The Gothic Jane Austen: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Creation of Mary: A Fiction(1788)
In 1785, Mary Wollstonecraft’s life seemed at its lowest ebb. Her dearest friend, Fanny Blood, had died in Portugal after a long illness, and the school they had jointly established (for young girls) in Newington Green was drowning in debt and disappointment. With few prospects and nowhere to go, she began brooding over the fate of women in English society, a society that had sacrificed Fanny in a loveless marriage and now threatened to thwart her own prospects for happiness. Encouraged by a friend, she recorded these thoughts in a fiery dissertation that offered a prelude of works to come, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). The topical manuscript quickly passed into Samuel Johnson’s hands, who not only offered to buy it, but encouraged her to write more in the same vein. With such a benefactor in her corner, she began to see herself as a writer, and like all women in the 1780’s, her thoughts turned to writing a proper (and properly Gothic) novel.
While ideas for her first work of fiction, Mary, began percolating, Wollstonecraft accepted a position as a governess to the Lord and Lady Kingsborough in Ireland. Expecting a properly slavish and retiring governess, Lady Kingsborough instead found a willful firebrand who took the side of their Irish tenants and treated her daughters as human beings. Her pupils were quickly won over by their eccentric tutor and her disdain of female convention; if she was to teach them anything, Wollstonecraft surmised, it was to avoid the example of their frivolous mother (a figure she would satirize in the opening pages of Mary). The tutelage worked its magic, and before long, the oldest daughter, Margaret, defied her mother and refused a respectable marriage. Wollstonecraft was promptly shown the door.
Instead of writing a novel in the then-popular manner of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and its many imitators, Wollstonecraft found the ‘gothic’ in the drawing rooms of genteel homes, as well as the empty lives of their wives and daughters. The ghosts are the women themselves, who are neither seen nor heard by their society, leaving them to haunt their own minds with daydreams of hope — or suicide. Of course, Mary is also a response to the other genre of popular eighteenth-century literature, the sentimental novel, chiefly focusing on the romantic prospects of a young woman and her didactic moral sentiments.
As Wollstonecraft makes clear in the Advertisement to the novel, her heroine “is neither a Clarissa, a Lady G — , nor a Sophie”, citing the celebrated women from Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), Sir Charles Grandison (1753), and Rousseau’s Émile (1762). The latter work, in particular, was one she deeply admired and read to her young charges in Ireland. However, as Charlotte Gordon notes in her book, Romantic Outlaws, “she grumbled that Sophie… existed solely for the benefit of the hero and that her only role was to desire and be desired, to attract and charm. Where was Sophie’s inner life?… It was time, she declared, to show readers ‘the mind of a woman’” (96).
The story is a simple one, all the better to explore the interior world of its heroine rather than losing the reader in mazes of extraneous incident. Mary is born to a loveless couple who pay no attention to their daughter or her education, forcing her to piece together her own improvement through books, relationships, and nature. She finds early encouragement through her friendship with Ann, a local girl of strong sensibility, who encourages her to defy convention. When Ann becomes destitute, Mary is given the opportunity to save her friend through an act of sacrifice: by marrying Charles, a wealthy nobleman, she can pay off her debts and take charge of Ann’s declining health. After the marriage, Charles departs for an extended Grand Tour, while Mary takes Ann to Lisbon (where, not coincidentally, Wollstonecraft followed her own ‘Ann’, Fanny Blood) to affect a cure. There she meets Henry, a sickly, yet sympathetic gentleman with whom she falls in love.
Unfortunately, Ann’s sudden death cuts short their blossoming romance, and Mary returns to London to console Ann’s family. Henry soon follows her there and confesses his love, but alas, too late: she spends their final days trying to nurse him to health, only to watch him die in her arms. Having lost both people she loves, Mary reluctantly returns to her husband, though Wollstonecraft hints that her own fatal illness “did not promise long life” (68).
As Wollstonecraft would later write in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), “if woman be allowed to have an immortal soul, she must have, as the employment of life, an understanding to improve” (Brody 155). Mary explores how difficult it is for women, with all the instincts of love and reason, to accomplish either one. Indeed, the novel opens with a description of Mary’s mother, Eliza, who is described as “a gentle, fashionable girl, with a kind of indolence in her temper, which might be termed negative good-nature… She carefully attended to the shews [sic] of things, and her opinions, I should have said prejudices, were such as the generality approved of” (1).
The most that can be said for Mary’s mother is that she reads novels, but only such as the “generality approved of,” while lingering on the ‘wrong’ parts: “she read all the sentimental novels, dwelt on the love-scenes, and, had she thought while she read, her mind would have been contaminated; as she accompanied the lovers to the lonely arbors, and would walk with them by the clear light of the moon” (3). In other words, she reads books as a way of gratifying her vanity, rather than enlarging her mind through sympathetic understanding.
Not surprisingly, our heroine is a neglected young girl like the daughters of Lady Kingsborough, left to her own devices; even when “once, or twice, [she had] told her little secrets to her mother, they were laughed at, and she determined never to do it again” (7). As Wollstonecraft discusses in her later Vindication, a woman bred only to be attractive can have no other relationship with a daughter than a rival. In the same way, when Mary meets a trio of sophisticated young women in Lisbon, we learn that they are shaped similarly for the “shews of things,” and “their minds shackled with a set of notions concerning propriety, the fitness of things for the world’s eye” (24). These women, who should be among Mary’s tutors and allies, can teach her nothing but alienation and contempt.
Strangely enough, Mary learns to become a rational, thinking creature much in the same way as Frankenstein’s monster in her daughter’s novel, Frankenstein (1818). Ignored by her parents, she learns to emulate Ann’s letter writing and highly emotional, sensibility-laden speech. For the rest, she is taught by the sublimity of nature itself: “When her mother frowned, and her friend looked cool, she would… gaze on the sea, observe the grey clouds, or listen to the wind which struggled to free itself from the only thing that impeded its course… then she rejoiced in existence, and darted into futurity” (9). The lessons of sublimity are only compounded by her forays into literature, not the sentimental novels her mother (mis)reads, but the more foundational literature that transforms man and beast alike: Paradise Lost, Thomson’s Seasons, and Young’s Night-Thoughts (10). Through these, she learns the “luxury of doing good,” (10), and “[enters] with such spirit into whatever she read… that it soon became a part of her mind” (10).
As someone passionately drawn to education, particularly the education of young women, Wollstonecraft realized the importance of novel-reading to the growing imagination. However, Mary also realizes the danger of its own advice; for to become intellectually emancipated is to merely see the prison bars with greater clarity. Mary soon realizes that she only “saw through a glass darkly” (11), and holds little hope for happiness in a world where women are bought and sold, only to be displayed — and forgotten — on the shelf. As she reflects, “Such is human nature, its laws were not to be inverted to gratify our heroine, and stop the progress of her understanding, happiness only flourished in paradise — we cannot taste and live” (17).
She understandably finds her marriage with Charles hateful, and even when she meets Henry, her intellectual equal, she refuses to entertain the possibility of a happy ending. She is prepared to even reject her inheritance by living abroad, much to the shock of Ann’s family, who exclaim, “Not live with him! How will you live then?” (49). It was a question which had no answer in her society, and for all her imagination, Mary can only shrug and respond, “I will work, she cried, do anything rather than be a slave” (49). Bold words for 1788, and difficult for any but the most intrepid woman to bring to conclusion.
Indeed, not even Wollstonecraft could forswear the company of men, having a series of tragic love affairs until her final union with the writer, William Godwin. Autobiography (and name) aside, Mary is not the cipher for Wollstonecraft herself; on the contrary, she is sensibility taken to its logical extreme, similar to the runaway Romanticism of Marianne from Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811). Rather than live with compromise she is ready to die for disappointed hopes, clutching to the shreds of female independence. Wollstonecraft repeatedly contradicts her heroine, since life (and happiness) shouldn’t be forsaken so easily. Only love can complete her tutelage, as Wollstonecraft shows when Mary and Henry strike up a friendship among the expatriates in Lisbon:
Henry was a man of learning; he had also studied mankind, and knew many of the intricacies of the human heart, from having felt the infirmities of his own… Mary could not help thinking that in his company her mind expanded, as he always went below the surface. She increased her stock of ideas, and her taste was improved. (27)
Alone, she can only drain the dregs of isolation with philosophic content. With Henry, she can glimpse a better world, and continue to improve herself not only as a woman, but a being of reason and “genius”. The latter is an oft-used phrase in the book, which suggests not cosmic uniqueness, but rather the capability that all sensible men and women possess. Sadly, she remains a Gothic heroine trapped in a castle of her own construction; by the time she finally accepts his advances, their time is spent. Henry is dying and she can only lament the time they might have had, if she had listened to her own heart and not allowed a misguided sentiment to cloud her sensibility.
As Wollstonecraft defines it, sensibility is “ ‘the most exquisite feeling of which the human soul is susceptible: when it pervades us, we feel happy… It is this quickness, this delicacy of feeling, which enables us to relish the sublime touches of the poet, and the painter… But it is only to be felt; it escapes discussion’” (53–54). Not trusting her own happiness, Mary insists on reasoning sensibility into sentiment, passion into pedagogy. Convincing herself that true passion can only be glimpsed in heaven, she squanders it on earth; her fleeting glimpse at the truth is seen only by his deathbed, when she contemplates the “horror of surviving him” (60).
By the end of the novel, Mary can only look forward to her own death, in a world where “there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage” (68). In her own life, Wollstonecraft hoped to find a more harmonious marriage of two minds, writing Mary as a warning to all young women of genius. It was a first, tentative step toward the bolder works to come, and a powerful sketch (however unfinished) of the true mind of a modern woman.
Works Cited
Gordon, Charlotte. Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her Daughter Mary Shelley. New York: Random House, 2015.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Mary: A Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.
Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody. New York: Penguin, 1985.
