Mary Wollstonecraft

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Daring to Dialogue: Mary Wollstonecraft's Rhetoric of Feminist Dialogics

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In the essay that follows, Barlowe examines Wollstonecraft's use of different genres as an effort to engage in dialogue with the male-dominated intellectual tradition, in the larger service of achieving the practical social ends of feminism.
SOURCE: "Daring to Dialogue: Mary Wollstonecraft's Rhetoric of Feminist Dialogics," in Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, edited by Andrea A. Lunsford, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, pp. 117-36.

Of the many remarkable aspects of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)-—best known for her feminist manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)—perhaps the most remarkable was her steadfast belief in her right to participate in dialogues with the philosophers, politicians, educators, historians, and artists of her day as an informed, capable, rational thinker. Such public dialogues were not generally considered to be a woman's province, but Wollstonecraft neither questioned nor apologized for her own intellectual self-assurance. Whether she was challenging eighteenth-century cultural norms—as in her novels Mary and Maria—or responding to men such as Burke, Rousseau, Paine, and Talleyrand—as in her two Vindications—or writing letters to Gilbert Imlay or William Godwin, she consistently and persuasively argued for the rights of women. Thus, though her use of genres varied and though she grew increasingly radical, she never altered her goals of exposing the irrationality of the arguments used to debase and exclude women and of examining the pernicious, unquestioned assumptions on which those arguments rested.

Some critics have faulted Wollstonecraft for not explicitly engaging in dialogues with other contemporary women, particularly Frenchwomen, such as Olympia de Gouges and Etta Palm d'Aelders, who spoke out in the opening stages of the French Revolution. Instead, these critics note that she talked with men; some even go so far as to say that she appears not to "like women" (see Lorch; Butler and Todd; and for an opposing view, Brody). Yet by talking to men, Wollstonecraft became a representative dialogist—a rhetor, standing for other women of her time, especially those who had no understanding of their oppressed conditions. We can, in fact, applaud her bold assumption that she could and should talk to men, especially since men's notions not only shaped the thinking of her time but the policy as well. For Mary Wollstonecraft was engaged in a theoretical dialogue as a means to the practical ends of changing conditions and laws.

Wollstonecraft set out to persuade men that the natural extension of their logical positions would lead them to include rather than exclude women, that they were irrational in their thinking about women, that they had relativized virtue by trivializing and marginalizing women, that they violated "natural" laws, and that they created and shaped cultural conditions that ultimately victimized themselves as well as women. Moreover, she urged upper- and middle-class women to resist tyranny, first, by recognizing the wretchedness of cultivating the graces and perpetuating childish dependencies, and then by refusing to be complicit in that oppression. Their resistance—and consequent action—could alter the oppressive conditions of poor women as well as their own conditions. In fact, she refused to patronize women for their failures to recognize their own complicity, addressing them as "rational creatures" and thus implying their potential dignity and ability (Vindication of Woman 81).

My analysis of Wollstonecraft rests on the assumption that as modern readers we are in dialogue with her work as we try to understand her dialogics, her positions and methods, and the consequences of all her work. As I see it, such an analysis necessarily generates an argument for considering her private letters, not as the context of her public writings, but as equallyvaluable and valid texts in themselves, which also reveal her particular rhetorical strategies, her passionate commitment to a feminist ideology, her formidable intuitive and analytical skills, and her personal struggles.

Too often, critics have argued that Wollstonecraft's personal life betrayed her feminist positions and that her letters to Gilbert Imlay violated her intellectual integrity. In view of such thinking, we can understand why such critics want to create separate categories, viewing her personal life as mired in the oppression of female emotions and desire and her public writing as increasingly radical. For example, Jennifer Lorch says that "to reach an accurate assessment of Mary Wollstonecraft's relevance to the late twentieth century is to disentangle her political writings, her career, and her private life" (109). Mary Poovey argues that Wollstonecraft never incorporates into her personal life her own intellectual challenges, thus "falling hostage … to the very categories she was trying to escape," and that the "difficulties Mary Wollstonecraft encountered again and again in her private life and her literary works all center on the issue of feeling" (48).

Rather than trapping our examination of Wollstonecraft's writings in the binary oppositions of reason/emotion and public/private that her culture depended on to separate men and women (and denigrate and isolate women), we can refuse such oppositions by examining both her private letters and publish-ed works as they reveal her consistent resistance to those limiting categories. In doing so, I will not be re-narrativizing her life; instead, to the ends I have articulated, I will examine some representative pieces of Mary Wollstonecraft's work as they fall into categories of genre: political writing; novels; and letters, discussing them in terms of the dialogues they imply and the rhetorical strategies they employ as a way to achieve their feminist aims of effecting changes in belief and understanding—in the hope of real social changes.

I

Although few readers of A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) or of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) fail to see the immensity of their public force, many scholars criticize these pieces in terms of methodology; often the criticism takes the form of lamentations about what Wollstonecraft did not do rather than considerations of what she did do and how she chose to do it, given her larger purposes. Like many readers, I will look at A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as an extension of the argument developed in the first Vindication, even while analyzing it in terms of its own feminist ends and its dialogic and rhetorical means. In addition to refuting Burke's dramatic and emotional response to Dr. Price's sermon "Discourse on the Love of Our Country," Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Men supports the idea of the inherent, natural rights of all humanbeings. This is in opposition to Burke's insistence on the perpetuation of a class system, the very existence of which, he claimed, constituted its justification. Belief in natural rights, he scoffed, was the province of philosophers and metaphysicians; for him, a natural right was the right to maintain the social and political position into which one was born:

The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned.… This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature.… We [the English] are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers.… In England … [we] fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natiural to be so affected; because all other feelings are false and spurious, and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals.… Society is indeed a contract.… Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place. This law is not subject to the will of those, who by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law. (1271-87)

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft extends her argument about natural rights to women, this time taking on such thinkers as Rousseau—who, compared to Burke, seemed liberal and enlightened, but who refused to see women as rational beings, thus violating his own philosophic and political positions. She views Burke as holding fully irrational beliefs, and also considers Rousseau irrational—in part because he uses the consequences of women's treatment—their irrational behavior—as evidence for their incapacity for rationality, just as Burke used the behavior of men as evidence for their incapacity for rational behavior. Women act in irrational ways, she argues, because they have been deprived of the knowledge and skills which would allow them to behave rationally. Even so-called educated women have been taught in a

false system of education; the minds of women are enfeebled by false refinement … the books of instruction, written by men of genius, have had the same tendency as more frivolous productions … they are treated as a kind of subordinate being, and not as part of the human species, when improvable reason is allowed to be the dignified distinction which raises men above the brutecreation, and puts a natural scepter in a feeble hand. (79-80)

She dedicates this Vindication to Talleyrand, hoping, as Miriam Brody tells us, "to influence legislation before the French Assembly on women's education" (18):

Pardon my frankness, but … I call upon you … now to weigh what I have advanced respecting the rights of woman and national education; and I call with the firm tone of humanity, for my arguments, sir, are dictated by a disinterested spirit—I plead for my sex, not for myself. Independence I have long considered the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants. It is then an affection for the whole human race that makes my pen dart rapidly along to support what I believe to be the cause of virtue; and the same motive leads me earnestly to wish to see woman placed in a station in which she would advance, instead of retarding, the progress of those glorious principles that give a substance to morality. My opinion, indeed, respecting the rights and duties of woman seems to flow so naturally from these same principles, that I think it scarcely possible but that some of the enlarged minds who formed your admirable constitution will coincide with me. (85)

In other words, Wollstonecraft takes the men on where they are: if they believe in morality as a consequence of rationality, which is natural to human beings, and if they believe that education is one of the ways to cultivate virtue through rationality, then women, as human creatures, will "stop the progress of knowledge and virtue" if they "be not prepared by education to become the companion of man" (86). That education—what she calls the "perfect education"—is

an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent. In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason. This was Rousseau's opinion respecting men; I extend it to women; … I may be accused of arrogance; still I must declare what I firmly believe, that all the writers who have written on the subject of female education and manners, from Rousseau to Dr. Gregory, have contributed to render women more artificial, weak characters, than they would otherwise have been; and consequently more useless members of society. (103-04)

Wollstonecraft's purposes and her confident expression of them have radical potentialities. Of course, she refrains from stating the implications of her argument—full independence of women—because otherwise her argument would have been so threatening as to be disregarded. Instead, she argues that if men desire certain societal ends, then one of the means to reach those ends is to educate women to help achieve—rather than thwart—them. Since she believes in full independence in her own life—having already proposed the unconventional arrangement of living with a married couple, the Fuselis; having already decided against marriage for herself, and having chosen writing as a way to achieve financial independence—she knows the implications and potentialities of her argument. What she cares about—more than possible future consequences—is getting men of power to listen to her argument and then getting changes instituted.

Thus, her goals seem radically feminist: on the local, immediate level, she seeks to change the educational system and thus perhaps women's self-estimation, in order to gain the respect of men; on the vaster level, she seeks women's independence. She does not, I'll admit, dialogue—except implicitly—with women, nor does she ever write the projected Part 2 of the Vindication, which would have included discussions of "women's legal and political rights." Neither does she specifically discuss "the individual woman's self-realization" (Butler and Todd 15). While such omissions may be "frustrating" from a twentieth-century feminist point of view, her arguments—and her life—do not close out such possibilities. As Margaret Fuller was to do half a century later in America, Wollstonecraft publicly demanded a recontextualization of women inside the generally received notions of human beings and their souls, as both a moral action and a means to social morality.

The remainder of the long Vindication, divided into sections, serves as supporting arguments and evidence for her positions, her statements of problems, and her proposals of solutions, always anticipating and accounting for objections. She remains in the dialogic mode throughout the piece, addressing this audience of so-called enlightened men, assuming their desire to live up to the terms of their own philosophical and political systems and assuming their intelligence and morality. She pushes them gently at times and shoves them around rhetorically at others. She also assumes her own ability to reason, to argue, and to persuade. She ends the Vindication with these words, using irony as one of her persuasive tools:

Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man [the "enlightened" men she is directly addressing]; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated or justify the authority that chains such a weak being to her duty. If the latter, it will be expedient to open a fresh trade with Russia for whips: a present which a father should always make to his son-in-law on his wedding day, that a husband may keep his whole family in order by the same means; and without any violation of justice reign, wielding this scepter, sole master of his house, because he is the only thing in it who has reason:—the divine, indefeasible earthly sovereignty breathed into man by the Master of the universe. Allowing this position, women have not any inherent rights to claim; and, by the same rule, their duties vanish, for rights and duties are inseparable. Be just then, 0 ye men of understanding; and mark not more severely what women do amiss than the vicious tricks of the horse or the ass for whom ye provide provender—and allow her theprivileges of ignorance, to whom ye deny the rights of reason, or ye will be worse than Egyptian task-masters, expecting virtue where Nature has not given understanding. (319).

II

Wollstonecraft's advertisement for her first novel, Mary (1788), describes the book as "an artless tale, without episodes," but one in which "the mind of a woman, who has thinking powers is displayed" (5). In a letter she calls it "a tale, to illustrate an opinion of mine, that a genius will educate itself (4), following Rousseau. In this rather short but intense third-person narrative, no dialogue breaks the relentless account of an empathetic, energetic female of genius whose external circumstances help shape her sensibility, changing her from a naive, vulnerable, unsettled young girl to a woman who "struggled for resignation" (73). Faced with continual painful events in her life—often a loved one's death—Mary does not so much overcome the events as internalize them to become ever more attuned to the pain of others, often to her own discomfort. Through reading and writing, she works to include reason into her own deliberations; reason, in fact, curbs the passions, which, unshaped and unstrengthened, lead to full immersion in sentimentality, sensuality, idleness, and self-indulgence—in other words, to becoming someone like Mary's mother, Eliza. In fact, just in case the reader might misunderstand the initial direction of this novel, the narrator ironizes the portrait of Eliza's life:

When she could not any longer indulge the caprices of fancy one way, she tried another. The Platonic Marriage, Eliza Warwick and some other interesting tales were perused with eagerness. Nothing could be more natural than the development of the passions, nor more striking than the views of the human heart.

What delicate struggles! and uncommonly pretty turns of thought! … Fatal image!—… What a heart-rending accident.… Alas! Alas! If my readers would excuse the sportiveness of fancy, and give me credit for genius, I would go on and tell them such tales as would force the sweet tears of sensibility to flow in copious showers down beautiful cheeks, to the discomposure of rouge, etc. etc. Nay, I would make it so interesting, that the fair peruser should beg the hair-dresser to settle the curls himself, and not interrupt her. [Eliza] had besides another resource, two most beautiful dogs, who shared her bed.… These she watched with the most assiduous care. (8)

But Mary, the daughter, is "neglected in every respect, and left to the operations of her own mind." Mary, too, is filled with passions, although hers take the form of "sublime ideas … always connected with devotional sentiments; extemporary effusions of gratitude, and rhapsodies of praise would often burst from her"(11). More important, as unformed and uninformed as Mary's passions are as a young girl, their consequence is not idle self-indulgence, but action. She helps others: "Her benevolence, indeed, knew no bounds; the distress of others carried her out of herself; and she rested not till she had relieved or comforted them. The warmth of her compassion often made her so diligent, that many things occurred to her, which might have escaped a less interested observer" (16). The movement from passion/emotion through reason to action, in fact, becomes Mary's primary mode of operation. Reason, engendered through reading and writing and discussion, does not mitigate or overpower the emotions, but informs them so that, combined, they can lead to action—not merely to theories or more abstract thinking—but to real human actions. These actions often take the form of resisting the culture's strictures, undoing, in fact, its inevitable destructive consequences by intruding into the lives of its victims, nurturing them emotionally and supporting them financially. Moreover, Mary's rational thinking allows her respite from her own grief and the power to persuade men that she should be trusted to make decisions and act in terms of them, for example, when she persuades her husband (a man she neither knows nor loves) that she should take her friend Ann, who is dying, to Portugal or southern France and care for her there.

In other words, Mary, given the cultural codes and rules, feels she has no choice but to seek his approval for her trip, and given human frailty and providential decisions, knows she cannot change the course of her friend's illness. If such uncontrollable circumstances could be seen as forming the circumference of Mary's external world, then, even in this context, she finds the means of active resistance—of action itself. Meena Alexander has suggested that Mary's resistance takes the form of writing, which allows her to "discover an authentic self, capable of both action and expression" (41). Perhaps we are to see that in other, less limiting circumstances, a thinking/feeling woman like Mary would be liberated, fully independent, and free to develop her genius, as Rousseau envisions for men.

Although this early novel is often categorized as merely sentimental, I see it instead as the initial working out of Wollstonecraft's feminist project of envisioning a life of independence for women and envisioning and re-envisioning a society that will allow it. In fact, the last lines of Mary, which strongly rearticulate one of the lessons of this text, also prepare us for Wollstonecraft's last work, another novel, the unfinished Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798): "[Mary's] delicate state of health did not promise long life. In moments of solitary sadness, a gleam of joy would dart across her mind—She thought she was hastening to that world where there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage" (73). Thus, while I would agree with such feminist critics as Alexander and Lorch that Wollstonecraft's last novel, Maria, is more radical in form and content than her first, Mary (see Poovey; Ferguson; and Butler and Todd for other views), the groundwork forthat radicalism has already been laid in Mary. In fact, the groundwork covers much more than Wollstonecraft's attitudes about marriage; a variety of social ills, from property rights to impressment and women's spheres of action are also reexamined. In Maria the female protagonist is locked inside a prison, effecting change both inside and outside the walls as well as in the minds and hearts of others. Like Mary, she persuades others, through language informed by reason and passion, to help her or at least to agree with her methods. Maria, however, resists the strictures of her own life in ways Mary would not have considered. Mary's resistance—though certainly not passive—is never great enough to generate punishment (all her "punishment" or pain is a result of illness and death), but Maria's resistance is more consequential. Leaving her marriage, in fact, results in her imprisonment and the kidnapping of her child.

Even critics such as Poovey, who consider Maria a failure in both its form and political aim, find Wollstonecraft's characterization of Jemima innovative and feminist. As Poovey says,

Jemima's story—which is a radical, indeed feminist, story—has the potential to call into question both the organizational principles of bourgeois society and the sentimentalism that perpetuates romantic idealism. For the anarchy implicit in Jemima's brief assertion of female sexuality combines with the stark realism of the narrative to explode the assumptions that tie female sexuality to romance and thus to the institutions men traditionally control. (104)

Poovey faults Wollstonecraft, however, for not fully developing Jemima's character and her political potential, and she feels that Maria—as well as the narrator—is crippled by "sentimental idealism" (105). Yet others consider, as I do, the inclusion of issues of class and gender to be politically radical and potentially subversive. Poovey also argues that Wollstonecraft's novel fails in "reconciling her intended 'purpose' with the genre, which here shapes the 'structure' of the work." According to her sketchy preface, Wollstonecraft had a political purpose, yet her choice of genre, which allowed for the dramatization of "finer sensations [which] were deeply implicated in the values—indeed, the very organization—of bourgeois society," caused her severe problems (96).

Instead, Wollstonecraft reshaped the genre of sentimentalism to fit her political, feminist purposes. If her characters demonstrate "finer sensations," it is always with the goal of solving their immediate problems at the level of story, which reflect the larger political ends of Wollstonecraft. Her characters, in other words, work in the service of Wollstonecraft's political themes. Examining both her novels in light of their feminist aims, we can see that her rhetorical strategies often demanded subversion of typical expectations of genre and that her continual dialogic mode puts the reader in a specific relationship to Wollstonecraft' scharacters—and to Wollstonecraft as author—who request attention, acknowledgement, and action.

III

Finally, I want to consider as part of her feminist aims, rhetorical strategies, and dialogic method Mary Wollstonecraft's letters to Gilbert Imlay (the man with whom she lived during the early years of the 1790s and with whom she had a daughter, Fanny), although, as I indicated in my introduction, even feminist critics have generally categorized these letters as personal and thus separate from her public writings. In part, that separation is a consequence of a kind of embarrassment. The fact that the woman touted as writing the first feminist manifesto could twice attempt suicide after Gilbert Imlay's rejection of her is a source of ideological discomfort. For example, Jennifer Lorch argues that Wollstonecraft mythologized Imlay and the beginnings of their relationship, believing in capacities he did not have and then refusing to acknowledge her mistake: "She clung to the notion that she could improve her Gilbert." Lorch sees Wollstonecraft as violating what she had earlier written in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1789), namely, that one should root out passion that is unapproved by reason; Lorch also deplores what she sees as Wollstonecraft's emotional and financial dependence on Imlay (45-47).

Although viewing Wollstonecraft generally as one who "proclaimed the new feminist viewpoint" and in whose works "may be found a chronicle of an epoch," Moira Ferguson and Janet Todd consistently undermine Wollstonecraft as they interpret her letters to Imlay, primarily through their tone and their use of charged, negative words:

Wollstonecraft's love letters prove her to be a woman very much swayed by emotions … a woman … unafraid to express [her feelings] extravagantly, unabashed by lavish sentiments.… As Imlay withdrew his affection, she shifted into a … more frenzied emotional gear. At first when his affections waned she burst with fury and resentment … [showing an] absence of control to the point of suicide … She reproves Imlay for her sufferings, discomfits him with stories of her fatigue and disorders, while petulantly (and paradoxically) reminding him that she does not complain. In an apparent attempt to reforge their emotional links, she attempts to arouse a sense of guilt in him as she chides him about the health and general disposition of their daughter. (13-15, 91-93)

Up against these letters, Ferguson and Todd put the published Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), praising them for their "control and power" (103). Yet they "fancy" that her pleading in An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794) is an "imposition of rationalismonto the chaos of indulged emotion" in which there is a "parallel to her efforts at rationally controlling her frantic infatuation with the retreating Imlay" (82). They go on to say that the "ultimate optimism of The French Revolution, so qualified even in its closing chapters, is more darkly undercut when the book is placed in the context of Wollstonecraft's life. Perhaps it is fortunate in being the only one of her later works that does not insist on this context" (88). Their argument about her personal life—at times explicit and at others implicit—is that it always imposes on her writing, usually in negative ways. The personal life, then—including her letters to Imlay—is a context into which they place her texts.

Equally appreciative of Letters in Sweden, Mary Poovey argues that they "enable [Wollstonecraft] to objectify her tumultuous emotions in a form that does not demand an integrated, fully formed persona … as the mirror of a maturing self and self-consciousness; … the Letters details the narrator's passage from an initial state of poised expectation through a period of energetic exploration, observation, and self-discovery, to a gradual decline into melancholy and anger" (91-92). Thus, her experiences with Imlay, as related in her personal letters to him, provide a context (positive rather than negative, as in Ferguson and Todd) for the published, polished, controlled Letters in Sweden (see also Alexander; Brody; Butler and Todd).

I want to look at Wollstonecraft's letters to Imlay, not as a context for her public writings—either positive or negative—or as a fully separate category, but as another equally important genre in which she expresses her fundamental right to argue her case. In that light, they are rhetorically interesting, ideologically sound, and dialogically motivated. Just as she believes she should argue for her ideas about the education and rights of women in her other writings, Mary Wollstonecraft is arguing for her personal rights in these letters to Imlay. To see them in such a light may require that we shift away from the long-held perspective that they are not feminist in aim or method.

What we know now—and what she did not know for certain when writing these letters—is that her passionate and reasoned arguments to him would not touch him emotionally or move him to action. The fact that she believed in him—and in her power to move him—continued to motivate her until she fully recognized that she had failed. She could not know that she would fail, yet we judge her as though she should have known. Interestingly, however, we do not judge her negatively for failing to institute radical social changes as a consequence of her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, the two Vindications, or the two novels. We applaud and analyze her efforts, her ideas, and her voice in those public writings, even though when she died, her society had not incorporated any of her ideas into their political, educational, or economic system. Similarly, Gilbert Imlay refused to change or to incorporate herarguments into his life, to examine his ethical inadequacies, or to live up to the terms of their earlier relationship; yet we seem to be more embarrassed by Wollstonecraft's rhetorical failures than by his ethical ones.

The alternative to her letters might have been silence or passivity, reactions eschewed for obvious reasons by Wollstonecraft and by today's feminists. Some might suggest that, even if she decided to maintain a dialogue with him, she should have argued less passionately or suppressed her anger, pain, and despair. At the very least, some say, she should have not harangued him for his failures. Yet, had she adopted these means to her end of persuading Imlay, she would have been false to herself. She would also have violated her sense, at that time, of her best methods of persuasion. In all her previous public writings, she argued strongly, even haranguing, about the ills of her culture, the failure of men to live up to their own professed notions of rationality, and of women to take themselves seriously. Yet since she also knew that women were victims and thus hardly responsible for their weaknesses and failures, she directed most of her arguments to men with ideational, political, and economic power. If, as we saw in her political writings and novels, the system were to change, then women themselves would change. As a consequence, men would change, too, and life would improve for all. In her letters to Imlay, she directs her personal argument (seeing herself as a victim of his irresponsibility and insensibility) to a man with emotional, if not ideational or economic, power. If he would only listen, understand, and take action, both their lives would be better.

It seems unlikely that Imlay would have been surprised by her intensity and commitment to her beliefs, not the least of which was her desire to convince him to stay with her and give up his pursuit of commercial interests. Yet critics consistently condemn Wollstonecraft's desire and understand Imlay's wish to escape her intensity and any commitment to her perspective. She took herself—and him—so seriously, however, that it never occurred to her that her love for him was silly, misdirected, or wrong, nor did she realize—at least for a while—that he would find justification for his rejection of her and of her expectations of him.

Her early letters to Imlay, I would argue, rest on the same assumptions as her letters to her publisher, Johnson, or later to her husband, William Godwin: mutual respect and shared understanding, which ostensibly reflected their relationship to that point. Whether her assumptions fully reflect his sense of the relationship, we have no idea. Given Wollstonecraft's intelligence and intuition, however, we can infer with some assurance that they shared something emotionally powerful, whether or not his emotional commitment was primarily physical. For example, in letters dated from June 1793 to [December 30], 1793, she tells him:

I obey an emotion of my heart, which made me think ofwishing thee, my love, good-night! before I go to rest … Cherish me with that dignified tenderness, which I have only found in you. (Letter 2)

You have often called me dear girl. (Letter 3)

I have just received your letter, and feel as if I could not go to bed tranquilly without saying a few words in Teply—merely to tell you, that my mind is serene, and my heart affectionate.… I am going to rest very happy, and you have made me so.—This is the kindest good-night I can utter. (Letter 5)

My' best love, your letter to-night was particularly grateful to my heart.… There was so much considerate tenderness in your epistle tonight, that, if it has not made you dearer to me, it has made me forcibly feel how very dear you are to me, by charming away half my cares. (Letter 8)

Yet she is also sensible of differences between them and of the problems caused by his absence, and she is always arguing her points and beliefs:

The way to my senses is through my heart; but, forgive me! I think there is sometimes a shorter cut to yours. With ninety-nine men out of a hundred, a very sufficient dash of folly is necessary to render a woman piquante, a soft word for desirable; and, beyond these casual ebullitions of sympathy, few look for enjoyment by fostering a passion in their hearts. One reason, in short, why I wish my whole sex to become wise, is, that the foolish ones may not, by their pretty folly rob those whose sensibility keeps down their vanity, of the few roses that afford them some solace in the thorny road of life. I do not know how I fell into these reflections, excepting one thought produced it—that these continual separations were necessary to warm your affection. Of late, we are always separating. Crack!—crack!—and away you go.—This joke wears the sallow cast of thought; for, though I began to write cheerfully, some melancholy tears have found their way into my eyes. (Letter 4)

His repeated absences demonstrate to her the problems caused by separation; she describes the "fancies" she conjures up when alone, and her fears, yet does so in a way that makes her descriptions seem more like rhetorical strategies than admissions of weakness:

I will never, if I am not entirely cured of quarrelling, begin to encourage "quick-coming fancies," when we are separated. Yesterday … I could not open your letter for some time; and, though it was not half as severe as I merited, it threw me into such a fit of trembling, as seriously alarmed me.… This morning I am better; will you not be glad to hear it? You perceive that sorrow has almost made a child of me, and that I want to besoothed to peace. One thing you mistake in my character, and imagine that to be coldness which is just the contrary. For, when I am hurt by the person most dear to me, I must let out a whole torrent of emotions, in which tenderness would be uppermost, or stifle them altogether; and it appears to me almost a duty to stifle them, when I imagine that I am treated with coldness. (Letter 12)

What is the reason that my spirits are not as manageable as yours? Yet, now I think of it, I will not allow that your temper is even, though I have promised myself, in order to obtain my own forgiveness, that I will not ruffle it for a long, long time—I am afraid to say never. (Letter 17)

She continues to argue that he should live with her and their daughter, Fanny, and give up commerce. In December 1794, she says, "How I hate this crooked-business! This intercourse with the world, which obliges one to see the worst side of human nature!" (Letter 30). Moreover; she repeats her threats to leave with their child if he continues his absences. She is worried about her own financial situation, of course:

I am determined to try to earn some money here myself, in order to convince you that, if you choose to run about the world to get a fortune, it is for yourself—for the little girl and I will live without your assistance, unless you are with us. I may be termed proud—Be it so—but I will never abandon certain principles of action. The common run of men have such an ignoble way of thinking, that, if they debauch their hearts, and prostitute their persons, following perhaps a gust of inebriation, they suppose the wife, slave rather, whom they maintain, has no right to complain, and ought to receive the sultan, whenever he deigns to return.… You know my opinion of men in general; you know that I think them systematic tyrants, and that it is the rarest thing in the world, to meet with a man with sufficient delicacy of feeling to govern desire… You will call this an ill-humored letter, when, in fact, it is the strongest proof of affection I can give, to dread to lose you.… You have always known my opinion—I have ever declared, that two people, who mean to live together, ought not to be long separated.—If certain things are more necessary to you than me—search for them—Say but one word, and you shall never hear of me more.—If not, for God's sake, let us struggle with poverty—with any evil, but these continual inquietudes of business, which I have been told were to last but a few months, though every day the end appears more distant. (Letter 31)

Yet he continues to make her believe, according to her letters, that he will return and that he also returns her affections, even if the moments of affection are punctuated by their quarrels. She describes the difficulties she faces in order to prod him to action, not merely to "complain," as she has beenaccused of doing by those who want to place her in a context that she so desperately wanted to escape: that of expectations for women. Nor does she want him to act out of guilt, but rather out of a shared affection. In fact, she consistently refuses his offers of financial assistance after it is clear his passion has cooled.

Even as late as June 1795—after her first suicide attempt and her subsequent trip to Scandinavia—she argues her case, based on her belief in him and in herself: "Well! you will ask, what is the result of all this reasoning? Why I cannot help thinking that it is possible for you, having great strength of mind, to return to nature, and regain a sanity of constitution, and purity of feelings—which would open your heart to me.—I would fain rest there" (Letter 44). We can infer that he begins to accuse her of failures to show him respect, yet she considers her most profound signals of respect to be manifested in her unlimited confidence in his capacity to live up to expectations.

She finally begins, however, to admit to herself the magnitude of his rejection, and her despair grows; yet she never stops trying to persuade him to listen to her reason and to honor his various commitments to her, not cultural commitments of marriage or finances, but those of the heart, affection for her and Fanny. When she is hurt—which is quite often—she tells him so openly and honestly, speaking out, as she had always done, refusing to be silenced by his actions or by the world that had oppressed her:

I have been hurt by indirect enquiries, which appear to me not to be dictated by any tenderness to me.—You ask "If I am well or tranquil?"—They who think me so, must want a heart to estimate my feelings by.—I chose then to be the organ of my own sentiments. I must tell you, that I am very much mortified by your continually offering me pecuniary assistance. (Letter 73)

I do not perfectly understand you.—If, by the offer of your friendship, you still only mean pecuniary support—I must again reject it… I have been treated ungenerously—if I understand what is generosity.—You seem to me only to have been anxious to shake me off—regardless whether you dashed me to atoms by the fall.—In truth I have been rudely handled. (Letter 75)

These two sections of letters were written after she discovered he was living in London with a mistress. She is angry, yes, and actively argues against him. She is planning another attempt at suicide, yet she continues to answer each of his letters, believing in her own rhetorical and dialogic power and in the possibilities of language to make changes in her terrible situation. Even her very last letter to him maintains her position of intellectual integrity and justification for her love of him, no longer because he deserves it, but because it is her feeling to have, not his to discard:

I now solemnly assure you, that this is an eternalfarewell.—Yet I flinch not from the duties which tie me to life. That there is "sophistry" on one side or other, is certain; but now it matters not on which. On my part it has not been a question of words. yet your understanding or mine must be strangely warped—for what you term "delicacy," appears to me to be exactly the contrary. I have no criterion for morality, and have thought in vain, if the sensations which lead you to follow an ancle or step, be the sacred foundation of principle and affection. Mine has been of a different nature, or it would not have stood the brunt of your sarcasms. The sentiment in me is still sacred. If there be any part of me that will survive the sense of my misfortunes, it is the purity of my affections. The impetuosity of your senses, may have led you to term mere animal desire, the source of principles; and it may give zest to some years to come.—Whether you will always think so, I shall never know. It is strange that, in spite of all you do, something like conviction forces me to believe, that you are not what you appear to be. I part with you in peace. (Letter 7

IV

To conclude this essay. I wish to examine a few of the important implications for us as academics of considering Mary Wollstonecraft's writing. The first concerns the targeted audiences of feminist academics. whether their work be that of reclaiming lost (or suppressed) texts by women; providing a hearing for hitherto unheard female voices; recontextualizing the work of women who have been undervalued, ignored, misunderstood, or vilified by the culture; criticizing the texts that depict women; or theorizing about texts, authors, readers, and language from feminist perspectives (the work of this collection of essays). Too often, we address our work primarily—sometimes exclusively—to other women, assuming perhaps that we are working only to educate one another. Although that is a significant part of our task—sharing our research and challenging one another—part of our task, too, is to follow Wollstonecraft's lead and, as often as possible, publicly address ourselves directly to the source of problems—institutionalized power that, intentionally or indirectly, allows oppressive practices to continue: in hiring, committee assignments, and course loads; through texts selected from publishers as well as for class syllabi; and through decisions about administrative positions, women's studies departments and programs, and tenure and promotion—just to name a few potentially problematic areas. No matter how much we would like to believe the contrary, that kind of work is never completed. Even if certain fundamental goals have been achieved at certain institutions by certain women, there is no evidence that there is general change, especially at small universities and colleges, both public and private.

Sexism is so deeply ingrained in our culture—including academic life—that our best efforts have so far merely begun the work ofexamining its extent and the means by which it is perpetuated. And if we see the immense amount of work to be done in academe, the work in the general community is even more daunting. The sexism of many of our students and colleagues should be confronted more directly. We should feel compelled, once again, to bring up sexism and its consequences in department and university meetings, at conferences, and in our classrooms. In the spirit of Gerald Graffs idea of "teaching the conflicts" and in the spirit of Wollstonecraft's belief in the rhetoric of feminist dialogue, we can generate discussions that guarantee even more public airings of the issues of sexism in texts, in decisions, in power, and in life, especially at places where these discussions are limited or discouraged—and there are many such places. Frank and open dialogues should be especially encouraged at institutions where there are (often unacknowledged) punitive consequences for being a feminist. "The New Rhetorics," explored and explained in this collection through the contributions of women, encourage us to break silences, to dialogue, to connect, and to collaborate.

Moreover, we may want to rethink any decisions we might make to teach unproblematically texts that perpetuate exclusionary ideas because we feel uncomfortable about our own prospects for tenure and promotion or about students' opinions. Two hundred years ago Mary Wollstonecraft felt compelled to speak out against such men as Burke and Rousseau—doing work that was well known (if not well loved) at the same time. Yet how many classes in eighteenth-century thought (in literature, history, rhetoric, and philosophy) teach the texts of these men and never once consider the value of putting them in dialogue with Wollstonecraft's two Vindications? Indeed, how often is there even a general awareness of her texts? In places where Wollstonecraft is part of the work of the classroom, she is often included in the "women's issues" section of the syllabus or in some other kind of isolating category, without the students also reading the works of the men to whom she responds; or she is read only in classes taught by women. In other words, adding her to classes dealing with women's issues or to classes taught only by women is not enough. We should work to get her and other women who made significant contributions to intellectual history and to the history of rhetoric more generally accepted and included.

For us to teach the male tradition without putting their work in dialogue with their historical, cultural, linguistic, and ideological contexts and with female thinkers and rhetors is to participate in the perpetuation of beliefs that are oppressive. Students, especially ours in the 1990s, do not automatically challenge such beliefs, for unquestioning adherence to some notion of duty or code of behavior is continually valorized in our culture, whether by socialization learned in school, religious education, or participation in war. However, I also find the decision not to teach the texts of the past problematic. Instead, putting ideas in dialogue with oppositional voices, especially when we can discover contemporaneous ones, allows our students to see, as Mary Wollstonecraft so clearly understood, that reading andwriting—as a way of gaining the knowledge and skills to speak with vision and confidence—and then publicly articulating one's concerns can effect change, even if those changes do not fully emerge, as in Wollstonecraft's case, until two centuries later in classrooms in America. Perhaps our students, especially our women students, will understand, too, that the committed—and yes, sometimes passionate—expression of one's ideas and beliefs can make a difference at the personal level, as well as in the public domain.

References

Alexander, Meena. Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley. Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble, 1989.

Applewhite, Harriet Branson, Mary Durham Johnson, and Darlene Gay Levy. Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1795. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979.

Brody, Miriam. Introduction. Vindication of the Rights of Woman. By Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Penguin, 1985.

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. In Eighteenth Century English Literature. Ed. Tillotson, Fussell, and Waingrow. New York: Harcourt, 1969.

Butler, Marilyn, and Janet Todd. General introduction. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. 7 vols. Washington Square: New York UP, 1989.

Ferguson, Moira, and Janet Todd. Mary Wollstonecraft. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

Lorch, Jennifer. Mary Wollstonecraft. The Making of a Radical Feminist. New York: Berg (St. Martin's), 1990.

Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

Price, Richard. A Discourse on the Love of our Country at the Meeting House in the Old Jewry for the Society of Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain. London: Cadell, 1790.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile. Trans. Barbara Foxley. New York: Dutton, 1974.

Wardle, Ralph M. Godwin and Mary: Letters of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1966.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Ralph M. Wardle. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979.

——. The Cave of Fancy. In vol. 1 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd. 7 vols. Washington Square: New York UP, 1989.

——. An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. In vol. 6 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft.

——. Letters to Gilbert Imlay. In vol. 6 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft.

——. Letters to Joseph Johnson. In vol. 6 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft.

——. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. In vol. 6 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft.

——. Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman. In vol. 1 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft.

——. Mary. In vol. 1 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft.

——. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. In vol. 4 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft.

——. A Vindication of the Rights of Men. In vol. 5 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft.

——. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In vol. 5 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft.

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