Vindication (11 page)

Rising out of this book is the portrait of a professional woman. Though Wollstonecraft draws on her experience, it's not a self-portrait, more a possibility. Here is her first attempt at the alternative life plot that could bring into being an exemplar of her sex. The first thing she learns at her mother's breast is the ‘warmest glow of tenderness'; and the next most important lessons go back to ‘The Nursery', the title of the first chapter. Unlike Mary, the model girl is not subject to excessive restraint in the nursery; affection calls out her ‘amiable propensities'. This loved child becomes a reader from her earliest years, searching out books that improve her whole being. She cultivates the intelligence to judge for herself, ignoring the craven chorus of those around her and dissociating her sensibility from fictional heroines ‘so different from nature'. Later,
Northanger Abbey
would mock the gush and tremors of girls who imitate fictional heroines. Wollstonecraft precedes Jane Austen when she dissociates genuine sensibility from affectation: ‘those who imitate it must make themselves very ridiculous'. Discipline is not imposed from above; it grows spontaneously from the secure ritual of the nursery, encouraging the responsiveness of the small child. Wollstonecraft in no way slights the domestic character of women–traditional achievements in nurture and emotional literacy are the heart of her model–but the outcome of training is realistic self-reliance, displacing the old model of passive dependence.

One of the hardest trials, Wollstonecraft warns in a chapter on ‘Love', is the single woman's irrational susceptibility to unsuitable men. At twenty-seven, her advice is tough, born of her own disappointments with Joshua Waterhouse and Neptune Blood: ‘The passion must be rooted out, or continual excuses that are made will hurt the mind.' Wollstonecraft's confiding manner is free of the loftiness of men's advice books, which took it upon themselves to school females in proper femininity, though ostensibly
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
belongs to that genre. An editorial note to
excerpts printed in the
Lady's Magazine
commends their ‘many judicious observations'.

Daughters' education had not always been quite as constricted as in the era of advice books. Katherine Parr, the last of Henry VIII's wives, was the daughter of a learned mother, published two books, and dared to debate with the King on risky questions of theology–nearly costing herself a horrible death when Henry began to fume: ‘A good hearing it is, when women become such clerks, and much to my comfort to come in mine old age to be taught by my wife.' The intellectual training of Elizabeth I made study fashionable for aristocratic women, especially in the circle around Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (sister of the poet Sir Philip Sidney).

In the seventeenth century during the English Civil War ‘bold impudent huswives' emerged, and ‘preacheresses' who would ‘prate' an hour or more, some sanctioned by Dissenting sects like the Quakers and Levellers. Charles I employed a learned woman, Basua Makin, to teach his children, but at the licentious court of Charles II women were treated as toys and their standing declined. In the 1660s Basua Makin said that a female scholar was looked on like a strange comet that bodes mischief. In
The Female Vertuosos
(1693) Sir Maurice Meanwell complains that ‘now a-days Wives must Write forsooth, and pretend to Wit'. His sister Catchat protests that women's wit is innate, not pretended. ‘'Tis the partial, and foolish Opinion of Men, brother, and not our Fault hath made it ridiculous nowadays.' Catchat is in fact ridiculed as a single woman past her first youth who is out to catch a man. Sir Maurice: ‘A woman's wit was always a Pimp to her Pleasures.'

During the eighteenth century advice or courtesy books, stressing obedience and manners, became increasingly popular with the rising middle classes. These books are wordy and leaden beside Wollstonecraft's, whose briskness is deliberate: a counter to the ‘affected' style of others' advice, ‘designed to hunt every spark of nature out of [girls'] composition'. Wollstonecraft said she would ban such books on the grounds of style alone. Her emphasis on domestic training does not rule out public life. She believes that nursery instincts like tenderness, if empowered by the right
training to think and act, could one day redeem the world. The enormity of this claim widens the contrast between forbidding advice (the most influential advisers being Lord Halifax in 1688 and Dr James Fordyce in 1766) and the moral independence of the young Wollstonecraft.
*

Women a little older than Wollstonecraft–those born in the early to mid-1740s–tended to concur in the subordination of their sex. Mrs Barbauld, a writer from Newington Green, who had run a school in Suffolk, laid it down that girls ‘must often be content to know that a thing is so, without understanding the proof'. They ‘cannot investigate; they may remember'. Wollstonecraft's ideas for girls' education burgeoned in a context where millions of girls were taught to memorise, not to think. She mocks one of Mrs Barbauld's poems, a cascade of clichés which likens women to ‘DELICATE' flowers, free from toil, ‘born for pleasure and delight ALONE'. Mrs Barbauld's concluding lesson is that ‘Your BEST, your SWEETEST empire is–TO PLEASE.' Even Hannah More, a purveyor of popular pieties and leading member of the ‘Blues', believed that the ‘bold, independent, enterprising spirit' encouraged in boys should be suppressed in girls. Wollstonecraft recognised that it was through such misteaching that ‘daughters' internalised their subjection. Education was therefore central to her message.

 

At the time she completed the book, a new phase loomed. The Bloods had invited her to live with them in Ireland, but she refused: ‘I must be independant and earn my own subsistence, or be very uncomfortable.' Nor could she forget her debts: she had hoped to save, but by early July, after two or three weeks of her Spartan regime, saw she could not. To pay off her debts, the only course was to become a governess. Dr Price, with the help of Mrs Burgh, alerted a friend at Eton, the Revd John Prior, an assistant master at the school, where he lived with his wife. Recommended by the Priors, Mary had several offers, amongst them a post in Wales and another with a noble family, the Kings, in Ireland. This last offer seemed hand
some: £40 a year. (It's been suggested that this was a poor sum, reflecting Mary's educational limitations. But we need only compare it with the £30 accepted half a century on in the late 1830s by Charlotte Brontë who, as a governess, could offer French and highly developed skills in art as well as teaching experience.) Mary took up the Irish offer. Her plan was to use half her salary against her debts. Paying off £20 a year meant that she would have to work at least four years, and this was not to be the end of it, for she had a further plan to support Bess. Years of dependence seemed to stretch ahead as she sighed over the prospect of social isolation between employers on the one hand and servants on the other: the usual position of the governess. Mary Wollstonecraft was coolly realistic. The most she hoped for was civility.

As summer waned she took lessons in French, and looked through her clothes in dismay–they were worn, unequal to a proper appearance amongst grandees. Miss Mason came for two days to help her make a coat (‘I do not know what I should have done without her,' Mary said), while Mrs Cockburn, having won the contest for lodgers, could afford the conciliatory gift of a rather weird blue hat. Regretting the modish gown Skeys had promised, Mary was driven to ask George if he could send her fabric for an old pattern Mrs Blood could supply.

Beneath this wave of activity rolling her towards Ireland were undertows tugging her back to the deep sea of inertia. Some unkindness could make her turn, sick, from social ties. One night her friend seemed to beckon her towards death like Hamlet drawn to the ghost of the beloved dead: ‘I dreamt the other night I saw my poor Fanny, and she told me I should soon follow her[.] I am sick of the world, “'tis an unweeded garden”–…I want a friend[.] I am now
alone
and my heart not expanded by the usual affection preys on itself. I can scarce find a name for the apathy that has seized me–I am sick of every thing under the sun–…all our pursuits are vain…' Part of this sickness was self-despair. Repeatedly she questioned her affections, ‘which are too apt to run into extremes'–apt to carry her ‘beyond the pitch which wisdom prescribes', then fall into ‘apathy'. Two things she trusted to carry her through: she held by her understanding, and her faith never faltered: ‘He has told us not only that
we
may inherit
Aeternal life but that
we
shall be
changed
if we do not perversely reject the offered Grace.'

A lawsuit to do with a ‘
lapsed legacy'
remained unsettled in late August. Ned had brought a court case against a man called Roebuck, the senior partner in a firm of insurance brokers called Roebuck & Henckell of 49 Threadneedle Street, for an annuity or trust which the Wollstonecrafts claimed was theirs. It's likely this was the ‘fortune' Mary spoke of losing in her late teens–what she and her sisters had loaned to their father during the financial ‘storm' associated with the family's move to Wales in 1776–7. An outcome in favour of the Wollstonecrafts would wipe out the bulk of Mary's debts–she would need to remain a governess for no more than a year. Correspondence flew back and forth without much result; Ned was rude and unhelpful; the day school went on through August; the pupils teased their distracted teacher; and then, in the midst of her daily life, Fanny's image would blot it out.

Her debts pressed on her conscience: certain people could not wait for what they had lent her. One day, when a creditor was rude, her confidence as a teacher faded into the squirm of an unprotected female. It seems that Dr Price absorbed certain of these debts. ‘He has been uncommonly friendly to me,' she told Bess. ‘I have the greatest reason to be thankful–for my difficulties appeared insurmo[u]ntable.' Mrs Burgh, too, showed endearing solicitude, inviting Mary and Hewlett to dine, and offering a further loan to set Mary's mind at rest about some remaining creditors, including the vulnerable Hinxman. ‘Mrs Burgh has been as anxious about me as if I had been her daughter–I have paid all my trifling debts and bought all the things I think absolutely necessary–,' she reported to Bess. ‘You have no conception of Mrs Burgh's kindness.'

As she packed her bag, and took leave of the faithful Mason and benevolent Mrs Burgh, it was the end of her Newington years–underlined by the death of Mrs Price that same September. For Dr Price, too, was leaving the Green. ‘I am at present literally speaking on the wing,' she wrote to Bess at the end of the month. Her farewell letter was ‘the last…from this Island'.

 

The spring and summer of 1786 saw the end of the community of women, and the start of her writing life. This resurgence after loss, failure, mourning marks the inception of a new story. It's not her father's narrative of moving from place to place, nor the Bloods' narrative of running away, nor–still tempting to Mary–the eighteenth-century tragedy of female independence: Clarissa dying in protest against her abuse. For Mary would repeatedly find the strength to go on in the face of disaster. In doing so, she was never idle and ever mindful what she owed to others–a responsible alternative to persisting master-plots of greed and power. As a friend, Mary groans over loss; as educator and writer, loss turns to gain. Her book confirms her vocation as an educator, for though she never taught in school again, everything she wrote from this time was driven by the transforming passion of the born teacher.

It's often assumed that greatness is produced by circumstance. We say that domestic violence gave rise to rebellion; we say that adversity in Mary's late teens set her apart as a middle-class girl who must work to survive; yet neither, on its own, can explain greatness. In fact, these conditions usually produce victims like Mary's mother or frustrated strugglers like her sisters. It's impossible to explain genius, but certainly, in the case of Mary Wollstonecraft, it was not thrust upon her. She would describe herself later as ‘a strange compound of weakness and resolution!' When it came to resolution, she showed extraordinary vigour; her groans were the obverse of daring, in part its cost in genuine suffering, in part a protective shield for missions too embryonic to expose. These don't appear in her letters, where she relieves her feelings during the hard times she certainly endured. In reading her letters, then, we must not allow the volume of the groans to muffle the rising voice of an educator: a voice designed to be heard beyond the range of one failing school on a village green in 1786.

Though her
Thoughts
were delivered in the acceptable guise of innumerable guides to girls' education, the message itself cut through the feminine model of weakness and passivity. Mary's new post now offered an opportunity to try her alternative model on three young members of the Irish aristocracy: the eldest daughters of Lord and Lady Kingsborough.

T
he first stage of Mary's journey to Ireland took her to Eton College in Windsor. Stepping down from the coach early in October 1786, she was welcomed by Mr Prior who had taught classics in the school since 1760. He was the Master of a red house opposite the west doorway of the chapel, and his family also owned a boarding-house on the south-east corner of Keate's Lane, where Mary may have stayed. Orders were to await the arrival of George and Robert King, aged sixteen and thirteen, the eldest sons of her employers, who would travel with her post-chaise via the Welsh port of Holyhead to Dublin, and from there to Mitchelstown Castle, County Cork, another hundred and thirty miles to the south.

At the time, it was not uncommon for boys to be away from school during term. A message came that the Kings were ‘actually on the road' to Eton; they were expected hourly. But day after day passed. Possibly, they had instructions to escort the new governess, a proper attention to a young woman about to cross into unknown territory. Certainly, this explanation never occurred to Mary, accustomed as she was to move about alone. For a traveller to Portugal who had braved the Bay of Biscay, the Irish Sea presented no fears.

Waiting over two or three weeks for boys who never appeared, she became uneasy, then impatient and put out by the strange ways of Etonians. All appeared to ‘move in the same round', permitting no boy to
‘fly off to any other sphere'. Two of the boys in Mr Prior's house were younger sons of the King family: Edward who had been at the school for five years, together with his elder brothers, and Henry who had joined them in 1785. Laughter at private jokes exploded around her. ‘Witlings abound,' she wrote to Everina on 9 October, ‘and
puns
fly about like crackers, tho' you would scarcely guess they had any meaning in them, if you did not hear the noise they create–.' Wit and politeness appeared to have banished love, ‘–and without it what is society?' In tears over a ‘tender unaffected letter' from Everina, she proposed a visit from her sister, and then, when Mrs Prior could not accommodate Everina as well, Mary almost fainted and had to be nursed. Depressed to be once more on course as a subordinate, she found herself in the nursery of this ruling class, and excluded by its lingo. Eton alerted her to her place as foreigner in her own country.

Two weeks were enough to see how the school of that day reared a warped specimen with an undeveloped heart. Boys, removed from home to school, developed instead their physical strength, competitive aggression and caste solidarity, preparing them to wrest an empire from inferior races. Future rulers were schooled in Spartan conditions to endure hardships far from home. Mary Wollstonecraft is already a revolutionary, original, far-sighted, when she identifies the problem as domestic atrophy: the disempowering and exclusion of the mother. In theory, the House Master and Mrs Prior provided a substitute home; in practice, Mary saw, this didn't work: the boys were repressed with the Master, and rampant the moment they left his presence. After a silent dinner they would swallow a hasty glass of wine, ‘and retire', she observed, ‘to ridicule the person or manners of the very people they have just been cringing to'. The masters seemed indifferent to morals. Mary overheard them saying that ‘they only undertook to teach Latin and Greek; and that they had fulfilled their duty, by sending some good scholars to college'.

Public schools were rough places in the eighteenth century. Boys of the upper classes were trained to numb sensitivity to bullies and defer to their seniors, biding their time until they could take their turn as top dogs. Part of the ethos was caste loyalty: not to ‘sneak'–not to expose the defects of the system to outsiders. This was still the brutal period before Dr Arnold,
headmaster of Rugby, introduced fair play (‘cricket') and chastity as attributes of manliness in the 1820s–and chastity, through those long, shut-up nights in dormitories, was not to be expected. Boarding-schools, Mary said, were ‘hotbeds' of furtive sex. They pushed boys into ‘libertinism…hardening the heart as it weakens the understanding'. She deplored the ‘vice' of senior boys, linked as it was to ‘the system of tyranny and abject slavery' of younger boys.

Her voice is so forthright that it's easy to miss what she holds back: a hint of a sea change at the age of twenty-seven during these weeks of enforced idleness. She has ‘so many new ideas of late', she tells Everina, she ‘can scarcely arrange them'. She is plunged ‘in a
sea
of thoughts'.

 

On the packet to Dublin, she fell in with a clergyman fresh from New College, Oxford. Henry Dyson Gabell, aged twenty-two, was bound for the household of John O'Neill of Shane's Castle near Antrim, where he was to serve as tutor. Two years later he would enter on duties as an Anglican priest in Wiltshire. The men who appealed most strongly to Mary in these early years were alert to the soul. They did not impose the falsities of gallantry. Like Dr Johnson, Dr Price and the Revd Mr Hewlett, young Gabell heard ‘the
tone
of melancholy', a balm after her sojourn with the witlings. One issue she longed to discuss was why the deity–‘the Searcher of hearts'–should burden people (like herself) with a sensitivity that seemed to have no use in society, and only complicated the effort to ready the soul for heaven. As with Dr Johnson, it didn't put her off that Gabell's politics were opposed to hers. In the late 1790s he would use the pulpit to preach counter-revolution. In the meantime, he took the view that the masses should be kept down in ‘fat contented ignorance'.

‘The appetites will rule if the mind is
vacant
,' Mary argued.

Gabell countered that our reasoning is often fallacious and our knowledge conjectural.

Mary had to concede this. But it seemed to her also true that ‘flights into an obscure region open the faculties of the soul'. Afterwards, when she had to mute her mind to some extent in the company of Right Honourables, she recalled this opportunity to flex her eloquence.

In Dublin she was welcomed by Mrs Blood, George Blood and a family
friend called Betty Delane who had known Fanny. It was a relief to find old Blood at last in comfortable circumstances. After a few days, a civil and unexpectedly kind butler from the castle arrived to escort Mary on the long last lap of her journey. She would have enjoyed it, she said, had she not been in tears all the way at the prospect of the journey's end. Dr Price's talk of ‘aristocratical tyranny and human debasement' had warned her what she would find.

 

She approached her destination along a road that ran parallel to the northern slopes of the Galtee Mountains–a boundary to the Kingsboroughs' lands. It was a landscape of peaks and drops, with torrents of water falling between birch and whitethorn trees on the mountainsides. After six or seven miles the road turned over a hill, opening a vista of their other side. Mary looked down on a long plain, bounded to the south by the furred, dark-green tops of the Knockmealdown Mountains. At the centre of this plain, fed by its rivers, was Mitchelstown.

They were approaching the spreading elegance of a stately home. It had a square Palladian centre with wings on either side, a massiveness stretched out rather than high–height was provided by the position of the house on a rise. It backed on to a gorge with a river below. In the fourteenth century and for the next three hundred years a castle had provided a lookout over the surrounding countryside. It had been destroyed (except one tower) and rebuilt in 1645 with an upstairs gallery seventy feet long, overlooking the Galtees. Lord Kingsborough had recently added a storey and moved what had once been the adjacent medieval village of Villa Michel, or Baile Mhisteala, to a safer distance, the present site of Mitchelstown. All that remained of the old village was a graveyard, its mossy, rain-washed stones there to this day.

Between what continued to be called the ‘castle' and the town–between, that is, the Protestant Ascendancy and Catholic natives–was the buffer of a spreading Georgian square of two-storey houses, named Kingston College.
*
Protestant occupants had been brought in to fill this buffer zone nine years prior to Mary's arrival.

As she drove through the new-built town, on through the new square, and reached the gates in the wall that surrounded the castle, she felt cut off in a setting contrary, she said, ‘to every feeling of my soul'. It struck her as a prison: ‘I entered the great gates with the same kind of feeling as I should have if I was going into the Bastile.' The prison in Paris had come to stand for an oppressive regime; its thick walls that made it impossible for an inmate to be heard meant live burial: walls rearing up as a frontier between being and nonexistence. Mary's apprehension of a Bastille appears excessive–the Wollstonecraft proneness to moaning, and moaning here in the midst of luxury–but apprehension did have some basis in North Cork, a settler part of Ireland with a long history of violence, where tension between rulers and ruled was reflected in the layout: the distanced town and the containment of the castle with its new-built barrier of a ten-to-twelve-foot wall.

In contrast with its austere façade, the interior of the castle was ornate, with elaborate plaster mouldings. The Rape of Proserpina decorated the ceiling of the hall. The butler would have conducted Mary upstairs to the drawing-room and gallery on the first floor. Waiting to greet her was Lady Kingsborough; her stepmother Mrs FitzGerald, with three grown-up daughters; and what appeared to Mary a ‘
host
' of Ascendancy ladies. All were examining her minutely.

As a ‘solemn kind of stupidity' froze her ‘very blood', the children, her charges, presented themselves. ‘Wild Irish' was her first impression. The eldest, Margaret, was fourteen or fifteen, tall for her age, with a high pointed nose and eyes so pale as to appear almost colourless. Her brown hair fanned out on either side of her face, frizzled in fashionable disarray and ending in locks curled about her neck. Her gaze had the directness of a girl who nerves herself not to fear. Next came her prettier sister, Caroline, aged twelve; and last, Mary who was only six, with blue eyes and abundant dark-brown locks like her mother's. The three had planned to drive out this English governess, or at least amuse themselves by giving her a hard time. She would be shut up in the schoolroom with these aliens from whom she could expect little mercy for her meagre French and nonexistent accomplishments. It crossed her mind that the Priors had oversold her.

After these none too promising introductions, she had to contemplate the parade and diversions of high life. Politeness required her to hear this set ‘decide with stupid gravity, some trivial points of ceremony, as a matter of the last importance', and join in jollities about the getting of husbands. It was an effort to hide her dislike. Save me from the ‘volubles,' she sighed a few months later, longing for time to think and read.

She did not see the castle in Georgian terms of ceremonial, grace and order; she questioned its deference to custom and public opinion. Her faith went beyond the formal Anglicanism which, above all, defined membership of the Ascendancy; to her, faith meant something close to her idea of genius: reaching beyond the frontiers of consciousness towards divine intentions–the sort of talk she continued to exchange in letters to Henry Gabell. She was in her element with clergymen who could sift the higher claims of the moral life, or hear the sweet, sad music of humanity. Lady Kingsborough was charitable, more so than most, but had not the remotest notion of the interior drama–soulfulness crossed with Hamlet–in which her governess specialised. It upset the latter, in the way it embittered Hamlet–and she was always quoting Hamlet–to have to hide her true self. Without losing her professional effectiveness, Mary nursed ‘that within which passes show'. There were, anyway, no exact words for her drama of imprisonment or invisibility. Here again is a glimpse of a new form of life, sprouting apart from the flower of the Ascendancy, in the concealed ground of Mary's gloom. No amount of consideration from her employers could make up for their failure to know who, in this sense, she was.

 

Her room at the back of the castle looked out across the gorge and dark hills to the Galtees in the distance. This prospect and its solitude would please her in the months to come, but that first night she felt the common isolation of the governess, set apart from her employers and from the servants dancing to a fiddle below.

The next day or soon after, Mary was called to an interview with Lady Kingsborough who lay in bed with a sore throat. The first sight that met her eyes was numbers of dogs reclining on cushions. Throughout the
interview, their mistress caressed and watched them with the most assiduous care, lisping out ‘the prettiest French expressions of ecstatic fondness in accents that had never been attuned by tenderness'. Her display of French prodded Mary's weak spot. So did her regret that Mary could not teach ‘fancy work'. Lady Kingsborough had assured Mrs Prior who in turn had reassured Mary of Lady K's opinion that preceding governesses had neglected the children's minds, attending only to the ornamental part of education which ‘ought ever to be a secondary consideration'. Where that message had soothed Mary, the present about-face was calculated to deflate assurance, and she was further disconcerted to find her ladyship's eloquence equal to her own. Lady Kingsborough's manner of condescending to give an opinion reminded her disagreeably of the Revd Hewlett's overbearing wife. Her ladyship was clever as well as pretty, and civil enough to wish every attention should be paid to the new governess. Together with Mrs FitzGerald, she set an example of consideration the castle followed. ‘Every part of the family behave with civility–nay, even with kindness,' Mary had to admit when she had been there a little over a week.

Yet though she was surprised into gratitude, instinctively she distrusted Lady Kingsborough. The wife, mother and human creature seemed swallowed up by a rouged and ‘factitious' femininity. Mary saw her as a product of ‘an improper education' who could utter ‘nonsense' in infantile accents ‘to please the men who flocked round her'. Again, as in Bath and Windsor, Mary had to put a lock on thoughts and feelings if she was to retain her post. She practised forbearance, and banished the ‘contending strain' from her voice. ‘I am thought to have an angelic temper,' she comments wryly to Everina during her third week. Being angelic took its toll: her mind languished, her responses were blunted–replaced by indifference. The buzz of good-humoured attention to whatever she had to say, even the wonder she aroused, gave no pleasure–she was not flattered by the admiration of people whose judgement was ‘of the grosser kind'. Two feelings remained acute: irritation with her own sex–the boisterous, unmeaning laughter and bickerings of ‘silly females'–and persistent alienation: ‘I am an exile–and in a new world.'