Vindication (19 page)

When the Terror struck, Burke seemed vindicated. Yet during the earlier phase of the Revolution, from 1789 until a massacre in September 1792, its outcome looked promising to the circles of Dr Price and Joseph Johnson, as to most Britons. The streets of Paris were tranquil, according to Thomas Christie who, armed with introductions from Dr Price, spent the first six
months of 1790 in Paris analysing the new order as it was promulgated by the National Assembly. His
Letters on the Revolution of France
, published by Johnson in 1791, used facts to counter Burke, but nothing could budge the alarm once it took hold. Burke split the Whigs when he crossed the floor of the Commons to join Pitt's side, and the Whig leader, Fox, wept to see it. Scores of writers set out to answer Burke, the most famous being Tom Paine in 1791–2, who links monarchy with war-making, conflicts that ‘unmake men'–undo their natural benevolence: ‘Man will not be brought up with the savage idea of considering his species his enemy.' But ahead of Paine, in fact the first protest, within four weeks, came from Mary Wollstonecraft at the end of November 1790.

While writing
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
, Wollstonecraft stopped in the middle. She went to Joseph Johnson, who had been printing her work page by page as she wrote it, and told him she could not do it. Johnson's response was perfectly judged: he reassured her that he would be willing to ditch the printed sheets. Eased and piqued, Wollstonecraft resolved to press on.

The pulpit voice of Dr Price had taught her that truths ‘coming warm from the heart…find the direct road to it'. Her first target was the untruth of what we now call ‘spin': social wrongs wrapped in Burke's ‘flowers of rhetoric': ‘Words are heaped on words, till the understanding is confused.' Wollstonecraft identifies the dodges of rhetoric as the most dangerous enemy of human rights. Her answer is the dissenting voice of truth, above the puerile tit-for-tat of party debates that ‘narrow the understanding and contract the heart'. This is no hasty pamphlet. Wollstonecraft is taking on the whole edifice of power. Her adversarial heat appears to come off the pulse, but it's under control, pruning the millenarian dreams of Dr Price in favour of facts, logic, exposure.

A Vindication of the Rights of Men
exposes a politician as a vain, verbose, self-interested climber. In the form of a letter, it confronts Burke with his secret motives. ‘You have raised yourself by the exertion of abilities, and thrown the automatons of rank into the back ground,' she concedes. ‘But, unfortunately, you have lately lost a great part of your popularity: members [of Parliament] were tired of listening to declamation or had not
sufficient taste to be amused when you ingeniously wandered from the question…You were the Cicero of one side of the house for years; and then to sink into oblivion…was enough to…make you produce the impassioned
Reflections
.' Another of Burke's motives was to redeem his loss of face over his treatment of George III during the King's bout of madness in 1788–9. The Prince of Wales, manoeuvring to be king, had gained Burke's support with the bribe of the post of Paymaster-General. When Pitt introduced a bill to limit the Prince's powers, Burke had hurriedly collected statistics from mental institutions suggesting that, at the age of fifty-five, the King was unlikely to recover. Burke tried to convince the Commons that the hand of God was ‘hurling' George III from the throne. When the King recovered, Burke's self-interest did not go unnoticed in the press, and Wollstonecraft contrasts his tears for the French King with ‘unfeeling disrespect and indecent haste' in trying to oust his own. ‘You were so eager to taste the sweets of power, that you could not wait till time had determined whether a dreadful delirium would settle into a confirmed madness; but, prying into the secrets of Omnipotence, you thundered out that God had
hurled him from his throne
…And who was the monster whom Heaven had thus awfully deposed, and smitten with such an angry blow? Surely as harmless a character as Lewis XVIth…'

Wollstonecraft's aim was not to weigh Burke's conduct, she tells him–‘it is only some of your pernicious opinions that I wish to hunt out of their lurking holes; and to show you to yourself stripped of the gorgeous drapery [of rhetoric]'.

This is not recognisably a woman's voice, nor is it gentlemanly. Yet it's not a vulgar voice. In fact, it can't be placed according to the traditional registers of class or gender. It takes its eminence rather from the dignity of Reason holding up a mirror to irrational sentiment. Burke has no tears, she notes, for men taken by violence to fight wars, nor for people who can hang for stealing £5; his tears are reserved for ‘the downfall of queens'. She cites his demand that the poor ‘must respect that property of which they cannot partake', and look for justice in the afterlife. ‘This is contemptible hard-hearted sophistry, in the specious form of…submission to the will of Heaven,' Wollstonecraft retorts. ‘It is, Sir,
possible
to render the poor
happier in this world, without depriving them of the consolation you gratuitously grant them in the next.'

Burke opens the way to an attack on laws that put property before morality. Should ecclesiastical revenues, extorted in times long past, continue in the hands of the clergy ‘merely to preserve the sacred majesty of Property inviolate…'? To politicians, ‘an abolition of the infernal slave trade would not only be unsound policy, but a flagrant infringement of the laws (which are allowed to have been infamous) that induced the planters to purchase their estates'. Slavery on these estates ‘outrages every suggestion of reason and religion' and is a ‘stigma on our nature'.

The tide of her eloquence rises as she comes to the current issue of the slave trade. ‘Is it not consonant with justice, with the common principles of humanity, not to mention Christianity, to abolish this abominable traffic.' While Burke mourns the pageant of the French aristocracy, ‘the lash resounds on the slaves' naked sides…Such misery demands more than tears.' Nowhere is her eloquence more affecting than at this point where, dramatically, words appear to fail, and the reader stops short at two lines of silent dashes.

A Vindication of the Rights of Men
was published anonymously at the low price of 1s 6d, half the cost of Burke's pamphlet. All the best journals of the day discussed it. The author, aged thirty-one, sent a copy to the sixty-year-old historian Catharine Macaulay, who said how it pleased her that the
Rights of Men
‘should have been written by a woman and thus to see my opinion of the powers and talents of the Sex in your person so early verified'. Wollstonecraft also sent a copy to Dr Price in Hackney, and though sick and near to death, he replied on 17 December that he had ‘not been surprized to find that a composition which he has heard ascribed to some of our ablest writers, appears to come from Miss Wolstonecraft. He is particularly happy in having such an advocate; and he requests her acceptance of his gratitude for the kind and handsome manner in which she has mentioned him.'

 

A newcomer, William Godwin, appeared at Johnson's table on 13 November 1791. He looked pale, with thin, pale hair, a long, straight nose with an
enquiringly tilted tip, and a pursed mouth–its slightly jutting lower lip belied the paleness of his presence. Talk turned to Voltaire and religion. Wollstonecraft would not have agreed with Godwin's atheism, and a quarrel developed that spoilt the dinner. She was at this time writing a larger, more daring book than her
Vindication of the Rights of Men
called
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
. Godwin had little interest in women's emergence, and had come, that evening, to meet Paine who was due to leave for France.

‘I had little curiosity to see Mrs Wollstonecraft',
*
Godwin said, ‘and a very great curiosity to see Thomas Paine.' Paine turned out to be rather quiet; Mary, not. ‘I…heard her, very frequently when I wished to hear Paine,' Godwin repeated.

He had glanced at the first
Vindication
, ‘displeased as literary men are apt to be, with a few offenses against grammar and other minute points of composition'–the common response of a thinker who sights a woman of no importance advancing on his territory. (Virginia Woolf spoofed such rebuffs when she pictures the dismay of an educated man to find the housemaid browsing in his library and Cook composing a Mass in B Minor.) Godwin was three years older than Mary, a bachelor aged thirty-five, who earned his living by the skill of his pen. He was hardworking, prolific, and soon to formulate ideas of political justice that were to make him the leading radical thinker for his own and the next generation. The Romantics didn't have to be revolutionaries (as Byron, for instance, was not) to respect the stand Godwin took against the injustice of power. His arguments were rational to the point of coldness–not a man to cultivate disciples, though he had them. Godwin prided himself that though he disagreed with ‘Mrs Wollstonecraft', he did grant her independence of mind. It annoyed him to find this act of justice was not reciprocated. ‘Mrs Wollstonecraft', he heard, made it known that she disliked him. He would have condoned disagreement, but dislike was irrational. When they met two or three times in the course of 1792 they agreed no better.

The second
Vindication
(published in January 1792 with the author's
name) asks legislators to turn their attention to women, demanding ‘JUSTICE for one-half of the human race'. The French constitution of 1791 did away with aristocratic privilege in the name of the Rights of Man, but denied women equal citizenship. Following a
Declaration of the Rights of Woman
by French feminist Olympe de Gouges in 1791, Wollstonecraft's
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
deplores the relegation of her sex to a state of ‘ignorance and slavish dependence', encouraged to see themselves as silly creatures trapped in sensibilities.

An alternative in the late eighteenth century, the woman as preacher, was visible in society–not in Wollstonecraft's immediate milieu, but taken for granted by the Dissenters with whom she mixed. A memorable instance was Elizabeth Evans, George Eliot's aunt whom she would immortalise as the preacher on the green in
Adam Bede
. Her eloquence is of a different kind from doctrinal preaching, in that it is attentive to the lives of her listeners, and at the same time she displays none of the affectations of femininity: ‘there was no blush, no tremulousness,…no casting up or down of the eyelids, no compression of the lips, no attitude of the arms that said, “But you must think of me as a saint.” She held no book in her ungloved hands, but let them hang down lightly crossed before her, as she stood and turned her grey eyes on the people. There was no keenness in the eyes; they seemed rather to be shedding love than making observations; they had the liquid look which tells that the mind is full of what it has to give out, rather than impressed with external objects.' Such women, whose faith granted them a speaking role, did not formulate this as a cultural expression; it remained for Mary Wollstonecraft to shape public words to conscious effect.

As many before her, she scorned the wiles women had to adopt for the marriage market, and gallantry as the manipulations of male ascendancy. True civility, she believed, can only exist between equals. This sweeps aside a distinction between decent and rakish gallantry championed by the mid-century philosopher David Hume and other members of the Scottish Enlightenment who did, in fact, go some way towards Wollstonecraft's position. They did look to women as bearers of social sympathies, and concede women's apparent weakness as a consequence of external pressures
like education. To Wollstonecraft, though, gallantry in any form is condescension; it puts women in a false position–reality and rhetoric diverge–and she calls on ‘reasonable men' to eschew it. In February 1792 she told Everina of a proposal: ‘my book &c &c has afforded me an opportunity of settling
very
advantageous in the matrimonial line, with a new acquaintance; but entre nous–a handsome house and a proper man did not tempt me'.

The writer Joan Smith has pointed to the similar enclosures of land and women's bodies in the eighteenth century. Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act was designed to ensure the transmission of property to the rightful heir in the next generation. Women's bodies were therefore policed by laws preventing adultery. As Dr Johnson put it: ‘The chastity of women is of all importance, as all property depends on it.' From 1753 no marriage was legal except the formal, indissoluble one that controlled the passage of property. The Act outlawed all alternative forms of union: cohabitation by mutual agreement, like the partnerships of today, or clandestine marriage without parental consent, an escape route for a girl whose father or guardian was forcing on her a suitor of his choice. The new marriage laws were really property laws: a wife, her money and her children being the property a man gained in perpetuity–divorce was virtually impossible. A legal decision of 1782 entitled a husband to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than a thumb, and an earlier judgement by Sir Matthew Hale established that rape in marriage was no crime.

Wollstonecraft had witnessed the dangers of these laws in her father's licensed violence to her mother, and in her sister's indissoluble marriage to Meredith Bishop. ‘From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain,' she wrote in the
Vindication
of 1792, ‘most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind.' The injustice of English law for women was to be the subject of a sequel. In the meantime, she questioned the association of morality with women's subordinate behaviour and sexual reputation, as a misconception of morality itself–the focus on women's sins and virtues deflecting attention from a wider morality of tolerance and compassion ignored by those in power.