MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: GENERAL COMMENTARY

GARY KELLY (ESSAY DATE 1997)

SOURCE: Kelly, Gary. "(Female) Philosophy in the Bedroom: Mary Wollstonecraft and Female Sexuality." Women's Writing 4, no. 2 (1997): 143-54.
In the following essay, Kelly examines Wollstonecraft's personal life as well as her writings and argues that Wollstonecraft was a forerunner in reimagining women's sexuality outside of traditional marriage structures. In doing so, Kelly also defends Wollstonecraft from criticism of her relationships with men and her seemingly extreme behavior.

At a certain point in Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), the relentless pedagogical exercises in the Sadean grammar of sexuality are suspended by, or perhaps culminate in, the reading of a revolutionary polemical tract. Despite the apparently revolutionary sexual and textual articulations in Sade's novel, the pupils are female, the instructors male, and the novel could be claimed to reproduce a gender hierarchy inherent in the courtly ancien régime. This was just what Mary Wollstonecraft claimed about an earlier proposal for ostensibly revolutionary pedagogy. In her polemical tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she attacked Talleyrand's scheme for national education in France because it assigned a subordinate place to women and thus ran the risk of reproducing the ancien régime's subordination of women, thereby wrecking the revolutionary project itself. As Sade and Wollstonecraft both recognised, however, female sexuality, its construction and emancipation, was central in both courtly and revolutionary regimes. In this essay I will describe Wollstonecraft's articulation of that issue, partly in her writings, but also in her personal life, and the key terms I use are those in my essay's title.

By Mary Wollstonecraft I mean an archive and an agent. The archive is a set of texts ranging from manuscript letters and documents, through published works and the testimony of others about Mary Wollstonecraft, to the initials M. W. marked on the stays worn by an unidentified female, later recognised as Wollstonecraft's daughter Frances, at the time the latter committed suicide (Wardle, p. 335). These texts have material form, however, as works wrought by an agent addressing others in a socially and historically specific discursive situation, and, though that situation cannot be fully or finally known to us, it is not ours.

By female here I mean not just the usual modern sense of those persons so classified according to the discourse of biology. Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries such as Mary Hays would use the term to include what we would now consider the feminine, that is, subjective, cultural, and social practices learned as part of a historically and socially particular "language" of gender, as distinct from sex. The sense of "female" used here is, then, based on what is often referred to as "social constructionism" (Berger & Luckmann).

By philosophy I mean the term as used in Wollstonecraft's day, that is, a certain politicised intellectual critique of unreason, principally the court system of the ancien régime, with the "prejudice" and "custom" that sustained it and the "ignorance" and "superstition" that enabled it to perdure. Philosophy as such was gendered masculine in Wollstonecraft's day and, in the opinion of many people, females, like children and the common people, were excluded by nature or education from mastery of analytical and theoretical discourses. Accordingly, these social groups were widely considered to be naturally or all too easily the dupes of "prejudices" and "custom", "ignorance" and "superstition". Thus these groups were seen as both characteristic of unmodernised society and culture and reproducers of it. Not surprisingly, then, many in Wollstonecraft's day would have considered the phrase "female philosopher" to be an oxymoron.

These conventional attitudes were precisely what Wollstonecraft and other feminists of her time challenged, pointing out that if women, like children and plebeians, were excluded from philosophy as analytical discourse and from philosophy's revolutionary programme, they would hinder or even prevent the realisation of that programme. For Wollstonecraft, female philosophy meant not just access to philosophy for women or a distinct and desirable supplement to philosophy as conventionally and historically practised by men. To them, female philosophy was an urgently necessary reformation of male philosophy by "feminine" elements, in order to effect philosophy's potential for revolutionary transformation. Inevitably, revolutionised philosophy would have to enter the bedroom because the sexualisation of women to the exclusion of other attributes was, in the view of a broad range of late eighteenth-century writers, the cause of the courtisation and thus the degradation of women—their exclusion from the broad middle-class revolutionary project.

More particularly, feminists such as Wollstonecraft understood philosophy in practical terms to be the analytical method and discursive practice required by men in order to be successful in the professions (Wollstonecraft, 1792, ch. 2). To call for women, especially of the middle classes (Wollstonecraft's declared subject and audience), to become female philosophers was to call for the professionalisation of women of those classes. Wollstonecraft argues that, if women of the middle classes are not professionalised, or given appropriate knowledge, intellectual training (which she calls "reason"), and moral self-discipline ("virtue"), they will remain the subjects of undisciplined desire ("custom", "prejudice", "superstition", etc.) and thus liable to courtisation, as they had been for centuries. Such women could only impede and would probably wreck the middle-class revolution that was in train in Wollstonecraft's day, not only in France but, in various ways and to varying degrees, throughout the Western world.

By sexuality I mean subjective and somatic practices that are designated erotic and amorous by a particular society and culture. Such practices have long been represented as "natural" to or inherent in individuals in ways that are extra-social and extra-cultural, arising from deep, perhaps prelinguistic or extra-linguistic structures in subjectivity, or from "human nature". In this sense, sexuality seems authentic. A contrastingly different representation of sexuality is as performance (Butler), and therefore as no more authentic than any other kind of practice. In general, post-modernism questions any attribute as "naturally" or essentially human, and this questioning would include sexuality. Another strong approach to sexuality has been through psychoanalytic theory. Here my interest, however, is in sexuality as socially constructed, historically and socially specific, and yet a form of personal agency. Thus sexuality pertains to gender rather than to biological sex. The question of the conjunction of the sexuality of deep psychological structures and that which is socially constructed and historically particular remains unresolved here.

In addition, by defining sexuality as I do, I am not presenting sexuality as a form of discipline or policing, a compulsory regime scripted by society and merely enacted or performed by individuals (Foucault). I am more interested here in sexuality as being like a language, or rather sociolect and idiolect, one that individuals learn and employ for particular personal and social aims or reasons. Here I am using Roy Harris's model of language as a social practice. Thus I am not considering sexuality as a psychic, biological, or physiological imperative but rather as a psychic, biological, and physiological potential realised in culture and society, or a historically particular culture and society. Inasmuch as society and culture are political, or inevitably differentiated by relations of power, sexuality is also always political. As Cora Kaplan has pointed out, this relationship is central for feminist criticism, and Wollstonecraft and her writings form an exemplary case of it (Kaplan, pp. 32-54, 121-125, 155-160).

Similarly, by the bedroom I mean not a particular chamber but the politically, socially, and culturally designated and sanctioned scene for such practice of sexuality, though of course any place, indoors or out, could and can serve as a temporary site for it. More particularly, I mean the bedroom as boudoir, a private if not secret domestic space historically assigned to women as a site for conducting their private, including sexual, relationships. It is, of course, interesting in itself that this particular sense of "bedroom" is covered in English by a word appropriated from French, the language of Sade, and the sense used by Sade, suggesting that what transpires in the "boudoir" may not have been considered to be fully or properly "English" or "British". It is additionally interesting that a "boudoir" was originally a private room into which a woman could retire in order to sulk (bouder), presumably as a result of some rebuff or neglect in the public social sphere. Later the term came to mean a room in which a woman could receive her intimate acquaintances, and this is the sense that was appropriated into English, though "boudoir" retains the sense of a scene of sexual practice.

This leaves the words in and and—though small, they are important for articulating an argument. By female philosophy in the bedroom I mean a complex relationship. Philosophy and the bedroom could be distinct if not opposing discursive sites and practices. Philosophy and the bedroom could also be seen in hierarchical relationship, with philosophy able to account for the bedroom, but not the other way around. Here philosophy masters the bedroom, or even forestalls it. Yet the bedroom could be seen as the site of a practice more "authentic", more practical, more "real" than philosophy. In this view the bedroom is not just a place where philosophers (too) can be off duty, can be themselves, but the bedroom triumphs over philosophy by exposing its impractical, abstract, dehumanising character. All of these possible relationships were current in Wollstonecraft's day, seen in Wollstonecraft's texts and those of her fellow English Jacobins and their French contemporaries such as Laclos and Sade.

For example, the bedroom could be the recreation and refuge of the man—less often the woman—weary of the practice of philosophy as contestation and critique, as in Sade. Philosophy could also extend its critique to the bedroom, analysing sexual practices as necessary products or symptoms of one kind of political regime or another, as in Sade and Wollstonecraft. Here philosophy could also imagine the bedroom and sexuality otherwise, as a site among others for avant-garde or revolutionary political practice. The bedroom could also be the site of philosophy's failure, its lapse into courtly sexuality, thus exposing avant-garde, revolutionary philosophy's impracticality or hypocrisy, as in the Anti-Jacobin counter-revolutionary critique of Wollstonecraft. It was particularly in the aftermath of the Jacobin Terror, during the early Directory period of the Revolution, that sexuality of a particular kind came to seem intrinsic to the Revolution and, in the eyes of many in Britain, to reveal the Revolution's "true" character as at once a broad programme of license and transgression, including sexual, and a return of decadent courtliness. It was during the Directory period of the mid-1790s that the Revolution became associated, for many British observers, with excess of all kinds, including sexual excess. Wollstonecraft's public reputation was to be ruined by this association.

For those, like Wollstonecraft, who had determined to apply philosophy even to sexuality, however, philosophy had to be applied in the bedroom or the Revolutionary project would fail, would lapse back into the vitiated and vitiating gender relations of the ancien régime. Furthermore, the principles of revolutionary philosophy required enactment of this critique in the philosopher's own sexual practice in the bedroom and its surrounding domestic space and culture. That the personal is political and vice versa was a common understanding in the age of Mary Wollstonecraft, as an examination of the "paper war" over the Revolution amply illustrates. Though this commonplace was pursued with particular energy in the Revolution debate, it did not originate in revolutionary culture. It was partly a residue of court culture under the ancien régime and partly a recreation of the culture of Sensibility that was designed to oppose and supersede court culture.

Court government had long been represented by its (largely middle-class and puritan) critics and opponents as a system of intertwined political and sexual intrigue, of favourites and mistresses manipulating the top of a patronage system that in turn controlled the social, economic, cultural, and political life of the country and largely determined social and domestic relations and personal characters of individuals. This was the system that Wollstonecraft attacked in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and elsewhere as the cause of the courtisation of women, or their intellectual and moral trivialisation for erotic subordination. It was the system that Wollstonecraft thought the first wave of Revolutionaries had unthinkingly subsumed in their state constitution by excluding women from the full process of state education. This exclusion, Wollstonecraft argued, denied women the civil consciousness and roles they must have if they were not to continue to be courtly coquettes undermining the Revolution at home, and subverting the public and political sphere for private and personal ends, as the court system forced them to do.

Before the Revolution, writers of Sensibility reformulated the relation of the personal and political as a comprehensive oppositional culture constructed in the interests and image of the self-idealised professional middle class (see Brissenden, Barker-Benfield). According to the politics of Sensibility, the illegitimate personality politics of court government were to be supplanted by a politics of merit, or the disciplined moral and intellectual subject that was the idealised image of the professional man of the time. The court system was routinely figured as a regime of the father, or interconnected systems of patronage, paternalism, and patriarchy. Thus Sensibility, as an oppositional culture, tended to figure its idealised self as female and feminine after a bourgeois rather than courtly model of woman. Sensibility was feminised in a historically and socially specific way, though in fact it was available to both men and women of the subaltern middle classes, addressing men in the first instance, and addressing men and women differently. It was this culture that enabled Wollstonecraft to theorise her own experience of sexuality as a mediation of gender and class difference within the revolutionary politics of the professional middle class in her time.

In order to explicate the and in "Wollstonecraft and female sexuality", I turn now to a narrative of Wollstonecraft's encounter with and attempt to revolutionise, as a female philosopher, female sexuality for the larger revolutionary project of philosophy.

Her early letters, written while a girl living with her family in Yorkshire, show her grappling uncertainly and ambivalently with the courtisation of women of her class (Wollstonecraft, 1979). Within her family and early circle of friends she experienced and observed the degrading and brutalising effect of the courtly code of gender relations filtered down into the margins of the gentry and middle classes in which she grew up. Her mother was beaten and possibly raped by a drunken, over-ambitious father. Wollstonecraft and her siblings were deprived of proper education and reasonable expectations in order to fund the social advancement of her oldest brother. Her sister Eliza married and was probably rushed into motherhood and thus driven into mental and marital breakdown. Her friend Frances Blood was kept dangling by the self-interested family of her fiancé and, once married, unwisely became pregnant and removed to Portugal, where she died after childbirth. Blood's sister Caroline became a prostitute and workhouse inmate. While living in Windsor as a lady's companion Wollstonecraft was amused and irritated at the flutter caused by the notoriously gallant Prince of Wales, a figure to whom she would return in The Wrongs of Woman. In Ireland, as governess in the family of the titled and wealthy Kingsboroughs, she rejected courtisation in the education of her young female charges and observed with amusement and contempt the coquetting manipulativeness of Lady Kingsborough.

It was at this point that the literature of Sensibility, with its basis in Enlightenment philosophy, spoke so forcibly to Wollstonecraft in her social no man's land as professional and intellectual woman, as it did to many other men and women in similar situations in Western societies of the time. The relevance of Sensibility for her was focused in Jean-Jacques Rousseau as self-feminised male and her model for self-reconstruction as female philosopher. Rousseau's writings made clear the conflict between the political and the personal, including sexuality and private life. By the late 1780s Wollstonecraft was increasingly critical of the subjection of women by the gentry property system, expressed in the English tradition of female conduct literature with its pessimistic and repressive view of female sexuality. Yet she also knew how easily women could be seduced by courtly ideology. At this point, then, both conventional marriage and unconventional sexual conduct would, it seemed to her, vitiate her project of self-construction as a "female philosopher", or avant-garde exemplar of female emancipation within the horizon of possibilities offered by late eighteenth-century society.

In the face of this impasse Wollstonecraft struggled to find an acceptable practice of sexuality. One way was through intense female friendship of the kind she had with Frances Blood. Such relationships could of course have an erotic dimension, as implied by conduct-books' anxiety about them. Blood's death put an end to this experiment in female sexuality, but the intensity of Wollstonecraft's feeling about it may be taken to indicate a lesbian or potentially lesbian relationship. Such homosocial intensity was and is not uncommon, was licensed to a degree by social convention at that time, and was indeed encouraged in the culture of Sensibility. Adopting lesbian sexuality and way of life was a possible though highly risky political gesture, and if Wollstonecraft did so she didn't make the relationship into such a gesture. Later, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she regards girls' boarding schools as morally dangerous in part because by their nature they encourage masturbation and lesbianism (Wollstonecraft, 1792, p. 164). In short, whatever personal satisfactions lesbianism may have offered, its political usefulness in Wollstonecraft's day, if openly avowed, was not what it may be today.

A different field for personal and political construction of female sexuality was offered by religious Dissent. As a marginalised urban and commercial middle-class community, Dissent defined itself largely by rejecting hegemonic culture, including courtly sexuality. At that time, such rejection was not necessarily repressively puritanical but could liberate men and women from the codes and roles of courtly sexuality. Partly for this reason intellectual women such as Wollstonecraft found Dissent a congenial environment in many ways. Furthermore, as an oppositional culture Dissent also embraced feminisation and facilitated useful and safe relationships of male-female intellectual equality or mentorship, such as that enjoyed by Wollstonecraft with several clergymen, including Richard Price (whom she would later defend in her Vindication of the Rights of Men ). A more dangerous relationship of a similar kind involved George Ogle, one of Lady Kingsborough's circle, who turned out, in Wollstonecraft's view, to conceal courtly amorousness beneath Rousseauist feminisation.

Wollstonecraft's most important relationship with a feminised man, however, would be with her publisher. Joseph Johnson was a Dissenter, a bachelor, the leading publisher of the English Dissenting Enlightenment, and had close friendships with creative, feminised men such as William Roscoe and Henry Fuseli, who also became Wollstonecraft's friends. She not only earned a living thanks to Johnson, but, as a member Johnson's circle of progressive writers, intellectuals, and artists, she could ignore courtly femininity and sexuality to create an identity as a female philosopher, discussing subjects conventionally closed to women or barred from mixed company, such as science, politics, and sexuality itself. Like many men and women in her situation she welcomed the French Revolution, and even identified with it by becoming a "philosophical sloven", or adopting the style of dress, comportment, and domestic life affected by Parisian women who had thrown off courtly femininity and sexuality for an openly revolutionary counter-culture.

By this point she was reinventing her female sexuality in a relationship with the expatriate Swiss artist and critic Henry Fuseli. His presence in her intellectual and personal life facilitated her emergence as a public character, first with A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and then withA Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In the latter, Wollstonecraft consistently casts the expression of female sexuality in a negative light. For example, in chapter 4, significantly entitled, "Observations on the State of Degradation to which Woman is Reduced by Various Causes", she states:

Love, considered as an animal appetite, cannot long feed on itself without expiring. And this extinction in its own flame, may be termed the violent death of love. But the wife who has been thus rendered licentious, will probably endeavour to fill the void left by her husband's attentions …
Personal attachment is a very happy foundation for friendship; yet, when even two virtuous people marry, it would, perhaps, be happy if some circumstances checked their passion … In that case they would look beyond the present moment, and try to render the whole of life respectable, by forming a plan to regulate a friendship which only death ought to dissolve.
(Wollstonecraft, 1792, p. 73)

Here Wollstonecraft seems to repeat the commonplace warning of female conduct-books against expression of female sexual desire. The dim view of conjugal sexuality is also found in her letters of the late 1780s and early 1790s, and there is her own observation of the disorienting effect of sexual desire in her younger sister, Fanny Blood, and other women. Wollstonecraft's concern here, however, is that women be able to resist courtisation in marriage, given the prevalence of such pressures in society and culture at large. It is not so much female sexuality that she denies as its distortion by the dominant ideology and culture—a distortion that works to subordinate and oppress women.

Between the two Vindications Wollstonecraft also reflected on a new model, the "bluestocking" and notorious female philosopher of an earlier generation, Catharine Macaulay Graham. Macaulay Graham was a second generation bluestocking writer and intellectual who had transgressed the gendered boundary of discourse by writing full-scale and frankly political historiography—otherwise a masculine discourse. Macaulay Graham also breached conventional femininity by openly advocating classical republicanism. More seriously damaging was her decision, once widowed, to marry a man younger and from a lower social class, thereby advertising, in the eyes of many, that she was marrying for sexual pleasure. She was satirised accordingly. Significantly, Wollstonecraft decided to memorialise Macaulay Graham in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. While writing the book, she also abandoned her avant-garde Parisian and Revolutionary-style coarse attire and appearance and adopted a more "bluestocking" style of dress, conduct, and life.

This transformation has been interpreted as an attempt to please Fuseli and to formalise her relationship with him. Yet it is clear from her letters and actions that she had no intention of giving up her ideal of avant-garde revolutionary intellectual companionship or betraying the anti-courtly sexual politics she had advocated in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She did, finally, propose joining the Fuseli household as his intellectual partner, while Fuseli's wife Sophia, a former model who may have been illiterate, was to remain his sexual partner and housekeeper. Such an arrangement would obviously have been problematic, however, since it could too easily have been seen to subsume the interrelated class and gender differences of court culture; in any case the proposal was rejected.

By this time, Wollstonecraft must already have heard of the avant-garde conjugality being practised in Girondin Revolutionary coteries and expatriate British circles at Paris, including the salon of Marie Roland and the society around Johnson's partner, Thomas Christie. Here amorous and conjugal relationships were formed without marriage, which was rejected as an institution of gentry property and court government. Among women Wollstonecraft knew who were involved in such relationships were Helen Maria Williams, Marie Roland, and Thomas Christie's wife Rebecca. Wollstonecraft went to Paris to pursue both her writing career and the kind of relationship she had failed to achieve with Fuseli. She soon found with Gilbert Imlay a way to practise female philosophy in the bedroom.

What we know of this relationship, especially from Wollstonecraft's letters, suggests that it was intensely intimate yet open, allowed much independence to both partners, and was obstructed and thus probably intensified by the actual political and economic situation of France at the time. Under the Jacobin Terror, and with a state of war existing between Britain and France, Wollstonecraft as a British subject was in a dangerous position. She had herself registered as Imlay's wife with the American embassy, though they did not marry, and had to live outside Paris for some time; Imlay, as an American with commercial experience, could engage in business, especially blockade running, for the French government. To Wollstonecraft's irritation, this work seemed to require long absences from Wollstonecraft and their daughter, who was born in the spring of 1794. Wollstonecraft was also irritated by the Jacobin regime's negative attitude to female philosophers and politicians and their exhortations to women to stay at home to raise good citizens with literal and metaphorical "lait républicain".

Nevertheless, her letters, especially to Imlay, show a determined endeavour to practise her new-found revolutionary conjugality as both female and philosopher. In this endeavour, she strove over some period to keep her sexual needs and desires in balance and relationship with what she believed to be a reflective, "philosophical" self-awareness, and with an economy of mutuality and equality in desire as in all aspects of their relationship. Eventually, his loss of sexual feeling for her proved overwhelmingly disappointing in terms of her politics of sexuality and conjugality. Imlay became involved with another woman and the relationship with Wollstonecraft broke down, though whether Imlay's involvement with the other woman was the symptom or cause cannot be known. In fact, we have on record only one side of their relationship and the available evidence is open to conflicting interpretations. The letters show that Wollstonecraft tried to keep the relationship going and was prepared to overlook Imlay's infidelities up to a point. When this failed she threatened or attempted suicide, but then agreed to be his agent in recovering money he was using to purchase embargoed goods for the French government. On her return she found Imlay with a new partner and again attempted suicide. After some months she accepted that the relationship was over, though she remained fearful of being betrayed again.

The prevailing view has been that Wollstonecraft made a fool of herself over Imlay, that he was probably not worthy of her, and that as a feminist she ought to have been stronger and more decisive in dealing with him. My reading is that she saw in Imlay and her relationship with him the sexual, domestic, and conjugal realisation of her female philosophy and the personal basis for sustaining her public and political dissemination of that philosophy. That she may have been mistaken in the circumstances cannot be known and should not be to her discredit. Besides, during and from this personal and public-political crisis she produced, in An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794), a feminisation of historiography and the Revolution in the style of Catharine Macaulay Graham, and, in Letters from Sweden (1796) and The Wrongs of Woman (1798), a textualisation of female philosophy both in the bedroom and at large in society of pre-Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary Europe. In this text, as I have argued elsewhere (Kelly), she created, in the figure of the author-in-the-text, an exemplary avant-garde consciousness for a new revolutionary cadre at a moment when revolutionary hope seemed about to be extinguished. It is not coincidental that this avant-garde consciousness is represented repeatedly as a female philosopher in the bedroom, as a subjective yet embodied site of lost and remembered revolutionary sexuality and of post-Revolutionary reflection and self-reconstruction.

If Imlay turned out to be not enough of a philosopher to sustain a relationship with her, Wollstonecraft's next partner, William Godwin, was the most famous and infamous philosopher in Britain. Their relationship is well documented through their letters and notes and Godwin's journal. They intended from the outset to practise an avant-garde sexuality and conjugality called for and validated by their philosophy. As with Imlay, Wollstonecraft's relationship with Godwin was to be part of a revolutionary subculture implicitly criticising and proleptically replacing hegemonic relations between the sexes. Significantly, in their bedroom they alternated avant-garde philosophy and sexuality, giving up the latter for the former whenever Wollstonecraft might have become pregnant. Again, however, this relationship was hindered by repressive political and social values and also by financial pressures. Opposition to such personal-political subcultures was less obviously dangerous and more diffused than in Jacobin France, but Wollstonecraft and Godwin had to protect their livelihoods and their political usefulness in an atmosphere of increasing political repression, social surveillance, and moral policing, especially after Wollstonecraft became pregnant, against her wishes. Therefore they legalised their relationship, though this was in effect a public admission that Wollstonecraft had not been married to Imlay.

Her unexpected death from complications of childbirth was not, of course, the end of the story. Godwin chose to publish work she left unfinished at her death, with a candid memoir of her and what are evidently selections from her letters to Imlay and Johnson (he would have included letters to Fuseli but the latter refused access to them). These texts enabled counter-revolutionary journalists to pillory Wollstonecraft as an example of the commonplace Anti-Jacobin argument that reformers and revolutionaries were merely using a political programme to advance their ambitions and gratify their appetites, including sexual appetite. These journalists made common practice of discrediting reformist and revolutionary programmes by showing how their proponents betrayed their own principles, theories, and arguments. Feminism was but one reform cause of many successfully smeared and marginalised or suppressed in this way. In the intense ideological and armed struggle of the later 1790s and early 1800s there were many who believed the smear and many others who thought such means were justified for the end of national survival against resurgent Revolutionary France under Napoleon. The social, political, and economic crises of the post-war years, up to the reform movements of the 1830s, again deferred any useful opportunity to reinsert Wollstonecraft and her work into the public political sphere, though there were opportunities to do so, and it was attempted in early socialist circles (as Barbara Taylor has shown) and attempted obliquely or covertly in the work of Mary Shelley, Lady Caroline Lamb, and other women writers of the 1820s and 1830s.

A politicised female sexuality such as Wollstonecraft enacted and represented in her work was diverted into and continued to be part of avant-garde and "bohemian" practice. Counter-revolutionary propaganda successfully disabled it, however, as an important element in transgressive and reformative practice in the public political sphere, except within socialist, feminist and other reform movements. In the meantime, Wollstonecraft's views about and practice of sexuality remained a problem. Answers to this problem, unfortunately, comprise a history of the sexual double standard and middle-class moralising. The counter-revolutionary condemnation formed after the appearance of Godwin's memorialising texts continued to have a strong influence, even with feminists. The commonest and longest-lived view has been that Wollstonecraft preached female independence but practised dependence, that she betrayed her feminist principles or at best could not live up to them, that her sexuality let her feminism down, that the female philosopher was defeated in the bedroom. Since the 1970s, when female sexuality became a central issue in feminist discourse, some commentators have also criticised Wollstonecraft's apparent denial of female sexuality in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

In re-presenting Mary Wollstonecraft as the (female) philosopher in the bedroom, I have aimed to re-place Wollstonecraft in her time in order to represent her as a philosopher with much to tell us about the discourse of sexuality and whatever comes into it, in any time and place. In doing so I have approached sexuality as socially and historically particular, and, like other social and cultural discourse, one way that human agents express and negotiate social difference and relations of power in particular circumstances. Like language as theorised by Roy Harris, sexuality may be treated as a field of creative communication within a particular horizon of possibility. In order to understand Wollstonecraft's exercise of such agency, and thus illuminate our own, it is necessary to understand her horizon of possibility, which was not ours. Such an approach may not produce Wollstonecraft as the female philosopher in the bedroom who is what Angela Carter calls the "Sadeian woman", and there are, of course, other ways of treating sexuality than that used here; each has its limits, as does this one. Certainly, readings of Wollstonecraft based on gender-only or transhistorical assumptions about sexuality often seem to produce her as victim, hypocrite, bourgeois liberal, or all of these. Historicising her and the discourse(s) of sexuality in her time perhaps produces a more interesting Wollstonecraft, for some of us; and, at the risk of indulging in celebratory criticism, such a reading also produces a Wollstonecraft who is admirable, exemplary, and instructive, even now.

References

Brissenden, R. F., Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sensibility from Richardson to Sade (London, 1974).

Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Berger, P. L. & Luckman, T., The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971).

Butler, J., Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993).

Butler, M. (Ed.) Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Cobban, A. (Ed.) The Debate on the French Revolution, 1789-1800, second edition (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1960.

Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality, 3 volumes (London: Lane, 1979).

Harris, R., The Language Myth (London: Duckworth, 1981).

Kaplan, C., Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986).

Kelly, G., Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's, 1992).

Taylor, B., Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983).

Wardle, R. M., Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1951).

Wollstonecraft, M. (1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, edited by Carol Poston, second edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988).

Wollstonecraft, M. (1976) Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, edited by Carole H. Poston (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press).

Wollstonecraft, M. (1979) The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).

WENDY GUNTHER-CANADA (ESSAY DATE 2001)

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AN ANONYMOUS DEFENSE OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, DISCUSSING HER DEATH DURING CHILDBIRTH

It is not very improbable that, if we possessed the means of knowledge equal to a full investigation, the cause of the fatal issue, which closed the light of this world upon one of its most brilliant ornaments; that robbed rational liberty of one of its most able and determined advocates, and that deprived your sex in particular of their firmest champion, might be traced to the violent agitations and anxieties that she had formerly sustained. Though her mind, in consequence of its native elasticity, had relaxed but little, if any thing, of its former vigour; yet the mere animal frame, it is not improbable, had received so rude a shock, as materially to affect the delicacy of its internal organization.—If so; we can be at no loss to determine to whose account Humanity will ascribe the being deprived of one of her most intelligent and determined friends.

In good truth, my dear Madam, my decided and unequivocal opinion of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin is, that the world was not worthy of her;—for its absurdities, its prejudices, its vices, and its vanities, she was much too intelligent, too independent, too good, and too great.

Anonymous. Excerpt from A Defense of the Character and Conduct of the Late Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, pp. 147-48. London, 1803.