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Writing a Revolutionary Life: Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft

Pamela Clemit, University of Durham
1.

William Godwin was accused of mourning Wollstonecraft "with a heart of stone," but in fact he was too upset to attend her funeral on 15 September 1797.[1] Instead he took refuge at a friend's house, where he wrote to Anthony Carlisle, the doctor who had nursed her to the end.[2] The letter begins:

I am here sitting alone in Mr Marshal's lodgings during my wife's funeral. My mind is extremely sunk & languid. But I husband my thoughts, & shall do very well. I have been but once since you saw me, in a train of thought that gave me alarm. One of my wife's books now lies near me, but I avoid opening it. I took up a book on the education of children, but that impressed me too forcibly with my forlorn & disabled state with respect to the two poor animals left under my protection, & I threw it aside.

Nothing could be more soothing to my mind than to dwell in a long letter upon her virtues & accomplishments, & our mutual happiness past & in prospect. [. . .] I may say to you on paper what I observed to you in our last interview, that I never, in the whole course of my life, met with the union of so clear & capacious an understanding, with so much goodness of heart & sweetness of manners.[3]
This passage shows Godwin composing an image of Wollstonecraft in order to compose himself. Over the next ten days, he re-read her novels and letters, then on 24 September he recorded in his diary, "Life of Wt, p. 2."[4] Thus began the writing of Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman: in part an act of mourning, in part a love letter, and in part a candid justification of the revolutionary life, loves, and death of Mary Wollstonecraft. Godwin's philosophical biography of Wollstonecraft provides not only a commemoration of a loved individual but also a vindication of their shared progressive social and political ideals.[5]
2.

The publication of Memoirs in 1798 provoked widespread hostility from the conservative press.[6] Godwin quickly became notorious for, in the words of Robert Southey, "the want of all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked."[7] Later generations of readers, however, found Godwin's biographical construction of Wollstonecraft a source of inspiration. For example, among the papers of Ruth Benedict, the American anthropologist, is the manuscript of a biographical essay on Wollstonecraft (ca. 1914-17), laid aside when Benedict began her professional training.[8] Though Benedict studied Wollstonecraft's writings, it was her life-story that she found most compelling:

The story of Mary Wollstonecraft is that most precious of human documents: the story of a life that achieved an idea. [. . .] For her, life had no axioms; its geometry was all experimental. She was forever testing, probing; forever dominated by an utter unwillingness to accept the pretense, the convention in place of the reality. [. . .] the knowledge she won, the price she paid, her books may hint to us, but it is her life through which we understand. [. . .] It is her life story that makes her our contemporary.[9]
Here Benedict fashions a biographical image of Wollstonecraft which reflects her own values, hopes, and aspirations. Similarly, Virginia Woolf, in the essay, "Four Figures" (1929), celebrated the forward-looking, experimental qualities of Wollstonecraft's life as much as her writings:

Many millions have died and been forgotten in the hundred and thirty years that have passed since she was buried; and yet as we read her letters and listen to her arguments and consider her experiments, above all, that most fruitful experiment, her relation with Godwin, and realise the high-handed and hot-blooded manner in which she cut her way to the quick of life, one form of immortality is hers undoubtedly: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.[10]
In each of these passages, Godwin's portrait of Wollstonecraft speaks to different historical and personal concerns. To engage with Godwin's biographical construction of Wollstonecraft at the start of the twenty-first century is thus to engage with modern ideas about women's literary, social, and political identity as well as with late eighteenth-century cultural contexts (not that the two can ever be separated).
3.

Memoirs was the first of several philosophical biographies by Godwin, in which he aimed to foster gradual social change by transforming the moral consciousness of his readers. Godwin set out his claims for the importance of biography as an agent of reform in an essay of 1797 called "Of History and Romance." Here he rejects the history of mass movements in favour of "individual history," or biography, which contributes to progress of mind by providing scope for study of the intricacies of mental life.[11] For Godwin, the reformist potential of biography lies in its ability to depict the individual in a social context, and the best subjects for biography are historical individuals who contributed to public welfare in their own time. By demonstrating how social forces act on such individuals, and how they, in turn, had an impact on society, Godwin argues, biography has the power to inspire the reader with an analogous spirit of reform. Thus in Memoirs he presents Wollstonecraft's life history as "the fairest source of animation and encouragement to those who would follow [her] in the same career" (p. 43). As the full title suggests, Memoirs is not only the story of one woman's life but also a vindication of every woman's entitlement to the moral and political role advocated by Wollstonecraft in her writings.
4. Godwin's depiction of Wollstonecraft as a harbinger of revolutionary change is further indebted to the autobiographical writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.[12] With his dual reputation as one of the intellectual fathers of the French Revolution and as "the true Prometheus of sentiment," Rousseau was a central, ambivalent presence in Wollstonecraft's works.[13] Following Wollstonecraft's example in Letters from Norway (1796), Godwin was especially drawn to Rousseau's Confessions (1782-89) and its sequel, Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782), which presented a mythical figure of male virtue thwarted by an unjust social order.[14] These autobiographical works were written as exercises in self-justification and self-analysis. Rousseau presents sincere self-examination as the key to his vision of humanity freed from modern social corruption: in recounting the numerous instances in which social circumstances constrained his own development, he invited readers to reflect on their own experiences of political alienation.[15] In this way, self-analysis forms a way of rethinking social and political relations. Yet Godwin's construction of Wollstonecraft's revolutionary consciousness presents an advance on Rousseau's thought, since it demonstrates the inseparability of personal and historical experience in a woman's life, as well as in a man's.
5. By using Rousseau's writings as a means of shaping "individual history," Godwin established a link between Wollstonecraft's career and those of French Revolutionary intellectuals, both male and female, whose memoirs began to appear in English translation from 1794 onwards. The most significant of these memoirs were produced by leaders of the Girondist moderate faction in the French National Assembly, after they were proscribed in the early summer of 1793, several of whom Wollstonecraft had met in Paris.[16] Their justificatory self-representations, modelled on Rousseau's themes and techniques, were written while they were awaiting trial and facing almost certain death, as in the case of Manon Roland, or while they were on the run, as in the case of Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray.[17] As suggested by Manon Roland's title, An Appeal to Impartial Posterity (1795), these figures turned to memoir-writing to vindicate their political conduct and beliefs-just as Godwin did with regard to Wollstonecraft.
6. For Godwin, the main appeal of Rousseau lay in the way that he traced the origin of his adult mind and personality in his early experiences of social and cultural alienation. Similarly, Godwin is concerned with the formation of Wollstonecraft's identity as a revolutionary woman intellectual. Adopting the structural principle of the Confessions, Godwin depicts Wollstonecraft's history as a series of "revolutions" or turning-points which threaten to alienate her from society, but in fact lead to a growth in moral and political awareness. For example, he presents her response to her father's violence towards her mother—in which, like Jean-Jacques defending his brother, she would "throw herself between the despot and his victim" (Memoirs, p. 46)—as giving rise to an indignation against tyranny rather than a sense of oppression.[18] The difficulties of her early life lead not to demoralization but to an expanded sense of her own potential: "to her lofty spirit, scarcely any thing she desired, appeared hard to perform" (p. 58).
7. It is equally central to Godwin's view of Wollstonecraft as a revolutionary figure that she is not fundamentally damaged by personal or social disappointments. For example, he presents the collapse of her relationship with Imlay as the most extreme instance of the clash between her advanced moral idealism and present-day social corruption. Yet he depicts her resulting suicide attempt as the product not of despair, but of "cool and deliberate firmness" (p. 97), which recalls the principled suicides of the proscribed Girondins.[19] And in describing her recovery, Godwin attributes to Wollstonecraft an extraordinary moral resilience. Whatever her sufferings, she remained, in Godwin's view, "fraught with that generous confidence, which, in a great soul, is never extinguished" (p. 105).
8. For Godwin this "generous confidence" not only provides the key to Wollstonecraft's improvement, but also makes her an agent of change in others, including himself. In describing Wollstonecraft's abilities as an teacher, Godwin highlights her potential as an agent of moral, and hence social and political, reform: "No person was better formed for the business of education; if it be not a sort of absurdity to speak of a person as formed for an inferior object, who is in possession of talents, in the fullest degree adequate to something on a more important and comprehensive scale" (p. 59). This view of Wollstonecraft as a catalyst for revolutionary change is reinforced in a passage added in the second edition. Her "powers and cultivation," Godwin declares, were "formed to adorn society, and to give a relish the most delicate and unrivalled to domestic life, as well as, through the medium of the press, to delight, instruct, and reform mankind" (p. 213).
9. In emphasizing Wollstonecraft's endless capacity to foster change in others, Godwin simultaneously tells the story of her influence on his own development. In the last two chapters of Memoirs, his autobiographical impulse becomes explicit as he traces the growth of their egalitarian affection: "The partiality we conceived for each other [. . .] grew with equal advances in the mind of each. [. . .] I am not conscious that either party can assume to have been the agent or the patient, the toil-spreader or the prey, in the affair. [. . .] It was friendship melting into love" (p. 104). Godwin describes how he was gradually initiated through Wollstonecraft's "culture of the heart" into new modes of thinking and feeling,[20] which became the basis of a shared domestic "experiment," untrammelled by legal institutions: "We did not marry" (pp. 106, 105). In his revisions for the second edition, Godwin pursued the question of Wollstonecraft's educative influence, highlighting the role of domestic affections in bringing about gradual social change.[21] These additions, as well as strengthening Godwin's defence of Wollstonecraft's conduct, reveal how much he had assimilated the expanded vision of human possibility she had taught him.
10.

By demonstrating Wollstonecraft's transformative impact on himself, Godwin holds out the possibility of a similar change of consciousness in the reader. In this way, Wollstonecraft is conceptualized as not only the embodiment but also the agent of the gradual social revolution they both sought to further, in their lives as in their writings. Such lessons in the use of "individual history" as a means of bringing about historical change were not lost on the next generation of radical writers, notably Godwin's and Wollstonecraft's daughter and intellectual heir, Mary Shelley, and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley.
 
 

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