Chapter 7 Passionate Solitude (2)

Wollstonecraft arrived in Paris at the end of December 1792. King Louis XVI is beheaded in January 1793; the reign of terror begins in September.In the ecstasy of the first years of the Revolution, a large group of women thought they were included in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.They started women's clubs everywhere, published manifestos, had some social debates.But the dictatorship of Robespierre put an end to all that with the rise of democracy and humanism. In Claire Tomalin's long biography of Wollstonecraft, it is easy to see how that moment in Paris was the culmination of a life and an era, and Mary's life is closely related to the ups and downs of her century.Thus, in France, Wollstonecraft shed her last prejudices, fell deeply in love, and fell into the arms of a thirty-nine-year-old American adventurer, Gilbert Imre, handsome, cheerful, and understanding of life. , the sort of volatile and frivolous figure that usually emerges in tumultuous moments of history.With him, Mary discovers the pleasures of the flesh, and she soon becomes pregnant.

In order to escape the reign of terror, Marie took refuge in Neuilly, where she spent three months on her honeymoon, enjoying perfect love.And in Paris, where women's clubs were banned, the heads of her friends were rolling.Feminists Olampe de Gouges and Manon Rollin were beheaded (the latter famously uttered the words "Liberty, how many crimes have been committed in your name" as he mounted the guillotine), Condorcet, sentenced to death by Bospierre, hid in a modest apartment and continued writing about women's rights until he was discovered and arrested.He would rather commit suicide by taking poison on his first night in prison than die in public disgrace on the guillotine.Mary was sorry for all this, but Imre's arms were too sweet: in the blood and terror she was still happy.Pregnant Marie wanders the countryside in Neuilly, solitary and blissfully touring the abandoned palace of Versailles (spooky, dusty halls) while the world crumbles around her.

Yet Imre's love is so ephemeral and unreal, befitting his character, that by the time Mary gives birth he is tired: he leaves England and begins living with an actress.And so Wollstonecraft's resentful passion reaches morbid proportions: she chases him to London, cries to him, makes demands of him.She also attempted suicide twice, once by taking opiate tincture and another by jumping into the Tam River. "You're torturing me," Imre even said to her.Mary's infatuation with him was indeed suffocating.But one should consider what Mary's step at the time meant: now she is a "loose" woman.The fate of women is cruel and narrow.Mary writes from Sweden about her new daughter, Fanny: "I am troubled by the thought of her sex being oppressed and dependent." Twenty-two years later, Fanny fulfilled her mother's promise by committing suicide by taking opium. worry.

We are approaching the abrupt end.Over time, the pain and shame of being abandoned by Imre lessened, and at the age of thirty-seven Mary began a relationship with her friend William Godwin, who was as much a writer and a democracy as she was person.She was soon pregnant again, and the two were married, although they continued to live in their separate apartments. At the end of August 1797, the future author of Frankenstein was born; 10 days later, Mary Wollstonecraft died of a postpartum infection.Only lived to be thirty-eight years old. After Mary's death, Godwin was so sad that he lost his mind, and he published all of Mary's works, including the letter to Imre.He tries to mourn his wife in this way, but there has been a reactionary wind in society, and conservatives have used the irregularities of Mary's life (her suicide attempt, her immoral sexual relationship) to eliminate her memory.They demonized her, ridiculed her, and belittled the meaning of her work.For a century and a half they were able to bury her in a suitably self-explanatory sketch: she was a lunatic, a wretch, an immoral woman, a feminist; feminists are immoral, unlucky Yes, crazy.

At the time of her death Mary was working on her second novel, 'Maria or the Misfortunes of Woman', in which she recounts the horrific experience of a woman whose husband puts her in an insane asylum in an attempt to get rid of her (It seems this was a fairly common situation in England at the time: a married woman was a property of her husband, she lacked any rights).The novel begins with a pejorative reference to the Gothic novels that were popular at the time: the horrors of those ghostly castles, she says, are compared with the horrors of the "House of Despair" in which the heroine lives, and, in short, with the horrors of life itself. , nothing at all.Ironically, only twenty years later her daughter Mary Shelley would be writing the gothic novel that annoyed her so much.But Frankenstein is a very beautiful novel, and in that tormented monster some see the symbol of the humiliated woman. "Do I have to respect humans when they despise me?" said the monster. "Wherever I see happiness, I am irrevocably excluded from it".It is the same feeling of exclusion from life (impossibility of a fulfilling life) experienced by nineteenth-century women bound by worldliness and prejudice.It took a hundred years before Europeans allowed women to go to university, and women's voting rights were not achieved until well into the twentieth century (Spain during the Republic, France in 1945).Mary Shelley's moving monster demands only the treatment of an equal human being, but no one understands him, and he ends up dying in the great solitude of the Arctic, consecrated to the fire altar of self.Like Mary Wollstonecraft, he is full of reason and passion in the face of extreme incomprehension and indifference.

bibliography ○ Claire Tomalin: Mary Wollstonecraft, Montesinos Press. ○Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Galterella; Mary, or the Misfortune of Woman, WW Norton. ○ Bonnie Anderson, Judith Zinzer: Women's History (Volumes II and III), Critical Press. ○E Schmidt: "Introduction to the History of the French Revolution", Galtera Press. ○Edmund Burke: Reflections on the French Revolution, Rialpa Press. ○Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, La Arholt and Plaza & Hanes. ○James Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson, Penguin (London).