Mary Wollstonecraft and the "reserve of reason".(Critical essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-06

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I. Reason and Sensation in the 1790s

IN A RECENT STUDY OF THE "DISCOURSE ON ENTHUSIASM," JOHN MEE HAS described Wordsworth's Prelude as "an extended attempt to demonstrate that a continuity of subjectivity could survive and benefit from the transports of enthusiasm and remain grounded in the world without dissolving into it." (1) Current British studies of the intellectual culture of the 1790s, and of Romanticism and beyond now abound with attempts to rediscover a lost relation between affect and reason, to examine the rational self's embodiment in the world and to suggest that the self remains "grounded" by resisting visionary transports through regulating emotion. The classic feminist endeavor to "include affect under the sign of cognition," as Isobel Armstrong recently put it, (2) has been supplemented by the view of poetry, in Mee's useful formulation, as a kind of "regulatory discourse" that determines the circumstances under which the rational self may be "transported" with enthusiasm without losing its contours in the "wild" enthusiasm of the crowd or of the religious visionary. Such revisions have in turn challenged a pat view of the archetypal male rationalist of the late Eighteenth Century. The view of William Godwin as a kind of "cold fish" inhabiting the "frozen zone" of the radical Enlightenment that Wordsworth supposedly set forth in The Prelude has been significantly revised, (3) while the stock view of Immanuel Kant as a dry formalist in the metaphysics of morals has been challenged by recent studies of the "anthropological applications" of his thought, and his alleged "embodiment of reason." (4) Many of these studies serve to historicize affect, to look at specific and significant moments of transaction between sensation and thought, rather than to describe a decontextualized sensation either as under the tyrannical sway of reason, or as escaping it in the anarchic and unregulated impulses of popular politics and dissenting extremism. (5) And far from figuring a transcendental authority that is inattentive to the differential life of embodied experience, this increasingly historicized power of reason shows itself, both for Godwin and for Kant, to foster its own dangerously excessive species of enthusiasm in its combined activity with an ambivalent and untrustworthy power of imagination. The worrying capacity to "rave with reason" that Kant encountered in a number of his contemporaries (notably J. G. Herder) required that reason itself be regulated or, as I will suggest below, that it be oriented with reference to sensibility.

But what can these revisions to our understanding of the intellectual culture of the 1790s and its attitudes to emotion, this closer attention both to the structure of reason and the structure of feeling through an account of their significant interactions, tell us about female participants in the culture of radical Enlightenment? (6) Are not accounts such as Mee's in danger of reproducing a traditionalist view of the transcendentalizing effects of poetry in the Romantic period, by describing poetry's overcoming and regulating of an embodied particularity which for feminists such as Cora Kaplan long represented a form of resistance to the canon? (7) Shouldn't we after all be celebrating the capacity of sensibility and the life of the body to escape rational predication, to embody an eternally differential experience that escapes the domineering formalizations of reason? Yet it is not only canonical male poets who seek to regulate emotion in the revolutionary decade. As Mee reminds us, part of Mary Wollstonecraft's polemic against Burke in the Vindication of the Rights of Men serves to attack his "romantic enthusiasm," his attempt to make sentiment serve the ends of a nationalist and hierarchical domesticity against the revolutionary "cold mathematicians." (8) Even so, the breathless animation of the Vindication of the Rights of Men struggles to articulate a type of passionate resistance of reason to Burke's enthusiastic and irrational counter-revolutionary rallying call. Reason is shown to have its own emotional content here, as the appeal to the "rational religious impulses" advocated by the dissenting circle to which Wollstonecraft belonged suggests. (9) And as the examples of Burke and Rousseau go to show, for Wollstonecraft, as much as for Godwin and Kant, this sensualized reason shows itself to be in dire need of regulation in its engagements with an increasingly mobile power of imagination.

Part of the appeal of reading reason and sentiment as antithetical at this period surely derived from the way in which the antithesis allows for an orderly and traditionalist subordination of sentiment to reason, the kind of subjection of enthusiasm to intellect that would suggest that enthusiasm made manifest without the guiding hand of reason will always lead to irrationalism. But recent studies of the historicity of affect and the embodiment of reason suggest that rather than seeking to dominate an inherently irrational emotional life, reason is enabled through emotion, it takes on an expressive capability that allows it to be responsive to the embodied particularity of its context. Mee's study has suggested important ways in which a presentist view of a largely cold and disembodied Enlightenment rationalism in a figure such as Godwin, a view of reason as seeking to transcend the contexts of its expression and to restrict the life of the body, may obscure our understanding of what for Godwin's contemporaries was a species of "Enlightenment enthusiasm." Far from being antithetical, and thus allowing for a neat historical alignment of "enthusiasm with Romanticism as part of a binary opposition with, say, Reason and Enlightenment" (Mee 5). the relation between reason and sensation is highly equivocal during this period.

In a close parallel to readings of Godwin, Wollstonecraft was long read as a would-be rational formalist who denied that conditions of embodiment are constitutive to reason, and as a woman who struggled unsuccessfully to reconcile her commitment to reason with a torrid emotional life. This deeply patronizing view has recently been countered by studies of the imagination as a space within which reason is reconciled to sensibility, notably by Barbara Taylor and John Whale. (10) Both studies, but Taylor's in particular, restore to Wollstonecraft the religious teleology which is central to her thought, by reconciling Wollstonecraft's rationalism to an understanding of the Platonic eros, a sacralized form of erotic love which Wollstonecraft inherited through the commonwealth tradition. Wollstonecraft is thus re-placed in an historical context which is no longer understood to be grounded in an implacable conflict between reason and sensation and that describes the emergence of a liberated romantic enthusiasm out of the rationalist restrictions of the Enlightenment, but that rather recognizes complementary manoeuvers and productive contradictions between the two. It is my purpose in this article to discuss these negotiations, and to place them in a wider context of Enlightenment rationalism, both local and European, that is attentive to the interactions rather than the opposition between reason and sensation and that neither seeks to castigate nor defend reason, either in its embodied or disembodied form. In practice this means attention to the way in which emergent forms of literature, and the use of particular literary devices and tropes in philosophical discourse, take on constitutive roles in a cultural debate about sensation and what was often understood as its dangerous capacity to expand the public sphere.

2. "Mistakes of Conduct": Literature and the Regulation of Reason

John Mee understands The Prelude as a representation of a mature self that emerges unscathed from youthful transports of enthusiasm that it retrospectively recognizes to have been excessive and yet contributory to the formation of a regulated subjectivity. This is matched by Wollstonecraft's description, in the fictional Wrongs of Woman, of "mistakes of conduct":

There are mistakes of conduct which at five-and-twenty prove the strength of the mind, that, ten or fifteen years after, would demonstrate its weakness, its incapacity to acquire a sane judgement. The youths who are satisfied with the ordinary pleasures of life, and do not sigh after ideal phantoms of love and friendship, will never arrive at great maturity of understanding; but if these reveries are cherished, as is too frequently the case with women, when experience ought to have taught them in what human happiness consists, they become as useless as they are wretched. (11)

Wollstonecraft's feminism articulates an ambivalent role for the imagination in personal development. The imagination is a condition of our attaining a "maturity of understanding" that those who "do not sigh after ideal phantoms of love and friendship" would never attain. Yet this arrival at maturity is equally determined by our ability to let go of this erotic idealism fostered by the imagination. Failure to recognize the productive "mistake" in the imagination, its capacity to idealize objects that later turn out not to have merited the idealization, would forestall the formation of a sane judgment. Even so, failure to let go of the ideal means that it would have been better never to have sighed after the ideal in the first place.

Mee's suggestion that poetics in the 1790s are "regulatory," in that they attempt to memorialize states of passion that are retrospectively recognized to have been productive to the formation of the subject (but only insofar as they are later sublimated into the literary imagination) raises the question of the disciplinary function of the...

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