Standing Apart: The Untapped Potential of Enlightenment Feminist Aesthetics DRAFT Published 2012

Laura Mandell Department of English Miami University Oxford, OH 45056 mandellc@muohio.edu

Table of Contents Introduction. The Case: Psychological and Political Subjectivity 1. Virtue and Evidence: Catharine Macaulays Historical Realism (published in JEMCS) 2. Bad Marriages, Bad Novels: The Philosophical Romance (published in

Recognizing the Romantic Novel, eds. Jill Heydt-Stevenson, Charlotte Sussman, Liverpool Press, 2008, pp. 49-76) 3. 4. 5. The Politics and Poetics of Religious Melancholy: Anna Barbauld The First Women (Psycho) Analysts: Learning from History (published in MLQ) Sacred Secrets: Psychological Depth as Feminist Critique (a shorter version

published in Nineteenth-Century Prose) Conclusion. Developing Taste, Standing Apart

Introduction The Case: Psychological and Political Subjectivity In this book, I look at histories, novels, and essays written by Enlightenment feminists, Catherine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Eliza Fenwick, Amelia Opie, and Anna Barbauld. Like the contributors to Women, Gender and Enlightenment (2005), I am interested in the Enlightenment project broadly construed, rather than the high philosophical Enlightenment of earlier studies.1 Though this book defines neither Enlightenment thinking in general nor Enlightenment aesthetics in particular,2 I put Enlightenment in the title in order to signal the books central problematic. I offer here one intervention in two debates. The first is between Jrgen Habermas, for whom Enlightenment did not so much fail as never complete itself, and postmodern theorists such as Michel Foucault for whom Enlightenment instituted typically invisible modes of social control.3 The second is internal, among feminists, who have productively found limits to the feminisms grounded in rationality.4 Based on work by Amanda Anderson who explicates and somewhat rehabilitates Habermasian ideas,5 and work by Julia Kristeva who explicates Freud as and transforms psychoanalysis into a counterEnlightenment discourse in the fully dialectical sense of bringing Enlightenment to a higher level based on that work, I argue here that psychoanalysis can transform what might be called the communicative irrationality of these eighteenth-century feminist writers into comprehensible meaning that offers us an objective view of eighteenthcentury history. While the chapters of this book offer individual instances of realistic accounts to be found in these womens works, in this introduction, I explain how psychoanalytic feminist work can possibly achieve such objectivity.

For the oppressed, as women were at their historical moment, having no legal status and no political voice, speaking and writing is not self-expression, and more skill will not help. Language itself in a universal and abstract sense is not the problem, but rather context. At any historical juncture of inequality, those out of power cannot put themselves in the speakers position of power and remain who they are. One can be a feminist, but not a woman who inhabits a society without sexism. But their societys refusal to grant them subjective powers of articulation is what gives these women writers the capacity to stand apart. It gives them greater objectivity. The absence of bias, or rather, their active shunning of it and our active shunning of it in reading them, comes not despite the fact that they are feminist writers and we some of us feminist readers, but rather because we share a concern with the oppression of women in sexist society. Moreover, their passionate response to inequity their own psychical sufferings coupled with the conviction that their own sufferings are exemplary prompts them to perform analyses in the way that psychoanalysis analyzes cultural problems that have emotional and psychical impact. Bertha Pappenheim, the famous Anna O who first launched psychoanalytic thinking for Freud in his work with Josef Breuer, clearly suffered from social constraints placed upon women as well as from mental illness.6 That her suffering was not purely personal was clear to Freud, to Pappenheim who went on to become an active feminist, and to us.7 Unfortunately, that Pappenheim and others like her suffer from political oppression has led to a celebration of her that transforms the formation of symptoms expressing her unconscious desires and real sufferings into conscious agency. Unconscious motivation becomes conscious intent, and not without significant loss to the

very theory of the unconscious that makes possible Pappenheims cure, her capacity to become an active feminist rather than a housebound hysteric whose politically resistant articulations were incomprehensible to everyone, including herself. Jacqueline Rose noticed as early as 1988 the danger of celebrating mental illness as political resistance.8 To state the problem baldly, does Deleuze and Guattaris celebration of schizophrenia mean that we should all abuse our children as Schreber was abused? But if to herorize Pappenheim and Schreber is to erase the unconscious from view with the consequence of pathologizing political action itself, so that suffering quietly and campaigning for womens suffrage are indistinguishable acts, to see these two people as pure victims of mental illness is to deny anything wrong with their society at all. Though the unconscious cannot be purely political, it cannot be purely personal either (Rose 23). There are ways to differentiate political activism from mental illness while simultaneously acknowledging their connection. First, recognize that contemporaneous economic, social, and political conditions go all the way down into the formation of subjectivity, shaping what it means to be a self in any given society. Second, recognize that some forms of defense against the oppressive character of these conditions are not pathological. It is precisely this latter idea that is refused by American trauma theorists who ally trauma with the Real per se. We equate the Real with traumatizing violence to our political peril. In her talk Destruction of Humanism and the Humanities given at the Future Human conference in Prato, Italy, Juliet Mitchell berated U.S. literary critics and theorists for celebrating the breakdown of symbolization. For Mitchell, trauma theorists themselves perpetuate and repeat trauma insofar as they would preserve it as

massive, transhistorical, and individual: to identify with trauma rather than attempting to articulate it makes you violent, she says.9 In condemning the Real to the realm of the inarticulable, trauma theorists resemble the modernists attacked by George Lukcs in Realism in Our Time. The modernists, for whom the theoretical impossibility of understanding reality is the point of departure, substitute [their] angst-ridden vision of the world for objective reality.10 Modernists escape into neurosis as a protest against the evils of society (31). Modernists, Lukcs says, and trauma theorists, I would add, attribute distortion to reality itself (76) rather than connecting it to their own elitism. Universalizing pathology is politically quietist, escapist, as well as distorting, and only critical detachment can restore a realistic, objective point of view as well as the possibility for political action. Both Lukcs and Mitchell share a belief that there are non-pathological articulations of socio-political disorder, the former insofar as he insists that good political action is possible, the latter insofar as she is a psychoanalyst for whom articulation is in fact therapeutic. Symptoms disappear when analysands articulate their unconscious desires and what prevents them, restoring a critical awareness through which they can think about rather than compulsively re-enact their desires frustration, or can protest against the society that prohibits them. The critical distance necessary for both Lukcs and Mitchell entails establishing subjectivity. Lukcs names that subjecvitity critical detachment: The modernist writer identifies what is necessarily a subjective experience with reality as such, thus giving a distorted picture of reality as a whole [. . . .] The realist, with his critical detachment, places what is significant,

specifically modern experience, in a wider context, giving it only the emphasis it deserves as part of a greater, objective whole. (51) The possibility of realism [. . .] is bound up with that minimal hope of change for the better offered by bourgeois society. (68) Becoming a subject is not the same not at all as establishing an identity, an activity with which it is too often conflated. It is not about uncovering a list of repressed predicates that identify me, whoever that me is. Establishing ones identity is all about self-objectification, about becoming an imaginary object to others as well as to oneself, and its political, therapeutic, and epistemological value are highly questionable. Rather, becoming a subject or developing critical detachment involves seeing what is wrong with ones society and limited about ones own point of view. It requires faith in progress toward utopia, that minimal hope of change for the better offered by bourgeois society. To see reality objectively thus requires utopianism, imagining a wider context in which everyones needs are being met. Psychoanalysis enacts that hope: there is an implicit millennialism in the act of lying on a couch since it involves imagining that one will live illness-free among people who do not require it. As John Forrester argues in discussing whether psychoanalysis is science, objectivity requires putting oneself in the position of the analysand, becoming patient to oneself: To suggest that, in order to be truly objective, one should temporarily set aside the application of psychoanalytic hypotheses to oneself is to miss the force of the psychoanalytic method and of its theories.11 Is that like Lukcss claim? The kinds of psychoanalysis that require investigating the psychoanalysts counter-transference for the sake of objectivity recognize the violence of self-imposition and distortion in the

rationality that pretends to come from nowhere the mode of speaking of Lukcss modernist. In Dying to Know, George Levine offers an account of the modernist in keeping with this view. For Levin, Walter Pater refashions the ideal of scientific objectivity derived from empiricism as an aesthetics of self-abnegation: attempting to render art eternal involves disembodying it, Pater believes. In Levines account, Pater follows modern science in rewriting detachment as dying, (246), a passionless passion as Lorraine Daston puts it (Baconian Facts 58; Levine 269) or self-sacrifice of personal passions and desires at what is allegedly the altar of objectivity or eternal meaningfulness, that which gives the aesthetic its more than personal authority (Levine 246). George Eliot stands out as the main figure in Levines account of the modernist distortion of disinterestedness, the one who does not simply critique but in Daniel Deronda is able to imaging alternatives to dying as the means for resist[ing] the powers of satisfaction to distort knowledge (271), and, as I will demonstrate in this book, it is because she has so much more to lose in the dream of desireless, disembodied knowledge (281). While other narratives explored by Levine written in the tradition of nineteenth-century realism bemoan the abjuration of desire, its banishment from a subsequently disenchanted, rationalized world, more than feeling is at stake for Eliot in this disembodied knowledge. For Eliot as for the writers examined in this book, body is constitutive of rather than an impediment to knowledge. What Eliot knows that no other realists do, in Levines account, because of living in a body with culturally inflected significance (as my book shows), is that the author or narrative voice speaks not from on high but from a subaltern, fully embodied position analogous to Derondas in Eliots

novel. The voice of authority comes from someone who has a life with conflicting commitments and desires (191) and who is able nonetheless (or rather, especially) to attain to the disinterestedness and cosmopolitanism by which the provincialism and blindness of [his or] her own culture might be transcended (Levine 189). In the psychoanalytic scene, an allegedly disembodied analyst who hands interpretations down from on high, drawing solely on his or her own beliefs about patients as if those beliefs existed independently of his or her bodily existence, and primarily with that his or her psychically complicated relationship to the analysand, is caught up in the process of inflicting trauma by denying the reality of his or her own desires.12 The analyst colludes with patients in repeating their trauma in lieu of analyzing it. The locus classicus of the demand to analyze counter-transference can be found in Freuds footnotes to the Dora case, and it is emphasized by Lacan and all post-classical analysts. Inflicting trauma can only be avoided by giving the patient a subject position from which to speak. Bertha Pappenheim went on after being cured of hysteria to become a feminist activist, and Mary Hays, after protesting against Godwins misunderstanding of philosophical romance, to write two feminist novels. Their cures involved attaining status as subjects of history. For both Lukcs and psychoanalysis, then, the critical detachment necessary for objectivity requires recognizing the existence of an unconscious wish, and articulating precisely why one cannot articulate it except through pathology. It requires recognizing personal and social pathology, sorting them, apprehending their overlap. For example, a member of a marginalized group is forced to argue for his or her right to speak before speaking. A woman can state outright her desire to have a mans job, but what she

cannot state outright, and what will have to be expressed through symptoms or complex theoretical articulations is the desire to not have to protest that one wants a mans job because it isnt one (because that bit of sexism has been eradicated) while simultaneously expressing anger at that (past) sexism. This is an impossible position, the subjective speaker inhabiting simultaneously her own world and the world she wishes to bring about. To call a subjective position impossible is not to call it unrepresentable nor inarticulable. The real contradiction between Jurgen Habermas and the people whom he calls neo-cons and whom we call poststructualists has to do with the possibility as to whether certain kinds of oppressiveness are communicable or not. In the work of JeanFrancois Lyotard, the Differend a sublime and inarticulable terror is precisely whatever must necessarily be repressed, the blindnesses requisite for sustaining a dominant and dominating episteme, an exclusive picture of universality that represses as unspeakable any opposition to it. This book locates the specific moments in texts or even in lives surrounded by textuality in which a blindness sustaining sexual oppression is not spoken exactly, but rather presented as the possibility for future articulation. The future is now: we can read it. My goal has been to show a) how a particular textual moment of political resistance looks like madness/bad art, and b) that it can indeed be read otherwise, now. In a sense, then, this book shows how Habermas and Lyotard might come together not in a happy marriage, but rather in a felicitous antagonism, why both might propose valuable reading strategies to be deployed at specific moments, the dialectic between the two enabling new kinds of insight. I have used a psychoanalytic vocabulary to capture that insight because I find it to be an effective means of opening up

10

the normative to reinterpretation while still acknowledging it inescapability as the basis for effective communication. In this book, I examine primarily two genres for representing the impossible probability of utopian subjectivity the subjectivity that would exist in a world of radical equality. The first is conjectural history, the second philosophical romance what is sometimes called the Jacobin novel. Eighteenth-century works of conjectural history by David Hume, William Tytler, William Robertson, and Catherine Macaulay resemble in their willingness to recapitulate ontogeny as phylogeny Freuds Civilization and its Discontents and Moses and Monotheism: they portray history only insofar as it can be put to the use of analyzing the present. But, in countering Hume, Robertson, and Tytlers claims to greater historical realism, Macaulay represents her own notion of the civic virtue or enactment of egalitarianism that will bring about the millennium as also granting her a more objective view of history. During the Romantic era, the philosophical romance represents not just sufferers who are victims, but the case history capable of demonstrating not simply how people should behave but how society should change. In his analysis of the historical emergence of the case, James Chandler quotes De Quinceys definition of casuistry: Casuistry . . . is the moral philosophy of cases that is, of anomalous combinations of circumstancesthat, for any reason whatsoever, do not fall, or do not seem to fall, under the general rules of morality.13 Connecting the case to casuistry highlights De Quinceys or do not seem to fall: a good casuists argument might show that the exception does indeed fall under general rules if one modifies them a bit. Thus this question of a particular case fitting or not into a rule opens

11

up the rules to scrutiny. The same happens with a scientific case. Sometimes in a scatter plot, all the scientific data from an experiment fall close together on a graph, in accordance with the experiments governing hypothesis, but then there is one anomaly, way off on its own. The anomaly must be explained, or the hypothesis is not really valid. The act of explaining the anomaly always involves revisiting the terms of the hypothesis. Mightnt that hypothesis be reformulated so that there are no exceptions, no special cases? A case, according to Chandler, offers a seeming departure from the principles of generalization: it is both an instance of and a challenge to a generalization (296) that is, it deviates from and still somehow exemplifies it. Freud promulgates a belief that the abnormal sheds light on the normal, a belief arguably incipient in Lockean nominalism. In John Lockes philosophy, ones sense of reality is organized in accordance with the way words connect things in relationship with each other. In the case of simple ideas, a word connects to others via systematic structures of causality mirrored in logical grammar (cause and effect). But in the case of mixed modes, one word yokes many simple ideas together in a complex relationship. That yoking is individual and cultural, a matter of relationships taught to a child through frequent exemplary uses of the word in the artificial world around him. For Locke, the problem of disagreement among people attempting to think together rationally arises because mixed modes are so often misused: ideas are inappropriately linked together poverty with villainy and vulgarity, for instance, the etymology of those two words referring to no more than persons of peasant stock. In the 33rd chapter of Book II of Lockes Essay Concerning Human Understanding, added to the fourth edition in 1700, Locke describes how individually-acquired associations are in fact a form of insanity. A

12

compulsive aversion to honey and inconsolable mourning are his examples. This chapter logically implies that any association not found in nature is questionable. It inadvertently proposes the possibility that cultural connections between ideas, no matter how widely shared, are, just like an individuals insuperable melancholy or inexplicable aversion, a form of insanity. People can correct their mis-associated ideas, Locke insists, thereby setting up the individual as a bulwark on which to rest while critiquing culture. Indiscernible to contemporaries because tacit, habitual assumptions, culturally dominant modes of connecting ideas culturally specific rationalities are decipherable to us in historical retrospect only insofar as they are not still habitually assumed. Historically, a certain set of attitudes pre-determined the meaning of symbolic acts performed by women, thereby refusing them subjectivity. If those attitudes still prevail, so do the assumptions depriving women of the subjective power to articulate their own meanings meanings with affordances (limits and possibilities) to be sure, but not predetermined in a way that objectifies the meaning-maker. Unfortunately, there are things being said by eighteenth-century feminists that we still cannot hear. Categories became visible to Kant with a breakdown in the possibility of proving them to be true. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein determines the cultural impact of grammar by staging linguistic breakdown. Cultural rationality becomes visible as it breaks down, when its forms no longer work properly. What literary critics call forms, Kant calls the categories of reason. For Kant there are twelve. For Stanley Cavell following Locke, there are as many categories, as many methods for organizing reality, as there are complex words mixed modes to Locke. What looks to us like insanity, feelings and behaviors that include unacceptable levels of suffering, do offer critical

13

purchase. Attempts to understand a personal breakdown, a case in the psychological sense of the word, force or allow us to see the limits of our meaning-making forms. According to Frances Ferguson, the awareness of reality production achieved at the moment of the break down of form gives us a sense of the real: an awareness of the breakdown of form, she says, is as real as it gets.14 Both the case and conjectural history are two Enlightenment forms of what Freud and his followers call metapsychology. Metapsychology is the theory about normal psychic functioning as required by civilization in its current state. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud insists that illness tells you more about normal psychic functioning than sanity.15 Here he is completely an Enlightenment thinker, valuing the marvelous, the curiosity, the strange case. As he begins to discuss women in Female Sexuality and On Femininity, one realizes that, for Freud, it is really impossible for women to develop normally in civilized society: normality in women is rare enough to be classed an abnormality. Not only are the odds stacked against successful Oedipalization for women, but woman has to be Oedipalized in an inverted way: she is an abnormal man.16 Notice that, insofar as the abnormal is psychoanalysiss best because most instructive object, logically, woman is its quintessential object and moreover an object that has subjective power, the power to instruct. Following out the logic of the Three Essays plus the two articles on female sexuality, one can say that examining (abnormal) woman tells us best how normal psychic functioning works, that women teach us what men should be. Any person suffering from mental illness has something to say which he or she cannot speak but can only express through symptoms, through turning his or her own

14

body and life into signs. Psychoanalysis transforms people from spoken objects into speaking subjects. The goal of psychoanalysis is to get a person so speak to subjectify someone who has objectified him or herself or been objectified by history, or (usually) both.17 Insofar as woman is its quintessential object, it attempts to subjectify women. The goal of metapsychology is to theorize the normal for the sake of providing future cures for humanity, for men and women alike. Like work on the couch, it presupposes utopianism. In a recent book articulating the successes and failures of classical Freudian analysis vis--vis feminism, Nancy Chodorow criticizes Freudian psychoanalysis for universalizing.18 But while it is indeed politically suspect to insist that the exemplary psyche is male and heterosexual, as Chodorow points out, there is an implicit kind of universalizing that occurs in documenting any case history; the case is written up because it will, the author believes, help future analysts understand their patients. Chodorow mentions that, in writing up his case histories especially about hysterics, Freud managed to grant women subjectivity (19-20). In fact, whenever Freud wrote about women, the process of universalizing his patients cases by publishing them, he gave them the power to be exemplary. Building upon that fact, his propensity to discuss his theories with his patients gave them subjective power, that is, the capacity for political voice and efficacy. Chodorow is of course right that Freuds interpretation, dispensed in a completely authoritarian style, of Doras feelings alienated her and caused her case to fail (18-19). But typically when Freud offered interpretations to his female patients, they argued with him until he altered his theories producing those interpretations. The witty butchers wife so celebrated by Catherine Clment even produced a dream to contradict one of

15

Freuds theories. I noticed in reading a recent case reported by Dutch psychoanalyst Nikolas Treurniet that in fact discussions of metapsychology, of the theory of normal functioning proved by an analysands case, help the patient insofar as the analyst adopts her insights into his theory, which Freud at his best and Treurniet habitually do.19 Becoming co-theorists of metapsychology enables realistic social-appraisal and selfarticulation by oppressed people: that is, it is a mode for those forbidden it to assume subjective power. Co-theorists have the capacity to make an impact on history through successful and skillful articulation. These are the times that try mens souls shaped a readership into a republic; Frau K. transformed hypnosis into free association. The subjective power of patients by definition passive, their agency circumscribed insofar as they suffer is secured insofar as one can generalize from their case to humanity, insofar as they are held to be representative subjects. It is only politically retrograde to universalize the case of a dominating subject, not a marginalized one. To universalize the marginal, to require that it become part of the picture, is to achieve historical objectivity through critical detachment. Enlightenment feminists therefore stand apart in two senses. First, as women, they are abnormal, marginal, exceptional. It is during the Enlightenment that the marvelous exception and the single case first started to have epistemological power. It is during the Enlightenment that women began to see themselves as abnormal rather than underdeveloped humans.20 Second, they take themselves to be social experiments in radical equality. Even Barbauld does so, though for her such equality does not eradicate differences. Universalizing from their own cases, the women writers examined here developed metapsychology in their histories, poems, and fictions.

16

In chapter 1, I show that Macaulays notion of civic virtue as it is deployed throughout her texts informs Wollstonecrafts understanding of it as articulated in the second Vindication that Macaulay, much to Wollstonecrafts despair, did not live to read. For Macaulay, virtue is the name of a normative principle being virtuous involves enacting justice, promoting equality that colors how one reads and writes history. Insofar as an historian is biased toward virtue, she writes what I call transferential history, texts that are intersubjective even or especially for readers of the future. It is through writing transferential history that Macaulay is able to expose violence committed in the name of objective historical writing, a violence, I argue, that persists even after the conjectural history writing of the eighteenth-century cedes to more realistic historicizing modes. As I argue in Chapter 2, Mary Wollstonecrafts so-called Jacobin novels, as well as those written by Mary Hays, do not in fact simply propose a political agenda but rather constitute a new genre that Hays calls philosophical romance. As romance, these novels propose an alternative form of sexuality to that put forward by male, novel-writing sensualists who wish to sexually subordinate women. These novels explore what the alternative form of sexuality might be and what kind of society must be constituted to accommodate it: they are philosophical insofar as they try to imagine what affective bonds might look like if there were political justice. That the philosophical romance could be written without proposing a Jacobin political program, as is Amelia Opies Adeline Mowbray (1804) shows that these novels have aesthetic ambitions. Insofar as the taste for this feminist rewriting of the romance remains uncreated, the novels seem to

17

us bad aesthetically. I argue that the aesthetic sensibility we need to appreciate them artistically is yet to be developed. In Chapter 3, I elucidate the tenets of Barbaulds Unitarianism by exploring her prose essays and her relationship to Joseph Priestley. I argue that Coleridges and Lambs anger is directed at her largely because she rejects what she sees as a fundamentally a-political melancholy aesthetic. In her own work, she proposes a materialist millenarianism and employs artistic techniques designed to bring about the millennium by changing peoples feelings and attitudes. In Chapter 4, I argue that, what appears to be obstreperous and even somewhat psychotic behavior on the part of Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft, both of whom seem almost to stalk their lovers, is in fact an insistence on living in the kingdom of ends a society without sexism. Similarly, Chapter 5 connects suicidal melancholy with an attempt on the part of women to mean what they say in a society that refuses them the subjective power necessary for it. Hays, Wollstonecraft, and Fenwick left texts written TO that society which we can only properly read insofar as we see their aesthetic requirements and goals. As such, these texts delineate for us most clearly the genderspecific contradictions operating both at their historical moment and ours. In the conclusion, I look at current arguments among theorists, primarily over work by Jrgen Habermas, about the value of Enlightenment thinking. Proper aesthetic feeling for these works by women writers is only possible in a society free of sexism: in a gender-neutral society, aesthetics will no longer be mystifiying. At our moment, now, we can nonetheless intellectually understand the aesthetic goals formulated by these writers as well as their political implications. These thinkers thus show us the political potential

18

of aesthetic discourse and offer yet another reason for attempting to complete rather than abandon modernitys project.

19

Chapter I Virtue and Evidence: Catharine Macaulays Historical Realism Morals must be taught on immutable principles. From which position Mrs M[acaulay] infers That true wisdom, which is never found at variance with rectitude, is as useful to women as to men . . . . [For Macaulay, there is] No characteristic difference in sex. The observations on this subject might have been carried much farther . . . . --Mary Wollstonecraft21 Wollstonecraft herself carried these observations further in her Vindication of the Rights of Men, penned immediately after or concurrently with this review in November 1790, and in her later continuation of that work, Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). The subject of this chapter is Catharine Macaulays notion of virtue, a concept that has radical political potential as seen, if nowhere else, in the historical fact of Wollstonecrafts productions and their indebtedness to Macaulays work. Macaulay is a sagacious writer with whom Wollstonecraft finds herself perfectly coinciding (Article 1, 7.309) in this respect. Feminist readers from Mary Hays in the 1790s, to Sally Alexander in the 1980s (128-129) and Susan Eilenberg at the outset of the twentyfirst century have, I believe, consistently misunderstood what both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft mean by virtue.22 Macaulays notion is not identical to bourgeois virtue, an ideological notion that arose in conjunction with political liberalism,23 nor even congruent with the Jacobin or radical beliefs of her political circle,24 nor completely congruent with the civic humanist view of James Harrington that it most closely resembles. Like the civil-war Republicans who form the heroes of her History of England, Macaulay affirms the value of devotion to the public good, but for her, such devotion is personally rewarding rather than privative. As I will show, for Macaulay, virtue is an

absolute principle of radical equality in which societys good and ones own good and pleasure are consubstantial. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist accounts of both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft, I would like to suggest, misunderstand virtue by locating it in the wrong register. For Macaulay (and later Wollstonecraft), virtue is not a claim about the self, not an identity. To reduce it to such a thing is to render it bourgeois, puritanical, and, of course, deluded. Rather, her definition coincides with Harringtons view that virtues are political powers.25 Macaulays virtue is an ethical imperative to behave not just as a feminist, but with consistently applied egalitarian principles. The virtuous historian asks over and over again, while performing any activity, the question posed by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell: what kind of a restructuring of [society] is possible and desirable . . . such as would further womens emancipation as well as create a more humane society for all?26 Such radical egalitarianism includes participation in the movement against cruelty to animals (the portion of Macaulays Letters with which Wollstonecraft is so taken in her review).27 But Macaulays virtue is more. As an intersubjective principle, it is a heuristic device as well for arriving at an objective understanding of the past. That is, Macaulays virtue is not only a principle of action: as a position from which one can represent the past, it generates historical realism. There is some still untapped, radical potential in Enlightenment feminisms. We have reached a crisis at our historical moment in politicizing historical and literary historical accounts. According to Hayden White, contemporary historians notion of objectivity is quite different from anything that might be meant by that term in the physical sciences.28 Allowing the bare facts to speak requires that the historian

21

identify with the historical object and yet not impose upon it. Yet, we now accept as theoretical dogma that all of us are guilty of projecting, to some degree, our own values and concerns into the past.29 This crisis in the describing the historical object is most visible in what David Simpson calls the sheer ubiquity, awkward visibility, and visible incompetence of arguments from situatedness.30 In Whites view, the definition of objectivity that is quite specific to modern historical theory was fabricated during the eighteenth century (67). Thus our current theoretical problems with historical realism are traceable to eighteenth-century historiography. In this chapter, I will discuss three kinds of history that appeared during the eighteenth century: projective, or partisan in the sense of power-mongering; objective in the sense of non-partisan or impartial, which can be synonymous with ideological; and transferential, or partisan in the sense of altruistic understanding achieved through virtue as Macaulay defines it. The first is delimited by the psychoanalytic concept of projection as defined by Laplanche and Pontalis: In the properly psycho-analytic sense: operation whereby qualities, feelings, [or] wishes, . . . which the subject refuses to recognize or rejects in himself, are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing. Projection . . . may be seen at work . . . in . . . superstition.31 Party politics at this moment involved superstition and especially charges of superstition (one was a papist at heart, an accusation often leveled at Tories), but clearly, at its worst moments, it involved demonizing members of the opposing party, projecting evil onto them. I will show instances of projective history and then show that the Georgian historians discussed in this chapter, writing from 1754 to 1803, participated in the

22

transformation of history writing from propounding party politics to an allegedly more impartial view, the second kind of history. I demonstrate below the persistence of some chivalric modes of truth-telling within this allegedly more objective historiography, and the repression of their violence, that go into achieving modern notions of historical objectivity. 32 Finally, this chapter shows that Macaulay is able to demystify historical objectivity by using the third historical method described above, the transferential method. Macaulays sense of virtue is intimately tied to the question of evidence.33 Virtuous historical writing is one way to account for the historians existence and position without participating in those problematic self-affiliation gestures (Simpson 202) that we currently rely upon to alert others to our biases as well as to establish authority. I call this third historical method transferential because Macaulays principle of virtue allows her work to be intersubjective in the way that psychoanalysis is (ideally) intersubjective, allowing history (and the future) to speak to and through the historian or analyst who actively manages the distortions imposed upon reality by her own interests and desires. As Macaulays work demonstrates, an absolute principle of radical equality can produce both Enlightenment feminism and historical truth. Projective, Ideological, and Transferential History It is a pivotal moment in the history of the modern fact, Mary Poovey tells us, when David Hume appends a note to the 1758 version of his essay The Parties of Great Britain: Some of the opinions delivered in these Essays, with regard to the public transactions of the last century, the Author, on more accurate examination,

23

found reason to retract in his History of Great Britain. And as he would not enslave himself to the systems of either party, neither would he fetter his judgment by his own preconceived opinions and principles; nor is he ashamed to acknowledge his mistakes.34 The moment is indeed remarkable. In this note, Hume in effect describes the process of writing history as a cure for (party) bias: it is a return, or at least a turn, toward objectivity. But, Poovey insists, the appended note marks more than that: This retraction amounts to an admission that even the philosopher who claims to be superior to preconception and interest may be blinded by a bias he cannot see (209). Hume added a sentence to the end of this note in 1770: These mistakes were indeed, at that time, almost universal in this kingdom (72, 616nl). That additional sentence attempts to mitigate but in fact exacerbates the uncertainty Poovey rightly sees as generated by the original note: is unbiased history possible? The late eighteenth-century historians rhetorical efforts to achieve a much desired impartiality (Black 91) shifted historical writings goal from consciously held and explicitly articulated political agendas to ideology.35 The shift is partly due to the context of these historical writings. They span (and join) two political crises and print eventsthe Marian controversy36 and the [French] Revolution controversy37that stimulated rampant conspiracy theories.38 Attacking others by accusing them of evil conspiracies and thereby asserting ones own besieged virtue is projection by any other name. These events therefore stimulated the degeneration of historical debates into projective histories in which the virtue of the historians determines the validity of facts.

24

Hume refuses partisanship in order to distance himself from projective history. He presents, according to some of his readers, the most allegedly dispassionate and thus objective account possible of Mary Queen of Scots (Black 91-92). However, in an apocryphal story, Hume screamed in the ear of her defender, Walter Goodall, queen Mary was a whore.39 Though Hume and Robertson seem to have removed the idealizing and demonizing passions from their histories, I will show that they in fact persist. Though not partisan, their histories are ideological (Phillips 19), and passionate misogyny actually abets the work done by these popular male historians to transform partisanship into an apparent objectivity that is ideological through and through. Jayne Lewiss work on eighteenth-century histories of Mary suggests that Humes dispassion and passion are allied in establishing their narrations positivist air.40 If projective histories visibly turn Mary into a voracious sexual predator, Hume and Robertson do so less visibly. Nonetheless, this particular variant of misogynist figuration is (as I will show) still there in their works. But its presence raises two questions. First, what is the difference between the way misogyny works in avowedly political, projective histories as opposed to the ostensibly objective, but truly ideological ones, histories that reveal and hide their political bias (respectively)? And second, why is sexualized misogyny necessary? The problem with facts, as Lorraine Daston has shown, is that, in order to be most effectively enlisted as evidence in an argument, they must appear to have a veracity that is independent of that argument; otherwise they appear to be selected according to bias, or worse, fabricated.41 Political histories of the past or present do not need pure, bare facts since the writers bias is evident, presumed, and even itself testimony to a

25

narrations truth.42 But histories are ideological as opposed to political by seeming to be true universally, from all perspectives, so the problem for universalizing historians is, precisely, that they must denude their facts of all intentionality. Freud specifies that only forbidden sexual desires can be repressed. In the case of Frulein Elisabeth Von. R, written by Freud, Elisabeth has, at the moment of her sisters death, the fleeting thought that her brother-in-law, to whom she is sexually attracted, is now free to marry her; an idea made obnoxious by her love for her sister, she immediately represses it, falling ill with hysteria as a result. But Elisabeth would not have repressed nor fallen ill from the idea that she could now wear her sisters red shoes. In other words, one can reject an idea, disparage it, find it distasteful, or whatever, but an idea is not repressible not completely excludable from consciousness at the moment of becoming only a fleeting thought or vague intuition unless it is sexual.43 I will show the sexualizing of facts by eighteenth-century writers engaged in writing projective histories, and will demonstrate how Hume and Robertson manipulate these sexualized facts for the sake of transforming projective histories into histories that appear to be comprised purely of facts. That is, a misogynous demonizing of woman as sexually insatiable is one way of ideologizing the political. Facts become intentionless by becoming bare, denuded, and pure, when they play virgin Elizabeth next to a sluttish Mary (or vice versa). Contrasting Macaulays histories to Robertsons and Humes exposes the misogyny that dogs allegedly objective evidence, bringing into relief the female rake at the heart of every historical fact. Macaulays work makes visible the process of ideologizing in Humes and Robertsons histories, though not necessarily because she

26

intended to do so. Rather, it is because she offers a kind of disinterestedness, one that is not established upon the foundation of repressed denigration. Macaulays histories are grounded in virtue as Macaulay defines it not the saintly repudiation of female sexuality and retirement into a maternal private sphere, but a manly Republican virtue that consists in a passion for equity. In my view, it is precisely this passion that makes her into a psychoanalytic historian. Along with Mary Hays, whose Female Biography is also discussed here, Macaulay does engage in projective history, as do William Tytler and other defenders of Queen Mary. Even Robertson and Hume are guilty of that at moments. But just as the latter two manage to move beyond projective, overtly partisan history, to the allegedly objective, ideological kind, Macaulay moves beyond Robertson and Hume. She does not simply move from projection to ideology, as they do: her work is also at certain moments genuinely demystifying in ways that were to be extraordinarily productive for feminism. At these moments, Macaulay works like a psychoanalyst, refusing to be drawn into historys repetitions. Roy Schafer best describes what the analyst analyzes, traditionally denominated transference in psychoanalytic theory: The analysts focus is on the interpretation of psychical reality. Schafer speaks of the reality of the patient; in this context, it is the reality presumed by various histories and pamphlets. Schafer continues in a way that makes clear that the transferential historian will not engage in projective history, will not respond to the content of an assault by another historian, viz. to the charge of conspiracy: With this focus the analyst is not obliged to respond in kind to the analysands [historians] emotional overtures. . . . By not responding in

27

kind I mean, for example, not meeting love with love or rejection or exploitation; not meeting anger with retaliation or self-justification or appeasement . . . . As a rule, responding in kind impedes the work of analysis.44 Virtue is less a quality for Macaulay than a stance promoting historical altruism and, with it, true objectivity. I will show that what Macaulay defined as virtue modifies Republican notions of virtue touted by Machiavelli and Harrington but also differs dramatically from later notions. It is neither Robespierres public, state-mandated virtue nor the privatized, domesticated virtue of Republican motherhood. Public and private at the same time, Macaulays virtue provides the ground enabling her to see both the sexual and intellectual assault (love and retaliation in Schafers terms) at the heart of new notions of objectivity promulgated by late Georgian history. Instead of only engaging in counter-attacks against historians misogyny sometimes overt, sometimes couched as chivalry Macaulay creates a context in which the desires of the excluded and the extinct,45 historys losers, can be uttered and heard. If impartiality is an achievement that could potentially benefit politically sensitive postmodern criticism,46 we may well be interested in Macaulays moral perfectionism.47 When one turns to the philosophers analyzing that fundamentally Republican school of ethics, one confronts literally a wall of mens names spanning twenty-five centuries:48 Macaulay is the only woman among them. This chapter shows one profound difference made by uttering Republican principles from a female body,49 in particular its incitement to the Enlightenment feminists Mary Hays and Wollstonecraft.

28

Projective History One can see projection at work both in what William Tytler in 1790 dubs the Marian controversy (17) as well as what we have come to call the Revolution controversy. In 1790, with the publication of a new edition of Tytlers defense of Mary Queen of Scotts and of Macaulays attack on Burke, an onslaught of pamphlets begin to appear in which the historian is established as good and right (that is, having a true vision of the world) through paranoid projection onto others of partisan distortion and conspiratorial designs. Their belief that their own disinterestedness makes them better historians than the partisans they attack, to quote Macaulays Observations II, depends upon seeing other historians as morally vicious. As Macaulay puts it in Charles I, faulty historians are not so much mistaken as purely bad: they are advocates for more atrocious acts of wickedness [who] give the lye to moral sense . . . in short, they are depraved.50 Both sets of historians, then, albeit on opposite sides of the political fence, achieve historical sense certainty, but at the expense of projecting depravity onto a group of others at the expense, that is, of conspiracy theories and paranoia. Politically opposite in inclination, both Tytler in his 4th, 1790 edition of Inquiry, Historical and Critical, Into the Evidence Against Mary Queen of Scots, and Macaulay, in her Observations II, establish a difference between themselves and the paranoid historians whom they combat (30) to quote Tytler, and with whom they wage war (55) to quote Macaulay. When the historian is a member of an opposition party or a papist, his enthusiasm or superstitions pervert history. When the historian is virtuous, however, the passions that affect ones powers of observation become an accessory to truth rather than

29

its adversary. Tytlers reverence for the antient constitution of Britain brings to mind Edmund Burkes Reflections on the Revolution in France, a book resembling Tytlers in another way as well: it describes the French Revolution as a conspiracy, and it does so by portraying as virtue in distress (Phillips 65) another Queen of suspect virtue, Marie Antoinette. Tytlers and Burkes self-justifications for idealizing their good objects, Mary and Marie Antoinette, and demonizing the bad, Elizabeth and philosophical revolutionaries, respectively, are strikingly similar: [T]he author considered the present subject . . . with no other view, than that of discovering the truth . . . . At the same time, for the honour of the sex, what generous breast would not endeavor, if in his power, to rescue an unfortunate and injured princess from a load of infamy that has been thrown upon her? [1760. In 1790, he adds:] The love of justice is imprinted in the breast of every man. If there be a latent grain of native virtue in the human heart, innocence oppressed will raise it into a flame. Under this predicament the Author of the [present] Inquiry found himself. (Tytler 11-12; 25)

Oh ! What a revolution! and what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion [Marie Antoinettes] elevation and [her] fall! . . . . Some tears might be drawn from me, if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage. I should be truly ashamed of finding in myself that superficial, theatric sense of painted distress, whilst I could exult over it in real life.51

30

Tytler and Burke stake their own veracity on their capacity to feel for persecuted virtue, contrasting themselves against conspirators who assault these two distressed damsels. In this truly paranoid hermeneutic circle, they both claim to be able to dispassionately appraise the truth because they are more virtuous, staking their claim to virtue on their capacity for compassion for having the facts rouse vehement passions in them. All one has to do to expose this circularity, Macaulay and Wollstonecraft both know, is to point out that some facts and not others arouse Burkes passions: When we reflect that such dreadful [imperial] purposes can never be effected without the effusion of oceans of blood, of such an invidious intention we must certainly exculpate Mr. Burke; unless by a strange modification of sympathy, the lives of plebeians, and those vulgar characters which compose the swinish multitude, is held at no value in his account. (Macaulay, Observations II 92) Quoting Burkes infamous phrase for the revolutionaries, of course, turns this ironic exculpation into charge, conviction, guilt. Compare Wollstonecraft, writing her pamphlet slightly before Macaulays was finished:52 Misery, to reach your heart, I perceive, must have its caps and bells; your tears are reserved, very naturally considering your character, for the declamation of the theatre, or for the downfall of queens, whose rank alters the nature of folly, and throws a graceful veil over vices that degrade humanity; whilst the distress of many industrious mothers, whose helpmates have been torn from them, and the hungry cry of helpless babes,

31

were vulgar sorrows that could not move your commiseration, though they might extort an alms. The tears that are shed for fictitious sorrow are admirably adapted, says Rousseau, to make us proud of all the virtues we do not possess.53 Both Wollstonecraft and Macaulay attest to the selectivity of Burkes sensibility: some kinds of suffering are visible to him, others are not. But then, as is partly visible in these quotations, they diverge paths. Wollstonecrafts Vindication of the Rights of Men impugns the Queens virtue as a way of demonizing Burkes compassion for her, just as those in the Marian controversy attack either Elizabeth or Mary to discredit other historians; in that case, bigotry causes misperception, and indeed, Wollstonecraft protests Burkes investment in arbitrary authority and dark traditions (Vindication I 37), intimating that Burke is secretly a Papist. In Macaulays account, it is Burkes virtue that is questioned more than the Queens. Burke had characterized the French aristocrats who welcomed the revolution as philosophic spoiler[s] (Reflections 273); she counters by describing their virtuous enthusiasm (Observations II 23). Denuding them of interest, Macaulay wonders what secret passions motivate Burke and his party (6): Burkes pamphlet attempts to captivate its readers affections (5, 53) just as his imagination has been captivate[d] by the charms of the Queen of France (53).54 Here Burke does not misperceive but in fact deliberately misrepresents (43) the state of affairs in France for the sake of securing his own libertine interests. For both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft then, Burkes facts are selective and deformed because both he and his object are vicious.

32

Insofar as paranoia is objectivitys bedfellow, then the virtue of the historian is always implicitly at stake. Impartiality and Chivalry The problem confronting eighteenth-century historians was how to break out of projective historicizing, and thereby (ideally) establish ones own position as inassailable how to render ones facts inert rather than impassioned. Hume and Robertson were able to break out of projective history through a very specific rhetorical technique. Instead of empathizing deeply with the object proven virtuous by their historical narrations of pure fact, as Burke does with Marie Antoinette and Tytler with Mary, they sympathize with object proven maleficient the bad guys. Such gallantry is chivalrous, even more chivalrous than Burke and Tytler, but it is also a rhetorically effective means for establishing their own objectivity. Thus, Robertson pauses a moment over Marys tragical distresses, while warning his readers that we should not approve of our tears, as if they were shed for a person who had attained much nearer to pure virtue.55 This passage contrasts starkly with Burkes on Marie Antoinette, proffering to readers both sympathetic identification with the woman whom his narrative accuses of conspiracy and a warning idealizing her too much for the sake of allowing ones sympathy to be a sign of ones own virtue. This rhetorical gesture produces a realism effect. Similarly, Hume shed[s] a generous tear for the fate of Charles I even though writing a history that faults the Stuarts for introducing corruption into the constitution. I commenced writing the History of England, Hume says in his autobiography (1777),

33

with the accession of the House of Stuart, an epoch when, I thought, the misrepresentations of faction began chiefly to take place. I was, I own, sanguine in my expectations of the success of this work. I thought that I was the only historian, that had at once neglected present power, interest, authority, and the cry of popular prejudices; and . . . I expected popular applause. But miserable was my disappointment: . . . English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, churchman and sectary, freethinker and religionist, patriot and courtier, united in their rage against the man who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I. and the Earl of Strafford; and after the first ebullitions of their fury were over, what was still more mortifying, the book seemed to sink into oblivion. (Essays xxxvi-xxxvii) Humes alleged misery over the books fate belies his pride: if indeed he is maligned by everyone, then he was in fact writing a history that served no present power or interest not even his own ruling passion for literary fame (xl). The author who empathetically identifies with everyones fall guy, Charles I, proves himself, like a chivalrous knight, capable of serving the cause of truth no matter what the cost. Here Hume takes a tactic that lifts his history which slowly grew on people, becoming much more popular by the centurys end out of the paranoid hermeneutic circle. If in chivalry, ones virtue is exhibited through conformity to Gods will in an ordeal, the historians virtue is exhibited through bowing before the facts, even those he or she dislikes. Though Hume himself claimed to be a Tory in feeling and a Whig in thought (much as did Walter Scott a quarter-century later), in fact his ideas are Whig, his

34

rhetorical method Tory in the chivalric sense that Hume himself defined it (Essays 70), performing feats of passive obedience and recognizing the facts indefeasible right to absolute sovereignity. This chivalric rhetorical mode equally defines the modern historian: [T]he historians task [is] to enter sympathetically into the minds or consciousnesses of human agents long dead, to empathize with the intentions and motivations of actors impelled by beliefs and values that may differ totally from anything the historian might himself honor in his own life, and to understand, even when he cannot condone, the most bizarre social and cultural practices. . . . Here . . . the imagination is disciplined by its subordination to the rules of evidence . . . . (White 67) In the modern historical theory of objectivity here described by Hayden White, writing history means being a champion as in a medieval joust, submitting to the intentions of the fact as the knight submits to divine will. If Humes and Robertsons histories were not modern in many ways Humes was a philosophic history (Phillips 49-51) dedicated to proving certain philosophical convictions from which he started as first principles, and it was mawkish[ly] sentimental (Black 93) they were modern in others, and their rhetorical construction of the historians objectivity through a chivalric attitude toward facts is, I hope to have demonstrated, one of them.56 Crucial to this argument is noticing that chivalric history produces objective fact by preserving a sexualized misogyny the desire to love and retaliate not in content but in method. As objective historians, Hume and Robertson do not delineate ravishing and

35

ravished damsels; they rush into their bedchambers and stab their beds with detecting historical pens. Right Reason as Public Virtue In order to achieve historical objectivity, Catharine Macaulay also champions virtue, but in a different way than the chivalric. I first elucidate her notion of public virtue, garnered mainly from a pamphlet answering Burkes justification of party politics, her Observations on a Pamphlet, Entitled Thoughts on the Causes of Present Discontents (1770) and from her Letters on Education published exactly two decades later, shortly before her death.57 I will then illustrate how it informed her history writing. Her thinking is strikingly original: it differs not only from her predecessors notions of Republican virtue but from those subscribed to by her fellow radicals among the Wilkites and radical reformers of the London Society for Constitutional Information (Withey [see note 36] 60) in whose meetings she participated. The true singularity in Macaulays thinking about virtue lies in two of her ideas about how public is connected to private virtue. She shares with Barbauld the idea that to presume that God wants, demands, and enacts anything other than absolute justice would be unworthy the idea we ought to form of God (Observations I 8). Both of them reject the Calvinist notion of a capricious God who operates like a feudal tyrant.58 But from this idea Macaulay draws very distinctive conclusions. She insists God has made humans fully adequate to the task of establishing its own present security and happiness (Observations I 8) insofar as they can now, at this moment in history both understand and obey the principles of truth (Observations II 16).59 It is in its presentism that Macaulays millennialism (Withey 59; Observations II 20) differs from

36

similar ideas proffered by Price, Priestley, and Godwin, also millennialists: while many of her contemporary Dissenters saw such a moral capacity as developing with the gradual improvement of society through education, Macaulay sees each individual as capable of adhering to principles of truth now; her system of education is therefore not designed to bring about the social reform that would make a society of moral beings in the future; rather, it presumes that people need only to be addressed reasonably to behave well now. All that will change in the future with the improvement of society is that government will conspicuously reward people for following their true interest, identifiable with the public interest, itself becoming a primary educator as the value of virtuous action and by that means extending the bounds of good (Letters 271-272, 276, 273). For Macaulay, while it is true that public liberty (Observations I 12) will be extended as more people become virtuous, it is also true that behaving virtuously which is to say, acting on the notion that ones own interests are best served by universal equity (Letters 275) rather than private [i.e., selfish] interest (Observations I 9) and benefiting from it are possible now. Acting in accordance with just ends is neither morally impossible in itself, nor beyond the abilities of man, she says; it is only that they are currently individual, achieved by various perspicuous individuals, rather than general because people fear change (Observations I 9). In her life of Macaulay, Hays implicitly criticizes this view by imputing it to a youthful enthusiasm born of Macaulays cloistered upbringing: like Lennoxs Female Quixote, Macaulay had been left alone to expatiate at will through her fathers library (Hays [see note 29] ii.156). But unlike Arabella, Macaulay tires of reading Romance:

37

[H]istory became her darling passion, and liberty the idol of her imagination. Rollins Ancient History . . . first lighted up that spark in her mind . . . To a spirit thus excited, retirement, by concentrating its force, added strength: the world, with its lax principles and vicious habits, had not yet broken in upon the gay mistakes of the just expanding heart, enamoured of truth and virtue, and ignorant of the difficulties which retard and obstruct their progress. Oh youth! the lovely source of generous errors! (Hays ii.157) But Macaulay had already answered such a charge in 1770. In her attack on Burkes defense of the British party system, she imagines that readers will disregard her views because, as a woman, she had not been engaged in the practical parts of [government] administration and so would be too apt to [propose ideas] incompatible with the gross and vicious nature of human affairs (Observations I 7). She does not answer that charge by defending herself. Instead, she insists that her critics prove as non-existing the human virtue that springs from recognizing an identity between ones own happiness and the public good. I think it would be hard to overestimate the brilliance of this claim for radical politics, both in Macaulays time and in our own. Its brilliance lies not in whether it is true or false, and even less in whether Macaulay herself was able to live as a virtuous woman though that question fascinated her contemporaries.60 Its brilliance lies in its perlocutionary effects:61 rather than assaulting authorities and thereby more deeply defining and entrenching their edicts, she shifts the radical position to the authoritative, requiring its detractors to defend themselves.

38

Macaulay alleges that those who insist that such virtue does not exist do so out of sinister views, for the sake of furthering their own private interests (Observations I 89). Private interests are a poor substitute for the happiness and pleasure one gets from realizing the identity of ones own and societys well-being: the satisfactions of prominence, power over others, wealth, and ease are pleasures to which people are accustomed (Observations I 9), and so fear to relinquish, but they are less pleasurable than living in accordance with the principle of equity. Whether one agrees or not with her arguments about pleasure, evidence that Macaulay is exactly right to identify the proposition that divine happiness is only possible in the next world with self-serving designs, as Burkes Reflections amply demonstrate: The body of the people must not find the principles of natural subordination by art [i.e., the artifices of philosophical reasoners] rooted out of their minds. They must respect that property of which they cannot partake. They must labour to obtain what by labour can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavour [i.e., when they come up against the fact of their societys inequitable distribution of goods], they must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice. (372) Burke here clearly states that the notion of happiness in the afterlife can be used to serve aristocratic interests: promising eternal life in heaven is a way of getting the people to do more than their fair share of labor for less than their fair share of the benefits. Macaulay rightly maintains that one must insist that happiness for everyone is possible on earth now

39

in order to prevent sinister designs such as Burkes, whether such a possibility really exists or not. But though Macaulays paranoia is therefore correct, its genius lies beyond detection of the sinister: Macaulay transforms her proposition that an equitable society beneficent to all is possible now, whether she really believes it or not, into a heuristic device rather than a positive claim. She does so by refusing to prove that people are fundamentally good and that celestial happiness is possible on earth (Observations II 55). Instead she says to her critics, you prove that a Republic founded upon human virtue is impossible by showing definitively that the virtue necessary for sustaining it does not exist. Though immersed in attacking Burke as the mouth of faction (Observations I 14), she disengages from projective history by asserting analytic neutrality as Schafer defined it above (p. 22): her proposition might be true, it might be false; she resists loving it by asserting it as a positivity and refuses to retaliate against those who reject it. Though fears of conspiracy fuel its formulation, her idea is also scientific. It operates according to the rules that scientists habitually rely upon in which a hypothesis is valid if useful until disproven.62 Though immersed in and responding to party politics, Macaulay is partisan in the best sense of the word, partisan to the oppressed people whom Burke wants to dupe. Coinciding with Macaulays political premises, Georg Lukcs explicitly says that rendering realistic portraits of a society (past or present) requires utopianist thinking as a heuristic device: The possibility of realism . . . is bound up with that minimal hope of change for the better offered by bourgeois society63 that is, with the desire to carry on the glorious work of improvement (Macaulay, Letters 274) that

40

promised to gradually usher in the millennium formulated by the eighteenth-century radical Dissenters within whose circles Macaulay moved. Realistic History Macaulay remains disinterested in her political arguments by basing them on universal human virtue that, she claims, is necessary to presume until disproven. How does Macaulay conduct transferential history? Though recognizing that Macaulays research methods outstripped those of her contemporaries, which rendered her account of the Armys revolution between 1647 and 1649 . . . the best written in the eighteenth century and perhaps well into the nineteenth, J. G. A. Pocock laments that Macaulays historiography is still rhetorical and humanist in comparison to Humes much more innovative philosophical history (252-254). And similarly, Lynne Withey faults Macaulay for writing history as a history of characters: The real reason for her antipathy to Hume lay in her view of individual morality as a primary force in shaping history. . . . [T]hat men must be judged in part by the circumstances in which they lived was completely antithetical to Macaulays moralistic point of view ([see note 44] 74). Macaulays History does indeed read like a collection of extremely moralistic character studies of politically important men64 fabricated for didactic ends typical of history writing before Humes and Robertsons works revised the genre (Phillips 14-19). However, when one reads Macaulays Hints towards the Education of a Prince, Letter 25 of her Letters on Education, one realizes that her didacticism differs dramatically from the classical.65 I would like to suggest that she did not, as Withey maintains, us[e] history . . . as an illustration of mans moral character (74), and that Macaulays history is much more philosophical (in the

41

eighteenth-century sense of the word) than might at first appear: she presumes associationism. In Lockean and Hartleyian associationist psychology, the worst thing about habitual misassociations is not the associations themselves, since they can be corrected; rather, it is that habitually misassociating ideas may pervert a persons capacity for reasoning itself. Someone who grows up seeing poverty continually associated with immorality neither a logical nor a natural association becomes a very poor thinker. Taken to its logical conclusion, Lockes psychology tells us that culture makes us mad.66 It is on this foundation that Macaulay recommends isolating future kings from courts and society. She argues that the cultural institution of monarchy causes kings, when still small children, to be surrounded by unnatural circumstances that deform their capacity for reasoning rightly beyond the power of any tutor to intervene: [F]or what great effects can even a wise man produce by the most assiduous attention to the education of a being, surrounded from the instant of his birth by fawning courtiers? A being, set up as a pageant for the idolatry of the public. A being, treated with ceremonies which from their nature must destroy every just idea of self, and of the relation in which he stands to the people whom he is to govern. . . . And, to sum up all, a being, whose mind must be corrupted by the designing sycophants who crowd about him before his reason is sufficiently strong to perceive the difference between vice and virtue. (224) As the letter describes in greater and greater detail what is necessary for developing a patriot king (225), its tone gets more and more ironic about my philosophic prince

42

(227). Macaulays interlocutor even protests that people such as these are only characters to be found in the regions of romance (228-229). Suddenly, at a certain moment, Macaulays point becomes clear: could we be sure of a line of philosophic princes, the people might receive benefit, rather than injury, from the plenitude of power (231). This is a covert argument for democracy, the conditionality of the sentence negated by the ridiculous measures enumerated in the rest of the letter: could we really means we cant. If a society would reap any advantage from the personal virtues of their prince, Macaulay intones, but the conditions following it are life apart from the court at an early age, and then continued throughout life. What king can live apart from court? Thus the stringent list of moral requirements that follows her if is not, or not only, a measure of her impossible moral standards. Rather, it shows that the fault of a monarchy is structural: monarchy is a form of government that only works well if kings achieve a state of moral perfection which they cannot achieve if they live as monarchs. In Macaulays History of England, she clearly delineates the vices of kings, and thus seems to engage in traditional character history, as Pocock and Withey maintain. But while put off by Macaualays apparent moralizing over vicious kings, Withey notices that Macaulays most common explanation for corrupt behavior was lack of the proper type of education; never did she accuse anyone of being inherently evil (65). I would suggest that Macaulays History is precisely philosophical in its attempt to prove two democratic points: monarchical systems necessarily educate kings so that they are unfit to serve; until monarchy is limited or abolished, history will be the history of corrupt kings. That is, under monarchy, people other than kings are more perfect morally for the good reason that they can be, given that they are not raised as monarchs; and also, under

43

monarchy, virtuous people dont get to make history. While I cannot prove that suggestion here, I do want to show in concluding this chapter an instance in Macaulays History of her opting for a transferential rather than projective historical mode, of her assuming and then suddenly eschewing the chivalric method of objectifying historical fact adopted by Robertson and Hume. It is this particular instance of transferential historicizing, focused on the question of Charles Is chastity, that has had, I believe, a significant impact on the history of feminist thinking. That is, in characterizing Charles, Macaulay both does and makes history. The Male Rake67 One reviewer comments on Macaulays portrait of Charles I that [she] seems to think it possible that a great monarch may be a low, shuffling, disingenuous slave to bigotry and love of power.68 More than possible: probable. But to accomplish her philosophical task of demonstrating that monarchy as a cultural institution unfits people to be virtuous patriot kings, Macaulay must demonstrate to her readers that her history is not merely a Whiggish assault on an overbearing monarch as it was taken to be by Pitt who proclaimed it in the House of Lords an Antidote to [Humes Tory] poison.69 To do so, she adopts Robertsons and Humes rhetorical strategy, described above, of shedding a generous tear for the enemy virtually quoting Humes autobiography that had appeared four years before her account of Charles: I shed many tears whist I was writing this catastrophe.70 As in Robertson and Hume, and in contrast to merely projective historians like Burke and Tytler, this alleged emotional investment makes her assault on Charles Is character appear to be waged against her will out of a purely chivlarous devotion to the facts.

44

In fact, Macaulay too completely assumes the knight-historians position, given her gender. Most startling to reviewers was Macaulays assault on Charless chastity: even though Charles Is chastity was a focus for many historians, including Hume (v.291), critics were agitated that this criticism came from a lady (Hill 34). But the feminist action of her statement goes beyond its content, chastity, and that a woman presumed to pronounce on such content. Macaulay writes, His chastity has been called into question by an author of the highest repute, Macaulay says, and were it allowed, it was tainted by an excess of uxoriousness which gave it the properties and the consequences of vice (History iv.395). The comment is quite striking. Macaulay actually says that Charles either had affairs or didnt, but, even if he didnt, he was still just as vicious as if he had. Why? Because he loved his wife too much. Her sentence declares that overzealous chastity is just as bad as promiscuity, a proposition that only makes sense if one understands what she would have us say to women about chastity, as delineated in her Letters on Education. In her Letters, Macaulay advises teaching daughters of the purity and independence of mind that results from chastity but without deluding them about the origin of the double standard which did in all probability arise from women having been considered as the mere property of men; and [is] still preserved in society from the unruly licentiousness of . . . men (220). If, as Macaulay maintains, independence of mind is the goal of chastity, then it makes perfect sense that promiscuity or uxoriousness would impair Charles Is morality: in either case, independence would be sacrificed. That describes the philosophical content. However, the consequences of this statement about Charles for both historiography and history can be seen only in a slow-

45

motion unraveling of its performative power. Since Macaulay is a transferential historian, part of its rhetorical effect comes from resisting power, from resisting the temptation to love her own partys version of the facts and to retaliate against the absolute monarchist. She is describing Charles Is character: the historian has rushed into the chamber; the pen is poised to stab through the curtains surrounding his bed; Macaulay could at this moment make a property of him. But she does not throw the lance. Macaulay does not say that Charles was or was not unchaste; she does not arbitrate either for Milton, who describes Charles Is promiscuity (Macaulay, History iv.395 n.), or for Hume, who describes his uncommon fidelity (History v.291). She says, rather, if he wasnt adulterous, he was unchaste in the sense of overly dependent upon his wife. At the moment of refusing to project evil onto Charles, Macaulay instead redefines chastity, giving it a new ground in philosophy rather than custom. Susan Staves has demonstrated that Macaulays historical writings necessarily make the analogical leap from mens political and civil rights to womens . . . , whether she explicitly says so or not.71 The leap is clear in 1790 because she is describing how to instruct young girls when she then offers a definition of chastity, one that helps us to make sense of her much earlier statement about Charles I. But arguably it is precisely this analogy that makes earlier reviewers of Macaulays History so uncomfortable. A reviewer in the London Chronicle, calling himself An Old Bachelor, writes, I think it was by no means the least that ladies should rise up in this generation, who after having stripped him of all other virtues, will not allow him even the cold comfort of chastity, or suffer him even to kiss his own wife with impunity.72 This bachelor is not, or not only, attacking a lady historian for arraigning Charles I on chastity; he is attacking her

46

for being so moralistic as to not even allow him to kiss his own wife with impunity. Charles I has been judged by a moralist too stringent who would only accept bachelors as virtuous. And yet behind that perfectionism lurks something even worse, evoked in the review by the image of ladies rising up.73 This redefinition that makes kissing ones own spouse unchaste would, if applied to women, call into question the virtue of the most devoted wives. In fact, it would dub vicious, unchaste, any woman dependent on a man. This premise, as well as the implicit idea that one standard of virtue can be applied to both sexes, is arguably the philosophical ground of Wollstonecrafts visionary revolution in female manners (Vindication II 45, 192). Notice that Macaulay deploys a transferential method in her feminism as well. In projection, men attack by saying that But ev'ry Woman is at heart a Rake (Pope, Epistle II). Women counterattack by describing the double standard: Hays does, in fact, describe Lord Darnleys numerous infidelities as spurring Queen Mary into the arms of her ravisher (iii.40, 51) that is a feminist historiographical act. But Macaulay does something different: she redefines chastity so that the virtue cannot be used oppressively on anyone, male or female, implicitly in the act of redefinition also demanding its universal application. This does nothing less than make female independence a condition of female virtue, the major presumption stimulating Wollstonecrafts second Vindication. No wonder, then, Wollstonecrafts despair that Macaulay died shortly before she could read it: When I first thought of writing [the Vindication of the Rights of Woman,] I anticipated Mrs. Macaulays approbation . . . .74 Conclusion

47

This chapter risks heroizing Macaulay instead of her critical historical procedure. Natalie Zemon Davis provides a welcome counterbalance. Macaulays public reactions to [Hume] and to other historians with whom she disagreed, Davis says, were efforts at transcendence, that is, efforts to stand above private rivalry and speak only of historys higher goals. But Davis points out that the consequences of engaging in such rivalry, personal attack, would be worse for her as a woman than for any of her rivals (10). She did engage in a short interchange with Hume in letters publicly exchanged in the European Magazine. Hume ultimately defers to her, employing a high strain of gallantry. Macaulay jokingly reminds him that, in the feudal past, chivalry was one way of controlling women, while other methods, practiced at the same time, were cropping of ears . . ., slitting of noses, and branding of foreheads.75 Macaulays refusal both to project and to romance the fact brings into relief the possibility that physical violence subtends all forms of historical objectivity in which facts are not uttered from the perspective of an equitable world.

48

Chapter 2 Bad Marriages, Bad Novels: The Philosophical Romance Mr S[elby]. [. . .] Adsheart! we shall have a double marriage, as sure as two and two make four. [. . .] The Curtain Falls -- Jane Austen, Sir Charles Grandison or The Happy Man: A Comedy in Five Acts. [written 1799]76 Written just after Austen had completed her first draft of Pride and Prejudice (Southam 6), this sentence attests to what remains the same in the novel genre as it is transformed toward the end of the eighteenth century into a vehicle for psychological realism. Clearly, Austen had figured out by the time she co-authored this dramatic adaptation of Richardsons novel that good marriages make good novels, just as they end comic plays.77 The satisfaction is not simply aesthetic. An ending via double marriage insures that two and two make four; it conserves or perhaps even creates cultural rationality, the kinds of reasoning that a particular social order recognizes as indisputable. John Stevenson reminds us that, in Northrop Fryes generic theory, the distinctive feature of comedy in the broadest sense of the term is that a concluding marriage offers its audience an image of restored social order . . . (471), containing the anarchic sexual energies that had threatened its dissolution. Austens contemporaries, the female Jacobin78 authors Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft, of course much lamented the social order. If marriage is a way of rejoining and reaffirming the world as currently constituted, it offers no solution to their demand for change. The character Mary ends Wollstonecrafts novel of the same name, famously, by preparing and wishing to die, reassured that she was hastening to that world where there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage.79 And Maria in

Wollstonecrafts posthumously published The Wrongs of Woman connects marriage to social order and the question of its renewal when she says, famously, Marriage had bastilled me for life (154-155). The revolution in female manners for which Wollstonecraft calls, repeatedly, in her Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) will require overturning marriage as instituted at the end of the eighteenth century.80 Of course, the novel form is revolutionary in the sense that, from its inception, it participates in the bourgeois revolution by creating and disciplining the emerging middle class.81 But in the sense of revolution as overturning society to institute radical justice, a simultaneously classic realistic and radically revolutionary novel is a contradiction in terms. One could argue that, as a novelist, Godwin did not try to create a revolutionary, realistic novel, that he strove instead to bring about a revolution in the feelings of his readers by depicting the corruption of things as they are. Of course, utopianism is possible in the novel, but such imaginings alter the genre from the novel of classic realism to something else: the gothic, science fiction, allegory, fantasy literature. The comedy of romance, as Samuel Johnson calls the realistic novel,82 romantically opens up the possibility of discord between an individual and social mores, but then comedically, in Dantes sense of the word, closes it down. Realism and revolution thus cannot co-exist generically except to the extent that the classic realist novels ending fails. It is just possible, D. A. Miller says, that Edward Ferrars will marry Lucy Steele, or that Captain Wentworth will go away again. Those endings would leave Austens heroines unfulfilled within the given social structure. However, Miller continues, [i]f these possibilities were realized, [. . .] they would have the status of sheer

50

and utter mistakes (72). A radically revolutionary novel written at the beginning of the nineteenth century would by definition be an artistic blunder. The incompatibility of good art with progressive politics is a story weve heard repeatedly, beginning with attacks on socialist realism up to more recent attacks on aesthetic ideology. What is ideological about aesthetically pleasing totalities is the way that they seem to paper over social, political, and economic problems visible as textual contradictions, aporia, and gaps.83 And yet in this case what is ideological is aesthetic displeasure insofar as it forecloses upon further literary analysis of so-called Jacobin novels which seem to present only an unambiguous political platform. Wollstonecraft reports in a private letter a dinner conversation in which she and Mary Robinson debated over where, at what precise event, her novel Mary should have ended because the readers sympathies were no longer engaged.84 As a result of similar revolutionary sympathies, Hays also wrote novels contesting marriage, despite exhortations not to do so: William Godwin tells her that her novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) has little story,85 and that it would have been more interesting had [her] heroine been beloved (256). Required for readerly interest and sympathy as well as for plot (story) is romance, a plot form that is fundamentally inimical to the Enlightenment feminist writers desire to set her heroine on a quest for radical justice, according to Rachel Blau DuPlessis: [A] contradiction between love and quest in plots dealing with women as a narrated group, acutely visible in nineteenth-century fiction, has, in my view, one main mode of resolution: an ending in which one part of that

51

contradiction, usually quest or Bildung, is set aside or repressed, whether by marriage or by death.86 Hays refuses, however, to believe that she cannot portray heroines on a quest for justice and still have romance too. Hays balked at Godwins injunction that she make her novel more interesting by making the plot conform to the rules of courtship and romance as instituted in her own imperfect world. She demurs, and responds, may there not be philosophical romance?87 The word philosophical has, of course, a long and varied history.88 But by philosophical, Wollstonecraft and Hays meant, not prejudiced, unsophisticated to use another of their favorite terms which only later became a slur. At this moment, to be philosophical is to steer a course through societys sophistical reasoning, employed to justify its own corrupt practices, by refusing to grant any prejudged notion about the quality or value of things as they are. To be philosophical is to be able to stand apart from ones own historical moment and social mores in order to judge their validity. It is to be critical not in the Kantian sense of the word, but rather by using Lockean/Hartleyian analytical method: one analyzes ones associations, determining whether they have become associated in ones own mind by prejudice, culture, or personal experience, and then decides whether the association is rational or just. This chapter attempts to overturn prejudices instilled by taste, arguing that novels written in the genre of philosophical romance89 by Wollstonecraft, Hays, Mary Shelley, and Amelia Opie are in fact good novels, not despite but because of their endings. In her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft insists that taste will change once radical equality is seen for what it is once domination no longer blasts all [our]

52

prospects;90 clearly she and Hays write philosophical romance to an audience not yet in existence, one that will find their work beautiful because situated differently in relation to the prospect of radical democracy. Though burdened with considerably more complicated political views, Shelley and Opie too write in the genre, showing us that the term philosophical romance is not at all equivalent to Jacobin novels, and moreover show us the value of considering these works to be interventions in form as well as politics. Beyond defending these novels by showing that their aesthetic failure comes out of adherence to an epistemological system underlying Godwins radical vision of a just society, I show that Wollstonecraft, Hays, and Shelley deploy the novel form as a way of interpreting and revising Godwins system, while Opie mourns its impracticality. In the process, these authors develop a new aesthetic, one that need not be considered a failure not yet. Godwins radical philosophy, the one that Hays and Wollstonecraft attempted to embody in novels, had a problem insofar as rationalism can form the basis of individual but not social virtue. Looking for a way to import feeling into rationalist calculations, Hays and Wollstonecraft turned to the novel (Wallace). Marriage is both a metaphor for and instance of social values; the novel with its marriage plot therefore provides a space for experimentation, for trying to render interesting i.e., emotionally binding that rationalist, equalizing virtue that according to Godwin would rule a radically egalitarian, just society. Hays, Wollstonecraft, and Shelley romanced philosophy in order to render it sociable. Their efforts should be especially interesting to scholars of British and American Romanticism insofar as they deliberately desynonymize romantic and

53

individual.91 I argue below that the philosophical romance queers romanticism, rendering it communal. The Problem of Radical, Rational Philosophy In the 1793 edition of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, William Godwin argues that human beings can achieve consensus about what should be done in any given situation (justice) through the proper use of reason if the mind has not been imbued with false principles engendered by an imperfect system of society.92 Based on reason, civic action is voluntary. From this perspective, all government, from absolute monarchy ruled to a Republic regulated by laws corresponds in a certain degree to what the Greeks denominated a tyranny (3.308). He then articulates the antiauthoritarian and anarchical basis of what Kant had called, nine years earlier, the motto of the Enlightenment:93 Natural independence, a freedom from all constraint except that of reason and argument presented to the understanding, is of the utmost importance to the welfare and improvement of mind. [. . .] Beware of reducing men to the state of machines. Govern them through no medium but that of inclination and conviction. [. . .] The proper method for hastening the decay of error, is not, by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself. (3.448-450) But if it is true for Godwin that government [. . .] is nothing more than a scheme for enforcing by brute violence the sense of one man or set of men upon another (3.110), how can all these individuals thinking for themselves ever cohere for Godwin into a

54

society? As he admits in the sentence following the motto think for yourself, From these principles it appears that every thing that is usually understood by the term cooperation is in some degree an evil (3.450). How will a rational society work in practice? In Godwins scheme, reason insures social existence in two ways. First, as a rational creature, one realizes that promoting mutual benefit is the best way of securing ones own happiness. [V]ice is nothing more than error (3.20). Second, in thinking for him or herself, each individual will come to the truth (3.131): that is, consensus is possible because since there is a single and uniform truth (3.104). The force of conviction is, for Godwin, an internal force, that, in an ideal society, would take the place of any usurping and illegitimate external force that is, of government and rule by law. But Godwin recognizes that there are subjects about which we shall continually differ, and ought to differ (3.450): in those cases, what will hold us together as a group? I have just summarized part of the chapter of Political Justice dealing with the problem as to how the endless variety of mind affects the project of regulating society rationally rather than by government. It in part attempts to answer Edmund Burkes contention that this new conquering empire of light and reason94 wont hold together: On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, [. . .] laws are to be supported only [. . .] by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations [. . . .] On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied [. . .] in persons [i.e., authorities]; so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment. But that

55

sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place. (171-172) Burke does not see how bare or naked reasoning can commit people to honorable social interaction. Whereas for conservative ideology, the law that operates in the political realm might serve as a metaphor for laws that act in the sphere of the domestic,95 for Godwin, imagining a lawless political realm in which each individual operates rationally and responds to another individuals rational thought (justice, he calls this96), the political and the domestic cannot be in any real sense separate. The true reason why the mass of mankind has so often been made the dupe of knaves, has been the mysterious and complicated nature of the social system (3.309) played out in every-day arrangements. Hence the easy movement in this chapter from a discussion of governmental power to a discussion of when to have dinner. Because cooperation with others names for Godwin all public and private action in his empire of reason (3.311), this chapter defending rational rule contains in it Godwins discussion of cohabitation and marriage, though later, in the 1798 edition, it became an Appendix. One paragraph of that appendix completely new to the 1798 edition and written, therefore, after Godwin had met, fallen in love with, and married Mary Wollstonecraft, after the birth of their daughter Mary and after Wollstonecrafts death adds this idea to the question of social cement in a rational society: It is a curious subject, to enquire into the due medium between individuality and [acting in] concert. [. . .] [H]uman beings are formed for society. Without society, we shall probably be deprived of the most

56

eminent enjoyments of which our nature is susceptible. In society, no man, possessing the genuine marks of a man can stand alone. Our opinions, our tempers and our habits are modified by those of each other. This is by no means the mere operation of arguments and persuasives [. . . .] (4.335) Hays and Wollstonecraft take up this curious subject, assuming with Godwin that personal relationships are not merely a metaphor for, nor merely on a continuum with, but in fact constitutive of the political scene.97 And of course the novel, generically tied to marriage, provides the perfect laboratory for trying the experiment of whether there can be such a thing as rational society held together through a sense of connectedness to them, i.e., through love. Needless to say, there is a great deal at stake in the success of philosophical romance. Marriage and Politics Coleridge ends his Rime of the Ancyent Marinere of 1798 by telling the Wedding-guest whom he has detained to tell his tale that sweeter than the Marriagefeast, / Tis sweeter far [. . .] / To walk together to the Kirk / And altogether pray.98 The Wedding-guest leaves, stunnd, having been successfully by the Marinere Turnd [away] from the bridegrooms door (lines 654-5). Relying upon these passages, Stanley Cavell argues that the poem offers prayer as a necessary substitute for marriage as a way of rendering humans social: [Coleridges] Mariner teaches [his moral] by buttonholing WeddingGuests, preferably next of kin, and leaving them stunned, so that they too [turn away] from the bridegrooms door. Why? Even if [the] ceremony

57

[of all praying together] is sweeter than the marriage-feast, it does not yet follow that they are incompatible, that we must choose between them. Why is the marriage deserted [. . .]? Cavell ends his reading with a question that echoes Hamlet: [S]hall there be no more marriages?99 Cavells reading of Coleridges Rime shows that it is concerned with the problem of witnessing: the Marinere prevents the Wedding-guest from witnessing a marriage. The question as to how witnesses might determine the authority of any performative act its binding sacrality is an especially pressing one during the 1790s. Questions as to the legality of performances made in front of social bodies that may not be, or not yet be, legitimate enforcers of legal authority, are paramount. When exactly the Third Estate actually became the National Assembly in France, when exactly its edicts began to have the force of state authority, has to do with the problem of witness, of when French citizens began to react to Third-Estate edicts as laws. Many such extralegal bodies sprung up in England and Scotland, prompting the Two Acts: as can be seen in the treason trials over what was said at these conventions, the fear is that one body could or would suddenly become the state because witnessed as such. At such a political moment, anxieties run high about the power of performatives such as we declare or I will. The convening of assemblies is outlawed in 1795 by the Two Acts, also called the Gagging Acts, out of fear of the spontaneous creation of social bodies that might be taken by witnesses to have political efficacy, just as clandestine marriage the marrying of two people without parental consent and published church bans is declared ineffective in creating a legal body, the married couple, by Lord Hardwickes Act. Lord

58

Hardwickes Act remained in effect from 1753-1835/6. This law insisted that marriages were not only illegal without the proper witnesses of parish and parents (they had always been that), but also and this is new they are invalid (Emsley 481). The government enacts laws to prohibit private enactment of public meaning, both at the macro level of politics and at the micro level of marriage. Expecting people to violate the prohibition, the law declares secret acts to be null and void, meaningless. The problem is, as the novels examined here show, secret acts are at this historical moment seen to be utterly possible. Marriage and Meaning Over the course of a lifetime of work on how God becomes present in the bread and wine during holy communion, Luther transfers the agent which makes possible the effect of eating the bread, Gods forgiveness, from the Priest to inner faith, from worldly convention witnessed by authority to interior mental act, potentially witnessed by no one.100 The consequences of this anti-authoritarian theology were rendered practical in marriage: Ecclesiastical rites were prescribed by the authority of the state [in Germany] as the best means of securing publicity [for marriage], but neither Luther nor the other Protestant leaders insisted upon them as necessary to a binding marriage.101 Spousals, the betrothal or engagement that could be public or secret, preceded nuptials or a public marriage ceremony, but [a]s a rule, the [ecclesiastical] courts tended to treat all secret betrothals followed by actual connubial life as binding marriages. Until far down

59

into the eighteenth century the engaged lovers before the nuptials were held to be legally husband and wife. (Howard 1.374) Two people would only need to consent to marry each other for a marriage to have effectively taken place. Once verbal consent between two people who are alone is accepted as the necessary and sufficient conditions for performing an act of marriage, it is a short step to imagining marriages made through a wordless mental act of internal consent on the part of both parties, along the lines of Luthers communion. In 1685, the English legal thinker Henry Swinburne describes marriage as quite possibly even a silent act of consent when discussing the grammatical difference between promises to marry in the future and actual performances of the act: [T]he Vulgar sort [sometimes] intend to tye such a Knot as can never be loosed, and make the [marriage] Contract so sure as it may never be dissolved; yet such is their unskilfulness and ignorance herein, that they cannot frame their words to their minds [. . . .] And therefore, since it is the very Consent of Mind only which maketh Matrimony, we are to regard not their Words, but their Intents, not the formality of the Phrase, but the drift of their Determination, not the outward sound of their Lips, which cannot speak more cunningly, but the inward Harmony or Agreement of their Hearts, which mean uprightly [. . . .]102 Though perhaps not advocating private ceremonies, Swinburne in effect indicates that it is possible to marry through an inward aligning of hearts: it is possible to marry someone without uttering a word.

60

Mary Wollstonecrafts posthumously published and unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria describes how Marias husband, Mr. Venables, adds to his own infidelities by attempting to barter Marias sexual favors for a loan; he then incarcerates her in a madhouse for the sake of obtaining control over an inheritance left to their daughter under her guardianship. While imprisoned, Maria meets and befriends an at first cruel keeper named Jemima, and then Henry Darnford, a dandy whose dissipating habits were cured by living in America. He is imprisoned in the madhouse against his will upon returning to Europe by someone who wished to defraud him of an inheritance. In The Wrongs of Woman, Maria and Darnford fall in love while imprisoned. Early in the novel, they marry each other through gestures: They were silent yet discoursed, how eloquently? (100). It is not till much later that they consummate their spousals, rendering them, as Darnford says, irrevocable (188); she then in a letter to him call[s] him by the sacred name of husband (190). Mary Shelleys Lodore, written 40 years later is still arguably part of this genre. Ethel is the daughter of an impetuous Byronic hero, the title character Lord Lodore. Lodore had taken her to America when she was only an infant, raised her to be virtuous in the isolated wilds of Illinois, and then died fighting in a duel when they were both on their way to return to England. Ethel falls in love with a deserving man, Villiers, who fails in subscribing too entirely to social judgments of his own worth. Lodore provides a dramatic instance of the wordless ceremony: Villiers took [Ethels] hand and held it in his [. . . .] He felt that he was loved, and that he was about to part from her for ever. The pain and pleasure of these thoughts mingled strangely he had no words to express

61

them, he felt that it would be easier to die than to give her up. [. . .] [O]ne kindred emotion of perfect affection had, as it were, married their souls one to the other. (238) Villiers thinks he must leave Ethel forever because too poor to marry her worse, in debt. Ethel prefers (as she later actually demonstrates) to live in debtors prison with him than without him. Though the kindred emotion described in the above passage causes marriage for Villiers only metaphorically (as it were), it does so literally for Ethel, which is why she is so stunned and betrayed by his initial decision to leave her: she takes this private ceremony to mean that he is coming back; he takes it to mean that she accepts his inability to marry her but knows that he is married to her in soul, as it were, not in reality. Villierss problem is his inability to prevent his life and his words from betraying each other. Even much later in the novel, even after and despite their public wedding ceremony, Villiers does not really marry Ethel until he can, as she does, see riches and social station as ancillary to a marriage rather than constitutive: his education as to the unreality of social appearances causes a change in his soul that renders his outlook on the value of riches the same as Ethels (338), and it is only this change that allows him to truly consent to his marriage (338-339). Long after their formal marriage ceremony and its consummation, the couple achieve marriage: the intimate union of their thoughts allows them to dr[i]nk life from one anothers gaze (339). In Hayss The Victim of Prejudice, an orphan named Mary is virtually adopted by one Mr. Raymond who had loved but failed to act on his love for her mother. Mr. Raymond adopts and raises Mary because he feels partly responsible for in his own self-distrusting timidity having abandoned her to her seducer and father of Mary, an

62

illegitimate child. Mr. Raymond takes in two boys, sons of a gentleman, in order to raise them as well. Mary and William, the eldest of the boys, grow up living as brother and sister in Mr. Raymonds house. At a crucial moment, Mr. Raymond realizes that they have become too attached Williams father would never let him marry an illegitimate child. Yet by the time Mr. Raymond realizes this, it is too late. Mary and William have married each other insensibly, simply in growing up together. When Mr. Raymond tries to separate them, they realize that they are indeed wedded together. Again, in this case, the moment of realization happens wordlessly. Mary responds physically to the injunction of her beloved guardian not to marry William as it is contradicted by her knowledge that she is in fact already bound to him in her soul: my heart was rent by contending passions; confused notions of danger and impropriety, of respect for the judgement of my guardian, struggled with my native sincerity: I trembled; I felt the blood alternately forsake and rush back to my heart, which a faint sickness overspread. I sunk into a chair, and remained silent. I understand you, said William [. . . .] (52) Mary refuses to have a minister preside over their nuptial-ceremony (84), in true Godwinian form refusing to take an oath made unnecessary by the firmness of her heart:103 If your knowledge of my heart, [she says to William,] afford you not a security for my faith, weak indeed were the sanction of oaths, and unworthy the sacred flame that animates us [. . . .] (85)

63

The sacred flame is the intent behind any words, its existence, these novels seem to insist, being either unnecessary to articulate or even potentially falsified in the articulation.104 And here we get back to why the wedding guests cannot adequately witness the wedding in Coleridges Rime. Social forms have become so corrupt that social ceremonies or rituals mean the opposite of what they pretend, marriage in fact licensing infidelity, oaths hypocrisy. As Wollstonecrafts Maria realizes, Had she remained with her husband, practicing insincerity, and neglecting her child to manage an intrigue, she would still have been visited and respected (192). Eliza Fenwicks Secresy makes plain that marrying legally, publicly, actually falsifies ones vows to monogamy insofar as the social form of marriage bespeaks its incipient violation.105 Marriage, as at present constituted, Wollstonecraft says in Maria, lead[s] to immorality (193). And the young Mary Wollstonecraft describes the insidious emptiness of public ritual in her earliest novel Mary. Because it is her mothers dying wish, the heroine Mary marries one Charles in order settle a suit of contested inheritance: The clergyman came in to read the service for the sick, and afterwards the marriage ceremony was performed. Mary stood like a statue of Despair, and pronounced the awful vow without thinking of it, and then ran to support her mother who expired the same night in her arms. Her husband set off for the continent the same day [. . . .] (15) It is the corruption of social institutions that forces the uttering of empty vows in marriage as well as civic engagement. Godwin describes living under a government: I

64

am bound to co-operate with government, as far as it appears to me to coincide with [the] principles [of justice and truth]. But I submit to government when I think it erroneous, merely because I have no remedy (3.97). Yet both agreement and submission despite disagreement will appear the same to outside observers. Godwins predicament also obtains for participants in public marriage: vows can be said and meant or said and not meant, but what witness will be able to tell the difference? The wedding guests are detained by the Marinere: they cannot uphold the meaning of the marriage performed at a public marriage ceremony because what is performed there is undecidably marriage or its failure. But more is rotten in Denmark than the corruption of the social ceremonys meaning. In Wollstonecrafts later novel, Maria is shunned by society for having privately married her lover, though she did so after she publicly divorced her husband for offering her sexual services for money. We part for ever, she utters, a performative that has for her the efficacy of divorce: Then, turning to Mr. S----, I added, I call on you, Sir, to witness, and I lifted my hands and eyes to heaven, that, as solemnly as I took his name, I now abjure it, I pulled off my ring, and put it on the table; and that I mean immediately to quit his house, never to enter it more. I will provide for myself and child. I leave him as free as I am determined to be myself he shall be answerable for no debts of mine. (162) Maria adheres to her vow of divorce to the bitter end, even refusing to go back to her husband in exchange for release from the madhouse. But she is not allowed by society to keep her freedom or her child. The problem is Mr. S----: he is the man who attempted to

65

purchase her sexual favors from her husband, reminding her of Mr. Venables blatant infidelities in the process. This witness is not himself virtuous enough to help her uphold her meaning. Until Society is no longer as vicious as S----, until peoples intentions stand behind the meaning of their public pronouncements, marriages, Cavell takes Coleridge to be saying, cannot take place. In Wollstonecrafts The Wrongs of Woman, Mr. Venabless last ploy to get money out of his wife is to sue Darnforth for seduction and adultery.106 The judge in the civil court in which Maria defends Darnforth becomes the voice of injustice whose edict almost ends the novel. In response to Marias claim that she never committed adultery in her feelings, the judge responds: What virtuous woman [ever] thought of her feelings? It was her duty to love and obey the man chosen for her by her parents and relations, who were qualified by their experience to judge better for her, than she could for herself. (199) This unjust judge articulates the aristocratic code of honor, duty to parents in choice of a marriage partner, but then adds a bourgeois twist to the plot: she must be virtuous as well.107 The realistic or good novel similarly attacks aristocratic honor for its corruption, participating as it does in bourgeois revolution. Both Clarissa108 and Sense and Sensibility test out the validity of the judges proposition, the latter demonstrating through Mariannes tragedy the inadvisability of working outside kinship networks an affirmation of things as they are that is later more directly modified by Persuasion. Richardson finds greater corruption in things as they are than does Austen, showing how

66

much experienced parents and relations might operate selfishly, out of a concern for their own profit, and revealing the corruption and meaninglessness of aristocratic forms: If you yourself think your Word insufficient, what reliance can I have on your Oath!109 Like hypocritical words, the oath too often signifies the withdrawal of the very consent it is meant to mark (73, 376, 1280, 1283, 1433).110 Clarissa ultimately succeeds in reforming her parents and Lovelace, though it requires her death to do so, insuring that the judges ruling in The Wrongs of Woman could actually dispense justice (social order preserved) and simultaneously creating an ideological space of virtue that will be inhabited by the middle class (overturning aristocratic hegemony).111 How do the novels of philosophical romance differ from THE novel? Virtue Typically, virtue, like the novel itself, is seen as a fundamentally bourgeois ideal.112 Fairly certain that the French Revolution was a convulsion staged not for the sake of instituting radical democracy but rather for bringing into being the middle class, critics of Jacobin literature such as Gary Kelly have seen the Jacobin novel as an artistic variant of the artifacts produced for and by the professional middle-class cultural revolution.113 As Lisa Moore puts it, Wollstonecrafts ideas exemplified rather than resisted the new bourgeois consensus about the virtuous self; [t]he rational heroines of Austen and Edgeworth were much closer to Wollstonecrafts ideal [of virtue] than their political investments would seem to indicate (152).114 But is the virtue of the heroine of philosophical romance simply bourgeois? Hayss later novel, The Victim of Prejudice (1799) contains a moment when a Lord asks a woman to be his mistress:

67

[William Pelham:] Hear me, Mary! Drive me not to despair! Distinguish, I pray you, between the dictates of nature and virtue and the factitious relations of society. By the former, infinitely more dear and sacred, my soul is bound to you, the first and only object of its tenderest sympathy [. . . .] [By the latter], in my nuptials [with another woman], mutual convenience was the bond of union; affection was, on neither side, either felt or pretended. [. . .] [Mary:] Think not by this sophistry, to seduce my judgement: [. . .] it is virtue only that I love better than William Pelham [. . . .]115 What man of taste marries a woman after an affair with her? is a line uttered by a worldly wise woman at the end of another philosophical romance, Eliza Fenwicks Secresy (1795),116 and novels of taste dont marry the fallen woman either. How would someone who knows good novels from bad construct the novels denouement from here? If Mary means by virtue what Pamela means, then Pelhams wife of convenience will die suddenly and, because Mary has refused his offer to be his mistress, he will be able to convince his father that her virtue outshines her lineage and legally marry her. Or if the main characters virtue is Clarissas, then Pelham, swept away by uncontainable desire, will rape her, and, despite the fact that his wife subsequently dies and he is free to marry her legally to repair the fault, despite her love for him, she will waste away Clarissa-like and die. Victim of Prejudice ends neither way. What kind of virtue is this? Queer Families In Hayss Memoirs of Emma Courtney, Emma continuously veers away from the traditional romantic quest of trying to win Augustus in marriage, ostensibly its central

68

plot. When Augustus finally is able to declare his love for Emma, after his wifes death and the end of his clandestine marriage, he is in a delirium. Coming to find her, he has fallen from his horse and lays dying, slipping in and out of consciousness: they are unable to engage together in the mental act of marriage. When he regains consciousness, it is only long enough to communicate through broken words. What Emma consents to in this disjointed conversation is not marriage but adoption of Augustuss son: I comprehend you say no more he is mine (205). This is marriage to a child, perhaps desexualized (although sometimes Emma sounds like the boys lover), and definitely maternal: it is the performance of a promise to be his devoted mother. There is also a marriage scene in the novel resembling the marriage scenes described above: a strong sympathy united us, and we became almost inseparable (91). This scene is enacted with Augustuss mother whom Emma calls her more than mother (101, 183) which undecidably suggests something sexual and something familial. It is quite clear that Emma has fallen in love with Augustus via her love for his mother (91). In this romance Emma falls for a family. That the goal of this romance is to establish a queer family is amply demonstrated by its ending: after the suicide of her husband Montague out of remorse for the abortion he induced in his mistress (Emmas maid) Rachel, Emma sets up a household comprised of herself, her daughter, the victim Rachel, and Augustuss son whom she loves with more than a mothers fondness (219). Like the clandestine marriage between Emma and Mrs. Hartley, there is another such marriage between Maria and Jemima: Maria promises Jemima that she will teach her daughter to consider you as her second mother, and herself as the prop of your age. Yes, Jemima, look at me observe me closely, and read my very soul; you merit a better

69

fate [. . .] (121). Jemima later asks Maria to enact the performance of her promise (189) and flee the insane asylum with her which Maria does, despite her commitment to Darnford and the presumed death of the child, for whose sake she had offered Jemima her promise in the first place. The promise to Jemima is made in the mode of marriage. Right before it, Maria has become married to Darnford by similarly looking into his eyes, letting him read her intentions in them (100) as she insists that Jemima do. The novel will end, Wollstonecrafts notes suggest, with Darnfords desertion and Maria, after a thwarted suicide attempt, living with Jemima and her daughter, discovered to be alive. I would call the household that ends Hayss Victim of Prejudice (although all the members of it die) a queer family as well, though Mary lives with her second father, the deceased Mr. Raymonds ex-servant, then later with a family that she saved from destitution. Whats queer about these endings is that they wed together people by transgressing class and gender lines with a social glue that is paternalistic except for two things. First, the charity comes from the servants rather than the masters, more than parental or filial, and undecidably erotic or platonic. This glue is based upon the capacity of its primary characters to witness each others virtue or true intent in a society that mislabels them adultress, prostitute, or immoral indigent in short, vicious in feeling. But that does not obviate the paternalism here: charity flows upward when recognition what Cavell calls acknowledgement of the other flows downward. When Jemima calls upon Maria to adhere to her promise to make her a second mother to Marias child, she says, on you it depends to reconcile me with the human race (189). Jemima, as her story shows, has been duped by everyone, even the libertine friends of freedom who educated her (114). This treachery mis-educates her, which is

70

to say, seeing oaths uninhabited by intentions teaches her to tell lies and to mistrust any pretense at virtue. For Godwin, insincerity injures the capacity to think (3.135): Human beings will never be so virtuous as they might easily be made, till justice be the spectacle perpetually presented to their view, and injustice wondered at as a prodigy (3.254). At stake in speaking sincerely is creating an audience of virtuous witnesses, and hence a society of virtuous people, though what most often happens is that meaning fails. For Jemima to reform into a virtuous person, someone must mean what they say to her. Maria inhabits her promise to make Jemima her childs second mother completely by the novels end: the girl and two women live as a queer family happily ever after. Though sometimes the heroines die in the end, even those who die leave behind a primarily female family devoted to each others future happiness. Here virtue names the force insuring social bonds that are not oppressive: these bonds are woman-to-woman. And so this brings us to the second difference between the love found in philosophical romance and the older, feudal system of paternalistic benevolence: this glue is not paternalistic insofar as all those who are capable of performing acts of acknowledgement that involve continuously ratifying their promises, continuously inhabiting them with intention, are women. Acknowledgment In The Avoidance of Love, Stanley Cavell defines acknowledgment as recognition of our helplessness before the suffering of another, as if watching a tragedy, all the while recognizing our own implication in his or her suffering.117 While helplessness suggests that Cavells formula is a recipe for political quietism, implication does not. Cavells idea is that the pain of watching someone whom one

71

loves suffer becomes excruciating insofar as the spectator knows him or herself to be the cause. One avoids love, according to Cavell, insofar as to avoid ones own implication in anothers pain. This formula explains the Enlightened understanding of the social affections (Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney 220) at work in these novels. One member of Emma Courtneys queer family, Rachel, was at the age of 18 seduced and impregnated by Emmas husband, his jealous reaction to her fatal attachment to Augustus Harley (211). Emmas husband murders her infant after failing to abort it, then commits suicide. Emma recognizes her personal guiltlessness on the one hand: she did not commit adultery with Harley, and she told Montague of her undying love for him before they were married. Of Montagues suicide murder, she says, These are the consequences of a confused system of morals (217) that would brand the servant Rachel a whore and unemployable were she to publicly bear and care for an illegitimate child. Had she said, these are the wages of sin, and condemned Rachel, she would be upholding that confused system of morals, putting Rachel in the position that the heroine Mary finds herself in Victim of Prejudice. But Emma backs up her recognition of Rachels innocence, filling the words these are the consequences of a confused system of morals with effective intentionality, by participating in and thereby creating a society that does not have such a confused system: I proposed to the poor girl to take her again into my family, to which she acceded with rapture (218). Though of course take her into my family means to rehire her, the language here (proposed, rapture) suggests a marriage proposal, in any case insisting that Emmas reaction to the womans victimage by her husband is an act of love. Conversely, then, these are the wages of sin is an act of hate: according to Cavell, such a refusal of acknowledgment is a way of taking

72

revenge on the other for his or her suffering, for the demand to recognize ones own implication. No matter how humanitarian, this love seems cold-blooded, rational, detached: what if Emma and Rachel dont really get along in personality what if they dont really love each other, and so Emma acknowledges Rachel only out of a sense of duty? Female versus Male Sentiment In Godwins Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, he justifies their initial refusal to marry:118 certainly nothing can be so ridiculous upon the face of it, or so contrary to the genuine march of sentiment, as to require the overflowing of soul to wait upon a ceremony [. . . .]119 This declaration seems so quintessentially romantic: the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings will brook no form, convention, or ceremony. But while it may seem that Godwin romantically focuses on the inability for lovers to wait to consummate their love, the sentence really insists that a sacred bond is forged when the genuine march of sentiment meets the genuine march of sentiment, whether with or without words. Because the intentions must be there for both parties, it is unlikely that one could plan a ceremony and then, at the moment of publicly saying I will, feel, think, and intend together, as if by rote. Sentiment is of course not mere emotion, but, deriving from sententiousness, an amalgam of thought and emotion. Godwins phrase genuine march of sentiment emphasizes that genuine feeling is militaristic in some way, revolutionary, since current cultural forms require its absence.120 Maria and Darnforth are privately married before they can publicly announce their marriage. Though wanting the public ceremony so as not to be confounded with women who act from very different motives, Marias conduct would be just the same

73

without the [public] ceremony as with it (194). In her notes to the unfinished novel, we discover that Darnforths unspoken oath was not as firm (194) as Marias: Wollstonecrafts notes to the as yet unwritten Volume III, ch. IV, Her lover unfaithful Pregnancy Miscarriage Suicide (202). In another ending to the novel, perhaps contradicting the first outlined ending, or perhaps adding to it, Jemima rushes in upon Maria just after she has taken an overdoes of laudanum bringing with her Marias daughter whose death had been faked to prevent her mother from seeking her. Maria vomits up her poison and is saved. Whether they be the worst of men -- Mr. Venables and Mr. S---- in Wollstonecrafts Wrongs of Woman or the best, Darnforth in Wrongs, Villiers in Lodore, and William in Hayss Victim of Prejudice it is only the women who can keep their word. Even in the latter novel which uniquely contains some more than fathers, the one to live and die by her word is Mary. Wollstonecraft explains gender differences in performative power: A fondness for the [female] sex often gives an appearance of humanity to the behaviour of men, who have small pretensions to the reality; and they seem to love others, when they are only pursuing their own gratification. (192) This seems like a kind of sexist attack on Wollstonecrafts part, and yet, if one understands whats going on in this genre of novels, one can see that the crime is really impersonal, structural. Women keep their promises because the only power they have is the personal power over their own virtue, whereas men, granted too much power in an unequal

74

society, love other kinds of power. Women dont love the Rachels and the Darnfords, the Augustuses and the Williams, as people, but love their own power to create a permanent bond with them through virtue, the genuine march of sentiment, the strength of meaningfulness that stands outside any of societys rituals. [I]t is virtue only that I love better than William Pelham, Mary says (Hays, Victim of Prejudice 127). As the case histories of Lodore, Villiers, Darnford, and Harley tell us, men are seduced away from the love of the power that is virtue into love of other kinds of power. As the case histories of all these Marys, Jemima, Maria, and Ethel show, women are either subjected to the tyranny of passions the feelings that arise from being victim to an unjust social system or insist upon their capacity to act rightly independently of that system. In this case, they exercise freedom, but they still feel love. It is simply not love of a particular person, but love of their own virtue or performative power. Thus, in being more anxious not to deceive, than to guard against deception in expressing her love to Darnford (188), Maria enacts true sensibility. Because women are not given the power to effect what they mean, to really mean what they mean, they must sustain their own meaningfulness with ardor. Like the word in a private language, the intention of which is insecure, their loves must be checked and rechecked. It is really this extra layer of consciousness, this critiquing of ones own feelings to make sure that ones own humanity is present to others, that allows women to partake of the sensibility which is the auxiliary of virtue, and the soul of genius; [the woman is] in society so occupied with the feelings of others, as scarcely to regard her own sensations. (176)

75

Concerned with their own virtue, their own performative power to mean what they say, the heroines of philosophical romance stand beside themselves in a sane sense, questioning their own reactions, stemming the passionate desire to take vengeance on others for their sufferings because occupied with acknowledging the feelings that arise out of unjust social circumstances and meeting those feelings with justice. When the judge exclaims to Maria, what woman of virtue ever thought of her own feelings? he is using feelings to mean sensations, with a sexual innuendo. She on the other hand in insisting that she never violated any of her own vows, pleads her feelings, in the judges phrase: there, feelings mean the sentiment marshaled to shore up a meaning not granted by society, and her investment in that personal virtue or strength just is the love, a love that substitutes for object love. Is it cold to love a principle rather than a person? Well maybe. But maybe it is colder to love a person for gratification than to love a principle defining subjective power for both oneself and the loved one: these heroines dont simply uphold their own meanings but mutual meanings. Maria divorces her husband and marries Darnford by her own performative act, and she loves her own power to do that, but it is a divorce he calls for by prostituting her: she enacts their mutual and deeply felt intentions. Making her performance of the act of marrying the treacherous Darnford into an efficacious act means allotting to herself historical and subjective performative power. Maria can only choose suicide, as Mary Wollstonecraft had once done, to enforce the meaning of the word husband upon a man who has deserted her for another; only suicide allows her to preserve the power of her own utterance: I am his wife, as I said and meant, or I am nonexistent. But, and this is why the novel requires two endings, suicide violates her marriage contract with Jemima

76

and her maternal contract with her daughter. She must both die and live to be a powerful historical agent and thereby not subject to the tyranny of the passions that comes from victimhood (Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney 221). Anti-anti-Jacobin: Adeline Mowbray Within the literary history of the Jacobin novel, Amelia Opies Adeline Mowbray has been seen as an anti-Jacobin novel, directly attacking Godwin and his ideals about marriage in the ill-fated and destructive character of Glenmurray who quite literally wrecks Adelines life by living with her without marrying her.121 But Miriam Wallace has rightly argued that it is reductive to see Opies novel as simply anti-Jacobin.122 For one thing, she never withdraws sympathy from her heroine, nor prompts us to do so, even though Adeline has been misguided by Godwins system. Early in the novel, Adeline utters a speech that expresses and affirms Godwins ideas about marriage, wishing to communicate her views to Glenmurray who, in the novels world, had written and published about them. Adeline has met this radical philosopher at Bath, and has been taught by her similarly philosophical mother to think freely. For Opie, though, Adelines mother puts on radical philosophy for the sake of being fashionable in a kind of avant-garde sense, and, when it comes to her daughters and her own romances, she reveals herself underneath it all to be truly conventional. Glenmurray is treated less cynically, but he too abandons his principles when their social consequences become completely clear to him. At Bath, Adelines speech reiterating Glenmurrays unorthodox views of marriage precipitates unwanted advances from her widowed mothers gold-digging new, young paramour, who happened also to be in the room when she spoke. In protesting against this rakes definition of honourin the

77

phrase man of honouras promiscuity, Adeline proclaims that it is not marriage but the individuality of an attachment that constitutes its chastity,123 echoing a statement made by Emma in Hayss novel published eight years earlier: I loved you, not only rationally and tenderly but passionately it became a pervading and a devouring fire! And yet, I do not blush my affection was modest, if intemperate, for it was individual it annihilated in my eyes every other man in the creation. (159)124 Adeline comes to regret that she placed her faith in her own understanding of chastity rather than in traditional marriage or a continuance in those paths of virtue and decorum which the wisdom of ages has pointed out to the steps of every one (506). And yet, we have in this novel as well two scenes showing the main characters making sometimes secret (318) and sometimes private vows (330) that both Glenmurray and Adeline Mowbray hold sacred and binding throughout the novel: Adeline is tempted to lie about her past (504-505), but never does. And this novel, too, ends with a community of women all of whom are committed to either living together or supporting each other financially:125 Adelines mother, Mrs. Pemberton the Quaker, two women who have hastened Adelines ruin -- her greedy and lying cousin Miss Woodville, and her one-time servant Mary Warner, a woman who had an illegitimate child, Savanna Adelines devoted mulatto servant who often works for her without food and pay, and Editha, Adelines legitimate daughter. Only one male character remains at the end within this circle of women, Dr. Norberry, who several times identifies himself as an old woman (621).

78

As the subtitle suggests, the novel is really about the star-crossed but pure and passionate love between mother and daughter. As she is dying, Adeline asks her mother if she loves [her] still: Love you still! replied Mrs. Mowbray wth passionate fondness: never, never were you so dear to me as now! Adeline does die in the end, but she does so grasping her mothers hand in passionate joy and with her head on Savannas bosom (625). She has adored these women and has been adored by them precisely because of her difference from all the men in the novel: Do you tink, if she be one selfish beast like her husband, Savanna lover her so dear? exclaims her mulatto servant (561). When Adeline dies, she leaves a strong community of worshippers dedicated to following her unselfish principles in dealings with each other a utopian and completely female community. This novel, I would suggest, is classifiable as philosophical romance as well. That Adeline Mowbray articulates ideas opposed to Emma Courtney does not disqualify it from the genre of philosophical romance. Like Emma, it threatens to seem aesthetically inferior because its ending is so queer. Conclusion In The Trouble with Normal , Michael Warner implicates the novel genre as inspiring the push among some gay and lesbian groups for state-sanctioned same-sex marriage (100).126 Opposing that desire, Warner says that advocating same-sex marriage by adopting (novelistic) discourses of chastity and virtue requires a massive repudiation of queer cultures best insights on intimate relations . . . (91):

79

The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it [. . . .]127 In her life, Wollstonecraft showed herself to be less impoverished, in her Romantic friendship with Fanny Blood as well as in the famous escapade in which she asked Henry Fuseli to allow her to live with him and his wife. In one of her letters to Imlay, Wollstonecraft offers rather queerly to establish a home consisting of Imlay, Wollstonecraft, their daughter Fanny, and Imlays current mistress. Imlay refuses. Could Wollstonecrafts proposal really have been indecorous to such a hardened and public philanderer as Imlay? This was an arrangement that Imlay was certainly not too sexually but too politically prudish to accept. Godwin calls the proposal injudicious (Memoirs 252), his word for queer. Insofar as he (consciously, at least) uses the word injudicious as a term of disapprobation for Wollstonecrafts attempt to live with Imlay and his mistress, Godwin points to his own inability to imagine the most radical consequences of fully lived political justice. Yes, these novels can be read as only revolutionary in the sense of bourgeois. But then of course they will have to be condemned aesthetically as bad novels because they do not effectively imagine the heterosexual domos. They portray families not nuclear nor

80

extended with kin, but queer, bound together by the continuous performance of personal justice. One can see the achievement of these novels when one looks at them as explorations of what fails in Godwins revolutionary epistemology once it is put into action in the real world, which Hays and Wollstonecraft at least were trying to do in their lives. The endings of these novels, and the domestic arrangements that they idealize, are queer as Warner defines it, naming relations of durability and care and involving an astonishing range of intimacies that are sexually charged but also very complex because the rules [for these relationships] have to be invented as we go along (116). We do not have to read philosophical romance through the lens of compulsory heterosexuality. If the political and aesthetic power of the philosophical romance depends upon the virtue of witnesses, then lets witness better and call it good.

81

Chapter 3: The Politics and Poetics of Religious Melancholy: Anna Barbauld While many recent analyses of melancholia have focused on it as a mode of resistance to capitalist and politically oppressive modes of social exchange, both economic and artistic, Barbaulds pamphlets and poems in which she attacks fellow Romantic poets reveal the politically retrograde side of depressive passions, particularly in terms of gender politics. Depressive inertia may be an affective means for revolting against things as they are, to quote Godwins name for social inequities, but for Barbauld as well as for other Unitarians, melancholy resistance fails to cut off the head of the king, as Foucault puts it, but not in the world; rather, intrapsychically. The despair experienced by religious people, whether Dissenters, Methodists, or Established Church, is based on the Calvinist doctrine of pre-destination, which requires, as Mary Hays says explicitly in her Appeal to Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women (1798), a view of God as tyrannical and unjust.128 Such a God can only be modeled on the arbitrary tyrant of feudal social arrangements. Those who suffer from religious melancholy transfer their understanding of unjust human authority to their image of God. Both Barbauld and Hays reason against such a view of God, earning for themselves denigrating epithets from Coleridge who felt that the Unitarians were trying to run Religioun thro with an Icicle.129 Absent the grace-giving, frosty icicle, Coleridges poetry turns into a depressive storm, Barbauld argues: tacitly paying homage to the Calvinist God, high Romantic poetry simply transposes repressive feudal distinctions into a modern depressed form of consciousness that limits the liberating potential of Enlightenment thinking.

82

Almost all Unitarians, Olive Griffiths insists, whether as radical as Joseph Priestley or more middle-of-the road, as was Dr. John Taylor, for a short time principal of Warrington Academy where Barbauld was raised and where she met Priestley almost all Unitarians were de facto materialists; Dr. Richard Price, Giffiths argues, was unusual. Their materialism followed logically from the new science and the psychological model of the association of ideas formulated by John Locke and David Hartley (Watts 41), but it also followed from rejecting the doctrine of original sin: flesh is not intrinsically evil. I will now show how this Unitarian respect for the material manifested itself first in Barbaulds gender politics, and then in her antiRomantic theory of poetics. I. Gender Politics Anna Letitia Barbaulds adage that a womans best, [her] sweetest empire is to please was rendered infamous by Mary Wollstonecraft who attacked it virulently, calling it an articulation of the sensuous error that has promoted sexism for centuries. William McCarthy has rightly pointed out that Wollstonecraft may be wrong to call Barbauld sexist: there are feminisms, of which Wollstonecrafts is only one variety. Barbauld proposes a materialist or difference feminism that is as powerful as Wollstonecrafts rationalist or equality feminism,130 even though it has been less influential. It has been less influential because it fits less well than Wollstonecrafts into the paradigm of Romantic individualism. Her gender politics are based upon the very same materialist theology that makes nonsense of individuating and isolating despair a despair that seems purely personal, or psychologically necessary, but is in reality Calvinist theology internalized.

83

Barbauld takes very seriously John Lockes master metaphors for the mind as white Paper, [originally] void of all Characters which is furnished by experience (Essay II.i.2): for Locke, mind or spirit is a substance to be written on and a room filled with furniture. When introducing an anthology of poetry that she has collected to educate women, Barbauld offers only those works that deserve to be indelibly impressed upon the memory and thereby make up the real furniture of [womens] minds (Preface of the Editor, The Female Speaker, iii-iv). Barbauld sees soul in terms of Lockes mental tablets and unfurnished rooms, as do Joseph Priestley her mentor -- David Hartley, and many mainstream Unitarians, in a very materialistic reading of Locke.131 According to Priestley, the whole of man is of some uniform composition, and . . . the property of perception, as well as the powers termed mental, is the result of such an organical structure as the brain.132 Such materialism doesnt worry Priestley even though he is a devout Christian because he does not believe that a future life [in heaven] depends upon the immateriality of the human soul (181): according to the Book of Revelation, we will all be physically resurrected during the last judgment (181-2). Barbaulds poem Life offers, as William McCarthy points out in his notes, both the traditional notion that the soul leaves the body when one dies and an alternative materialist understanding of death.133 First she wonders whether the soul leaves the body on death, whether To the vast ocean of empyreal flame, / From whence thy essence came, / Dost thou thy flight pursue, when freed / From matters base encumbering weed? But then she offers Priestleys scenario: Or dost thou, hid from sight, / Wait, like some spell-bound knight / Through blank oblivious years thappointed hour, / To

84

break thy trance and reassume thy power? In this case, the soul waits until the body, from which it is inseparable, is resurrected at the last judgment to reassume its power. However, the poem Life really does not offer two alternatives in a simple way. In Barbaulds very use of the word Life instead of soul, she engages in the debates that took place in the 1770s between Priestley and Richard Price, debates over the materiality of the soul and its relation to the body in which Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as Adam Ferguson and (later) Dugald Stewart participated.134 Life could be soul, or it could be body, the term combining body and soul. Barbaulds poem Life begins with an epigraph from Hadrians To His Soul, which Pope translates as Ah fleeting Spirit! Wandring Fire (McCarthys note, Poems 319). The key word in this epigraph is Animula which means little soul or little life, but life not in the sense of vitalis; rather, life in the sense of spirit, as in, for example, God breathed life into clay. The word life as Barbauld uses it in the first two lines of the poem, however, clearly refers to the world of objects: Life! I know not what thou art, / But know that thou and I must part (Poems 166). If life meant soul, and Barbauld assumed the usual Christian dualism, there would be no talk of parting. The sense of life as lover offered by the poem, -- O whither, whither dost thou fly? she asks, and describes death as a strange divorce -- connects this term that ambivalently refers to body and soul with pleasure. Pleasure is of course itself a conundrum for dualists: is it always physical? Is there such a thing as mental pleasure? I imaginatively reconstruct Barbauld coming upon a materialist philosophy early in her writing life. In the late 1760s and early 1770s, she wrote a poem To Mrs. Priestley that describes the difference between insects and humans in terms of the traditional Christian notion

85

that humans have souls: Pleasures the portion of thinferior kind; / But glory, virtue, Heaven for Man designd (Poems 8). In contrast to Man, insects idly fluttering live their little hour; / Their life all pleasure, and their task all play.135 But here pleasure is clearly physical, and is distinct from glory, virtue, and Heaven, food for the soul (Poems 8). I imagine Priestley reading and arguing with Barbauld about her dualistic premise since she produced this poem at the moment that he was immersed in a debate with Price over the materiality of the soul, published in a series of letters in 1778.136 In arriving at his notorious materialism, Priestley could have been reading, at the time that Barbauld presented her poem to his household, Fergusons works.137 There is a crucial passage from Ferguson quoted extensively by Stewart in his 1793 Outlines of Moral Philosophy that attempts to understand the nature of the soul in terms of insects: It has been observed that the Author of Nature appears to delight in variety . . . . Among [such . . . successive variations] there are many examples of progression coming in one line or direction to an end, but renewed in a different one. The butterfly . . . . lives at first in the form of a worm or caterpillar. . . . He awakes from his torpid condition, breaks the crust of the chrysalis in which he was cased, is borne aloft upon wings variegated in the pride of most beautiful colors; and thus from a reptile that crept on the ground, or devoured the grosser part of a leaf on which he was hatched, he comes to perform all his movements in the air, and scarcely touches a plant but to suck from its flower the finest part of its juices; he sports in the sun, and displays the activity of a new life, during the heat and the light of noon.138 Here the insects joy comes from his new life and not from the grosser existence that preceded it, but both existences are represented as physical, and Stewart uses this analogy to show that the dissolution of the body does not necessarily infer the extinction of the soul even if the soul is not in fact separate from the body (v.382).

86

I imagine Priestley arguing with Barbauld that the pleasure of her insects does not differ markedly from the pleasure taken in glory, virtue, and heaven. However it happened, Barbauld began thinking about material existence and pleasure as continuous with spiritual existence. Mary Hilton persuasively argues that Barbauld, from reading William Paley, developed the sense that society in each of its successive stages fulfills a providential design:139 she began to think at this time about what pleasures for women, given their physical and cultural specificity, offer spiritual redemption. Priestleys notion not contradicted by Ferguson or Stewart is that the body goes into another state after death, cocoon-like, and then is resurrected. In A Summer Evenings Meditation, Barbauld imagines her own death. Death, she says at the end of the poem, is the hour [that] will come, a moment When all [the] splendours of the universe, bursting on my sight / Shall stand unveild, and, to my ravishd sense / Unlock the glories of the world unknown (Poems 84, ll. 119-121). Barbauld will die not by shedding her sense, not by sailing up out of the body that allows her to have sensations. Rather, death for her is ravishment, sensation brought to the highest degree of pleasure. The belief that body and spirit are not distinct entities enables Barbauld to claim for women higher moral authority as sensual beings. Women are capable of being governed by reason, she says in On Female Studies, and, because they are trained to be virtuous, they are diverted from developing tastes that will misguide their souls: the broader mirth and more boisterous gayety of the other sex are to [women] prohibited.140 While most writers, including Wollstonecraft, see sensibilitys connection to physical sensuousness as putting it on the brink of vice if not curbed by reason,141 Barbauld does not see physical passion as antithetical to

87

spiritual growth; for her reason is not a curb on passion but a directional device, directing women away from the bawdy (bad taste) and toward great art (good taste). She aligns a rationally and tastefully directed sensibility with a chastity that nonetheless unabashedly procures inordinate amounts of pleasure: [T]he purity and simplicity of heart which a woman ought never, in her freest commerce with the world, to wear off, her very seclusion from the jarring interests and coarser amusements of society, fit her in a peculiar manner for the worlds of fancy and sentiment, and dispose her to the quickest relish of what is pathetic, sublime, or tender. To you, therefore, the beauties of poetry, of moral painting, and all, in general, that is comprised under the term of polite literature, lie particularly open, and you cannot neglect them without neglecting a very copious source of enjoyment. (41-2) Shes not saying, stay simple, pure, and secluded so that you save your soul by not being tempted by bodily desires. Shes saying, stay simple, pure, and secluded so that your bodily desires dont get corrupted by being sexualized and your pleasure reduced. To Freud, Barbauld would say: to see sublimation as not physical because de-sexualized comes from the symptomatic sexualization of all physical pleasure. In psychoanalytic terms, sexualization is a defense, just like repression; in Barbaulds terms, its the untoward result of Calvinistic theology. In Female Education, Barbauld insists that polite literature is more attractive than the bawdy jokes one hears in commerce with the world, providing a very copious source of enjoyment, pleasure that is physical but not sexual. Cultivating the mind, she says, will open to you an inexhaustible fund of wonder and delight (43). Cultivation pleases self as much as others142 and here we can see the basis for the much-maligned poetic line, Womans greatest empire is to please. Barbauld adequates receiving with giving pleasure, desire with ravishment.

88

In Priestleys scheme, it is pleasure or attraction that holds together spirit and body, meaning and matter. [E]very body, Priestley says, as solid and impenetrable, must necessarily have some particular form or shape; . . . no such figured thing can exist, unless the parts of which it consists have a mutual attraction . . . . 143 Physical desire or attraction holds material particles together into a form, and it is this desire that we call soul, although, according to Priestley, it is nothing independent of matter. Every figured thing, be it a poem or a person, has soul because of (and not despite) its physical attractiveness. For Barbauld, the way that one monitors ones words, just as one channels the bodys physical desires, via reason and taste, determines the souls state which consists in the quality and degree of attractiveness and ravishment (pleasure given and pleasure received). In writing The Rights of Woman, Barbauld clearly had in mind this Priestleyan notion of physical attraction, of a beneficent attractiveness and ravishment. Barker-Benfield reads this poem as a straightforward commendation of sensibility as womans empire,144 but the poem clearly denigrates women who wish to use their sensibility only to rule: Thou mayst command, but never canst be free (line 20). The poem asks women to abandon each ambitious thought (line 29), even or especially the desire to Resume [her] native empire oer the breast! (line 4), and recognize instead That separate rights are lost in mutual love (line 32). One recent critic has said that equality is curiously absent from her vision,145 pointing out that equality differs from the sense of mutuality conveyed by the poem. It is true: equality feminism such as Wollstonecrafts denies that physical differences have intellectual requirements and effects, whereas material conditions remain central to Barbaulds notion of mutuality in difference. But her sense of difference is not as anti-feminist as it first seems: while the mutuality described in

89

the phrase mutual love isnt equalizing, in Barbaulds view, love is it is radically leveling. For Barbauld, whether romantic love or love of God is at stake, it is only in the case of a lower, coarser kind of sensuality in which one person debases him or herself to the other; the higher form of mutual attraction raises each person to physico-spiritual perfection. As I will now show, for Barbauld, art can promote both kinds of sensuality. II. Calvinist Poetics In To Mr. S. T. Coleridge, Barbauld insists that Coleridges melancholy poetry -- and indeed, all Romantic melancholy poetry -- has been vitiated by the coarse or degraded sensuality that arises from privileging a Calvinistic god: Midway [up] the hill of Science, [Barbauld says,] ... Here each mind Of finer mold . . . ... Rests for a space, in fairy bowers entranced; And loves the softened light and tender gloom; And, pampered with most unsubstantial food, Looks down indignant on the grosser world, And matters cumbrous shapings. Youth belovd Of Science of the Muse belovd, not here, Not in the maze of metaphysic lore Build thou thy place of resting; lightly tread The dangerous ground, on noble aims intent; And be this Circe of the studious cell Enjoyed, but still subservient. (Poems 132) The unsubstantial food that Coleridge is eating while isolated in his world of thought unsubstantial both physically and spiritually has made him disdain the grosser world, and matters cumbrous shapings. But being indignant at physicality, Barbauld says, is like being enchanted by Circes physical gratifications and degredations: she at first turns all of Odysseuss crew into pigs, and then, out of love for Odysseus, delights them for a year with sumptuous 90

feasting. By loitering in the groves of melancholy, then, Coleridge is not then feasting on air but indulging himself like a pig. For Barbauld, poets who indulge in melancholy and represent that indulgence in their poems lead people astray because pronouncing humans worthless is in effect to promote Calvinism: "The idea that all are vile . . . is an idea as consolatory to the profligate, as it is humiliating to the saint" (II.468). Melancholy self-humiliation is, in other words, profligacy for the aspiring saint. Calvinistic beliefs that one is either saved or not independently of anything, at the arbitrary whim of God, come from living under an unjust government, the system of absolute monarchy (II.465), which stimulates the appetite for and requires courtly sado-masochism. She attacks people like Price for debasing themselves to God because she sees the impulse to do so as the same impulse that drives a courtier to debase himself to a King (II.467): the true God would not promote such inequities. In Barbaulds view, melancholic profligacy comes from degraded sensuality of the kind that makes obeisance to a monarch pleasurable, but this degraded sensuality comes from preferring the spiritual to the physical, not vice versa. The passion for self-humiliation should not be cultivated, whereas joy should. Unlike sexual jouissance (pleasure that comes from the pain of the symptom, according to Lacan), joy will impel a person to "seek for fellowship and communication": "The flame indeed may be kindled by silent musing; but when kindled it must infallibly spread. . . . Joy is too brilliant a thing to be confined within our own bosoms . . . .146 Joy drives people together to worship, she says, and social devotion gives a colour and body to the deductions of reason that leave melancholy idealists such as Berkeley in a perplexed and

91

doubting state (Works II.444-5). Colour and body are good; gray, attenuated melancholy is spiritually misleading. Barbaulds theology includes the notion that good spiritual love does not supplant an allegedly sinful physical appetite, but, on the contrary, refines it. In An Address to the Deity, when God tells her his name, she suddenly "feel[s] that name my inmost thoughts controul / And, . . . / . . . the waves of grief subside" (Poems 4, ll. 11-13). Gods name reworks her passion so that, instead of the masochistic sublime thrill of gloomy terrors, she feel[s] the intensely passionate exultation of being omnipotent in thee (5, ll. 71-2). Love of God the love activated by mutual love among humans doesnt involve prostrating oneself before an arbitrary, tyrannical power who elects some and damns others but rather of discovering oneself to be most powerful. To put this in terms of her poem To S. T. Coleridge, Barbauld is saying that a male poet, used to coarser pleasures, can get caught in Circes cell only half-way up the hill of knowledge and needs a woman poet to help him climb higher. Higher, female pleasures form the basis of Barbaulds materialist aesthetic: in it, women are taken to be most capable of forming and imprinting beauty on the world. Pleasing men, then, means forming their minds. It takes writing like her own to reform the gross sensuality out of poetry written by men.

92

Chapter 4: The First Women (Psycho-)Analysts, or the Friends of Feminist History France has continued the Roman and Christian work that Christianity had promised . . . . Brotherly equality had been postponed to the next life, but [France] taught it as the law on earth to the whole world. . . . [Its] principle . . . . is called brotherhood in the language of man. Jules Michelet, Le Peuple, quoted by Jacques Derrida The woman is not yet fraternal enough, not friend enough; she does not yet know what fraternity means; above all, she does not know what it will and should mean, she does not understand not yet the fraternal promise. She knows the word well enough, but she does not possess the concept . . . . She reads it literally but does not yet have access to what it thinks in spirit and so it is the sacred that she misses, and history and the future, no less: She can spell the sacred word of the new age, Brotherhood, but cannot yet read it. Not yet. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, ventriloquizing and quoting Michelet In one very real sense, being a friend of feminists is impossible. As Derridas ventriloquism of Michelet shows us, and Michelets own hyperbolic and surely defensive rhetoric also demonstrates, the Enlightenment sense of friendship is bound up with fraternit: only brothers can be friends, where a woman cannot replace a man, nor a sister a brother.147 What alters the masculinist bias, however, of the revolutionary redaction or incarnation of Christian friendship by those who violently ushered in the Western Enlightenment the Friends of Truth in Germany148 and Friends of the People in England is its sense of time: the not yet in Derridas rendition of Michelets voice; women will be friends or equals deserving justice, but are not so yet perhaps they will be.149 It is ironic that Derridas Michelet sees women as dead to the sacred promise of providential history, for they certainly were not so to the secular, progressive hopes instilled by the French Revolution, the era, obviously, that gave birth to modern, Western feminism.

93

Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft make use of this decidedly masculinist structure of Enlightenment friendship, turning it to feminist ends. They convert friendships among radicals into psychoanalytic relationships, thereby transferring the addressee in some of their most important works to the future to us. Psychoanalysis secular millenarianism like William Godwins is as much a cure for as it is the legacy of Enlightenment thinking. Similarly, feminism is both antidote to and child of Enlightenment thought, sometimes hampered by the very Enlightenment philosophy prompting its birth. I use scare quotes, of course, because there were feminisms before Wollstonecraft published her second Vindication in 1792. For my purposes, it is sufficient to say that the Vindication of the Rights of Woman first codifies equality feminism,150 an egalitarian refusal of the feminine.151 Also, as Barbara Taylor points out, it is the first feminist text written with a sense that achieving a radically egalitarian society through education and reform is possible (211), and thus is the first realistically utopian feminist text. By returning to Wollstonecrafts works, and the works of another woman in her radical circle, Mary Hays, we can begin to understand some of Enlightenment feminisms greatest achievements, as well as its limits, or, I should say, the limits we place on it by our own modes of reading. We too quickly read Wollstonecraft as postulating (or refusing) an identity, womanhood, rather than as positing a subject whose voice hails from a female body but who nonetheless has the power to articulate its wishes. This power would not be imperial potency, nor even the fraternit that seems unable to do away with sovereignity, transferring it to the subjects terroristic ability to get its way. Rather, this is the power to articulate in a comprehensible way the subjects desires. It is (Re)public(an) insofar as the speaking subject performs desires within a Republic comprised of three: him or herself, the listener or friend, and

94

implicitly whoever else shares the medium of articulation. To perform desire, the prerogative constitutive of subjectivity as such, is to make it heard with visible impact on another; it is not the same as (imperialistically or terroristically) achieving gratification; it is not realizing ones wish, but uttering it with impact. Speaking as a subject from the position of being oppressed is quite tricky, for even to say I protest, as a woman inscribes victimhood by rendering selfcategorization necessary. Here, a victimizing Subject too powerfully issues its decrees by setting up the scene of articulation that renders self-objectification necessary.152 Oppression operates, precisely, by rendering inaudible the desires of the historically oppressed, by reducing a subject to an identity. The decidedly not fraternal partisanship that is the focus of this chapter reverses this objectification by rendering the oppressed persons articulations audible and powerful. It is another scene for speaking, and, like the couch, it is a scene made possible by hope. A. Accurate History But to what extent does partisanship born of hope for a better society deform rather than reform reality? From a politically and epistemologically astute position, David Simpson has argued that cultural-studies critics characteristically deliver history in parodic or reductive form, rendering it a mythic or Imaginary enemy: orientalism, sexism, homophobia, Eurocentrism, and so on. 153 Cultural critics project Manichean images of the bad and the good onto the past; current political agency is disowned by becoming things as they were. In response, Simpson argues that academic literary historians can get critical purchase on our blindnesses by deliberately seeking out information that is uninteresting. He thereby avoids asking current historians to begin their projects by rummaging around in their own unconscious minds. Yet we still need to ask not why is history othered? but why is history othered?

95

Given that cultural criticism focuses on present-day concerns,154 why talk about the past at all? Given that there are so many existing bad guys, perfectly amenable to assuming the black-hat of otherness, why turn to past hegemonies, orientalism, or colonialism? Why does the proverbial dead white Western male have to be dead? My own answer will have to await the end of this chapter. But it is predicated on the proposition that, as Thomas Haskell puts it, [o]bjectivity is not neutrality.155 It cannot be, simply, that an historians involvement in political activism deforms his or her view of history. In fact, as Georg Lukcs says, The possibility of realism . . . is bound up with that minimal hope of change for the better offered by bourgeois society.156 Representing reality requires some utopianism, the minimal hopefulness that comes from befriending the oppressed.157 When applied to the reality of the past one possible definition of history158 partisanship promotes objectivity. If Lukcs is right, then understanding history makers is crucial to analyzing the mystery of [the pasts] presence to us.159 According to Cynthia Marshall, psychoanalysis is useful precisely to the extent that it can analyze this mystery: [T]raditional historiography erases the act of making history. Indeed, historicist models may be shackled by their insistence on immanence, since it condemns them to chronicity while mystifying the complexity of textual negotiations over time.160 This chapter focuses on textual negotiations over time and the role played by friendship, arguing in the process that the psychoanalysis of historical subjectivities generated by texts brings us closer to the real than do immanent, archival histories.

96

As Dominick LaCapra puts it, there is a residue of the past that cannot be made good,161 past inequities that persist in the form of current suffering. The past leaves us with ghostly traumatic residues (196) that consist in historys failure to take someones part, to be their friend in both the Enlightenment and Romantic-era, political senses of the word: the Friends of Truth (see note 2), the Friends of Liberty described by radical Thomas Walker,162 ye friends of freedom addressed by Richard Price in the speech that provoked Edmund Burke to write and publish his Reflections on the Revolution in France. This sense of friendship is a historically particular variant of what Derrida describes as a universal structure: it consists in the hope . . . that the other will come, as other, for that would be justice, peace, and revolution.163 In his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Godwin deliberately substitutes the term advocate for friend in the phrase advocates of liberty in order to avoid connecting his views with those of the members of various associations distrusted by a panic struck public.164 Fear of revolution silences complaints of injustice that only friends and advocates will hear, but it does not permanently erase them. Whereas projective histories flatten reality, psychoanalytic histories that analyze transference and countertransference give us greater access to the unarticulated residue of suffering caused by socio-political and economic circumstances.165 Subjectification is also an ideal mode of history making, through which, as Jerome Christensen says, the excluded and the extinct can make common cause, eternally renewing their claims in effective apposition to the verdicts rendered by history and achieving thereby a plaintiff immortality.166 In Christensens partisan (but not projective nor parodic) type of history, counterclaims that were made by the historically extinct are put into effective apposition to the dominant tale through the agency of

97

the currently excluded. One way to enact this kind of partisanship is through the attentive listening or openness to the other that is cultivated within the psychoanalytic scene. Although Lukcss ideal of friendly partisanship seems to contrast with more psychoanalytic accounts, both are animated by the structural feature that for Derrida renders friendship rather than hostility politically radical: the structure of the perhaps, addressing oneself to the possible (Politics 67): For to love friendship, it is not enough to know how to bear the other in mourning; one must love the future. And there is no more just category for the future than that of the perhaps (Politics 23). Similarly, what impels one to the couch is the idea that perhaps there could be another tale to tell, another fate. Hope for a better future is also the essence of the political partisanship Lukcs proposes: those oppressed by history are objectified by it; the historian who shares the concerns of the oppressed tries to turn them back into speaking subjects. B. The Potent Political Subject It is common to connect subjective potency to having the phallus and so to masculinity. Avoiding the masculinist bias in analyzing subjectivity is not easy. One wrong turn sometimes taken in feminist criticism, as visible most recently in Judith Butlers [ital.]The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection,[/end ital.] consists in reducing the subject to an identity: [T]he psyche which includes the unconscious, is very different from the subject: the psyche is precisely what exceeds the imprisoning effects of the discursive demand to inhabit a coherent identity, to become a coherent subject.167 In this passage, Butler defines "psyche" as subjectivity and equates the "subject" with "identity" ("coherent subject" and "coherent identity" are in grammatical apposition). She does so because

98

she equates, as she claims Lacan does, "I" with ego-ideal, with a thing regulated by norms. However, in my view, the grammatical subject ("the 'position' of the subject within the symbolic," 86) is not indeed distinct from the psyche. The grammatical subject can be said to be subjective: it is not only the ego ideal; it is not sheerly "juridical" as Butler claims that it is (101). "I" only names an identity if it is reduced, essentialized, pinned to some referent. The phrase "coherent subject" is an oxymoron. Reducing the subject to an identity risks rendering persons Imaginary flat characters wearing white or black hats, erasing the difference between Imaginary identification and the subjects power of Symbolic articulation. 168 In that case, the only resistance possible is inarticulate. Positing the "I" (assuming a position rather than referring to oneself as a person) includes the unconscious insofar as it always and everywhere refers to something more than any "I" who utters it, and Emile Benveniste explains what that more is. Benveniste insists that the word I does not refer to a concept or to an individual. Instead, Benveniste says, I refers to the act of individual discourse in which it is pronounced, and by this it designates the speaker.169 This definition of subjectivity renders the problems of becoming a subject performative and therefore social.170 The mobile sign, I, Beneveniste says, can be assumed by each speaker on the condition that he refers each time only to the instance of his own discourse. An instance or exercise of language, Benveniste also calls it (220), is thus an instant in time. In the case of written artifacts, the performance of subjectivity of any person at a previous historical moment is not yet complete insofar as reading past texts performs acts now. Traditional histories reflect a sexist bias insofar as they assess the potency of selfexpressions. Focusing on any speech act as quotable or iterable event rather than as self-

99

expression is one way to avoid masculinizing the subject, as well as of reducing the psyche of an historical other to an identity: this subject is potential rather than potent in the sense of phallic. In my readings, I will try to achieve in our instant the performance of subjectivity begun by texts from the 1790s my way of being a good friend. Epistolary works by Hays and Wollstonecraft addressed to someone who serves as a (psycho-)analyst show personal loss compounded by historical trauma. In a recent psychoanalytic reading of both writers, Mary Jacobus has emphasized personal loss. Jacobus notices that when the heroine of Hayss quasibiographical novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney asserts, I am friendless, she publicly announces Hayss own despair over rejection by William Frend.171 This attachment appears so pathological, even after being fictionalized and so, one would imagine, whitewashed, that Elizabeth Hamilton dubbed Hays Botherim, a great name for a female stalker. Hayss selfanalysis via letters to William Frend and William Godwin recast for inclusion in her posthumously published novel Emma Courtney (Jacobus, Traces 213-219), Wollstonecrafts self-analysis in her letters to Gilbert Imlay, and Godwins analysis of Wollstonecraft in his biography, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, offer us an accurate rendition of life during Britains conservative reaction against the French Revolution when there were too few friends of women as well as too few friends of the people. There are still too few of such friends now. Hays and Wollstonecraft are habitually depicted as having neurotic attachments to men. Wollstonecrafts letters to the lover and father of her child who deserted her, Gilbert Imlay, are importunate, and feminist critics such as Janet Todd (Wollstonecrafts most recent biographer) understandably feel betrayed by Wollstonecrafts weakness, her desire for Imlay, her dependence

100

on a man to the detriment of her feminist principles.172 The only published correspondence of Hays, edited by A. F. Wedd, includes similarly neurotic love letters to her fianc, John Eccles. And in tracing Hayss relationships with various intellectual mentors throughout the 1790s, Gina Luria Walker speaks eloquently of Hayss anxiety that she herself is de trop, a problem that Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and others of their circle contended with in the 1790s.173 The implication is that Hays behaved in sexually inappropriate ways, linking Hayss neurotic problems to Wollstonecrafts sexual overvaluation of Imlay. Ever since there has been a disconnect between the view of Hays and Wollstonecraft as beset by personal, sexual problems and the understanding of Wollstonecraft by her last, best analyst, Godwin, whose Memoirs have been called her case history.174 From the reviewers, who thought Godwin had exposed his wife as a prostitute, to the most recent work on Wollstonecraft that finds her attitudes towards eroticism deeply contradictory (Taylor 208), we have converted Wollstonecrafts subjective performances to expressions about her personal (oversexed) self, a strategy typical of anti-democratic sexism: since Wollstonecraft, Myers points out, feminism has been yoked to sexual profligacy (302). This pathologizing and personalizing of Wollstonecrafts principles has been noticed as sexist, paradoxically, by the very critics who (re)perform it such as Cora Kaplan and Barbara Taylor. In contrast, both Wollstonecraft and Godwin regard verbal and physical actions as exemplary for a future world to be ruled by the simple principle of equality. Thus, in one notebook passage Godwin links the (sexually) aggressive Mary who visits him at home on her own initiative, and alone, to the radical politico intent upon bringing about a revolution in female manners:175

101

Her visit, it seems is to be deemed a deviation from etiquette; but she had through life trampled on those rules which are built on the imbecility of her sex; and had trusted to the clearness of her spirit for the direction of her conduct, and to the integrity of her views for the vindication of her character.176 Godwin published his Memoir for the benefit of posterity: he wrote it, he says, to assert and establish [her] honour in the face of thoughtless calumny because her life was in fact the fairest source of animation and encouragement to those who follow . . . in the same career(Clemit and Walker 43). By vindicating her character against the imputation that she is psycho (Mary, stalker of Fuseli, Imlay, and finally Godwin, the latter being the only one of the three to welcome her in her mad pursuit), Godwin participates in the utopianism of her two vindications that analyzed the oppression of men and women by unequal social systems. Given his absolute faith in the connection between being psycho and analytic, we might better see her presumed contradictoriness about sexuality as in fact produced by our collective politically and historically conditioned repression. We are still unable to see her system. Befriending past women writers requires letting Hays and Wollstonecraft analyze us: transference is nothing apart from the countertransference; the transference . . . [is] the operation of the analyst who interprets it.177 As I show below, these two friends of feminist history reveal the sexism harbored by feminisms that undercut Hays and Wollstonecrafts claims to be legitimate subjects of desire.178 C. Analytic Friendship Both Wollstonecraft and Hays established relationships that involved not just transference but more important, transference neurosis. Both selected certain men to function as

102

psychoanalysts in their own lives for the sake of cure. Im not going to make the familiar argument that Joseph Johnson helped Wollstonecraft overcome her suicidal depression, although thats true. In fact, what Johnson called Wollstonecrafts frank manner (she was incapable of disguise, Clemit and Walker 163) led her to create among her intimates a series of friends / psychoanalysts: Johnson, Gilbert Imlay, and then William Godwin. Imlay and Godwin become her psychoanalysts, and Godwin also becomes Mary Hayss psychoanalyst (Jacobus, Traces 214), for at least two reasons I will adumbrate here. Because of Imlays subsequent turn to business, for which Wollstonecraft berates him, it is difficult to remember that he was among a circle of radicals gathered in France and that he shared their desire to tear down the corrupt fabric of sophisticated society via unflinching statements of simple principles.179 What makes Imlay and Godwin into friends of the psychoanalytic sort, first and foremost, is their radical faith in what Freud called the fundamental rule, psychoanalysiss most necessary component: no self censorship. The revolutionary hope for radical equality creates a space for uttering inaudible desires and stimulates faith that they will be, eventually, at least, articulable. It is really only the capacity to imagine a radical democracy Luckcss hope that gives psychoanalysis its material and its goal. Second, they become psychoanalysts because neither answers either womans letters with more than a cursory response. Wollstonecraft constantly berates Imlay for failing to answer, so much so that the selections published as Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark were characterized by Coleridge in Kubla Khan as a woman wailing for her demon-lover.180 For Hays and Godwin, Godwins silence was part of what he explicitly

103

calls our . . . contract.181 Imlays and Godwins silences182 serve one function of what psychoanalysts call analytic neutrality:183 they render visible the distortions when past unstated wishes are transferred into the present. One of Godwins rare missives to Mary Hays explicitly accuses her of distortion of mind in relation to me (26 Dec. 1797, Wedd 242). And in one of Wollstonecrafts last letters to Imlay, she wonders whether he ever corresponded to her own fantasmatic construction of him (6 Sept. 1795, Todd 6.427).184 But even if analytic, in what sense could neutrality in the form of silence actually be seen as friendship? Probably few ever really believed that a psychoanalyst is a passively observing, completely objective and objectifying scientist. But recent developments in psychoanalytic theory suggest that the analyst is more like than unlike a friend. According to Dutch psychoanalyst Nikolaas Treurniet, Few analysts now regard feeling reactions to patients in the clinical situation as an obstacle to the analytic work. 185 The old image of the analyst as a detached scientist has now been replaced by that of the participant observer from whom active expressions of empathy are required (600). Still, the relationship is not reciprocal: it is a two-person engagement with a one-person focus: the principal object of analysis remains the emotional i.e., experiential acquisition of insight into the analysands own person . . . (606). But even though only one person is revealed to the other, the psychoanalyst is necessarily affected by the analysands speech. For Treurniet, analysis provides a corrective emotional experience that obeys the ethical injunction to respond naturally to patients rather than to deliberately manipulate them.186 Though theoretically at odds with Freuds sense of analytic neutrality, Treurniets practice seems to me closer to Freuds than classical psychoanalysts

104

would like to admit. Treurniet describes a female patient who is a second-generation Holocaust victim of Jewish parents as having fragile contact with reality, but he tells of a session when she aroused anger in him and then correctly diagnosed his interpretation as retaliatory. For the moment in better contact with reality than he, she produces metapsychology through him (614-617). Freud shared so many of his metapsychological speculations with his patients, and there is ample evidence that they deliberately produced and manipulated some of them. Thanks to his patient, Treurniet is able to theorize that structural change or analytic success is possible only insofar as the analyst is used by the analysand . . . as a new object in an interactive process (607). The analysands cure was effective because she could successfully analyze the psychoanalysts reactions for the future good of humankind. Such a contribution can only be called political. Though one friend in this scene is allegedly more alienated from reality by personal mental illness than the other, these two friends exist in a condition of epistemological equality (620). It might be possible to argue, given Treurniets work, that Freuds cases were successful only insofar as he allowed his patients to participate in his theory building.187 How do Imlay and Godwin differ from simply bad correspondents, unresponsive friends? Silence can be aggressive: what is neutral at one moment may be biased at another (Treurniet 601). So Imlay failed as Wollstonecrafts analyst, and Godwin failed as Hayss, but succeeded later, as Wollstonecrafts. Cultivating non-aggressive friendliness requires something more than passivity on the analysts part. John Durham Peters defines Christian agap a millenarian, hopeful love as an unwillingness to interpret, and he praises passive resistance to ones own desire for interpretive mastery over another by calling it the majesty . . . of

105

nonresponsiveness.188 The resistance to ones own aggressiveness comes from the belief that a better interpretation (a better future) is always possible: Lukcsian hope. D. Revolutionary Friends Godwin theorizes friendship after his relationship with Wollstonecraft had ended, prematurely, because of her death, from which he suffered deeply. In Godwins version of true friendship, just as in Michelets understanding of fraternit, there is neither interested intention nor rivalry, but here the similarity ends. In direct opposition to Michelet, Godwin sees friendship as neither brotherly nor based in equality. For him, friendship involves the unbending of the soul by one who is the superior party to another who is the unpretending, unassuming party.189 In friendship, Godwin writes, [t]here is a pouring out of the heart on one side, and a cordial acceptance on the other . . . (292). This accepting other, this modest and unassuming friend will be gratified in being instrumental to someone whom he so ardently admires (290). Godwin is describing friendship as a one-person analysis, in psychoanalytic terms, and moreover, he theorizes along Treurniets lines how this inequality needs to be structured. [T]hough inequality is necessary to give . . . . completeness to friendship, the inequality must not be too great (291). Godwin first argues that friends must be unequal by arguing that the love of a parent for a child is paradigmatic, but then, disconcertingly, in order to prove that inequality is necessary to friendship, he turns to love between the sexes as the best example of it: Nothing can be more certain, however we may seek to modify and abate it, he says, than the inequality of the sexes (292). If such sentiments, so opposite to Wollstonecrafts, are startling, Godwins Burkean turn to chivalry as instantiating sexual inequality, raises an even greater alarm. But by the end of the essay, the inequality that has made

106

friendship and sexual love possible seems not permanently assignable to any party, nor any sex: chivalry teaches mutual deference and submission, and the essays ending suggests to me that the superior, unbosoming friend190 and the inferior listener frequently switch roles: in all cases [of love and friendship] it is requisite there should be a mutual deference and submission, agreeably to the apostolic precept, Likewise all of you be subject one to the other (297). We have no Western, modern, secular name for a relationship in which two people alternately submit to each other, except perhaps in the realm of personal psychopathology (sadomasochism). E. Feminist Friends What is truly revolutionary about the 1790s, and why both Wollstonecraft and Hays had such faith in an imminent revolution in female manners, is the belief that anything could be said. Wollstonecraft asserts her faith in the sacred majesty of truth in her second Vindication (31); Mary Hayss second letter to Godwin, after reading the copy of Political Justice that he had lent to her, praises its energetic reasoning in favor of intrepid, unequivocal sincerity. 191 The radicals in general and Godwin in particular thus articulate the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis against self-censorship. But unlike Freuds explicit formulation of the rule, Godwin insists that Frankness has its limits, beyond which it would cease to be either advantageous or virtuous: but we are not to conceal any thing, that it would be useful or becoming in us to utter. Our first duty regarding the faculty of speech is, not to keep back what it would be beneficial to our neighbour to know. But this is a negative sincerity only. If we would acquire a character for frankness, we must be careful

107

that our conversation is such, as to excite in him the idea that we are open, ingenuous and fearless.192 Godwins admiration for Wollstonecrafts true delicacy, her capacity to utter the truth of what was going on inside her for the sake of benefiting humankind, is clear from his publication of Memoirs, as well as from the moving tribute to her in his Essay on Sepulchres.193 Godwin listened to all that was uttered by Wollstonecraft, and Hays (for a time, at least) with the analytic attitude: with heartfelt admiration for an authentic being at work trying to create meaning in a world indisposed to hear; thus with the faith that this being deserves to live in a better world, one not deaf to her desires. In an essay on the connection between biography and history never published during his lifetime, Godwin discusses what he calls the genuine scholar in a way that undeniably evokes a psychoanalyst. This scholar listens to the life history of a person with insatiable curiosity, upon the watch for further, and still further particulars. Trembling for his own fallibility and frailty, he employs every precaution to guard himself against them by never hazarding any claim to decypher the whole character of anyones history.194 Godwin here describes the analytic attitude and its magisterial resistance to preemptory interpretations as it has been formulated by Roy Schafer: If one takes seriously [the] principles of overdetermination, multiple function, and ambivalence, one can only judge it to be a failure of the analytic attitude to encounter an analyst speaking of what something really means. For to speak of the real meaning disregards these principles. . . . The analytic attitude will be evident in the analystss making a more modest as well as sounder claim, namely,

108

that a point has now been reached in the analytic dialogue where reality must be formulated in a more complex manner than it had been before.195 But there is always the possibility that an even more complex formulation will come to pass, and with it, necessarily, an even better community of friends capable of hearing it: a better world. This political version of Freuds fundamental principle, the belief that egalitarian wishes could and should be uttered by the Friends of Liberty (Goodwin, see note 17) for the sake of improving humankind, was to be shut down toward the end of the 1790s, 1798 if we are to believe Charles Fox, with the growing threat of state intervention prosecuting as treasonous any writings that stimulate mob violence, even if they do so by being misconstrued, and an alarmist recognition of the potentially revolutionary consequences of [a] new reading public . . . .196 But the personal consequences of this outspoken decade are visible in Wollstonecrafts and Hayss continual and often anxious asseverations to be speaking . . . freely, without Lady-like affectation, without reserve & without apprehension,197 with utter confidence in the correspondents rectitude.198 To Godwin, Hays writes what might be considered the perfect articulation of an analysands early relation with the psychoanalyst: There are not many persons to whom I dare venture to disclose my heart, few would understand me, & still fewer would sympathise with me. You have on many subjects listened to me with indulgence, & this has inspired me with confidence, has encouraged me to speak freely. It is because you are a philosopher that I can unfold my mind without reserve or apprehension: you are able to trace, & to investigate, the sources of its disorder & its mistakes. . . . I feel

109

a degree of solicitude that my motives should not be disapproved by you, because I respect your esteem.199 Hays here articulates the fundamental rule, an early, positive transference (what Freud sometimes called transference-love), and her hope for Godwins capacity to cure, a faith that she ultimately articulates explicitly in the very medical terms that Freud would adopt: I like your sincerity, & to afford you a still greater proof of my own, I will give you a little farther insight into my character, though it will make yet more against me: but we cannot expect to have our disorders heald by the Phycisian [sic], however skilful he may be, while we conceal any of their symtoms [sic]200 Hayss faith in Godwin comes from her belief that his utopianism is visionary if a little premature and one can wonder whether Freuds followers have the same motivations for their faith in the efficacy of psychoanalysis. Godwin represents Freuds fundamental principle to and for Wollstonecraft as well, after she turns from Imlay to him as psychoanalyst. Godwin responds with openness to a letter in which she worries about having said or done too much: [you hope] that, in despising false delicacy, you have not lost sight of the true. I see nothing in you but what I respect and adore.201 Godwin was friend to Hays and Wollstonecraft, and as the latters memoirist, perhaps even inventor of the modern Memoir, steeped in Romantic adulation and brutal honesty. He was sought out for unbosoming by Hays and later Wollstonecraft in the very way that Breuer and Freud were sought out by Anna O, for her talking cure. That Godwins theorizing about friendship so much resembles the newest accounts of the psychoanalytic relationship suggests as does Bertha Pappenheims relation to psychoanalysis that principled egalitarian utopianism,

110

including, especially, feminism, lies at the core of a psychoanalytic practice that is constitutionally revolutionary. This insight need not be diminished even if one recognizes that psychoanalytic practice sometimes serves rather than opposes sexism, which it does whenever it goes (for the) psycho, as, for instance, when Freud heterosexualizes Dora or when it serves (as in Cheevers The Country Husband or Foucaults History of Sexuality) as the police. F. Hearing Otherwise The fictional Emma and the real Wollstonecraft articulate explicitly feminist principles yet, in Todds memorable phrase about Wollstonecraft, appear to be victims of their own clinging love for a man.202 Yet feminist anger at what appears to be Emmas and Wollstonecrafts neediness for men leads to some major contradictions. For one thing, though Emma appears to drive Augustus away by so avidly pursuing him, she actually turns out to have been right: Augustus Harley did love her all along, though he wouldnt admit it; the truer understanding lies with her. As for Wollstonecraft, a contradiction surfaces in Todds comments on the philosophical discourses contained in Wollstonecrafts letters to Imlay: Had [Wollstonecraft] not scorned the literature of passionate women . . . , she would have learnt that . . . frankness and . . . intensity of affection, especially an initiatory or pursuing one, will not catch a man. (313) While I sympathize with the disappointment over a womans neediness, Todds advice here exactly reproduces Rousseaus advice in mile to make women appear weak and alluring, to which Wollstonecraft replied, What nonsense! (Vindication 26). Reading Wollstonecraft as "psycho" turns feminists into sexists like Rousseau, and such a metamorphosis ought to make us suspect that representations of the female stalker are about more than they seem.

111

Both Wollstonecraft in her life and letters and Hays in Emma Courtney go to great lengths to distinguish these heroines arguing with their lovers from weak, socially feminine forms of obsession and dependence. These are not instances of the woman wailing for her demon lover but rather women trying to take up the position as subjects of desire, a position traditionally but not logically, and not inescapably, reserved for men. Emma writes to Augustus a letter very like many of Wollstonecrafts to Imlay frank and judicious in the same way: she demands from him, as her right, not a public marriage, but a private, sacred bond that would be sealed by their own avowals (s.a. Wollstonecraft, Letters 6.435-6, 438). Emmas proposition to Augustus is neither for marriage nor, she says, for a liaison: You cannot suppose, that a transient engagement would satisfy a mind like mine; I should require a reciprocal faith plighted and returned an after-separation, otherwise than by mutual consent, would be my destruction I would not survive your desertion (Hays, Emma Courtney 154). This crucial sentence encapsulates the sentiment informing all of Wollstonecrafts letters to Imlay. I would not survive sounds like the clingy, neurotic woman, one who seeks symbiosis within a lost maternal imaginary.203 The troth proposed is not state-sanctioned marriage because Emma is aware that Augustus will lose his inheritance if he marries, an absurd bequest but nonetheless binding (154). Thus the witnesses and enactors of the bond are Augustus and I: if Augustus afterwards leaves Emma, she would be no more than a seduced maiden, an object rather than an authoritative subject capable of bringing social formations into existence through self-positing. The I in I would not survive your desertion does not therefore refer to a particular, embodied person: it is not in fact Emma, Hays, or Wollstonecraft. The I is an instance of discourse with legislative power. That the pact was enacted, the troth

112

performed, is what hollows out the space of the I, what renders its positing successful, what makes possible the speakers full accession to subjectivity. The I that would dissolve upon desertion is not a person desperately in need of all-encompassing love, but the I capable of making a bond. In that case, even suicide isnt a psychotic act, but rather an attempt at enforcement of a pact the existence of which guarantees the full subjective power of its plaintiff. What is the connection between neurosis and history? Neurosis arises when for some reason a desire becomes inarticulable; neurotics cannot speak because they do not (consciously) know. In politics and history, one cannot even say what one does know because in saying certain words one seems to be saying something else: the failure of articulation occurs at the hearing end. When Emma says to Augustus, I would not survive your desertion, and when Wollstonecraft says to Imlay, My friend my dearest friend I feel my fate united to yours by the most sacred principles of my soul (Letters 6.410), we as part of our historical neuroses hear the psycho rather than the analytic, the stalker rather than the subject verbally performing an act recognizable as such only in a radically egalitarian Republic comprised of revolutionary, analytic friends who alternate being each others partisans. In one of her last missives to Imlay, Wollstonecraft says that he leaves her with something like conviction that its still possible to prosecute her cause (6.438). Just because he personally failed to respond adequately to her plaintiff subjectivity doesnt mean that no such response will ever be possible, that no such friend will ever exist who will ratify by adequately witnessing a womans assumption of the subject-position of articulate desire. F. Conclusion

113

I hope that this article has made it possible to hear attempts by Wollstonecraft and Hays at political efficacy as feminist reformers within what sound like evidences of personal mental illness. They want to assert themselves as powerful subjects. Their works are filled with strident objections, but objections not to the loss of an object of desire in which they are too deeply invested as needy women. Rather, they object to the incapacity to articulate their desires with emotional impact. It is nonetheless true that these women seem needy de trop, as Walker puts it even to themselves. At her best moments, Wollstonecraft is able to see herself not as abnormal but exemplary for a world to come, but she is not always up to that task, as evinced by her worry about true delicacy in her letter to Godwin. Hays berates her heroine for imbibing the delicious poison of a more than maternal fondness as she cultivates a relationship with Augustuss mother (Emma Courtney 101), and Emmas novelistic genealogy includes early loss of a mother, suggesting, as any good psychoanalyst might, that her problems stem from the transfer of excessive affections from an overloved mother to an overvalued man (see Jacobus, Traces 221-223). As our friends, the analysts of our counter-transference, they have shown us that the loss of subjective power can masquerade as inconsolable mourning over the loss of a symbiotic relationship the nightmare identified by Janet Todd. At a certain point in history, when it became possible to hope that women could assume the position of subject of desire, articulations of desire slid easily for both the hearers and the utterers of them into psychological narratives about fatal attraction. Insofar as we are analyzed by them, then, we might guess that narratives of fatal attraction so fascinate us because they raise the specter of failed revolution an insight

114

that seems counterintuitive to me, and thus a reality to which, without their friendly intervention, I might be (historically) blind. The cure of Hays and Wollstonecrafts affective disorders, then, could have been effected through psychoanalysis (as Wollstonecrafts probably was by the analyst Godwin), but also it is their cure of (our) history. Through alternately exchanging roles of analyst and analysand, historian and historical objects have mutually achieved a complex, temporarily adequate articulation of reality. That we are currently revolted by history, in the very same way that so many critics of every school are revolted by Freud, suggests the (psycho)analytic power of history itself at least as a revolutionary tale.204 It may be that Wollstonecrafts insistence upon her own power to articulate audible desires did not fail, not yet that the language capable of tallying the difference between being psycho and analytic, and the community of friends it implies, is still to come, perhaps, in time.

115

Chapter 5 Sacred Secrets: Psychological Depth as Feminist Critique In his 1798 biography of his deceased wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin discussed Wollstonecrafts extra-marital connection with Gilbert Imlay as an engagement . . . of the most sacred nature,205 the birth of Wollstonecrafts daughter Fanny testifying to her faith in its endurance even though the connection had not been ratified by church or state in an official wedding ceremony. For exposing the sacred engagement, Godwin was considered an unfeeling husband by friends such as Robert Southey and William Roscoe: Southey accuses Godwin of stripping his dead wife naked; Roscoe sees Wollstonecraft as mournd by Godwin with a heart of stone.206 Godwin was judged insane by Richard Polwhele in The Unsexd Females (1798),207 and has been pronounced Wollstonecrafts worst enemy by her other biographers from Archibald Rowan in 1803 to Ralph Wardle in 1951.208 But Godwin himself did not see his biography as unfeeling. Even more extraordinary, Godwin believed, as he says in his preface to the first edition, that these memoirs would improve humankind: There are not many individuals with whose character the public welfare and improvement are more intimately connected, than the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (204). How could Godwin believe that the pubic would find improving his Memoirs, and Wollstonecrafts private Letters to Imlay which he published the same year, especially given that the tale they tell is one of broken vows, illegitimate children, and attempts at suicide? One way to begin to answer this question is to read Godwins Memoirs in conjunction with Eliza Fenwicks novel Secresy published three years earlier in 1795. Events in the life of the heroine, Sibella Valmont, strikingly resemble events in Wollstonecrafts life. Sibella

116

similarly engages in a sacred union with her beloved Clement, similarly becomes impregnated, and is similarly betrayed. There is even a scene in which Sibella jumps into a moat, resembling perhaps Wollstonecrafts suicidal leap into the Thames. Fenwick was a friend of Wollstonecraft, close enough to her and to Godwin that Fenwick took care of Mary Godwin (the future Mary Shelley) for the first ten days after Wollstonecrafts death. Though people often suggest that Sibella is modeled on Wollstonecraft,209 the intertextuality is complicated: Fenwicks novel was published in the same year that Wollstonecraft moved from Paris to London, went to Norway on business for Imlay, wrote what sometimes sound like desperate letters attempting to get Imlay to honor the sacred nature of their engagement, discovered his infidelities, and twice attempted suicide. Its not quite clear how much Fenwick and other London radicals knew about this relationship, nor when. However, even if Fenwick did not write the novel with Wollstonecraft in mind, Godwin certainly could have remembered Fenwicks Secresy while writing the Memoirs. That is, part of his belief that the public will find Wollstonecrafts life improving is based on his sense that Fenwicks representation of Sibellas life represents and instills virtue. Even if Secresy is not a veiled biography of Wollstonecraft, the novel clearly delineates what was at stake politically during the early Romantic period in the notion of a secret engagement. A careful analysis of the novel reveals why Godwin thought so admirable any depiction he might make of Wollstonecraft as undertaking a secret engagement, attempting to ratify it, and adhering to it even to the point of suicide. The question posed by Fenwicks Secresy and Godwins Memoirs about marriage is not simply a personal one but a political one, and it is a question that still haunts Romantic

117

philosophy and literary theory. J. L. Austin describes the operation of performatives: if a person says, I do, he or she is married; if a person says, I christen this ship the Thelma, the ship is so named. But crucially, the efficacy of naming a ship depends upon social arrangements. Not anyone can christen a ship and effectively name it only one who is authorized by society to do so has that power. The question as to what makes a performative effective was hugely important during the revolutionary period when the National Assembly in France and the several conventions on British electoral reform, held in Scotland and England, made proclamations, the legal status of which were open to debate. Resolutions formulated at these conventions, and the documents and resolutions produced by the societies which ran them, stated the will of a popular front: were those statements declarative, designed to inform members of Parliament of the peoples desire and thereby influence members of Parliament in their decision-making process, or were thy performative, enacting a law (as happened in France) that provides an alternative to the laws upheld by Parliament and the monarchy? This was the central question of the Sedition trials in Scotland in 1793, and the Treason Trials in London of 1794.210 The difference between the two alternatives depends upon the intent of the convention attendees and the public that supports them: are they publicly expressing grievances or privately enacting, via Secret Committees, an alternative law (see A. Goodwin 300-301)? Radical politics calls into question the connection between publicity and ratification. Marriage is the central theme in Fenwicks novel and Godwins memoir, but marriage was to them both a profoundly political issue. The institution of marriage provides a test case for seizing political power through secret agreements: if a vow or oath is enacted secretly, as it is in clandestine marriages, what makes it inviolable sacred? I will show that, to Sibella, the ill-

118

fated heroine of Fenwicks Secresy, and Wollstonecraft, the subject of Godwins Romantic biography, secret performatives were as binding as the virtue of their participants made them. Godwin believed that, by portraying Wollstonecrafts virtuous tenacity to her connections, he could, as Fenwick had done, insist on the legitimacy and legality of promises performed in private, an insistence crucial to the self-understanding of the radical reform movement. Romantic biography thrusts the personal into the realm of the political, revealing sacred secrets for the sake of radical reform. To the extent that we read Godwins Memoirs, along with Wollstonecrafts Letters to Imlay, as only about Wollstonecrafts personal life, I will argue, and to the extent that we read Secresy as a novel only about love, we defuse the political radicalism latent in each text. Not only. But personal psychological distress over loss of a loved one and resistance to the desecration of community ties by politics are, this chapter will show, two sides of the same coin. Lockes ideas delineated in chapter 1 propose a specific model for political radicalism that is distinctively melancholic. As I will show here, melancholia and suicide, the personal experience of intense psychological suffering, is one way albeit a very costly one of enacting political reform within the context of a community that speaks too corrupt a language to ratify ties that bind. Romantic Biography: Texts Godwin seemed not to expect the outrage over Wollstonecrafts morality generated by his publication of the Memoirs and her private letters: Never did there exist a human being, that needed, with less fear, expose all their actions, and call upon the universe to judge them (256). Critics usually account for Godwins equanimity about divulging all the details of Wollstonecrafts life by his obliviousness to his reading publics sensibilities. As Nicola Trott

119

puts it, in commenting on the passage quoted above, Godwins trustfulness is awe-inspiring, his very obtuseness rather moving (34). And Amy Rambow points to similar comments made by his contemporaries, Southey and Coleridge. Godwin is always exposing himself in a posture which says, come kick me! Southey said in a letter to Coleridge, and Coleridge commented that every one of Godwins writings as always contained some one, outrageously, imprudent suicidal passage (Rambow 24-5). There is a stark contrast between Godwins own very self-assured sense that he knows how to improve the public and his critics belief in his complete incapacity to effectively connect with other human beings. That stark contrast between philosophical self-assuredness and social ineptitude reappears in critics estimates of Mary Wollstonecrafts life as revealed in Godwins Memoirs as well as in her Letters to Imlay which Godwin published as part of her Posthumous Works. These letters attempt to convince Gilbert Imlay to reunite with her. Critics attack Wollstonecraft simultaneously for her arrogance and for her ineffectuality in preserving her relationship with Imlay.211 [M]y conduct, says Wollstonecraft in a letter to Imlay, has always been governed by the strictest principles of justice and truth. . . . You do, you must, respect me and you will be sorry to forfeit my esteem.212 Wollstonecraft appears to have the same problem as Godwin does: she is convinced of her own virtue and that virtues attractiveness to others; she is obtuse about the actual reception of such declarations of virtue. After describing their stormy first encounter, Richard Holmes says of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, normal [social] behavior by eighteenth-century standards was never to be their forte (10). What we have here are two curiously self-aggrandizing and yet bumbling social misfits.

120

Eilenberg makes the (astounding) claim that, had Wollstonecraft softened her selfpresentation, as she did in revising her letters to Imlay for publication as A Short Residence in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, she might have been able to write the letters that . . . brought her lover back to her (14). After all, Eilenberg points out, Godwin confesses in the Memoirs that it was reading A Short Residence which made him fall in love with Wollstonecraft (249), although Eilenberg in general faults Godwin for having an idiosyncratic sensibility (13-14). What is astounding to me about the claim is that it ignores who Imlay was (a philanderer to the point of pathology), grants Wollstonecrafts writing more power than perhaps any letters could possibly have, and angrily exacts vengeance from Wollstonecraft for what is inexplicably seen as her failure to get Imlay to settle down! Eilenberg clearly takes her cue from Todd who seems furious with Wollstonecraft for not being better able to win Imlay back, for the inefficacy of her whining plaintiveness in her letters to Imlay. Todd attacks Wollstonecraft because, convinced of her own moral superiority, she instructs Imlay to strive for rational virtue. The analysis was not calculated to rein in an erring lover. Todd reprimands Wollstonecraft because she fails to make use of more conventional, feminine means of seduction for recapturing Imlays love. That she was inevitably alienating her lover with criticism meant less to her than selfjustification (331). Both Eilenberg and Todd seem to have, in the case of Wollstonecraft, forgotten the old feminist adage that it is easiest to blame victims, especially when they are abandoned and abused women. Though Todd and Eilenberg complain a lot about Wollstonecrafts self-pity,213 it is perhaps an indirect (and certainly unintentional) tribute that they do not see her as a victim but rather as having the power to determine the outcome of her affair with Imlay through the power of her prose.

121

In discussing the texts of Godwins Memoirs and Wollstonecrafts Letters to Imlay, in other words, critics have been extraordinarily concerned with analyzing their performative power as speech acts. Godwins misjudgment of how his audience would see Wollstonecraft upon reading his Memoirs and Wollstonecrafts similar incomprehension of the impact of her letters on Imlay have been perceived as personal failures. That both of these acts failed to portray Wollstonecraft as admirable is explained by critics through a narrative of inner depth. This narrative reconciles contradictions apparent in each text: Wollstonecrafts principles as opposed to her feelings; Godwins adulation of Wollstonecraft as opposed to his unconscious hostility towards her, perhaps for her dying. This narrative of inner depth explains away the stark contrast discussed above between genial thinker and uncongenial socialite apparently constitutive of both Wollstonecrafts and Godwins personalities. Whether provoking a true assessment of their personalities or not, it is precisely this sense of contradiction betokening personal failure which gives depth to the personalities populating Romantic biography, of which Godwins Memoirs is one founding instance.214 As Deirdre Lynch puts it in describing the achievement, during the Romantic period, of creating round characters in novels, Profundity of character . . . [is] an effect produced by . . . difficulties with image management (153). As seductive as are those interpretations that give us glimpses into a persons inner world, we might ask, did Godwin and Wollstonecraft herself, in private letters, both fail to represent Wollstonecraft as admirable to their respective audiences (the public and Imlay), or were they trying to do something else? What if, instead of adhering to the dominant critical tradition which interprets these acts as failures that reveal their authors psychological problems, we took seriously Godwins claim that public exposure of Wollstonecrafts actions in both the

122

Memoirs and the Letters is more than intimately connected with public welfare? What if instead of failing to please their audiences by speaking in conventional pieties, Godwin and Wollstonecraft refused to do so for political reasons? Passing in theoretical perspective from the personal to the political is not as difficult as it might sound in the abstract, nor need each point of view be mutually exclusive. For example, Todd attacks Wollstonecraft for personally failing to charm Imlay back into her domestic fold: Had she not scorned the literature of passionate women and the conduct-book manuals with their pragmatic sexual politics, she would have learnt that, in the culture as it existed, frankness and judicious evaluation of a lovers character do not attract the straying male and that intensity of affection, especially an initiatory or pursuing one, will not catch a man. (313) Anyone who has read Wollstonecrafts Vindication of the Rights of Woman will see immediately in this passage that Todd is recommending some of the same strategems for creating sexual desire as appear in Rousseaus fantasy of the natural woman, which Wollstonecraft summarizes: Rousseau declares that a woman should never, for a moment, feel herself independent, that she should be . . . made a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire.215 Her infamous answer to Rousseaus call to be alluring could just as easily constitute her answer to Todd: What nonsense! (26). It is very easy to believe, pace Todd, that Wollstonecraft did not fail to attract Imlay but rather that she refused to do so using this system of gallantry, in keeping with her explicitly articulated principles in the second Vindication. The first Vindication she wrote was, of course, Vindication of the Rights of Man, and it is in the

123

contexts of radical and sexual politics that the Memoirs and Wollstonecrafts private letters must be understood. Marriage: How is it a Political Act? Lord Hardwickes Marriage Act, enacted by Parliament in 1754 and not repealed until 1823, outlaws clandestine marriage, defined early in Ecclesiastical law as those kinds of marriage [that] are called secret: the first is one concluded privately and without witnesses, . . . . The second . . . without the consent of the brides father . . . .216 As Bridget Hill argues, clandestine marriages were extraordinarily popular during the eighteenth century: We now know that Fleet marriages, as clandestine marriages performed within the Fleet prison or its rules were known, accounted for between 200,000 and 300,000 marriages in London between 1694 and 1754 -- and those were only the ones recorded. . . . Some [researchers have gone so far as] claiming that regular marriage in the London of the first half of the eighteenth century was a minority practice.217 Noticing that, as the century progressed, the fashion for Fleet marriages spread upwards into fashionable society, Hill concludes that the Act was singularly unsuccessful in doing away with clandestine marriages.218 Just as laws did not have to be enacted in California calling English the official language until other languages threatened to usurp its hegemony just so, Hardwickes Marriage Act, insisting on the determining power of parental consent did not have to be enacted until the moment when that power was waning. Paternal authority in the family was, of course, the central political allegory mustered to defend and attack monarchy, from the publication of Filmers Patriarcha in 1680, to Burkes assertion of the necessity of obedience to paternal power in his Reflections on the Revolution in France and Wollstonecrafts attack on such obedience in

124

Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). And Fenwicks Secresy is in large part a diatribe against the evils of blind obedience to paternal power: in deciding to raise Clement Montgomery and Sibella Valmont as a social experiment, according to his own principles, Lord Valmont proves himself to be a tyrant, exacting unreasoned submission, and the cause of their ruin (55, 104, 123-124, 305, 342, 349). But in the act of marriage, paternal and governmental authority are connected in much more than an allegorical way, as Church law fully recognized: The reason why the holy Church forbids secret marriages is this: . . . the church has no means to prevent the separation [of the wedded pair] even when in truth a marriage exists; . . . . For the church cannot pass judgment on secrets . . . (quoted in Howard 348). As Howard points out, Lord Hardwickes Marriage Act attempted to exert control through insisting that only legal marriages were valid: the remedy to loss of control was publicity (450). It was in fact not at all lost on the eighteenth-century British people that clandestine marriages were to be preferred as a way of preventing government intervention in the wedded couples affairs, particularly financial. Women especially stood to benefit since they lost legal status and all control of their own property upon marrying, but kept that status and control if no court could prove them married (Hill 204, 206). Before 1754, clandestine marriages were illegal but not void (Hill 203). Hardwickes Act attempts to collapse the difference between the two:219 clearly the government was frantically trying to prevent the people from instituting and living by their own laws, oblivious to strictures placed on them by legal fiat. For the people, then, eighteenth-century marriages were primarily enacted privately via custom, and were a threat to the government insofar as the peoples adherence to customary rather than monarchical or Parliamentary law threatened the government

125

at its foundations.220 For the upper classes as Howard points out, the real target of Lord Hardwickes Marriage Act marriage was a public, governmentally-regulated affair. Many critics presume that what scandalized early nineteenth-century political conservatives about the way that the Memoirs frankly depicted Wollstonecrafts connection with Imlay as involving sex out of wedlock and an illegitimate child, that the proper reception of Godwins text thus requires our environment, the sexual revolution having liberated us from sexual repression (Rambow 54). But it is crucial to abandon any kind of progress narrative about sexual liberation, imagining that the further one goes back in history, the more sexually repressed a society or community. The virtue of pre-marital chastity was one of the identityconstituting values of an emerging middle class, one way it had of distinguishing itself both from the lower orders and from aristocrats who practiced the French version of marriage in which each partner blithely ignored the others infidelities (Secresy 293, Grundy, 293 n. 1) marriage la mode. Writing towards the end of his life, Francis Place, a radical who was politically prominent in the London Corresponding Society during 1795 (A. Goodwin 364) and was a friend of the Fenwicks, wrote that, at the end of the eighteenth century, among London tradesmens daughters, want of chastity . . . was common, but it was not by any means so disreputable . . . as it is now.221 During the eighteenth century, the financial situation of being poor actually allowed greater sexual freedom: Where there was no question of an inheritance, Hill says, and little or no property was involved, the attitude to pre-marital chastity was far more tolerant (180). In fact, a womans loss of virginity was condoned in the practice of bundling, parentaland community- promoted premarital sex to determine whether a couple was sexually compatible222 but also fertile: If after a considerable period of courtship the woman failed to

126

become pregnant, the couple concluded that they were not meant for each other and the courtship was ended (Hill 182-183; Howard 349). Fenwicks Secresy and Godwins Memoirs both attempt to distinguish virtue from aristocratic notions of honor, and are therefore engaged in the ideological work of creating a middle-class identity.223 True, the definition of virtue came to include chastity by the time that virtue became the defining attribute of the hegemonic middle class. But a counter-definition of virtue that included sexual freedom was proposed by this novel, biography, and Wollstonecrafts letters which represent radical views of their time. Moreover, whats threatening about this counter-definition is not its liberal attitude toward sexuality so much as the politics that goes along with it. In other words, the ideological work of characterizing radical politics as oversexed was one way of excluding it from the hegemonic (see Trott). According to customary law, derived from ecclesiastical practice, for a clandestine marriage before Lord Hardwickes Act (and, during the period of the laws enactment, for those who ignored it), all that was necessary was simply spousal, the consent or promise to marry; any actual nuptial or marriage ceremony was unnecessary (Emsley 478-9; Howard I.374-5). Widespread premarital pregnancy224 suggests that the people placed more faith in secret spousals as constitutive of marriage than they did in the legal system. According to Hill, In many areas the pregnancy of brides seems to have been assumed. [F]or example, . . . in the mining community in Camborne in Cornwall in the period 1778-1797, 45.2 percent of first baptisms followed within 8 months of marriage. Such a

127

high level of pre-nuptial pregnancy probably depended on strong community sanctions against desertion.225 The bride who was not a virgin therefore represents a woman who lives according to rules that are created and enforced by the people around her rather than enacted by Parliament. The AntiJacobins listing in its index of Prostitute see Mary Wollstonecraft (quoted in Trott 35) needs to be taken in this context. What makes the Wollstonecraft of Godwins Memoirs and of her own Letters to Imlay so scandalous to political conservatives is her desire to enter into a secret engagement that effectively declares herself and her community more competent to watch over her own interests than is the state. Performatives: Naming and Marrying The political scene of the 1790s was dominated by groups of people asserting their own performative power. Austins four paradigmatic instances of the performative speech acts are 1) saying I do in a marriage ceremony; 2) the act of naming, as in christening a child or a ship; 3) bequeathing, as in a will; 4) betting. Pierre Bourdieu accuses Austin, as the founder of speech act theory, of thinking about performatives in solely linguistic rather than political terms,226 but it is hard to see Austins view as anything but socio-political.227 The christening of a ship is a performance that misfires if the person who breaks the bottle and utters the name is not authorized to do so by the audience. Revolution might be defined as the sudden acquisition of the authority to name and enact. The National Assembly in France passed resolutions, but what made those resolutions into a new legal structure for government was the fact that people behaved as if they were law.228

128

It was precisely out of fear of such legal bodies that the government tried to convict the leaders of the British Convention in Scotland of sedition in 1793, under sentences of 14-years transportation.229 Again, fear that the power of associations such as the London Corresponding Society extended beyond lobbying for electoral reform motivated the Treason trials of 1794 in which, thanks partly to Godwins help, Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, and John Thelwall were acquitted. Given the Reign of Terror in France, the government feared direct popular action.230 But how exactly does that action work? In December 1795, Parliament enacted the Two Acts or Gagging Acts that restricted large gatherings. They were enacted shortly after a monster meeting held on 12 November, 1795, in which, led by the popular societies, a crowd of over 100,000 people reasserted the constitutional right of Resistance to Oppression (quoted in A. Goodwin 392). Parliament first asserted that right during the debates that culminated in the Glorious Revolution (A. Goodwin 395). It was, of course, possible to see such Parliamentary action as treasonous, and certainly as revolutionary, but the repetition of this constitutional right in 1795 is even more so because of who is speaking. Why? Austin points out that, if an unauthorized person christens a ship, the performative act is not achieved (16); the ship is not named. One can imagine an insane person strolling onto the scene where a christening will take place, as soon as the governor arrives, and insanely pretending to do the governors job: breaking the bottle, uttering the name. The performative misfires; the intruder is led away by police and another champaign bottle quickly procured. But what if, instead of leading the intruder away, the police take his side and turn against the governor -- as might happen in a revolution. In the case of performing any law by reiterating it, as in the case of christening a ship, taking the performance as authoritative confers authority

129

upon the performer. If the people presume to voice a constitutional right, they are implicitly claiming the authority to arbitrate constitutional affairs, an authority that government doesnt want them to have. Such authority is made explicit in a comment such as that made by Chairman Binns at the 26 October Copenhagen meeting: when the voice of a united people [goes] forth, it was [Parliaments] duty to attend to it or incur the guilt of high treason against the people;231 if one can commit treason against a people, it is only because such a people is sovereign. During the 1794 Treason trials, Judge Eyre and Godwin tussle over the question as to whether resolutions of the London Corresponding Society are designed to overawe (Eyre) or awe Parliament (Godwin). Are the people claiming to be a legislative body whose will Parliament must obey? According to one of the Two Acts, the Treasonable Practices Bill, it is precisely such performative actions, attempts to intimidate or overawe . . . Parliament . . . by speech or writing, that constitute treason.232 Or, conversely, are the people hoping to inspire Parliament with enough respect for them that ministers will take their needs and wishes seriously?233 The passage of resolutions by reform societies, although taking place in these huge public forums, were private in the sense that there was no legally pre-established means for the people to address Parliament. This question of treason, viz., did the people intend to usurp Parliament or persuade it in privately, as it were, reasserting their constitutional rights, resembles the question that arises out of clandestine marriages in which there are no witnesses but the couple themselves. Sometimes one member of a betrothed, and thus de facto married pair,234 would allege that he or she had only promised to marry in the future, as opposed to consenting to marry now, the difference being (according to scholastic debates) the verbal one

130

between I will and I do.235 Henry Swinburne, who might be considered the Austin of the late Tudor period because he wrote on two of Austins performatives, marriage and wills, wrote a treatise defining effectual spousals that was published not during his lifetime, but later, in two editions, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, precisely when, according to Lawrence Stone, there was a huge rise in the number of children born out of wedlock (see note 18).236 Swinburne insists that people may not be aware of the distinction between I will and I do: And therefore, since it is the very Consent of Mind only which maketh Matrimony, we are to regard not their Words, but their Intents, not the formality of Phrase, but the drift of their Determination, not the outward sound of their Lips, which cannot speak more cunningly, but the inward Harmony or Agreement of their Hearts, which mean uprightly. (62) Swinburnes commentary might be taken as Sibellas and Wollstonecrafts mantras when they contracted their secret, sacred engagements. When her epistolary companion, Caroline Ashburn, questions the uprightness of Sibellas secret husband, Clement, Sibella answers, Oh! how ill do you appreciate [Clements] soul, wherein the image of Sibella lives immoveably, and eternally, undivested of her sway by any outward form or circumstance (248). According to Austin, people only begin to postulate that a verbal performance is accompanied by an inward and spiritual act when there is a good chance that customary ritual forms will be abused, that is, enacted insincerely (16-17): an excess of profundity, or rather solemnity, he says, paves the way for immodality (10). One only posits that something other than the verbal act itself renders that act valid in the midst of widespread hypocrisy, when a mans word isnt his bond.

131

Immodality or the abuse of ceremonial forms (bigamy, for instance) paves the way for formulating the belief in a mental act that precedes, is independent of, and deeper than uttering what has become a merely verbal form. Psychological depth is born out of widespread political corruption.237 Secrets A performative word doesnt work, the printed Anglican Marriage Ceremony tells us, if anyone, beginning with the couple themselves, harbors secrets about why that couple cannot utter I will, I take thee, and With this Ring I thee wed (A4r.-A5r.) and really mean what they say: I Require and charge you both, says the Priest, speaking unto the persons that shall be married, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgement when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in Matrimony, ye do now confess it. For be ye well assured, that so many as are coupled together otherwise than Gods Word doth allow are not joined together by God; neither is their Matrimony lawful.238 But not all secret immodalities can be attributed to personal hypocrisy. Speech acts gain and lose performative power based on the interpretive contexts of their audience. From 1680 to 1800, the large number of illegitimate births (see note 18), in contrast to the number of bridechildren who eventually were legitimated through marriage (see note 30), shows that customary spousals were not in fact at all secure. Just as the number of legitimated prenuptial pregnancies

132

attests to the presence of strong community sanctions against desertion, as John Rule points out, the number of illegitimate births attests to the breakdown of those sanctions. Coleridges Rime of the Ancient Mariner, first published the same year as Godwins Memoirs and during Coleridges politically radical period, begins by interrupting a marriage ceremony: it cannot be effectively witnessed by the stunned wedding guest until the mariners story is told, until, that is, the wedding guest is made into A sadder and a wiser man.239 Pointing out that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ends with all people making prayers that are sweeter than the marriage feast, and that the Mariners mode of telling his tale is by button-holing WeddingGuests, preferably next of kin, and leaving them stunned, so that they too [turn] from the bridegrooms door, Stanley Cavell asks Why? . . . . Why is the marriage deserted . . . ? Does God, among all the things he makes and loves, not love, or not make, marriages? . . . [S]hall there be no more marriages?240 To the portion of the Anglican marriage ceremony in which the Priest says, if any many can shew just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace (A3r.), then, Coleridges poem answers that there is just cause, and that it has to do with the integrity of the witnesses or audience to the wedding ceremony. Fenwicks Secresy makes very clear whats rotten in England that renders the witnessing of marriages ineffective. The novel is full of secrets, beginning with Lord Valmonts designs in raising Sibella Valmont and Clement Montgomery, the former being, unknown to herself, his niece, the latter, again, unknown to himself, Valmonts illegitimate son. He sequesters them both in Valmont Castle, surrounded by a moat, and, without telling them, raises them to be husband and wife, attempting to give Sibella no education at all so that she will completely

133

submit to her husband, and attempting to instill in Clement Valmonts own loathing for aristocratic society, London during the season and courtly life in general. It is by keeping secrets, then, that Valmont exercises his tyranny over his children: by telling them only what he wants them to know, he attempts to get them to do exactly as he wishes. Caroline Ashburn, daughter of a Nabob and the other heroine of the tale, an unusually virtuous aristocrat who became virtuous under the influence of a poor Indian woman, attacks Valmonts use of secrecy as illegitimate in ways the clearly echo Godwins Political Justice (349). When writing this novel, Fenwick takes part in the radical circle in London who believe that, once all human beings are well-educated enough to think rationally, social ills can be cured.241 Valmont educates Clement; luckily, Clements tutor secretly educates Sibella as well. She is the most virtuous character in the novel because educated in rational principles without ever having had contact with the corrupt aristocratic society into which Clement is suddenly thrown by Lord Valmont so that he can determine the effects of his experiment in child rearing. Clearly, then, Secresy makes use of the metaphorical equation in contemporary political discourses between father and monarch (or oligarches) in order to argue against maintaining the obedience of the lower orders through ignorance. But the novel does more than present the radical view of education.242 The full title of the novel is Secresy; or, the Ruin on the Rock. This ruin is an edifice that had been built by monks who were commissioned by a sinful lord, turned penitent (260), to fast and pray for his soul alone in this hermitage until they died of hunger. But this building, a monument to true repentance, turns out to be just an empty form. First, as is discovered by Arthur Murden, another atypically virtuous aristocrat who falls in love with Sibella, a secret bridge concealed just below the waters of the moat surrounding Valmont

134

castle had been built by the saintly contrivance of the starving monks (263) they lived for many years despite appearing to fast, getting food sent into them over the moat. Second, the ruin contains in it a trap door leading to a secret passage that allows secret communication with some apartment in the castle (264). Allegorically, the ruin represents visible forms titles, manors, castles, moats, priestly robes, and hermitages that enact nobility (in the sense of honor and virtue) for the sake of disguising a deep corruption hidden secretly beneath them. Just so in the case of aristocratic marriage: it is a form that hides only corruption. The large, public wedding ceremonies that joined lords and ladies united them only in appearance. Such marriages were governed by the precept, as Secresy articulates it, of Keep my secret and Ill keep yours (293), meaning, by shared knowledge of each partners infidelities. In that context, when forms and ceremonies are corrupted into meaning their opposite. Public performance of a bond actually disproves its existence. Such a context renders secrecy incredibly problematic. If publicity provides false witness, then surely secrecy validates a performative act: if the grand display of uniting two souls in fact separates them, then secret marriage should unite. But secrecy is double-barreled in the context of aristocratic corruption. The word secresy in its titular form is used only eight times throughout the novel, and the first time we encounter it, it signifies what Austin calls an abuse of, a hollow or insincere, an unconsummated performative (15-16): about Murdens secresy, Sibella says, his words wore one form, and his intentions another (105-106). It is important to notice first that Sibellas statement provides a formula for psychological depth as constructed in Romantic biography and in the realistic novel that begins with Edgeworth, Burney, and Austin: one has to search beneath appearances, beneath material conditions but also

135

beneath all the words used to describe and locate her, to find a characters true nature. It turns out that Murden is true, and his words, his request for secrecy, is only reactive against an environment in which he cannot act nobly because it has been contaminated by others (in this case, by Valmonts unconscionable seclusion and deception of Sibella). So, in this case, eschewing corrupted public forms is a way of maintaining virtue. However, as the formula for French or aristocratic marriage enunciated by the novel makes clear, secrecy is the means of corrupting those forms. As Caroline says in speaking about fashionable London society, insincerity the immodality that renders any performative ineffective is the grand cement which binds our intercourse with each other (167). Insofar as public forms for enacting bonds are corrupted, refusing to use them being secret is a way of performing the purity of ones own bond: The vow of the heart is of sacred dignity, Sibella writes to Caroline after, according to the dictates of her own will, having secretly married Clement. Forms and ceremonies seem too trifling for its nature (250). Sibellas refusal of public forms attests to her true sincerity in espousing Clement. However, secrecy is the means by which public forms have become corrupted in the first place. Sibellas use of it performs a meaning of which she, but not Clement, is unaware. At first, immediately following Clements and Sibellas spousals and consummation, undertaken at her demand, Clement writes to Murden, I am her husband, recognizing the legitimacy of the bond (154). Later, he writes to Murden again, I will make her my wife (200), showing that he no longer regards their spousal and consummation as binding. Fenwick emphasizes the meaning of this slight verbal difference in Murdens letter back to Clement:

136

Thou wilt make her thy wife. Good God what an implication! And is her claim yet to be enforced! I will make her my wife. How often, since I read thy letter, have I repeated those words those despicable words! . . . . [T]here are moments when I hate thee heartily. (243). Clement has been living the life of an aristocrat in Paris and London, and has in fact had an affair with a French woman. He has learned the aristocratic mode in which any performance of secrecy Guard[ing] a secret, Keeping it, or Be[ing] secret (158, 195, 198-199, 292) allows indulging in secret vice (134, 158). Each Lord or Ladys knowledge of anothers secret vice is the grand cement binding members of aristocratic society to each other, as can be seen in Filmars relationship to Laundry in the novel. The corruption of public forms itself has occurred, as the allegory of the ruin makes clear, via secrecy, in the sense in which the word is used for the fifth and seventh times in the novel: it is what Valmont practiced on Clement and Sibella, and what caused their ruin (325, 336). Valmonts grand secret is that Sibella is his niece, that she has a huge marriage portion (174, 207, 303, 304), and that he ultimately intends to marry her to Clement in order to legitimately establish his illegitimate son. After Valmont finds Clements less-than-genuine rejection of the aristocratic high life unconvincing, he continues to keep Clement in the dark about his plans and sends him back to London to find a profession, giving both him and Sibella the impression that she will be forced to marry someone else. Sibella asks Clement to secretly espouse and consummate their marriage to prevent Valmont from giving her hand in marriage elsewhere. Valmont causes their ruin because Sibella becomes pregnant from consummating the clandestine

137

marriage, and Clement, convinced that he and Sibella are penniless except for whatever he can make in a profession, publicly marries Carolines wealthy mother. The clandestine, popular form of marriage and public, aristocratic form clash in a heart-wrenching scene, in which Sibella, seven months pregnant, rushes to London to be with her Clement: [Clement:] I am sorry, but I cannot now give you any protection, for I I am, indeed Yes, Madam, I am married [to Mrs. Ashburn]. [Sibella:] Are we not both married [to each other]? Mrs. Ashburn who epitomizes the high society of London articulates what the context of a community cemented together in hypocrisy does to such secret rites: Nay, now, Miss Valmont, your are childish . . . . What man of taste marries a woman after an affair with her? Performing secretly, Sibella marries; in doing the same, Clement has an affair the change in the meaning of a verbal performance from marriage to affair occurring solely based on the virtue of the witnesses. For Clement and his social context, that is, whatever is secret just is vicious. To perform anything secretly transforms it from the sacred into the profane. The Sacred Her marriage to Clement is so sacred to Sibella that, in her mind, it could remain secret, needing no public marriage ceremony to ratify it: The vow of the heart is of sacred dignity. Forms and ceremonies seem too trifling for its nature (250). As Emsley points out, those sentiments echo Godwins in his Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman: Certainly nothing can be . . . so contrary to the genuine march of sentiment, as to require the overflowing of the soul to wait upon a ceremony and to blow a trumpet before that

138

which is of all things most sacredly private.243 Wollstonecrafts posthumously published private letters to Imlay reveal her agreement with both Sibella and Godwin: My friend my dearest friend I feel my fate united to yours by the most sacred principles of my soul, and the yearns of yes, I will say it, a true, unsophisticated heart. (410). A virtuous community with strong sanctions against immodality, would have honored secret spousals, converting Sibellas child into a legitimate bride-child and Clements public nuptials into bigamy. In contrast, an aristocratic society converts secret marriage into an affair. It is tempting to turn to Sibella, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft and remind them that the latter is the society in which they live as do Todd and Eilenberg: grow up! Though he believes that he reveals Wollstonecrafts Sibella-like virtue in describing her attachment to Imlay, to the point of death, Godwin cannot speak of Wollstonecrafts secret union with Imlay, nor publish her letters about that union, without evoking an act of renaming on the part of The Anti-Jacobin: prostitution and heresy (for her attempts at suicide). It is impossible to speak a private language. Even if one wishes to reject conventional forms, one must be speaking to somebody. Context, witnesses, determine the meaning of what is said as much as the intention of the speaker. Again, it is tempting to say that Godwin should have known as much. In failing to grasp how his readership would interpret The Memoirs and Letters to Imlay, he was simply as Mrs. Ashburn puts it to Sibella childish. To say that Godwins work as Romantic biographer and editor is childish does not, however, answer the question driving this chapter: as a speech act, is his work a failure or refusal? At this moment in the history of British radicalism, childhood has, of course, radical

139

connotations.244 And, in fact, in proclaiming herself to be someone with an unsophisticated heart, Wollstonecraft makes a claim about her capacity to enact reform despite social corruption. In Fenwicks Secresy, the virtuous Murden takes Sibellas secret vows to Clement vows that he has in effect witnessed, since Clement has written to him about them (and has even enclosed a copy of Sibellas letter asking him to marry her) to be sacred, which is to say, binding and irrevocable (246, 268, 310), no matter what Clement thinks about it. Just as the members of aristocratic society are cemented together in hypocrisy, by the end of Secresy, Sibella and Murden are conjoined by their own insistence on never relinquishing faith in a sacred union (250). Sophisticated and unsophisticated are the terms that Wollstonecraft uses in An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution to designate the difference between Clement and Murden, people who, in effect, generate two different kinds of societies, aristocratic and virtuous, and two different ways of being secret. According to Wollstonecraft, there is a difference between the unsophisticated savages of primitive society and the sophisticated, degenerate slaves of tyrants, such as are found among the lower orders in England and France now, she implies. Tyranny, operating secretly (according to policy) creates these slaves who are indeed cunning and secretive: The deprivation of natural, equal, civil, and political rights, reduced the most cunning of the lower orders to practice fraud . . . And why? because the rich and poor were separated into bands of tyrants and slaves, and the retaliation of slaves is always terrible. In short, every sacred feeling, moral and divine, has been

140

obliterated, and the dignity of man sullied, by a system of policy and jurisprudence as repugnant to reason, as at variance with humanity.245 Fenwick illustrates the difference between the degenerate slave and the savage in contrasting Clement with Sibella, placing on opposing pages their different understandings of their own secret acts of rebellion against Valmont. When Clement writes to Murden of having sacralized his union with Sibella, he gloats over what he has been able to do: it was in secret to receive Sibella into my arms, . . . . It was to outplot Mr. Valmont. To enjoy a glorious though secret triumph over this rival, this chosen, this elected of Mr. Valmonts favour [i.e., the man to whom, he imagines, Sibella will be given in marriage]. (130) Clements sophisticated taste makes him enjoy secretly usurping power over Valmont and another, nameless aristocratic pretender to Sibellas hand: for him secrecy offers the secret pleasure of retaliation. The ferocity of the savage is, Wollstonecraft says, distinct in nature from that of the degenerate slaves of tyrants (231). When Sibella invites Clement to Come to [her] apartments from which he shall go the transported confiding husband, she does so as a way of abjuring Clement to cease to witness Valmonts power: Rivals in Sibellas love! Oh, no! . . . But force, you say. Mr. Valmonts power. Ah, Clement, Clement, turn your thoughts back, and find its impotence. (131)

141

Sibella dubbed throughout the novel, wild (131), romantic (195), and enthusiastic (140), a genuinely romantic unsophisticated woman like Wollstonecraft herself (Letters to Imlay 388) does not use secrecy for revenge, as does the slave Clement, but rather simply to render tyranny impotent. What would constitute a sign that secrecy is being enacted differently, for the sake of virtuous rebellion, than it is typically enacted by aristocrats who hypocritically ignore their own laws, or by their slaves, victims of a tyrannical system who, like Clement, want vengeance? In other words, what would adequately distinguish Sibellas sacred principle from Clements secret vice? One way to make such a distinction is to find or create a community of virtuous witnesses. Murden and Caroline are Sibellas. All of the complaining that recent biographers have found in Wollstonecrafts Letters to Imlay, and her arrogance in which she upbraids him for not behaving rationally, like herself, must be reread, I believe, as an attempt to reform Imlay into a virtuous witness, a Murden: I am stunned! Your late conduct [infidelity] still appears to me a frightful dream. Ah! ask yourself if you have not condescended to employ a little address, I could almost say cunning, unworthy of you? Principles are sacred things . . . . I know that your mind, your heart, and your principles of action, are all superior to your present conduct. You do, you must, respect me and you will be sorry to forfeit my esteem. (436)

142

Wollstonecraft needs only a community of two to make her union last, but she must exorcize the secrecy (the address, I could almost say cunning) that Imlay employs in his practice of aristocratic marriage. Godwin believes that he can find or perhaps, like Wollstonecraft, create, a fit audience though few in publishing his Romantic biography. Like Murden, these fit readers would interpret Sibellas and Wollstonecrafts pregnancies as signs of the sacredness of their connections to Clement and Imlay, not as signs of illegitimacy and vice. Sibellas unborn baby miscarries the moment she discovers Clements treachery. Wollstonecraft describes her daughter as a sacred sign of her union with Imlay most movingly in Letter 24: I have been playing and laughing with the little girl so long, that I cannot take up my pen to address you without emotion. Pressing her to my bosom, she looked so like you . . . every nerve seemed to vibrate to the touch, and I began to think that there was something in the assertion of man and wife being one for you seemed to pervade my whole frame, quickening the beat of my heart, and lending me the sympathetic tears you excited. (388) Children incarnate the sacred pledge of these unions, making them more real and binding than the public enactment of a ceremony that is most often enacted insincerely. But children can be illegitimate, and so, as a sign, they are still ambiguous. The second way to demonstrate the sacredness of a secret union is to refuse to relinquish it under any circumstances, to incarnate it, that is, in ones own body. Sibella sees herself as incorporate with Clement (103, 128), and so, when she finds that he has violated their sacred vow, she

143

becomes incorporeal. Miss Valmont! exclaimed Murden. Give me not a name cried Sibella. I own none! she says, since she gave up Valmont upon marrying Clement, but has not been given his name, because of his treachery. What am I? a shadow! A dream! (356). Sibella quickly becomes as incorporeal as she imagines herself to be by dying. In tearing myself from you, Wollstonecraft writes to Imlay, it is my own heart I pierce (437). Wollstonecrafts suicide note for her second attempt insists that she is the victim of your [Imlays] deviation from rectitude (431) and it is as if, in anger, she were murdering him as much as killing herself, suggesting again what she says even in her final letter to him of farewell, that [t]he sentiment in me is still sacred (438). Whatever else it is, suicide over the loss of Imlay certainly is an act testifying to Wollstonecrafts belief that they were joined forever by their secret union, rather than that she merely slept with him for pleasure. Murden and Sibella have decided that death only can overcome any breach in a sacred vow of love, so that, when Sibella sees Murden after discovering Clements treachery, she cries, Do you reproach me with living? (356). Most depressing about this novel is its suggestion that this community of the virtuous, for whom performatives are binding, can only exist as dead: at the end of the novel, Sibella and Murden are entombed together (359). Why? It will take the whole of the next section to provide one answer to this question. Melancholia and Truth The Lockean epistemology upon which radical liberal political theorists of the eighteenth century base their notions of reform and progress tends, as has been shown in Chapter 1, to rewrite community as absolute communion: people only really understand each other when speaking, Locke says, if they have identical ideas in mind. While belief that ideas can be taken

144

in isolation from the words used to express them, and thus from habitual social interactions, sustains the possibility of political critique, such a belief does in fact express a desire to escape, as Cavell points out. [T]he gap between mind and world, he says, is closed . . . in the appreciation and acceptance of particular human forms of life, human convention. This implies that the sense of gap originates in an attempt, or wish, to escape (to remain a stranger to, alienated from) those shared forms of life . . . . 246 The gap between mind and world that Cavell discusses is the one delineated in this chapter: the distinction between word and intention is the very gap that is posited upon the failure or immodality of performatives that betokens political corruption. One reason for desiring such an estrangement is moral or intellectual heroism, as Cavell calls it, insofar as the refusal of convention is based on its corruption. But, as Fenwicks image of the tomb suggests, such alienation has its costs. That the epistemology underlying eighteenth-century political radicalism requires, as has been delineated in Chapter 1, identity and alienation, is visible in Godwins Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Wollstonecrafts Letters to Imlay. Godwin adopted the basic tenets of associationist psychology, and, like Locke in his political treatises, used those tenets to justify democracy. In his perfect political system, the power of National Assemblies would be limited because A multitude of men after all our ingenuity [in devising their modes of interaction] will still remain no more than a multitude of men. Nothing can intellectually unite them short of equal capacity and identical perception. So long as the varieties of mind shall remain,

145

the force of society can be no otherwise, than by one man [or a majority of men] . . . taking the lead of the rest. . . . All government corresponds in a certain degree to what the Greeks denominated a tyranny. . . . [I]n despotic countries mind is depressed by a uniform usurpation; while in republics it preserves a greater portion of its activity . . . .247 And again: The ideas, the associations and the circumstances of each man are properly his own; and it is a pernicious system that would lead us to require all men, however different in their circumstances, to act in many of the common affairs of life by a precise general rule. . . . The proper method for hastening the decay of error, is not, by brute force, . . . to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself. (3.450) And yet, like Locke, Godwin is also tripped up by the notion that effective communication only occurs when people have the same ideas in mind. While for Godwin the least tyrannical government is one that best preserves initiatives undertaken by the endless variety of mind, he does, like Locke, posit an ultimate end to variety and thus, as in Houyhnhnm society tyranny by mind itself: The objectors of the last chapter were partly in the right when they spoke of the endless variety of mind. It would be absurd to say [as a result] that we are not capable of truth, of evidence and

146

agreement. In these respects, so far as mind is in a state of improvement, we are progressively coming nearer to each other. . . . [B]y the doctrine of progressive improvement, we shall always be erroneous, though we shall every day become less erroneous. (3.450) For Godwin as for Locke, truth is irresistible,248 so that every mind which holds it in view is forced to consent to it, and agree completely with all other consenting minds. The only way that Godwin preserves differences among minds is by postulating that progress toward rational thinking will never be complete. In the radically utopian communities imagined by progress in mutual understanding posited by Lockes epistemology and, at moments, Godwins Political Justice, communication is envisioned as absolute communion. In his society, Godwin insists, performatives will not be enforced by community sanctions. Instead, (outer) force will be replaced by (inner) conviction: the sheer use of evidence will replace persuasion, rhetoric, oratory, attention to (literary) form (3.472-3, 307) -- all of the mechanisms by which the diversity of auditors or readers are taken into account. For words to force identical convictions, for them to represent ideas that are identical in no matter how many minds is, in effect, for them to become transubstantiated into immutable things. That is, imagining this radically utopian society in which agreement between individuals comes from thinking for themselves requires that the meaning of words be secured, once and for all, by correspondence to some actually existing thing rather than continually generated over again and anew through the play of social relations (language games). Indelibly tied to the ideas they represent, words must, in short, be sacred.

147

Again such a view is necessarily tied to reform. For one thing, finding the true meaning of a word is a means for critiquing corrupt social practices. For another, if the society that banters words about is corrupt, one can only put faith in the words themselves. The society of two into which Wollstonecraft entered, believing it to be as virtuous as Sibella and Murdens, turned out to be corrupt, as became more and more visible to her during the course of writing her letters to Imlay. Imlays performative I do may have taken physical rather than linguistic form. As Godwin says in a note to the Letters, Imlay and Wollstonecraft met at the barrier, a tollgate in the city walls of Paris, and Fanny, the daughter they conceived, is called in Wollstonecrafts letters the barrier girl (370). During one of their many separations for the sake allegedly of Imlays business, Wollstonecraft insists that he come back to her, but not in any socially conventional way. Wollstonecraft doesnt want a husband and father bound by duty. Writing to him after, as Wollstonecraft puts it, many days browned by care (376) she says, bring back to me your barrier-face (389). One can imagine the completely loving face he presented to her at the rendezvous constituting the early part of their courtship. This was the physical token like the words I do that for Wollstonecraft ratified the sacred nature of this affair of the heart (Godwin, Memoirs 240). To take a face for a word is to regress back to the moment of gathering passion from a mothers eye, when the form of communication is a mothers loving gaze. Melancholia consists in a refusal to give up that loving symbiosis even when the mother (or love-object) is gone, preferring instead to join the lost beloved in the grave: the nuptials of suicide, as Julia Kristeva puts it.249 Before she met Imlay, Wollstonecraft had bouts with depression. Godwin in his Memoirs describes Wollstonecrafts saturnine temper (240), her melancholy (243 n. f), as

148

coming from the accumulated mortifications of a childhood disturbed by an alcoholic father and abused mother, as well as the loss of both her mother and her dearest friend Fanny Blood when she was a young adult (241). Her sacred engagement with Imlay, Godwin says, lifted the depression of her spirits (240, 242), and Wollstonecraft says directly to Imlay, in a letter, that his love had helped her to abandon the most melancholy views of life and then asks him, Why have you so soon dissolved the charm? (397). I would argue that, using Imlay as a charm, Wollstonecraft had transferred the desire to be gazed at by a loving mothers face from her dead mother to Imlay, in effect reincarnating her mother in Imlay.250 For one thing, her letters often present the fantasy that she and Imlay are one flesh, as is a mother with a child, and it is in fact when she holds her own daughter Fanny in her arms that she think[s] that there [is] something in the assertion of man and wife being one (388): mother-daughter symbiosis evokes for her the sacred nature of her union with Imlay. The images in her letters of separating from Imlay involve being cut or stabbed by a knife or spear, also suggesting that, to her, they are one flesh as are, in the beginning, mother and child: Uniting myself to you, your tenderness seemed to make me amends for all my former misfortunes. On this tenderness and affection with what confidence did I rest! but I leaned on a spear, that has pierced me to the heart.251 The most obvious clue that Wollstonecraft substitutes Imlay for her mother -- the being with whom she was one flesh -- comes from the fact of her attempting suicide when he leaves her. They are one flesh to Wollstonecraft if, in killing herself, she is also at the same time angrily killing this man who has, in her own words, deserted her and his child (402).

149

That Wollstonecraft could be fantasmatically killing Imlay in killing herself is suggested by Freuds notion that the melancholic incorporates the lost love object, intoned most famously in his analysis of the hatred motivating suicide as not really hatred of the self but of the other, internalized as the self: Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego.252 In fact, Wollstonecrafts letters beautifully describe depression in its modern form, as delineated during Wollstonecrafts time by John Haslams Observations on Insanity and, in ours, by Freud and most recently William Styron. Of the pain that Imlay has caused her, she says, There are wounds that can never be healed, evoking Freuds image of melancholia as an open wound (). Wollstonecrafts letters to Imlay also recount her agony over being unable to sleep, and experiencing the pain of a mental storm, as Styron calls it:253 To tell you truth, I never suffered in my life so much from depression of spirits from despair. I do not sleep or, if I close my eyes, it is to have the most terrifying dreams, in which I often meet you with different casts of countenance. (413) I lie awake, till thinking almost drives me to the brink of madness . . . . (414) And finally, right before her second suicide attempt, she writes: I could encounter a thousand deaths, rather than a night like the last . . . (431) Perhaps the most eloquent and lyrical description of depression ever written appears in a letter to Imlay while she is waiting for the ship to set sail from Hull which refers so clearly to both her

150

physical and her mental state: This is the fifth dreary day I have been imprisoned by the wind, . . . unable to banish the remembrances that sadden my heart (414). This becoming physical of mental events, despair becoming wind, is a sign of psychosis, and one sign of Wollstonecrafts incipient melancholy, even before she returns to London from Paris and attempts suicide, is the hallucinatory quality of the language in her letters, the way that she begins to have a sense of her words to Imlay as physical things uniting them sacred things. As she sinks further into a melancholy mood from Imlays absences, she imagines his words as having the power to kill her: If certain things [e.g., wealth, pleasure] are more necessary to you than [I am] search for them Say but one word, and you shall never hear of me more (397). The word is lethal: shes not telling Imlay that he will not hear from her anymore, but that he will not hear of her anymore, despite the friends they share in Paris and London. She says God bless you at the end of almost every letter to Imlay despite her antipathy to any system of religion (Godwin, Memoirs 215). Todd reads the gesture as ironic, a curse (), but Wollstonecraft makes clear in an early letter that she sees it rather as the equivalent of physical action, kissing: But, good-night! God bless you! Sterne says, that is equal to a kiss . . . . (370). This word-kiss provides a transfer of sentiment from one body to the other: God bless you, my love; do not shut your heart against a return of tenderness; and, as I now in fancy cling to you, be more than ever my support. Feel but as affectionate when you read this letter, as I did writing it, and you will make happy your **** (378). Wollstonecraft ends the letter shortly preceding her first suicide attempt, and another, which seems to presage a third,254 with

151

God bless you, which could be a curse but could also attest to her belief that her words join them physically, just as she continues to imagine that they are one flesh. In reading the Letters to Imlay, then, we confront both personal pathology (Wollstonecrafts fall into suicidal depression) and political rectitude. We confront two kinds of sacred secrets. First, Wollstonecrafts attempts at suicide testify that she would rather die than allow her own and Imlays secret I do to mean something other than their eternal connection. It seems to me, she says, that my conduct has always been governed by the strictest principles of justice and truth, she says (435); and the rectitude of my heart in adhering to those principles has made me above vulgar precautions such as legal marriage (432). For Wollstonecraft, aristocracy and fanaticism (411) cannot adequately ground society. What bests those two kinds of social glue are the sacred emotions (419), such as those she feels for Imlay, that are the sacred foundation of principle and affection (438). Since she feels her connection with Imlay to be a political enactment, a living testament to her faith that a virtuous society can exist, the horror she feels upon discovery of a breach of confidence his infidelities is of a kind that snaps every social tie (421). Here the sacred secret is a steadfast adherence to the performative truth of ones words secret or private in the sense of existing extraneously to the corrupt society in which it is performed, that extraneousness being demonstrated by the very fact that the bond it enacts will be maintained even to the death. But politically motivated rectitude has a private side. There is another aspect to the secretive nature of it, as was suggested by Cavells statement above which connects intellectual heroism with the desire to escape. Right after her first suicide attempt, upon arriving in Hull and waiting to sail to Norway, she writes:

152

I have looked at the sea, and at my child, hardly daring to own to myself the secret wish, that it might become our tomb; and that the heart, still so alive to anguish, might there be quieted by death. (408) North-bound ships often did sink, so she is hoping here not for suicide255 but accidental death, perhaps wishing that Fanny would join her so that she wouldnt have to worry about having abandoned the child clearly her uppermost concern in her letters before and after each suicide attempt (400, 401, 418, 421, 430). But Wollstonecrafts secret wish to become an entombed mother and daughter fuels her more actively suicidal desires. The sense of gap between self and convention, Cavell says, once again, originates in an attempt, or wish, to escape (to remain a stranger to, alienated from) those shared forms of life, to give up the responsibility of their maintenance. (109) One reason for alienation, for enacting bonds secretly, is political critique, as explored above. Another reason is escapism, the desire to give up the responsibility of maintaining shared forms of life, the work of communication, that is, necessitated by diversity: rhetoric, negotiation, the continual positing and testing of forms of authority -- in short, engagement in language games and social activity. That desire to give up is fed by the epistemological notion that two people can think identically, that communication can indeed become absolute communion. This notion is melancholy insofar as absolute communion is really only imaginable in death: Sibella and Murden entombed together; Fanny, Imlay, Wollstonecraft immersed in the sea. The melancholic desire to be one with other human beings is both fueled and activated by the

153

politically radical epistemology that sustains Lockes and Godwins notions of democracy: the belief that cultural critique can operate by sacramentally transforming words into things.256 Open Secrets Luckily for us, and for Wollstonecraft, radical political action does not depend for its efficacy on an epistemology that reifies truth into a sacred thing that exists physically -- outside of any culture, any language. That is, there is a public, anti-melancholic way to enact the difference between hypocritical defiance of conventions and virtuous rebellion against corruption. The moment when Murden falls in love with Sibella is the moment when she articulates the impotence of tyranny: I am not weak enough to descend to artifice. Did I think it right to [leave Valmont castle,] I should go openly. Then might Mr. Valmont try his opposing strength. But he would find that I could leap, swim, or dive; and that moats and walls are feeble barriers to a detemined will. (104) Godwins Memoirs present Wollstonecrafts similar strategy of always go[ing] openly in her affairs: Mary made no secret of the nature of her connection with Mr. Imlay . . . . She was of too proud and generous a nature to stoop to hypocrisy. . . . [Many respectable people, ] however, in spite of all that could be said, persisted in shutting their eyes, and pretending they took her for a married woman. . . . (260)

154

Although she called herself Mrs. Imlay indeed, feeling herself to be sacredly united to Imlay Wollstonecraft apparently made it clear to London society that she and Imlay had never been formally married: [S]he was, and constantly professed herself to be, . . . an unmarried mother . . . . Her scrupulous explicitness as to the nature of her situation, surely sufficed to make the name she bore perfectly immaterial (261). Godwins Memoirs describe Wollstonecraft performing an open secret. Behaving secretly in the sense of having conducted a clandestine marriage with Imlay, but opening up the secret by insisting that she has not been formally, publicly married at all, Wollstonecraft behaves as does the man described by Austin who does not have the authority to christen the ship but does so anyway, and does so using the proper name, the name with which the ship will really be christened by legitimate authorities. Austin says of this action, (1) that the ship was not thereby named; (and Wollstonecraft is indeed, legally, able to give up the name of Imlay at will), and (2) that it is an infernal shame. It is an infernal shame to live in a society in which legitimate performatives cannot be enacted by anyone who knows a true name, a sacred truth. Through contradictory performances, using Imlays name but calling herself an unmarried mother, Wollstonecraft attests to the unconventionality and sacredness of their engagement. It is this example that, Godwin hopes, will conduce to improvement of character and public welfare (204). Moreover Godwin himself performs the open secret by publishing his Memoirs and Wollstonecrafts Letters to Imlay. A virtuous readership would interpret her secrets as sacred; another kind as vicious and profane. Godwin risks scandal in

155

hopes that he can reform secrecy as a social and political practice which would of course bring into existence the society of equals who coexist rationally, as is described in Godwins Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, as is visible in Godwins recipe given there for sociopolitical reform: [I]t is the duty of individuals to publish truth without diffidence or reserve . . . [T]ruth must be told at whatever expence. . . . In this interesting period, in which mind shall arrive as it were at the true crisis of its story, there are high duties incumbent upon every branch of the community. . . . [T]hose cultivated and powerful minds [leading reform] . . . . should be urged to tell the whole truth without disguise. (3.468-469) In this society, because no strategems for inequality need to be concealed (kept secret, in the aristocratic sense of the word), equality forges private (secret, in the virtuous sense of the word), sacred ties. Fenwicks Secresy is unsure, it seems, that a sacred society could exist, except in the tomb, unlike Godwin and Wollstonecraft who attempt to bring that society into existence by enacting contradictory performatives that look psychologically like genius, arrogance, and social ineptitude. This would be a radically utopian society, in which sacred openness definitively replaces infernal shame. Romantic Biography: Experience Benjamin DeMott has recently lamented the lack of psychological depth in Tom Wolfes journalistic novels such as Bonfire of the Vanities.257 Round characters can be flattened in

156

novels for many reasons (see Lynch, note 10), but one reason is that, in Wolfes novels, conventional forms only inspire and deflate vanities, meeting neither failure to conform nor reasoned resistance. If political corruption provides a context for psychological depth -- if we posit intentions as separate from words when words dont perform as they should -- it is also the case that only resistance to corrupt forms gives us intentions lurking below the surface of language. In Romantic biography, deep psychology secures the hope of radical reform. More than that, resistance gives us deep souls. Being at odds with the language one speaks is certainly a rhetorical predicament, but it is also simultaneously a psychological one. The pain of Wollstonecrafts suffering, as revealed in her Letters to Imlay, shows that this depth is much more than a mere rhetorical device used in Romantic biography for the sake of proposing political reforms. The radical epistemology within which Wollstonecraft and Godwin envisioned political progress offers melancholia as a temptation insofar as it proposes that one can in fact escape social forms, when really the only way to do so is through death. Given this epistemological framework, suicide is the most cogent rejection of corrupt cultural forms. But Wollstonecraft ultimately engages in another kind of radical political action: the contradictory performative. I hope to have shown here that the quest for discovery of ones own deepest soul is not anti- (nor even a-) political if, in doing so, one attempts to work through rather than around conventional forms, discovering self in open secrets, allowing the sacred to mingle with the earthly, the private with the public. If Wollstonecrafts use of contradictory performatives coincides with the lifting of her depression, it also indicates that she has moved out of Lockes epistemology into another one. Ordinary language philosophy and psychoanalysis are the ultimate fulfillment and ultimate

157

critique of empirical philosophy: neither one sees cultural mediation as escapable through the referential use of language. In other words, both show that empirical philosophy was wrong to think that one could escape social bonds by pinning the meaning of words directly onto things, by seeing linguistic performances as physical incarnations. Lacan says that the unconscious is structured like a language because all desire makes use of form to secure its objects, and all forms have a social history, as does language. The secrets of the unconscious, in other words, are visible in discursive events (if not necessarily rational ones): they have a body, and it is a linguistic one. I am of course here thinking of free association as the major instrument for psychoanalysts and analysands of uncovering unconscious wishes. But it is also the case that a lot of what gets done in any analytic session is ordinary language philosophy as practiced by J. L. Austin, defined by Cavell as sounding to their depths the criteria of words. Analyst and patient uncover the words interpersonal, community relations, as a way of discovering why the patient selected that particular word at that moment: in order to reveal what? To the extent that analyst and patient do manage to perform secrets openly, they constitute an ideal political community of at least two.

158

Conclusion Developing Taste, Standing Apart Several strands of argument traverse this book: one insists that Enlightenment feminist writings give us greater access to historical reality than any other because they are biased in favor of the oppressed rather than in spite of that bias. The other is that the various aesthetic ideals proposed by these writers, whether they be historical or literary, are not quietist nor evasive of linguistic predicaments they do not try to hide the fact of mediation, nor insist upon themselves as a substitute for political action. The so-called aesthetic ideology258 is a misleading reduction insofar as it proposes THE aesthetic: there are multiple aesthetics, multiple ideologies, some necessary in an inequitable world. The reduction that obscures these other aesthetics and ideologies is only possible when women writers are excluded from view. A third is that these women writers help us understand how to mean what you say in an inequitable society. Part of what is required to accomplish this task is critical distance. Passionate Disinterestedness The kinds of critical distance described in this book as enacted by Enlightenment feminists fit into Jurgen Habermass understanding of what is necessary for completing the task of modernity.259 That may seem odd given that my readings of Enlightenment feminists subscribe to objectivity in the post-positivist understanding of it as best explained by Satya P. Mohanty: for Mohanty, objectivity is determinable through an analysis of different kinds of bias.260 But the feminists whose work I have described in this book clearly themselves subscribe to a universal principle of ethics: radical equality. Though bias as defined by Mohanty and Lukcs therefore go far toward explaining their method of analysis, then, they fit better into

159

a Habermasian view of Enlightenment thinking as explained and expanded upon by Amanda Anderson: individuals can and should, Anderson says, assign to themselves the task of rigorous impartiality in acting in the name of the right [. . . . The Enlightenment project demands] stringent self-reflexivity and post-conventionality [. . . . ,] the aspiration to impartiality, the constant attempt to break free of the horizon(s) of ones [own particular] ethical life, and the dedication to the right over the good. (177) The difference between right and good here is the difference between a principle of equity and some claimed substantive good. It is precisely such a good that Macaulay resists, as seen in Chapter 2 above, when she insists upon the principle of independence of mind, a heuristic device, rather than chastity, a substantive good as well as a particular cultural ideal insofar is it a thing in which someone holds an interest in making ethical judgments about Charles I and women who are her contemporaries. It is precisely such a good that Hays, Wollstonecraft, Shelley, Fenwick, and Opie refuse in substituting one kind of romance for another in their novels: they substitute love of virtue for love of particular people. Virtue can of course be defined as a set of culturally specific positivities or substances. But for all the women writers discussed in this book, virtue is the strength to advocate for and oneself participate in social justice. Participating in an as yet unachieved social justice sounds like Immanuel Kants formula for moral action, articulated in the Groundwork of a Metaphysic for Morals (1785), in which one acts as if living in a completely rational kingdom of ends, a world in which all behave morally. Anderson distinguishes Habermass ideal of virtue from Kants by pointing out that, for Kant,

160

moral duty is often disagreeable insofar as desire often contravenes duty. Macaulay and Barbauld are closer to Habermas, or Andersons, ideal of virtue, a shared dedication to principled democratic procedure (178). It is Edmund Burke who in Reflections on the Revolution in France insists that one can only love figureheads, monarchs, queens, and not democratic principles, and it is on that basis that he offers as a conservative fantasy the notion that revolution, once started as it was in France, will unleash interminable violence, the continuous oscillation of overthrow and usurpation. Anderson argues for peoples passionate investment in democratic procedure: she calls it aspiration. A concrete instance of this aspiration to or passion for virtue, Anderson says, is to be found in demonstrations against the invasions in Iraq that recently took place across U.S. college campuses, among other places. According to the writings analyzed above, you love virtue as passionately as you love your own freedom not simply because freedom is intrinsically lovable (as it is for Kant) but for the pleasure virtue gives you. Macaulay and Barbauld clearly articulate that pleasure comes from enacting ones belief in social equity, a pleasure deeper, they insist, than the sensual pleasure offered by gains ill-gotten in an inequitable structure. Barbaulds assault on a particular kind of sensuality can be used to argue that the repressed which psychoanalysis seeks to recover is passion suffering arising from trauma inflicted upon those made passive by inequitable law or its exception by an absolute potentate (Empire). If Freud named such inequity sexuality, Barbauld argues, it is only because we are still titillated by absolutist power, be it that of despotism or exceptionalism. Sexualizing is a defense Freud didnt name, one that arguably enabled as much as it undermined psychoanalytic theory in his hands. Agreeing with her opponent Anna Barbauld

161

(see chapter 3 above), Mary Wollstonecraft identifies sexualization as a defense in her second Vindication: [W]armly as I admire the genius of [Rousseau], whose opinions I shall often have occasion to cite, indignation always takes place of admiration . . . when I read his voluptuous reveries[. . . .] Rousseau declares that a woman should never, for a moment, feel herself independent, that she should be [. . .] made a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire [. . . .] What nonsense! When will a great man arise with sufficient strength of mind to puff away the fumes which pride and sensuality have thus spread over the subject!261 Such passages contribute to Wollstonecraft being read as a virtue-bound rationalist in our time and as a hypocrite in her own, but attacks on masculinist sensuality are not prudery. As seen above, Barbauld equates sadomasochistic sexuality with feudal structures, arguing that there is a greater joy than jouissance, the orgasmic pleasure accompanying pain, hate, and revenge. Though for Barbauld, joy grounded in equality may not involve sex, the works discussed in this book describe queer communities and individual passions in which sexual love is both implicitly and explicitly expressed. But to return to discussing the specific alternative to psychoanalysis offered by Enlightenment feminisms, if sexualization in Freud is a defense, as it clearly is for Rousseau in Wollstonecrafts view, a defense against what? In this Enlightenment-feminist psychoanalytic account, being traumatized by inequity gives rise to what Hays calls the tyranny of the passions (Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney 221). Sexualization would be a defense against feeling passion as the response to being passionated, or rendered passive, in asymmetrical power relationships. According to Andr

162

Green, Jacques Lacan completely repudiates the place of affect in psychoanalytic theory.262 That Lacan also completely excludes the mother from his version of the mirror stage263 points to the connection made between affect and the pre-Oedipal mother, both in Ernest Joness notion of the Urangst and Kristevas notion of abjection.264 Whereas for Freud and Lacan libido is repressed in order to sustain the pleasure principle,265 the Enlightenment feminists discussed in this book would argue that deep anguish is repressed in order to sustain the inequality principle, an argument with which Kristeva would agree though she may see symbolic asymmetries of power as ineradicable. But just as Kristeva sees transcendence as possible through love,266 for these Enlightenment feminists, love differs from the tyranny of the passions that we call neurosis or psychosis and that Enlightenment thinkers called fanaticism. The post-classical psychoanalysts discussed by Nikolaas Treurniet see Freud as having misunderstood how the pre-Oedipal functions in psychoanalysis (see note 195). Unlike Freud, they realize that it is not just libido-cathected signifiers which pass between people in a relationship but also affect-laden meanings, transitional objects co-authored in a holding environment267 or a community that is queer insofar as circulation within it is playful and safe. What occurs for these analysts in the holding environment that constitutes the psychoanalytic situation is not just transference-neurosis but love. The analyst loves the analysand, but not as an object as a subject. The best interpretation of analytic neutrality is not withholding of gratification but a leveling of analyst and analysand that empowers the latter to become a subject of history. Adam Phillips speaks of restoring to the analysand access to his or her own talents; Nikolaas Treurniets patients correct his metapsychology and know they are doing it for posterity; Evelyne Schwaber describes this kind of equality as a way of listening that allows the

163

analysand to create his or her own hermeneutic rather than subjecting him or herself to the analysts.268 In the analytic scene as well as in a world trying to become radically egalitarian, love is directed away from objects toward: 1) a principle, radical equality; 2) a goal, creating a society in which saying what one feels is always practical, always judicious no longer queer in the pejorative sense; and 3) a means for achieving that society. The latter, the means for achieving radical equality, is the power to make historical meaning: it is virtue. Virtue for these Enlightenment feminists means passionate adherence to the principle of equality. Since these writers are themselves oppressed, virtue includes as its definition the strength necessary for shifting the place from which they enunciate, for hefting oneself up from objecthood into the position of subject of history. Macaulay speaks to Burke and others from the position of someone who has already won, though she is not in that position: you must prove, she demands, your right to contradict my claims (see p. 26 above). The philosophical romance does the same. Partly it does so thematically, in making its main characters capable of wedding others to living with them in an equitable community (see p. 56 above). The oppressed women, the victims who are the novels central characters, can make effective, valid (i.e. governmental) decrees. But if virtue offers pleasure in ones own strength, as this book demonstrates, it also has psychic costs in an unequal world. Taking up the subject position in a society that refuses it to you sometimes requires drastic means for making meanings true: for women, it can require fatal attraction (chapter 4) or suicide (chapter 5). How can one speak on behalf of the object of oppression and simultaneously be the object? Speaking as a potent(ial) victim would seem to be impossible. Yet these writers do it. They straddle a contradiction in their lives and their writings

164

by offering contradictory endings. In one, they create history by committing suicide in order to protest against dying intestate. In the other they live and affect history. These effects can only be achieved if we develop taste. Taste In Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft accuses Edmund Burke of set[ting] up a spurious, sensual beauty, under the specious form of natural feelings.269 (121). Wollstonecraft attacks that kind of taste driving cultivation of the sublime and picturesque in the gardens of grand estates comprised of enclosed commons and protected by the Black Act which made usage by the poor a capital offense. She blames taste, in part, for these predations: The rich man builds a house, art and taste give it the highest finish. His gardens are planted, and the trees grow to recreate the fancy of the planter, though the temperature of the climate may rather force him to avoid the dangerous damps they exhale, than seek the umbrageous retreat. Every thing on the estate is cherished but man;yet, to contribute to the happiness of man, is the most sublime of all enjoyments. But if, instead of sweeping pleasure-grounds, obelisks, temples, and elegant cottages, as objects for the eye, the heart was allowed to beat true to nature, decent farms would be scattered over the estate, and plenty would smile around. (145) A depraved taste enjoys the very signs of political oppression, unusable land cultivated only to be seen by a despotic lord: Returning once from a despotic country to a part of England well cultivated, but not very picturesquewith what delight did I not observe the poor mans

165

garden!The homely palings and twining woodbine, with all the rustic contrivances of simple, unlettered taste, was a sight which relieved the eye that had wandered indignant from the stately palace to the pestiferous hovel, and turned from the awful contrast into itself to mourn the fate of man, and curse the arts of civilization! (147-148) Her heart does beat true to nature; she has an unlettered, what she in her letters to Imlay repeatedly calls an unsophisticated taste. She opposes natural taste to Burkes civilized, specious, sensuous, depraved taste, that touted by despots. And she even posits the possibility of a different sublime, one not based on the sadomasochistic relationsa viewer cowering in terror before a superior, threatening, and obfuscating powerspelled out in Burkes treatise on the sublime.270 In attacking Burke for canonizingher wordour forefathers (41), both their laws and their taste, she participates in an argument launched more recently by Walter Benjamin and John Berger. Laying out Benjamins argument in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Berger argues that reproducibility, prints of pictures for instance, give a specious aura to original works of artspecious insofar as art works no longer really serve as the holy relics they once did: Because works of art are reproducible, they can, theoretically, be used by anybody. Yet mostlyin art books, magazines, films or within gilt frames in living-roomsreproductions are still used to bolster the illusion that nothing has changed, that art, with its unique undiminished authority, justifies most other

166

forms of authority, that art makes inequality seem noble and hierarchies seem thrilling.271 This is precisely what Wollstonecraft here protests, and, with her, Barbauld, Fenwick, and Hays as shown earlier in this book: the aesthetic ideology that makes hierarchy thrilling. But these writers also know that contradicting these artistic ideals is incredibly difficult. It is not merely a matter of educating people, making poor people more civilized or sophisticated, but of re-educating the rich: The vulgar, and by this epithet I mean not only to describe a class of people, who, working to support the body, have not had time to cultivate their minds; but likewise those who, born in the lap of affluence, have never had their invention sharpened by necessity are, nine out of ten, the creatures of habit and impulse. (Wollstonecraft, Vindication 1 28). One cannot simply exhibit scenes of social oppression in novels or poems because the impulse of deriving pleasure from thrilling hierarchies will only be fed by these representations, not thwarted. One can see this argument in Wollstonecrafts discussion of novel-reading in the context of the evils of what she calls the infernal slave trade (128): Where is the dignity, the infallibility of sensibility, in the fair ladies, whom, if the voice of rumour is to be credited, the captive negroes curse in all the agony of bodily pain, for the unheard of tortures they invent? It is probable that some of them, after the sight of a flagellation, compose their ruffled spirits and exercise their tender feelings by the perusal of the last imported novel.How true these tears are to nature, I leave you to determine. (111)

167

And most important for the argument in this book, she blames their unnatural feelings directly on aesthetics. The passage continues immediately: But these ladies may have read your Enquiry concerning the origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and, convinced by your arguments, may have laboured to be pretty, by counterfeiting weakness. (111-112) Wollstonecraft was the first in a series of feminists to attack Burke for his gendering of aesthetics.272 Though popular eighteenth-century novels would seem to instill the desire to reform social evil, they do not. For the aesthetic to address social inertia, taste must change. The political potential of various aesthetics is their capacity to reform our very desires, to make hierarchies no longer thrilling, sexually or otherwise. Insofar as hierarchies are thrillingeven or especially intellectual onesthe aura that ensconces artistic productions obscures for us any encounter with their historicity (Berger 31, 33). THE aesthetic that promotes an obscurantist ideology is therefore staked, not in canonical works, but in canonizing modes of reading.273 Frustration at readers who construct an aura around particularly literary works and then attack them for being oracular motivates Susan Wolfsons Formal Charges, a book that provides historical readings of formal problems.274 Jeanette Winterson theorizes the process in her book Art Objects, the latter functioning in her title as both noun and verb: Canonising pictures is one way of killing them. . . . I do not want to argue here about great artists, I want to concentrate on true artists, major or minor, who are connected to the past and who themselves make a connection to the future.275

168

The aesthetic derived from canonizing may indeed promote an obscurantist ideology, but various counter-aesthetics open a door into past reality insofar as their proponents try to answer the question, what would the world have to be like for inequality to seem as ugly as it is morally repugnant? To me the works analyzed in this book are fascinating precisely because the devaluation of these aesthetic objects is indecipherably due to artistic or responsive ineptitude, undecidably their failure to please for bad reasons or refusal to gratify for good. If these works seem ugly to us, I would insist, they are more valuable than otherwise for understanding human history. Winterson agrees: [T]he process of art is a series of jolts, or perhaps I mean volts, for art is an extraordinarily faithful [historical] transmitter. Our job is to keep our receiving equipment in good working order. How? [. . .] Do I like this? is the question anyone should ask themselves at the moment of confrontation with the picture. But if yes, why yes? and if no, why no? The obvious direct emotional response is never simple, and ninetynine times out of a hundred, the yes or no has nothing at all to do with the picture in its own right. (13) More able to be self-reflexive and evaluative perhaps than a picture, the histories, novels, and poems I have examined justify their wayward aesthetic values and historicizing ambitions. The eighteenth-century feminists self-explanation includes an analysis of our own incapacity to understand her, its sources and springs in social inequities that still prevail.

169

Literature is one place where acknowledgment of the victim can be enacted, psychoanalysis the other. The genres of philosophical romance, and romantic biography discussed above do not only describe heroines who enact social equity, they themselves do so as artistic practice. Here acknowledgment, recognizing the victims subjective potency, comes from the case history: Jemimas, Lodores, Villiers, Emmas. Psychoanalysis is a fundamentally literary technique, as John Forrester maintains.276 The case history, like an effective analyst, traces out the truthful part of a victims emotions, the part trampled and ignored by things as they are. By actively publishing the history, philosophical romancers give the victim historical potency insofar as the case works toward a better future. In this writing and reading of cases lies the untapped potential of enlightenment thinking. For if (post)modernity involves seeing today as different from yesterday, enlightenment means allowing change to be effected now by the past. Like Wollstonecrafts The Wrongs of Woman, the case histories of Wollstonecraft, Hays, Macaulay, and Barbauld offer hints of possible outcomes. It remains for us to write their end.

170

Notes
1

Dror Wahrman, Introduction to Section 3, Sex and Sensibility, of Women, Gender and

Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott, Barbara Taylor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 136139, 137.
2

I discuss aesthetics especially in the books conclusion. Jrgen Habermas, Modernity An Incomplete Project, in Postmodernism, ed. Thomas

Docherty (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993), 98-109; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
4

Timothy J. Reiss, Revolution in Bounds: Wollstonecraft, Women, and Reason, and Frances

Ferguson, Wollstonecraft Our Contemporary, in Gender & Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 11-50, 51-62.
5

Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006). Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic

Books, [n.d.]).
7

Dianne Hunter, Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism: The Case of Anna O., Feminist

Studies 9.3 (1983): 465-488.

8

Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), 1-23, cited hereafter in the text. Juliet Mitchell, Destruction of Humanism and the Humanities, The Future Human

Conference, Prato, Italy, 20 July 2004.

10

Georg Lukcs, Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle, trans. John and Necke

Mander (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 25-26, cited hereafter in the text.

171

11

Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

Univ. Press, 1997), 247.

12

Evelyne Schwaber, Psychoanalytic Listening and Psychic Reality, International Review of

Psycho-Analysis 10 (1983): 379-392.

13

Thomas De Quincey, Casuistry of Duelling, in Uncollected Writings, 2 vols. (London: Swan

Sonnenschein, 1892), 2.91, quoted in James Chandler, England in 1819 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 295.
14

Romantic Studies, in Redrawing the Boundaries, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Giles Gunn (New

York: MLA, 1992), 100-129, 122.

15

Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, ed. Steven Marcus, trans. James

Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 36-42.

16

Freud though [femininity] an inherently pathological state (Robert Stoller, Presentations of

Gender [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985], 17.

17

In Terrors and Experts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), Adam Phillips calls

this process of subjectification recovering ones talents.

18

Nancy J. Chodorow, Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities (Lexington, KY: Univ. Press of

Kentucky, 1994), 29-31, 71.

19

Nikolaas Treurniet, On an Ethic of Psychoanalytic Technique, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 66

(1997): 596-627, 600, 606, 610, 620.

20

Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Berkeley: Univ. of

California Press, 1987).

172

21

Mary Wollstonecraft, Article 1. Letters on Education : with Observations on Religious and

Metaphysical Subjects. By Catharine Macaulay Graham, Analytical Review 8 (1790): 247254. Rpt. in Marilyn Butler, Janet Todd, eds., The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 vols. (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1989), 7.309-322, hereafter cited in the text by volume and page number.
22

Sally Alexander, Women, Class and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 1840s: Some

Reflections on the Writing of a Feminist History, History Workshop Journal 17 (Spring 1984): 125-149. Susan Eilenberg, Forget that I exist, London Review of Books (30 Nov. 2000): 12-14.
23

The best account of this ideology and its rise appears in Michael McKeon, The Origins of the

English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 212ff. An alternative definition of virtue occurs in the tradition of civic humanism, revealing the alliance of the ideology with political liberalism (J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 46-48. I would like to thank Kevin Gilmartin for helpful suggestions at an early stage of this project, and Laura Rosenthal for untiring perspicuity as well as heroic patience.
24

John Brewer notes Macaulays remarkable disagreement, on the question of history, with the

members of the radical opposition forming her circle (Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III [New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976], 261).
25

J. G. A. Pocock, Introduction, The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock

(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), 16.

173

26

Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, Introduction, Feminism as Critique (Minneapolis: Univ.

of Minnesota Press, 1988), 1-15, 9.

27

For a counterview to the one Im proposing here that allies the anti-hunting movement to

bourgeois values, see Donna Landry, The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking, and Equality in English Literature, 1671-1831 (New York: Palgrave, 2001),114-125.
28

Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 67, hereafter cited by page number.
29

What history needs, Dominic LaCapra says, is a revised notion of objectivity not in terms of a

perspectiveless view from a transcendental position of absolute mastery but in terms of the attempt to counteract inevitable (and at times thought-provoking or heuristically valuable) processes of projection to work viably through ones implication in the problems one investigates (History and Memory After Auschwitz [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1998], 206).
30

David Simpson, Situatedness, or Why We Keep Saying Where Were Coming From (Durham,

NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2002), 194.

31

J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 1967, trans. Donald

Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 349.

32

According to White, twentieth- and twenty-first-century historians sense of objectivity

requires them to enter sympathetically into the minds or consciousness of human agents long dead, all the while keeping the imagination . . . disciplined by its subordination to the rules of evidence (67). Both Mark Phillips and Jayne Lewis have gone far toward tracking the emergence of the sentimental method so crucial to eighteenth-century historiography (Jayne Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation [New York: Routledge, 1998], 122). For 174

Phillips, sentimental revisions [. . .] of historical writing (42) are a generic innovation (Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 [Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000],12-25). Lewis sees sentimental history as part of the campaign to gain a common sensible view of the past that would forge the imaginary sense of a coherent community subtending British nationalism (122). Relying on their work here, especially Lewiss insight as to how Mary [Queen of Scots] career as a sentimental heroine . . . . worked to produce an unprecedented sense of distinctly British . . . history (101), this chapter also focuses on the emergence during the eighteenth century of the notion of historical objectivity.
33

I quote from the title of a collection of essays edited by James Chandler, Arnold Davidson,

Harry Harootunian (Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion Across the Disciplines [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994).
34

David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. ed.

(Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 72; quoted in Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1998), 208, cited hereafter by page number.
35

J. B. Black, The Art of History: A Study of Four Great Historians of the Eighteenth Century

(New York: F. S. Crofts, 1926), 91; Phillips 29. See also Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 2; Steven Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event (Hanover, NH: Univ. Presses of New England, 1988), 2.

175

36

William Tytler, An Inquiry, Historical and Critical, Into the Evidence Against Mary Queen of

Scots, 4th ed., 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell, 1790), 17; cited hereafter by page number in the text.
37

Marilyn Butler, ed., Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (New York:

Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984).

38

Mark Philp, The Fragmented Ideology of Reform, in The French Revolution and British

Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 50-77, 59. Mulford discusses Joel Barlows 1792 poem The Conspiracy of Kings in relation to Burkes fears of Masonic conspiracy (Carla J. Mulford, Joel Barlow, Edmund Burke, and Fears of Masonic Conspiracy in 1792, in Secret Texts: The Literature of Secret Societies, ed. Marie Mulvey Roberts, Hugh Ormsby-Lennon [New York: AMS Press, 1995], 169-187). In the controversy over Mary Queen of Scots, Hume, Tytler, and Hays all use the word conspiracy, the former to designate Marys machinations (David Hume, The History of England, From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 6 vols. [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1879], iii.495498, iv.62-65), the latter two those of Elizabeth (Tytler i.60, 65, 67; Mary Hays, Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, 1803, 3 vols. [Philadelphia: Birch and Small, 1807], iii.152-154). Macaulays Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France (London: C. Dilly, 1790; rpt. Washington, DC: Woodstock Books, 1997), hereafter cited as Observations II to distinguish it from her earlier attack on Burke, may provide the first instance of the conspiracy theories formulated by radicals against Burkes paranoid account of the French Revolution since, in comparing Burke to Henry IV of Frances wicked conspiracy against the rights of men (Observations II 92) she

176

indeed insinuates, as Philp puts it, that the bloodshed in France is a result of the conspiracy of European states . . . (59).
39

Goodalls An Examination of the Letters Said to be Written by Mary, Queen of Scots, to

James, Earl of Bothwell: Shewing by Intrinsick and Extrinsick Evidence, That They Are Forgeries (Edinburgh: T. and W. Ruddimans, 1754) whitewashes Marys reputation. This story is recounted by Robert Chambers, Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1835), ii.453; quoted in Jayne Lewis, Mary Stuarts Fatal Box, in The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, ed. Paul J. Korshin (New York: AMS Press, 1996), 7.427-474, 450.
40

Fatal Box 452; The sorrow of seeing the Queen: Mary Queen of Scots and the British

History of Sensibility, 1707-1789, in Maximillian E. Novak, Anne Mellor, eds., Passionate Encounters in a Time of Sensibility (Newark, DE: Univ. of Deleware Press, 2000), 193-220, 208.
41

Lorraine Daston, Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe, in

Chandler, ed. (see note 24), 243-274. Presumptive evidence is an exception to this statement: in this case, a fact is presumed true if it is really the only bit of information that makes everything else comprehensible.
42

Frances Dolan, Ashes and the Archive: The London Fire of 1666, Partisanship, and Proof,

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.2 (2001): 379-408, 390.
43

Frulein Elisabeth Von R (in Studies in Hysteria, see note 1), 135-182, 156-7. Freuds On

Repression describes this operation in theoretical terms.

44

Roy Schafer, The Analytic Attitude (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 8-9.

177

45

Jerome Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.

Press, 2000), 208 note 5.

46

George Levine, Saving Disinterest: Aesthetics, Contingency, and Mixed Conditions, New

Literary History 32 (2001): 907-931, 910, 930 note 4.

47

Lynne E. Withey, Catharine Macaulay and the Uses of History: Ancient Rights,

Perfectionism, and Propaganda, Journal of British Studies 16.1 (1976): 59-83, 59.
48

Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian

Perfectionism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), 5.

49

Michel de Certeau articulates the question of situatedness this way: That the particularity of

the place where discourse is produced is relevant will be naturally more apparent where historiographical discourse treats matters that put the subject-producer of knowledge into question: the history of women, of blacks, of Jews, of cultural minorities, etc. . . . [F]rom the fact of the differentiation of the sexes, must one conclude that a woman produces a different historiography from that of a man? Of course I do not answer this question, but I do assert that this interrogation puts the place of the subject in question and requires a treatment of it unlike the epistemology that constructed the truth of the work on the foundation of the speakers irrelevance (Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985], 217-18, quoted in Joan Scott, The Evidence of Experience, in Chandler, ed. [see note 24], 363-387, 379, note 4). De Certeaus insight has had the misfortune of inciting what Spivak calls the critical piety of reciting a detailed description of the position from which one speaks, but here it serves as a useful analytic tool. For more on this issue, see Simpson (see note 21). 178

50

Catharine Macaulay, The History of England From the Accession of James I. to the Elevation

of the House of Hanover, 3rd ed., vol. 4, Charles I (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1791), iv.214.
51

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790 (New York: Penguin Classics,

1986), 169, 175.

52

Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revoultionary Life (New York: Columbia Univ. Press,

2000), 167.
53

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 1790 (Gainseville, FL: Scholars

Facsimiles, 1960), 27; hereafter, Wollstonecrafts Vindication of the Rights of Men will be cited as Vindication I; her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792, 2nd ed., ed. Carol H. Poston. [New York: Norton, 1988]) as Vindication II.
54

John Barrell discusses at length the role of imagination in the Revolution controversy, attempts

by loyalists and radicals alike to attribute imaginative distortion of reality to the other side (Imagining the Kings Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793-1796 [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000],1-45): reformers attributed to the government alarmism as a disorder of the imagination, a kind of hysteria by which every demand for political change was imagined as a threat to the king (44) i.e., as constructive treason (see also Don Lock, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin [Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980], 7686). In opposing reformers, however, loyalists after Burke never defend imagination: I can find no defender of Burke or opponent of Paine who could produce a positive use of imagination which did not call attention to those very aspects of the word which make it difficult to use in

179

political discourse except pejoratively (Barrell 26). That imagination is a near cousin of fanaticism may explain why.
55

William Robertson, William, The History of Scotland, During the Reigns of Queen Mary and

of King James VI, 1759, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. Bioren and T. L. Plowman, 1811), ii.189. Lewis analyzes this passage in great detail (Mary Queen of Scots [see note 23] 122).
56

Phillips extensively analyzes Humes construction of critical distance in his histories, and his

use of concepts of aesthetic distance in order to do so.

57

Catharine Macaulay, Observations on a Pamphlet Entitled Thoughts on the Present

Discontents (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1770), cited in the text as Observations I; Letters on Education. With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (London: C. Dilly, 1790).
58

Capricious is Macaulays word in Observations I 8; on Barbaulds rejection of a feudal,

Calvinistic God (see Laura Mandell, Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain [Lexington, KY: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1999], 135-137, and see chapter 3 below).
59

This presumption that human perfectibility is both necessary and possible makes her work

closer to Emersons and Thoreaus as described by Cavell (see note 38 above).

60

Devoney Looser, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820 (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000).

61

These are the effects of a linguistic performance that are not illocutionary, not allied to

content, as described by J. L. Austin in How To Do Things With Words, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). 180

62

I am grateful to Dr. Steven J. Harper, formerly of Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, for

explaining to me the relation between science and positive proof. According to Harper, the kind of evidence typically used in scientific practice consists in presuming that an hypothesis is true until something falsifies it, and then coming up with another hypothesis capable of explaining the counterevidence.
63

Georg Lukcs, Realism in Our Time: Literature and Class Struggle, trans. John and Necke

Mander (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 68; this passage is discussed in the Introduction as well (see pp. 3-5 above).
64

It is on the basis of reading her History as merely classical that Hicks analyzes her feminism, a

premise that necessitates looking for feminist ideas in female characters drawn by Macaulay (Philip Hicks, Catharine Macaulays Civil War: Gender, History, and Republicanism in Georgian Britain, Journal of British Studies 41.2 [2002]: 170-198). My method differs insofar as I am looking for feminist rhetorical effects of statements that may or may not be about women.
65

Devoney Looser has discovered a new letter by Macaulay to Ralph Griffiths attacking him for

publishing an unfavorable review of her Letters in The Monthly Review in which Macaulay defends herself by repudiating her own historical work as outmoded, overturned (Those Historical Laurels which Once Graced My Brow are Now in Their Wane: Catharine Macaulays Last Years and Legacy, Studies in Romanticism 42.2 [2003]: 203-225), which suggests a disconnection between the two texts rather than continuities between them. In this letter, Macaulay also demands chivalry from the press, Looser shows a demand that would undercut my argument here that Macaulay abominates chivalry. Looser maintains, though, that 181

Macaulays letter to Griffith is undecidably either self-deprecating or ironic. Based on my argument in this chapter, I would suggest interpreting it as ironic.
66

I say this because Lockes chapter on Association, added the 1700 edition of his Essay,

discusses how misassociated ideas make people mentally ill, complementing in a very dangerous way the earlier sections on language that show how the linguistic associations of ideas formed by society and upbringing are false and misleading. Needless to say, politically radical thinkers from the anti-psychiatry movement through Foucault to the Lacanians and even, in a milder way, Roy Porter (Reason, Madness, and the French Revolution, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 [1990]: 55-80) are still trying to dope out the connection between madness and (political) resistance; see the Introduction (pp. 2-3 above).
67 68

Macaulay, Letters 222. Critical Review 27 (1769): 81, quoted in Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and

Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1992), 34.

69

Mossner 310 qtd. in Natalie Zemon Davis, Historys Two Bodies,American Historical

Review 93.1 (1988): 1-30, 11; it seems to me that Humes and Macaulays histories were as often accused by contemporaries of being the mouthpieces of party as they were praised as disinterested, revealing that both had one fit in projective history and one foot in modern objectivist historical practice.
70

Davis notices the verbal echo (610), quoting the sixth volume of the first edition of

Macaulays works (6.xii-xiii) which first appeared in 1781; Humes My Life first appeared in 1777.

182

71

Susan Staves, The Liberty of a She-Subject of England: Rights Rhetoric and the Female

Thucydides, Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 1.2 (1989): 161-184, 169-170.
72 73

London Chronicle 25 (1769): 45, quoted in Hill 34. The reviewer means by rise up, of course, born and raised; nonetheless, the image of

rising up remains.
74 75

Quoted. in Todd 179, Looser Historical Laurels (203). European Magazine 4 (1783): 331 (Hill 42-43). Hill also quotes the magazines conclusion to

their public debate: It is unnecessary to observe, that the celebrated Scotch historian, in the present correspondence, is manifestly inferior to the lady, at least in argument (332; quoted in Hill 43).
76

Sir Charles Grandison, by Jane Austen, ed. Brian Southam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980),

57, cited hereafter by editor and page number in the text.

77

Such is the assumption of all the essays gathered together by Robert Clark about two of

Austens novels. Written by major literary critics, these essays ruminate on the extent to which, given the aesthetic satisfaction of the endings, Austens novels actually close down or open up the possibility for critiquing the patriarchal ideology that would like to see women objectified and legally restrained (Butler, Armstrong, Newman, in New Casebooks: Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, ed. Robert Clark (London: St. Martins Press, 1994).
78

Miriam Wallace discusses the differences between them that tend to be erased by this rubric,

Hayss valuation of feeling as an element of philosophy versus Wollstonecrafts privileging of reason (Mary Hayss Female Philosopher: Constructing Revolutionary Subjects, in

183

Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, eds. Adriana Craciun, Kari Lokke [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001], 233-260).
79

Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1976, 1980), 68. Both novels will be hereafter cited in the text by page number.
80

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792, 2nd ed., ed. Carol Poston

(New York: Norton, 1988, 1975), 45, 192.

81

Nancy Armstrong, Writing Women and the Making of the Modern Middle Class, in

Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, ed. Amanda Gilroy, W. M. Verhoeven (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 29-50, 35, 42-44; Mary Poovey, Ideological Contradictions and the Consolations of Form, from The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecarft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), rpt. in Clark, 83-118, 85.
82

Samuel Johnson, Rambler No. 4 (Saturday, 31 March 1750), in Samuel Johnson, Selected

Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Brady, W. K. Wimsatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 155.
83

The locus classicus of this argument in British Romantic Studies is Jerome McGann, The

Romantic Ideology (1983), and Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworths Great Period Poems (1986). The best rebuttal I have seen to date is Susan Wolfson, The Speaker as Questioner in Lyrical Ballads, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 77 (1978): 546-568, a polemic that she continues in Formal Charges (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997).
84

Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Hays, postmarked November 1796 (Pforzheimer, MW 43). 184

85

I am distilling comments made by Godwin in his letter to Hays dated 9 March 1796 (reprinted

in Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 1796, ed. Marilyn Brooks [Petersborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2000], 250) and in a very psychologically distressed undated letter (MH 18 in the Carl Pforzheimer Collection) that clearly responds to Godwins critique of her novel, and in my view responds specifically to his letter of 9 March. I will cite Hayss letters from Brooks edition, unless I quote from letters such as MH 18 that Brooks did not include. I am grateful to the Pforzheimer Collection of the New York Public Library for giving me access to these manuscripts.
86

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-

Century Women Writers (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), 3-4.
87

Mary Hays to William Godwin, handwritten date 10 Jan. 1796; postmark 9 February 96 (MH

13, Pforzheimer).
88

John Vladimir Price, The Reading of Philosophical Literature, in Books and Their Readers in

Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Isabel Rivers (New York: St. Martins Press, 1982), 165-196.
89

Though I wont discuss it here, Eliza Fenwicks Secresy fits into this category. It has been

analyzed in relation to the politics of marriage by Sarah Emsley, Radical Marriage, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11.4 (July 1999), 477-498.
90

In A Wollstonecraft Anthology, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989),

80-81.
91

Though often referred to Descartess cogito and Lockes notion of identity, the word

individualism often can be glossed romantic individualism, especially during the 1790s. The word individual means singular, not plural, and romantic often means singular, peculiar 185

or wild, uncivilized, a singularity and wildness that, from Charlotte Lennoxs The Female Quixote to Wollstonecrafts Mary, comes into existence out of a persons isolation. Desynonymy is Coleridges term for an analysis that distinguishes two ideas confused under one word, and his own act distinguishes, famously, imagination from fancy (Biographia Literaria, 1817, 2 vols., ed. James Engell, Walter Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press), I.82-84. The best explication of desynonymy that I have seen can be found in Barrett Watten, The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2003), 16-25.
92

William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793, 1796, 1798, Vol. 3 and 4 of

Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp (London: William Pickering, 1993), 3.19, cited hereafter in the text by volume and page number.
93

Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (1784), in On History

trans. Lewis White Beck, et. al. (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 3.
94

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, ed. Conor Cruise OBrien

(New York: Penguin, 1968, 1987), 171, cited hereafter in the text.
95

David Kaufmann, Law and Propriety, Sense and Sensibility: Austen on the Cusp of

Modernity, ELH 59.2 (1993), 385-408, 396.

96

Justice is a rule of conduct originating in the connection of one percipient being with another

(Godwin 3.49).
97

Evidence of just how indebted the feminist movement is to Enlightenment thinking, should we

need any more, is that Godwins notion of political justice entails the idea that the personal is the political. 186

98

[William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,] Lyrical Ballads, 1798, 2nd ed., ed. W. J. B.

Owen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 7-32, 31, lines 630, 634-5, 638-9, cited hereafter in the text by line number.
99

Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed.

Morris Eaves, Michael Fischer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 183-213, 201.
100

Ralph W. Quere, Changes and Constants: Structure in Luthers Understanding of the Real

Presence in the 1520s, Sixteenth Century Journal 16.1 (1985), 45-78, 72.
101

George Elliott Howard, A History of Matrimonial Institutions, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1904), 1.370, cited hereafter in the text.

102

Henry Swineburne, A Treatise of Spousals, or Matrimonial Contracts wherein all the

questions relating to that subject are ingeniously debated and resolved, 1st ed. (London: Robert Clavell, 1686), 62. On the difference between spousals in the future and spousals in the present, see Emsley 478-479.
103 104

See Political Justice 3.339-341 On falsification of wedding vows through publicly uttering them, see chapter 5. For a detailed discussion of Fenwicks novel, see chapter 5. Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman 192; see also Stone on the law of criminal

105

106

conversation (22-25).
107

Michael McKeon articulates the novels attempt to elevate bourgeois over aristocratic

ideology in The Rise of the Novel, pp. [].

108

Im grateful to Sarah Pittock for alerting me to continuities between Richardsons work and

the revolutionary writings I wish to explore. 187

109

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (New York:

Penguin, 1985), 1071.

110

Frances Ferguson, Rape and the Rise of the Novel, in Misogyny, Misandry, and

Misanthropy, ed. R. Howard Bloch, Frances Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 88-112. Though in Fergusons view the problem of being unable to mean what one wishes in social forms has to do with symbolic systems themselves (108-9), whereas one can argue that it is historically locatable.
111 112

Armstrong, Writing Women 42. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

Univ. Press, 1987), 131-133, 212.

113

Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790-1827 (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1993), 81.

114

It is possible to conclude (though Moore doesnt) that the difference between

Wollstonecrafts and Austens novels has to do with artistic skill. Insofar as it is really true that, in the verbal battle between English Jacobins and Anti-Jacobins, both sides were really on the same side, the side of bourgeois culture (Moore 151-152), the difference between Hayss and Austens Emmas is really uninteresting and perhaps even embarassing to feminists. Hayss works could be seen as revealing a romantic enthusiasm inimical to the artistry required for novel writing that provides a sad contrast to Austens realistic and ironic wit.
115

Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice, 1799, 2nd ed., ed. Eleanor Ty (Petersborough, Ont.:

Broadview Press, 1998), 127.

188

116

Eliza Fenwick, Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock, 1795, ed. Isobel Grundy (Petersborough,

Ont.: Broadview Press, 1994), 345.

117

The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear, Must We Mean What We Say? (New

York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), 267-356.

118 119

They did marry later, after Wollstonecraft became pregnant Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, A Short Residence in Sweden [1796] and

Memoirs of the Author of The Rights of Woman [1798], ed. Richard Holmes (New York: Penguin, 1987), 258.
120

The first book about the revolutionary potential of sensibility is C. B. Jones, Radical

Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (New York: Routledge, 1993); on Hayss and Wollstonecrafts understanding of sentiment and feeling, see Miriam Wallace, Mary Hayss Female Philosopher: Constructing Revolutionary Subjects, in Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, ed. Adriana Craciun, Kari Lokke (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), 233-260; Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995).
121

Im grateful to Anne Mellor for insisting that I compare this novel to the others insofar as

doing so, for me, helped me to see the generic features of philosophical romance and distinguish it from the Jacobin political platform.
122

Miriam, L. Wallace, Introduction, in Memoirs of Emma Courtney, by Mary Hays; Adeline

Mowbray; or, the Mother and the Daughter, by Amelia Alderson Opie, ed. Miriam L. Wallace (Glen Allen, VA: College Publishing, 2004), 1-41, 4.

189

123

Amelia Alderson Opie, Adeline Mowbray; or, the Mother and the Daughter, in Wallace, ed.,

271-625, 317, cited hereafter by page number in the text.

124

Wallace quotes Roxanne Eberle: that the individuality of an affection constitutes its chastity

is Wollstonecrafts ideal (Amelia Opies Adeline Mowbray: Diverting the Libertine Gaze; or, the Vindication of a Fallen Woman, Studies in the Novel 26.2 (1994): 121-54, quoted in Wallace 11).
125

As Anne Mellor puts it in discussing the utopianism of womens political writing, One might

also look to Amelia Opies novel Adeline Mowbray (1802), which sites the future salvation of the British body politic in a reconstituted family of choice, one composed of an upper-class British woman, a middle-class Quaker woman, a working-class freed African slave woman (Mothers of the Nation: Womens Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2000], 145). For me most striking about this community is that it includes two women who tried to and succeeded in destroying the heroine: their crimes are seen as structural and their corruption thus curable by relocating them in a community with equitable power distribution.
126

Warner does so directly, but also implicitly: he accuses proponents of same-sex marriage as

attempting to woo marriage and therefore of participating in the Romance plot as they construct a revisionist and powerfully homophobic narrative (95).
127

Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New

York: Free Press, 1999), 116.

128

Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women, 1798 (New York, Garland, 1974),

13. 190

129

Letter to Southey, sometime after 1800, quoted in Gina Lurie, Introduction, Appeal to the

Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women, by Mary Hays

130

The divide between difference and equality feminism is discussed by Ann Snitow in A

Gender Diary, in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch, Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), 9-43, 24.
131

Olive M. Griffiths, Religion and Learning: A Study in English Presbyterian Thought from the

Bartholomew Ejections (1662) to the Foundation of the Unitarian Movement (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1935), 145. Giffiths lists the names of those theologians holding this belief: Priestley, John Mort, Dr. Taylor of Norwich (for a short time, principal of Warrington Academy), Bretland and Timothy Kentrick (n. 1, p. 146). Kathryn Gleadle and Ruth Watts point out that, at its inception, Unitarianism was virtually synonymous with Hartleyan associationism and materialism: Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Womens Rights Movement, 1831-51 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1995), 10-11; Ruth Watts, Gender, Power, and the Unitarians in England 1760-1860 (New York: Longman, 1998), 33-7, 41.
132

Joseph Priestley, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, 25 vols.

(London, 1817-1832), 5.182. [check citation]

133

Anna Letitia Barbauld, The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed. William McCarthy,

Elizabeth Kraft (Athens, GA: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994), 166-167, cited hereafter in the text as Poems.
134

Barbauld was familiar with Stewarts works. She mentions Scotch philosophers, Ferguson

among them, in her introduction to Akensides Pleasures of the Imagination. 191

135

I doubt that thinferior kind refers to the lower classes of people, as McCarthy maintains,

since Barbauld explicitly contrasts the insects she has been discussing with Man.
136

The proper advantage derived from the doctrine of a soul, or the hypothesis of the perceptive

and thinking powers of man residing in a substance distinct from his body, is that it will not be affected by the death of the body, but will pass into a state of recompence when the body is in the grave. This doctrine is, therefore, in fact, nothing more than a provision against a failure in the arguments for the scripture doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, and consequently does not affect a Christian, who, as such, firmly believes that doctrine (Joseph Priestley, A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity [London: Johnson, 1778], xiv).
137

Institutes of Moral Philosophy, first published in 1769, or Fergusons Analysis of Pneumatics

and Moral Philosophy (1769).

138

Adam Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science, 1792, I.324-325; quoted in Dugald

Stewart, Works: Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown, 1829, 7 vols., v.384-385.

139

Mary Hilton, Child of Reason: Anna Barbauld and the Origins of Progressive Pedagogy,

in Practical Visionaries: Women, Education and Social Progress 1790-1930, ed. Mary Hilton and Pam Hirsch (New York: Longman, 2000), 21-38, 26-7.
140

In English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1967), 41,

cited hereafter in the text by page number.

141

Mary, A Fiction (1788), in Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary

Kelly (New York: Oxford, 1976), 55.

192

142

As McCarthy argues in We Hoped the Woman was going to Appear: Repression, Desire,

and Gender in Anna Letitia Barbaulds Early Poems, Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, eds. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover, NH: Univ. Press of New England, 1995): 113-137.
143 144

Theological Works 3.233. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century

Britain (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992).

145

Dale Johnson, Women in English Religion, 1700-1925 (New York: Edwin Mellen Press,

1983), 47.
146

Anna Letitia Barbauld, Works, 2 vols., ed. Lucy Aikin (London, 1825), II.428, cited hereafter

in the text.
147

Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), 227,

236-7.
148

The Enlightenment motto Have courage to exercise your own understanding, which appears

in Kants What is Enlightenment? was the motto adopted in 1736 by the Society for the Friends of Truth, a group discussed by Elizabeth Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby in the Introduction to On the Aesthetic Education of Man, by Friedrich Schiller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), lxxiv-lxxv, cited in Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Waugh (New York: Edward Arnold, 1992), 90 n. 1.
149

Loving in Friendship: Perhaps the Noun and Adverb, in Politics of Friendship, 26-48. Anne Snitow, A Gender Diary and Joan Scott, Deconstructing Equality-versus-

150

Difference, in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch & Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: 193

Routledge, 1990); this divide, as Snitow calls it, or distinction between equality and difference feminisms, and the necessity of oscillating between the two in order to oppose sexism, is now assumed by feminist writers (see, for instance, the Introduction to Londa Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science? [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999]).
151

Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Wild Wish of Early Feminism, History

Workshop Journal 33 (1992): 197-219, 200, cited hereafter in the text by page number.
152

I am deliberately resisting use of the term Other here because there is so much conceptual

confusion surrounding it: it is too often reduced to the Imaginary antagonist described below.
153

"Is Literary History the History of Everything?: The Case for 'Antiquarian' History,"

SubStance 88 (1999): 5-16, 6.

154

Meaghan Morris, Introduction: History in Cultural Studies, in Too Soon, Too Late: History

in Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

155

In an article by that title, Objectivity is not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs Practice in Peter Novicks

That Noble Dream, History and Theory 29.2 (1990): 129-57; see also AHR Forum: Peter Novicks That Noble Dream: the Objectivity Question and the Future of the Historical Profession, American Historical Review 96 (1991): 675-708.
156

Georg Lukcs, Realism in Our Time: Literature and Class Struggle, trans. John and Necke

Mander (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 68. I think Hayden White would agree with Lukcs: White points out that it is in fact the modern discipline of history that purports to be above politics and at the same time rules out as unrealistic any political program or thought in the least tinged with utopianism, and then he goes on to contend that it is in fact the politics of [historys] disciplinization that has in fact made realism effectively identical with 194

antiutopianism. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 62-3.
157

Another way to put this would be to say that what makes bourgeois society only one stop on

the road of progress towards communism is that it offers utopianism as a conceptual possibility.
158

The term history, G. W. F. Hegel says, comprehends not less what has happened, than the

narration of what has happened, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York, 1956), 60; quoted in Hayden White, The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality, Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980): 11. What motivates positivistic historians, White insists, is belief in a world capable of speaking itself . . . (Value 23).
159

Marshall Brown, Introduction: Provocations, in Eighteenth-Century Literary History: An

MLQ Reader (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1999), 1-8, 4.

160

Cynthia Marshall, Psychoanalyizing the Pre-Psychoanalytic Subject, PMLA 117.5 (2002):

1207-1216), 1208, quoting Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1999), 4.
161
162

History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1998), 187. A Review of some of the Political Events which have occurred in Manchester during the last

Five Years (London, 1794), p. 3, cited in Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 14.
163

Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. John Caputo (New

York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 24-5.

195

164

William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, vol. 3 of Political and

Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp (London: William Pickering, 1993), 3, 2, v.
165

I would dispute Elizabeth Bellamy and, insofar as her reading of an important essay by

Dominick LaCapra is correct, LaCapra as well, who insist that psychoanalysis can only become political if transference is disavowed; Elizabeth Bellamy, Discourses of Impossibility: Can Psychoanalysis Be Political? Diacritics 23.1 (1993): 24-38, 25, discussing Dominick LaCapra, History and Psychoanalysis, Critical Inquiry 13.2 (1987): 222-51.
166

Lord Byrons Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), 324, quoted in Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000), 208 n. 5.
167

Butler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 86. The most influential feminist

essay that, early on, so vigorously equated subjectivity with identity as to use the two words interchangeably is, in my view, Linda Alcoff, Cultural Feminism Versus Poststructuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory, Signs 13.3 (Spring 1988): 405-436. In a much more recent essay, Alcoff changes her reading of Foucault. See Objectivity and Its Politics, New Literary History 32 (2001): 839.
168

I get my sense of this distinction from Fredric Jameson, Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan:

Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject, Yale French Studies 55-56 (1977): 338-95.
169

Emile Benveniste, Subjectivity in Language, Problems in General Linguistics, 1966, trans.

Mary E. Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), 226. 196

170

Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew

Adamson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 109-111.

171

Traces of an Accusing Spirit: Mary Hays and the Vehicular State, in Psychoanalysis and the

Scene of Reading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 202-234, 222.
172

For an analysis of the affect informing Todds 2000 biography of Wollstonecraft sadly, not

millennial see Susan Eilenberg, Forget that I Exist, London Review of Books (30 November 2000): 12-14.
173

Gina Luria Walker, "'Sewing in the Next World': Mary Hays as Dissenting Autodidact in the

1780s," Romanticism On the Net 25 (February 2002): para. 21, <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/25walker.html> 12 September 2002.
174

Mitzi Myers, Godwins Memoirs of Wollstonecraft: The Shaping of Self and Subject,

Studies in Romanticism 20 (1981): 299-316, 308.

175

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792, 2nd ed., ed. Carol H.

Poston (New York: Norton, 1988), 45.

176

A passage added to the second edition of Godwins Memoirs, in Memoirs of the Author of A

Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by William Godwin, ed. Pamela Clemit, Gina Luria Walker (Petersborough, Ont., CA: Broadview Press, 2001), 214, hereafter cited in the text as Clemit and Walker.
177

The first quotation is, I believe, Mary Jacobus, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, graduate

seminar, Fall, 1987; the second is from Jacques Lacan, Intervention on Transference, in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the cole freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 61-73, 65, s.a. 71. 197

178

By legitimate, I dont mean masculine: to talk about (female) subjects as subjects of

masculine desire or feminine desire, for that matter is once again to conflate subjectivity with identity instead of undertaking a better project, which is to show that Human Nature is Two, to quote the chapter title of a recent book by Irigaray. Only rethinking subjectivity as always already two can we begin to undertake what Irigaray calls the labor of the negative, which is to continually question what difference it makes in perlocutionary effects that any given I is speaking as a man or a woman at any given time: only then can we deconstruct any imaginary positivity that besets us, be it male or female, masculine or feminine (Luce Irigaray, I Love to You, trans. Alison Martin [New York: Routledge, 1996], 35-6, 39.
179

Taylor discusses Wollstonecrafts reiteration of this procedure as part of the utopian wing

of eighteenth-century progressivism founded on above all galit as the foundation for a new morality within human relations (204). Wollstonecraft uses the term sophisticated to indicate reasoning corrupted by society throughout her letters, both public and private (Letters on the French Revolution ; Letters to Imlay ); Mary Hays gives an example of how culture leads the reasoning process awry and she calls it sophisticated reasoning in The Victim of Prejudice (Petersborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1998) 76-77, 84, 127.
180

The argument that this line of Kubla Khan refers to the just-published Letters Written in

Sweden is made by Richard Holmes, Introduction, A Short Residence / Memoirs, by Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 41.
181

William Godwin to Mary Hays, 7 Sept. 1795, in The Love-Letters of Mary Hays, ed. A. F.

Wedd (London: Methuen, 1925), 232. The full context is this: after completing a short letter to Mary Hays, Godwin closes by saying, We will now, if you please, return to our old contract: 198

you shall communicate your sentiments by letter, and I will answer you in person. It may be that Godwins visits were a bit like analytic sessions at least those more rationalistic parts of psychoanalytic encounters in which one tries to understand the philosophical assumptions underlying ones own discourse, which is how their meetings sound to me, based on her letters after their meetings. But I would claim only that, what makes Godwin her analyst is primarily the infrequency of his visits, which, I would say, corresponds to analytic neutrality.
182

Mary Wollstonecraft, Letter LXVI, 25 Sept. 1795, Letters to Gilbert Imlay, in The Works of

Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 vols., ed. Janet Todd, Marilyn Butler (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 6.427.
183

The best discussion of this phenomenon that I have seen is Elliot M. Adler, Janet L. Bachant,

Free Association and Analytic Neutrality: The Basic Structure of the Psychoanalytic Situation, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 44.4 (1996): 1021-46.
184

It is worth wondering whether the returned letter itself isnt essentially a psychoanalytic tool,

since its addressee necessarily assumes magisterial silence and since it offers its author, rereading it, time for self-interpretation. Hays and Wollstonecraft either kept copies or were able to get their letters returned to them the former then incorporating her letters into her novel The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Marilyn Brooks, ed., Introduction, Memoirs of Emma Courtney [Petersborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2000], 14), the latter having her letters incorporated for her into Godwins Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft, Letter 75, 27 Nov. 1795 [Todd 434]). It could be argued that the greatest transference neurosis so far documented by psychoanalysts was fundamentally epistolary Freuds letters to Fliess, letters returned not to Freud but to the discipline of psychoanalysis 199

itself, through Marie Bonaparte (James William Anderson, Sigmund Freuds Life and Work: An Unofficial Guide to the Freud Exhibit, The Annual of Psychoanalysis 29 [2001]: 19). Here we get a sense of the psychoanalytic situation recapitulating or literalizing the fundamentally literary relationship between an author and an anonymous audience.
185

Nikolaas Treurniet, On an Ethic of Psychoanalytic Technique, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 66

(1997): 596-627, 609; page numbers cited hereafter in the text.

186

The term corrective emotional experience originally comes from Alexander and French

whose work gives it a bad name (603); it is in order to distinguish the new understanding of psychoanalysis as a holding environment from Alexander and Frenchs work that Treurniet forms as part of his ethic of technique the injunction that the analyst enable the patient to have a corrective emotional experience without deliberately manipulating the patient (620).
187

Dora certainly directs Freud to countertransference, but he does not recognize her

metapsychological contribution in her presence, not until after the fact; insofar as her psychoanalysis failed, it did so by thwarting her capacity to form a better future reality for others, and thereby thwarting her cure.
188

Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1999), 57.

189

Of Love and Friendship, in Thoughts on Man, His Nature, Productions, and Discoveries, by

William Godwin (London: Effingham Wilson, 1831; rpt. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969), 273-298, 287-8.
190

In his letter to Godwin written to assist Godwins writing of the Memoirs, Joseph Johnson

says that, [d]uring her stay in George Street she spent many of her afternoons & most of her 200

evenings with me . . . . [W]hen harassed, which was very often ye case, she was relieved by unbosoming herself & generally returned home calm, frequently in spirits (Clemit & Walker 163).
191

I quote from Mary Hayss letters to William Godwin, currently residing in the Pforzheimer

Collection, New York Public Library; I thank them for allowing me to review these materials and quote from them, as I do here, by letter number and date: MH 2, 7 Dec. 1794.
192

Of Frankness and Reserve, in Thoughts on Man, 299-313, 302. In The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp, vol. 6 Essays

193

(London: William Pickering, 1993), 1-30, 8-9; I am grateful to Jennifer Jones and Charlotte Sussman for suggesting this essay to me.
194

Essay of History and Romance, in Philp, gen. ed., vol. 5: Educational and Literary Writings,

ed. Pamela Clemit, 290-301, p. 294; rpt. in Clemit and Walker, 143-146, p. 146.
195

Roy Schafer, The Analytic Attitude (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 8. Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (New

196

York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 74. Charles Fox called Wakefields arrest in 1798 for publication of an anti-war pamphlet, and Joseph Johnsons imprisonment for selling (not even printing!) the pamphlet, a death blow to the liberty of the press, Fox to D. OBryen, 29 July 1798; quoted in F. K. Prochaska, English State Trials in the 1790s: a Case Study, Journal of British Studies 13 (1973), 71 n. 30, quoted in Keen 72.
197

Mary Hays to William Godwin, MH 7, 1 Oct. 1795, Pforzheimer Collection. Confidence is a term repeated by Wollstonecraft in letters VI, XI, XIV, XXXV, LVIII. MH 8, 13 Oct. 1795, Pforzheimer Collection, reprinted in Brooks, ed., Memoirs, 233. 201

198

199

200

MH 27, 5 Nov. 1795, Pforzheimer Collection. Clemit and Walker 155; Godwin quotes Wollstonecrafts letter to him, the letter to which he is

201

responding.
202

Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Columbia University

Press, 2000), 320.

203

For an excellent analysis of this phenomenon which does not in fact de-politicize, see Mary

Jacobus, In Love with a Cold Climate: Traveling with Wollstonecraft, in First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1995), 63-82; and "Out of Bounds: Epistolary Subjects and 'Scandalous' Memoirs, NASSR, 15 November 1996.
204

In The Imaginary Puritan (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1992), Leonard

Tennenhouse and Nancy Armstrong connect revolutionary history to the making of the modern subject; this essay points out that it is connected to its unmaking or analysis of the subject as well.
205

Memoirs 240, in A Short Residence in Sweden and Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication

of the Rights of Woman, ed. Richard Holmes (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 202-278.
206

Quoted in Amy Rambow, Come Kick Me: Godwins Memoirs and the Posthumous Infamy

of Mary Wollstonecraft, Keats-Shelley Review 13 (1999): 24-57, 30. So frequently are Southey and Roscoe quoted by biographers that references are no longer given.
207

Nicola Trott, Sexing the Critic: Mary Wollstonecraft at the Turn of the Century, in 1798:

The Year of the Lyrical Ballads, ed. Richard Cronin (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998), 3267, 34. 202

208

Anonymous [Archibald Hamilton Rowan?], A Defence of the Character and Conduct of the

Late Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (London: Wallis, 1803), in Lives of the Great Romantics III: Godwin, Wollstonecraft, & Mary Shelley By their Contemporaries, 3 vols., ed. Harriet Jump (Brookfield, Vt.: Pickering & Chatto, 1999) 2.197-228; for attribution of authorship, see Jump, Introduction xix. Ralph Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (Lawrence, KS: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1951), 317, quoted in Trott 34.
209

Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Weidenfeld and

Nicolson, 1974), 201, cited by Isobel Grundy, ed., Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock, by Eliza Fenwick (Peterborough, Ontario, CA: Broadview Press, 1994), 129 n. 2.
210

On the threatening similarities between the British Convention of 1793 and French

Revolutionary forms of address, see Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), 302-303. Chief Justice James Eyres worry that the London Corresponding Society was conducting meetings that imitate French assemblies is made clear in The Charge . . . To Enquire of Certain High Treasons . . . To the Grand Jury (London: Daniel Isaac Eaton, 1794), 11-12, quoted in William Godwin, Cursory Strictures on the Charge Delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre (London: D. I. Eaton, 1794), 15. Both texts are reprinted in William Godwin, Uncollected Writings (1785-1822) (Gainseville, FL: Scholars Facsimiles & Reprints, 1968).
211

Susan Eilenberg, Forget That I Exist, Review of Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A

Revolutionary Life, London Review of Books 22.23 (30 November 2000): 12-14, 12.
212

Janet Todd, Marilyn Butler, eds., The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 vols. (New York:

New York Univ. Press, 1989), 6:435-436. 203

213

Eilenberg 12; Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Columbia

Univ. Press, 2000), 327, 333.

214

On the connection between the Romantic period and the emergence of character

representations with psychological depth, see Deirdre Lynch, Round Characters and RomanticPeriod Reading Relations, one chapter of her The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 123-163.
215

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 2nd ed., ed. Carol Poston (New

York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 25.

216

Quoted in George Elliott Howard, A History of Matrimonial Institutions, 3 vols. (Chicago:

Univ. of Chicago Press, 1904), 1.348.

217

Bridget Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (New York:

Basil Blackwell, 1989), 204-206. Hill quotes R. B. Outhwaite, ed. Marriage and Society (1981), 13.
218

Hill 206-7. Howard points out that, after the Act was passed, two royal marriages were

performed clandestinely, and were later legalized, due to the fact that Lord Hardwickes Act did not apply to royalty (1.449 n. 3).
219

Sarah Emsley, Radical Marriage, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11.4 (July 1999): 477-498,

482. I benefitted tremendously from Emsleys article, which includes an analysis of Secresy and compares it to Austens Pride and Prejudice. Emsley notes that Secresy and Godwins Memoirs are both concerned with marriage as a social contract (482-483), but she is ultimately interested in how the politics of marriage law affects marriage, not, as I am concerned here, with how alternate conceptions of marriage affects peoples understanding of politics. 204

220

E. P. Thomson, The Moral Economy of the English Crowd, Past and Present 50 (1971): 76-

136; Bob Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony, and Community in England 1700-1880 (London: Junction Books, 1982); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986).
221 222

The Autobiography of Francis Place (1771-1854), (1972), 81-82, quoted in Hill 181. One would have expected that both trends [decreased age in marriage, and decrease in

proportion of men and women who never married] would have reduced the number of extramarital conceptions, but in fact the reverse occurred, Lawrence Stone asserts in discussing the period between 1680 and 1800: the proportion of first conceptions out of wedlock rose from 12 percent to a staggering 50 percent. Only in half of these cases did the couple marry before the child was born, leaving the rest a quarter of all first births as bastards abandoned by their fathers . . . . There must have been a major change in moral attitudes toward premarital sex The New Eighteenth Century, New York Review of Books 31.5 (29 March 1984), 46.
223

Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

Univ. Press, 1987), 131-133.

224

In the course of the eighteenth century, pre-nuptial pregnancy was to become the condition

of 40 percent of all brides. Records suggest that it increased after 1740" (Hill 181).
225

Hill 181, quoting John Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750-1850

(1986), 197, 198.

226

Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond, Matthew Adamson (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), 109.

205

227

How to Do Things With Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), 23, suggests

the political import of any performative, as will be demonstrated.

228

Alfred Cobban, A Modern History of France: 1, 1715-1799 (New York: Viking Penguin,

1963), 144-145, 153.

229 230

Skirving, Margarot, and Gerrald were convicted and sentenced (A. Goodwin 305-6). A. Goodwin 386. At an earlier meeting on 26 October 1795, at Copenhagen House in

Islington, an Address to the Nation had been approved by the over 100,000 present which had reminded [Parliamentary] ministers that when the voice of a united people went forth, it was their duty to attend to it or else incur the guilt of high treason against the people (Account of the Proceedings . . . , Oct. 26, 1795, p. 4, quoted in A. Goodwin 385.
231

Account of the Proceedings . . . , Oct. 26, 1795, p. 4, quoted and summarized by A. Goodwin

385.
232 233

36 Geo. III c. 7., summarized by A. Goodwin 387. In the Treason Trials of 1794, Judge Eyre wondered [w]hether . . . collecting together a

Power, which should overawe the Legislative Body, and extort a Parliamentary Reform from it, . . . will also amount to High Treason (13). In defending those charged with treason, Godwin insists that there is a difference between, on the one hand, armed power and military force, and, on the other, the rhetorical power to persuade: Awe in its true acceptation has always been understood to mean deference or respect, he says, and respect for a proposition comes from, first, its universality, and second, from the sense that those among whom the proposition is universally held are bodies of men intitled [sic.] to eminent credit (Cursory Strictures 20).

206

234

Until far down into the eighteenth century the engaged lovers before the nuptials were held

to be legally husband and wife. It was common for them to begin living together immediately after the betrothal ceremony; and the so-called bride-children were given rights of legitimate offspring, this custom in part surviving until our own times (Howard, 374-375).
235

On the difference between sponsalia de praesenti and sponsalia de futuro, see Emsley 478-9;

Howard 1.340-344.
236

Henry Swinburne, A Treatise of Spousals, or Matrimonial Contracts: Wherein all the

Questions Relating to that Subject are Ingeniously Debated and Resolved (London : Robert Clavell, 1686); 2nd ed. (London: D. Brown, 1711). Clavells title page indicates Swinburnes renown as a speech act theorist, since it says, by the late famous and learned Mr. Henry Swinburne, author of the Treatise of wills and testaments.
237

I include personal hypocrisy here insofar as such personal choices are influenced by

widespread approbation of certain kinds of hypocrisy for instance, using tax shelters, for instance, that are barely legitimate at all, which really means cheating on ones U.S. taxes. This view fits into Rousseaus notion that no people would ever be other than the nature of their government made them (Political Institutions, quoted by Jean Starobinski in Rousseau in the Revolution, The New York Review of Books [12 April 1990]: 47).
238

The Offices, According to the United Church of England and Ireland, for the Solemnization

of Matrimony; . . . . (Oxford, Clarendon Press, [1801]). I am grateful to William Wortman of King Library and Karen Jones of Archives at Ohio University Libraries for tracking down this document for me.

207

239

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner: A Poets Reverie, line 618, in Lyrical

Ballads, 1805, ed. Michael Mason (New York: Longman, 1992), 204.
240

In Quest of the Ordinary: Texts of Recovery, in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism,

eds. Morris Eaves, Michael Fischer (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), 201. The answers that Cavell provides to his own question, How does the Mariners tale compete with marriage? have to do with the effect upon intimate relationships of philosophical skepticism, which he sees the Mariner as enacting.
241

As Grundy points out, John Fenwick visited Paris in 1793 with letters from English radicals

to the National Convention and a copy of Political Justice (Introduction to Secresy, 8). As is made clear in Elizabeth Fenwicks letters to Mary Hays, she was her husbands intellectual companion and equal, if not his superior, given that she helped him complete translations for which he got paid (The Fate of the Fenwicks; Letters to Mary Hays (1798-1828), ed. A. F. Wedd (London: Methuen, [1927]).
242 243 244

For a full discussion of the novels views on education, see Grundys Introduction to Secresy. 258, quoted in Emsley 483. Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blakes Songs and Wordsworths Lyrical Ballads

(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983); Alan Richardson, Childrens Literature and the Work of Culture, in Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as a Social Practice, 1780-1832 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), esp. 153-166.
245

An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, 1794, in.

Todd, ed., 6.1-237, 231-234.

246

The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), 109. 208

247

William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings, 7 v., The Pickering Masters, ed. Mark

Philp, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp (London: William Pickering, 1973) 3.308.
248

Godwin, Political Justice 3.472. In speaking of the Truths of Intuition, John Locke says:

This part of Knowledge is irresistible, and like the bright Sun-Shine, forces it self immediately to be perceived, as soon as ever the Mind turns its view that way . . . , An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 4.2.1, p. 531.
249

Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:

Columbia, 1989), 14.

250

See also Mary Jacobuss analysis of the role of the dead mother in Wollstonecrafts suicidal

depressions (In Love with a Cold Climate: Travelling with Wollstonecraft, in First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1995), 63-82.
251

428. See also Letter 56: My dearest friend! I cannot tear my affections from you and,

though every remembrance stings me to the soul, I think of you, till I make allowance for the very defects of character that have given such a cruel stab to my peace (419), and all those portions of the letters in which she mentions her wounds.
252

Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1966), 14.239-258, 249.
253

William Styron, Darkness Visible (New York: Random House, 1990), 47. John Haslam lists

sleeplessness and manic thinking as symptoms of the disease; Observations on Insanity [later retitled Observations on Madness and Melancholy] (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1798), 16-17. 209

254

Biographers only write of two suicide attempts, but a letter written shortly after the second

suicide attempt on 10 October 1795, ends with: When I am dead, respect for yourself will make you take care of the child. I write with difficulty probably I shall never write to you again. Adieu! God bless you! (432).
255

That she is not imagining herself committing a homicide-suicide, taking her daughter with

her, is obvious when she later, under sail on the ship, desires to throw herself overboard but does not want to abandon Fanny (418).
256

Kristeva connects the melancholics refusal to relinquish a connection with a lost mother to

the philosophical search for das Ding (Black Sun 13-15), the thing-in-itself, in Kantian terms as revised by Heidegger; the extra-linguistic noumenal thing that is, alas, forever lost, but also thereby impervious to all categories for knowing in other words, to all culturally acquired forms of knowing. Mary Jacobus picks up on Kristevas idea, calling her essays on the connections between maternity and melancholia First Things (see note 244).
257

Caught in the Curve, The New York Review of Books 48.2 (8 February 2001): 22-24. This phrase is the title of a book of essays by Paul de Man: he and his followers argue that

258

aestheticizing any text is a defensive maneuver, a way of warding off an incipient awareness of the radical contingency of meaning that it exists, that it hits its mark. Terry Eagletons The Ideology of the Aesthetic presents a nuanced view of its politics (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), for instance 26-28, 100. George Levines introduction to Aesthetics & Ideology, ed. George Levin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1994), 1-28, gives an overall view of the radical transformation of in literary study precipitated by charges against the aesthetic (1). 210

259

In Mothers of the Nation: Womens Political Writing in England, 1780-1830, Anne Mellor

argues that the writers considered in this book participated directly in the emancipatory project of enlightened rationality celebrated by Habermas (142). I would agree. Mellor focuses on their participation in the public sphere and in resisting their own imbrication in the private. Here, I argue that the way these writers defined virtue, based upon their indebtedness to Catherine Macaulay, is procedural rather than substantive and so Habermasian (Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006], cited hereafter by page number in the text); that is, for them being virtuous entails subscribing to a certain method universally applied rather than adhering to allegedly universal principles.
260

Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics

(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1997). His position is reiterated in Can Our Values Be Objective? On Ethics, Aesthetics, and Progressive Politics, New Literary History 32.4 (2001): 803-833, which I quote here, 804.
261

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 2nd ed. of 1792, 2nd. Ed., ed.

Carol Poston (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 25-26.

262

Andr Green, The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse, 1973, trans. Alan

Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1999), 100.

263

Shuli Barzilai, Lacan and the Matter of Origins (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999),

90-110.
264

On Jones, see Green, 74; Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 1980,

trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982. Though the mother figures in Freuds metapsychology, he does not theorize the pre-Oedipal as do post-classical 211

psychoanalytic theorist. See Nikolaas Treurniet, What is Psychoanalysis Now? International Journal of Psychoanalysis 74.4 (1993): 873-891.
265

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1973, trans. Alan

Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 184.

266

Julia Kristeva, Freud and Love: Treatment and its Discontents, in Tales of Love, 1983,

trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987), 21-56.
267

D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971). Nikolaas Treurniet, On an Ethic of Psychoanalytic Technique, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 65

268

(1997): 596-627); Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), Introduction; Evelyne Schwaber, Psychoanalytic Listening and Psychic Reality, International Review of Psycho-Analysis 10 (1983): 379-392.
269

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 1790 (Gainseville, FL: Scholars

Facsimiles, 1960), 121.

270

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the

Beautiful, 1757. In her Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft directly addresses some of Burkes statements in the Sublime and Beautiful, questioning especially his association of beauty with weakness (111-112), a charge she reiterates in the second Vindication.
271

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corp., 1972; New York: Penguin

Books, 1977), 29.

272

Frances Ferguson, Legislating the Sublime, in Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Art and

Aesthetics, ed. Ralph Cohen (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), 128-147; Paul Mattick, Beautiful and Sublime: Gender Totemism in the Constitution of Art, in Feminism and 212

Tradition in Aesthetics, ed. Peggy Zeglin Brand, Carolyn Korsmeyer (University Park, PA: Penn. State Univ. Press, 1995), 27-48; s.a. Eagleton 54.
273

John Berger does a much better job of separating his political critique from traditions of

understanding and interpreting art from artworks themselves than is found, for instance, in the collection of essays edited by Hal Foster called The Anti-Aesthetic.
274

Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997). In contrast to

critics such as Antony Easthope, Jerome McGann, and Terry Eagleton, Wolfson argues that arguments made via form during the Romantic era levy charges against contemporaneous political reaction.
275

Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1996), 12.

276

John Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press,

1997), 244.

213