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1 Making Public Love
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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c h a p t e r o n e Making Public Love We must then woo philosophy chez vous ce soir, n’est-ce pas; for I do not like to lose my Philosopher even in the lover. Mary Wollstonecraft to William Godwin, 15 September 1796 Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin are famous for their problems making love. Di√erent kinds of things troubled each of them, but both of their lives and careers were shaped by fallout over the ways that they made love as a textual and sexual activity. Wollstonecraft’s problems were more conventional, in part because she loved more readily. From start to finish, her writing life was dictated by the imperative to reformulate love so that experiences of it no longer defeat women. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) goes the farthest in denouncing love and its enthusiasts, but her first novella, Mary, a Fiction (1788), joins her posthumous novel, The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798), in delineating the di≈culties for women that attend loving the wrong man. Her so-called personal life tells the same story at least twice, with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay, before promising a happier outcome with William Godwin. Even then, the promise was short-lived; indeed, the consequences of making love to a more plausible man were no less lethal. The critical reception of Wollstonecraft still identifies love as a major stumbling block in her life/writing, highlighting discrepancies between head and heart, theory and practice, saying and doing, dying and generating. Ever since her death, Wollstonecraft ’s feminist credentials have been seen as severely compromised by the passion—and the variety of passions—with which she lived her life.∞ Godwin raises less conventional problems because he approached love with such declared ambivalence. Until Wollstonecraft, his treatment of the topic was either so vague or superficial that it occasioned little comment. His love for and marriage to Wollstonecraft caused some initial troubles, owing espe- 24 Revising Family cially to his clear condemnation of marriage as an unjust, degrading, and monopolistic institution in the Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793), but, after some negative comment, the public was willing enough to let him get on with his life and work.≤ Where the public drew the line was at his most explicit composition as a married man, his Memoirs of the Author of ‘‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’’ (1798), written as a loving commemoration of Wollstonecraft just months after her death from childbirth. The major outrage here was that, in recounting her life, he published all the illicit details of Wollstonecraft’s personal history, including her love for Fanny Blood, fantasized ménage à trois with the Fuselis, her bastard daughter, Fanny Imlay, two attempts at suicide out of despair over Gilbert Imlay, the intimate gynecological details surrounding her death, and, in so doing, ruined her reputation for generations.≥ His credibility as lover su√ers to this day. My concern is not to restore his reputation as lover but rather to examine its formative impact on his life and career. Observing this draws attention to two of his favorite conceptual maneuvers: redrawing the boundaries between private and public in a way that essentially dissolves the former realm, and approaching attachment as an outcome of reading. In the latter domain, especially, he expressed fidelity to Wollstonecraft. Even before they knew or loved each other, Wollstonecraft and Godwin each identified heterosexual love as a major impediment to their visions of social perfectibility. For both, perfectibility required achieving a society that is committed to truth and that serves and preserves the independence of the individual. For both, attaining this entailed re-educating society about the importance of freedom of thought, and therefore of education, to the strength and security of any society. For reasons that stemmed from the gender inequities of then-current social relations, Wollstonecraft viewed love as the primary impediment to autonomy, especially in the case of women, whereas Godwin considered love as one of several obstacles. At the same time, the aspects of love that Wollstonecraft censured are more restricted than those that Godwin identified, her target being passionate heterosexual love, especially as it deforms the minds and prospects of women. Otherwise, Wollstonecraft usually construes love for family and children as rational feelings, as women’s chief contribution to society because one of their only means of enhancing perfectibility.∂ Women’s amorous preoccupations, in contrast, render them superficial, fanciful, mindless, and...