(Download) "Godwin's Case: Melancholy Mourning in the "Empire of Feeling"." by Studies in Romanticism # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Godwin's Case: Melancholy Mourning in the "Empire of Feeling".
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 241 KB
Description
"THERE ARE MOMENTS, WHEN ANY CREATURE THAT LIVES, HAS POWER to drive one into madness. I seemed to know the absurdity of this reply; but that was of no consequence. It added to the measure of my distraction." In his Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), this is William Godwin's description of his feelings shortly after questioning the nurse just coming out of the room where his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, lay dying. To Godwin's question, what she thought of the state of her mistress, the nurse responded that "in her judgment, she was going as fast as possible." (1) Godwin's distracted condition during Wollstonecraft's fatal illness continued well beyond her death. It is from the state that verges on the borderline of madness that he started to mourn her. After Wollstonecraft's death from septicemia following the birth of the future Mary Godwin Shelley, Godwin, symbolically taking his dead wife's place, moved into her room at the Polygon, where she used to live and work separately from Godwin during the day. Here he immediately immersed himself in work, rereading all her books and letters. As a reaction to his pain at her loss he started writing the Memoirs, and also began to edit and then publish her posthumous works in 1798, among them her last, unfinished novel, Maria; or, the Wrongs of Woman, and her letters to Gilbert Imlay. Much scholarly attention has been paid to the unfortunate consequences of the publication of Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Despite Godwin's respect for Wollstonecraft and his good intentions, the book--with an honest account of his wife's sexual affairs, suicide attempts and unorthodox religious ideas--scandalized contemporaries, and was an inevitable blow to the feminist views associated with Wollstonecraft's life and work. After the publication of the Memoirs, Wollstonecraft's work was largely ignored and her name only invoked as a warning until the end of the following century. (2) Her reputation suffered intensely from what the public saw as tasteless exposure. Even friends like Southey were disappointed and accused Godwin of a "want of feeling in stripping his dead wife naked." Roscoe condemned him for mourning her "with a heart of stone." (3) Cruel jokes written by Tory journalists proliferated, while the Reverend Richard Polwhele saw the hand of Providence operating in Wollstonecraft's life, death and the Memoirs: "she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes." The Anti-Jacobin, in one of its volumes anonymously edited by Polwhele, cross-referenced "Wollstonecraft" and "Prostitution" in its index. (4)
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