SOURCE: Hust, Karen. “In Suspect Terrain: Mary Wollstonecraft Confronts Mother Nature in Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.” Women's Studies 25 (1996): 483-505.

[In the following essay, Hust examines Mary Wollstonecraft's perception of nature in her travel writings about Scandinavia's rugged and rocky coasts.]

The landscape [or representation of a natural scene] is not so much a paradise to long for … as it is a mirror that reflects our own cultural image. We now view landscape photographs, both past and present, much like the shadows on the walls of Plato's cave. They are artifacts of what we think we know about the land, and how we have come to know it—the language of an individual's experience in his or her time, and at their best a form of commentary.

Mark Klett, 72-3

Over two hundred years ago, in June of 1795, Mary Wollstonecraft and her infant daughter boarded a ship bound for Sweden. Wollstonecraft, the English radical reviewer and polemicist for the rights of women, was on the trail of a deal that had gone bad for her smuggler lover, Gilbert Imlay.¹ But while Wollstonecraft helped Imlay, she also suspected that he was unfaithful, and she needed a way to earn the money to leave him. So on her trip to Sweden she was planning to write a popular book of her travels.² On a deeper level, I'll argue, she was hoping for even more. Wollstonecraft hoped that her trip, and the resulting book, would help her rebuild the foundation of her moral and political philosophy.

That philosophy had been based in nature, in “a universe unified by basic natural principles” (Sapiro 77), and she shared it with others at the time who felt that natural law guaranteed individual rights. Wollstonecraft had spent two and a half years in France supporting the Revolution, but events of the recent Terror had severely shaken her faith. She had seen close friends sent to the guillotine in Robespierre's purge of the moderate Girondists. Mob riots and blood running in the city streets had dashed her belief in the Revolution's ability to restore a peaceful and uncorrupted social order grounded in “the natural and imprescriptible rights of man,” as the 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” had promised. She wrote not long afterward, “the horrors I had witnessed in France … cast a gloom over all nature” (A Short Residence 14). For Wollstonecraft and others like her who based their arguments for revolution on natural law, the resulting gloom was much more than a problem of mood.³

Wollstonecraft's journey to the sparsely-populated Scandinavian countryside at first might seem an escape from violence to pastoral simplicity. But in an important sense it was no escape at all. By sailing to Sweden, Wollstonecraft was figuratively heading once more into the breach. She was journeying, in effect, from one kind of wilderness to another: from a blood-soaked wilderness inside what had been the most civilized of European capitals, to a different kind of wilderness in the far north, on the frontier of civilization. Few tourists had ever ventured to Scandinavia's rocky coasts, and English geography textbooks rumored them to be the home of fantastic sea monsters—indeed, one of the tasks Wollstonecraft sets herself is to discover whether or not such monsters exist (134). In the rugged landscape and harsh life of the north, Wollstonecraft knew she would confront the fragile boundary between culture and nature, the same boundary she saw disintegrating in France.

Thus, when she composed her Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, Wollstonecraft was trying to come to terms with the emerging dilemma of the Revolutionary decade: if the worst, most brutal aspects of nature could suddenly appear in the middle of urbane Paris—if the Rousseauean golden age the Republic hoped to restore was in fact merely Hobbes's state of nature, where life is nasty, brutish and short—could a different kind of wilderness provide a solution to her doubts about nature's ability to ground and inspire an egalitarian society? Could a virgin land redeem nature's “implication in the ruinous processes of revolutionary change and betrayal?”⁴ In the end, Wollstonecraft's encounter with the sublime landscape she found in Sweden provided the materials for a new philosophical foundation. And in gathering these materials, Wollstonecraft also rebuilds important relations between women and nature that may well have implications for readers today. I submit that her journey can guide us to a better understanding of the role nature plays in society—and ultimately to a new synthesis of feminist and ecological criticism. To follow her, however, we must first untangle the historical, political and social threads of Wollstonecraft's thought.

LANDSCAPE AS BACKGROUND

As a radical, Wollstonecraft was worried that the Revolution had run disastrously off-track, and as an eighteenth-century feminist, she had a special interest in the way women and nature were often lumped together in the surrounding debates. Women were identified with the earth and animals in sermons, in art, in figures of speech and in politics—both conservative and radical. Rousseau, whose theories of human independence and perfectibility through reason had fueled the Revolution, had excluded women from such liberty, for “[b]y the very law of nature women are at the mercy of man's judgments” (Emile 364). Or, as a revolutionary newspaper more crudely put it in the voice of its male editor's female persona, la Mère Duchesne, “whenever we wanted to speak, they shut us up by saying to us ever so politely, ‘You're reasoning like a woman’; that is, more or less like a fucking animal.”⁵

Of course, women have always straddled the boundary between nature and culture in Western society. As the bearers of children, women participate both in the mysterious fertility of nature and in the process of socialization. But because, metaphorically speaking, our mothers' bodies are the soil in which we grow, women and nature have long been allied as the scapegoats for human mortality.⁶ Indeed, when it came to motherhood, most people in the 1790s thought the concepts Woman and Nature interchangeable. Since women were created to be mothers, they didn't need the rational abilities of men—women's special excellence was their kinship to spontaneous, generating nature. And if women's bodies planted them firmly in nature, their weak intellects only dimly took part in the world of culture. They were not to direct society; they were to serve it by bearing and nurturing children. Wollstonecraft derided a contemporary woman poet, who had claimed that women are like flowers:

Gay without toil, and lovely without art,
They spring to CHEER the sense, and GLAD the heart.
Nor blush, my fair, to own you copy these;
Your BEST, your SWEETEST empire is—to PLEASE.(7)

How can pleasing flowers be thinking human beings? Here, women may win an “empire,” so called, but Wollstonecraft knew that it was a vacant one. When she argued instead that girls should receive an education like their brothers', this rhetoric of Mother Earth blocked her way.

Moreover, Wollstonecraft quickly grasped the frightening subtext of this seemingly innocent floral metaphor in eighteenth-century thought. When people linked women and nature, they made women's bodies their code for the natural forces that they believed threatened civilization. Beautiful but dangerous, tenuously controlled at best, women were part of nature, and nature was the wanton consort of man, in need of the master's chastening and possessive hand. Augustan landscape description reflected this ideology. It rested on the three forms of real estate a man could enjoy—aesthetic, economic, and sexual—and the many interconnections between them. For example, Addison prescribed the gentleman's view of nature as a fantasy of unlimited power, where the “Polite Imagination” makes looking a particularly sensual form of owning, and turns all one surveys into a kind of seraglio:

[A] Man of a Polite Imagination … feels a greater Satisfaction in the Prospect of Fields and Meadows, than another does in the Possession. It gives him, indeed, a kind of Property in every thing he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated Parts of Nature administer to his Pleasures.

(Spectator No. 414)

Those who could afford it brought this theory home, using aggressive landscape gardening as a way to simultaneously take pleasure in nature's unruly femininity and assert their control as her master.⁸ Horace Walpole captured the mood of the era when he wrote of Capability Brown, garden designer to the rich and famous, that he “shall enjoy unsullied fame / For many a paradise regained” (qtd. in Fabricant 128). Landowners used male art to tame the feminine excesses of the material world, thereby restoring unfallen order and reclaiming Eve under their rule. Masculine management transformed what one writer had called “the ‘boils and warts, the pudenda of nature’ … into the purified and modestly concealed private parts of a restored Eden” (Fabricant 132, quoting Charles Cotten). For his talent in thus “binding and dressing nature's loose tresses,” Brown was known as “Lady Nature's second husband” (110).

Wollstonecraft spent her entire life opposing these attitudes. In her 1792 feminist manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she fought any identification between women and nature. There she wrote angrily that both conservative and radical men had used women's fertility—their link to nature—as an excuse to deny them other qualities and rights. Rousseau, for one, had rankled Wollstonecraft when he wrote, “[R]eason … how many questions are raised by this word! Are women capable of solid reasoning? Is it important that they cultivate it? Will they succeed in cultivating it? Is its cultivation useful for the functions which are imposed on them? Is it compatible with the simplicity that suits them?” (Emile 382). She responded curtly:

[R]eason must be the same in all, … Yet … the soul of woman is not allowed to have this distinction, and man, ever placed between her and reason, she is always represented as only created to see through a gross medium, and to take things on trust. … On this sensual error, for I must call it so, has the false system of female manners been reared, which robs the whole sex of its dignity, and classes the brown and fair with the smiling flowers that only adorn the land.

(142-3)

People like Rousseau mire women in the “gross medium” of material nature, and separate them from reason. Women then must receive abstract knowledge through men's intercession (just as in Paradise Lost Eve received the Angel's universal knowledge only through Adam). Yet, Wollstonecraft argued, if women have souls, they must share in reason. The definition of woman as purely material must be “a sensual error”—for it is an error that confines women to the sensual realm, and moreover, it is an error rooted in men's sensual desires, in “arguments dictated by a gross appetite” (155).

Wollstonecraft drew harsh criticism for challenging the normative definition of women's irrational and “sexual character.” In Richard Polwhele's 1798 poem “The Unsex'd Females,” he charges her with inciting “a female band despising NATURE'S law” (6):

Ah! once the female Muse, to NATURE true,
The unvalued store from FANCY, FEELING drew;
Won, from the grasp of woe, the roseate hours,
Cheer'd life's dim vale, and strew'd the grave with flowers.
But lo! where, pale amidst the wild, she draws
Each precept cold from sceptic Reason's vase;
Pours with rash arm the turbid stream along,
And in the foaming torrent whelms the throng.

(11-12)

Polwhele pictures Wollstonecraft's Muse unnaturally drawing precepts from Reason when she should be taking her material from “FANCY [and] FEELING.” Through this violation, the female Muse has separated herself from a certain type of landscape, from nature understood in conventional terms as a metaphor for human experience. Though “woe” stalks “life's dim vale,” the well-behaved feminine Muse can win “roseate hours” and even cheat death, causing flowers to bloom from the grave. True to the eighteenth-century view of “NATURE,” Polwhele's proper woman would guarantee humanity's rebirth by binding natural processes into a system defined by men's needs. But in preferring the cerebrally insulated vase of “sceptic Reason,” Wollstonecraft has exiled herself from that orderly landscape of gender distinction and now stands “pale amidst the wild,” directing the “turbid stream” that will drown mankind. The implication is that by disobeying nature, this Unsex'd Female has blasted the earth, bringing disorder into the world as Eve did in desiring knowledge unmediated by Adam. As we saw above in the ideology of landscape gardening, women are both identified with material nature and blamed for ruining that world when they aspire beyond it.⁹ Yet Wollstonecraft strips the flowery pretence from those who lumped women and nature together, and acidly asks to what purpose women were in the world—were they created simply “to procreate and rot?” (155). If “improvable reason is allowed to be the dignified distinction which raises men above the brute creation,” then women have been treated “not as a part of the human species” (80).

Wollstonecraft demanded a revolution in her society's views of women and nature in order that all people might realize their truly “natural” potential to build a better world, as she and others had hoped the French would do. With the openness of the early period of the Revolution, the time had come, she felt, when the “false system of female manners” could be replaced with the individual efforts of women to develop their faculties: “It is time to effect a revolution in female manners—time to restore to them their lost dignity” so they can help to “reform the world” (132). She had dedicated her Vindication to Talleyrand, the young Republic's Minister of Education, hoping he would support legislation to allow girls to enter state schools. In her letter of dedication she praises the French constitution for its principles of equality, from which, she says, her opinion “concerning the rights and duties of women seems to flow so naturally,” and urges that he put women in a position to help “advance, instead of retarding, the progress of those glorious principles” (85). He did not.

The French were not doing very well by the time Wollstonecraft left Paris. As food shortages and war put more and more stress on the factions competing in the vacuum of power, women's rights—still unspecified and precarious under the constitution and the Declaration—were increasingly restricted. Jacques-Louis David's Fountain of Regeneration, designed for the Festival of August 10, 1793, to celebrate the adoption of the new Jacobin constitution, aptly represented the place of women under this more specific document. On the rubble of the Bastille was built a statue of “Nature,” a massive woman with arms modestly crossed over her breasts, from which flowed a steady stream of water to refresh her people. In late October of that year, during the trial of Marie-Antoinette, a petitioner to the National Convention demanded “the abolition of all societies [political clubs] of women, because it is a woman who is responsible for the misfortunes of France.” The ensuing debate over women's access to public politics resulted in their exclusion based on “the private functions to which women are destined by nature.”¹⁰ And although the iconography of the Revolution had originally centered on the image of Liberty as a shining woman (Marianne), as the Terror began to overtake Paris, a different female image in newspapers and broadsides became the most common figure for people's alarm: a bloodthirsty woman breaking all bounds of human decency.¹¹ This new wave of popular association of women with both the maternal breast and bestial violence would only have confirmed Wollstonecraft's fears regarding the uses of the link between woman and nature.

Given this backlash, Wollstonecraft's approach in A Short Residence might surprise her readers today as much as it did at its publication in 1796. Not only did this new book abandon her stern polemical style for epistolary candor, but A Short Residence also allows nature to compete with its author for the status of main character. Readers who criticized the political philosopher of the Vindication were delighted to see Wollstonecraft embrace the Scandinavian landscape. To write of nature was consider tamer, more proper for a woman, than her previous polemical work. In her descriptions of landscape and the feelings it evoked in her, they credited Wollstonecraft with writing for the first time as a woman. Her friend Amelia Alderson explained:

I remember the time when my desire of seeing you was repressed by fear—but as soon as I read your letters from Norway, the cold awe which the philosopher has excited, was lost in the tender sympathy called forth by the woman. I saw nothing but the interesting creature of feeling and imagination.

(Letter of August 28, 1796, qtd. in Wardle 274)

William Godwin, who had been annoyed when he first met Wollstonecraft by her habit of taking an equal part in conversations with illustrious men, now exclaimed, “If any book were calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book!” (129). (He would later marry her.)

Why does Wollstonecraft strike this new tone? Was she just taking up the conventions of a different genre, gushing like a Gilpin Tour? What of the reservations she expressed so forcefully in the Vindication? Had she suddenly become a romantic, “perhaps owing to a personality change that some attribute to her apparent release from reason by her lover Gilbert Imlay?” (Sapiro xxi). Many critics have assumed that Wollstonecraft's shift toward nature is a result of the happiness she found with Imlay at the beginning of their relationship, which led her to endorse the authority of direct, physical experience more fully than in her earlier work.¹² Yet so much of the energy in A Short Residence comes from Wollstonecraft's need to gain emotional independence from Imlay, that I suggest we look elsewhere for a tie to the physical world.

I believe Wollstonecraft is not using landscape on purpose to please her audience, though she did please them. In her reaction to the problems of the 1790s, she was developing ideas and methods that romantic writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge would study and imitate,¹³ but she came to her own conclusions. Every landscape is a vision of an ordered universe, an individual answer to the question of the human place in nature, and an engagement with the answers the writer has inherited. Through her strategic use of landscape in A Short Residence, Wollstonecraft is able to confront in symbolic form the representations of women she fought in the Vindication. Her book maps the tensions she felt as a woman writer approaching the land, and defending herself against misogynist interpretations that had gone before. In A Short Residence she charts the conceptual territory of woman and nature, measuring the distances between a static, conventional version of the feminine landscape and her experience of the dynamic relation between the land and the human observer. It is a record of the attitudes she had tried earlier to refute philosophically, and of the new strategies she uses to confront and remake those attitudes.

LANDSCAPE AS MOTHER

Travel writer William Gilpin, influential arbiter of the picturesque, mentioned Scandinavia disapprovingly a decade before Wollstonecraft's trip. He believed that the lands of the north lacked the “proportion” necessary to harmonize unruly elements. Beyond that—though not speaking as one who had actually been there—he felt these lands were too inartistically excessive to be properly sublime. In a brief but sweeping judgment, he declared, “The mountains of Sweden, Norway, and other northern regions, are probably rather masses of hideous rudeness, than scenes of granduer and proportion” (1:3). Within his dismissal of the north as unpicturesque, Gilpin distinguishes between two versions of sublimity, one “grand” and one “hideous.” “Granduer,” allied with the civilized “proportion,” evokes a Burkean patriarchal sublime, the originally frightening but ultimately reassuring feeling that one has (at least if one is a man) in the presence of great authority.¹⁴ “Hideousness,” by contrast, hints at a power even more terrifying, somehow beyond or beneath organized “grandeur and proportion,” something “rude,” or formless. Recalling the aesthetic of landscape gardening, we see that these two kinds of sublimity correspond in eighteenth-century terms to masculine and feminine modes, respectively. If the “grand” represents the clarity and order of the father, who first dominates and then empowers the son, the more troubling “hideous” sublime is the maternal force that lies beyond the father.¹⁵ Gilpin's Scandinavia, teeming with sea-monsters and lying so far north as to be potentially untameable, is the caricature of this threatening wilderness of energy men strove to contain. It is a geographical representation of a son's fear of maternal power, the counterpart to the femininity that Rousseau defined and controlled in the education of Sophie, his ideal little girl, whose image Wollstonecraft replied to in the Vindication. Likewise, when Wollstonecraft saw women scapegoated in Paris—from Marie-Antoinette to Olympe de Gouges—she saw the projection into public life of this same uneasily tamed chaos.

As A Short Residence opens, Wollstonecraft uses her first encounter with the land to invoke both this traditionally “hideous” maternal sublime and the “grand” power of patriarchal order that resists it. When their ship arrives at the Swedish coastline, mother and child are for a while unable to find a place to disembark. The seas are calm, but the language Wollstonecraft uses to describe the scene suggests a contest between the cliffs and roiling waves. The rocks stand like sentries policing the boundary between matter and the void: “Rocks were piled on rocks, forming a suitable bulwark to the ocean. Come no further, they emphatically said, turning their dark sides to the waves to augment the idle roar” (14). Wollstonecraft's exaggeration implies that the waves' power is purposeless and inarticulate—it is “suitable” that the rocks ignore the ocean's “idle roar.” She sketches a traditional symbol of feminine disorder in an image of the sea barely contained by the cliffs, picturing the “huge, dark rocks” as Gilpin might, as “the rude materials of creation forming the barrier of unwrought space” (10). Rude as they are, however, these rocks have the power of speech, voicing the decree of culture that nature be contained, echoing the voice of the Creator-Father of the Psalms, who “hast set a boundary that [the waters] may not pass over, that they turn not again to cover the earth.”¹⁶ In alluding to the Bible, Wollstonecraft's description of the coastal landscape brings full cultural authority to bear against feminine disorder.

Stopping at a small island to ask directions, Wollstonecraft finds only a pair of grizzled lighthouse keepers, “two old men, whom we forced out of their wretched hut.” The pair are mostly unintelligible, and seem “scarcely human in their appearance.” These feral men personify the fear that the lighthouse is too weak to illuminate the cultural boundaries that control nature. Living at the very edge of the void she has described, the lighthousemen guard the boundary between masculine culture and feminine nature, and they have lost much of the rationality their culture values because of their close proximity to that chaos. They “remain so near the brute creation,” Wollstonecraft writes, that they cannot “fructify the faint glimmerings of mind which entitle them to rank as lords of the creation” (10). Like Burke's accounts of the Parisian mobs she had recently left, and like the strongly biased description of the untamed sea she has just given, Wollstonecraft's picture of these men registers a conservative view of the encroachment of wilderness on civilization.

Wollstonecraft inherits this mythology of feminine chaos, as she inherited the antifeminist judgments of Rousseau, Burke and Gilpin, and so she fittingly begins her encounter with Sweden by calling up their ideology at full strength. This is the given starting-point for a woman writer of her time. Yet, she could not adopt their analysis. To identify herself with nature, thus defined, would be to abdicate rather than gain power, to lose rather than to find her voice.¹⁷ These are the conventions Wollstonecraft struggled with in the Vindication, and the conventions she must navigate if she is to write the meeting of woman and nature in A Short Residence.

LANDSCAPE AND DAUGHTER

Having invoked Mother Nature in her blindest and most brutish aspect, Wollstonecraft moves farther inland, leaving behind that traditional figure. “How silent and peaceful was the scene,” she writes. “I gazed around with rapture, and … forgot the horrors I had witnessed in France, which had cast a gloom over all nature” (14). On shore, one-year-old Fanny's antics give her another model of interaction with the land. In a letter to Imlay, Wollstonecraft had written that her daughter is closer to nature than she is. There she said:

My animal is well; I have not yet taught her to eat, but nature is doing the business. I gave her a crust to assist the cutting of her teeth; … You would laugh to see her; she is just like a little squirrel; she will guard a crust for two hours; and, after fixing her eye on an object for some time, dart on it with an aim as sure as a bird of prey—nothing can equal her life and spirits.

(Letter XXXIII, Paris, Jan. 15, 1795. Todd and Butler 6:399)

In Sweden, Wollstonecraft envies what she sees as her baby's innocent confidence in nature, and she casts Fanny as a tiny noble savage as the two explore the scene. Coming up to some wildflowers, Wollstonecraft muses on their different points of view:

[M]y eye was attracted by the sight of some heart's-ease that peeped through the rocks. I caught at it as a good omen, and going to preserve it in a letter that had not conveyed balm to my heart, a cruel remembrance suffused my eyes; but it passed away like an April shower. If you are deep read in Shakespeare, you will recollect that this was the little western flower tinged by love's dart, which “maidens call love in idleness.” The gaiety of my babe was unmixed; regardless of omens or sentiments, she found a few wild strawberries more grateful than flowers or fancies.

(13-14)

In this brief encounter, Wollstonecraft's flower travels a great distance. First she uses it as an occasion for allegory. It becomes “a good omen” for her reconciliation with Imlay, whom she addresses in the book. But the action of picking the flower takes it out of its natural, rocky context and embeds it in two new, literary ones: a physical context, the apparently unsatisfying letter from Imlay she says she is “going to preserve it in,” and a figurative one, Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. This uprooting detaches her mind, as well, from the immediate scene, allowing her to stray to thoughts of Imlay's unfaithfulness. Perhaps in defense against these consequences, Wollstonecraft represses her grief by placing her feelings back into the context of natural cycles, comparing her tears to April showers that pass away and bring new growth. She notes that her baby has not had to follow such a mental obstacle course to find meaning in the land; Fanny doesn't see flowers as omens or sentiments, for she moves in harmony with an environment that can easily nourish her.

Wollstonecraft mocks her own need to interpret, ornament and embalm nature, ruefully suggesting that Fanny is the wiser. Yet she can't bridge the distance between their positions. In this paragraph she has translated her representative bit of nature from literal flower to symbol, to letter, to literary allusion, and finally back to nature again—but the “nature” she rests with at the end is still a product of literary conventions, whether Shakespeare's words or “April showers” that “bring May flowers.” In the following paragraph she concludes, “The view was sterile: still[,] little patches of earth, of the most exquisite verdure, enamelled with the sweetest wild flowers, seemed to promise the goats and a few straggling cows luxurious herbage” (14). She, like the livestock and Fanny with her strawberries, can find “luxurious herbage” in a nearly sterile scene, but hers—in contrast to Fanny's physical nourishment—is only a metaphorical sustenance, founded in the rapture of seeing nature as “exquisite” and “enamelled,” covered with the aesthetic gloss of culture.

Wollstonecraft distrusts the easy satisfaction she ascribes to Fanny, believing that she herself must seek distance from nature through the activity of her mind, so as not to become like the “brute,” “scarcely human” lighthousemen. The thought that she may be kin to their rough touch of nature causes her to fly to the safety of abstraction. That abstraction can take her a short distance from material nature—as in her Shakespeare allusion to the poetic meanings of flowers—or quite far, as in many passages where views of the land lead her to imagine the God who created it. When she writes, “I bowed before the awful throne of my Creator, whilst I rested on its footstool” (74), Wollstonecraft's evasions reduce nature to a lowly position under the guise of exalting it. Ultimately, Wollstonecraft knows that when she uses new symbols to defend herself against being absorbed into nature, she only alienates herself from her surroundings. Here she is stymied. The two possible definitions of nature she has put forth so far in A Short Residence—the literary gloss of “beauty” or the chaos of the maternal sublime that beauty is meant to tame—would force her into following one of two paths: dissolution or transcendence.

Fanny's experience, as Wollstonecraft constructs it in her book, holds out the potential for an escape from convention into a new relation with nature. Later that same night, unable to sleep because “my senses had been so awake, and my imagination still continued so busy,” Wollstonecraft finds that in the lingering light “I could write at midnight very well without a candle” (16). As her sentences proceed we picture Wollstonecraft glancing from nature to the child and back:

I contemplated all nature at rest; the rocks, even grown darker in their appearance, looked as if they partook of the general repose, and reclined more heavily on their foundation.—What, I exclaimed, is this active principle that keeps me awake?—Why fly my thoughts abroad when every thing around me appears at home? My child was sleeping with equal calmness—innocent and sweet as the closing flowers.

(16)

Fanny's presence, sleeping nearby as her mother writes, inspires Wollstonecraft to describe the rocks differently than she had before. Fanny blends into the “repose” around her, but while she shares nature's “calmness,” Wollstonecraft sees no threat that Fanny will be swallowed by it. Here, humanity is not at war with nature; the “home” Fanny rests in shares its “foundation” with the rocks and flowers. In place of the traditional choice between brutality and transcendence Wollstonecraft's landscape offered before, here the senses and imagination work together, and she can write an encounter with nature “without a candle,” that is, with her page illuminated by the light of the sky—even at midnight in the northern summer. She has no need of artificial light, whether that of the lighthouse or its miniature version, the candle.

The kinship with nature that Wollstonecraft imagines through Fanny tempts her to test the possibility of plunging into her surroundings and speaking through, or from within, nature. She pictures herself leaving the confinement of her room for the hillsides and opening all her senses, merging with the land, the air, the evening light. In these scenes she seems to rise off the page as she writes, tying down her exclamations with dashes:

With what ineffable pleasure have I not gazed—and gazed again, losing my breath through my eyes—my very soul diffused itself in the scene—and, seeming to become all senses, glided in the scarcely-agitated waves, melted in the freshening breeze …

(74)

No wonder Godwin was impressed: her synesthetic body, “seeming to become all senses” and overwhelming the structure of the sentences which express it, rides the wind like the poetic sailboats Shelley would launch decades later. But this experiment does not succeed for Wollstonecraft. As she imagines herself dissolving into the landscape, gliding closer and closer to the wished-for release of complete immersion, its power threatens to lead her beyond expression entirely, and she falls back onto cliché. Her soaring book risks crashing to the bathos of a bodice-ripper as she watches the approaching dawn with “the most voluptuous sensations”: “I opened my bosom to the embraces of nature; and my soul rose to its author, … [I was] almost afraid to breathe, lest I should break the charm. I saw the sun—and sighed” (51).

In sailing on the breeze in these scenes, Wollstonecraft is helping to develop a literary strategy that the romantic poets would continue (as in Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind”). The male romantics took the idea of female sexual power in nature and used it as an engine for their own poetic authority, staging a ventriloquism in which they borrow this power to speak for their subjects, silencing nature in the process. (As Shelley says, “Be through my lips to unawakened earth / The trumpet of a prophecy!” L1.68-9, my emphasis.) But Wollstonecraft finds that avenue mined with problems, since the convention on which it is built—that nature is feminine and therefore voiceless without a male translator—would tie her tongue.¹⁸ When Wollstonecraft attempts to gather nature's power into herself, she teeters on the edge of losing what little individual power she has, and so she resorts in these moments to the conventional poetic language of the “ineffable … soul.” In this poetic economy she must either be silent herself or collude with her culture in silencing nature. These are, in fact, the passages that her readers approved as the most “feminine.”¹⁹

LANDSCAPE AS MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

Wollstonecraft began A Short Residence where a woman writer of landscape is forced to begin: with an inherited vision of nature as feminine violence. Setting out from this compass-point at the beginning of her book, she quickly moves away from it and crosses that rough sea to land on terra firma. Once on land, she fights her defensive tendency to avoid direct contact, to see figures instead of actual flowers. Turning from figurative to sensual experience, Wollstonecraft finds her literary project disintegrating as she tries to merge with silent feminine nature, then distorted into misogynist cliché as she tries to recover her voice. Where can she go next? Is the only choice for a woman writer the unhappy dualism, dominance of or submission to nature? What new landscape can she envision?

On a night when she is separated from Fanny for the first time, Wollstonecraft dreams of a reunion with her child that is also a reimagined union with the natural world:

I was weary; and opening the window to admit the sweetest of breezes to fan me to sleep, I sunk into the most luxurious rest: it was more than refreshing. … If I woke, it was to listen to the melodious whispering of the wind amongst [the trees], or to feel the mild breath of morn. Light slumbers produced dreams, where Paradise was before me. My little cherub was again hiding her face in my bosom. I heard her sweet cooing beat on my heart from the cliffs, and saw her tiny footsteps on the sands. New-born hopes seemed, like the rainbow, to appear in the clouds of sorrow. … Now all my nerves keep time with the melody of nature.

(98, 100)

In this remarkable passage, Wollstonecraft fulfills the promise that the senses and imagination might work together to define the woman-nature relation in a new way. The passage begins, we note, with Wollstonecraft's preparing for bed inside the house where she is lodging. It is significant that her vision takes place indoors, within a sheltering structure, but one that is still permeable to nature's influences. Opening her window, she does not “melt into the freshening breeze,” as before, but rather invites it to speak to her with its “melodious whispering.” Foreshadowing Wordsworth's use of the “correspondent breeze” in The Prelude, Wollstonecraft's image is quite different in its domestic anchor. The house represents a kind of mediation between Wollstonecraft and nature, but not a defensively rigid barrier, like the rocks she described in the book's opening, with their impenetrable “dark sides” that by definition “augment the idle roar” of the disorder they exclude. The breezes easily enter her room, bringing on their mild breath what Wollstonecraft most desires to hear—her daughter's name—as they “fan” her to sleep. Thus both sheltered and fanned, Wollstonecraft shares the calm repose she had seen in her child earlier, finally “at home” with “everything around her.”

Answering Fanny's call to join her in the landscape, Wollstonecraft finds herself in a Paradise, regained without the sacrifice of woman or nature. In the dream, Wollstonecraft's physical bond to her child literally bridges the distance between the observer and her environment, and does so without dissolving either of them into silence. Even more than the insinuating whispers of the wind, Wollstonecraft's vivid image that Fanny's “sweet cooing beat on [her] heart from the cliffs” insists that the observer is in dialogue with nature. Fanny's position—both in her mother's arms, “hiding her face in [her] bosom,” and calling to her from the cliffs—connects Wollstonecraft deeply to the land while maintaining the difference between them. Here woman and nature are the same flesh, as she and Fanny are, but still separate, part of the larger order unified by the image of the rainbow. Watching the distant cliffs and reading the “tiny footsteps on the sand,” Wollstonecraft knows that her adult consciousness sets her apart from nature, that she is the audience and interpreter for the scene as much as she is an actor in it.

This visionary landscape takes the ancient supposition that humanity is related to nature like a child to its parent, and reframes it utterly. This new landscape is not an oedipal sublime, clearly; nor is it a “pre-oedipal” version (as typically understood), since the mother here is the observer. In dreaming of Fanny-in-nature, Wollstonecraft asserts a relationship that disarms the overwhelming, “hideous” potential of feminine nature's maternal aspect. Nature in the dream is neither feminine nor masculine; it escapes convention to be redefined in terms of Wollstonecraft's ongoing interaction with her surroundings. She frames the complex web of identity and difference that flows between her environment and her self as a dynamic in which mind and world are interdependent. The many crossings back and forth in the passage symbolize this web: literal crossings like the wind moving through the window, the cooing coming to Wollstonecraft across the beach, the “tiny footsteps” crossing back toward the cliffs, the rainbow in the sky; and figurative ones, like the anthropomorphism of winds whispering and morn breathing, the return to Paradise, the metaphors of clouds of sorrow and nerve-strings, and finally, the implied crossings of the letter and its response in the reader.²⁰ These interlacings place her mind and nature in a dialogical relation, in which thoughts move out to take on a physical form, and matter moves back to inspire and flesh out the abstract. At the dream's end, the baby herself is the literal incarnation of “New-born hopes,” continuing the growth from “conception” to physical reality that a baby is, and renewing through that growth Wollstonecraft's strained belief in a more just future.

And this is where her doubts about nature and Revolution find their tentative answer. In writing Fanny-in-nature as a model of this movement from the imagined to the literal and then back from the specific to the universal (from new-born hopes to new born baby, from hope for herself to hope for the world), Wollstonecraft finds the organic renewal of faith she seeks. It is in this constant interweaving of thought and experience that the laws of nature as she felt them—equality, perfectibility—can eventually influence society.²¹ Wollstonecraft relates her experience of wilderness in the north to her concerns for social justice halfway through A Short Residence, asking herself,

[C]onsidering the question of human happiness, where, oh! where does it reside? My thoughts fly from this wilderness to the polished circles of the world, till recollecting its vices and follies, I bury myself in the woods, but find it necessary to emerge again, that I may not lose sight of the wisdom and virtue which exalts my nature.

(90)

The society she would have wished to live in would not have so polarized the values of nature and humanity. Her anxious shuttling here, made necessary by the same dualism that caused her to fear nature at the outset, would relax in the ideal society into the kind of give-and-take she describes in her dream of Paradise. The narrative in A Short Residence prefigures this dialogical revolution and begins its work by rewriting one of the strongest, longest-lived terms of the nature-culture dualism. Slowly sloughing off the conventional definitions of bestial, inarticulate feminine nature, Wollstonecraft affirms her own power as a part of nature, offering an alternative to her society's containment of the feminine by writing into creation a landscape that rings not with fears of feminine chaos, and not with a hollow silence, but with the strong voices of mother and daughter.

LANDSCAPE OF THEORY

In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem.

Camille Paglia, 1.

Wollstonecraft's revolution has not yet been accomplished. The link between woman and nature that plagued her still plagues us today. Ecofeminist theory aims, by and large, to uncouple these mythic partners by exposing the ideology that had joined them.²² Still, some ecofeminists, and much of the popular environmental movement, rest their hopes for a healthy future on a “resacralization” of the earth as Gaia, the mother-goddess. In the words of Riane Eisler, nature is “the great Mother, a living entity who … creates and nurtures all forms of life.”²³ The complementary view has its strongest expression in the work of Camille Paglia, who devotes the 700-plus pages of Sexual Personae to the multifarious literary and artistic expressions of Western culture's fear of Mother Nature. Paglia also embraces nature as feminine, but her nature is an avenging demon, a femme trés fatale. She writes that “violence is the authentic spirit of mother nature. … Force, not love, is the law of the universe” (236). This theory of female power (which might be expressed as “the best offense is a good pair of spike heels”) is familiar to us all through figures of pop culture. For both Paglia and Eisler, femininity rightly understood is strength. Yet different as they are in tone, both of these seemingly opposed positions have a similar blind spot: the temptation to claim natural forces as a female realm. We must ask, is it really so easy to reclaim Mother Nature? Wollstonecraft didn't think so. When she saw the swift replacement of the mother-goddess of the French Revolution with her opposite, the mother-demon, she was appalled, and the scene should give us pause too as we survey the options feminism and ecocriticism offer us now.

One place to look for answers is in recent feminist literary criticism on the sublime. Patricia Yeager's “Toward a Female Sublime” (1989) asked whether it is useful or even possible for women writers to take up such a misused mode. She began by apologizing for even bringing up this “‘moribund aesthetic’”—quoting Thomas Weiskel's earlier apology for a topic which had seemed to him in 1976 something “we have long since been too ironic for” (Weiskel 6, qtd. by Yeager 196). It is a genre, Yeager suspects,

that is—in the present age—of questionable use; it is old-fashioned, outmoded, concerned with self-centered imperialism, with a “pursuit of the infinitude of the private self” that we, in the twentieth century, regard with some embarrassment and keep trying, epistemologically, if not politically, to amend.

(192)

Yet, Yeager judges it worthwhile to “reinvent the sublime as a feminine mode,” for, who more than the woman writer needs a form of writing in which—as Weiskel had put it—“the burden of the past is lifted and there is an influx of power?” (Weiskel 11, qtd. by Yeager 192). This essay and Anne K. Mellor's Romanticism and Gender, published a few years later, reexamine women's use of various sublime strategies in their landscapes, finding many that challenge our understanding of the genre as a masculine construction of self upon the sacrifice of woman and nature.

The most radical of these posited strategies is what Yeager dubs the “‘feminine’ or ‘pre-oedipal’ sublime.” Referring to Neil Hertz's observation of a deeper, maternal power motivating the confrontation with nature, she says that the struggle with the father Burke outlined is actually a mask for “an oral, primordial desire to merge with (rather than to possess) the mother … [, an] initiating desire for the mother's inundation and comfort” (204). In masculine writing, this desire is too threatening to be met openly. But in the “feminine” sublime, as Yeager reads it in Elizabeth Bishop's poem, “The Moose,” “these libidinal elements are not repressed; they break into consciousness and are welcomed[;] … the poet refuses to annex what is alien, but revels, for a brief poetic moment, in a pre-oedipal longing for otherness and ecstasy” (205, 209). In this theory, the woman writer meets the mother in nature with open arms.

Two of the striking features of Yeager's “pre-oedipal” sublime are that it accepts the structure of the encounter as that of a child approaching its parent, and that it assumes this encounter is positive, equating “inundation” with “comfort.” When Wollstonecraft confronts the terrifying mother symbolized by the ocean, and when she works in the Vindication to distance her vision of femininity from the perverse gender role Rousseau and others prescribed, she is approaching the mother in nature not with love but with suspicion. Writing as a daughter, Wollstonecraft fears a mother-figure whose qualities have been so used against her in patriarchal culture. Inundation is not always to be desired. Further, we may want to ask, with Susan Rubin Suleiman, “what about the writer who is ‘the body of the mother’? … Does the mother who writes write exclusively as her own mother's child?” (359). When Wollstonecraft describes Fanny in nature, she writes not as a daughter, but as a mother, imagining a different relation between women and nature than had gone before. Thus, while Yeager's theory takes us part of the way to understanding Wollstonecraft's text, further work remains to be done.²⁴ By putting her baby daughter's voice onto nature's lips, Wollstonecraft helps us define a sublimity that does not ultimately refer to the convention of nature as mother. What we need is a theory of the sublime that does not bind us to a psychoanalytical encounter with Mother Nature, nor to a drama of self-creation at nature's expense, but one that, in its gender neutrality, allows both the writer and nature itself fuller expression.

Wollstonecraft's originality in landscape, and its relevance for us today, is in creating her authorial voice in such a way that human independence of nature (what limited separation there is) can benefit both. When Wollstonecraft uses her own child in her writing, the result is to focus attention on the immediate future, on the life of this specific child.²⁵ In this sublime moment, nature is no longer the power that has charge of the writer, that which can kill or save her. Rather, the roles are reversed, and the question of human responsibility to the natural world is suddenly made visible. Julia Kristeva has written, “If pregnancy is a threshold between nature and culture, motherhood is a bridge between the singular and the ethical” (qtd. in Suleiman 365). This is how Wollstonecraft uses her parenthood, to expand the self she creates in her text to include its relation to the world.²⁶ Wollstonecraft's landscape allows her to build her sense of self in nature on the foundation of interdependence rather than on exclusion, and in granting herself the role of the parent she goes further than the bonding of the “pre-oedipal” would allow. In accepting the independence of human consciousness, she takes on the responsibility to use it wisely.

Yeager began her article by invoking the “moribund” sublime. Perhaps the “old-fashioned sublime of domination” is dead, and, if so, few will mourn its passing (191). Yet if “the sublime” refers to a mode of experience and writing that allows us to reconnect with and express the power we apprehend in nature, it may be crucial to the work of the late twentieth century. Consciously or not, it undergirds reclamations of feminine power in writers like Eisler and Paglia, and in a subtler sense it informs all of what is now called “ecocriticism.”²⁷ As Paglia says, “nature remains the supreme moral problem.” If this was true in the ancient world, when coming to terms with nature's indifference to man was the first task of theology, it is doubly true today as we are faced with the fatal consequences of man's indifference to nature. Wollstonecraft's example shows us a sublimity that is not concerned only with the private self, but with the larger world that grounds and sustains that self, and with how we might reimagine our relation to it. A new understanding of the sublime—one that refuses to fence us into gender or psychoanalytic categories, and one that acknowledges how diffuse and balanced the power is that flows between humanity and nature—can help us respect and articulate our place in the world, and do it in a revolutionary way.

Notes

1. Nyström has uncovered the hidden circumstances of Wollstonecraft's trip: to frustrate the blockade of British-French trade, Imlay had routed a cargo of silver bars and plate through Scandinavia. When the captain of the ship disappeared with the silver, Imlay sent Wollstonecraft after them.

2. Wollstonecraft explains her determination to make herself and their daughter financially independent in Letter LXIV, Gothenburg, Aug. 26. (Todd and Butler 6:426)

3. In her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft had written: “If the voice of nature was allowed to speak audibly from the bottom of the heart, … the native unalienable rights of men were recognized in their full force” (qtd. in Todd 74, emphasis in original). Nicolas Roe explains how the excessive violence of the revolution soured intellectuals' faith in nature broadly understood. He outlines the references to nature in arguments on both sides of the revolutionary debates, and concludes that after the Terror of 1793-4, nature was “author and arbiter of a revolution which had exhibited the best and the worst of human potential” (9). For analysis of the philosophical doubts expressed in Wollstonecraft's writing on the Revolution, see Jump 90-110.

4. Roe 9. Burke's idea of the natural human character (to which Wollstonecraft replied in Vindication of the Rights of Men), was similar to Hobbes's well-known formulation in the Leviathan (1651). Burke and others opposed to revolution maintained that natural depravity required restraints based on deference to traditional hierarchy. Rousseau's Social Contract (1762), an inspiration to Wollstonecraft and her colleagues, had argued that the right to rule inhered in the consent of the governed, implying citizens were capable of choosing or modifying their own government. Paine, following Rousseau, had hoped that through revolution, “man becomes what he ought [and] sees his species, not with the inhuman idea of a natural enemy, but as kindred” (qtd. in Roe 9).

5. Le Père Duchesne, a newspaper printed from 1791-94 by Jacques-René Hébert, president of the Paris Revolutionary Commune, meant to evoke the plain (often obscene) speech of the market people. Qtd. in Gutwirth 285-6.

6. See Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” for the classic statement of this paradox. In “The Gothic Mirror,” Claire Kahane gives a clear summary of the child's experience of the irrational but compelling woman-nature link: “Because the mother-woman is experienced as part of Nature itself before we learn her boundaries, she traditionally embodies the mysterious not-me world, with its unknown forces. Hers is the body, awesome and powerful, which is both our habitat and our prison, and while an infant gradually becomes conscious of a limited Other, the mother remains imaginatively linked to the realm of Nature, figuring the forces of life and death” (336-7).

7. From Anna Letitia Barbauld, “To a Lady with Some Painted Flowers,” qtd. by Wollstonecraft in the Vindication as an example of women's complicity in this seductive rhetoric (143).

8. Fabricant writes, “Both women and landscape were continually being judged for their ability to titillate the imagination and satisfy the senses while at the same time remaining within carefully prescribed moral, aesthetic, and territorial limits” (111).

9. It is interesting to compare Polwhele's image to Fuseli's painting Mad Kate (1806-7), in which a woman's loss of rational control dissolves her into a furious storm. Sonja Hookway suggests Fuseli might have intended a comment on Wollstonecraft.

10. Passages from the Moniteur, 9 brumaire (October 30, 1793), and from J. B. Andre Amar's speech of the same date, qtd. in Blum 213-14.

11. See Gutwirth's chapter “The Maenad Factor; or Sex, Politics, and Murderousness” (307-340).

12. See Poovey, 84, for the most influential version of this argument.

13. Mitzi Myers describes this connection as circumstantial, while more recently Harriet Jump has traced lines of direct influence from Blake to Wordsworth and Coleridge through Wollstonecraft. See Jump, 151-54.

14. Burke writes in the Philosophical Enquiry, “I know of nothing sublime, which is not some modification of power” (64), linking it to one's feelings for “kings and commanders” and for God (67-8).

15. Neil Hertz, following Thomas Weiskel's suggestion, points out that few people in Wollstonecraft's time or in ours talk about the maternal roots of the sublime. Rather, its complexity sends them for cover behind the “screen” of the more straightforward Oedipal confrontation (75). Weiskel had suggested (but not developed) a primary motivating force for the sublime in a desire for inundation, based on pre-oedipal experience, which is deflected into an oedipal scene of conflict in order that the self can feel secure (99-106). As Hertz summarizes, “The goal in each case is the oedipal moment, that is, the goal is the sublime of conflict and structure … when an indefinite and disarrayed sequence is resolved (at whatever sacrifice) into a one-to-one confrontation, when numerical excess can be converted into that supererogatory identification with the blocking agent that is the guarantor of the self's own integrity” (76, emphasis added). Hertz foreshadows the feminine character of his “indefinite and disarrayed” image of sublimity earlier in the essay when he writes, of his own scholarly task in facing a numerical excess of literature on the sublime, “What people are led to call ‘chaos’ sometimes strikes them as the confused seas on which they must embark; here, in a figure equally traditional, chaos is a woman out of Swift or Rowlandson” (67).

16. Psalm 104:9, King James version. At verses 6-7, “the waters stood above the mountains. / At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away.”

17. Margaret Homans analyzes the underpinnings of the Western assumption that women and nature exist together in silence while language belongs to men, in Bearing the Word.

18. For the Romantic paradigm of the male poet speaking for feminine nature and the problems this creates for women writers, see Homans, “The Masculine Tradition,” chapter one of Women Writers and Poetic Identity.

19. Interestingly, these are also the passages some feminist readers cite as examples of a “female sublime” today. I will take up one of these theories at the end of my essay.

20. Karen Lawrence focuses on the letter form and points out that Wollstonecraft is testing notions of “correspondence,” “first, between the traveler and nature and, then, between the traveler's response to nature and the reader's response to the traveler's representation of experience. … [T]he dialogic structure of the epistolary travelogue … [directs her scenes of sublimity] toward a reader/witness whose own response is crucial to the completion of the scene” (88, 95). For an application of Bakhtinian dialogics to landscape writing, see Murphy.

21. Wollstonecraft will make a literary theory of this movement in her last published work, the essay “On Poetry and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature.”

22. Ecofeminist scholarship is generally said to begin with Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature and Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature. For a variety of approaches to ecofeminism see Diamond and Orenstein.

23. Eisler, 26. While some ecofeminists criticize the idealization of the woman-nature bond (notably Karen Warren and Ynestra King), the persistence of Mother Earth imagery in popular environmentalism testifies to the strength of the tradition and the attractiveness of the idea that the earth as mother will care for us. See Murphy's chapter, “Sex-typing the Planet.”

24. Mellor's readings of Wollstonecraft's contemporaries help to fill this gap. For Mellor's romantic writers nature “is not … an all-bountiful mother. Instead nature is a female friend, a sister, with whom they share their most intimate experiences and with whom they cooperate in the daily business of life” (97).

25. Compare her image of the child in nature to those of her contemporaries, Blake and Wordsworth. In Wordsworth's poetry, the child is his young self, and nature is his nurse and teacher. Blake, famously not to be “[brought] down to believe such fitting and fitted” (667), had used the figure of the child to embody creative, natural energy in a way that was ideal and prophetic, emphatically not representational. Wordsworth views nature from a distance of years, focusing on his own origins. Blake is hardly concerned with nature itself at all, but with a visionary apprehension of the relation of nature to eternity.

26. I would stress that this is a model of parenthood, not motherhood exclusively. And of course, it is an imaginative opportunity for anyone—whether parent or not—that Wollstonecraft created from her particular experience. A benefit of avoiding a gender-based, psychoanalytical definition of sublimity is that men and women could take up Wollstonecraft's position with equal ease.

27. For a provisional definition of “ecocriticism” and a thumbnail review of ecocritical scholarship, see Buell, 7-8, and notes.

My title's unwieldiness raises the need to shorten Wollstonecraft's; but so far, critics have been unable to agree on a nickname for her text. Within the last few years it has appeared as Letters from Sweden, Letters, and A Short Residence (Jump, Lawrence, Sapiro). I've decided to choose this last option, because it seems to be both close to the original and close to the spirit of the text.

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