August, occupying the naval base and town, any kind of association with Britain was a deadly liability. Paine was arrested, along with Helen Maria Williams and some other members of the club, and incarcerated in the Luxembourg, once a royal palace. He missed his date with the guillotine only by a fantastic stroke of luck. Cell doors were marked to indicate the intended victims of the next day’s executions. His were by accident left open. In haste the mark was made on the inside and, when the doors were later slammed shut, became invisible. Or so Paine’s version of the story goes.
Just as bad for Mary, the
bête noire
of
A Vindication
– Jean-Jacques himself – was everywhere. The image of the patron saint of the Republic of Virtue appeared on placards, on drinking glasses and on patriotic pamphlets. The women’s clubs that had agitated for their inclusion in the franchise and for legal rights were shut down by the Jacobins and their leaders arrested or beaten up on the streets if they opened their mouths. The duties of women to the Fatherland were exactly as Rousseau had prescribed: indoctrination in the arts of ‘tenderness’; a solace for citizen-soldiers, breast-feeders for the
enfants de la patrie
.
Mary had no choice but to play by the rules of the enemy; to find some sort of refuge from fear and insecurity. It materialized in the good-looking shape of the American revolutionary soldier and author, Gilbert Imlay. Imlay was now in the business of selling revolutionary happiness, or more specifically the real estate on which happiness could be planted in farming settlements and small towns. His
Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America
(1792) was, like Imlay himself, an attractive thing of many parts: travelogue, land survey and commercial promotional literature. He certainly understood the power of romance and something drew him towards the alternately exuberant and insecure Mary Wollstonecraft. A love affair began, which quickly turned serious. As ‘Mrs Imlay’, Mary’s status as an American citizeness protected her from the hostility and suspicion directed at the British, subjects of a king with whom the Republic was at war. By June she was settled in a cottage at Neuilly on the western outskirts of the city, tending a garden and cooing over the
soupers à deux
she was sharing with Imlay. The author of
A Vindication
, who had made such a powerful case against the delusory and destructive nature of romantic passion, was now in the rhapsodic throes of it. Sensing, already in August, Imlay’s reservations about being smothered in so much emotional intensity, she wrote to him with the note of imploring desperation that she had despised in sentimental novels: ‘Yes I will be good, that I may deserve to be happy; and whilst you love me, I cannot again fall into the miserable state, which rendered life a burden almost too heavy to be borne.’ Mary Wollstonecraft had become a dependant.
By January 1794 she was pregnant, and became anxious and weepy whenever Imlay disappeared on business trips. The more clinging she became, the more regularly he disappeared, leaving her overwhelmed by despondency at the ebbing of ‘tenderness’. Only the prospect of the baby pulled her out of this morbid brooding. Determined to go through a modern pregnancy, she made sure she had regular exercise and when her girl, named Fanny, was born in May, Mary horrified the midwife by getting up from her bed the next day, refusing the purification ritual of covering herself in ashes, and resuming, almost immediately, her routine of country walks. Needless to say, she nursed Fanny herself – even though, as she wrote frankly to Ruth Barlow, her ‘inundations of milk’ were sometimes inconvenient. But Imlay was away a lot, and when he wasn’t he fell sick. And the little life added to hers had given Mary a fresh aversion to the tide of death running through France. ‘My blood runs cold and I sicken at the
Just as bad for Mary, the
bête noire
of
A Vindication
– Jean-Jacques himself – was everywhere. The image of the patron saint of the Republic of Virtue appeared on placards, on drinking glasses and on patriotic pamphlets. The women’s clubs that had agitated for their inclusion in the franchise and for legal rights were shut down by the Jacobins and their leaders arrested or beaten up on the streets if they opened their mouths. The duties of women to the Fatherland were exactly as Rousseau had prescribed: indoctrination in the arts of ‘tenderness’; a solace for citizen-soldiers, breast-feeders for the
enfants de la patrie
.
Mary had no choice but to play by the rules of the enemy; to find some sort of refuge from fear and insecurity. It materialized in the good-looking shape of the American revolutionary soldier and author, Gilbert Imlay. Imlay was now in the business of selling revolutionary happiness, or more specifically the real estate on which happiness could be planted in farming settlements and small towns. His
Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America
(1792) was, like Imlay himself, an attractive thing of many parts: travelogue, land survey and commercial promotional literature. He certainly understood the power of romance and something drew him towards the alternately exuberant and insecure Mary Wollstonecraft. A love affair began, which quickly turned serious. As ‘Mrs Imlay’, Mary’s status as an American citizeness protected her from the hostility and suspicion directed at the British, subjects of a king with whom the Republic was at war. By June she was settled in a cottage at Neuilly on the western outskirts of the city, tending a garden and cooing over the
soupers à deux
she was sharing with Imlay. The author of
A Vindication
, who had made such a powerful case against the delusory and destructive nature of romantic passion, was now in the rhapsodic throes of it. Sensing, already in August, Imlay’s reservations about being smothered in so much emotional intensity, she wrote to him with the note of imploring desperation that she had despised in sentimental novels: ‘Yes I will be good, that I may deserve to be happy; and whilst you love me, I cannot again fall into the miserable state, which rendered life a burden almost too heavy to be borne.’ Mary Wollstonecraft had become a dependant.
By January 1794 she was pregnant, and became anxious and weepy whenever Imlay disappeared on business trips. The more clinging she became, the more regularly he disappeared, leaving her overwhelmed by despondency at the ebbing of ‘tenderness’. Only the prospect of the baby pulled her out of this morbid brooding. Determined to go through a modern pregnancy, she made sure she had regular exercise and when her girl, named Fanny, was born in May, Mary horrified the midwife by getting up from her bed the next day, refusing the purification ritual of covering herself in ashes, and resuming, almost immediately, her routine of country walks. Needless to say, she nursed Fanny herself – even though, as she wrote frankly to Ruth Barlow, her ‘inundations of milk’ were sometimes inconvenient. But Imlay was away a lot, and when he wasn’t he fell sick. And the little life added to hers had given Mary a fresh aversion to the tide of death running through France. ‘My blood runs cold and I sicken at the
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