[In the following essay, Jones contrasts Williams's emotional account of the French Revolution with the more rational writings of Mary Wollstonecraft on this subject.]

Survey with me, what ne'er our fathers saw
A female band despising NATURE's law
As ‘proud defiance’ flashes from their arms,
And vengeance smothers all their softer charms.
I shudder at the new unpictur'd scene,
Where unsex'd woman vaunts the imperious mien; …
With equal ease, in body or in mind,
To Gallic freaks or Gallic faith resign'd, …
With liberty's sublimer views expand,
And o'er the wreck of kingdoms sternly stand …

In this scurrilous piece of conservative propaganda, radical British women writers of the 1790s are found guilty of a triple violation: of national loyalty, of generic decorum and, inevitably, of sexual morality. They have become, according to the poem's title, The Unsex'd Females, betrayers of an ideal femininity which ‘in ancient days, To modest Virtue, claim'd a nation's praise’.¹ Ostensibly about women's writing, the poem clearly demonstrates the way in which, in the post-revolutionary period, ideologies of literary value, gender, and national identity are inextricably bound up together. Polwhele defends/defines English values against ‘Gallic freaks’ and ‘Gallic faith’ by hysterically reasserting conventional gender definitions: for women, the ‘softer charms’ and ‘modest Virtue’ of sensibility are not simply appropriately feminine but proof of patriotism.

In this paper I shall be focusing on Helen Maria Williams's Letters from France² and Mary Wollstonecraft's Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution,³ texts in which two of Polwhele's ‘unsex'd females’ have to negotiate this fraught conjunction of national, sexual and literary identities. For women, their project—to write the history of the French Revolution—was doubly problematic: as middle-class radicals, they faced the difficulty of redeeming the Terror for an English audience, of explaining the Revolution's degeneration into violence and turning it towards progressivist narrative; as women, they incurred additional conservative wrath for daring to write polemical history at all, breaking the gendered literary proprieties which restricted them to the private arena of novels and poetry. And as female defenders of the bourgeois revolution, they provide a particularly revealing example of the process described by Foucault:

… one of [the bourgeoisie's] primary concerns was to provide itself with a body and a sexuality—to ensure the strength, endurance, and secular proliferation of that body through the organization of a deployment of sexuality. This process, moreover, was linked to the movement by which it asserted its distinctiveness and its hegemony. There is little question that one of the primordial forms of class consciousness is the affirmation of the body; at least, this was the case for the bourgeoisie during the eighteenth century. It converted the blue blood of the nobles into a sound organism and a healthy sexuality.⁴

In this period, that ‘distinctiveness’ very clearly includes a discourse of national difference. Given this hegemonic will to ‘conversion’, to the establishment of ‘a sound organism and a healthy sexuality’, I want to explore the effects of competing discourses of gender and sensibility, national identity and radical patriotism in Williams and Wollstonecraft's texts. How far can their rewritings of history succeed in also rewriting gender as the Revolution released new possibilities for sexual as well as national politics? And what does this suggest about the sexual politics of the emergent ‘Romantic’ aesthetic, and the difficulties women had in inserting themselves as writing subjects into the dominant discourse of imagination?

The ‘private’ sphere of feminine conduct and propriety was a crucial site in the struggle for definitions of patriotism. Polwhele's crudely effective propaganda is only an extreme example among numerous polemical educational texts from the period. Often written by women, these texts follow Burke in mobilising an already well-established discourse of national/gender difference: French effeminacy—a decadent inability to maintain appropriate gender distinctions—contrasted with English ‘liberal and manly morals’.⁵ Laetitia Matilda Hawkins's Letters on the Female Mind and Hannah More's Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, for example, were written in direct response to the work of Williams and Wollstonecraft. These conservative women are concerned, like Polwhele, to maintain national stability through sexual propriety and a traditional division of gender roles. Their strategy is to persuade their female readers that politics is inimical to femininity: ‘the study, my dear madam, which I place in the climax of unfitness, is that of politics’,⁶ but that national survival depends on women's special ability to resist corrupting change. More puts this duty in explicitly national terms when she urges British women to resist ‘French infidel’ literature:

Conscious of the influence of women in civil society, conscious of the effect which female infidelity produced in France, they attribute the ill success of their attempts in this country, to their having been hitherto chiefly addressed to the male sex. They are now sedulously labouring to destroy the religious principles of women, and in too many instances have fatally succeeded.⁷

More's anti-Enlightenment polemic cleverly draws on an Enlightenment association of cultural progress with feminisation. As Volney puts it: ‘In proportion as civilization spreads, the manners become milder, and the condition of women improves’.⁸ The paradigm is clearly open to More's more narrowly patriotic appropriation—as in a text like Alexander's History of Women, where the position of British women becomes the touchstone of constitutional maturity: their ‘privileges and immunities’ are secured by ‘the laws of their country’; under European chivalry, by comparison, women are ‘complimented and chained’ with only the ‘influence of politeness’ to rely on.⁹

But there is a powerful collusion between Enlightenment progressivism, ‘European’ chivalry and an English ‘patriotism’ which maintains strictly separate spheres. In each case, women and/or femininity are simply objects against which national maturity or corruption can be measured. The female citizen or enlightened feminine subject remains a structural impossibility. Writing as a female radical within the Enlightenment tradition, Wollstonecraft refuses any such account:

I shall not go back to the remote annals of antiquity to trace the history of woman; it is sufficient to allow that she has always been either a slave, or a despot, and to remark, that each of these situations equally retards the progress of reason.

Instead, she deconstructs the identification of women with ‘over-exercised sensibility’ and begins to write an alternative, ungendered, subjectivity: ‘my own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures’.¹⁰

Wollstonecraft's attempt to transcend gender parallels the radical transcendence of narrow national interest typified by Price's Discourse on the Love of our Country (1790):

It is proper to observe, that … that love of [our country] which is our duty, does not imply any conviction of the superior value of it to other countries, or any particular preference of its laws and constitution of government.¹¹

This internationalist ‘patriotism’ informs both Wollstonecraft and Williams's responses to the French Revolution. Williams, for example, envisages a liberatory French expansionism which will ‘leave the subjects of the driven tyrants to return again under the yoke, or form an independent government for themselves’ (Letters, IV, 135).

In Britain, in Wollstonecraft's words, liberty has been ‘continually wounded by the arbitrary proceedings of the British ministry’ (HMV [Historical and Moral View], p. 234), and this standard oppositional charge becomes an argument against identifying the principle of liberty with the Terror:

It could not have been imagined, that those who had themselves made a long and severe struggle for liberty, would have looked with an evil eye on the efforts of another nation to obtain that same valuable blessing: …

Let the real patriots of England be on their guard. Let us beware of thinking, because a corrupt and frivolous people were unfit for a system of extensive liberty, that therefore such a system is bad; ….

(Letters, IV, 156, 254)

But, as that second quotation suggests, these rationalist defences of liberty constantly threaten to collapse back into much less tolerant formulations. Though Williams is eager, in another standard radical diagnosis, to blame French corruption and frivolity on ‘despotism’ (IV, 254), it is a short step from this insistence on political causes to that more conservative progressivism which sees Britain as superior, because constitutionally more mature than France, and from that to a narrow patriotism based on inherent national characteristics. Difference is returned to hierarchy. In both Wollstonecraft and Williams's texts there is an attempt to provide a new, feminised political response, a subject position which seeks to transcend the established binaries of reason/sensibility or England/France, but which is constantly threatened by the power of those gendered representations.

At one level, this is a matter of genre. In both Letters from France and HMV (masculine) history is written in (feminine) novelistic terms; Williams and Wollstonecraft deploy powerful fictional paradigms to contain and demystify ‘paternal tyranny’,¹² plots of sentiment and sexuality to transform the violent sublime. In Williams, the fluid letter form transgresses the boundaries between history and fiction, sublimity and sensibility, public and private: her account of the Revolution becomes a romance, an ‘affair of the heart’ (Letters, I, 66) in which emotional constancy is finally rewarded after the nightmare of political disillusionment and ‘a heart almost broken’ (Sketches, I, 174). And Wollstonecraft's more rationalist account in HMV mobilises at moments of crisis a tragic version of the narrative deployed more pervasively in Williams: the story of the violated innocent heroine, staple plot of the eighteenth-century bourgeois novel.

The villain of that plot is the libertine, personification of aristocratic corruption and one element in the complementary degeneracy of upper and lower class which, in standard bourgeois radical terms, characterised the ancien regime: ‘the depravity of the higher class, and the ignorance of the lower respecting practical political science, rendered them equally incapable of thinking for themselves’ (HMV, p. 296). But a constitutionally (in all senses) sound English middle-class then becomes the missing term which would save France from destruction: ‘well-informed and worthy men, in the middling ranks of society, who connect the rich with the poor, and the men of large property with those who have none’ (Letters, IV, 253).

In HMV, Wollstonecraft's account of the October march to Versailles provides an interestingly sexualised version of that fatal collusion between two ‘unnatural’ classes. She adopts what was a conservative reading of events, seeing the Parisian women as puppets of the Duke of Orléans's ambition. Her novelistic description of the duke as archetypal sexual villain links political ambition with private vice:

To a disposition for low intrigue was added also a decided preference of the grossest libertinism, seasoned with vulgarity, highly congenial with the manners of the heroines, who composed the singular army of the females.

Having taken up his abode in the centre of the palais royal, a very superb square, yet … entirely occupied by the most shameless girls of the town, … he was considered as the grand sultan of this den of iniquity.

(pp. 452-3)

To complete the Gothic scenario, Marie Antoinette becomes simply representative woman, the innocent victim of predatory violence:

The sanctuary of repose, the asylum of care and fatigue, the chaste temple of a woman, I consider the queen only as one, the apartment where she consigns her senses to the bosom of sleep, folded in it's arms forgetful of the world, was violated with murderous fury.

(p. 457)

Wollstonecraft's anxieties in the face of revolutionary excess are manifest in this defence of social order and bourgeois privacy: domestic space, moral/religious value and female body simultaneously penetrated by mob violence. The novel plot importantly qualifies its reactionary tendencies, however: the location of motivation with the abhorrent aristocratic male identifies feudal patriarchy as author of both class and sexual tyranny.

Williams's Gothic villain is the levelling ‘monster’ Robespierre, the enchanter ‘to whom nature, by some strange deviation, has given a human form’ (Letters, IV, 185); her heroine is Liberty, persecuted, abducted and ‘transformed into a Fury’ (Sketches, II, 212), but finally freed as Robespierre's death breaks the ‘terrible spell which bound the land of France’:

… the shrieking whirlwinds, the black precipices, the bottomless gulphs, suddenly vanished; and reviving nature covered the wastes with flowers, and the rocks with verdure.

(Sketches, III, 190)

Liberty emerges from her ordeal essentially inviolate, though her charms are now ‘divine’ rather than physical:

Upon the whole, the cause of liberty is not the less sacred, nor her charms less divine, because sanguinary monsters and sordid savages have defiled her temple, and insulted her votaries.

(Sketches, IV, 178)

In the new dispensation, a feminine world of beauty and feeling replaces the Gothic landscape of ‘black precipices’ and ‘bottomless gulphs’. But that ‘upon the whole’ betrays a narrative and ideological anxiety at the heart of Williams's ultimately optimistic account. Can defiled femininity really survive violation in a world where the dominant ideology decreed that ‘propriety is to a woman … the first, the second, the third, requisite’?¹³ Early in the Letters, Williams compares French with English liberty:

… Liberty appears in France adorned with the freshness of youth, and is loved with the ardour of passion. In England she is seen in her matron state, and, like other ladies at that period, is beheld with sober veneration.

(Letters, I, 71)

As the abduction/seduction narrative so clearly demonstrates, French liberty's ‘youthful beauty’ makes her vulnerable to violation and corruption. On one level, then, the Revolution's degeneration into the Terror becomes a familiar cautionary tale, a demonstration of the necessary containment of female sexuality into the mature ‘matron state’ of English respectability, guarantor of social and commercial stability.

But another narrative of feminine sensibility operates throughout the Letters. Williams's own exemplary ability to ‘blend the feelings of private friendship with my sympathy in public blessings’ (Letters, I, 71-2) effects a continuity not simply between private and public, but between passivity and activity. The sentimental narratives and vignettes through which history is played out in the Letters record and evoke the ‘enthusiasm of the virtuous affections’, an alternative, feminised, sublime capable of transforming tyranny, ‘the throb of indignant horror’, to ‘the glow of sympathetic admiration’ (Sketches, II, 103). After the Terror, it breaks the cycle of extremity, the desire for retribution, by offering an alternative mode:

… sensations of softer pleasure were excited by observing the delightful transition which these momentous scenes produced in the situation of private individuals: …

(Sketches, IV, 52)

These ‘sensations of softer pleasure’ are precisely the means of producing that national community of private feeling which will make the Terror unrepeatable:

… the whole nation, roused into a sense of its danger by the terrible lesson it has been taught, can be oppressed no more. There scarcely exists a family, or an individual in France, that has not been bereaved by tyranny of some dear relation, some chosen friend, who seems from the grave to call upon them with a warning voice to watch over the liberties of their country.

(Sketches, I, 258)

This transformation of sublimity into beauty is thus effected by, in Wollstonecraft's phrase, ‘active sensibility’,¹⁴ an androgynous and transgressive quality given contemporary ideologies of gender.

In HMV, Wollstonecraft flirts with an even more transgressive possibility. At one climactic point, French aristocratic women become a kind of model:

… in France, the women have not those factitious, supercilious manners, common to the english; and acting more freely, they have more decision of character, and even more generosity. … not left a prey to their unsatisfied sensations, they were less romantic indeed than the english; yet many of them possessed delicacy of sentiment.

… it is natural to hope, that the labour of acquiring the substantial virtues, necessary to maintain freedom, will not render the french less pleasing, when they become more respectable.

(p. 311)

The perfectibilist hope in this extraordinary passage is that the effort ‘to maintain freedom’ might incorporate beauty into (sublime) ‘substantial virtues’, French aristocratic ‘effeminacy’ into middle-class ‘respectability’, and, in Williams's terms, French liberty's active sexuality into a mature femininity. The tone of longing for a ‘respectable’ aesthetic/sexual pleasure exactly captures the revolutionary moment of possibility as an active, anti-nationalist femininity is threatened with regulation, with reappropriation for the ‘sound organism and healthy sexuality’ of masculine bourgeois hegemony.

Focusing on the sexual narrative of Vaudracour and Julia in Wordsworth's Prelude, Gayatry Spivak argues that the male Romantic text ‘bring[s] the French Revolution under control by declaring it to be a felix culpa, a necessary means toward Wordsworth's growth as a poet’.¹⁵ She goes on to suggest that it does so by occluding history/woman in order to privilege poetry and the transcendent individual imagination; in other words, that the early Romantic aesthetic is grounded in a sublimated act of sexual violence. Wollstonecraft, Williams and other women writers of their generation were similarly trying to ‘bring the French Revolution under control’. In the fictive narratives through which the Revolution is depicted in their texts, the blame for the Fall (into revolutionary violence) is transferred to the male, but women are still restricted to the roles of sexual object or asexual ‘respectability’: they struggle to construct a new subject position, a feminine agency, but the repressive binary categories on which nationalist identity, gender and, it would seem, emergent Romanticism are constructed are essentially unbroken.

Notes

1. Richard Polwhele, The Unsex'd Females: a Poem (London, 1798), pp. 6-9, 30.

2. Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France, 4 vols (London, 1790-96), Letters containing a Sketch of the Politics of France, 4 vols (London, 1795-6), hereafter Letters and Sketches, volume and page references included in the text.

3. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (London, 1794), hereafter HMV, page references included in the text.

4. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth, 1979), pp. 125-6.

5. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 182.

6. Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, Letters on the Female Mind (London, 1793), p. 21.

7. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (London, 1799), I, 43.

8. Volney, The Ruins (1791; English trans. London, 1853), p. 199.

9. William Alexander, The History of Women, from the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time (London, 1779), II, 313; I, 102.

10. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), ed. Miriam Kramnick (Harmondsworth, 1982), pp. 144, 152, 81.

11. In Marilyn Butler (ed.), Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge, 1984), p. 25.

12. Volney, p. 35.

13. More, I, 6.

14. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), ed. Gary Kelly (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 153.

15. Gayatry Spivak, ‘Sex and History in The Prelude’ in R. Machin and Christopher Norris (eds), Post-Structuralist Readings in English Poetry (Cambridge, 1987), p. 199.