Vindication: A Life Of Mary Wollstonecraft (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
This is a beautifully written, intensively researched biography of an often misunderstood and greatly underappreciated woman. Lyndall Gordon has the enviable position of being a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford, so she has both the time and the access to apparently every extant scrap of her subject's life. Considering the considerable false press that enveloped Mary Wollstonecraft's short but super-eventful life, both the access and the time are crucial to understanding her and how unfortunate it was that her own writings were ignored and misrepresented. The plight of women and children in England in the 18th century was dreadful. A woman literally belonged to her husband. As soon as she said "I do," her husband had total control of her money. If she left him, or he threw her out, he had the right to take her children and never allow her to communicate with them. Wollstonecraft's writings clearly and forcefully showed the deeply flawed and unjust situation and, most important, how it could be remedied with proper education of both men and women. She also was a great advocate of mothering. She rightly figured that if women nursed their own babies and gave them love and nurturing, infant mortality wouldn't be so rampant. She was even an early advocate of keeping children clean. This sounds absurd in the days of Tide and washing machines, but in 18th century England, high-born women often gave their newborns to a country woman to wet nurse them. Infants farmed out this way were often kept in cradles suspended from ceilings of a dank, cramped cottage with dirty rags stuffed in their mouths to keep them quiet. Infant mortality rates were exceedingly high, even among the nobility and wealthy merchant classes. Wollstonecraft correctly suspected that neglect and filth was a major cause of infant mortality. She also believed that lack of nurturing left those babies who survived emotionally stunted. What the early neglect hadn't stamped out of their souls, formal education did, especially for males. The brutality of the hallowed halls of Eton and other schools were designed to quench all human sympathy. Boys were raised to have but one emotion: patriotism. This made them perfect tools of empire building, eager to trample on what they deemed as inferior cultures and scoop up riches from them. She also noted that if boys weren't raised to be so callous, they wouldn't grow up so willing to go to war.Wollstonecraft not only witnessed the ravages of war in France, but she actually lived in Paris during the Terror, so she well knew how vicious people can be. She laid this viciousness at the door of childraising and education. She advocated that children not be taught to parrot facts or excerpts of literature, but that they should be encouraged kindly to learn and understand by freely asking questions and investigating issues. As a side note, I have to mention that Mary actually traveled alone to Scandinavia to carry out Imlay's business dealing with a sunken treasure ship. That story alone makes incredible reading. What an extraordinary, brave woman this was!During her lifetime, she had ample followers. She herself did run a school on kindly principles for a time. Her vivid writings could have had a positive impact on the status of women and also on education. However, she died tragically young, a victim of male arrogance, and, her grief-stricken husband, who supposedly loved her for her independence and mind, wrote a memoir of her that portrayed her as a wild, woman who advocated free love. He never bothered to look at her voluminous correspondence with her sisters and her friends. He just presumed. They had been married for only 5 months when she died. What he wrote in his grief destroyed her reputation, so that, whenever the question of women's legal status arose, Wollstonecraft was used as an example of a wanton woman, the result of educating the female of the species.Yes, Mary did have an alliance with the American entrepeneur, Gilbert Imlay, with whom she bore her first child, Fanny. Imlay was her first lover. She was 34 when she met him. She met Godwin, to whom she did become legally married, when she was 39, and died in giving birth to Mary Godwin Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Interestingly, Mary Shelley's point in this novel was that merely to create another being and not to nurture him or her was to create monsters. She did read her mother's words.Why did I say that Wollstonecraft died as a result of male arrogance? In 18th century England, male surgeons decided that midwives were not suitable for birthing babies, although midwives usually knew a great deal more about the entire process than males did. Unfortunately, Godwin called in a surgeon when Mary's delivery became complicated. The surgeon then spent the night ripping the placenta from Mary's womb with his bare hands, rather than allowing it to expel naturally as she nursed the infant. Not only did Mary suffer horribly as there was no anesthesia at all, but she developed sepsis from his dirty hands. She didn't go to a hospital and she did have a midwife until Godwin interfered. The mortality rate of wealthy women was between 70% and 80% if they chose to do the "modern" thing and have their babies in hospitals with male doctors attending. Most of them died from rampant infection caused by the doctor's failure to wash their hands as they moved from patient to patient. It is true they didn't yet know about the mechanisms of bacterial contamination, but even Mary Wollstonecraft knew that keeping babies clean, for instance, lowered their chances of dying from infection. She actually wrote about that. In other words, people did know there was contagion spread by contact with dirty hands. Male surgeons would stick their hands in a woman's vagina, and then go to another woman without bothering to clean his hands first. I personally feel that such a practice, even in the 18th century, was a product of arrogance, of just not caring. That is not Lyndall Gordon's judgment, but mine.One excellent feature of this biography is that Gordon doesn't stop with Mary's tragic death. She goes on to show what happens to her daughters, and her students. She also discusses what impact Wollstonecraft didn't have on society throughout the 19th century, but she does relate her influence on Virginia Woolf, about whom she has also written a biography. I hope to have that on my shelf soon.
It is a shame that Mary Shelly, Wollstonecraft's daughter, is the more remembered of the two. Though Mary Shelley did (arguably, according to the deconstruction in Shelly Unbound) contribute significantly to English-language literature, it was her mother whose social progressiveness and teachings made waves still being felt. Mary Wollstonecraft was ahead of her time--even, in some ways, ahead of our time, given that the world still struggles with issues of female equality, the treatment of children, and slavery. Gordon's biography is not for the casual reader, though anyone interested in Wollstonecraft can spend as much or as little time as they want on this very thorough treatment of Wollstonecraft's life, personality, and legacy. The book does not end at Wollstonecraft's death, instead examining how her heirs in thought carried on her philosophy and how those close to her perpetuated her memory--for good or for ill.The title of the book is not an accident. Gordon "vindicates" Wollstonecraft in a way that her biographers, heirs, and lovers failed to do. It rewrites misogynistic portrayals of her and reveals the whys of her ideas and how the obstacles in her life, including, poverty, society, and the law impeded her in ways that might not have had such an impact had she been a man. It shows a woman who, while she would be considered independent today, was seen as someone flouting entire institutions in a dangerous and irresponsible manner. Through this vindication is a criticism of those who failed her, including Imlay, Godwin, and relatives. Additionally, instead of heroicizing the poets who took advantage of her offspring, it exposes them as the narcissistic manipulators that they were. Though some redeemable characters do present themselves, such as Margaret, Wollstonecraft's charge during her position as governess, and her publisher, Wollstonecraft lived a life in which people--men and women alike--misused, misunderstood, and dismissed her. We are fortunate that so much of her correspondence and writings have survived, and this well-researched and well-written biography places her life in context with the times and trends in thought, including attitudes towards women, children's education, parental or spousal abuse, and medicine.
What do You think about Vindication: A Life Of Mary Wollstonecraft (2006)?
This more than a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft. At least a third covers the legacy of her influences. I read this as an ebook from the library, which did not have the illustrations that would have increased my interest. Instead, I relied on Wikipedia for pictures as well as context for certain deficiencies in my knowledge of that period of history (such as Enclosure laws, and much more). An impressive amount of research is displayed, but I found the writing to be a bit tedious. And there was much more about Gilbert Imlay that I wanted to know. Read it if you are interested in feminist history. I'd love for a skilled writer to turn this into an historical novel.
—Betty
As I expected (having really liked Gordon's bio of Charlotte Brontë), this was excellent. Gordon examines the truths and myths of Wollstonecraft's life in an illuminating way, with generally just the right level of detail. She does spend a little too much time on Gilbert Imlay (Wollstonecraft's lover and father of her daughter Fanny) and his business partners and intrigues, but other than that, I found this a very compelling biography (and now I want to reread Claire Tomalin's, when I have a chance).
—Margaret
There's no greater tragedy in the history of mankind than the suppression of womankind. Though there have been exceptions; some queens have ruled, some societies have been matrilineal, but for the most part women have been the captives of men.This is still the case in large parts of the world. The proof of the complete subjugation of a woman is the idea in her head that there really is no role for her except that assigned by men. As this book attests, even in England, a country at the cutting edge of Western civilization, women were the possessions of men in the late 1700's, as were children. Divorce required an act of Parliament and only two had been granted in the 200 years up to Mary's late 18th century!So much progress has been made in the following 250 years, that we now are about to make same-sex marriage legal in the United States as a whole (we are, aren't we?). There has never been a better time to be alive, particularly for women.Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, that I read several years ago with pleasure. That book is filled with what we would now call common sense. The primary point in it is that women were forced, by the very limited number of paths open to them, to become the foolish, timid, flighty coquettes that most of them were. Intelligence was not appreciated, cultivated or rewarded in women. Even today many women carefully adhere to fashions in order to take on whatever look may be in vogue, under a pressure that still exists for them from which men are largely free.Wollstonecraft's story is interesting because it is the plight of a free mind trapped in a society that does not approve of it, similar to the situation of someone trapped on a desert island - how does one stay sane? How does one find food (or food for thought) to survive?She succeeds in her writing on various subjects, first under a male pseudonym and then under her own name. She is fortunate to find friends who are supportive, most important being Joseph Johnson, her publisher. Improbably, she succeeds entirely on her own, mingling with men of intelligence as their equal while avoiding romantic attachments and the entrapment of marriage through her 20's.Her life unfolds at the time of the American and French Revolutions. Far from avoiding the upheaval of the French Revolution, she heads straight to Paris to see it firsthand. She becomes romantically involved with Gilbert Imlay, an American wheeler-dealer of great influence in Europe. He induces the American ambassador to France to declare Mary to be his wife, though she is not, so that she has a safe-conduct in France at the time of the Terror. As a result, she, an Englishwoman in a France suspicious of all foreigners, goes where she pleases, passing barricades even into prisons to visit those condemned to the guillotine.Imlay plays a huge part in Mary's life though he is, after their first sexual encounters, entirely absent. Though a child is born of their union, he lives the fast life in distant places while fully supporting Mary financially and, after a fashion, emotionally through correspondence filled with genuine tenderness and solicitude. All the while, they are still unmarried even as she goes by "Mrs. Imlay".The forgoing would be plenty for a terrific novel, but there's much more. Mary meets a man who shares her disdain for the marriages of the time, but they marry...only to live contentedly but separately a few doors apart sending correspondence to each other several times a day and trysting in the wee hours!This book is rich in detail and characterization. I haven't mentioned Mary's family, all of whom feel she owes them support, or Margaret, the daughter in a family for which Mary was a governess. Margaret is powerfully affected by Mary's thinking and succeeds in later life in attending medical school while cross dressing as a man.How much more could be packed into a life that ends before 40? Her manner of death? That's for you to discover.A mother of two, she practiced and wrote about childcare of a kind we moderns would approve. Independent as she was, Mary longed for domestic happiness. She knew that the two could be compatible, but in her time, living in a life-enhancing natural way and living in accord with what society demanded were very far apart.Lyndall Gordon provides emotional depth and historical perspective in this book. Other female authors such as Charlotte Bronté, Emily Dickenson and Jane Austin, and the characters from their novels are frequently mentioned. The lives of those who knew and were influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft are followed after her death. The book wraps up with a chapter describing Mary's Wollstonecraft's impact up to the 20th century.Are you a hardware (things) or a software (emotions) person? Hardware people may find this book boring beyond description as it is all about human psychology and emotional interaction, not the stuff of a Tom Clancy book. Software people will love it. If you are a fan of the great Russian authors - Tolstoy, Doestoyevsky - this is a must read because it explores the same territory.
—Clif
