Imlay’s business associate, Elias Backman, had offered to host her during her stay, and Mary’s spirits lifted slightly when she saw the Backmans’ clean, comfortable home with crisp white linens and a brood of small children. Having spent most of her life alone with her mother and her nurse, Fanny was at first alarmed by the crowd. But before long, she was playing with the other children in the garden, allowing Mary a few hours to herself each day, a time she used to refine her criticisms of Gilbert. Each day, and sometimes several times a day, she bent over her writing desk, wielding her formidable pen, bombarding him with accusations and questions: Would he really meet her in Europe? If she found his ship, would he really stop devoting himself to a life of commerce? Was he capable of being a father and a husband? As in Paris, their separation gave Mary the room she needed to develop her ideas. She was intent on proving that she suffered not because of her own weakness or any intrinsic flaw, but because of her capacity to have feelings—true feelings—and his inability to have any. “Ah, why do not you love us with more sentiment?” she demanded.
This argument, an extension of her earlier debates with him, represented her embrace of what scholars now call “the culture of sensibility.” Having first encountered these ideas in Rousseau, she had long seen “sensibility,” or “sentimentality,” as a special faculty possessed by only the most enlightened people, such as herself. Now she pitted her refined feelings and elevated mind against Imlay’s crass materialism. If only she could teach Gilbert to feel as deeply as she did, then his morals would improve. If only he had her imagination, she told him, he might triumph over “the grossness of [his] senses.”
The more she wrote, the more Mary discovered that there was a certain power to being the abandoned one. According to the culture of sentiment, the purity of her heart and spirit meant she stood outside—that is, above—the ordinary run of human beings. It was also true that being abandoned had two meanings: being left behind, but also being wild, or living outside the law. The eighteenth century was fully aware of this paradox, in part because a woman who was alone was not answerable to any man. Paradoxically, then, with each cry of abandonment Mary was also announcing her distinctiveness, her lawlessness, and her independence. Mary Robinson, an actress who was the castoff lover of the Prince Regent and would soon become one of Mary’s close friends, expressed this strange condition in a sonnet she wrote after the prince’s desertion: the abandoned lover strays “from the tranquil path of wisdom,” she says, and is driven into “passion’s thorny wild, forlorn to dwell.” Abandonment, for Robinson as for Wollstonecraft, becomes a grievous exile from civilization, but at the same time both Marys were declaring something more complicated and compelling than simple sorrow. With the loss of the lover came a certain freedom, a release from all restraint.
The more Mary wrote, the more she saw her suffering as evidence of her superiority to Gilbert. Not only did her grief reveal her freedom from societal mores, it demonstrated her profound sensitivity. To the modern reader, it may seem contradictory—and rather disappointing—that the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman would exhaust her ex-lover with weeping missives, try to kill herself, and then despair at his rejection, but for Mary each of her laments was an essential building block in the case she was building against Gilbert. She had moved from writing about the abuse of women in general to writing about her own suffering. Having experienced a man’s betrayal, she would now bear witness against him, and in the spirit of her Rights of Women, she refused to submit to her dismissal gracefully or decorously.
One can almost feel sorry for Gilbert. An intrepid journalist, Mary knew how to fight with ink. Viewed collectively, her letters to Gilbert are formidable. In the end, not only had Mary composed the equivalent of several treatises that could be called A Vindication of the Rights of Mary, as well as a Treatise on the Wrongs of Gilbert, she had also written a ferocious condemnation of the sexual double standard and a stirring argument on behalf of “sentiment” and “imagination” when threatened by the forces of the marketplace. Other women might view their pain as unique, pertaining to themselves and no one else, but not Mary. To her, Gilbert’s betrayal, his disagreement with her about how to live one’s life, represented the ultimate collision of ideologies: he stood for the commercial forces of the Industrial Revolution; she stood for the truth of the mind and the heart. She was having the argument of her life, embarking on what she saw as a clash of the titans; but unfortunately Gilbert, many things though he was, was not a titan. Her battle would turn out to be one-sided, since her opponent did not have nearly her capacity, ability, or vision.
As soon as the stormy weather lightened, the Backmans persuaded Mary to do some sightseeing. Gothenburg was at the time the most prosperous city in Sweden, its ruler-straight canals lined with tidy homes and shops. The streets were wide enough that pedestrians could walk without fear of getting run over by a passing coach. Few cities could have been less like tightly packed London, or Paris. The largest building in Gothenburg was the Swedish East India Company House, a yellowish brick rectangle with a copper roof. Instead of pointing heavenward like Notre Dame or St. Paul’s, East India House was squat and wide, stuffed with barrels and crates, baskets and merchandise, an emblem of Gothenburg’s flourishing trade with the Far East.
The Swedish devotion to commerce annoyed Mary. All anyone here seemed to think about was making money, a whole city full of Gilberts. But at least there was the countryside. Beeches, lindens, and ashes grew in groves, as though they had been planted by a master gardener, and after the heat of London, a Scandinavian summer was magical. The air, the grasses, the leaves—all fairly hummed with golden light. While Fanny played with the Backman children under Marguerite’s watchful eye, Mary clambered over the rocks to the sea, strolled under canopies of enormous pines, ate salmon and anchovies, sipped cordials, and enjoyed bowls of strawberries with cream.
It was a relief to feel this “degree of vivacity.” Although she did not like the food—the meat dishes were overly spiced or strangely sweetened, the rye bread was almost impossible to chew because it was baked only twice a year—Mary relished the sheer foreignness of the land. And although she was disturbed by the lack of educated conversation, the poverty of the servants, and the childrearing practices of giving brandy to babies, wrapping them in heavy unwashed flannels even during the summer, and not allowing them to toddle freely outdoors, she enjoyed the adventure of being so far from home. Her compulsion to record Gilbert’s failings and analyze the dimensions, origins, and gravity of his sins gradually faded, and in its place she jotted down notes, not only about Sweden and the Swedes, but what it was like to be an Englishwoman recovering from a tragic love affair in the land of the Vikings, where the fields were a blaze of green and the night came creeping in long after midnight. The exercise was therapeutic; she could feel herself slowly returning to health, physically and mentally.
Alone at her desk, she spent hours describing the solace that Nature had to offer:
I contemplated all nature at rest; the rocks, even grown darker in their appearance, looked as if they partook of the general repose, and reclined more heavily on their foundation.—What, I exclaimed, is this active principle which keeps me still?—Why fly my thoughts abroad when every thing around me appears at home? My child was sleeping with equal calmness—innocent and sweet as the closing flowers.—Some recollections, attached to the idea of home, mingled with reflections respecting the state of society I had been contemplating that evening, made a tear drop on the rosy cheek I had just kissed; and emotions that trembled on the brink of extasy and agony gave a poignancy to my sensations, which made me feel more alive than usual.
Mary had set forth into uncharted territory. Wordsworth had not yet articulated his view of Nature; other late-eighteenth-century writers had celebrated the bucolic beauties of the outdoors, but only Rousseau had treated the landscape as an opportunity for psychological anatomizing, tying thoughts and feelings to lakes, rocks, and trees. And
Rousseau had entirely written women out of his universe of sentiment. Recording her thoughts in her notebook at night, the sun still high, celebrating her own capacity for self-examination even as she was smarting from Gilbert’s rejections, Mary could not know that her new work would be read by generations of writers to come, particularly Romantic poets such as her future son-in-law who would adopt many of her principles. In Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, the poet finds solace in Nature just as Mary did here, moving from despair to wisdom while walking along the Arno.
After a few weeks of research, interviewing people about Imlay’s ship to no avail, Mary decided it was time to visit Tonsberg, Norway, where one of Imlay’s former employees lived. Perhaps he would know what had happened to the silver. Tonsberg was a day’s ferry ride north, and Mary went alone—a difficult choice, as she had never been apart from her baby and relied on Marguerite’s cheerfulness to support her when she could not shake off her misery. But she knew it would be more efficient to travel unencumbered and she worried about Marguerite’s health, since she was still recovering from the seasickness she had endured on the passage to Scandinavia. Marguerite protested that she did not want to be left behind. She did not trust her volatile mistress to return, and she made Mary promise that she would not try to harm herself while she was gone.
As the ferry drew away from the wharf, Mary stood alone at the rails. Away from Fanny for the first time since she gave birth, she reflected on what it was like to be the mother of a girl:
I feel more than a mother’s fondness and anxiety, when I reflect on the dependent and oppressed state of her sex. I dread lest she should be forced to sacrifice her heart to her principles, or principles to her heart. With trembling hand I shall cultivate sensibility, and cherish delicacy of sentiment, lest, whilst I lend fresh blushes to the rose, I sharpen the thorns that will wound the breast I would fain guard—I dread to unfold her mind, lest it should render her unfit for the worlds she is to inhabit—Hapless woman! What a fate is thine!
And yet, much as she missed her child, Mary had not been on her own for over a year and felt free, more liberated than she had for many, many months.
TONSBERG, THE OLDEST SETTLEMENTonsberg, the oldest settlement in Norway, was picturesque, complete with painted wooden houses and a smooth deep-water harbor where its original inhabitants, the Vikings, had once anchored their dragon boats. About sixty miles north of Gothenburg, the town was nestled in a valley. Stands of pine and aspen climbed the hills beyond. Blue-tinted mountains rose in the distance. Farmland rolled along the shore. Seals sunned themselves on the small rocky islands. A fjord cut through the fields outside of the town, the water as clean and clear as any Mary had ever seen. Mayor Wulfsberg, Elias Backman’s associate, who had originally investigated the case of Gilbert’s missing ship, greeted Mary with genuine warmth, offering assistance to his tired guest. He assured her he would speak to all the interested parties, since she could not understand Norwegian, but she would need to give him time to make his inquiries—at least three weeks. Mary’s heart sank at the thought of being away from Fanny for so long, but she liked this kind, intelligent man, and she also liked the lodgings he had found for her. The inn was bright and cheerful, painted barn red with bright yellow trim and a sea blue interior. It was right on the water, so Mary could watch the ships sail in and out of the harbor, just as she had in Le Havre.
An enthusiastic tourist, Mary made it her business to learn about the places she visited. On a sightseeing mission to the Tonsberg church, she stared at a macabre display of embalmed bodies lying in their coffins, arms folded, faces shriveled. Disgusted at these “human petrifications [sic],” she reflected that “nothing is so ugly as the human form when deprived of life and thus dried into stone, merely to preserve the most disgusting image of death.…Pugh! My stomach turns.” To Mary, this evidence of corporeal decay made the existence of the soul an urgent matter. She did not want to believe that when she died, she would turn into one of these dreadful mummies, or worse, that she would simply disappear. Surely she would live on in some ineffable way. Surely she (and everyone else) had a soul. A few days later, she visited the remains of a thirteenth-century castle, high on a slope overlooking the water. Here was yet another example of the transience of human beings, particularly in contrast to the grandeur and the eternality of Nature.
Often she would “reclin[e] in the mossy down under the shelter of a rock,” and so tranquil was the countryside that “the prattling of the sea…lulled [her] to sleep.” Away from the judgmental eyes of Parisians and Londoners, freed from her responsibilities as a mother, Mary felt as though “my very soul diffused itself in the scene, and seeming to become all senses, glided in the scarcely agitated waves, melted in the freshening breeze.” No more would she try “to make my feelings take an orderly course.” Instead, she would accept “the extreme affection of my nature” and “the impetuous tide of [my] feelings.”
The philosophy she had carved out in her letters was taking hold. Gilbert had urged her to restrain herself, to hold back and be a different person, and although she had fought with him, she had still wanted to please him. But now, here in the Norwegian countryside, she was learning to embrace her most essential qualities: “I must love and admire with warmth, or I sink into sadness.” She would trust herself—her instincts, her emotions, her inclinations. She knew who she was. She knew her strengths. Even if he did not.
In the mornings Mary walked to a nearby stream, exulting in the “piney air.” In the afternoons she swam and learned to row from a young pregnant woman who took her paddling in shallow waters where starfish “thickened” the water. In the evenings the genial mayor invited her to parties, which she enjoyed despite the fact that communication was largely limited to the waving of arms and the pointing of fingers. Never before had she seen “so much hair with a yellow cast.” The young women were pretty, with clear eyes and open faces, and they endeared themselves to Mary by telling her “that it was a pleasure to look at me, I appeared so good natured.”
However, Mary noted that the hygiene was poor and the diet unhealthy; the older people’s teeth were “uncommonly bad” and the matrons grew plump thanks to an endless round of supper parties, feasts, teas, and picnics. To the abstemious Mary, it seemed that eating was all anyone cared about. She yearned to absent herself from the interminable banquets, but she knew that courtesy demanded she stay. Secretly, she was grateful that she could not understand what people were saying, as she suspected her new friends were guffawing at jokes she would find off color; whenever anyone translated things for her, she was somewhat shocked by the earthy humor of her hosts. However, she did like listening to Norwegians speaking—“the language is soft, a great proportion of the words ending in vowels”—and ultimately it was a relief not to talk about herself.
As the days passed, Mary slowly returned to the ideas that had interested her before Imlay—the rights of the individual, the relationship of the citizen to the state, the course of French politics. After the tumult of the last two and a half years—the affair with Fuseli, the execution of Louis XVI, the Terror, Gilbert’s deceptions and rejections—Mary had been disillusioned on almost all fronts. The Revolution had not turned out as she had hoped it would. Gilbert and Fuseli were not the men she thought they were. She herself had not behaved like the independent, self-sufficient woman she prided herself on being. She questioned what had happened: to her, to Gilbert, to the world. With new insight into the limitations of human nature, freed from the responsibility of looking after Fanny, and after more than a year of deep introspection, she began to make connections between her own experiences and outside events, between herself and her culture. She had always inserted personal reflections and colloquialisms into her political and historical work, but now she turned her style almost entirely inside out. Instead of writing primarily about politics and history with a few personal asides, she told the story of her love affair with Imlay and of her journey to Scandinavia, integrating philosophical obs
ervations and political theories into her own experiences. The result was an original mix of personal narrative and political science, travel writing and philosophical commentary. She described her broken heart even as she discussed her thoughts on the history of human society. She reveled in the beauties of Nature at the same time that she recalled the atrocities of the Terror. She was scarcely aware that she was breaking rules as a writer; what mattered was that the old forms could no longer contain all she wanted to say. Most important, she lost interest in berating Gilbert; he would have to rediscover his love for her on his own, she decided, trusting that when they met in Europe, as he had promised, they would have a joyful reunion.
By the first week of August, Wulfsberg had completed his inquiry, sending Mary to consult with lawyers in Larvik, about twenty miles south of Tonsberg. Once there, she was appalled at the pettiness of the officials and their corruption: “My head turned around[,] my heart grew sick, as I regarded visages deformed by vice,” she wrote. Fortunately, she did not have to stay long. The lawyers sent her south to Risor, the last place anyone had seen Imlay’s ship. It was here that she would at last get to meet with the captain, Ellefson, whom she had not seen since Le Havre, and who, Judge Wulfsberg believed, had clearly stolen the silver.
She traveled by sea, gazing out at the rocky shoreline and dreaming of a better future, if not for herself, then for humankind, writing in her journal words that young Mary, Claire, and Shelley would find particularly inspiring and that seemed to address them directly: “The view of this wild coast, as we sailed along it, afforded me a continual subject of meditation. I anticipated the future improvement of the world and observed how much man had still to do, to obtain of the earth all it could yield.”
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley Page 34
