The Body of Her Work, the Work of Her Body: Accounting for the Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

On Monday, Dr. Fordyce forbad the child’s having the breast, and we therefore procured puppies to draw off the milk.

—William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” ¹

Why is Mary Wollstonecraft’s death so difficult to talk about? Why is it just as difficult to forget? The above line from William Godwin’s loving and detailed account of the days preceding Wollstonecraft’s death due to puerperal fever offers a clue. That a feminist philosopher and writer who sought to defy the distinction of sex should die from complications arising from childbirth already seems too “cruel.”² The expectation that she nurse puppies on her own deathbed seems unspeakably so. Godwin’s including this intimate information among the many details documenting the steady dissolution of her body seems yet another example of his poor judgment in giving precedence to Wollstonecraft’s body in a memoir intended to celebrate her work.³ Godwin was methodical in both his life and his writing, and we know that he wrote Memoirs in a state of intense grief when any detail of her final days would become important; but why could not he quietly leave out this fact, be a little less thorough this time? And should we correct his misjudgement by leaving it out ourselves? For once you mention this detail, it proves impossible to forget.

But it is precisely because this detail is so impossible to forget that it requires our attention. The introduction of the nursing puppies into the scene of Wollstonecraft’s death, whether they were “procured” as a possible remedy for Wollstonecraft’s puerperal fever or as part of a common post-childbirth practice used to alleviate or maintain milk supply, demands some accountability. Even if its appearance results primarily from Godwin’s narrative meticulousness, it is too remarkable a detail not to discuss. Not that discussing it will render it any less unsettling for contemporary readers or distance it from Wollstonecraft’s body.⁴ To the contrary, unpacking this detail, dwelling upon this episode rather than skimming over it, only accentuates its obscenity. The reference to breasts and to puppies, particularly at such an inappropriate moment and in the memoir of a woman deserving far more professional treatment, may at first seem to be the source of our discomfort, but further exploration of this line reveals its more profound violation of what is deemed proper to human representation. Not simply obscene, it becomes in Michel de Certeau’s terms “ob-scene,” or precisely that which cannot be represented. The scene itself becomes impossible to read definitively, functioning as what Certeau calls an “unscriptable” moment in the text, or what we refer to more commonly as “unspeakable” when a tragedy proves too powerful to ever forget. Understood within this context, Godwin’s depiction of Wollstonecraft’s bodily decline emerges as far from callous, but rather as a rare late eighteenth-century account of death that allows no consoling distance or denial of the subject’s loss. Similarly, if we turn uncomfortably from this detail, we risk missing the intimacy of this moment and how deeply Godwin’s accounting of Wollstonecraft’s life and death connects to the very body of her work.

The Work of Her Body

Nothing could be more natural than a scene of nursing following a birth. By the late eighteenth century, maternal breastfeeding was acquiring increasing acceptance among the general population of the upper and middle classes, and among Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s radical circle it had been firmly embraced. For Godwin’s most immediate readers, a scene of nursing would appear far from scandalous; it is rather a welcome sign of domestic order amid the chaos of Wollstonecraft’s disease and even a hopeful acknowledgement of a natural progression, Wollstonecraft’s body performing its proper work. As Toni Bowers notes, as early as 1750, “the desire to breastfeed was considered to be one of the attributes of ‘natural’ motherhood, part of virtuous womanhood itself.”⁵ A depiction...