Mary Wollstonecraft

“ Poets have imagined scenes of bliss; but, sencing out sorrow, all the extatic emotions of the Soul, and even its grandeur, seem to be equally excluded. We dose over the unruffled lake, and long to scale the rocks which fence the happy valley of contentment, though serpents hiss in the pathless desert, and danger lurks in the unexplored wiles. Maria found herself more indulgent as she was happier, and discovered virtues, in characters she had before disregarded, while chasing the phantoms of elegance and excellence, which sported in the meteors that exhale in the marshes of misfortune. ”

“ No one can read the life of Mary Wollstonecraft without loving her, or follow her first bitter struggles without feeling honor, nay reverence, for her true womanliness which bore her bravely through them. ”

“ Few women have worked so faithfully for the cause of humanity as Mary Wollstonecraft, and few have been the objects of such bitter censure. She devoted herself to the relief of her suffering fellow-beings with the ardor of a Saint Vincent de Paul, and in return she was considered by them a moral scourge of God. Because she had the courage to express opinions new to her generation, and the independence to live according to her own standard of right and wrong, she was denounced as another Messalina. ”

“ Mason, Mary Wollstonecraft enriched English literature with the portrait of the typical British matron with "no nonsense about her", but in making this woman her mouth-piece she scarcely did justice to the qualities of her own heart. It was the struggle of her life to make her heart yield to the dictates of Reason, and Mrs. Mason certainly does not impress the reader as struggling very hard. She is the embodiment of pure, undiluted Reason in all its unyielding sternness. Any show of tenderness towards her charges would have seemed to her a confession of weakness. ”

“ Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the most remarkable and misunderstood women of even her remarkable day, was born in April 1759, in or near London, of parents of whose ancestors little is known. Her father, son of a Spitalfields manufacturer, possessed an adequate fortune for his position; her mother was of Irish family. They had six children, of whom Mary was the second. Family misery, in her case as in many, seems to have been the fountain-head of her genius. Her father, a hot-tempered, dissipated man, unable to settle anywhere or to anything, naturally proved a domestic tyrant. ”

“ Mary Wollstonecraft.
Her struggles with work wearied her less than her struggles with the follies of men, of which the foregoing is an example. Indeed, while she was eminently fitted to enjoy society, she was also peculiarly susceptible to the many slings and arrows from which those who live in the world cannot escape. The very tenderness of her feelings for humanity, which was a blessing in one way, was almost a curse in another. For, just as the conferring of a benefit on one in need gave her intense pleasure, so, if she was the chance cause of pain to friend or foe, she suffered acutely. ”

“ It was again Mary Wollstonecraft who extended this implicit faith in the perfectibility of humanity to the case of woman. All that women needed was to be given a good education, and the rest would follow. So convinced were these idealists of the incontestability of their arguments that they refused to make any concessions, however slight, to those who held different views. This very inflexibility became the means of ruining their best intentions. They did not stop at intellectual and moral enfranchisement, their daring schemes comprised complete social and political emancipation. ”

“ If an innocent girl become a prey to love, she is degraded forever, though her mind was not polluted by the arts which married women, under the convenient cloak of marriage, practise; nor has she violated any duty—but the duty of respecting herself. The married woman, on the contrary, breaks a most sacred engagement, and becomes a cruel mother when she is a false and faithless wife. If her husband has still an affection for her, the arts which she must practise to deceive him, will render her the most contemptible of human beings ”

“ Lady Kingsborough in Mary’s opinion was “a shrewd clever woman, a great talker.... She rouges, and in short is a fine lady without fancy or sensibility. I am almost tormented to death by dogs....” Lady Kingsborough was rather selfish and uncultured, and her chief object was the pursuit of pleasure. She pampered her dogs, much to the disgust of Mary Wollstonecraft, and neglected her children. What views she had on education were narrow. She had been accustomed to submission from her governess, but she learnt before long that Mary was not of a tractable disposition. ”

“ Though this employment lightened the weight of time, yet, never losing sight of her main object, Maria did not allow any opportunity to slip of winning on the affections of Jemima; for she discovered in her a strength of mind, that excited her esteem, clouded as it was by the misanthropy of despair.
An insulated being, from the misfortune of her birth, she despised and preyed on the society by which she had been oppressed, and loved not her fellow-creatures, because she had never been beloved. No mother had ever fondled her, no father or brother had protected her from outrage ”

“ CHAPTER VIII. LIFE WITH IMLAY.
1793-1794.
While Mary was living at Neuilly, the terrors of the French Revolution growing daily greater, she took a step to which she was prompted by pure motives, but which has left a blot upon her fair fame. The outcry raised by her “Vindication of the Rights of Women” has ceased, since its theories have found so many champions. But that which followed her assertion of her individual rights has never yet been hushed. Kegan Paul speaks the truth when he says, “The name of Mary Wollstonecraft has long been a mark for obloquy and scorn.” ”

“ Her sensibility prompted her to search for an object to love; on earth it was not to be found: her mother had often disappointed her, and the apparent partiality she shewed to her brother gave her exquisite pain—produced a kind of habitual melancholy, led her into a fondness for reading tales of woe, and made her almost realize the fictitious distress.
She had not any notion of death till a little chicken expired at her feet; and her father had a dog hung in a passion. She then concluded animals had souls, or they would not have been subjected to the caprice of man ”

“ Children peep into existence, suffer, and die; men play like moths about a candle, and sink into the flame; war and the ‘thousand ills which flesh is heir to’ mow them down in shoals, whilst the more cruel prejudices of society palsy existence, introducing not less sure, though slower decay.”
Had Mary Wollstonecraft lived in the present time, she too would have written hymns to Man. This is another of the many strange instances in her writings of the resemblance between theories which she evolved for herself and those of modern philosophers. She lived a century too soon. ”

“ Mary Wollstonecraft pleads the necessity of giving woman an education like that which is granted to man, that she may learn to take Reason for her guide. Only then will she be able to perform the specific duties of her sex. But there is a weightier argument for the cultivation of Reason in women. Their deplorable deficiency in this quality has so far made them consider only earthly interests and disqualified them from looking beyond the affairs of this world to the promise of that eternity for which only the soul can fit them. ”

“ Mary Wollstonecraft, at the head of a house, and mistress of a school, was a very different person from Mary Wollstonecraft, simple companion to Mrs. Dawson or dependent friend of Fanny Blood. Her position was one to attract attention, and it was sufficient for her to be known, to be loved and admired. Her social sphere was enlarged. No one could care more for society than she did, when that society was congenial. At Newington Green she already began to show the preference for men and women of intellectual tastes and abilities that she manifested so strongly in her life in London. ”

“ Thus it will be seen that Mary's primary wish was to make women responsible and sensible companions for men; to raise them from the beings they were made by the frivolous fashionable education of the time; to make them fit mothers to educate or superintend the education of their children, for education does not end or begin with what may he taught in schools. To make a woman a reasoning being, by means of Euclid if necessary, need not preclude her from being a charming woman also, as proved by the descriptions we have of Mary Wollstonecraft herself. ”

“ The outer revolution which was to assert the rights of the species was followed by an inner revolution in the individual which came to constitute the tragedy of Mary Wollstonecraft's life. The Father of Nature, whom she thanked for having made her so intensely alive to happiness, had also implanted in her breast an overwhelming capacity for sorrow, and after a short taste of the former, the latter became her portion to such an extent that life seemed to her unendurable. ”

“ Kegan Paul’s memoir, Mary Wollstonecraft has been viewed from an entirely different aspect, and many there are who have come under the spell of her fascinating personality. It is not, however, her message alone that now interests us, but the woman herself, her desires, her aspirations, her struggles, and her love. Pathetic and lonely, she stands out in the faint mists of the past, a woman that will continue to evoke sympathy when her books are no longer read. ”

“ With her very first years Mary Wollstonecraft began a bitter training in the school of experience, which was to no small degree instrumental in developing her character and forming her philosophy. There are few details of her childhood, and no anecdotes indicating a precocious genius. But enough is known of her early life to make us understand what were the principal influences to which she was exposed. Her strength sprang from the very uncongeniality of her home and her successful struggles against the poverty and vice which surrounded her. ”

“ Mary, then, with all the frankness which marked her character, explained her situation to him and mentioned her fatal tie with such disgust that he trembled for her. "I cannot see him; he is not the man formed for me to love!" Her delicacy did not restrain her, for her dislike to her husband had taken root in her mind long before she knew Henry. Did she not fix on Lisbon rather than France on purpose to avoid him? and if Ann had been in tolerable health she would have flown with her to some remote corner to have escaped from him. ”

“ Thus thought Maria—These are the ravages over which humanity must ever mournfully ponder, with a degree of anguish not excited by crumbling marble, or cankering brass, unfaithful to the trust of monumental fame. It is not over the decaying productions of the mind, embodied with the happiest art, we grieve most bitterly. The view of what has been done by man, produces a melancholy, yet aggrandizing, sense of what remains to be achieved by human intellect ”

“ Discouraged by these changes, Maria relapsed into despondency, when she was cheered by the alacrity with which Jemima brought her a fresh parcel of books; assuring her, that she had taken some pains to obtain them from one of the keepers, who attended a gentleman confined in the opposite corner of the gallery.
Maria took up the books with emotion. "They come," said she, "perhaps, from a wretch condemned, like me, to reason on the nature of madness, by having wrecked minds continually under his eye; and almost to wish himself—as I do—mad, to escape from the contemplation of it." ”

“ It is so cheering to see a human face, even if little of the divinity of virtue beam in it, that Maria anxiously expected the return of the attendant, as of a gleam of light to break the [14] gloom of idleness. Indulged sorrow; she perceived, must blunt or sharpen the faculties to the two opposite extremes; producing stupidity, the moping melancholy of indolence; or the restless activity of a disturbed imagination. She sunk into one state, after being fatigued by the other: till the want of occupation became even more painful than the actual pressure or apprehension of sorrow ”

“ That was the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, thirty years old, in 1789, the year of the Fall of the Bastille; the noble life now to be touched in its enthusiasms by the spirit of the Revolution, to be caught in the great storm, shattered, and lost among its wrecks. ”

“ When men deserve the ideal, it will be here. If mankind were honest and unselfish, then every proposition held out by Mary Wollstonecraft would hold true. Her book is a vindication, in one sense, of her own position—for at the last, all literature is a confession. But Mary Wollstonecraft's book is also a plea for faith in the Divinity that shapes humanity and "leads us on amid the encircling gloom." ”

“ Sleep fled from her eyelids, while she dwelt on the wretchedness of unprotected infancy, till sympathy with Jemima changed to agony, when it seemed probable that her own babe might even now be in the very state she so forcibly described.
Maria thought, and thought again. Jemima's humanity had rather been benumbed than killed, by the keen frost she had to brave at her entrance into life; an appeal then to her feelings, on this tender point, surely would not be fruitless; and Maria began to anticipate the delight it would afford her to gain intelligence of her child. ”