On my own in London, I walk, I wander, I look. And I let my mind wander too, to women, and the bridges they threw themselves from. Warriors, and who they stride into battle against, and why. Their struggles to harmonize the urges and sensings of the body and the mind. The men they settle into contented lives with, or not. The swollen rivers they cross in the dead of night, the warnings they shout. When they stand and fight, and when they walk away.
Mary Wollstonecraft was a warrior from birth, and never let up. A good hater, her husband, William Godwin, described her. She grew up witness to what she would describe as the “tyranny” of a bad marriage: her abusive father farmed halfheartedly, gambled, and drank. Young Mary Wollstonecraft slept on the landing outside her mother’s bedroom to protect her from him, and once her mother died, she lit out to cobble together an independent existence. “It is a happy thing to be a mere blank,” she wrote, “and to be able to pursue one’s own whims, where they lead, without having a husband and half a hundred children to teaze and controul a poor woman who wishes to be free.” The patriarchy of society, she saw early on, was just the patriarchy of the family writ large—one big bad marriage in which everyone was trapped.
London, of course, was her destination: the eighteenth-century version of the “creative class” centered around her publisher, Joseph Johnson, in St. Paul’s Churchyard. She plunged into a self-fashioned intellectual life, arguing with men around dinner tables, including Godwin, who didn’t like her the first time they met. Eventually she wrote the pair of political treatises that made her name, Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790) and Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The latter, in particular, made her notorious, although its central theme now seems too obvious to state: the mind is not gendered—or limited—by the gender of the body in which it resides, which is bound by a society organized from top to bottom to benefit men. Therefore, social and educational institutions must be reformed to let women live up to their full potential. “[T]he most perfect education, in my opinion,” she wrote, “is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent. In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.”
Drawn by the bloody drama of the French Revolution—like any journalist drawn to Afghanistan today—Wollstonecraft went to Paris intending to write her own history of it. There she met Gilbert Imlay—a tall, charming venture capitalist and professional trader in sentiment, including Europeans’ yearning for an unspoiled New World and Wollstonecraft’s for a man who understood her. But his mode of love, unlike hers, was to enjoy himself and then move on. Wollstonecraft fell in love anyway, meeting him during the height of the Terror at the barricades of the city and conceiving her first child, Fanny. She dreamed of traveling back to America with him, of starting a new life on a farm in the former colonies—sturdy and self-sufficient as Dicey Langston. Yet the relationship foundered, then soured. But still, on his behalf, Wollstonecraft traveled.
Go to Scandinavia and find out what happened to my ship, Imlay asked. I trust you. The ship was full of silver to rescue him from debt, and it had disappeared. Perhaps they both knew this was his way of distracting her from what was coming, as some men do: pile on compliments and signs of trust to raise a woman’s spirits before you let them drop. Because if you can’t get away to see to your own ship, and you have access to a smart, tough, and tough-minded woman like Mary Wollstonecraft, wouldn’t you take advantage of her?
Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—aka Letters from Norway (1796), drawn from her actual letters to Imlay—shows Wollstonecraft in that strange sort of limbo travelers enter under a weight of emotion: called out of preexisting preoccupations by the new scenes and challenges, half-reminded, by the contrast, of what she’s trying to forget. Her body is active, and her mind continually slips back to what is elsewhere: Imlay, and the relationship that may be already dead. Yet you can also see her fighting that other effect of travel: the dreamy instinct to let go of that tether connected at the other end to home, the need to let that lingering obsession or emotion go. Here, anyone in her shoes might wonder, does it matter anymore? Here, can’t I just let it go? Because the world is bigger than what that side of your heart, tugged by that cord, connected to that man, would suggest. Is it disloyal to let yourself let go of your old self and travel toward a new one? To choose solitude over a man who can never really give you love?
“Talked to Allan on the phone last night,” I wrote in my first day’s journal of London. “Don’t know why talking about this departure on the phone should feel so much like a departure in person.” Only now, approaching the age Wollstonecraft was when she died, have I learned to let go of men rather than beg and plead and cling to them. Only now do I see how I held onto the tiny thread of something that was real and spun it so far out it became too thin to hold.
Like Wollstonecraft and Imlay at the barricades, Allan and I couldn’t get enough of touching, talking, breathing the same air, that first summer we fell in love. We waded into a spring-fed waterhole, giggling. We lay in the grass as crickets and frogs tuned up and lightning bugs flashed in the trees, and his face over mine blotted out the moon. In his apartment, we’d prop ourselves up against the headboard of his old maple sleigh bed and smoke, dropping our ash into a tiny china dish set on his chest. When we moved the little dish and put out all the lights I’d kiss him there, again, right over his heart, with a fierce tenderness. This boy, this man, was the sweetest I had ever known.
Like Lot’s wife, I will turn to a pillar of salt, weeping, if I look back at this too long. Anyone does, looking back at feelings you can’t know then will change. But they do, as people do.
What happened to us? What happened?
We hung on by emails and phone calls and grueling drives between our separate states, where we trudged up our forking career paths. We both ate mindlessly and smoked a lot. Increasingly I felt too big around my boyfriend, too exuberant even in the toned-down version of myself I adopted to please him. I reached for him and he turned away. I picked him wild onion flowers—the bright stars in the grass I had always brought my mama, when I was a little girl—and he snorted, complained of their smell, tossed them in the trash. “Well,” I said weakly, “I didn’t know …I mean, I thought …” And I let it drop. If a woman were to tell the truth about herself, wrote the poet Muriel Rukeyser, the world would split open. If I told him I was angry and hurting—if I let that righteous strength roar out—the fragile bark of this relationship would split open and drop me into a cold bottomless sea: falling, falling, with nowhere to land.
Any relationship is work. Any marriage is work. And we do have to work, even to fight, for what we want. But we also have to choose when to stride, Boudicca-like, into battle, when to risk swimming that creek to warn the rebels, and when to walk away. Some love is sustainable; some has been prolonged beyond its natural life, out of fear. Some marriages are theoretical, the wouldn’t-it-be-good-if, white-lace daydreams of good little Southern girls and boys. And some are built on real passion, sturdy enough to take honesty, anger, the occasional burst of outrage or pique or immaturity from one or both. A relationship should be able to withstand the human frailty of the humans it shelters. And if it can’t, then both those humans are better off alone. I know that now.
This is what Wollstonecraft learned. And what she helped me see.
Shadowed by her dying love affair, Letters from Norway is Wollstonecraft’s most wistful and haunting book, and the one that enraptured even previously unwilling readers: as Godwin later wrote, it was “calculated to make a man in love with its author.” Mary presents herself as wandering the overlaid tracks of the present—the landscape in front of her—and the imagined and remembered past, where the lover who has sent her here is absent. She tracks back and forth from commentary on the customs and appearances
of the people she meets and the landscape she’s passing through to veiled, melancholic renderings of her own emotions (meant for Imlay, displayed to the public) and thoughts about the future of the soon-to-be-fatherless little girl traveling by her side. “I would then, with fond anxiety, lead you very early in life to form your grand principle of action, to save you from the vain regret of having, through irresolution, let the spring-tide of existence pass away, unimproved, unenjoyed,” she addresses little Fanny directly. “Gain experience—ah! gain it—while experience is worth having, and acquire sufficient fortitude to pursue your own happiness; it includes your utility by a direct path. What is wisdom too often but the owl of the goddess, who sits moping in a desolated heart …” Back in London, discovering that Imlay had moved on to another woman, she rented a boat to row herself to Putney Bridge, where she walked up and down on the bridge for half an hour, letting the rain weight her clothes, and then jumped in. Yet she was rescued, and made the determination to live. When Imlay wrote her, claiming that “he knew not ‘how to extricate’ them from the ‘wretchedness into which we have been plunged,’” she scornfully replied, “You are extricated long since.” It is as the sadder-but-wiser independent woman, her beauty deepened by the “experience” she had half-sought, that Wollstonecraft re-encountered Godwin and began to see him regularly, leading to their marriage in the spring of 1798.
The path marked by low points, broken places, wide bends where it stalls out, is the easier one to set your own feet on, if you’re looking for ancestresses to guide you. Boudicca is inspiring but the steep grade of her path—victory or death, by her own hand—can also seem intimidating. Wollstonecraft knew how the right models can enable the women who follow them: “In fact, if we revert to history,” she wrote dryly, “we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.” Remember, she implies, only shallow men admire the merely pretty and sweet, the stereotypical sterling ideal. Similarly, pure achievement leads straight up, on a grade no one but that distant, now-dead figure can climb. When you’re seeking the women who’ve gone before you, this is important.
The train carries me into Victoria Station through a suburban-industrial landscape of high-rise project housing, chain stores and parking lots, rows of brick Edwardian-era houses with tiny back gardens, graffiti slashed onto stone tunnel walls. Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave seems like the appropriate destination for a pilgrimage. Her daughter and Percy Shelley thought so too: every biography says there’s a strong possibility that they made love for the first time on that grave, within sight of the little stone church where Wollstonecraft and Godwin were married. St. Pancras is the only name I know, and there it is: an Underground stop on a map. I’ve never been on a subway before, but I navigate the Underground with no problem. Can this really be so easy?
Wollstonecraft never intended to get married. Nor did Godwin. For a while, even after she became pregnant, they kept their relationship, and then their marriage, a secret—sensing, correctly, that friends would tease them, since Godwin had written confidently of marriage as “the most odious of all monopolies” and she wasn’t much more positive. But these two prickly, self-sufficient intellectuals had really fallen in love. “You do not know how honest I am,” he wrote her. “I swear to you that I told you nothing but the strict & literal truth, when I described to you the manner in which you set my imagination on fire on Saturday. For six & thirty hours I could think of nothing else. I longed inexpressibly to have you in my arms.” And she felt the same. “I have seldom seen so much live fire running about my features as this morning,” she wrote in a morning-after note, “when recollections—very dear, called forth the blush of pleasure, as I adjusted my hair.” So, on a late-March morning—with Wollstonecraft three months gone in pregnancy—she and Godwin went to their small neighborhood church and got married, with only one of Godwin’s friends in attendance. His diary records only one laconic notation, amidst books read and friends visited: Panc.
Climbing up out of the Underground station into busy Euston Road, my eyes fall right on a tall marble building: St. Pancras Church. A dry-mouthed excitement takes hold of me as I hurry across the street and up the shallow steps into the church. On a weekday morning, the church is quiet, its vestibule low-ceilinged and cozy, smelling of wool coats and old carpeting. I step forward into the sanctuary and a black man in minister’s garb comes down the aisle. “Can I help you?” he asks with a Jamaican lilt. When I explain I’m looking for Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave site, at the church where she and Godwin were married, he frowns, and then his face clears. “Oh,” he says, “you want Old St. Pancras.” Rummaging in the stack of brochures and devotional books on the side table, he draws out a small Xeroxed map and hands it to me. There it is, a small square far to the right of the page, at the end of a curving line: Old St. Pancras.
Down the street I walk, passing the great reddish-brown sprawl of the British Library and heading into a neighborhood of densely packed row houses, small grocery stores, more graffiti on underpass walls. A trio of Indian women in bright blue and pink saris passes me, walking in the other direction, and we smile at one another. This neighborhood still feels as it might have in Wollstonecraft’s time, a scruffy, busy enclave of hardworking people, sun peeking into narrow streets through fitful clouds, trees in leaf in their sidewalk cages in front of dark brown brick buildings. Wollstonecraft and Godwin each kept their own apartments here, even after they were married, in the name of work and independence, sending food and notes and books up and down the street by messenger during the day and rejoining in one or the others’ rooms at night. Somewhere in this neighborhood Mary Shelley also grew up, in the building where Godwin and his second wife and their menage of children kept a faltering bookshop after Wollstonecraft’s death, but I don’t have the presence of mind to remember or look for the addresses. I’m in a fog, a haze. I walk.
And suddenly, there’s the little gray stone church, on a slight rise above the street, surrounded by big trees and a graveyard with stones tumbling left and right. It’s not hard at all to imagine Godwin and Wollstonecraft in a little cluster of people at the church door, gathering their wits about them before going inside to get married at last. Nor is it hard to imagine Percy Shelley, tall and skinny and excitable, walking under these trees next to a slight girl with her father’s serious, downward glance and her mother’s light auburn hair.
It isn’t hard, even though the whole site is surrounded by orange plastic construction fence and crisscrossed by growling, beeping machines. Old St. Pancras is under restoration. The door is barred, the whole site looks forbidding. But I slip through the barriers anyway and find the big, square monument quickly: Wollstonecraft’s name and dates on one side, Godwin’s on the other, and Godwin’s second wife’s on the side opposite: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: Born 27 April, 1759: Died 10 September, 1797. But the bodies aren’t there. Wollstonecraft’s granddaughter-in-law—Percy Florence Shelley’s wife Jane, zealous to preserve her husband’s family’s literary legacy—had Wollstonecraft and Godwin dug up and reinterred in Bournemouth, near their daughter’s grave, and this monument left here in apology. Still, past and present slide together and apart and back together here, like overlapping lenses in a viewing glass. The air under these big trees is dim and cool and welcoming. The stone church hunkers comfortably on its little hill. How old are these great trees? Maybe they were here at Wollstonecraft’s wedding, even if they were just little saplings. Maybe Percy Shelley leaned against one. Maybe he looked at Mary as their flickering shade fell on her face, searching for some sign of her mother in her eyes.
“Excuse me.” A construction worker in a yellow hat—her blond ponytail sliding over one shoulder—approaches me. “You can’t walk about in here, you have to go.” She points with Wollstonecraftian firmness at the barriers. The machinery is too loud for her to hear the explanation I try to give, so I smile and
walk away. I found it, after all.
Wollstonecraft and Godwin both expected her second child to be a boy. As with Fanny, she wrote jokingly of the “little animal” poking and prodding her belly from inside, complained affectionately of its “liveliness.” Yet when that baby was born on August 31, it was a girl—also named Mary. And complications immediately ensued: a retained placenta, leading to infection that grew worse. Wollstonecraft floated between consciousness and uncontrollable shivering, so strong that it shook her bed and the ceiling of the downstairs room. No one expected the new baby to survive. And soon, they knew her mother was dying. “Talk to her of Fanny & Mary,” records Godwin’s journal. Then, at twenty minutes to eight in the morning on Sunday, September 10, Mary Wollstonecraft died: Godwin recorded the time and scratched three solid lines underneath. A month after her death, he described his grief to a friend: “I partook of a happiness, so much the more exquisite, as I had a short time before had no conception of it, and scarcely admitted the possibility of it.” The irony hurts: Dicey Langston, in a cabin on the American frontier, survived the birth of twenty-two children. Mary Wollstonecraft, in the major city of the then-known world, died with number two.
The Best Travel Writing Page 17
