SIX
In the midst of a revolutionary world that redefined and redistributed rights, female novelists recast families. In the United Provinces of the Netherlands and Britain, both urban and merchant-centered, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Betje Wolff, Aagje Deken, and Isabelle de Charrière found French inspiration for new domestic arrangements freely contracted by individuals. Conscious of the social possibilities promised by political revolution, these Dutch and English novelists probed the sensibilities of young women, as they created new families in a turbulent world.
The domestic order described in Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken’s novel Sara Burgerhart drew readers to the authors’ tidy thatched cottage north of Amsterdam seeking counseling for their troubled households caught up in the swirl of revolutionary upheaval. So many young women made the pilgrimage to the small village of Beverijk that friends referred to it as the “Nun’s cloister at Lommerlust.” There, Wolff passed summer mornings in the garden before she retreated to her book-lined hermitage to write, a round wooden chair set before a writing desk and double doors open to the roses, jasmine, and chickens. Few of the visitors noticed that Wolff’s companion was not a prosperous merchant like Hendrik Edeling, the ideal husband portrayed in the novel, but Deken, the daughter of a cattle farmer. Although the fictional Sara Burgerhart found her calling in raising her five children, no young voices were to be heard in the authors’ refuge at Lommerlust.
Rousseau’s portrait hung over Wolff’s desk in Beverijk. For Dutch as well as British writers, the Genevan philosopher’s widely read and often-discussed book Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse and Émile defined the context for their explorations of the possibilities opened for women by revolution. According to Rousseau, women had emerged from the state of nature as sensitive, passive, irrational, and nurturing beings, the complement to independent, rational men. “A perfect man and a perfect woman ought not to resemble each other in mind any more than in looks,” the philosopher explained.1 Destined by their nature to bear children, in civilized society Rousseau’s women loved finery, were alluring to their husbands, had wit but lacked genius.
The characters of Julie in the novel that took her name and Sophie in Rousseau’s educational treatise Émile both meet tragic ends, unable to master the natural sensibility of their tender hearts or to fit within their families. The young Julie is sensitive and in love with her tutor, but her father intends her to marry his aristocratic friend. She pledges to obey her father and husband, assuring them both a happy family. The character of Sophie was explicitly created by Rousseau to marry the independent and reasonable hero ofÉmile and bear his children. “Thus the whole education of women ought to relate to men,” Rousseau advised his contemporaries. “To please men, to be useful to them, to make herself loved and honored by them, to raise them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, to make their lives agreeable and sweet–these are the duties of women at all times and they ought to be taught from childhood.”2 Sophie’s upbringing guides her to be modest and reserved, and to cherish her reputation for virtue. As the plot of Émile inexorably unwinds, Émile and Sophie marry and are happy until their first child, a daughter, dies. To distract Sophie, Émile takes her to Paris. Marital infidelity—first his, then hers—follows their visit to the vice-ridden city. Dying is the only way out for Sophie, as it was for Julie, who drowns saving her child.
Wolff, Wollstonecraft, Hays, and de Charrière’s female protagonists all struggled as mightily, as did Rousseau’s sentimental heroines, to secure their place in an era of individual freedom and male self-determination. Educated by experience, the characters pondered and negotiated their own fates. Not all of them expired, and when they did die, unlike Sophie and Julie, it was not for transgressing a social code. Instead, as the women writers adapted Rousseau’s plots to their ends, their female protagonists left the world as victims of legal or psychological oppression, exemplifying for Wollstonecraft the particular burdens women bore as a result of social and legal inequity.3
In the preface to her first novel, Wollstonecraft confessed, “I could have made the incidents more dramatic, would I have sacrificed my main object, the desire of exhibiting the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society.”4 Little high drama—no pirates, kidnapping, wars, or even revolutions—enlivened the novels of Hays, de Charrière, or Wolff and Deken. The Countess Flahaut, a French author and the mistress of both the American ambassador in Paris, Gouverneur Morris, and the French diplomat Charles Talleyrand, explained in the preface to her novel, Adéle de Senange, published in London in 1794: “The point of this work is not to paint characters who leave the common path; … I want instead to show what is not seen of life, & to describe the ordinary movements of the heart that make up the story of each day.”5 Revolutionary drama resided in the details of everyday life. Questioning the constraints on a wife’s relation with her husband was part of the project of challenging the Old Regime. Hays, Wolff, Deken, and de Charrière, like Wollstonecraft, saw writing novels about women and their families as a revolutionary act in itself, rendering the domestic political.
Literary critics and historians who have connected the fictional sensibility of novels to what historian Lynn Hunt labeled the “family romance” of eighteenth-century revolutions have focused on the American and French revolutions.6 Historian Sarah Knott depicts revolutionary Americans, preoccupied “with selves and social relations,” and their intimate novels that revealed the sentiments of love and friendship, of passion and virtue.7 “French revolutionaries attempted to use the state to remake society,” Hunt explains, and in doing so ripped “the veil of deference off society.”8 In contrast, Knott continues, “American revolutionaries sought, with greater suspicion of the state, to use society to remake itself.”9 The morality that infused Dutch and English accounts of daily domestic life on the margins of revolution, as with the French writers studied by Carla Hesse, created the “new terms of existence” for women to reside in Hunt’s republic of brothers.10
The legislation of the French revolutionaries that attempted to remake the family commanded the attention of the novelists. Wollstonecraft, the most politically outspoken, wrote for them all when she described the French Revolution as “the most extraordinary event that has ever been recorded.”11 She crossed the Channel from her home in England in December 1792 to witness the transformation for herself. The Dutch-born Isabelle de Charrière visited Paris on the eve of the French Revolution, and Wolff and Deken sought exile in provincial France after the Prussians crushed the Dutch Patriot Revolution in 1787, not returning to their home until the French had supported a second successful Dutch revolution in 1795. Only Hays remained in England, a sometime-recluse. Even though she saw revolutions as “ruinous and dreadful to those actually engaged in them,” she ventured that “posterity will, I have no doubt, reap the benefit of the present struggles in France.”12
France offered a new vista of social transformation. Well-read novelists from the two prosperous, commercial societies of England and the United Provinces imagined companionate marriages based on sentimental unions. One of the many visitors drawn to Wolff and Deken’s cottage at Lommerlust, the Dutch playwright Lieve van Ollefen, asked rhetorically in verse:
Who has ever seen such a selection of books
On a rural cottage wall? Who would
think to seek so many wise men
in a woman’s hermitage?
To his response, “No one but a Dutchman,” van Ollefen could have added the equally urbanized English.13
Betje Wolff published 5,094 pages on her own, contributing another 4,758 with Aagje Deken.14 She read more, including the novels of Samuel Richardson and Rousseau. Commercial printers, recently deregulated in some countries and flourishing almost everywhere at the end of the eighteenth century, encouraged novelists, increasingly including women, to write, and the ever more literate public to read. The number of European women writing novels doubled every decade from 1750 to 1800, despite the exclusion of women from institutions of higher education everywhere.15
In novels—perhaps more than in pamphlets, journals, narratives, newspapers, or rumors—geographic place, language, and national manners mattered. Characters inhabited specific places governed by particular customs. And yet the discourse of fiction in a revolutionary era transcended national boundaries. In novels, sometimes translated and more often reviewed and discussed, locally grounded images of reworked families traveled more widely than did some of their authors, striking home throughout the Atlantic world. Reflections of revolutionary aspirations, they were agents of change. That transformation in the family pivoted around women, first addressed in treatises on homely virtues.
FIGURE 6.1
Betje Wolff’s garden and library at Lommerlust in Beverwijk, where she wrote Sara Burgerhart. Lieve van Ollefen noted the shelves filled with books on the walls. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken’s Motherless Mothers with “Duties to satisfy”
“To be useful is our genius,” Betje Wolff counseled the readers of her advice manual, Proeve over de Opvoeding (Examples of upbringing) published in 1779.16 Her guidance for young mothers among the prosperous Dutch merchant class was practical, her tone cheerful. She addressed them informally “as we would converse among friends in a room surrounded by our children at play.” She promised neither to echo the male philosophers nor to bore her busy readers with tedious abstract treatises. These mothers had too many young children underfoot to spend time deciphering John Locke’s “costly book,” Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Instead, although she admired the seventeenth-century English philosopher’s views, Wolff wrote down-to-earth cautionary tales, advising Dutch mothers when to chastise, how to praise, and what to read aloud to their families. In keeping with Locke’s environmentalism, she counseled the Dutch mothers to model good behavior for their children, allowing the young to learn directly through experience. Her widely read advice manual assumed intimate and loving families. Was “anything else necessary to make a Woman happy?” she asked rhetorically.17
Economische Liedjes (Economic songs), published by Wolff in 1781, provided more exemplary scenes of a family life Wolff herself would never know. Betje Wolff had been married, but her own household offered no model to be followed. Born in the Dutch port of Vlissingen in 1738, she was the youngest of six children of a wealthy spice merchant; her mother died when she was little. In poor health herself, Wolff took up writing to pass time. She almost foreclosed her own marriage prospects as a teenager by running away with a soldier, who abandoned her to pursue a military career in the East Indies. Her family and friends took her back, but with shaking fingers and bowed heads. In 1757, she struck up a correspondence with Adrianus Wolff, a Dutch Reformed preacher and widower who shared her philosophical interests. The night in 1759 when they finally met in person, they decided to marry. She was twenty-one, he fifty-two. Their relations were “not familiar,” she wrote; the husband and wife lived together as “good friends.”18This was no ideal companionate marriage.
She had never imagined she would end up in a village of twenty-eight hundred people tucked away on an isolated polder, five hours from Amsterdam at the best of times, and unreachable when it rained. “My life has ended up to be very austere, as you would say, stuck with an old peasant pastor!”19 Wolff yearned to travel, but her husband was older and rooted to his pastoral duties, so she filled her attic with books and her mind with stories. She read Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or The new Heloise),Émile, ou de l’éducation (Emile, or Education), and the Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard (Profession of faith of a Savoyard vicar), as well as the epistolary novels of the English writer Samuel Richardson. She had less use for the rationalism of the French philosopher Voltaire. Wolff complained of “the deep loneliness that is my lot.”20 The year after Wolff published a parody of the Dutch Reformed Church in which her husband preached, the couple went their separate ways. Adrianus Wolff died in 1777 and Betje Wolff invited an aspiring poet, Aagje Deken, to come live with her, banishing the loneliness that had afflicted her throughout her childhood and married life.
Together they wrote the epistolary novel Sara Burgerhart. It was an instant success in the United Provinces in 1782, reprinted eleven days after its first publication; a 1787 French translation marked the only publication outside of the Netherlands. Wolff and Deken offered Sara to their Dutch readers as a model to be emulated of a marriage of friends. In their preface, they cautioned against translation, thinking the novel would not travel well.21
The story of an orphan who survived youthful indiscretions to marry an upstanding merchant, the protagonist, Sara learns from her experiences. Left after her parents’ death to the care of her mother’s pious and shrewish sister, twelve-year-old Sara reminisces about the “golden days” of her youth, when she had played in the garden while her father, a tea merchant, smoked his pipe and her mother read, all deeply in love with one another.22 She finally escapes her aunt’s control and takes up residence with a widow Spilgoed, who acts as a surrogate mother.23 The words “worthy,” “respectable,” and “duty” reverberate not only through the widow’s lessons, but through all of the letters addressed to Sara by the sensible burghers of her very practical Dutch world.
Throughout much of the novel, without the guidance of a mother, Sara fends off the young men who swarm around her “like mosquitoes to the light.” She knows nothing of love, she confesses, but has no desire to learn, either. “I am completely happy as I am,” Sara says as she brushes off one of the suitors.24 Independent, Sara is content in the society of her female friends who read in one another’s company, converse, take long walks, and correspond in a world separate from men. A prosperous young merchant, Hendrik Edeling, informs the widow of his love for Sara but is given little reason for hope. The widow informs this eligible suitor that Sara thinks of men and marriage less than if she lived in a convent. Undeterred, the earnest Edeling asks directly in a letter addressed to Sara whether he “dare to hope for the favor of one who is dearer to me than my own life.” In response, she will only call him her friend, confiding in her best friend, Anna, “Freedom is happiness.” A friend of her father’s counsels Sara that it is time to look for a man who is honest and respectable, sensible, able, and good-natured to be her husband. “Understand, my child, that from your choice, your happiness in life depends.”25 Adult women are dependent on men.
Sara’s story is told solely through correspondence, without the intervention of a narrator. Both authors had written so many letters during their isolated lives that they easily adapted the epistolary style of Richardson and Rousseau for their own. Letters allowed them to reveal the personal development of the young women who were their characters. As cool and reasoned as are Sara’s responses to the men seeking her hand, her letters to her female friends, Anna Willis and Aletta Bruneer, brim with impatient passion. Female friendship binds them in a way that love letters with men can only attempt to imitate.
Over time, heeding the counsel of her father’s friend, Sara comes to appreciate Hendrik Edeling. Before she can avow her love, however, she is abducted by a rich rake with whom she foolishly walked unaccompanied. The predatory aristocrat would have raped her but for the timely intervention of his gardener’s daughter. In a feverish state of semiconsciousness following her misadventure, she whispers to the hovering Hendrik that she is no longer worthy of marriage. She blames herself for being so careless and for assuming that men—especially, it seems, dashing aristocrats—could be friends. Hendrik assures her that she can rely on his “strength that he will use only to protect her from the dangers of the world.”26 He will be no tyrant, but a companion. Over time, they grow to love each other in the image of her parents, smoking a pipe and reading in the garden. “I have chosen my best friend to be my husband,” Sara confides in the widow.27
Wolff and Deken were not looking to revolution to change women’s lives. For the time being, at least, they found the conditions for individual fulfillment within Rousseau’s family as they reinterpreted and reshaped it. Even if Rousseau defined the subordination of women to be “natural” in the family, Wolff and Deken were convinced that he had opened new possibilities for the wives of merchants, and new happiness for mothers. In marked contrast to Rousseau’s works, though, Sara’s good sense triumphs over the obstacles thrown up by society. By the end of the novel, Sara has learned “what it is to be a mother.” At home with her five children, the young Dutch wife of a prosperous merchant no longer has time to walk out with friends, all of whom are also married with children, because she has “duties to satisfy that earnest reflection tells me are true.” Sara muses as she remembers her life’s experiences: “And how natural it is that a woman finds her diversions in her household and that she values her husband’s company above all others.”28 Sara has learned, as Mary Wollstonecraft would counsel, “to govern a family with judgement.”29
Two English Heroines, Mary and Emma, Adrift In “a thorny and a pathless wilderness”
Mary Wollstonecraft published Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in England in 1787, the year of the Dutch Patriot Revolution. She earned ten pounds and ten shillings for the small book addressed to English parents. Practical, like Wolff’s treatise on child rearing published a decade earlier, Wollstonecraft’s manual also followed John Locke, advising parents to model behavior for their children to emulate.30 Like Wolff, Wollstonecraft did not write from her own family experience.
Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 in Spitalfields in East London, the second of seven children. Her father, an alcoholic, abused her mother and squandered the family’s savings to establish himself as a gentleman farmer. Before she was old enough physically to leave home, Wollstonecraft confided to her journal: “I commune with my own spirit—and am detached from the world.”31 Self-educated, Wollstonecraft learned by experience. She made her own way in a world that spurned independent women, as it would the heroines of her novels.
“Mary, the heroine” of her first novel, entitled simply Mary, was raised by a caring mother to be compassionate and to think for herself. Over her mother’s deathbed, her insensitive father gives Mary in marriage to the boorish son of a friend. “It was the will of Providence that Mary should experience almost every species of sorrow,” the narrator informs the reader.32 Immediately after the wedding, her husband leaves to tour the Continent, so Mary sets off on her own for Portugal to care for an ill friend. There she meets Henry, and it is clear that although her husband has freedom to roam the world as an individual, Mary does not.
In the preface to her novel, Wollstonecraft condemned other authors whose little-thinking characters contentedly inhabited “an insipid paradise,” instead of striking out to create their own worlds. Samuel Richardson’s popular heroine Clarissa and Rousseau’s beloved Julie considered the opinions of others, usually fathers or husbands, before coming to any decision. In contrast, Wollstonecraft’s metaphysical heroine Mary examines ideas for herself on their own merit. Her “tumultuous passions” battle with “cold reason” as Mary is torn between her increasing friendship with Henry and her loveless marriage. Mary almost chooses Henry, clearly forgetting, as the narrator reminds the reader, “that happiness was not to be found on earth,” at least not for women. If she “built a terrestrial paradise,” it certainly would “be destroyed by the first serious thought.”33 Mary can envision the ideal family, but realizes it is not possible in this life.
Mary ultimately decides to return from Portugal to England and to dedicate herself to alleviating the misery of the poor. That worthy plan collapses when Henry, in declining health, follows her, seeking her care. “Wherefore am I made thus?” Mary despairs. “Vain are my efforts—I cannot live without loving—and love leads to madness.” Her husband’s precipitous return leaves her wishing “involuntarily, that the earth would open and swallow her.” In the end, the narrator reports, “her delicate state of health did not promise long life.” Mary “was hastening to that world where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage,” her escape from a claustrophobic society with no place for her.34 Neither the heroine nor the narrator could imagine liberty for reasoning women who could still be forced against their will into marriage. And such a marriage foreclosed all other options for friendship with men.
Wollstonecraft’s own fortunes improved with the publication of this first novel. She wrote her sister that the publisher of her novel, Joseph Johnson, had offered her regular wages as a staff writer as well as lodging. He “assures me that if I exert my talents in writing, I may support myself in a comfortable way. I am then going to be the first of a new genus—I tremble at the attempt.”35 A multitude of other women wrote romances, poems, conduct manuals, and literary criticism, but they only scraped by with their piecework. She fit readily into the circle of radicals who gathered around Johnson, including the future leader of the Society for Constitutional Information John Horne Tooke, the philosopher William Godwin, Thomas Paine, the American poet Joel Barlow, and the chemist Joseph Priestly. On the editorial staff of the Analytical Review, in a series of bold yet anonymously published articles, Wollstonecraft sympathized with the black loyalists’ economic plight in London, followed the Temne prince Naimbanna’s voyage from Sierra Leone to England, and heralded slave rebellions in Saint-Domingue. Her message was clear: what slaves could do, so should white women. Nevertheless, in her writing she disguised her gender; women did not typically comment on politics.
At Johnson’s London bookshop in Paternoster Row, Wollstonecraft met an admirer and aspiring author, Mary Hays, who asked Wollstonecraft to read the manuscript of her Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous. Wollstonecraft responded critically, especially irritated by the “vain humility” of Hays’s preface. Hays had not only apologized for her own intellectual inadequacy as a woman but had thanked all of the men who had contributed to her success. Wollstonecraft advised Hays to write clearly and courageously and to eschew expressions that would mark her as a female writer. Despite Wollstonecraft’s initial scolding, their friendship flourished.
Hays was one year younger than Wollstonecraft, born in 1760 to a family of Dissenters in a London suburb. At seventeen, she had fallen in love with a fellow Dissenter, John Eccles, who became her mentor and teacher. Families and friends on both sides disapproved of the relationship, so they corresponded in secret until Eccles’s premature death. In mourning, Hays withdrew from society to read philosophy, history, theology, and selected novels, including Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse.
In 1788, she ended her self-imposed “widowhood” to publish her first monograph, Cursory Remarks, under the pseudonym Eusebia. Hays’s defense of public worship beyond the established church won the attention of Dissenters and radicals, in particular, the philosopher William Godwin, who offered to serve as a mentor. Hays sent him her manuscripts in twenty-page packets that they met regularly to discuss. “How often have you poured the light of reason upon my benighted spirit!” Hays wrote, thanking Godwin for his critique.36 However, no sooner had Hays asked Godwin whether it was possible in their society for a woman to live independently, to be happy without the love of a man, than she fell in love with Cambridge mathematician and Dissenter William Freund. He apparently harbored no amorous feelings for her, leaving her heartbroken. Godwin encouraged Hays to write a novel to work through her unrequited love.
FIGURE 6.2
Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft reading, an unusual pose for a woman’s portrait. Illustration from Century Magazine based on the oil painting by John Opie, 1790–91. With permission of the Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
Emma, the love-sick protagonist of Memoirs of Emma Courtney, asks, “Should I desist from my present pursuit, after all it has cost me, for what can I change it?” With no parents to guide her, Emma was raised by an indulgent aunt and uncle. She grew up with the company of ten to fourteen novels a week, leaving her “as a human being, loving virtue, while enslaved by passion, liable to the mistakes and weakness of our fragile nature.”37 When she falls desperately in love with Augustus Harley, she casts herself as Rousseau’s Julie of La nouvelle Héloïse. She sends Harley increasingly desperate and cloying letters, only to learn that he is already secretly married. On the rebound, Emma accepts the proposal of Mr. Montague, whom she holds high in “rational esteem,” if not love. She resolves to assist him in his medical practice and she has his baby. But friendship proves an inadequate bond for a family, as in Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse. Mr. Montague discovers the depth of Emma’s past passion for Hartley, a glaring contrast with the reasonable friendship she has offered him as her husband, and dies. “I have no home,” Emma tellingly sobs at the end of the novel, “I am an alien in the world—and alone in the universe.”38 She has no family.
Alone, Emma is miserable. She ventures forth “with caution … and dread” into a world that appears to her as “a thorny and a pathless wilderness.” Unlike Wollstonecraft’s Mary, who resolves to forge a life of good works independent of her husband or her friend, Emma openly acknowledges her need for a husband to guide her. “That I require protection and assistance, is, I confess, a proof of weakness, but it is nevertheless true,” she laments.39 Hays intended her novel to be read by young women as a “warning, rather than as an example.” In the end, Emma blames society for her predicament. “I feel, that I am neither a philosopher, nor a heroine—but a woman, to whom education has given a sexual character. It is true, I have risen superior to the generality of myoppressed sex; yet I have neither the talents for a legislator, nor a reformer of the world.”40 Comparing herself to Rousseau’s Julie, who drowns after the appearance of her former lover, Emma recognizes her inability as a woman to control her heart.
A Cosmopolitan Voice: Isabelle de Charrière
The novels of Isabelle de Charrière, although influenced by her reading of her compatriots’ novel Sara Burgerhart, held out even less hope for women in families than did Wollstonecraft’s or Hays’s tragedies. De Charrière grounded her novels in a world that would have been recognizable to her Dutch, French, Swiss, and English readers, but unlike the other novelists, her characters reflected the cosmopolitan culture of the nobility of the Old Regime.41 De Charrière informed her intimate correspondent James Boswell that the ideas for her novels came from “every country,” not just her native Holland.42 As a young girl, she dreamed of claiming “the whole world as my nationality.”43 Her characters, however, never escaped the trap set within their own minds.
Born in 1740 in the heart of the United Provinces, Isabella van Tuyll van Serooskerken, daughter of the president of the provincial Dutch nobility, was raised in the castle van Zuylen. Belle rejected each of the steady stream of suitors seeking her hand, until at thirty she announced her decision to marry her brother’s mathematics tutor, Charles Emmanuel de Charrière, a phlegmatic Swiss gentleman of intelligence and somewhat limited means. He was as surprised as everyone else by her choice. “She has too much spirit for me,” he confided to a friend. “She is of too high a birth and she has too much money.”44 They moved to the principality of Neuchâtel to live in the family manor with his father and two unmarried sisters. She hoped for children, but had none, so she too passed her time writing letters, meeting friends, and reading.
In 1784, Isabelle de Charrière published Lettres de Mistriss Henley Publiées par son Amie (Letters of Mistress Henley published by her friend), a novel set in the England of Wollstonecraft and Hays. An orphan, Mistress Henry has been raised by an aunt in thoughtless luxury and is expected to marry a nephew who would inherit the family estate. This seemingly well-orchestrated future crashes down around her when the nephew dies suddenly. “I lost everything that a woman could lose,” she despairs.45 Suitors pursue her, but she turns them all down before finally choosing to marry a twenty-five–year-old widower with a five-year-old daughter. It seems a sensible decision to the reader. Describing him as the model husband and the wedding as the perfect ceremony, Mistress Henley yearns to be the ideal wife. As with Wollstonecraft’s and Hays’s heroines, Mistress Henley finds herself bereft of sensible guidance, fancifully envisioning herself either as “the most respectable of Roman matrons” or as one of “the wives of our barons from the feudal past.” Alternatively, she imagines herself ensconced in a romantic cottage high in the mountains, attired as one of the “shepherdesses living simply, sweet as their lambs and gay as the singing birds.”46 Her life turns out to be a disappointment.
Mistress Henley arrives at her husband’s country house after their wedding with delicately ornamented clothes and fragile accessories for her husband’s daughter. He abruptly questions her gifts, saying that the fancy clothes would restrict a young girl in the countryside from running and playing. He is right; she admits her error. Disappointed and determined to do better, Mistress Henley engages the eager child, teaching her to recite fables. Her father would rather she master history. In a letter to a friend, Mistress Henley acknowledges that she alone is to blame for her unhappiness. She can do nothing right, no matter how hard she tries. Visitors admire Mr. Henley as the most reasonable husband and congratulate his wife on her good fortune in marriage. She admits to her husband that any reasonable woman in her situation would be content, but she fears that she possesses none of the qualities to make them happy together.47 She aspires not to the dependence depicted by Rousseau but to autonomy, to the friendship of an equal marriage. Her husband accepts the world as it is; she yearns for something beyond her reach.
The small domestic matters that unite Rousseau’s heroine Julie to her husband Wolmar are a source of torment for Mistress Henley. She despairs at her pregnancy, obsessed by her fear that nursing the yet-unborn child will compromise her own delicate health. When her husband responds with concern for the fetus but none for her, Mistress Henley realizes that she is condemned to spend the rest of her life with a man who will never understand her. He turns down a seat in Parliament and a title, declaring his preference for the simple life of the countryside, and she is so overcome with disappointment that she faints, collapsing to the floor.
In contrast to Wollstonecraft’s Mary, no tyrannical father has forced Mistress Henley to marry. Hers has been a sensible choice, not unlike Emma’s decision to marry Montagu. But Mistress Henley’s psychological struggle is more desperate than the social constraints encountered by Hays’s Emma. Mistress Henley knows she cannot fit into her husband’s rational, ordered, but alien rural paradise, the aptly named Hollow Park. There is no room for her as an autonomous individual in his perfect family. Her personal liberty is incompatible with even the reasonable and virtuous husband she had chosen. All is not well in her sensible world without revolution.
A mother and her daughter are similarly wracked by internal conflict in de Charrière’s novel Lettres écrites de Lausanne (Letters written in Lausanne). Domestic happiness looms just out of their reach. The thoughtful mother explicitly counsels her daughter not to trust philosophers whose words “can be strung together one after the other to invent characters, laws, educations, and impossible domestic happiness.” Philosophers, in short, “torment women, mothers, and girls. Only imbeciles listen to their moral lessons.”48Rousseau’s nuclear family may have offered an asylum to men in revolutionary times; in the end, it traps women in claustrophobic private dependence.
A “natural result of our revolution”: Old Families, New Women
Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, literally has no ending. William Godwin published the unfinished manuscript after Wollstonecraft died in childbirth. The reader is introduced to Maria being “buried alive” in a “mansion of despair” by her husband, who is plotting to seize control of a legacy left to their newborn child. Maria’s darkness is broken only by reading Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse. The target of criticism in Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, here the novel opens a new world for Maria. “How I panted for liberty,” Maria exclaims after she finishes Rousseau’s novel.49
Maria seeks redress in the courts, but her pleas for the freedom to return home and raise her young daughter are rejected by a judge who sneers: “We did not want French principles in public or private life.” Why, he asks, could she not simply “love and obey the man chosen by her parents and relations?” The narrator answers the judge directly that only “moralists” would “insist that women ought to, and can love their husbands because it is a duty,” leaving the reader with little doubt that tyranny is entrenched within the family. At the end of Wollstonecraft’s novel without a conclusion, a domestic revolution seems to be the only alternative open to women. But that was apparently outside the realm of novels.50
Wollstonecraft, like Hays and de Charrière, depicted women ensnared in families that little resembled an enlightened paradise of reason, but they also created heroines to challenge tyrannical fathers, to repel insistent suitors, and to govern themselves without absent husbands.51 Other than Sara, they all succumb in the end, an unhappy fate that probably did not surprise readers, even in a revolutionary era that proclaimed liberty to be individual happiness.
In the novels, marriage causes suffering for women. A wedding was not the resolution of a life without a mother’s guidance for any of the female characters in Maria; each tells a story more miserable than the last. None of the “deserted females, placed within the sweep of a whirlwind,” has known a true home. “Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?” the narrator asks the reader rhetorically.52 Only Sara in Wolff and Deken’s 1782 novel can reason her way out of her plight to find happiness within a family.
The novelists’ own lives confirmed the cautionary tales of their novels. Other than Betje Wolff, who vowed not to marry again after her husband died and who told friends, “Never again think of Betje Wolff without thinking of Aagje Deken,” all of the novelists’ attempts to secure the companionship sought by their heroines were thwarted.53 Mary Hays’s dissenting suitor died, and her second love, William Freund, took no notice of her. Wollstonecraft pursued two loves, Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay, without success. Her friend and husband in the last year of her life, William Godwin, acknowledged her comfortless solitude.54 More than one of the novelists might have fit Godwin’s characterization of Wollstonecraft: “Her ardent imagination was continually conjuring up pictures of the happiness she should have found, if fortune had favoured their more intimate union. She felt herself formed for domestic affection, and all those tender charities, which men of sensibility have constantly treated as the dearest band of human society,” but instead, she “felt herself alone, as it were, in the great mass of her species.”55 Although none of these authors experienced the roles of wife and mother idealized by Rousseau and expected by the middle class in England and the United Provinces, it was their unorthodox positions that gave them the time to write about heroines and their families and allowed them to see from the perspective of outsiders.
More dramatically than their fictional characters, the novelists’ own lives, all negotiated through the course of at least one revolution, challenged conventions. At the same time, they confirmed the cautionary tales of their novels. Their futile searches for liberty within families, like those of their characters, demonstrated Mary Wollstonecraft’s motivation in calling for a “REVOLUTION in female manners” in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman.56 Wollstonecraft addressed the Vindication to the French, the revolutionaries she believed would transform society. “Public spirit must be nurtured by private virtue,” Wollstonecraft asserted, echoing Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse.57 She condemned Rousseau for making his character Sophie dependent, flighty, and oversensitive. To be virtuous, in private, as in public, women had to be taught to reason. “This was Rousseau’s opinion respecting men. I extend it to women,” Wollstonecraft explained.58
Wollstonecraft lamented that a married woman’s “sphere of action is not large, and if she is not taught to look into her own heart, how trivial are her occupations and pursuits.”59 Wollstonecraft’s critique of Rousseau’s limited expectations for women educated only for marriage summed up the plight not only of Rousseau’s characters but of Hays’s, de Charrière’s, and even Wollstonecraft’s own. Rather than rejecting domesticity, Wollstonecraft strengthened women’s role at the center of the family by demanding that women, like men, be taught to reason. She took Rousseau’s argument for political independence and applied it to the family, where women resided. The divine right of husbands made no more sense in an enlightened age than the divine right of kings, she reasoned, counseling friendship as the revolutionary antidote to tyrannical dependence. This reasoning friendship was Wolff and Deken’s ideal in Sara Burgerhart. It did not work for Emma, wracked as Hays’s character was by remembered passions.
The heroine of de Charrière’s novel Trois Femmes (Three women), suggestively named Émilie, after Rousseau’s hero, is cast out of her family and ventures alone into a postrevolutionary world. She resembles Voltaire’s Candide leaving the castle in Westphalia to travel the world, except that she has no guide, not even a misguided one like Pangloss. There is little optimism here. How, de Charrière asked, will women create lives if the restrictive laws of the Old Regime that rendered women dependent on propertied men are struck down in revolution? What resources had the French Revolution deployed to enable women to be independent? That was a question none of the other authors ventured to answer or even to ask.
Hays’s protagonist Emma observes with bitterness: “Those who deviate from the beaten track must expect to be entangled in the thicket, and wounded by many a thorn.”60 That was the lot of these female novelists and of most of their characters in revolutionary times. Hays wrote nine books after The Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Her last novel, The Victim of Prejudice, was the most deeply pessimistic. “Mine has been a singular and romantic life, its incidents arising out of a singular and romantic mind,” Hays reflected. “I am not suited to the times and the persons among which I have fallen, and I will say—that I have deserved a better fate.”61 In contrast to the pamphleteers and journalists of other chapters, mostly men brimming with confidence who boldly narrated their adventures and disseminated rumors, these novelists were stalked by self-doubt.
Wollstonecraft, who left a politically hostile England for France in 1792, telling her friends that she would be gone about six weeks, rejoiced in the revolutionary asylum she had chosen: “A new spirit has gone forth, to organise the body politic.”62 She renewed her acquaintance with Thomas Paine and the Americans Ruth and Joel Barlow, and befriended Helen Maria Williams. “We indulged little in common chitchat,” Williams observed. “The women seemed to forget the concern to please, and the men thought less about admiring them.”63 It must have appeared to Wollstonecraft a living example of her domestic revolution.
Isabelle de Charrière challenged Wollstonecraft, wondering whether women educated to be independent individuals would be content to be legally subordinated in the family. Many of Rousseau’s disciples—and there were many, female and male—shared de Charrière’s doubts about the harmony of two similar, equally powerful individuals in one family. Women who would be men’s wives should not also be revolutionaries themselves, Wollstonecraft’s critics cautioned.
Isabelle de Charrière was also more ambivalent about the revolutionary politics of France than was Wollstonecraft. Although de Charrière applauded the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which leveled privilege, the characters in her novels were disappointed by human nature when poor revolutionaries pillaged bakeries in search of bread. “I cannot resolve to be very democratic, even in the bosom of a tyrannical monarchy,” de Charrière confessed to a friend, “nor to be very aristocratic within even the most chaotic of republics.”64 De Charrière agreed to write a pamphlet in 1793 about the Swiss revolution. The government official who commissioned the pamphlet suggested that she take on the guise of an outsider. That pose came naturally to de Charrière, an aristocratic Dutch woman living in revolutionary Neuchâtel. With some insight, de Charrière’s longtime correspondent, James Boswell, observed that she preferred fiction to facts, the life of the mind to the external world.65
In June 1793, frightened by the violence of the Terror and pregnant with her daughter Fanny, Wollstonecraft moved out of Paris to the village of Neuilly. “Let them stare,” she said of women shocked by her pregnancy.66 But it was difficult. She admitted to her friend, the American Ruth Barlow, that while she still held the revolutionary French nation in high esteem, she was tired of being surrounded day and night by self-righteous revolutionaries. At the height of the Terror, Wollstonecraft wrote a history of the French Revolution, seemingly to convince herself that the French Revolution was worth the turmoil it had engendered. Wollstonecraft, though, admitted that she was “grieved—sorely grieved” by the “blood that has stained the cause of freedom at Paris.” Still, she held out hope. “Out of the chaos of vices and follies, prejudices and virtues, rudely jumbled together, I saw the fair form of Liberty slowly rising, and Virtue expanding her wings to shelter all her children!”67
Wolff and Deken, who had actively engaged in political commentary in the United Provinces before the Patriot Revolution was crushed, fled to Trevoux in provincial France. They thought they had buried themselves “so deep in France, in such a little city, that we did not fear violence.”68 Wolff grew fat, Deken thin, they reported, even though “all of Europe is in revolt and France is abundantly partaking of it.”69 In their third novel, they alluded to the French Revolution in only one footnote and made it clear in letters home that they had no use for the bloodshed, a position that got them into trouble, charged with hoarding sugar and called before a revolutionary committee.
In 1795, French troops marched into The Hague and proclaimed a new Dutch republic, giving the novelists another revolution. Liberty trees sprouted all over the country, and with support from the French, the Batavian Republic was declared. Wolff and Deken returned in August 1797 to reclaim Wolff’s widow’s pension. Betje Wolff’s longtime admirer who had visited her at Lommerlust, the playwright Lieve van Ollefen, prophesied the emancipation of the revolutionary Dutch, families and all. In his play Het revolutionaire Huishouden (The revolutionary household) the father of six skilled and sensible daughters teaches them the male occupations of cobbler, tailor, and painter. He boasts that his daughters will be good and useful friends to their husbands, not the “trifling fashion dolls” treasured by the French aristocracy of the Old Regime. Women’s new roles, he proclaims, will be “the natural result of our revolution.”70
Wolff lent her support to this revolutionary transformation of the family in a final fictional autobiography, Geschrift eener bejaarde Vrouw (Writings of an elderly woman). Women were born to take care of the house and to be responsible for the upbringing of children, she explained, echoing Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman had been translated into Dutch in 1796 by a theologian. According to the laws of nature, Wolff elaborated, a girl learned arithmetic by counting the window panes in her house and the fingers on her own hand. The study of history guided children to ask why all power should be vested in the hands of the aristocratic few. Little girls in the United Provinces looked out at the wider world and wondered how revolutionary Americans could treat slaves as animals rather than as men. In Wolff’s postrevolutionary world, they were convinced that the freedom derived from nature was the right of all.
In this last work, Wolff defined a middle course for individual women after the revolution, neither confined to narrowly defined household tasks nor dismissed as useless learned ladies. That was the way of nature; women had an equal right to follow their genius, cobbling, tailoring, and painting alongside their male companions. Like men, women could govern themselves and contribute to a community. As in the novel Sara Burgerhart, Wolff’s hopeful voice in Geschrift eener bejaarde Vrouw had few echoes, even among the other novelists caught up in the orbit of the French Revolution.