3.28.2008

On Mary Wollstonecraft and running to stand still

What a long time it requires for us to know ourselves; and yet almost everyone of has more of this knowledge than he is willing to own, even to himself. I cannot immediately determine whether I ought to rejoice at having turned over in this solitude a new page in the history of my own heart, though I may venture to assure you that a further acquaintance with mankind only tends to increase my respect for your judgment, and esteem for your character. --Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)


My committee member and I met to talk through Godwin and Wollstonecraft this afternoon. When I got to the coffeeshop (the same one where I once saw Paul Bettany), I told her that I'd figured out what Godwin meant about the Letters... being a book calculated to make a reader fall in love with its author.

Unfortunately, it came out sounding a little bit lame. But it still had the feeling of a profound revelation for me when it first crossed my mind this morning in the frenzy of preparation for the discussion now over (this has been the general motion of the week). This is how I wrote it in my notes this morning:

Does G find the letters to be calculated to make the reader fall in love with the author in part because the author is still in love with the person she’s addressing? Actually, it just occurred to me that there’s another thing here…there’s something hot for a certain kind of man about an obviously intelligent woman who feels—-and feeling here is almost entirely inseparable from suffering and from doing so with a kind of frankness—-allowing oneself to be seen at one’s lowest point: as W herself says at one point: “I felt like a bird fluttering on the ground unable to mount; yet unwilling to crawl tranquilly like a reptile, whilst still conscious it had wings.”


I should have just blogged this thought when I had it because it looks lame here, too. It felt more profound in the context of rereading my notes on the Letters and also, I think, in light of the fact that this week I have begun to articulate to some of my committee members and friends and really anyone who will listen the emotional effects of my orals reading. Namely, that I have been much happier since I got Charlotte Bronte out of my system. Because that was also about suffering and the reification of it by others. Yet, it's also connected to well, shallower things, more personal ones, some just ridiculous. The emotional equivalents of the ligers and tigons that distracted me from Tennyson earlier in the week.

But perhaps I should go back further. I started working on Wollstonecraft about two years ago. And I realized today, in going back and rereading certain texts and my notes on others, that I am much better positioned to understand Wollstonecraft than I was in the spring of 2006. If nothing else, I am profoundly grateful that a woman like her existed and that she left an archive. And I am grateful that Godwin wrote the Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, even with all its misreadings (and they are legion), imprudences, and, indeed, reifications of her as a suffering subject. (There's a particularly unforgettable image early on where the young Mary throws her body on top of her mother to shield her from her father's blows.)

In part, the fact that I can read around Godwin's impositions on Wollstonecraft is due to my internalization of the latter and also to the experience of the last two years, to my own reflections on why I once told The Poet that I don't believe in narrative (like many other people in my life, he thinks I should write a novel, which is laughable to anyone who reads this blog, I'm sure).


This post is also about feeling like I've spent this whole week doing work that gets consumed almost right after I produce it. Like I've been waking up at 7:00 in the morning to prepare for things that are over by 3. This is a weird way to live sometimes, especially because I don't feel actively stressed out. (Looks like there may be an advantage to dating a Zen master after all.)

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Related but tangential: Is there a bad version out there of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"? This may be one of the most beautiful songs in the world.


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I hope that the effort it just took me to type all of this out is worth it in terms of clearing my mind so that I can work this weekend without obsessing. I really must get ahead on prep and finish the conference paper. And apply to the next conferences, of course. And read Coleridge, Gaskell, and perhaps some early Tennyson.

Now off to Williamsburg for drinks and dinner.

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