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IN 1798 WILLIAM GODWIN PUBLISHED BOTH HIS MEMOIRS OF WOLLSTONECRAFT and his posthumous gathering of her works, including her unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman.(1) Godwin's Memoirs were so controversial that he was forced to issue a second, revised edition in the same year. Southey wrote that he lacked "all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked," through disclosures about her father's violence, her romantic relationships and the gynecological details of her death.(2) And although Mitzi Myers recognizes him as "something of an innovator in life-writing,"(3) Godwin's frank portrayal of his wife's relationships with Fuseli and Imlay has been blamed for the subsequent disfiguration of her name by anti-Jacobins such as Polwhele. His re-membering of his wife may indeed be "hurtful," if read against Wordsworth's association of epitaphs with monuments, and the latter's claim that memory should be selective, should "spiritualize and beautify" the deceased.(4) But Godwin does not necessarily share Wordsworth's use of memory to conserve the past and bury its failures. In "Of Choice in Reading" he locates the significance of a work (and, by extension, a life) not in its explicit moral but in a "tendency" opened by and to an uncertain future.(5) Writing Wollstonecraft's epitaph rather than her biography would contain these revolutionary tendencies within a morally acceptable summation of her life, as indeed the doctored version of the section on Fuseli tries to do.(6) Likewise, idealizing her innovations might be to fix as dogma the experimental and temporary responses she developed to the wrongs of woman, for instance in her educational writings, which reveal her construction by a propriety and Englishness she also sought to escape. Godwin's choice is rather to "romanticize" Wollstonecraft, in the sense that Novalis uses the word in writing (also in 1798) that the world "must be romanticized" through a "qualitative raising to the powers (Potenzirung)" in which the "lower self is identified with a better self."(7) Thus Wollstonecraft is all too real, all too human; but Godwin looks to the reader to potentialize the revolutionary idealism in such apparently base occurrences as her love for Fuseli and Imlay.
This paper thus suggests a method in what is often seen as Godwin's naivete and ineptitude. His editing of Wollstonecraft is his attempt to write the revolutionary subject into history so as to initiate the uncertain process of her future reading. Or to put it differently, Godwin's editing is a historiography that can be read with and through his other "experiments" (in essays, biographies, and fiction) with a history that is revolutionary and unsettled. This historiography sees the subject's re-formative potential as emerging only in a complexly negative dialectic both with herself and history. It locates her legacy not in the moral of specific texts and acts, but in a tendency often hidden from the author herself, and unconsolidated within existing discourses. Tendency, moreover, is not transparent: it is inseparable from a work's "effects," allowing genius a performative power, but also subjecting it to the accidents of its own disfiguration. Reading Wollstonecraft's texts as parts of her life, Godwin seeks to disclose the tendency within which specific writings on education or liberal reform emerge as experiments not reducible to their morality. His tendential reading of Wollstonecraft accounts for the unfinalized, fragmentary quality of her life in his portrayal. Sadly, among the. "effects" of this life, as Godwin wrote it, was the postponing of feminist justice for generations. Yet despite this fact, the Memoirs have also made possible our own reassessment of Wollstonecraft and how she figures in the political unconscious. To give but one example, Gary Kelly's argument that her passion for Imlay was part of her revolutionary feminism(8) rests, perhaps unconsciously, on Godwin's sense of the dialogical integrity of her life and work. For it is Godwin's framing of Wollstonecraft's writings within the Memoirs that inscribes the concept of life as a form of intellectual work. Godwin's "editing" of his wife was seminal in other respects: in bringing out a romantic rather than enlightenment feminism(9) catalyzed by her stay in France, and in revisioning sensibility as a radical empiricism--a mode of knowing that responds to the revisability of ideas by life.
Godwin's sober portrayal of Wollstonecraft has to do with a sense that revolutionary genius is a lightning that finds only ambiguous conductors, and to his feeling (voiced by Milton in Eikonoklastes) that the construction of icons is an impediment to revolutionary history.(10) Indeed Memoirs casts a new light on the fictional idealization of Wollstonecraft in St. Leon (1799), where Marguerite is an icon whose uncritical acceptance might too quickly lead us to dismiss St. Leon's alchemy for a domesticity disengaged from history. As we shall see, the domestication of woman within the genres of educational writing and children's stories, is something that Godwin regards as a limitation in the "English" phase of his wife's career. In contrast to the premature idolization of Marguerite in St. Leon,(11) Godwin tries to present Wollstonecraft in the Memoirs not as stereotypically perfect, but as a subject-in-process whose life and ideas are unfinished. He shows her as constantly learning, her experiences being the stimulus for a life and work that employ several genres and faculties. Thus her father's domestic violence and the inadequacies of her mother's "system of government" (M 7) are the first provocations for her interest in upbringing and education, carried out through her school and her books. But her love for Imlay in the midst of Jacobin France is another kind of work, as it seeks to unpack the contradictions of a revolution that both gives women a voice and yet excludes them.
Godwin uses the word "project" (M 12,170), analogous to his own term "experiment" in "Of Choice in Reading," to suggest the transpositional quality of Wollstonecraft's activities. Thus the Vindication, with which he identified her in the subtitles of both 1798 texts, is but one plateau rather than the monument of her fame others have made it. Godwin describes it as an "unequal performance ... deficient in method and arrangement," and written in "no more than six weeks" (M 83,85). If it is nevertheless "bold and original" (M 80), this is because he thinks of "genius" (M 84) as power rather than knowledge, as a capacity to respond and initiate. Yet Godwin's sense of his wife's genius, and of her responsiveness to the challenges posed by each context through which she moves, is set against an awareness of those contexts as limiting. The Vindication, post-revolutionary but written before Wollstonecraft's residence in France, is praised for its "imagination (and) sentiment" but criticized for its "rigid" and "amazonian temper" (M 82). Commenting on her translations for the Analytical Review, Godwin says that such "miscellaneous literary employment, seems, for the time at least, rather to damp and contract, than to enlarge and invigorate, the genius" (M 66). Of a certain conventionalism even in her own work, he comments that he "find(s) occasionally interspersed some of that homily-language, which ... is calculated to damp the moral courage, it was intended to awaken" (M 67).
Godwin thus stresses Wollstonecraft's radical originality, but also its misrepresentation, its discursive construction by the circumstances of her life. These circumstances, or her reaction against them, impose on her a "character pro tempore" that is not her "fixed and permanent character" (M 82). Correspondingly, Godwin also emphasizes her restless travelling, her "repugnance" at returning to England (M 125), and by implication her search for different contexts of cultural judgment marked by the parallels he draws between her and Goethe's Werther (M 20, 112).(12) Indeed Memoirs (in its first version at least) de-anglicizes Wollstonecraft by stressing sensibility rather than propriety. Though Godwin sees an essential continuity between her English and European phases, this being one reason he includes the Fuseli as well as the Imlay episode, he presents the French Revolution as radically opening Wollstonecraft's life to its own tendencies, through the "vehement concussion" it produced in the "prejudices of her early years" and her "respect for establishments" (M 74). Wollstonecraft one can argue, did not encounter the Revolution at a personal level until her stay in France, which resulted both in her book on the Revolution and her relationship with Imlay. The Revolution and its ambiguous aftermath raised the question of women's agency in history as well as in a politicized social sphere. Like Keats's chamber of maiden-thought, it resulted in an intensification of Wollstonecraft's insight "into the heart and nature of Man" and a new sense that the "World is full of Misery and Heartbreak." Through the Revolution "many doors [were] set open--but all dark--all leading to dark passages."(13)
Godwin's Memoirs are framed by the Posthumous Works, which produce a paratextual representation of Wollstonecraft quite distinct from that of the recent Picketing edition. And while the differences can be ascribed to a posthumous rather than collected format, Godwin's choices nevertheless have a direction. Though he should have omitted published work, he reprinted an essay on "Poetry" which had appeared (in shorter form) in the Monthly Magazine. On the other hand he left out the reviews for the Analytical Review that dominate Pickering's last volume, though they had appeared anonymously, and he also left out an abridgment of Lavater's Physiognomy mentioned in the Memoirs (65-66). That these choices are meant to romanticize Wollstonecraft is clear. Godwin omits a mode that places the critic squarely within the bourgeois public...
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