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c h a p t e r t w o Forms of Attachment The portrayals of domestic arrangements in the novels of Wollstonecraft and Godwin are valuable for posing as a relevant question, What is the value of family? Is family or the values conventionally associated with family life the arrangement most conducive to life, independence, and the pursuit of justice? Wollstonecraft’s answer is more a≈rmative than Godwin’s, in e√ect assuming its value but under conditions yet to be realized. Those conditions focus on making family life more accommodating to women but involve cultivating the mental lives of each of its members, for the enhancement of women’s minds depends on and improves upon the minds and happiness of husbands and children. Godwin’s concerns over family remain fundamental. Family life not only weakens individual autonomy or, more to the point of his novels, is no match against male oversensitivity but also sanctions as humane the propensity to care most about one’s blood relations, a propensity that Godwin finds immoral on two counts. By substituting instinct for reasoned judgment, family feeling mistakes the basis of true attachment. By constricting rather than enlarging the sphere of one’s relations, it mistakes its aim and final end. At best, family life provides incentive and opportunity for individuals to exercise their feelings, but once they have attained su≈cient strength, those feelings should head outward into the world. But what are the alternatives? Part of the sticking power of family is its presumed naturalness and indispensability as the origin of human attachment, apart from which a self would be alone, unsocialized, bereft. Intriguing about this family’s e√orts to reform family from within is that they theorize the self as an object-in-relation, which for them encompasses relations to other persons and other things. Even their approach to the topic of self is relational— that is, associational. None addresses selfhood in its own right but only as other concepts—justice, equality, women, truth—occasion reflections on it (witness Godwin’s Thoughts on Man, or Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Forms of Attachment 67 Daughters). Moreover, none comes to view self apart from a relation to books or the forms of dissemination that their commitment to writing and truth entails. At first, recognition of the self’s proximity to writing stemmed from the reformist energies that drove Godwin’s and Wollstonecraft’s political writings , whereby change in society depended on changes to the conventional plots, genres, and institution of writing. But gradually these writers could not think reform—that is, could not posit a future—apart from a personhood disseminated by writing. There are powerful disincentives to embracing Godwin’s views on attachment . The priority he ascribes to reason in his accounts of either the individual or human modes of attachment has been discredited on general grounds by virtually every recent account of subject formation. The chief objection of feminist and poststructural schools of critique concerns the a≈rmed indifference of reason, both as the objective aim of its concept of self—that is, the grounds of its claims to universality—and the privileged trait of its psychology. As philosopher and personality, Godwin has long been seen as epitomizing the negative features of the latter aim. Most accounts of Godwin have some di≈culty warming to his coldness, especially his reactions to other family members ’ pain—famously, Mary’s anguish over the death of her children but also the misery that prompted Fanny to take her life.∞ Some also consider his personality a chief cause of that pain. My reason for re-examining Godwin’s ‘‘thoughts on man’’ is to show how his reason is more postenlightened and attuned to di√erence than he is normally given credit for and how his psychological indi√erence underlies a type of humanity intimately tied to justice. Promoting the two together underlies his lifelong e√orts to theorize attachment apart from sentiment and to perceive the subject as an object that is at once drawn toward others on the model of magnetism and linked to others in a causal—even signifying—chain. This object-subject, moreover, is not overly defensive about maintaining its di√erence from things. Godwin describes ‘‘person’’ as a ‘‘vessel,’’ a ‘‘mechanism,’’ a ‘‘link,’’ a ‘‘stone,’’ not so that it can be used by or use others—Godwin’s remains one of the strongest voices against instrumentalizing others—but so that ‘‘person’’ can be disarticulated...

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