is repeated in stronger terms later in the scene with `Mr. S'. Maria gradually begins to enjoy and demonstrate her enjoyment of the `company of the gentleman . . . who had a general acquaintance with literature and subjects of taste', but Mr. S.'s `attentions became more pointed.' She boasts of her `conquest' to her husband, while making it very clear that she attempted to `give a different turn to his conversation'. After confiding the true state of her husband's financial affairs to her, Mr. S. offers `pecuniary aid', which Maria `absolutely rejected'. Then: One day he came, as I thought accidentally, to dinner. My husband was very much engaged in business, and quitted the room soon after the cloth was removed. We conversed as usual, till confidential advice led again to love. I was extremely mortified. I had a sincere regard for him, and hoped that he had an equal friendship for me. I therefore began mildly to expostulate with him. This gentleness he mistook for coy encouragement; and he would not be diverted from the subject. Perceiving his mistake, I seriously asked him how, using such language to me, he could profess to be my husband's friend? A significant sneer excited my curiosity, and he, supposing this to be my only scruple, took a letter deliberately out of his pocket, saying, `Your husband's honour is not inflexible. How could you, with your discernment, think it so? Why, he left the room this very day on purpose to give me an opportunity to explain myself; he thought me too timid ± too tardy . . . .' (p. 151) The letter records Venables' opinion that `every woman had her price', and `that he should be glad to have the duty of a husband

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

painful situation, my heart swelled with gratitude ± I knew not that my uncle had promised him five thousand pounds. (p. 134)

taken off his hands' for the loan of `five hundred pounds for a month or six weeks'. (p. 151) Her `use value' as commodity has dropped from £5,000 to £500 pounds since her marriage. The narrative expresses moments of self-awareness regarding Maria's commodification, and situates her personal situation as a symptom of written Law: `But a wife being as much a man's property as his horse, or his ass, she has nothing she can call her own. He may use any means to get at what the law considers as his, the moment his wife is in possession of it, even to the forcing of a lock . . . . The tender mother cannot lawfully snatch from the gripe of the gambling spendthrift, or beastly drunkard, unmindful of his offspring, the fortune which falls to her by chance; or (so flagrant is the injustice) what she earns by her own exertions.' (p. 149; original emphasis). The representation of `woman' as object of exchange between men hints at her de-subjectification: `and the laws of her country ± if women have a country ± afford her no protection or redress from the oppressor.' (p. 149; my emphasis). Irigaray argues that women can only exist as `objects' of exchange in a masculinist cultural economy, unless they adopt masculine subjectivity, founded on the alienation and exclusion of the feminine as matrilineage. (Irigaray, 1995, p. 131)

The murder of the mother results [in] the burial of the madness of women ± and the burial of women in madness ± Maria's awakening in `the mansion of despair' at the opening of the narrative is given a description worth dwelling on: Abodes of horror have frequently been described, and castles, filled with spectres and chimeras, conjured up by the magic spell of genius to harrow the soul, and absorb the wondering mind. But, formed of such stuff as dreams are made of, what were they to the mansion of despair, in one corner of which Maria sat, endeavouring to recall her scattered thoughts. (p. 85) The `mansion of despair' is emphatically not `such stuff as dreams are made of', or `conjured up by the magic spells of genius'. Her incarceration as if she were mad leads her to shadow symptoms or signs of

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Matrilineal Writing 105

madness that `threatened to fire her brain, and make her a fit companion for the terrific inhabitants'. (p. 85) Her attempt to argue her case to the `master of this most horrid of prisons', leads her to `rave[ ] of injustice, in accents that would have justified his treatment'. (p. 86) When the servant Jemima enters to bring Maria food, she interprets her unwillingness to eat as a symptom of her madness: `I have had many ladies under my care, who have resolved to starve themselves; but, soon or late, they gave up their intent, as they recovered their senses.' Maria replies: `Do your really think me mad?' (p. 87) The kind of madness ascribed to Maria to justify her incarceration is `hereditary', with `fits not occurring but at very long and irregular periods'. (p. 88) Her imprisonment leads Maria to experience `the anguish of a wounded mind'. The `mansion of despair', then, is a materialisation of patriarchal codes in which Maria's independence of mind is interpreted as madness. Alan Ingram reminds us that `a wife's refusing to love her husband' was `a sign of madness' for eighteenth-century medicine. (Ingram, 1998, p. 8) Jacobus understands Wrongs of Woman as attempting to represent `the prison of sensibility. . . created by patriarchy to contain women', where `they experience desire without Law, language without power'. Maria becomes mad through her imprisonment; her actions, which represent the bodily and linguistic gestures of `desire without Law', have no means to affirmation except by the narrative itself, and its reiteration in the Chinese boxes of women's stories recorded at every turn of the narrative. She identifies in the trope of women's madness the otherwise marginalised `language of feeling', which, `displaced into writing, produces a moment of imaginative and linguistic excess over-brimming the container of fiction, and swamping the distinction between author and character'. (Jacobus, 1989, p. 55) Jacobus identifies such a moment in Maria's reflection on `the poor wretches' she views from her window ± fellow inmates of the `mansion of despair' ± which breaks abruptly with the phrase: `Thus thought Maria-'. (Wollstonecraft, 1989, pp. 91±2; Jacobus, 1989, p. 57; see also, Felman, 1989) Wrongs of Woman insists on a scene in which madness and femininity occupy the same cultural space (both imprisoned and interpellated by the same structures), and reveal themselves in the same gestures; both mis-represented by their imprisonment, and both figured as a rejection of (or threat to) reason. It remains to be shown that the narrative produces a

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

106 Matrilineal Writing

significant and powerful footnote to the incarceration of `woman' in `the mansion of despair', the severing of her connection (bodily, affective, and caring) with her daughter, and her status as object of exchange under patriarchal laws. Irigaray argues that women bear the burden of madness under patriarchy, and that assertions of female subjectivity are coded as madness in themselves, since they rest on an undermining of the conditions for coherent masculinist subjectivity. (Irigaray, 1995, p. 37)

Speaking-among-women/ speaking (as) woman When de Lauretis considers the female aesthetic she rejects the question, `what formal, stylistic or thematic markers point to a female presence behind the camera?' For de Lauretis this question generalises and universalises women's cinema, and recognises only `cosmetic' changes in aesthetic form and content. (de Lauretis, 1997, p. 31) Instead she argues for a women's cinema (as represented for example in Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 1975) in which `the preaesthetic is already fully aesthetic': This is not so, however, because of the beauty of its images, the balanced composition of its frames, the absence of the reverse shot, or the perfectly calculated editing of its still camera shots into a continuous, logical and obsessive narrative space; but because it is a woman's actions, gestures, body, and look that define the space of our vision, the temporality and rhythms of perception, the horizon of meaning available to the spectator. (p. 31) The `pre-aesthetic' can become `aesthetic rather than aestheticized' when a piece of work `addresses the spectator as female'. The notion that cultural productivity might address the spectator/reader as female implies something which cannot `be dismissed with commonplaces such as authorial intention or intentional fallacy.' Bergstrom describes the film in question as proceeding with `two logics' or `two modes of the feminine': that of the camera and that of the woman filmed. The logic of the camera constructs a space in the film and through the film that is `a critical space of analysis, an horizon of possible meanings which includes or extends to the

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Matrilineal Writing 107

spectator.' (Bergstrom, 1977, p. 117) de Lauretis understands this to mean that the film `defines all points of identification (with character, image, camera) as female, feminine, or feminist.' (p. 33) When Wollstonecraft includes in Wrongs of Woman the memoirs written by Maria for (and addressed directly to) her estranged daughter, she offers a reinvestment of the narrative under the fictional device of `addressing the [reader] as female'. The shift is a subtle one with strong implications. Spencer draws on Rich's description of mother±daughter relationships as the `great unwritten story', and suggests that this story is `not so much unwritten, maybe, as unread: for although they have received little recognition for it, many women writers in the late 1700s and early 1800s were using their new forum, the novel, to express their sense of this relationship.' (Rich, 1977, p. 226; Spencer, 1992, p. 201) Wollstonecraft's novel follows `the tradition of the female conduct-book and the didactic novel', and `dramatizes the mother's advice to her daughter', so that `the mother's educational role' becomes `the source for her identity as a writer.' (Spencer, 1992, pp. 201±6) When Godwin edited Wrongs of Woman for publication after Wollstonecraft's death, he noticed a significant relationship between the unfinished novel, and work undertaken concurrently on `Lessons'; a series of set pieces for the purposes of educating young children, which is styled as a number of one-sided dialogues between mother and child. He made an editorial decision to `annex[ ]' `Lessons' to the Wrongs of Woman, when preparing the latter for publication in the second volume of Wollstonecraft's Posthumous Works. His `Advertisement' justifies this decision (one he expected to `excite surprise in some persons') on the grounds of a `slight association (in default of a strong one) between the affectionate and pathetic manner in which Maria Venables addresses her infant, in the Wrongs of Woman; and the agonising and painful sentiment with which the author originally bequeathed these papers, as a legacy for the benefit of her child.' Godwin is referring to the sentence Wollstonecraft offered as the subtitle for this work: `The first book of a series which I intended to have written for my unfortunate girl.' Godwin uses this title, which he tells us is `indorsed on the back of the manuscript' to date `Lessons' around 1795, as he assumes it `to have been written in a period of desperation, in the month of October, 1795.' (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol: 4, pp. 467±8) `Lessons' was however written

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

108 Matrilineal Writing

during Wollstonecraft's second pregnancy, in 1797, and hence concurrently with Wrongs of Woman. (Alexander, 1989, p. 143) `Lessons' records a series of short conversations between a mother and her child, which progress from lists of basic, monosyllabic words (`Lessons' I and II), through simple sentences which touch reference points in the child's life (`Lessons' III and IV), to more complex sentences which begin to discuss moral and relational questions, and include references to a baby, who is compared with the child to give examples of her own development (`Lessons' V±XIV). The baby discussed in these one-sided dialogues (only the mother's words are recorded) is called William; the name of the imaginary son Wollstonecraft and Godwin believed she was carrying in 1797.3 The `Lessons' record in moving detail a mother's careful interaction with her infant daughter, and refer to the daughter's age: `Have you seen the baby? Poor little thing. O here it comes. Look at him. How helpless he is. Four years ago you were as feeble as this very little boy.' (p. 469) `Lessons', then, posits the existence of the child Wollstonecraft was carrying as she was writing (it is set approximately one year in the future, when Fanny would have been four years old), and projects the fantasy of domestic stability she imagined following its birth: Away you ran to papa, and putting both your arms round his leg, for your hands were not big enough, you looked up at him, and laughed. What did this laugh say, when you could not speak? Cannot you guess by what you now say to papa? ± Ah! it was, Play with me, papa! ± play with me! (p. 470) `Lessons' VII describes the child's weaning, offering a unique record of Wollstonecraft's relationship with Fanny: When you were hungry, you began to cry, because you could not speak. You were seven months without teeth, always sucking. But after you got one, you began to gnaw a crust of bread. It was not long before another came pop. At ten months you had four pretty white teeth, and you used to bite me. Poor mamma! Still I did not cry, because I am not a child, but you hurt me very much.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Matrilineal Writing 109

110 Matrilineal Writing

As well as providing an intriguing and carefully documented record of Wollstonecraft's early relationship with Fanny, then, the `Lessons' represents a piece of writing specifically addressing the reader (because the reader is projected through the re-imagined infant Fanny) as female. `Lessons' III offers the following basic sentences and phrases: Hide your face. Wipe your nose. Wash your hands. Dirty hands. Why do you cry? A clean mouth. Shake hands. I love you. Kiss me now. Good girl. The bird sings. The fire burns. The cat jumps. The dog runs. The bird flies. The cow lies down. The man laughs. The child cries. (p. 469) What does the woman do? The question begged by `Lessons' III seems to find an answer in IV and V: `What do you want to say to me? Speak slow not fast. . . . Come to me, my little girl. Are you tired of playing? Yes. Sit down and rest yourself, while I talk to you.' (p. 469) The mother listens and talks to the daughter. This imaginary dialogue between mother and daughter is central to Spencer's notion of `maternal authority', it also paves the way for the Matrilineal writing that can be traced in Wollstonecraft's late works. The memoirs written by Maria for her daughter are embedded in the narrative of Wrongs of Woman. This female meta-narrative serves the conditions demanded by Violi (discussed above) for a `universal' narrative that would offer the female reader a bridge between her individual autobiography and a community of women; it quite literally dramatises the dialogue between mother and daughter initiated by ± and taking account of ± the estrangement of the daughter from the mother. This offers a model for the emergence of the `speakingamong-women' that Irigaray finds conditional for the emergence of the female subject: while in this mode women are still `speaking (as) man', it offers the only `place where a speaking (as) woman may dare to express itself.' Irigaray contends that `in these places of women-

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

So I said to papa, it is time the little girl should eat. She is not naughty, yet she hurts me. I have given her a crust of bread, and I must look for some other milk. (p. 470)

Matrilineal Writing 111

Feminist sublime where all foundations are called into question How, then, should we read the `memoirs' addressed by mother to daughter that transplant the third-person narrative of Wrongs of Woman? Jacobus identifies in Wrongs of Woman a moment that records what she terms the `feminist sublime': `A mental convulsion breaches the impasse between undifferentiated disappearance into a `male' text and the prison of sensibility.' (Jacobus, 1989, p. 56) This might be understood as a moment in which the `she' and the `I' of the narrative merge, rupturing authorial distance and disrupting the boundaries of the narrative fiction. Jacobus argues that the `transgression of literary boundaries ± moments when structures are shaken, when language refuses to lie down meekly, or the marginal is brought into sudden focus, or intelligibility itself refused ± reveal not only the conditions of possibility within which women's writing exists, but what it would be like to revolutionise them'. We have seen such a moment in Wollstonecraft's Historical and Moral View, where the `I' ruptures the Athenic narrative of the revolution and drags with it the abjected maternal body. In Wollstonecraft's first novel fragments from Mary's private journal are incorporated into the narrative in a similar way, collapsing the distance between author, narrator and character. (Kelly, 1992, pp. 51±3) It is not enough, however, to claim that Wollstonecraft's `I' posits a Matrilineal writing. Although we can see this at work in the disruption of the Historical and Moral View, Rights of Woman was also written entirely in the first person. It is necessary to differentiate between these `I's (between, in Braidotti's terms, the `I' and the `she-I'.)4 My argument so far has traced the trajectory of the female-embodied writing subject through Wollstonecraft's published works: from the `I' that attempts (but fails) to extrapolate itself from female genealogies in the early writings, through the Athenic `I' claiming masculine virtue, first as de-sexed (Rights of Men) and then as problematically female-embodied (Rights of Woman), through the disavowed maternal embodiment of the `I' returning to fracture the depersonalised Historical and Moral View. The flux of Wollstonecraft's

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

among-themselves, something of a speaking (as) woman is heard'. (Irigaray, 1995, p. 137)

`I' can be mapped against the shifting relationship between the writing subject and her embodiment. If we recognise maternity as an issue of embodiment, Wollstonecraft's status as a mother can be assumed to re-inflect the `I' of her writing. In the Wrongs of Woman the shift from the perspective of Maria/she to `I' marks a shift from narrative to memoirs. The memoirs ± significantly ± are addressed to Maria's daughter; and this in itself sections off this aspect of the writing in terms of `addressing the reader as female'. The `I' of the memoirs identifies itself as a Matrilineal `I' by addressing directly the estranged/displaced daughter. This establishes the conditions for a `female de-aesthetic', satisfying the `two modes of the feminine' necessary to such a definition: in this case the female-embodied `I' of the writing consciousness (merged here with the character) and the female-embodied reader (Maria's daughter, also merging with Wollstonecraft's daughter). The conditions for Matrilineal writing, then, are the acknowledged female-embodiment of the writer and the address of the reader as `female, feminine, or feminist . . . regardless of the gender of the reader.' This is not to claim that any fictional or autobiographical `I' by a female-embodied writer addressed to a female reader constitutes Matrilineal writing under all conditions: but this would offer a good place to begin to look for aspects of Matrilineal writing. The fragmentary nature of Wollstonecraft's Matrilineal `I' ± the fact that it emerges at moments of disruption to genre-specific written forms ± places it both as exterior to and contingent on those forms. The ± conscious or otherwise ± incorporation of the female-embodied `I' (or `she-I') addressing itself to a `female, feminine, or feminist' reader in an otherwise stable and convincing claim to literary form, features for Jacobus as `the moment of desire (the moment when the writer most clearly installs herself in her writing) [which] becomes a refusal of mastery, an opting for openness and possibility.' It is no surprise, then, that the memoirs, and the fragments in earlier works they reiterate and expand upon, bear characteristics of disrupted syntax, particularly at moments addressing the daughter directly. Matrilineal writing takes place in the direct exchange between two female-embodied subjects without the mediation of forms established as proper to masculinist writing. It is ± in Jacobus's terms ± a desire for female embodiment by the female-embodied subject that is recognised in these textual disturbances ± and this can occur in the

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

112 Matrilineal Writing

horizontal or the vertical register (mother/daughter and/or between women). The memoirs written by Maria for her estranged daughter begin with the words: `Addressing these memoirs to you, my child'. They are didactic (`uncertain whether I shall ever have an opportunity of instructing you', p. 123), and confessional (`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', p. 123). They are also self-justifying: `it is necessary, my dearest child, that you should know the character of your father, to prevent your despising your mother', and so offer an account of what led Maria to marry the man she later comes to fear and despise; and who ultimately severs the corporeal and affective relationship between Maria and the daughter (in the act of breastfeeding). (p. 127) This severing of relationship (whether permanently severed by death or temporarily severed by distance and imprisonment) is replayed but also denied in the writing of Maria's memoirs, and the imagined dialogue between mother and daughter that these memoirs represent. Spencer finds in Maria's memoirs `an attempt to provide the mothering that has been denied her', and hence, on a larger scale, `a model . . . of women's writing'. (Spencer, 1992, p. 258) Rajan finds in this novel an example of hermeneutic writing which is `structured as a series of attempts by people who are literally or metaphorically imprisoned to communicate to others.' (Rajan, 1988, p. 223) I am emphasising the specific double-gendering of the central attempt at communication through Maria's memoirs; a gendering of writer and reader as female that offers an example of the convergence of `two logics' of femininity necessary for a female deaesthetic. That this is a model of the mother-daughter exchange follows Walker's argument that `women attempt to bridge the chasm between themselves and their mothers by writing.' That bridge is only apparent once the estranged daughter becomes an estranged mother of a daughter. (Walker, 1998, p. 162) For Violi, the `two logics' would answer the `two aspects' of `the process of constructing male subjectivity': the masculinisation of the subject position in narrative, and the master/pupil ± or `representation of male solidarity in a group' ± tropes of narrative that reiterate hierarchical and peer relationships among men. (Violi, 1992, p. 171) Matrilineal writing, as represented by Maria's memoirs, establishes female-female exchange as the organising principle of the narrative

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Matrilineal Writing 113

(its justification), and represents love between women as the primary `horizon of meaning' available to the text. This gendering of the fictional memoirs is accentuated by the corporeal and material conditions under which they were written. Wollstonecraft was pregnant and nearing her second experience of childbirth, and while she may not have been conscious of the events that were to come in the near future, it remains that childbirth was considered (for good reason) a life-threatening activity for women. Wollstonecraft has incorporated into this novel, then, an address to her living daughter at a moment threatening her severance from that daughter by death. What remains central to the novel, but ultimately foreshortened by the writer's death in childbirth, is a piece of writing emerging from the writer's concern to communicate with the woman her living daughter will become, in case of her own death. It was written close on the heels of Wollstonecraft's `Lessons' (another mother-daughter-oriented piece of writing), and offers a version of the accounts of `women who on the eve of childbirth give voice to fears and doubts as they risk death' that Spender has been searching for in women's writing, and that Greer describes as the `mother's legacy'. (Spender, 1986, p. 262; Greer, 1988, p. 11) Maria openly states her fear that `Death may snatch me from you, before you can weigh my advice, or enter into my reasoning.' (p. 123). The memoirs record a scene in which, during her pregnancy, Maria meets Venables' illegitimate, neglected daughter whose mother `caught Mr Venables' eye' as a servant, but who died shortly after the child's birth as a result of her ill-treatment on becoming pregnant. (p. 142) The child `tottered along, scarcely able to sustain her own weight', on legs malformed as a result of careless feeding by a `parish nurse', and her features are ravaged by suffering. The moment offers a textual and dramatic focal point for the novel's layered refrain of the fears of mothers for daughters; specifically the fear that a mother will be prevented from caring for her daughter by economic, legal, and mortal forces outside of her control (imprisonment, powerlessness, death). The scene is described in the fictional memoirs written by a mother for her daughter now born but estranged from her mother (whose estrangement is caused by the bad father, but reinforced and reaffirmed by patriarchal law). The moment records simultaneously Maria's recognition during pregnancy of the dangers facing her unborn daughter; a potent embodi-

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

114 Matrilineal Writing

ment of those dangers in the damaged body of the illegitimate daughter orphaned by forces outside her own mother's control; the fictionalised act of an imprisoned mother writing this scene for her estranged daughter to read for fear that she will not be able to tell her directly, reiterated in the writer's own pregnancy and written with a living daughter in mind. The crippled orphan daughter is shown to Maria by `an old, mean-looking woman', employed by Venables to keep the child. Maria overhears Venables replying to the old woman's request for money on the grounds that his child `cannot live long' without `a little physic', with the comment `[s]o much the better'. (p. 141) It offers a paradigmatic scene in a novel concerned with the severance of the Matrilineal exchange under patriarchy, but also the opportunity to heal this severance through writing; specifically writing that is exchanged between (or imagined to be so in the moment of writing) a mother and daughter. The memoirs begin with a repeated insistence ± but also apparent hesitation ± in using the word `mother': `many observations will probably flow from my heart, which only a mother ± a mother schooled in misery, could make', and `[t]he tenderness of a father who knew the world, might be great; but could it equal that of a mother ± of a mother, labouring under a portion of the misery, which the constitution of society seems to have entailed on all her kind?' (p. 123) The break between the iteration and reiteration of `mother' in both cases marks the inadequacy of the language at her disposal to describe the `mother' relationship to her daughter: both hesitations offer an attempt to define the peculiarity of the mother's role. This occurs again in a sentence that replays a similar hesitation marking the distance between `child' and `daughter': `It is, my child, my dearest daughter, only such a mother, who will dare to break through all restraint for your happiness ± who will voluntarily brave censure herself to ward off sorrow from your bosom.' Imprisoned in the `mansion of despair', Maria is unable to come to the rescue of her own daughter: `To think that she was blotted out of existence was agony . . . yet to suppose her turned adrift of an unknown sea, was scarcely less afflicting.' (pp. 85±6) If we read this narrative in the way Wollstonecraft asked us to (as the story of `woman'), we find in the memoirs a paradigmatic scene capturing something of ways in which patriarchy leaves its marks on women, and ± perhaps more importantly ± on the nurturing relationships between women. The

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Matrilineal Writing 115

neglected illegitimate daughter in the scene described above embodies the damage patriarchy effects on the mother's daughter, as well as the horror faced by a mother of daughters under patriarchy. It is, I feel, not offered lightly that the orphaned and illegitimate daughter removed from her mother's care can hardly walk. Wollstonecraft's last novel, then, can be read for glimpses of Matrilineal writing in structural and textual figures of the mother-daughter relationship that drives the multi-layered narrative. Violi recognises that `[t]he structure of subjectivity is inscribed in the deep structure of narrative itself', and cites de Lauretis' argument that `[s]ubjectivity is engaged in the cogs of narrative and indeed constituted in the realm of narrative, meaning and desire, so that the very work of narrative is to engage with certain positions of meaning and desire.' (Violi, 1992, p. 169) In Maria's memoirs to her daughter, then, we can read the constitution of a narrative form that offers `symbolic mediation between individual and social experience' for women, absent in masculinist cultural forms. (p. 172) Jacobus recognises that moments of transgression of literary boundaries, such as the collapse between author, narrator and character marked in fragmentary moments of reflection in both Wollstonecraft's novels and the Historical and Moral View, offer a `breach of fictional decorum' that `enacts protest as well as articulating it', revealing `what the novel cannot say within its legitimate confines.' (Jacobus, 1989, p. 57) I am suggesting that such a moment of breach occurs when the `two logics' of female-embodied writer and femaleembodied reader converge in Matrilineal writing, threatening the boundaries of the fiction in which this takes place. The `moment of desire' Jacobus find in these breaches of the text is, more to the point, a moment of female-embodied same-sex desire. This can be understood in the light of Braidotti's work towards disclosing the `she-I' of discourse, and Irigaray's recent work on the `Ishe ' that remains largely unavailable to women. (Irigaray, 1986, p. 98) This female-embodied same-sex desire corresponds in important ways to Butler's work on the `lesbian phallus', where she argues that `[i]nsofar as language might be understood to emerge from the materiality of bodily life, that is, as the reiteration and extension of a material set of relations, language is a substitute satisfaction, a primary act of displacement and condensation.' She notes that `Kristeva argues that the materiality of the spoken signified, the vocalization of

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

116 Matrilineal Writing

sound, is already a psychic effort to reinstall and recapture a lost maternal body.' She also notes Lacan's model of language `understood as rules of differentiation based on idealized kinship relations'. (Butler, 1993, pp. 69±71) The laws of kinship governing matrilineage Æage, or of mother±son relations. are not reducible to those of patrõÆline At the most abstract we might claim that syntax ± as the communicative space between writer and reader ± records an assumed relationship, and that this relationship will reiterate either a patrilineal or a matrilineal communication (or a mixed one). Athenic writing crosses the boundary at one point only; replicating the culturally sanctioned mother-son relationship in writing, or masculinising the mother's relationship to her daughter. Unlike the mother±daughter relationship, that between mother and son is already a key symbol of Western cultures. Violi reminds us that `[t]he relationships between women have never been symbolized in male culture.' (p. 173) Butler accuses Kristeva of designating an `alleged psychosis of homosexuality', since she suggests that `the unmediated cathexis of female homosexuality leads unequivocally to psychosis.' (Butler, 1990, pp. 84, 86) For Irigaray, however, it is precisely this female± female relationship which is designated by her figure of `parler femme': speaking (as) woman. Irigaray remarks that `[w]hat seems difficult or even impossible to imagine is that there could be some other mode of exchange(s) that might not obey the same logic. Yet that is the condition for the emergence of something of woman's language and woman's pleasure'. (Irigaray, 1985a, p. 158) Johnson finds a similar conclusion at the level of narrative closure in her analysis of Wrongs of Woman, where she identifies in the narrative an invitation to `conclude that the emancipated, sturdy, purposive, mutually respecting, and rationally loving couple Wollstonecraft spent her career imagining is, finally, a female couple, the couple whose unrepresentability made Mary so difficult and strange.' (Johnson, 1995, p. 69) Matrilineal writing is the representation of this relationship at the level of writing, without collapsing into the psychoanalytic scene of female-female desire as a `masculine' desire. The relationship between genre and its breach in Maria's memoirs is not an arbitrary one. It is only during Maria's incarceration that she begins to write her memoirs. Indeed, the writing that offers Maria's salvation (her proof of reasonableness, communication in spite of imprisonment, contact with her daughter, her lover and a woman of

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Matrilineal Writing 117

lower class) is only possible under conditions of imprisonment. A direct relationship between Maria's writing and her incarceration in the `mansion of despair' is established by the narrative twice. First, the writing of the narrative itself begins at the moment that Maria awakens after being drugged, torn from her baby, and imprisoned. The moment at which Maria returns to consciousness is the moment at which the writing of this novel begins. Secondly, Maria obtains the conditions for writing during her incarceration; the separation that produces the need for writing between Maria and her daughter, and her desire to show her memoirs to her lover and Jemima, as well as the material conditions (pens and paper, a cell to write in, uninterrupted time). If Wrongs of Woman can be read as a meta-narrative of woman under patriarchy (femininity under patriarchy), it offers a paradigm that predicts and dramatizes the (re)emergence of Matrilineal writing from the deepest, darkest dungeon of patriarchal confinement. Patriarchy becomes the very condition for Matrilineal writing to heal the severing of meaningful relationships between women.5

Letters from Sweden: my babe the story of mother±daughter love exists as the repressed text of patriarchal culture. (Walker, 1998, p. 170) Wrongs of Woman was written during 1797, in the year following the publication of Letters from Sweden. While Wrongs of Woman records a narrative of the emergence of Matrilineal writing from patriarchy, Letters from Sweden represents the closest Wollstonecraft came to producing Matrilineal writing. The narrative of Wrongs of Woman retroactively describes and accounts for the writing of Letters from Sweden, Wollstonecraft's most successful and popular piece of writing. While Rights of Woman is credited with the origins of Western feminism, Letters from Sweden has been recognised as a strong and wide-reaching influence on Romanticism, recalled and repackaged in poetry and prose by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Shelley, and ± of course ± Mary Shelley.6 Letters from Sweden emerges from the mingling of a private discourse addressed to Gilbert Imlay ± Fanny's father ± based on a journal Wollstonecraft kept throughout the jour-

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

118 Matrilineal Writing

ney, and written in parallel to (and overlapping with) the series of private letters in which she negotiated the breakdown of their relationship ± and a public discourse addressed to a wider reading audience. Wollstonecraft highlighted the peculiarly mixed focus of this writing in an author's `Advertisement', which draws attention to the self-contemplative interest at the heart of travel writing: a reflectivity which focuses the writing on the first-person whose voice narrates the subject matter (travelling experiences, observations, facts) and in the process becomes the object of the reader's interest and of its own writing. The `Advertisement' opens this book with an attempt to balance a necessary (but uncomfortable) narcissism with a desired objectivity: In writing these desultory letters, I found I could not avoid being continually the first person ± `the little hero of each tale.' I tried to correct this fault, if it be one, for they were designed for publication; but in proportion as I arranged my thoughts, my letter, I found, became stiff and affected: I, therefore, determined to let my remarks and reflections flow unrestrained, as I perceived that I could not give a just description of what I saw, but by relating the effect different objects had produced on my mind and feelings, whilst the impression was still fresh. (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 7, p. 241) The unresolved oppositions (travels or memoirs, vanity or sensibility, this fault, if it be one) record an alternating between immersion in personal detail, and a demand for a more formal composition of experience in writing. Labbe addresses this dual-claim in her discussion of the picturesque in Letters from Sweden, where she concludes that the text's significance `lies in her insistence on the artlessness of the Letters, for they are anchored in a searching reassessment of aesthetic categories.' (Labbe, 1998, p. 63) Critical attention has tended to hover around fascinating glimpses offered by the Letters of the author's attempted suicides and unhappy affair, replaying Godwin's conclusion that Letters from Sweden were `calculated to make a man fall in love with the author.'7 A similar scene of writing is represented fictionally in the later and retroactive Wrongs of Woman; Maria gives the memoirs she has written to her lover, Darnford, to read. The effect of the memoirs is described:

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Matrilineal Writing 119

In former interviews, Darnford had contrived, by a hundred little pretexts, to sit near her, to take her hand, or to meet her eyes ± now it was all soothing affection, and esteem seemed to have rivalled love. He adverted to her narrative, and spoke with warmth of the oppression she had endured. . . . They met again and again; and Darnford declared, while passion suffused his cheeks, that he never before knew what it was to love. ± (p. 172) Rights of Woman had opened with the argument that women should stop being so `anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.' (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 9) That text can be read as a performance of its own argument, displaying the `abilities and virtues' of its author to `exact respect' in the reader. The later writings upset this order. While Wrongs of Woman foregrounds the point that writing can inspire love in its reader, Letters from Sweden had been busy demonstrating this to its paradigmatic male reader, William Godwin. While it may be the case that the letters on which the text of Letters from Sweden is based are written to Imlay, and for Imlay to read, the decision to publish the resulting hybrid text was made after Wollstonecraft had finally severed this relationship, and the reason for publication was a maternal, rather than a heterosexual, one. She writes around the time of producing the Letters: `But now I am writing for independence ± I wish I had no other evil to complain of than the necessity of providing for myself and child.' (Wardle, 1979, p. 328) The implied interlocutor of the Letters is certainly Imlay, but as Jacobus has demonstrated, the discourse of love in this writing oscillates between love of her child's father, by whom she has been spurned, to love of her child±daughter: In the course of Wollstonecraft's travels, the eroticized, blushing body of the lover is converted into that of a mother. The tearful relation of mother to child ± the bosom `heav[ing] with a pang at the thought which only an unhappy mother could feel' ± is Wollstonecraft's imaginary substitute for her relation to a cold and unfeeling lover; this is no ordinary sexual `pang', although it may still be an erotic one. (Jacobus, 1995, p. 72)

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

120 Matrilineal Writing

Labbe has argued that it is `in the potential loneliness of [Wollstonecraft's daughter] Fanny', that we find the `source for the grief that underpins Letters Written . . . in Sweden', and demonstrates that Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Smith in particular `bypass established lines of primogeniture and inheritance', since `[i]ntellectual and creative property is passed from mother to daughter' and `the lost body of the dead child or mother is reconstructed through the private act of reading and the public one of writing and publishing'.8 Letters from Sweden incorporates the presence of the narrator's daughter in some touching and illuminating ways. The narrator's first disclosure of the presence of the child occurs some way into the first letter, after a detailed description of their arrival in Norway. The `Advertisement' makes no mention of the maid or child accompanying the traveller, and until the passage in question occurs, this information is not available to the reader.9 It comes as quite a surprise when, after the party, having already travelled for 21 days on board ship, finally arrive at the lieutenant's cottage. We enjoy a lengthy description of the house, the meal of `[f]ish, milk, butter, and cheese, and am sorry to add, brandy', a reflection on `the politeness of the north' in relation to `the coldness of the climate', before the narrator has persuaded her host to allow her to `climb the rocks to view the country', where with the `help of the lieutenant's telescope' she sees `the vessel underway with a fair though gentle gale'. Then we hear mention of her little travelling companion: Straying further, my eye was attracted by the sight of some heart'sease that peeped through the rocks. I caught at it as a good omen, and going to preserve it in a letter that had not conveyed balm to my heart, a cruel remembrance suffused my eyes; but it passed away like an April shower. . . . The gaiety of my babe was unmixed; regardless of omens or sentiments, she found a few wild strawberries more grateful than flowers or fancies. (pp. 246±7) Later in the same letter (during the same day) we learn that a neighbouring family were `overflowing with civility', and that she shortened her visit there `to prevent their almost killing my babe with kindness'. (p. 248) That evening the narrator observes that she could `write at midnight very well without a candle', and in a

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Matrilineal Writing 121

122 Matrilineal Writing

What, I exclaimed, is this active principle which keeps me still awake? ± Why fly my thoughts abroad when every thing around me appears at home? My child was sleeping with equal calmness ± innocent and sweet as the closing flowers. ± Some recollections, attached to the idea of home, mingled with reflections respecting the state of society I had been contemplating that evening, made a tear drop on the rosy cheek I had just kissed. (p. 248) Alexander suggests that `women writers were much more literal than their male counterparts in their attachment to their own bodily being', and notes that `this was most striking in their images of maternity'. She contrasts Wordsworth's `abstract' description of his wife breast-feeding their child in terms of `the gravitation and the filial bond/ Of nature', with Wollstonecraft's descriptions in letters of a literal `inundation of milk' after Fanny's birth, and her reference to the power of the child's suckling `so manfully that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the R-ts of Woman'.10 The narrator pictures herself at one point, on the boat back to Sweden after a brief trip to Norway, where she had travelled without Fanny: Wrapping my great coat round me, I lay down on some sails at the bottom of the boat, its motion rocking me to rest, till a discourteous wave interrupted my slumbers, and obliged me to rise and feel a solitariness which was not so soothing as that of the past night. (p.268) The solitary figure wandering through nature is an elemental refrain of ± and is one of the points at which Wollstonecraft's Short Residence has been recognised as an influential precedent for ± Romantic poetry. Todd and Butler identify the `introverted traveller, nursing memories of a tragic and perhaps guilty passion, wandering off into desolate, dangerous places', as the prototype for Romantic poetic and prose narratives, and argue that the later `substitution by male writers

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

passage `contemplat[ing] all nature at rest', she contrasts her own wakefulness with the image of her sleeping daughter:

of a hero for a heroine' does not `necessarily mean that ``romantic subjectivity'' was experienced at its point of origin as male rather than female'.11 Holmes finds in Wollstonecraft's description of the `solitary wanderer, sailing through dangerous waters towards an unknown, misty shoreline', in Letters 5 and 6 especially, `something of the Romantic predicament itself'. (Wollstonecraft, 1987, p. 27) The solitary contemplative wanderer paradigmatic of Romantic writing has as one of its origins a mother separated from her daughter. The narrator describes `a sort of weak melancholy that hung about my heart at parting with my daughter for the first time', immediately before her famous meditation on her fears for her daughter's future: You know that as a female I am particularly attached to her ± I feel more than a mother's fondness and anxiety, when I reflect on the dependent and oppressed state of her sex. I dread lest she should be forced to sacrifice her heart to her principles, or principles to her heart. With trembling hand I shall cultivate sensibility, and cherish delicacy of sentiment, lest, whilst I lend fresh blushes to the rose, I sharpen the thorns that will wound the breast I would fain guard ± I dread to unfold her mind, lest it should render her unfit for the world she is to inhabit ± Hapless woman! what a fate is thine! (p. 269) Later in the same letter she again draws on the image of her daughter's cheek, this time as a sign of innocence, contrasting with adult emotions which offer the same physical symptom: the blush. The passage recalls Blood, and part of it is selected by Godwin as an illustration of how much Wollstonecraft suffered the loss of her lover/friend, a loss recalled in this passage ten years after her death: When a warm heart has received strong impressions, they are not to be effaced. Emotions become sentiments; and the imagination renders even transient sensations permanent, by fondly retracing them. I cannot, without a thrill of delight, recollect views I have seen, which are not to be forgotten, ± nor looks I have felt in every nerve which I shall never more meet. The grave has closed over a dear friend, the friend of my youth; still she is present with me, and I hear her soft voice warbling as I stray over the heath.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Matrilineal Writing 123

124 Matrilineal Writing

Fate has separated me from another, the fire of whose eyes, tempered by infantine tenderness, still warms my breast; even when gazing on these tremendous cliffs, sublime emotions absorb my soul. And, smile not, if I add, that the rosy tint of morning reminds me of a suffusion, which will never more charm my senses, unless it reappears on the cheeks of my child. Her sweet blushes I may yet hide in my bosom, and she is still too young to ask why starts the tear, so near akin to pleasure and pain? (pp. 271±2) She mentions weaning the child as a factor in her weakened health: `My imprudence last winter, and some untoward accidents just at the time I was weaning my child, had reduced me to a state of weakness which I never before experienced.' (p. 280) And she describes the fear, on returning to Gothenburg, that her child may have forgotten her in her absence, in a passage which offers a beautiful observation of longing for an absent child: Tonsberg was something like a home ± yet I was to enter without lighting-up pleasure in any eye ± I dreaded the solitariness of my apartment, and wished for night to hide the starting tears, or to shed them on my pillow, and close my eyes on a world where I was destined to wander alone. . . . Employment has beguiled this day, and tomorrow I set out for Moss, in my way to Stromstad. At Gothenburg I shall embrace my Fannikin; probably she will not know me again ± and I shall be hurt if she do not. How childish is this! still it is a natural feeling. I would not permit myself to indulge the `thick coming fears' of fondness, whilst I was detained by business. ± Yet I never saw a calf bounding in a meadow, that did not remind me of my little frolicker. (pp. 298±9; original emphasis) She describes `the sweetest picture of a harvest home I had ever beheld', in a passage meditating on her longing for the sort of domestic stability reproduced in the scenes of future bliss recorded in `Lessons':

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

This recollected loss seems to recall one closer to home, in an image of the flushed breast, signalling remembered desire:

A little girl was mounted a straddle on a shaggy horse, brandishing a stick over its head; the father was walking at the side of the car with a child in his arms, who must have come to meet him with tottering steps, the little creature was stretching out its arms to cling around his neck; and a boy, just above petticoats, was labouring hard, with a fork, behind, to keep the sheaves from falling. My eyes followed them to the cottage, and an involuntary sigh whispered to my heart, that I envied the mother, much as I dislike cooking, who was preparing their pottage. I was returning to my babe, who may never experience a father's care or tenderness. The bosom that nurtured her, heaved with a pang at the thought which only an unhappy mother could feel. (p. 315) And she seems to offer a glimpse of uncertainty regarding her own mothering in a passage noting her situation as a woman travelling alone with her child, and the `notable house-wives; without accomplishments, or any of the charms that adorn more advanced social life' who inhabit Copenhagen. Their `total ignorance may enable them to save something in their kitchens; but it is far from rendering them better parents. On the contrary, the children are spoilt; as they usually are, when left to the care of weak, indulgent mothers, who having no principle of action to regulate their feelings, become the slaves of infants, enfeebling both body and mind by false tenderness'. (p. 321) Towards the end of the journey, the mood of the letters shifts, and the playful moments recorded in earlier letters give way to a bleaker, more self-absorbed tone. Her references to the child reflect this: `Marguerite and the child often fell asleep; and when they were awake, I might still reckon myself alone, as our train of thoughts had nothing in common.' (p. 333) We are also offered a sketch of a woman faced with the horrors of a hungry child, in a passage describing her crossing from Denmark to mainland Germany: When I went on board at the Great Belt, I had provided refreshments in case of detention, which remaining untouched, I thought not then any such precaution necessary for the second passage, misled by the epithet of little, though I have since been informed

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Matrilineal Writing 125

that it is frequently the longest. This mistake occasioned much vexation; for the child, at last, began to cry so bitterly for bread, that fancy conjured up before me the wretched Ugolino, with his famished children; and I, literally speaking, enveloped myself in sympathetic horrours, augmented by every tear my babe shed; from which I could not escape, till we landed, and a luncheon of bread, and a bason of milk, routed the spectres of fancy. (p. 334) The final reference to the child is perhaps the most interesting and illuminating, arriving at Hamburg, the narrator complains of the `difficulties I might have to encounter to house myself and brat'. (p.339) We know this writing was not only successful in its object of inspiring `love' in the reader, but that it had also inspired love between its readers, since it was this book that Wollstonecraft's daughter and the poet Shelley took with them when they eloped. One can only wonder at the feelings it inspired in its subject, Fanny, who committed suicide as a young woman.

The subject of matrilineal writing We can read Letters from Sweden for a Matrilineal writing imagined emerging from the conditions imposed by patriarchy in Wrongs of Woman. Indeed, the final fragments for scenes included by Godwin at the end of Wrongs of Woman replicate the imaginary scenes painted by Wollstonecraft in her last letters to Imlay: particularly the motif of abandonment of the child in near-death, then resurrection to live for the child (imagined in Wrongs of Woman as a kind of female community).12 Letters from Sweden has been identified by Battersby as a piece of writing that transcends the weighted dualism at work in her writing until this point. (Battersby, 1997, p. 92) Labbe finds in it a piece of writing that turns on an organising motif of the motherdaughter relationship, and ± elsewhere ± as a work that challenges aesthetic categories (particularly the sublime and the beautiful). (Labbe, 1998, p. 63) I am suggesting that this challenge to aesthetic categories is symptomatic of Matrilineal writing. Yaeger bypasses the gendered binary of the `Oedipal sublime', which she claims confirms the unitary and empowered status of the

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

126 Matrilineal Writing

Matrilineal Writing 127

if what is repressed in the `oedipal' sublime is the desire for preoedipal bonding with a mother's body (which, in most Romantic poems, is given an imaginative correlative in the chaos and blissful heterodoxy of the cosmos), in the `pre-oedipal' sublime these libidinal elements are not repressed; they break into consciousness and are welcomed as a primary healthful part of the writer's experience, as part of the motive for metaphor. (Yaegar, 1989, pp. 204±5) Moore describes in Letter 15 a `moment of potential sublimity which is also one of sensibility', which results in `disorder in the narrator's thought and vision', when `language that is her own, but which she does not in any sense possess, eludes her': `[t]he result is not so much a ``proper sentence'' as a string of fragmented unco-ordinated statements which resolve nothing'. (Moore, 1992, p. 151) Irigaray associates the `proper' with `property' and the `logic of the Same', so an improper sentence would be one that resists or overturns `proper' syntax (on the previous page Moore describes the style of Wollstonecraft's letters as `[l]oose syntax'). Fay understands the sublime as `specifically a male achievement gained through women as female objects or through female Nature, and so is closed to women writers'. (Fay, 1998, p. 14) An aesthetic that relies on a paradigmatically masculinist subject, and a female/feminine object, corresponds to Irigaray's notion of the feminine as the commodity exchanged by male subjects in a `hom(m)osocial' economy. Women can experience and claim the `Oedipal' sublime, then, but only in the Athenic mode; and by extension alienating ourselves from the maternal body, and in the same move the female self. But what of a Matrilineal writing, which would posit a femaledesiring subject that is not masculinised, and in the process transforms the female-feminine desired object? In Letters from Sweden, this writing is present in the form of a disturbance of the clear boundaries between Sublime and Beautiful in the descriptions of scenery: a disturbance that is `improper' at the level of syntax and aesthetic categorisation. Labbe offers the most carefully studied and consistent account of this `disturbance' at play in Wollstonecraft's Letters from

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

self in its transcendence of a pre-Oedipal `desire for inundation' with her concept of the `feminine sublime'. She argues that:

Sweden to date. She identifies `Wollstonecraft's comfortable use of the sublime', which `complements her recreation of the picturesque', and argues convincingly that `[h]er technique exemplifies the feminine alternative to an aesthetics defined through masculinity'. (p. xix) She notes that the Sublime is `a masculine rite of passage . . . constructed theoretically and experientially . . . in such a way as, not pointedly to exclude, but rather to elide, the feminine'. (p. 36) She cites Moskal's comment that Wollstonecraft `repeatedly describes prospects as picturesque, in which the sublime merges, in a most un-Burkean way, with the beautiful'. (p. 62) For Labbe, `the merged sublime and beautiful constitute the picturesque'. Labbe emphasises the implications of Wollstonecraft's blurring of boundaries between beautiful and sublime: Such a narrative strategy portrays the picturesque as not only powerful, not only fused, but creative in a way not before encountered. . . . Given the cultural significance of the prospect, one would expect to see it associated with the sublime, were it occupying its usual eminent position in the aesthetic hierarchy; Wollstonecraft upsets these expectations, however, endowing the picturesque with a personal and universal power that destabilizes that very hierarchy. (p. 62) Wollstonecraft in Letters from Sweden `goes beyond the feminized activity of reconciliation to an intellectual and revolutionary recognition of the possibilities informing an aesthetic'. (p. 272) When Irigaray hints towards the `other' syntax of femininity (which I am arguing needs to be understood in terms of a Matrilineal syntax), she goes some way towards outlining the disruptive and improper nature of such a syntax in the context of patriarchy: `what a feminine syntax might be is not simple or easy to state, because in that ``syntax'' there would no longer be either subject or object, ``oneness'' would no longer be privileged . . . that ``syntax'' would involve nearness, proximity, but in such an extreme form that it would preclude any distinction of identities, any establishment of ownership, thus any form of appropriation'. (Irigaray, 1995, p. 136) To imagine a writing in which there is no longer `subject or object' is utopic or dystopic depending on one's disposition. Yaegar posits `a model of the self

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

128 Matrilineal Writing

that permits both a saving maintenance of ego-boundaries and an exploration of the pleasures of intersubjectivity.' (Yaeger, 1989, p. 205) The subject/object dyad that is imagined away by Irigaray's feminine syntax can be said to make way for an intersubjectivity that, in Wollstonecraft's Letters, can be perceived at the level of a disruption of the sublime movement of masculine subjectivity transcending a feminine object. Hence it is in these critical accounts of Wollstonecraft's improper use of the aesthetic categories Sublime/ Beautiful, and in what Labbe terms the `picturesque', that Letters from Sweden symptomises Matrilineal writing. If, as Labbe notes, the Sublime operates under the conditions of the Oedipus, then Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden can be said to record the emergence of a female-embodied writing subject that has made a different journey into symbolisation (one that does not disavow the maternal body as castrated) ± and that as a result this writing resists and disturbs the Athenic mode.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Matrilineal Writing 129

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

This page intentionally left blank

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Is there, then, no way for feminists to answer Woolf's call to `think back through our mothers' without falling into the fetishist's refusal of sexual difference ± no way to read the myth of Proserpine, as it were, `beyond Oedipus'? The myth `screened' by the Oedipus story (the rape of Proserpine) is a story of rape or exploitation. (Jacobus, 1995, p. 17) What relation continues to maintain that passivity toward the anal±sadistic drives which are permitted to man and forbidden to ± inhibited in ± woman? What relation guarantees man sole and simultaneous ownership of the child (the product), the woman (the reproductive machine), and sex (the reproductive agent)? Rape, if possible resulting in conception ± rape is depicted moreover by certain male and female psychoanalysts as the height of feminine pleasure ± has become the model for the sexual relation. (Irigaray, 1985a, p. 66) The relationship between female-embodiment and writing is not fixed: there is no immediate and transparent relationship to be claimed between female-embodiment and written style. It is necessarily un-fixed, and recognisable in its un-fixedness, because femaleembodiment is characteristically (one might say essentially) un-fixed in its rhythmic transformations (into and through cycles of ovulation and menstruation, in the unfathomable corporeal morphologies of 131

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Conclusion: Female Embodiment and Writing beyond Wollstonecraft

pregnancy, birth, post-partum retraction, placental production and expulsion, lactation in maternity, and through the menopausal phases). All these recognisable characteristics of female-embodiment (realised differently to different degrees in different women, and organised differently in different cultural and temporal matrices) by definition resist singularity or fixedness, and ± more importantly ± are mis-represented by modes of singularity and fixedness in cultural forms. Grosz reminds us that `unlike man's body, the female body is frequently depicted within patriarchal cultural discourse as fluid, unstable, chameleon-like . . . is penetrable, changes shape, swells, gives birth, contracts, lactates, bleeds'. (Grosz, 1995, p. 87) The one essential characteristic of female-embodiment, then, is this negation of fixedness and singularity. The Oedipality of dominant narrative forms can be understood in terms of a reiteration, or performative, of the trajectory of male-embodied subjectivity: not that there is no change through a temporal register, but that the change is linear in its realisation through repudiation, and then phallic ownership, of the maternal body. The `Oedipal' paradigm of Western narrative has been recognised by formalists, as well as champions of `difference', in critical work, and by psychoanalysts as structuring the scene of normative subject formation. (Violi, 1992, p.; 169; Bredbeck, 1995, pp. 480±5) Butler has argued that the phallus ± the `privileged' signifier ± is (dis)located in the male sexual organ: `to continue to use the term ``phallus'' for this symbolic or idealizing function is to prefigure and valorize which body part will be the site of categorization'. She is right to note that `this is an argument that deserves a serious response', because to consider the phallus as `transferable or plastic property' (the effect of positing a lesbian phallus) destablilizes the distinction between `being and having the phallus', which underpins the Oedipal paradigm. (Butler, 1993, pp. 62±3) The Oedipal paradigm, of (male-embodied) subject / (female-embodied) object, is what Irigaray finds in the `syntax' of Western cultural forms ± in language itself. In this syntax, the male subject is produced/confirmed/interpellated as the subject of language/of culture, realising himself through desire for the mother displaced onto desire for the mother's replacement who turns out ± after all ± to be the mother again unrecognised. This is what Irigaray describes as the subjectpredicate structure of language, in which the woman/feminine is

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

132 Matrilineal Writing

the `universal predicate'. Whitford notes that for Irigaray `the absence of the maternal-feminine in language is connected to the position of woman as universal predicate.' (Whitford, 1991, p. 44) Women, moreover, inhabit language by virtue of this Oedipal structuration, which objectifies them in the same moment that it objectifies the mother as that which the subject must differentiate (him)self from (`violently foreclose'). Whitford explains this moment and its implications for the female-embodied subject of language: Psychoanalysis posits an imaginary equivalence between playing with the body of the mother and manipulating the corpus of language. . . . If women learn their identity in the same way, the results are disastrous for that identity: `The woman cannot reduce her mother to an object without reducing herself to an object at the same time, because they are of the same sex'. If women take the mother's body as a phantasied object, and at the same time a woman identifies with her mother, she is forced to take herself as an object too. Then as soon as she starts using language, she is objectifying the mother and herself. Using language then presents a woman with the choice between remaining outside the signifying system altogether (in order to stay with her mother) or entering a patriarchal genealogy in which her position as object is already given. Irigaray envisages that in a different economy: `A woman would be directly in intersubjective relation with her mother. Her economy is that of the between-subjects, and not that of the subject-object relation'. Irigaray wants it to be possible for a woman to enter language as a subject, to make a female identification with her mother that does not objectify her. (Whitford, 1991, p. 44) For women writers to achieve a subject position that is not hysterical ± a subjectivity that would not immediately objectify them in their imitation of masculinist subjectivity conditional as that is on the woman as `universal predicate' (forms of writing which are not `Athenic' then), the maternal genealogy must first, or simultaneously, be symbolised. Without a Matrilineal symbology, the female-embodied subject can never find an identity that is not `violently foreclosing' the mother, or a subject position that is

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Beyond Wollstonecraft 133

not already defective-masculine in its articulation. For this to take place, the relations between women (vertical and horizontal) need to find or forge a symbolic figure of mediation, and Irigaray offers that figure as the `two lips' of female-embodiment. Whitford reminds us that `[w]hat Irigaray is describing in the controversial descriptions in This Sex is the metonymic or contiguous, that which touches, associates, or combines'. Contiguity is: a figure for the vertical and horizontal relationships between women, the maternal genealogy and the relation of sisterhood (since there are two pairs of two lips, of which one pair ± the mouth ± can be seen as horizontal, and the other pair ± the labia ± as vertical, each representing each other). It stands for women's sociality, love of self on the woman's side, the basis for a different form of social organization and a different economy. (Walker, 1998, p. 180) Walker describes this in terms of a `labial logic' that `confounds oppositional thinking'. (p. 157; and see Lorraine, 1999)

Rape and intersubjectivity The phallomorphic nature of the Symbolic, then, ensures that all relations are reduced to the governing relation of father-son (which makes space for the fraternal bonds of hom(m)osociality). In the subject-predicate base of coherent syntax, Irigaray posits a figure for the (metaphoric and real) rape that she finds paradigmatic to the relation between the sexes: the demand that all desire be relegated to the phallus/penis. Love between women is in this cultural economy `the greatest threat of all to masculine discourse, represents its most irreducible ``exteriority'' or ``exterritorality'' '. (Irigaray, 1985a, p. 157) For female-embodied subjectivity to be realised, the femaleembodied subject must first find a relation to her mother that does not objectify (hence severing) her/them. The `two lips', then, captures something of the intersubjectivity of the matrilineal relation that is severed and congealed by masculinist cultural forms, reiterated in and reconfirmed by `proper' syntax. Butler's imagining of the `lesbian phallus' approaches this question of intersubjectivity on the horizontal plane:

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

134 Matrilineal Writing

Consider that `having' the phallus can be symbolized by an arm, a tongue, a hand (or two), a knee, a thigh, a pelvic bone, an array of purposefully instrumentalized body-like things. And that this `having' exists in relation to a `being the phallus' which is both part of its own signifying effect (the phallic lesbian as potentially castrating) and that which it encounters in the woman who is desired (as the one who, offering or withdrawing the specular guarantee, wields the power to castrate). That this scene can reverse, that being and having can be confounded, upsets the logic of non-contradiction that serves the either-or of normative heterosexual exchange. (Butler, 1993, p. 88) The intersubjectivity of matrilineal exchange refuses the fixed subject±object relationship of heterosexual desire; it confounds the `being' and `having' that lies at the heart of masculinist cultural forms (in a similar way to Wollstonecraft claiming both to be and to have Reason in the Rights of Man). This intersubjectivity would be expected to have a syntactical incarnation: literally a syntax that does not posit the woman/feminine as `universal predicate' ± that does not re-enact the symbolic `rape' that underpins patriarchal cultures ± but that allows a movement (or exchange) between subject and object positions. We might see this present in Wollstonecraft's movement between the Sublime and the Beautiful in Letters from Sweden; or ± perhaps more directly ± in her refutation of Rousseau's rape paradigm in Rights of Woman, where a nominal intersubjectivity is imagined between men and women in place of the reduction of `woman' to the mute object of masculine desiring agency. It is as mute body that the female body most resembles the castrated male body ± and it is in Wollstonecraft's refutation of Rousseau's rape fantasy that we can find a mobilisation of consent (voice and embodied desire) as a radical figure. The `lesbian phallus' correlates to Irigaray's claim that `woman has sexual organs just about everywhere.' It follows that writing which records and enacts love between women would not follow the patterns of writing that suit patriarchal relations; and that without circulation of these written forms, women will always return to the status of `object' affected only for, and by, patriarchal exchange. For Walker, `women's writing performs, by its audacious styles, the

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Beyond Wollstonecraft 135

(re)production of new symbolic spaces in which woman's desire can be spoken', and `Irigaray's work on gesture and speech serves as a provisional model for understanding and appreciating the (sexual) difference that women's writing makes.' (Walker, 1998, p. 5) For Butler, the defining characteristic of the `lesbian' phallus is that it is characteristically fluid, mobile, un-fixed: The question, of course, is why it is assumed that the phallus requires that particular body part to symbolize, and why it could not operate through symbolizing other body parts. The viability of the lesbian phallus depends on this displacement. Or, to put it more accurately, the displaceability of the phallus, its capacity to symbolize in relation to other body parts or other body-like things, opens the way for the lesbian phallus, an otherwise contradictory formulation. And here it should be clear that the lesbian phallus crosses the orders of having and being; it both wields the threat of castration (which is in that sense a mode of `being' the phallus, as women `are') and suffers from castration anxiety (and so is `to have' the phallus, and to fear its loss). (p. 80) Intersubjectivity, then, demands that one `be' and `have' the phallus at the same time, or alternately. Significantly, this radical refusal of mastery depends on the relational context in which it takes place. The `lesbian phallus' depends ± at first perhaps ± on imagining a relational space between women as a context for signification. Braidotti cites Benjamin's work in which she argues `that female desire must be conceptualized as the in-between space, connecting inside to outside, in a constant flow of self into other that cannot and should not be disrupted by falsely dichotomous distinctions. She thus attempts to replace the mediation by the phallus with the capacity for interconnectedness and agency, so that desire need not be conceptualized according to the murderous logic of dialectical oppositions'. (Braidotti, 1992, p. 187) Pregnancy and mother±daughter dialogue are perhaps the most likely places to look to for traces of intersubjective exchange because ± as Franklin notes ± pregnancy is `the exact antithesis of individuality', and as such a condition in which a language of subject±object relations is most inappropriate, and

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

136 Matrilineal Writing

mother-daughter dialogue has more of a chance to bypass the Oedipalized relation. (Franklin, 1997, p. 491; Weiss, 1999, pp. 51±4) As Battersby has recently argued, to focus on `the female subject involves treating humans as non-autonomous, and instead thinking relationships of dependence (childhood/weaning/rearing) through which one attains selfhood. It also involves thinking the process of birthing as neither monstrous nor abnormal.' She contends that `dominant metaphysics of the West have been developed from the point of view of an identity that cannot give birth, so that birthing is treated as a deviation of the ``normal'' models of identity±not integral to thinking identity itself', and as a result female-embodiment (idealised as the capacity for pregnancy and birthing) confounds Western metaphysics. If male-embodied subjectivity is `taken as the norm', then female-embodied subjectivity is `paradoxical (both excessive and lacking).' For the `normalized' female-embodied subject, then, `there is no sharp division between ``self'' and ``other''. Instead the ``other'' emerges out of the embodied self, but in ways that mean two selves emerge and the self does not simply dissolve into the other. The consequences of this are extreme'. (Battersby, 1997, pp. 2±8) One of the consequences, as Battersby makes explicit, is the Irigarayan one of imagining a Symbolic ordered differently: `What Irigaray is suggesting is that there are two possible symbolic orders. There is the oedipalized order in which self can establish its identity only in terms of a cut from the Other. This is the ``white'' symbolic: that in which we confront only white forms or ghosts. But there is also the ``red'' order: the more revolutionary symbolism of bonding by blood, in which there is a more fluid relationship between self and its other.' (p. 115) Patriarchy is fundamentally a relation between men (Irigaray's `hom(m)osocial' economy that exchanges the woman/feminine as objects between men). That primary relation is encoded as patrilineage and fraternity in micro- and macro-cultural forms from global political structures, through marriage ceremonies, the naming of children (which Irigaray notes replaces the primary corporeal sign of matrilineage ± the navel), educational practices (`passing' exams can be understood as `passing as' the normative masculine subject), and ± as Shildrick has recently argued ± in bio-medical discourses that define health and well-being. (Schildrick, 1997) A convincing argument has yet to be pointed out to me that would account for its assumed absence in writing itself ± as central as writing is to the

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Beyond Wollstonecraft 137

processes of communication, debate, record-keeping, definition, knowledge, democratic power, identity, cultural representations, the law, education, economic transactions (in the guise of contract law), comprehension, medical and scientific practices, and definition(s) of sanity. What would be the effect on culture, on what is possible, and what is imaginable, if forms of writing that reiterated and gave syntax to the intersubjective relation between women (vertical and horizontal) gained circulation in these discourses that circumscribe the social? When women entered literary history, during the early decades of the eighteenth century, what did they leave behind? As Whitford reminds us `[u]sing language then presents a woman with the choice between remaining outside the signifying system altogether (in order to stay with the mother) or entering a patriarchal genealogy in which her position as object is already given.' (Whitford, 1991, p. 44) To `enter' literary history demands that one be recognised at all, and while I do not want to engage here with the historical conditions for women's emergence in literary history, it is worth lingering for a moment on the implications of the theoretical issues I have been tracing through Mary Wollstonecraft's writings towards this conclusion. When women entered the Symbolic through acts of publishing written work, can we understand this as a macro version of the psychoanalytic scene of the subject engendered in the Symbolic? In psychoanalytic terms, the girl-child enters the Symbolic later than the boy child, because she has a more difficult transition to make, and because she has more `trouble' distinguishing between her identity and that of the mother than the boy child, whose transition follows the fast track of the repudiation of femininity (`violent foreclosure' of the mother) that constitutes the desired `positive' resolution of the Oedipal drama (heterosexual masculinity) for the boy. Women come second. Can we analyse the entrance of women into literary history, then, as an equivalent case? Can we apply the insights of `sexual difference' gained through a sustained critique of psychoanalysis to this scene? If we did, we might find that our notion of women's literary history is subject to normative demands on our understanding of writing similar to the normative demands of the Symbolic governing and producing cultural forms: in both cases, the male-embodied subject has eclipsed the female-embodied subject. Sexual difference would simply posit that unless we are to repeat

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

138 Matrilineal Writing

and reaffirm the tendency to recognise only that which has already been seen, and to forget that we have forgotten that which remains unseen, we have to be ready and willing to direct energies towards evidence of the lost maternal imaginary ± the Matrilineal ± that remains preserved, if derelicted, in the Athenic text. The question that most often seems to be raised in resistance to Irigarayan work on women and writing, is that of what a women's writing would `look like'. This sounds to me very much like the question of what lesbians `do' in bed. Both questions ± although phrased in different contexts ± reproduce the bafflement to patriarchal knowledge that is represented by women among themselves. Female-embodied subjectivity addresses itself directly and in the first instance to women ± locates itself in the spaces available to femaleembodied subjects to speak among themselves without redress to patriarchal codes of `proper' behaviour.

Fantasies of the feminist in wet skirts Perhaps it is because mere physical accident seems so much less susceptible to processes of rationalisation that critics have shied away from the topic of Wollstonecraft's death in childbirth. But, no less than her life and writings ± and her attempted suicides ± Wollstonecraft's death is a social and discursive event. . . . And as the mixed form of Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and the precariously managed mixture of grief, guilt and objectivity in Godwin's Memoirs suggest, that individual death ultimately demands some other discourse than those of rationalist progressivism or historicist enquiry. (Jones, 1997, pp. 118, 204) There is something peculiarly powerful in the literary and philosophical remains of Mary Wollstonecraft. Jacobus makes this point well when she comments on the `feminist melancholia that links Wollstonecraft, her daughters, and her readers at the common site of transference and maternity.' (Jacobus, 1995, p. 66) In the writing of this book I have tried to meet that feminist melancholia head on, and account for its lasting resonance. A few words remain to be written regarding my own relationship to Wollstonecraft.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Beyond Wollstonecraft 139

Wollstonecraft's unusually well-documented unusual life, recording in writing an unusual period in European history, and her dominating presence within a complex web of fascinating figures of literary history, are associations with her name that it is impossible to disarticulate from the project of evaluating her writings. The corporeal lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley ± maybe more so than, or maybe just in a different way to, those of their male counterparts, William Godwin and Percy ± are symbolically and psychologically woven into the fabric of their writings. Wollstonecraft's Letters Written During a Short Residence, read alongside her private letters to Gilbert Imlay, form a cluster of words and images which make it tantalisingly possible to imagine the lived emotions of the writer ± a possibility grasped in the absence of sensations available from viewing the shadings on a photographed face, or the recorded inflexions of a long-dead voice. The fragmented, unfinished ending of her last novel is difficult to read without speculating on the reason for its abandonment, the identity and relationship of the editor who published it so soon after her death, and the identity of the daughter born ten days before the author's death. The younger Mary's journey from a Godwin to a Shelley ± the names recording a history entangled with that of her haunting first novel ± was made via her mother's grave, and through a shared appreciation and re-living of her writings. And her mother's death. And so many peculiarly female deaths; Blood in childbirth, Fanny by laudanum wearing her mother's stays, Harriet ± late in pregnancy ± by water (the memory of Wollstonecraft weighting her skirts in the water of the Thames before she throws herself in), Wollstonecraft herself by post-partum septicaemia. In a literary present mapped by the polarised fashions for detailed biography of exposure on one side, and the endless play of the signifier on the other, writing about Mary Wollstonecraft is a project impossible to take lightly. Feminist literary criticism, the theoretical and practical home of this book, has reached a complex and crucial point in its own history, which has been designated a `third wave'. Writing about Mary Wollstonecraft collapses almost immediately ± as the structure of this book dramatises ± into writing about feminist literary history and theory. But something remains beyond this formal agenda, something glimpsed from the top of the 73 bus as it akes its way through the chaos of modern Newington Green.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

140 Matrilineal Writing

Something visible from the scribbled signature closing Wollstonecraft's last heart-wrenching letter to Gilbert Imlay ± and uncannily absent from letters between Wollstonecraft and her beloved Fanny Blood, because none of these remain. This book has been an attempt at offering glimpses of Mary Wollstonecraft which resist as well as supplement the various and varied accounts of her life and works available; it is also an attempt to reclaim her life and that work from the fantasies of academics haunted by the ghostly feminist. Once again, necessarily, it offers a re-membering of Mary Wollstonecraft in my own image; hence its negativity, unsatisfied with the popular versions of Wollstonecraft in circulation, and with the way in which her writings have been so comfortably absorbed into the figure of a pre-Romantic radical heterosexual rationalist who disliked women writers almost as much as she disliked `ordinary' women. The `accent of the feminine' posited at the beginning of this argument points to the persistence of something belonging to the femaleembodied subject beyond assimilation to masculinism (or, in a more progressive narrative, emancipation from oppressive femininity). Under certain conditions, then, that `accent' can be seen to evolve beyond the possibilities inherent in the Athenic text through a form that `becomes a refusal of mastery, an opting for openness and possibility', and that breaches the boundaries between the writer and narrator, disrupting the `legitimate confines' of the text. (Jacobus, 1989, p. 57) These conditions rest in turn upon the realisation of a Matrilineal cultural and textual space, a making space for relations between women. There remains in this argument a confusion between the horizontal and the vertical registers of female-embodied relations, and this is appropriate. Irigaray talks of two pairs of two lips ± one horizontal and one vertical ± and the same figure applies to both. The female-embodied subject cannot be realised or made manifest outside the Matrilineal, and cannot find herself unless, and until, first and foremost among women. This intersubjective exchange needs to be recognised and preserved between mothers and daughters, and between women, before we can hope for meaningful exchange between the sexes. However, it is worth recalling that both Irigaray and Rich urge us to remember that all women are already always daughters of mothers. Male-embodied same-sex desire is mediated through culture in a way that is missing from the experience of female-embodied (not yet)

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Beyond Wollstonecraft 141

subjects. Hence only one sex speaks through culture. But this does not mean that female-embodied same-sex desire has no mediating forms; only that these forms are denigrated as feminine, and therefore not proper to the signifying subject because not `violently foreclosing' the maternal body. We can return to Burke's Philosophical Enquiry with this argument in mind. The Sublime denotes male-embodied desire for the father's body as mediated through (or sublimated in) taste for cultural and natural forms that reiterate (sometimes caricature) male-embodiment and the threat of castration: astonishment, fear, terror, overwhelming magnitude, hard lines, erect and craggy forms. The Beautiful denotes female-embodied desire for the mother mediated through (or sublimated in) taste for cultural and natural forms that reiterate (often caricature) female-embodiment: small, smooth, curved, delicate, gradual variation (the breast). Burke's comment that `we submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us', puts female-embodied subjects in a quandary ± perhaps finding `love' in Burke's sense only in their relations with children and animals. At the same time, this one-directional submission (and the denigration of the feminine at every level of experience upon which it rests) re-enacts the symbolic rape at the heart of patriarchal cultures. Rape because only one party to the sexual exchange has signifying power in and of itself. Or, as Walker understands it: `[w]omen's hysterical silence is pitted against man's abject voice'. (Walker, 1998, p. 3) Perhaps in Wollstonecraft's later writings, then, we can read a return of the Athenic subject to `feminine' forms (the fictional and the epistolary), but not simply as a collapse or a retreat. This return might be understood not as a failure, although it would explain what is often held to be Wollstonecraft's failure to complete the promised second volume of the Rights of Woman. Perhaps it is only by undergoing the Athenic mode that female-embodiment has a chance to speak at all in patriarchal cultures ± or; only by becoming Athenic can female-embodied (not yet) subjects bring female-embodiment (as desire and as identification) to signification at the level of culture. Through Athenic writing, female-embodied (not yet) subjects can give voice to female-embodiment, and in so doing open up the possibility of transforming culture, and the social relations it subtends, by establishing the conditions necessary to intersubjective exchange, rather than symbolic rape, between the sexes. The question remains, whether the Athenic subject is complicit in the rape of

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

142 Matrilineal Writing

the female/feminine at the heart of patriarchal cultures. I would like to imagine that it is this moment of (re)turning that is apparent in some `third wave' feminisms; a return of the disavowed female body to the Athenic text, through a hitherto impossible signification of female-embodiment at the very heart of the institutions of patriarchal knowledge and truth. It remains to be seen what the outcomes of this (re)turn in feminism might be.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Beyond Wollstonecraft 143

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

This page intentionally left blank

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Introduction 1. Whitford translates parler-femme as `speaking (as) woman' ± the adoption/ creation of a subject position that does not simply re-incorporate the woman as a crypto-masculine subject. Parler-femme, then, is both a practical and utopic idea: `For Irigaray, woman-as-subject in language and in the symbolic is the condition of the coming-to-be of woman-as-subject in the social, although I think that the relation is more two-way than this formulation suggests, in that the emergence of the women's movement ± women's affirmation of themselves as social subjects ± has also provided the conditions for the rethinking of subjectivity in language' (Whitford, 1991, p. 43). 2. See, for example: Alcoff, 1988; Braidotti, 1989; Cavarero, 1992; Gatens, 1992; Mohanty, 1992; Pateman, 1992; Irigaray, 1993, 1995; Schor, 1994. 3. See George, 1970; Nixon, 1971; Showalter, 1971; Flexner, 1972; Todd, 1973, 1975; Sunstein, 1975; Tomalin, 1992. The `gentlemen' in question are Kenneth Neil Cameron, John Cordy, W. Clark Durant, Paul Jefferson, Charles Kegan, John Knowles, and Ralph Wardle. Todd's new biography (2000) represents an important moment of revision (see also Taylor (forthcoming); Moore, 1999). 4. Eliot, 1855 (in Pinney, 1963); Woolf, 1935. 5. See: Pennell, 1885a,b, 1890; Hill, 1896; Fawcett, 1907, 1912. 6. Kristeva offers a useful analysis of the third wave of Western feminist activism: `the mixture of the two attitudes ± insertion into history and the radical refusal of the subjective limitations imposed by the history's time on an experiment carried out in the name of the irreducible difference ± that seems to have broken loose over the past few years in European feminist movements, particularly in France and in Italy' (Kristeva, 1989, p. 198). I would date the `Third Wave' in Wollstonecraft studies from Jacobus's and Kaplan's important essays (Jacobus, 1989 [originally published 1979]; Kaplan, 1985). 7. This argument is made in various modes throughout Irigaray's work, but the reader is referred directly to Irigaray, 1985a,b, 1995. 8. This is a collation of various writings: see especially Irigaray, 1995. 9. See Butler, 1993, pp. 57ff. 10. For the post-colonial version of a similar argument see Fanon, 1967. 11. See Leclerc, 1974; Spacks, 1978; Oates, 1980; Bovenschen, 1985; Jardine, 1985; Weigel, 1985; Cixous and Clement, 1986; DuPlessis, 1986; Jacobus,

145

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Notes

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

1986; Jones, 1986; Ostriker, 1986; Kristeva, 1987; Still, 1990; and Bowlby, 1992. As in Pallas Athene ± Goddess of Wisdom ± born from the head of Zeus (daughter of the father). Critical Review, 70 (1790), p. 695; Gentleman's Magazine, 61 (1791), p. 151; Wardle, 1947; Hare, 1957; Roper, 1958; Cameron, 1961, pp. 152±7; Wardle, 1966b, pp. 155±6; Myers, 1979, p. 119; Poovey, 1984, p. xv; Alexander, 1989, p. 95; Kaplan, 1986, p. 157; Kelly, 1992, pp. 80±3; Richards, 2000. Wardle comments: `[T]he letters to Johnson and Imlay which William Godwin published in his Posthumous Works of the Author of ``A Vindication of the Rights of Woman'' contain frequent deletions and are so much more coherent and carefully punctuated than Wollstonecraft's usual letters (despite her distraught state of mind when she wrote many of them) as to suggest that Godwin edited them carefully. No originals, however, are available for comparison: although Godwin scrupulously preserved other letters and his diary, he evidently discarded any manuscript that he had published' (Wardle, 1966a, p. 19). See Todd, 1980 and Rajan, 1988. Le Doeuff, 1977: 2±11. `Fuseli had the broad classical, literary and artistic knowledge to inform her break from women's writing into polemical politics' (Kelly, 1992, p. 84). Quoted in Walker, 1998, p. 11. Whitford glosses Irigaray's double-syntax: `the idea that there is a logic or syntax, the logic of the unconscious, which is quite other than the Greek logos or rationality' (Whitford, 1991, p. 93).

Chapter 1 1. Godwin spells the name `Dixon' in his Memoirs, and as a result there has been some confusion regarding Wollstonecraft's mother's name. Eleanor Nicholes demonstrates that Dixon is a corruption of the family name Dickson, and offers sources for tracing the Dickson family's origins in Ireland (Cameron, 1961, p. 39). 2. Woolf, 1935, p. 157 and Godwin, 1987, p. 206. 3. Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life (London, 1787) (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 4, p. 4). Wollstonecraft quotes from Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). She refers to `Mr Locke's system', and might also have read Hester Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady (1773), and Hannah More's Essays on Various Subjects, Principally Designed for Young Ladies (1777). She quotes from Rousseau's Emile in the essay on `Moral Discipline' (p. 9). 4. For Wollstonecraft's commentary on this period, see Wardle, 1979, pp. 117±56. 5. Wollstonecraft is as critical of her father's failings as her mother's, but she offers little of the material grounding for failure in his case. See her novels, but also directly in a letter to her childhood friend Jane Arden (Wardle,

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

146 Notes

6.

7. 8. 9.

1979, pp. 65±8). She expresses her opinion of Lord King in a letter to Eliza: `His Lordship, I have had little conversation with -but his countenance does not promise much more than good humour, and a little fun not refined' (Wardle, 1979, p. 123). There were some rumours around the time that Mary King eloped with her half-uncle (Colonel Fitzgerald) in 1797 and the subsequent scandal surrounding Fitzgerald's shooting by Robert King, that Wollstonecraft had at least desired a liaison with her employer, who had a reputation for seducing a previous governess to the family. See Bishop Percy's letter to his wife (1798), British Museum additional ms. 32.335 f. pp. 15±17. Tomalin speculates that Robert King paid Wollstonecraft a sum of money on her dismissal. (Wardle, 1979, p. 155 and Tomalin, 1992, p. 83). In a discussion of Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Sedgwick raises the question of how far we can succeed in `making narratively palpable again, under the pressure of our own needs, the great and estranging force of the homoerotic longing magnetized . . . by that radiant and inattentive presence ± the female figure of the love that keeps forgetting its name' (Sedgwick, 1994, p. 129). See Todd, 1979; Hobby, 1988; Woodward, 1993; Faderman, 1981, 1994, p. 5; Sedgwick, 1994, p. 89; Kord, 1996. See for example Tomalin, 1992, pp. 40±54; Jump, 1994, pp. 10±16. Johnson makes this point regarding Wollstonecraft's representation of sexual desire in the Rights of Woman, where she notes that the `parental heterosexuality' Wollstonecraft imposes on women is the solution to the problem of an excess of female sexuality (Johnson, 1995, pp. 42±3; Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 144).

Chapter 2 1. Rights of Men is often dismissed as a juvenile stage in the development of Wollstonecraft's feminism. See Sapiro, 1992, pp. 186±7; Tomalin, 1992, p. 95; and Hill, 1995, pp. 177±92. 2. She confidently identifies anonymous works as `female production', and adapts Pope's comment that `most women have no character at all' to `apply it to their production. ± Novels' (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol 7, pp. 46, 191). 3. See Jacobus, 1989; Furniss, 1991; Kelly, 1992; Simpson, 1993, p. 105; Zaw, 1994; and Moore, 1999. 4. See especially Wollstonecraft's reference to the `horse-laugh' she imagines in response to her `wild wish . . . to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour' (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 65). The Gentleman's Magazine claimed in a review of Rights of Man that: `[w]e should be sorry to raise a horse-laugh against a fair-lady; but we were always taught to suppose that the rights of women were the proper theme of the female sex; and that, while the Romans governed the world, the women governed the Romans' (Gentleman's Magazine, 61 (1791), p. 151).

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Notes 147

5. See, especially: Poovey, 1984; Furniss, 1991; Kelly, 1992, p. 153; Sapiro, 1992; Johnson, 1995; Moore, 1999, p. 49. 6. See Wollstonecraft (1989, vol. 5) for a precise comparison of the two editions. 7. See the review printed in the Gentleman's Magazine, 61 (1791), p. 151, which questions whether the writer might be `a fictitious lady', and Critical Review, 70 (1790), pp. 694±5, which accuses Wollstonecraft of `assum[ing] the disguise of a man'. 8. The statement echoes Shaftesbury's claim that `[e]ven the fair sex, in whose favour we pretend to make this condescension [towards a scrupulous nicety], may with reason despise us for it, and laugh at us for aiming at their peculiar softness' (Shaftesbury, 1969, pp. 5±6). 9. Wollstonecraft's effeminising of Burke also suggests awareness of the consternation surrounding his defence of homosexual offenders. In 1774 he campaigned successfully for the pardoning of a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery who was facing a death penalty for sodomy. In 1780 his outrage at the public murder of two men convicted of sodomy caused a reaction against his homosexual sympathies in a number of newspapers, provoking a libel suit against the Public Advertiser (later withdrawn) (Ayling, 1988, pp. 53-4). There is a similar case for reading Wollstonecraft's digressions on madness as a personal attack playing on rumours about Burke's state of mind. Accusations of madness, circulating before 1789, surface in various responses to his writings on the French Revolution (Mitchell, 1989, pp. 26±7). 10. See: `Don Dismallo, after an absence of sixteen years embracing his beautiful vision', `H. W.' 18th November 1790: British Library 7679; `Don Dismallo running the Literary Gauntlet', `H. W.' 1st December 1790: British Library 7685; `The Knight of the Woeful Countenance going to Extirpate the National Assembly', `H. W.' 15th November 1790: British Library 7678. Also, Coleridge, 1971, pp. 65±70. 11. See Butler, 1984, p. 93. Hunt's intriguing book ± The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992) ± shows how in representations of the revolution `sexual degradation went hand in hand with political corruption' (p. 105). She notes that `pornographic engravings [of the Queen] are interspersed with political engravings of aristocratic conspiracy' (p. 107). 12. Zaw takes issue with Furniss's reading of Rights of Men, suggesting that he views `Wollstonecraft's first Vindication in terms of her second' and for this reason takes `Burke's genderisation of the sublime and the beautiful, and his treatment of Marie-Antoinette . . . as the focus of Wollstonecraft's response' (Zaw, 1994, pp. 124±5). 13. For a full discussion of the feminisation of abstract virtues and forces see Warner, 1985 (especially chapter 12). She notes that `[c]ongruity with the female character was hardly ever adduced' (p. 287). 14. Wollstonecraft seems to be familiar with Locke; in Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution she describes his `definition of liberty' as an origin for `the elements of the Declaration of the Rights of Man', probably

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

148 Notes

15.

16.

17.

18.

in reference to his Two Treatises of Government, in which he argued against the divine right of kings. (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 6, p. 16). Chapter 1 of Rights of Woman bears strong echoes of Book II, Chapter 1, of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 14). Sapiro notes that Wollstonecraft can be understood as `a late eighteenthcentury Locke in drag', and notes also that her `radicalism is grounded in Lockean terms', although her `works from the 1790s are at least as infused with a language of republicanism as of legal rights' (Sapiro, 1992, p. xx). See also Pateman, 1988. See Pateman, 1988, p. 22. McKeon has more recently argued that traditional patriarchalism `is replaced by the modern conception of gender difference' by this time, after `foundering . . . at the end of the seventeenth century [due to] political developments' (McKeon, 1995, pp. 295±322). But Pateman identifies `a confusion [which] arises because ``patriarchy'' has yet to be disentangled from patriarchal interpretations of its meaning', which allows `modern society' to be `pictured as post-patriarchal and patriarchy [to be] seen as a pre-modern and/or familial social form', and which results in patriarchy being `reduced merely to the displacement of early familial relationships onto the political realm' (Pateman, 1988, pp. 21±2; Bennett, 1989, 1993). Until 1790 women found guilty of `petty treason' could be burnt at the stake. Petty treason included any crime against a representative of the king, i.e. forging coins as well as murdering husbands. George III meliorated the punishment to hanging then burning on the grounds that `the natural modesty of the female sex forbids the exploring and public mangling of their bodies' (Blackstone, 1774, vol. 4, p. 204). The last woman to be burnt alive for husband-murdering was Katheryn Hayes, on 3 November 1726. The last woman to be hanged then burnt was Christian Murphy, 18 March 1789. I am grateful to Dr A. D. Harvey for drawing my attention to this information. Johnson comments on the tendency of `feminist historians' to `scold' Wollstonecraft for her `commitment to the emerging institution of bourgeois motherhood' in the second Vindication. She is referring in particular to Cole, 1991 and Landes, 1992 (Johnson, 1995, p. 47, p. 215 n. 4). Johnson avoids scolding Wollstonecraft by arguing that `the centrality of maternity in Wollstonecraft's political thought has been exaggerated', implying that Wollstonecraft is being reconstructed by Johnson in a way which makes her more suitable as a feminist predecessor, in spite of her argument that `she does not [produce] a positive culture of the feminine and of female solidarity' and `Rights of Woman is preoccupied with championing a kind of masculinity into which women can be invited rather than with enlarging or inventing a positive discourse of femininity' (pp. 47, 23, 24). Wollstonecraft either hadn't read, or didn't feel obliged to mention, earlier works on the subject of women's rights or oppression, but she was clearly (and openly) influenced by her contemporary, Catherine

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Notes 149

Macaulay. Jump suggests that Wollstonecraft might have read the 200 pages of Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies which were included without credit in Richard Steele, The Ladies Library (1714). See Jump, 1994; Todd, 1995. 19. She is quoting from Forster, 1788, pp. 425±6. 20. Schilder, 1978; Grosz, 1994, pp. 62±85 and Weiss, 1999.

Chapter 3 1. She wrote to Eliza Bishop in June of 1793 that she was `writing a great book'. (Wardle, 1979, p. 231) Fanny was probably conceived in August. 2. A letter to Imlay says: `Ever since you last saw me inclined to faint, I have felt some gentle twitches, which make me begin to think, that I am nourishing a creature who will soon be sensible of my care' (Wardle, 1979, p. 237). After several lines deleted by Godwin's editing, the letter also makes a possible reference to her work on the View: `So you may reckon on its being finished soon, though not before you come home, unless you are detained longer than I now allow myself to believe you will.Ð' 3. See Analytical Review, 8 (November 1790) review of Macaulay's Letters on Education (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 7, p. 309). 4. Austen's Catherine Morland voices a similar opinion: `I can read poetry and plays, and things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. . . . I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me' (Austen, 1957, p. 90). 5. In her Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation, written before the View (it is dated Paris, 15 February 1793) but not published at the time, Wollstonecraft discusses the violence of the September Massacres in Godwinian terms of brutality in `the people' resulting from the Old Regime's brutalising mode of government (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 6, p. 444). She describes this Letter as the result of recent `melancholy effusions' (p. 445). 6. Wollstonecraft made several references to a `view' as rational and/or masculine (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 5, p. 68, p. 134). 7. Virginia Sapiro comments on the impression of the body metaphors and images used throughout the Historical and Moral View: `At the end of the book we are left not with the mechanical metaphors often associated with Enlightenment constructions of social phenomena, but with a most graphic organic image of a body politic maturing, sickening, and healing' (Sapiro, 1992, p. 33). 8. Jones reads the View's treatment of Marie-Antoinette as part of a larger tendency to offer psychological explanations of characters' degeneracy; Antoinette is `the heroine of a silly novel' (Jones, 1992, pp. 182±5). 9. Mary, in Mary; A Fiction, experiences similar `disgust' for her husband, but does not overcome it to her advantage as Marie-Antoinette is described to do (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 1, p. 72).

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

150 Notes

10. It was in 1793 that the Revolution staged what Warner has described as its `most notorious fete', the Festival of Reason, during which the Goddess Reason was enthroned in Notre-Dame in an imitation of the May ceremony of crowning a statue of the Virgin. Warner notes that the `blasphemousness of this rite was underscored, not just by the nature of the usurping goddess, but by her presence in flesh and blood' (Warner, 1985, p. 286). 11. Wollstonecraft is answering Burke's comparison of the Revolution to Greek Tragedy in his Reflections: `[n]o theatric audience in Athens would bear what has been borne' (Burke, 1969, p. 176). 12. A reinforcement of the argument that Louis' decapitated body is repressed by association with the castrated maternal body might be made on the basis of the Rights of Woman's association between kings and women, as sharing a commonly corrupting artificially elevated status: `a sex, who, like kings, always see things through a false medium,' `A king is always a king ± and a woman always a woman: his authority and her sex, ever stand between them and rational converse' (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 5, pp. 48, 64).

Chapter 4 1. Wollstonecraft attempted suicide twice in 1795 after learning that Imlay was having an affair, and after the final breakdown of the relationship. Letters from Sweden was written during 1795 when Wollstonecraft was travelling to Scandinavia (with her infant daughter and her maid) on behalf of Imlay to recover a lost treasure ship. For an account of this fascinating story see Richard Holmes' introduction to his excellent edition of Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden and William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of `The Rights of Woman' (1987). For a detailed account of the evidence uncovered about the exact nature of this journey and the missÈ m, 1980. ing ship Holmes refers us to Nystro 2. W. Clark Durant mentioned the similarities between the character of Venables and the story of Eliza Wollstonecraft's marriage to Meredith Bishop in his introduction to an edition of Godwin's Memoirs (1927). Kelly and Kinsley record Durant's opinion in a note to their edition of the novel, but flatly deny the connection, and reassert that `Maria's romance with George Venables is based on M.W.'s love-affair with Gilbert Imlay' (Wollstonecraft, 1987, pp. 223, 227). Nixon remarks that Wollstonecraft's novel was `based on her sister Eliza's unhappy experiences of matrimony' (Nixon, 1971, p. 222). 3. See Wollstonecraft's letter to Godwin, dated June 6 1797, where she speaks of `the disturbance produced by Master William's joy, who took it in his head to frisk a little at being informed of your remembrance' (Wardle, 1979, p. 395). The lists of words in `Lessons' I and II are directed at a child's early acquisition of language, and so might have been noted during Fanny's first 2 years, but even internal evidence only suggests that

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Notes 151

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

Wollstonecraft had kept notes during that period, and does not undermine the later dating of the work. See also Trinh T Minh-ha's distinction between the `I' (the all-knowing subject) ± `I/i' (the plural subject) ± and `i' (the race- and gender-specific subject) (Trinh, 1989, p. 9). This point emerged during an MA in Criticism and Theory Option seminar discussion in the School of English, University of Exeter, 1998. For discussions of the implications of Wollstonecraft's influence on Romanticism, and the detail of textual resonances, see Moore, 1992, pp. 140±59; Swaab, 1996, pp. 13±32. See: Myers, 1979, p. 166; Wardle, 1979, p. 44; Godwin, 1987, p. 249; St Clair, 1989, p. 161; Barker-Benfield, 1992, p. 363; Sapiro, 1992, p. 34; Tomalin, 1992, p. 40. See also Labbe, `The Romance of Motherhood: Writing the Daughter, Reading the Mother', unpublished manuscript at the time of writing this; quoted from with permission and thanks. Marguerite is mentioned twice before the child, and both times is represented as a timid, feminine foil to the narrator's boldness and observations: she is described as `poor Marguerite, whose timidity always acts as a feeler before her adventuring spirit', and as unnecessarily frightened of rape (`the other evil which instantly, as the sailors would have said, runs foul of a woman's imagination'), when they put themselves `into the power of a strange man' in a bid to get ashore (pp. 244, 245, see also p. 249). Alexander, 1989, p. 9; Wordsworth, Prelude, Book II, lines 264±5; Wardle, 1979, p. 256; original emphasis. Editorial Introduction to Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 1, pp. 23±4. See `Letters to Imlay' (Wollstonecraft, 1989, vol. 6, pp. 429±38).

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

152 Notes

Adorno, Theodor (1985), Minima Moralia (London: Verso). Alcoff, Linda (1988), `Cultural Feminism Versus Post-structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 13 (3), pp. 405±36. Alexander, Meena (1989), Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press ± now Palgrave). Alliston, April (1996), Virtue's Faults: Correspondences in Eighteenth-century British and French Women's Fiction (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press). Austen, Jane (1957), Northanger Abbey [wr. 1798±1803, pub. 1818] (London: Macmillan Press ± now Palgrave). Ayling, Stanley (1988), Edmund Burke: His Life and Opinions (London: Murray). Barker-Benfield, G. J. (1992) The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-century Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press). Barker-Benfield, G. J. (1989) `Mary Wollstonecraft: Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthwoman', Journal of the History of Ideas, 50, pp. 95±115. Barrett, MicheÁle and Anne Phillips (eds) (1992), Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates (Cambridge: Polity Press). Battersby, Christine (1989), Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: Women's Press). È nderBattersby, Christine (1994), `Unblocking the Oedipal: Karoline Von Gu ode and the Female Sublime', Political Gender: Texts and Contexts (New York and London: Harvester Wheastsheaf ), pp. 129±43. Battersby, Christine (1997), The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press). Bennett, Judith M. (1993), `Women's History: a Study in Continuity and Change', Women's History Review, 2, 2, pp. 173±84. Bennett, Judith M. (1989), `Feminism and History', Gender and History, 1, pp. 251±72. Bennett, Paula (1986), My Life A Loaded Gun: Female Creativity and Feminist Poetics (Boston: Beacon Press). Bergstrom, Janet (1977), `Jeanne Dielmann, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Ackerman', Camera Obscura, 2. Blackstone, William (1774), Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols (London). Blair, Hugh (1783), Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (London). Bock, Gisela and James Sue (1992), Beyond Equality and Difference: Feminist Politics and Female Subjectivity (London: Routledge). 153

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Bibliography

Bovenschen, Sylvia (1985), `Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?', tr. by Beth Weckmuller, in Feminist Aesthetics, ed. by Gisella Ecker (London: Women's Press), pp. 23±50. Bowlby, Rachel (1992), Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge). Braidotti, Rosi (1989), `The Politics of Ontological Difference', in T. Brennan (ed.), Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, (London: Routledge), pp. 89±105. Braidotti, Rosi (1992), `On the Female Feminist Subject, or: From ``She-Self'' to ``She-Other'', in Beyond Equality and Difference, ed, G. Bock and S. James, pp. 177±92. Braidotti, Rosi (1994), Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press). Bredbeck, Gregory W. (1995), `The New Queer Narrative: Intervention and Critique', Textual Practice 9 (3); 477±502. Brennan, Teresa (ed.) (1989), Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge). Bristow, Joseph (1997), Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge). Brody Kramnick, Miriam (ed.) (1975), Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Harmondsworth, Penguin). Brody, Miriam (1996), `The Vindication of the Writes of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Rhetoric', in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, pp. 105±23. Burke, Carolyn, Schor, Naomi and Whitford, Margaret (eds) (1994), Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought (New York: Columbia University Press). Burke, Edmund (1969), Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event. In a Letter To Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris. By the Right Honourable Edmund Burke [1790], ed. by Conor Cruise O'Brien (Harmondsworth, Ill: Penguin). Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge). Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London and New York: Routledge). Butler, Marilyn (ed.) (1984), Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Caine, Barbara (1997), English Feminism 1780±1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Cameron, Deborah (1992), Feminism and Linguistic Theory, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press ± now Palgrave). Cameron, Kenneth Neill (ed.) (1961), Shelley and his Circle 1773±1822, contributing editor Eleanor Nicholes, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press and Oxford: Oxford University Press). Castle, Terry (1982), `Matters Not Fit to Be Mentioned: Fielding's The Female Husband', ELH, 49, pp. 602±22.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

154 Bibliography

Cavarero, Adriana (1992), `Equality and Sexual Difference: Amnesia in Political Thought', in G. Bock and S. James (eds), Beyond Equality and Difference, pp. 32±45. Cixous, HeÂleÁne and Catherine Clement (1986), The Newly Born Woman (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press). Cole, Lucinda (1991), `(Anti)Feminist Sympathies: The Politics of Relationship in Smith, Wollstonecraft, and More', ELH, 58, pp. 107±40. Coleridge, S. T. (1971), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1, Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, eds L. Patton and P. Mann (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press). Copley, Stephen and Whale John, (1992), Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts (London and New York: Routledge). Critical Review, 70 (1790), p. 165. de Lauretis, Teresa (1993), `Upping the Anti (Sic) in Feminist Theory' (1990), in S. During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 74±89. de Lauretis, Teresa (1994), The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). de Lauretis, Teresa (1997), `Aesthetic and Feminist Theory: Rethinking Women's Cinema', in S. Kemp and J. Squires (eds), Feminisms, pp. 27±36. Diderot, D. (1995), Diderot on Art -1: The Salon of 1765 and Notes on Painting, tr.& ed. J. Goodman (New Haven, and London: Yale University Press). DuPlessis, Rachel Blau (1986), Conn., `For The Etruscans', in Elaine Showalter (ed.), New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, (London: Virago), pp. 271±91. Durant, Clark (ed.) (1927), William Godwin, Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Constable). Eliot, George (1963), `Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft', Leader, 6 (October 1855), pp. 988±9; in T. Pinney (ed.), Essays of George Eliot (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), pp. 199±206. Everest, Kelvin (ed.) (1991), Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press). Everest, Kelvin and Yarrington, Alison, (eds) (1993), Reflections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism (London and New York: Routledge). Faderman, Lilian (1981), Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow). Faderman, Lillian (ed.) (1994), Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin). Fanon, Frantz (1967), Black Skin White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press). Fawcett, Millicent Garrett (1907), `A Pioneer of the Movement', Brougham Villiers [Frederick John Shaw] (ed.), The Case for Women's Suffrage, (London: T. Fisher Unwin).

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Bibliography 155

Fawcett, Millicent Garrett (1912), Women's Suffrage: A Short History of a Great Movement (London). Fay, Elizabeth A. (1998), A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell). Felman, Soshana (1989), `Women and Madness: the Critical Phallacy', in C. Belsey and J. Moore (eds), The Feminist Reader, pp. 133±53. Filmer, Robert (1949), Patriarcha and Other Political Works, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Blackwell). Flexner, Eleanor (1972), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography (New York: Coward, McGann and Geoghegan). Fordyce, James (1770), Sermons to Young Women, 5th edn (London). Forster, John Reinhold (1788), Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World (London). Foucault, Michel (1981), The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, tr. R. Hurley (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin). Franklin, Sarah (1997), `Fetal Fascinations: New Dimensions to the MedicalScientific Constuction of Fetal Personhood', in S. Kemp and J. Squires (eds), Feminisms, pp. 487±91. Freud, Sigmund (1991), On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, Penguin Freud Library vol. 7, tr. James Strachey, ed.Angela Richards (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin). Furbank, P. N. and Owens W. R. (1988), The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press). Furniss, Tom (1991), `Gender in Revolution: Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft', in K. Everest (ed.), Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution, pp. 65±100. Furniss, Tom (1993), `Nasty Tricks and Tropes: Sexuality and Language in Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman', Studies in Romanticism, 32 (2) (Summer), pp. 177±209. Gatens, Moira (1992), `Power, Bodies and Difference', in M. Barrett and A. Phillips (eds), Destabilizing Theory, pp. 120±37. Gatens, Moira (1996), Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality (London and New York: Routledge). Gentleman's Magazine, 61 (1791), p. 151. George, Margaret (1970), One Woman's `Situation': A Study of Mary Wollstonecraft (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press). Geyer-Ryan, Helga (1994), Fables of Desire: Studies in the Ethics of Art and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell). Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar Susan, (1987), No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol 1, The War of the Words (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press). Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar Susan, (1996), Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, 2nd edn, (New York and London: Norton). Gilroy, A. (1999) `Espousing the Cause of Oppressed Women': Cultural Captivities in Gilbert Imlay's The Emigrants', in W. M. Verhoeven and B. D. Kautz (eds), Revolutions and Watersheds (Amsterdam: Rodop), pp. 191±205.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

156 Bibliography

Godwin, William (1927), Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by W. Clark Durant (London and New York: Constable). Godwin, William (1987), Memoirs of the Author of `A Vindication of the Rights of Woman', ed. R. Holmes (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin). Graham, Catherine Macaulay (1790), Letters on Education with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects, 3 parts (London). Greer, Germaine, Medoff, Jeslyn, Sansone Melinda, and Hastings, Susan (eds) (1988), Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse (London: Virago). Grosz, Elizabeth (1994), Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). Grosz, Elizabeth (1995), Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York and London: Routledge). Gubar, Susan (1995), `Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of ``It Takes One to Know One'' ', in D. Elam and R. Wiegman (eds), Feminism Beside Itself, (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 133±54. Guest, Harriet (1995), `The Dream of a Common Language: Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft', Textual Practice, 9 (2), pp. 303±23. Gunther-Canada, Wendy (1996), `Mary Wollstonecraft's ``wild wish'': Confounding Sex in the Discourse on Political Rights', in M. J. Falco (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, pp. 61±83. Hare, Robert (1957), `The Base Indian: A Vindication of Mary Wollstonecraft', MA thesis, Delaware. Hill, Bridget (1995), `The Links Between Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay: New Evidence', Women's History Review, 4, 2, pp. 177±92. Hill, Christopher (1958), Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Secker and Warburg). Hill, Georgiana (1986), Women in English Life from Medieval to Modern Times (London: Richard Bentley). Hobby, Elaine (1988), Virtue of Necessity: English Women's Writing, 1649±1688 (London: Virago). Hoeveler, Diane Long (1999), `Reading the Wound: Wollstonecraft's Wrongs of Woman, or Maria and Trauma Theory', Studies in the Novel, 31 (4) (Winter), pp. 387±408. Hirsch, Marianne and Evelyn Fox Keller (eds) (1990), Conflicts in Feminism (London and New York: Routledge). Hunt, Lynne (1992), The Family Romance of the French Revolution (London: Routledge). Imlay, Gilbert (1972), A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (London). Ingram, Alan (ed.) (1998), Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). Irigaray, Luce (1985a), This Sex Which Is Not One, tr. C. Porter (Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press). Irigaray, Luce (1985b), Speculum of the Other Woman, tr. C. Porter (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press).

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Bibliography 157

Irigaray, Luce (1989), I Love To You: A Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History, tr. Alison Martin (London and New York: Routledge). Irigaray, Luce (1991), [Amante Marine] Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, tr. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press). Irigaray, Luce (1993), je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, tr. Alison Martin (New York and London: Routledge). Irigaray, Luce (1995), The Irigaray Reader, ed. by Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell). Jacobus, Mary (1986), Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (London: Methuen). Jacobus, Mary (1989), `The Difference of View', in C. Belsey and J. Moore (eds), The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press ± now Palgrave), pp. 49±62. Jacobus, Mary (1995), First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge). Janes, Regina (1978), `On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman', Journal of the History of Ideas, 39, pp. 293±302. Jardine, Alice (1985), Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press). Johnson, Claudia (1995), Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press). Jones, Ann Rosalind (1986), `Writing the Body', in E. Showalter (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory (London: Virago Press), pp. 361±77. Jones, Vivien (1992), `Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in Wollstonecraft and Williams', in S. Copley and J. Whale (eds), Beyond Romanticism, pp. 178±99. Jones, Vivien (1994), ` ``The Tyranny of the Passions'': Feminism and Heterosexuality in the Fiction of Wollstonecraft and Hays', in Sally Ledger, Josephine McDonagh, and Jane Spencer (eds), Political Gender: Texts and Contexts (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf ), pp. 173±88. Jones, Vivien (1995), `Scandalous Femininity: Prostitution and EighteenthCentury Narrative', in D. Castiglione and L. Sharpe (eds), Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter: Exeter University Press), pp. 54±70. Jones, Vivien (1997), `The Death of Mary Wollstonecraft', British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 20: 187±205. Jouve, Nicole Ward (1998), Female Genesis: Creativity, Self and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press). Jump, Harriet Devine (1991), ` ``The Cool Eye of Observation'': Mary Wollstonecraft and the French Revolution', in K. Everest (ed.), Revolution in Writing, pp. 101±19. Jump, Harriet Devine (1994), Mary Wollstonecraft: Writer (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf ).

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

158 Bibliography

Kant, Immanuel (1959), Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals [1785], tr. by Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill). Kant, Immanuel (1991), Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, tr. H. B. Nesbitt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Kaplan, Cora (1985), `Pandora's Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism', in G. Greene and C. Kahn (eds), Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (London and New York: Methuen), pp. 146±76. Kaplan, Cora (1986), Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London: Verso). Keane, Angela (2000), `Mary Wollstonecraft's Imperious Sympathies: Population, Maternity and Romantic Individualism', in A. Keane and A. Horner (eds), Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 29±42. Kelly, Gary (1992), Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press ± now Palgrave). Kelly, Gary (1979), `Mary Wollstonecraft as Vir Bonus', English Studies in Canada, 5: 275±81. Kemp, Sandra and Judith Squires (eds) (1997), Feminisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Klein, Melanie (1991), Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921±1945 (London: Virago). Kord, Suzanne T. (1996), `Eternal Love or Sentimental Discourse? Gender Dissonance and Women's Passionate ``Friendships'' ', in A. A. Kuznier (ed.), Outing Goethe and His Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), pp. 228±49. Kristeva, Julia (1987), Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, tr. by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Kristeva, Julia (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (New York and Guildford: Columbia University Press). Kristeva, Julia (1989), `Women's Time', in C. Belsey and J. Moore (eds), The Feminist Reader, pp. 197±217. Labbe, Jacqueline M. (1998), Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press ± now Palgrave). Labbe, Jacqueline, `The Romance of Motherhood: Writing the Daughter, Reading the Mother', unpublished manuscript at the time of writing, quoted from with permission of the author. Landes, Joan (1992), Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Laqueur, Thomas (1990), Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (London: Harvard University Press). Le Doeuff, Michelle (1977), `Women and Philosophy', tr. D. Pope, Radical Philosophy 17 (Summer), pp. 2±11. Leclerc, Annie (1974), Parole de Femme (Paris: Livre de Poche). Lloyd, Genevieve (1984), The Man of Reason: Male and Female in Western Philosophy (London: Methuen).

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Bibliography 159

Locke, John (1975), Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1690] (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Locke, John (1989), Two Treatises of Government [1690], ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lorch, Jennifer (1990), Mary Wollstonecraft: The Making of a Radical Feminist (New York, Oxford and Munich: Berg Press). Lorraine, Tamsin (1999), Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press). Lundberg, Ferdinand and Marynia F. Farnham (1947), Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Harper and Brothers). Mavor, Elizabeth (1971), The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship (London: Michael Joseph). McAleer, Edward (1958), The Sensitive Plant: A Life of Lady Mount Cashell (University of North Carolina Press). Mckeon, Michael (1995), `Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660±1760', Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28, 3, pp. 295±322. Mellor, Anne (1993), Romanticism and Gender (London: Routledge). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962), Phenomenology of Perception [1945], tr. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Miller, D. A. (1988), The Novel and The Police (Berkeley: University of California Press). Mitchell, L. G. (ed.) (1989), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke: Volume VIII: The French Revolution, textual editing by William B. Todd (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Moers, Ellen (1977), Literary Women (New York: Anchor Books). Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (1992), `Feminist Encounters', in M. Barrett and A. Phillips (eds), Destabilizing Theory, pp. 74±92. Moi, Toril (1985), Sexual/Textual Politics (London and New York: Methuen). Moore, Jane (1989), `Promises, Promises: The Fictional Philosophy in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman', in C. Belsey and J. Moore (eds), The Feminist Reader, pp. 155±74. Moore, Jane (1992), `Plagiarism with a Difference: Subjectivity in ``Kubla Khan'' and Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark', in S. Copley and J. Whale (eds), Beyond Romanticism, pp. 140±59. Moore, Jane (1999), Mary Wollstonecraft (Plymouth: Northcote House). Moskal, Jeanne (1991), `The Picturesque and the Affectionate in Wollstonecraft's Letters from Norway', Modern Language Quarterly, 52 (3) (September), pp. 263±94. Mulvey Roberts, Marie and Tamae, Mizuta (eds) (1994), Perspectives on the History of British Feminism, vol 1, The Radicals: Revolutionary Women (London and Tokyo: Routledge/Thoemmes Press). Myers, Mitzi (1979), `Letters Written . . . in Sweden: Towards Romantic Autobiography', Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 8, pp. 165±85. Myers, Mitzi (1980), `Unfinished Business: Wollstonecraft's Maria', Wordsworth Circle, 11 (2), pp. 107±14.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

160 Bibliography

Myers, Mitzi (1989), `Sensibility and the ``Walk of Reason'': Mary Wollstonecraft's Literary Reviews as Cultural Critique', in S, McMillan Conger (ed.), Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics: Essays in Honor of Jean H.Hagstrum (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickenson University Press; London: Associated University Presses), pp. 120±44. Nixon, Edna (1971), Mary Wollstonecraft: Her Life and Times (London: Dent). È m, Per (1980), Mary Wollstonecraft's Scandinavian Journey, Acts of the Nystro Royal Society of arts and Sciences of Gotherburg, Humaniora No. 17 (British Library General catalogue Ac. 1036 (5a). Oates, Joyce Carole (1980), `Is There a Female Voice?: Joyce Carol Oates Replies', in J. Todd (ed.), Women and Literature, vol 1, Gender and Literary Voice (New York: Homes and Meier). Ostriker, Alicia (1986), `The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking', in E. Showalter (ed.), New Feminist Criticism, pp. 314±38. Paine, Thomas (1973), Rights of Man, [1790] (New York: Anchor Books). Pateman, Carole (1988), The Sexual Contract (Oxford: Polity Press). Pateman, Carole (1989), The Disorder of Women (Oxford: Polity Press). Pateman, Carole (1992), `Equality, Difference, Subordination: The Politics of Motherhood and Women's Citizenship', in G. Bock and S. James (eds), Beyond Equality and Difference, pp. 17±31. Paulson, Ronald (1983), Representations of Revolution (1789±1820) (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press). Pennell, Elizabeth Robbins (1890), `A Century of Women's Rights', The Fortnightly Review, NS 48, pp. 408±17. Pennell, Elizabeth Robbins (1885), `The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft', Athaneum Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Music, and the Drama ( July± December), pp. 80±1, and 143±4. Pennell, Elizabeth Robbins (1885), Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: W. H.Allen). Perry, Gill (1994), `Women in Disguise: Likeness, the Grand Style and the Conventions of Feminine Portraiture in the Work of Sir Joshua Reynolds', in G. Perry and M. Rossington (eds), Femininity and Masculinity in EighteenthCentury Art and Culture (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press), pp.18±40. Plant, Sadie (1997), `Beyond the Screens: Film, Cyberpunk and Cyberfeminism', in S. Kemp and J. Squires (eds), Feminisms, pp. 503±8. Poovey, Mary (1984), The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press). Rajan, Tilottama (1988), `Wollstonecraft and Godwin: Reading the Secrets of the Political Novel', Studies in Romanticism, 27 (2): 221±51. Rendall, Jane (1985), The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States (London: Macmillan). Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1959), Discourses on Art [1769±90] (California: Huntingdon Library).

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Bibliography 161

Rich, Adrienne (1977), Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (London: Bantam Books). Rich, Adrienne (1980), On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966±1978 (London: Virago). Rich, Adrienne (1997), `Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence', in S. Kemp and J. Squires (eds), Feminisms, pp. 320±5. Richards, Cynthia (2000), `Romancing the Sublime: or Why Mary Wollstonecraft fell in Love With That Cad Gilbert Imlay', paper delivered to the Aphra Behn Society Conference, Denver. Roper, Derek (1978), Reviewing Before the `Edinburgh': 1788±1802 (London: Methuen and Newark: University of Delaware Press). Roper, Derek (1958), `Mary Wollstonecraft's Reviews', Notes and Queries ( January), pp. 37±8. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1992), Emile [1762], tr. Barbara Foxley, ed. P. D. Jimack (London: Dent). Roworth, Wendy Wassyng (1994), `Anatomy is Destiny: Regarding the Body in the Art of Angelica Kauffman', in G. Perry and M. Rossington (eds), Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press), pp. 41±62. Ruddick, Sara (1984), `Maternal Thinking' in J. Trebilcot (ed.), Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory (Totowa: Rowan and Allanheld), pp. 213±30. Ruddick, Sarah and Pamela Daniels (eds) (1977), Working It Out (New York: Pantheon). Salvaggio, Ruth (1988), Enlightened Absence: Neoclassical Configurations of the Feminine (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press). Sapiro, Virginia (1992), A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press). Schilder, Paul (1978), The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constructive Energies of the Psyche (New York: International Universities Press). Schildrick, Margrit (1997), Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and Bioethics (London and New York: Routledge). Schor, Naomi (1987), Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York and London: Routledge). Schor, Naomi (ed.) (1994), The Essential Difference (Bloomington, Ill.: Indiana University Press). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1994), Tendencies (London and New York: Routledge). Shaftesbury, Anthony, Earl of (1969), Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times [1711] (New York: Greenwood Press). Showalter, Elaine (1971), Women's Liberation and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Showalter, Elaine (1977), A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from BronteÈ to Lessing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Simpson, David (1993), Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press). Sinfield, Alan (1994), Cultural Politics ± Queer Reading (London: Routledge).

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

162 Bibliography

Spacks, Patricia Meyer (1978), The Female Imagination (New York: Avon Books). Spencer, Jane (1987), The Rise of the Woman Novelist: from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Blackwell). Spencer, Jane (1992), ` ``Of Use to Her Daughter'': Maternal Authority and Early Women Novelists', in Dale Spender (ed.), Living by the Pen: Early British Women Writers, (New York and London: Teachers College Press), pp. 201±11. Spender, Dale (1986), Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen (London and New York: Pandora). St Clair, William (1989), The Godwins and the Shelleys (London: Faber and Faber). Still, Judith (1990), `A Feminine Economy: Some Preliminary Thoughts', in Helen Wilcox et al. (eds), The Body and the Text: HeÂleÁne Cixous, Reading and Teaching (Hert: Harvester Wheatsheaf ). Stone, Lawrence (1990), The Road to Divorce (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Sunstein, Emily W. (1975), A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harper and Row). Swaab, Peter (1996), `Romantic Self-Representation: The Example of Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters in Sweden', in Vincent Newey and Philip Shaw (eds), Mortal Pages, Literary Lives, (London: Scolar Press), pp. 13±32. Talleyrand-PeÂrigord, Charles Maurice de, Bishop of Autun (1791), Rapport sur L'Instruction Publique, fait au nom du Comite de Constitution (Paris). Taylor, Barbara (forthcoming), Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Todd, Janet (1973), `The Language of Sex in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman', Mary Wollstonecraft Newsletter, 1 (2) April, pp. 10±17. Todd, Janet (1975), `The Polwhelan Tradition and Richard Cobb', Studies in Burke and His Time, 16 (3) Spring, pp. 271±7. Todd, Janet (1979), Women's Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press). Todd, Janet (1980), `The Female Text ± Edited', Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 193, Transactions of the Fifth International Congress on the Enlightenment, vol. 4, pp. 1949±55. Todd, Janet (1986), Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York: Methuen). Todd, Janet (1988), Feminist Literary History: A Defence (Cambridge: Polity Press). Todd, Janet (1989), The Sign of Angellica: Women and Fiction, 1688±1800 (London: Virago). Todd, Janet (1993), Gender, Art and Death (Oxford: Polity Press). Todd, Janet (1994), Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings (Oxford and Melbourne: Oxford University Press). Todd, Janet (1995), `Aphra Behn, Whom Mary Wollstonecraft did not Read', Wordsworth Circle, 26 (3), pp. 152±8. Todd, Janet (2000), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). Tomalin, Claire (1992), The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft rev. edn (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin).

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Bibliography 163

Trinh, T Min-ha (1989), Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington, Ill. Indiana University Press). Trumbach, Randolph (1994), `London's Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture', in Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Third Sex, Third gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, (New York: Zone Books), pp. 111±36. Violi, Patrizia (1992), `Gender, Subjectivity, Language', in G. Bock and S. James (eds), Beyond Equality and Difference, pp. 164±76. Walker, Michelle Boulous (1998), Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence (London and New York: Routledge). Wardle, Ralph (1947), `Mary Wollstonecraft: Analytical Reviewer', PMLA, 62, pp. 1,000±1,009. Wardle, Ralph (ed.) (1966a), Godwin and Mary: The Collected Letters of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press). Wardle, Ralph (1966b), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press). Wardle, Ralph (ed.) (1979), Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press). Warner, Marina (1985), Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). Weigel, Sigrid (1985), `Double Focus: On the History of Women's Writing', in G. Ecker (ed.), Feminist Aesthetics (London: Women's Press), pp. 59±80. Weiskal, Thomas (1976), The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press). Twitchell, James (1983), Romantic Horizons: Aspects of the Sublime in English Poetry and Painting, 1770±1850 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press). Weiss, Gail (1999), Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (London and New York: Routledge). Whale, John (1992), `Preparations for Happiness: Wollstonecraft and Imagination', Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis (eds), in Reviewing Romanticism, (London: Macmillan), pp. 170±89. Whitford, Margaret (1994), `Irigaray, Utopia, and the Death Drive', in C. Burke et al. (eds), Engaging With Irigaray, pp. 379±400. Wollstonecraft, Mary (1989), The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 vols. eds Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering). Whitford, Margaret (1991), Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London and New York: Routledge). Wollstonecraft, Mary (1995), Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. A. Tauchert (London: Dent and Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle). Woodward, Carolyn (1993), ` ``My Heart is So Wrapt'': Lesbian Disruptions in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction', Signs, 18 (4) (Summer), pp. 838±65. Woodward, Carolyn (1994), `Naming Names in Mid-eighteenth-century Feminist Theory', Women's Writing, 1 (3) pp. 291±316. Woolf, Virigina (1935), The Common Reader Second Series London: Hogarth Press.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

164 Bibliography

Woolf, Virginia (1982), A Room of One's Own (London and New York: Granada Publishing). Yaeger, Patricia (1989), `Toward a Female Sublime', in Linda Kauffman (ed.), Gender Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 191±212. Zaw, Susan Khin (1994), ` ``Apealing to the Head and Heart'': Wollstonecraft and Burke on Taste, Morals and Human Nature', in G. Perry and M. Rossington (eds), Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture, pp. 123±41.

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Bibliography 165

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

This page intentionally left blank

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 145 Durant, W. Clark, 145, 151

Alcoff, Linda, 145 Alexander, Meena, 58, 87, 109, 122, 146, 152 Alliston, April, 99 Astell, Mary, 150 Austen, Jane, 147, 150 Ayling, Stanley, 148

Eliot, George, 5, 145

Barker-Benfield, G. J., 74, 100, 152 Battersby, Christine, 9, 95, 126, 137 Bennett, Judith, 149 Bergstrom, Janet, 108 Blair, Hugh, 59 Blake, William, 29 Blackstone, William, 149 Bovenschen, Sylvia, 100, 145 Bowlby, Rachel, 146 Braidotti, Rosi, 97, 111, 116, 136, 145 Bredbeck, Gregory, 132 Brody, Miriam Kramnick, 59, 60 Burke, Edmund, 14, 40, 55±8, 61, 142, 148, 151 Butler, Judith, 5, 7, 12, 13, 19, 41, 43, 51, 92, 116, 117, 132±9, 145 Butler, Marilyn, 148 Caine, Barbara, 2, 3, 21 Cameron, Deborah, 10 Cameron, Kenneth Neil, 145, 146 Cavarero, Adrianna, 4, 145 Chapone, Hester, 146 Cixous, HeÂleÁne, 145 Clement, Catherine, 145 Cole, Lucinda, 149 Coleridge, Samuel, 118 Cordy, John, 145 Critical Review, 148 De Lauretis, Teresa, 13, 79, 100, 107 Diderot, Denis, 39

Faderman, Lillian, 147 Fanon, Frantz, 145 Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, 5, 145 Fay, Elizabeth, 127 Felman, Soshana, 106 Filmer, Robert, 65±8 Flexner. Eleanor, 145 Fordyce, James, 69, 73±4 Forster, John Reinhold, 150 Foucault, Michel, 89 Franklin, Sarah, 83, 136±7 Freud, Sigmund, 11, 31, 41, 92 Furniss, Tom, 40, 63, 147, 148 Gatens, Moira, 53, 145 Gentleman's Magazine, 147, 148 George, Margaret, 101, 145 Geyer-Ryan, Helga, 92 Godwin, William, 4, 9, 10, 24, 28, 31±2, 98, 101, 108, 118, 123, 140, 146, 149, 151, 152 Graham, Catherine Macaulay, 84, 150 Greer, Germaine, 114 Gregory, John, 69, 73±4, 76 Grosz, Elizabeth, 1, 3, 7, 12±13, 78±9, 132, 150 Gubar, Susan, 77 Gunther-Canada, Wendy, 59 Hare, Robert, 146 Hill, Bridget, 147 Hill, Georgiana, 145 Hobby, Elaine, 147 Holmes, Richard, 98, 123, 151

167

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Index

168 Index

Ingram, Alan, 106 Irigaray, Luce, 1±2, 5±7, 9, 79, 97±9, 101±2, 105, 111, 116, 127±8, 131±9, 141, 145 Jacobus, Mary, 3, 16, 57±8, 59, 65, 68, 106, 111±12, 116, 120, 131, 139, 141, 145, 147 Jardine, Alice, 145 Jefferson, Paul, 145 Johnson, Claudia, 25, 32, 68, 76, 95, 117, 147, 148, 149 Jones, Vivien, 62, 88±9, 139, 146, 150 Jump, Harriet Devine, 147, 150 Kaplan, Cora, 57, 72, 145, 146 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 84 Keane, Angela, 12, 59 Kegan, Charles, 145 Kelly, Gary, 24±5, 51±2, 56, 60, 68, 98, 111, 146, 147, 148, 151 Klein, Melanie, 11 Kord, Suzanne T, 147 Kristeva, Julia, 51, 116±17, 145, 146 Labbe, Jaqueline, 119±21, 126±9, 152 Lacan, Jacques, 11, 117 Landes, Joan, 149 Laqueur, Thomas, 71 Leclerc, Annie, 145 Le Doeuff, Michelle, 9, 146 Locke, John, 15, 26, 65±8, 146, 148±9 Lorraine, Tamsin 3, 9, 22, 79, 134 Macaulay, Catherine, see Graham, Catherine Macaulay McKeon, Michael, 149 Miller, D. A., 49±50 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 152 Mitchell, L. G., 148 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 145 Moore, Jane, 29, 30, 45, 58, 72, 85, 88, 127, 147, 148, 152

More, Hannah, 146 Moskal, Jeanne, 120 Myers, Mitzi, 98, 146, 152 Nixon, Edna, 145, 151 È m, Per, 151 Nystro Oates, Joyce Carole, 145 Ostriker, Alicia, 146 Paine, Thomas, 59 Pateman, Carole, 3±4, 59, 66±7, 145, 149 Pennell, Elizabeth Robbins, 145 Perry, Gill, 39 Plant, Sadie, 99 Poovey, Mary, 57, 61, 70, 72, 146, 148 Pope, Alexander, 147 Quintilian, 60 Rajan, Tillotama, 113, 146 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 39 Rich, Adrienne, 33, 87, 108, 141 Richards, Cynthia, 146 Richardson, Samuel, 37 Roper, Derek, 146 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 14, 27, 56±8, 68±9, 70, 72±3, 79, 83, 88, 135, 146 Roworth, Wendy Wassyng, 39 Ruddick, Sarah, 87 Sapiro, Virginia, 70, 86, 88, 147, 148, 150, 152 Schilder, Paul, 78, 150 Schildrick, Margrit, 9, 137 Schor, Naomi, 39, 145 Sedgwick, Eve K., 147 Shaftesbury, Anthony, Earl of, 39, 148 Shelley, Mary, 118, 140 Shelley, Percy, 4, 118, 140 Showalter, Elaine, 145 Silvermann, Kaja, 49±50

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Hunt, Lynn, 89±90, 148

Simpson, David, 59, 147 Sinfield, Alan, 50 Smith, Charlotte, 37, 121 Southey, James, 118 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 145 Spencer, Jane, 103, 108, 110, 113 Spender, Dale, 114 Steele, Richard, 150 Still, Judith, 146 St Claire, William, 152 Stone, Lawrence, 61 Sunstein, Emily, 145 Swaab, Peter, 152 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 52 Todd, Janet, 4, 23±4, 27, 36±7, 51, 72, 85, 101, 145, 146, 147, 150 Tomalin, Claire, 23, 30, 145, 147, 152 Trumbach, Randolph, 50 Violi, Patrizia, 101±2, 110, 113, 116±17, 132 Walker, Michelle Boulous, 11, 19±20, 22, 26, 78±9, 81, 92, 95, 97±8, 113, 118, 134±7, 146 Wardle, Ralph, 9, 60, 83, 86, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152 Warner, Marina, 148, 151 Weiss, Gail, 137, 150

Whitford, Margaret, 2, 8, 133±4, 138, 145, 146 Williams, Helen Maria, 86 Wollstonecraft, Mary (works) Analytical Review, 9, 55, 150 Female Reader, 69 Historical and Moral View, 5, 12, 15, 83±6, 116, 148, 150 Letters from Sweden, 14, 95±6, 118±29, 135, 139, 140, 151 Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation, 150 Lessons, 124, 108±10, 151 Mary, 14, 33±52, 75, 85, 150 Original Stories, 14, 29±33 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 14, 26±9, 44, 146, 149 Vindication of the Rights of Men, 14, 52, 55±68, 135, 147 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1±5, 14, 16, 52, 56±7, 61, 68±80, 89, 101, 151 Wrongs of Woman, 15, 101±18 Woodward, Carolyn, 147 Woolf, Virginia, 5, 24, 145, 146 Wordsworth, William, 118, 152 Yaeger, Patricia, 126±9 Zaw, Susan Khin, 147, 148

10.1057/9780230287358 - Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine, Ashley Tauchert

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Index 169