Chapter 6 Passionate Solitude (1) Mary Wollstonecraft

In Spain, Mary Wollstonecraft was practically a stranger; yet she was one of the greatest figures of the modern world.In Anglo-Saxon circles, Mary has been belittled and ridiculed for a century and a half; today, despite the recovery of her memory by the New Historiography, she is remembered chiefly as the author of Frankenstein Mother of Mary Shelley. ①This Gothic novel, whose full title is Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus, describes a scientist who puts together a monster from corpses and loses control over it.The work is no longer just a "ghost story" full of dark imaginations, it echoes the religious motif of "the arrogance of the creator must be punished", and it predicts and questions the disasters that may be brought about by the proliferation of scientism. A work that combines gothic ghost stories and science fiction - Annotation.

Such ignorance is astonishing when one considers her accomplishments, as well as her charisma.We are talking about an eighteenth-century woman who was able to establish herself in London as an independent professional writer, which was extremely rare in those days.She published short stories, novels and essays; one of them, "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792), laid the foundation for modern feminism and made Mary Wollstonecraft the most famous woman in Europe of her time.She traveled alone to Paris during the Revolution, where she lived through the harrowing years of the Reign of Terror (or rather she survived, as almost all her friends were beheaded).In addition, she had an illegitimate daughter by an American adventurer, then another daughter (who became Mary Shelley's daughter) by the English writer William Godwin, with whom she eventually married.This kind of life was totally different back then, and she had to pay dearly for it.

Mary was a radical democrat, the glorious and vigorous eighteenth century—the perfect daughter of her time.There were many reformers like her: men who fought for universal suffrage, for individual rights, for liberty, all ideas that seem fundamental and indisputable today that were revolutionary then.But when these progressive knights demanded suffrage for all, that all meant men only; when they spoke of individual rights, they looked only at the rights of men; It is difficult to imagine a world so despotic, so intellectually incoherent, from today's perspective; but such is life, which brutally enslaves women and strives to give the weight of prejudice to rationality in even the most sensible minds. lose.The philosopher Locke, for example, a defender of the natural liberty of man, insisted that neither animals nor women share this liberty, but are subject to the male.Rousseau said: "A wise woman is a punishment to her husband, children, and everyone." Kant said: "Diligent study and hard thinking, even if a woman has achieved success in this area, ruin her life." The inherent advantages of the female sex.”

If the most brilliant and innovative thinkers of the age were to utter such follies, one can imagine how suffocating the whole environment must have been for those women who, like Mary Wollstonecraft, possessed a keen intellect , the spirit of nonconformity and enough courage to warn against the injustices of the prevailing sexism.But no one, or almost no one, values ​​and respects such qualities and talents in them.Few women (among them the Spaniard Joséfa Amar-Bourbon, who delivered her "Speech in Defense of the Talents of Women" in 1786);There have been men in this struggle, strict and honest men who knew how to carry their revolutionary analysis to the end.Like Condorcet, the great French philosopher.

①John Locke (1632-1704): British philosopher, founder of British materialist empiricism, who believed that acquired experience is the source of knowledge——annotation. How did a woman become a pioneer, breaking away from the comfortable routines of her time and insisting on a position that was progressive and even dangerously marginal?I guess, she is not through a clear historical ambition in the early years, but in a more humane and peaceful way, slowly gliding along that different road that is intellectually unacceptable.In fact only two things are irreversible in life: death and knowledge.What is known will not be known again, and ignorance does not need to be eliminated twice.Mary slowly learns the reality of injustice, and she is forced to act on it.

Mary was born in London in 1759, the daughter of a weaver whose father squandered a fortune on horse racing and a penchant for drinking.It is surprising how many writers have experienced some kind of social and economic downfall in their childhood.Marie had to protect her mother from the beatings of her drunken father as a child; but this should not have been the origin of her feminist thinking, because that kind of violence was very common in that era.I speculate that her thirst for knowledge and her intelligence have more influence on her conception: as a girl, Mary only went to a poor school in the community for a short time, where she barely learned to read and write, and her stupidity Brother Ned was well educated in a good school.

As evidence of social injustice, Mary's heart should be filled with the wounds of this earlier comparison, for Wollstonecraft insisted again and again in her essays on girls' right to education, and on women's lack of suitable Defenselessness suffered as a result of work.A decent middle-class woman was only allowed to be a nanny/governor, court maid, or teacher (but only as elementary school teachers for girls).These three miserable and difficult occupations Mary experienced from the age of eighteen to twenty-nine (she later made a living in literature), trying to support herself and her sisters, but the economy was still close to desperation.Despite facing so many difficulties, Mary did not give up her desire for knowledge.To do this she took advantage of one of the novelties of the age of books, which were finally available easily and cheaply.Thus, although women are forced to stay away from education, the door of knowledge can no longer be closed to them - the whole world is opened to them through the printed word.This is how Mary Wollstonecraft developed herself in a self-taught way.

At the same time, the eighteenth century buried an old feudal structure untouchable by hierarchy, always and forever emanating from the mind of God, allowing the emergence of individualistic ideas as we understand them now.In Mary's England the change was drastic.Executions, for example, were no longer public, and in London there were the first restaurants with separate tables, rather than the usual long boards where everyone ate together.Boswell, biographer of the British thinker Samuel Johnson, complained about such innovations: "This manner of supper, or rather, of being reared, is considered by many to be particularly antisocial, since everyone Eat at your own table, without forcing yourself to talk to anyone." Because medieval society was chaotic and mixed: eating in public, sharing tables with strangers; dying in public punitive executions; sleeping in public, because in inns There are ten people in each room.Instead, in the eighteenth century began the extreme solitude of modern life, but also the benefits of individualism: human rights, the dynamics of democracy.

In addition, social classes evolve rapidly.It is no longer necessary to be of noble birth, and one's own achievements can bring him a glorious position.The middle class is improving and improving, which creates an atmosphere of optimism from which, perhaps, the theory of improvement, the belief that human beings are gradually perfecting themselves in an inexorable manner.The ardent reformers of the era believed this, and believed that all human ills—hunger, violence, war, even disease and death—would one day be vanquished.The boundaries of the world have collapsed, and everything seems to be within reach.What Wollstonecraft did was demand that women also have the right to share in all that glory.

Mary's personal evolution was slow and painful.At first she joined the "Dissidents," a democratic but non-feminist group; before writing "In Defense of the Rights of Woman," which made her famous, she published another political pamphlet, "In Defense of Human Rights." A Vindication, supporting the ideals of the French Revolution against the attacks of British reactionaries, especially Edmund Burke.She becomes a feminist purely through the exercise of reason: for liberty is either for all or for no one, as Condorcet puts it.I don't have space here to explain the high price Mary paid for her life: incomprehension, controversy, social blame.Everything was difficult for her: getting an education, being self-reliant, finding a decent way of earning a living, falling in love, even writing.Being unique drives one to the edge of madness, and it's no wonder she's an angry, sad woman.

① Edmund Burke (1729-1797): British historian and political commentator, graduated from Trinity College in Dublin. In 1758, he founded the "age" magazine. He entered the House of Commons in 1766 and became the main representative of the Whig Party - Annotation. ②Neuilly: An affluent and wealthy residential area in the northwestern suburbs of Paris, France——Annotation. Her heart was as hot as liquid lead, and her passions could be destructive; but because she had been educated by the Puritanism that prevailed in her day, she had for a long time considered sex to be a dirty thing, and she turned her first love into a into a purely platonic dream.Until the age of thirty-three when she went to France where the Great Revolution broke out alone, she might still be a virgin, full of longing for life.