Vindication (45 page)

After Maria hears of her daughter's death, she relates her story to her keeper, Jemima, and a fellow-inmate, Darnford. It's a story of marital persecution. English law grants her so little protection that she ends by wondering if England can be her country–if a woman can, in truth, be said to have a country. For the law of the time permits the husband to force himself on his wife in brutal and drunken states, to declare her insane if she resists, to imprison her in a ‘madhouse' against her will, and take away their child in his capacity as sole owner. This is what the Wollstonecraft sisters had feared when Bess rejected Meredith Bishop, and this is exactly what the fictional husband, George Venables, does.

Venables is ‘gross', staled by prostitutes whose mirth he calls ‘nature'. With him, ‘imagination was so wholly out of the question, as to render his indulgences of this sort entirely promiscuous'. To his wife his ‘brutality was tolerable, compared with his distasteful fondness'. Still, Maria goes on, ‘compassion, and the fear of insulting his supposed feelings, by a want of sympathy, made me dissemble, and do violence to my delicacy. What a task!' Wollstonecraft, through Maria, questions the wifely virtue of sexual
compliance. ‘When novelists or moralists praise as a virtue, a woman's coldness of constitution, and want of passion; and make her yield to the ardour of her lover out of sheer compassion, or to promote a frigid plan of future comfort, I am disgusted.' In
Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bennet is similarly appalled by her friend's decision to marry Mr Collins, who is not a man whom a sensible woman could possibly respect. To marry for an establishment is ‘an affair of barter', Wollstonecraft says. Jane Austen, too, could not bring herself to marry her eligible suitor, the well-to-do friend of the family Big-Wither. She accepted his proposal; then, next morning, made her escape. Her most virtuous heroine, Fanny Price, will not marry to please her relations, grateful as she is for the home they have given her. Wollstonecraft reframes marital morality when she says that ‘heartless conduct is the contrary of virtuous. Truth is the only basis of virtue; and we cannot, without depraving our minds, endeavour to please a lover or husband, but in proportion as he pleases us.' If a wife is repelled or indifferent is she not ‘indelicate'? Wollstonecraft's Maria voices what Hardy's new-married Sue Bridehead dares to voice a century later (to an outcry from Victorian society): ‘It is not easy to be pleased, because…we are told that it is our duty.'

When Maria can please her husband no longer, she makes an escape. She lives as an outlaw in hiding, as Bess did in Hackney. Eventually, Maria is caught and consigned to an asylum–her ‘prison'. There, her solitary confinement again recalls Bess during her years in Wales where she had to plead for permission to take a walk. Shut up and humiliated, it was still preferable to the sexual captivity of her marriage, as is the ‘madhouse' for Maria.

‘Let me exultingly declare that it is passed,' says Maria, ‘–my soul holds fellowship with him no more.' Estrangement is the deep emotion in this story. ‘He cut the Gordian knot, which my principles…respected; he dissolved the tie, the fetters rather, that ate into my very vitals–and I should rejoice, conscious that my mind is freed.' Mary Wollstonecraft could not have written that without the emotional separation from Imlay that Godwin helped her achieve.

Maria, like Mary the author, is more resilient as well as more fortunate than Bess. She has an alternative in the wings–the congenial if unconvincing Darnford (made up of unblended elements of what had attracted
Wollstonecraft in two quite different men: the intrepid Imlay and the bookish Godwin), whose presence helps Maria assert her freedom. This is not, though, a romance plot where the hero effects the rescue; here a woman is the agent of her fate. Darnford (in one of the provisional conclusions) was to prove unreliable. Maria follows Clarissa, and is followed in turn by Fanny Price, Jane Eyre and Maggie Verver (wife of the adulterous Italian prince in
The Golden Bowl
by Henry James), all of whom manage to free themselves from pressure to surrender their bodies to men they can't trust.

‘I am vexed and surprised at your not thinking the situation of Maria sufficiently important,' Wollstonecraft complained in mid-May to Godwin's protégé George Dyson, who had read her manuscript. ‘Love, in which the imagination mingles its bewitching colouring must be fostered by delicacy–I should despise…[a woman] who could endure such a husband as I have sketched–yet you do not seem disgusted with him!!!'

Dyson's ‘want of delicacy' goaded Mary to explain her idea. Surprisingly, she does not stress the physical wrong of domestic violence. Her concern is an even more hidden wrong, the power of a husband to ‘degrade the mind'. This looks forward to
The Subjection of Women
(1869), where Harriet Taylor Mill and John Stuart Mill recognise that psychic wrongs are more damaging than visible ones; to Wollstonecraft's mid-Victorian admirer George Eliot, who explores the humiliation of Gwendolen Harleth by her politely fearsome husband in
Deronda
(1876); and to Henry James, lighting up more sinister manipulations, licensed by marriage, in
The Portrait of a Lady
(1881).

Wollstonecraft discerns all this almost a century before, when she claims that private pains are as dramatic as ‘what are termed the great misfortunes'. Those may have more ‘of what might justly be termed
stage effect
but it is the delineation of finer sensations which, in my opinion, constitutes the merit of our best novels, this is what I have in view; and to shew the wrongs of different classes of women equally oppressive'. The parallel history of Jemima, ‘witness of many enormities', reveals the wrongs of women of the working class. Like Maria, Jemima has been prostituted. Hers is no sentimental story–she is a thief, criminalised and hardened to some degree by her will to survive, yet still with a residue of compassion.

Wollstonecraft refuses to reduce the fallen woman to sinner or saint. The challenge was to make her entirely believable–she is not as hearty and quick as Moll Flanders, not as enterprising as Defoe's Roxana; not as dazzlingly amoral; she is too ordinary to be a heroine, and her wrongs in proportion more painful. Looming large amongst a working woman's wrongs is the extreme of economic exploitation. Wollstonecraft is accurate when Jemima states that she is paid no more than eighteen pence as a laundress from one in the morning till eight at night.

The wrongs are summed up in a courtroom scene where Maria defends women against the unjust laws of the land–only to be dismissed by the judge. It's a speech that could have been made in the Commons, were women admitted to Parliament. Maria's oratorical voice seems to evoke the pale, austere portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft in the image of Mr Pitt–the epitome of political power–painted while she was writing
The Rights of Woman
. Yet
The Wrongs of Woman
, five years later, presents an alternative image of womanly strength, tried, tested and transformed by the maturity to know ‘in what human happiness consists'. This presents an advance on imitation of existing power models, as does a new portrait of the author, painted as she composed this novel.

It is as though the living Mary Wollstonecraft is looking at herself as she takes shape on Opie's canvas in the spring of 1797. She wears a green velvet hat and a soft white dress wrapped across full breasts. Sleeves cover her
rounded arms to the elbow. Viewers often look for signs of pregnancy, but that's in shadow. Opie's light is on the promise of womanly intelligence.

 

On 3 June Godwin set off for the Midlands with the keenest of his disciples, a law student called Basil Montagu, an illegitimate son of the Earl of Sandwich, who later became an eminent barrister and author of books on bankruptcy, copyright and the death penalty. At this time, Montagu was engaged to the youngest of the Wedgwood daughters. The plan was to visit the Wedgwoods at Etruria near Stoke-on-Trent (where Everina was employed as governess). On the way the travellers were to take in Oxford, Stratford-upon-Avon, Dr Darwin in Derby, and the novelist Robert Bage at Tamworth. Godwin had to leave open the date for his return, given the uncertainties of travel in the eighteenth century–the rained-on, muddy roads–as well as his wish to follow what chance might throw in their way. His departure for two or three weeks should have presented no problem for an independent woman, but for Mary it brought back Imlay's departures and abandonment.

At first, separation brought them closer. Two days after Godwin left, on 5 June, his first letter struck a sure note, reversing the platitudes of the sentimental journey. He opens with a run of caustic observations, and then, abruptly, throws off distance and plunges into intimacy:

His speed and unembarrassed baby-talk provoked a quick return (showing off the benefit of Godwin's Latin lessons):

Godwin, in turn, was overcome. ‘No creature expresses, because no creature feels, the tender affections, so perfectly as you do,' he replied from Etruria on 10 June. After all his philosophy it had to be confessed that her love was ‘extremely gratifying'. He went on: ‘One of the pleasures I had promised myself in my excursion, was to increase my value in your estimation, & I am not disappointed. What we possess without intermission, we inevitably hold light; it is a refinement in voluptuousness, to submit to voluntary privations. Separation is the image of death; but it is Death stripped of all that is most tremendous, & his dart purged of its deadly venom. I always thought that St Paul's rule, that we should die daily, an exquisite Epicurean maxim. The practice of it would give to life a double relish.'

It's odd that, even as Godwin spells out this deepening attachment, he remains opposed to marriage for anyone else. He did not approve Montagu's engagement (it ended), and observes to Mary that he regards friends about to be married as if ‘they were sentenced for life to hard labour in the Spielberg' (a Moravian prison). The only hope for ‘the unfortunate captive' is that ‘the despot may die'–rather tactless talk to a pregnant wife nearing her term in an age when six to seven per cent died in childbirth.