Vindicating Rights is Messy Business

I began writing this post in my cold little academic tone, and I stopped. It would be very easy. Ms Wollstonecraft was alive a very long time ago, and some of the things she said in her book, in retrospect, feel pretty out of date, even wrong-headed. Some of them even bothered me. But, writing a post about the ways we've grown as a culture since then wouldn't have been possible for me - it would have ended up being a post about how clever I am.

And it wouldn't have done much good. There are a lot of people doing the Feminist Classics readalong, right now, and I suppose the direct analysis of what Wollstonecraft said will be done far better by someone else. And to be honest, the thing that strikes me most powerfully about Wollstonecraft has nothing directly to do with her ideas.

The thing that's most haunting to me about Mary is how ideals can betray you.

All of us are children of our time, all of us, no matter how much genius we might possess. Everything we think is, in this sense, trapped inside a time, it is impossible to say anything that is completely 'timeless.' There's no such thing. This feels like a strange thing for me to say, because I read classic literature, after all, I sit and read books that are advertised as 'timeless classics'. IT's a lie. Shakespeare, if we drop our reverence for a moment, is terrifically dated. Look at, say, how all the women  in his plays fit a short list of basic types. Look at his fawning adoration of kings and aristocracy. And as beautiful as the language is - there's a reason we don't enjoy it until we learn it - because, it's dated. Or the Odyssey: as grand and sweeping and epic as it is, to be perfectly frank, if it were published today, it wouldn't be terribly successful. I honestly don't think it would even be published, and at some level, this is because it isn't really that great for our time in some ways. IT is an artifact. Mary was, too.

And the great pain of literature and poetry is that, after all, for a lot of writers it is a sort of search for immortality. For some this is simple arrogance, they want to continue to be praised, even after they are dead. But not always. There is something innately human in a desire to find absolute truths, to find those things which can be relied on and really truly 'known'. Mythology was born this way, science was born this way, literature was born this way, most great human endeavors are part of this search for pure, incontrovertible truth.

In mathematics, perhaps, this is possible. Euclidean Geometry is as true now as it was when Euclid wrote it. Even in the less 'pure' sciences, perhaps there is some shadow of personality. I'm reading Hippocrates now, and one can feel in his writing, for all that it's largely guesswork and incorrect correspondences, at least the birth of a way of looking at health and medicine, that does continue on today, in some form. But in literature? No. There is no absolute literary truth. There is no provable conception of beauty. Philosophy has this fault, too, so does political science.

But, despite all this, more souls through history have stood and declared in defense of unprovable ideals than will ever stand in defense of Euclidean geometry. More souls have willingly died at the flag of the vague and misinterpreted than will die defending Newton's laws (this is not to attack the power and passion of science mind you). This is why we keep having Wollstonecrafts, and Shakespeares, and Virginia Woolfs, all in retrospect perhaps wrong in some ways, but nonetheless awe-inspiring in their defense sometimes of their very wrongness.

And who knows? Underneath all the veneer of wrongness (I do not think that modesty, for instance, is some great ideal of feminism that should be a measure of the success of women's liberation), there are germs that FEEL so incontrovertibly true, that you want to think there is something absolutely true to them. But, the moment you verbalize or systemize it, it will betray you.

This is what happened, after all, to Mary herself. Her husband, William Godwin, was himself a starry-eyed idealist, one of the early forerunners of the anarchist movement, which was for many years, the gold standard of wild idealism - at it's core, after all, anarchism seems to rely on the supposition that people, when left to their own devices, will do good instead of ill. And Godwin believed this, right down to the middle. So, when his wife died, he wrote a book, telling the truth about her life, because he genuinely and honestly believe his wife was the heroine of her life.

Was Godwin naive? Did he really think this book would not tarnish his wife's reputation? He had to have known. Godwin was an idealist, but he wasn't stupid. He had to have known that what he saw as a heroine, the world's standards saw as a a villainess, or even worse in the world's view, as a despicable, whorish, hysterical woman. At some level, it's difficult for me to grapple with this. His wife was dead, and he sacrificed her public memory to his own ideals. People, his reasoning went, SHOULD like her story, and to lie about it would be to betray the things he believed in. It was a quixotic joust at a windmill - only his used his wife as the lance. Quixote may be knocked off his horse in that situation, but the lance gets snapped in half.

But then, maybe that's how it should be. Mary was herself an idealist, after all, and the idealist is infamous for being willing to give up everything for the cause - everything. Even things that maybe are harder to give up than life. What would Mary think? Would she have been ashamed, if she were alive? Would she have been angry? Angry at her husband, or at the world that wouldn't accept that she acted as bravely as she could under the circumstance? She after all, acted similarly with a sister, who she encouraged to leave her husband, plunging her afterwards into horrible poverty. She was no stranger to the grand gesture.

I know this isn't the same for everyone, but this part of what I love in classic literature: seeing the grand gesture, the grand, quixotic leap towards the unreachable. Every single author falls - when you leap toward the sun, after all, the best you can hope for is that you stay in the air as long as possible. The sun will. not. catch. you. And there is something morbid and discouraging at seeing the places where these great lost souls fall to the rocks, the shapes and texture of their broken bodies. But, before they hit the ground - before that, you see the arc of the flight, the twist of the limbs, the thrust forward of the breast, as if that extra centimeter might be just enough to carry you... somewhere. And that curve, that twist, that sturggling hopelessness, there's no beauty quite like it. IT almost makes my own, tiny worthless little twists and arcs and thrusts seem, in dim reflection, perhaps to have their own traces of dignity