Vindication (32 page)

Women who asked for rights were now ‘Amazons', in contrast to virtuous homebodies; to be ‘daring' and ‘restless' was to be ‘unprincipled'. The result was to polarise women in the old way as saints or sinners, wives or wantons, negating Wollstonecraft's fusion of rights and domesticity. Burke aligned her with Mme Roland, Helen Maria Williams, Mme de Staël and Mme de Genlis, as ‘that Clan of desperate, Wicked, and mischievously ingenious Women, who have brought, or are likely to bring Ruin and shame upon all those that listen to them'. He implored mothers to ‘make their very names odious to your Children'. Women had to conform to the swing against equal rights if they were to survive as writers: ‘Do not…call me “a champion for the rights of women”,' Maria Edgeworth says in her 1795
Letters for Literary Ladies
. ‘Prodigies are scarcely less offensive to my taste than monsters.'

A third cause for caution on Mary's part was Imlay's maxim: to ‘live in the present moment'. When he had not returned at Christmas, it had occurred to her that another woman–‘a wandering of the heart, or even a caprice of the imagination'–detained him. If so, she told him, ‘there is an end of all my hopes of happiness'. She begged for ‘the truth'. If she was wrong, she said, ‘tell me when I may expect to see you, and let me not be always vainly looking for you, till I grow sick at heart'.

Next day she demanded his fidelity against the prevailing double standard: ‘such a degree of respect do I think due to myself'. Only a slave would open her arms to a sultan ‘polluted by half a hundred promiscuous amours during his absence'. Infidelity had to be an unacceptable betrayal of her belief that their extra-legal partnership would not grant him the customary advantage of master over mistress. ‘I could not forgive it, if I would.' If he came back only to prove his rectitude, she made it clear he was not to come at all.

Imlay tried to convince her that her suspicion was the result of her poor mental state.

Though Imlay and Barlow had appeared as new men from the New
World, respectful of women and tender as lovers, they practised the double standard as a matter of course.
*
Ruth came to accept that her husband would have ‘amours' during their long separations. ‘I will be indulgent & only require you to love me best when with me,' she assured him, promising on his return to ‘press you to my heart with as much ardour as the first day of our marriage–for you are every day more dear to me'. Such complicity was unthinkable for Mary Wollstonecraft.

The Barlows remained in Hamburg over that winter of 1794–5. They lived in the adjoining area of Altona, rising above the River Elbe, the chief town of the Duchy of Holstein, then under the jurisdiction of Denmark. Ostensibly, Barlow worked as a shipping agent, but that particular winter the port froze, and shipping came to a standstill. Curiously, at this very time, he confides to his brother-in-law Senator Abraham Baldwin (the increasingly distinguished member of Ruth's family who had not welcomed Barlow) that ‘pecuniaries' are prospering. Some of his gains could have come from his membership of a secret network provisioning the French war effort and from ships like the
Rambler
, but there remains the question: what happened to the silver in the hold of the
Margrethe
?

When the Barlows had left Paris with Joel and Imlay in cahoots in the spring of 1794, they had been in their usual financial straits. By the end of 1796, Joel Barlow had millions in today's terms–an estate valued at $126,000. No one so far knows how he made his fortune. Biographers who talk of ‘part-cargoes' and the ‘percents' he could levy as a shipping agent, forget the ice. Northern ports were impassable from the end of November 1794 until 11 March 1795. Gouverneur Morris, who wintered in Altona that same year, records in his diary that on 22 and 23 January 1795
many people who ventured out froze to death and frozen horses waiting in the street crashed over. Dealing did go on. Morris, for instance, managed to dispose of some silver on behalf of a French aristocrat, acting quickly, he explains, because it was dangerous to hold on to silver. Joel and Ruth spent that winter learning German, so they said; yet from the depths of the freeze, on 10 February 1795, Barlow informs Ruth's brother that ‘pecuniaries' will be bettered by this time in Altona. In the same breath he says that the Elbe has been shut to the mouth for near two months. Even after the port opened in March a traveller standing at the mouth of the Elbe saw ships ‘beat about by the Ice which still floats down the River in huge masses in a most frightful manner…I can almost from the appearance of the Sea conceive myself at Greenland.' If Barlow did grow rich over that winter, whatever shipping made his fortune had to have happened
before
the freeze–before, that is, November 1794. Can it be that the Barlow fortune began in the hold of the treasure ship that sailed north in August?

 

Mary made a new friend in Paris, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, aged forty-two, a commanding figure and refugee from County Kildare in Ireland. His first political act had been to challenge the clemency of the Viceroy in a case of an accessory to a rapist in high station. Though himself a wealthy landowner–a descendant of a sixteenth-century aristocrat–Rowan had joined the United Irishmen, a reforming coalition of radicals, Catholics, a few liberal aristocrats, and the politically sidelined professional and business classes. Rowan became Secretary, and then on 29 January 1794 was prosecuted for handing out seditious leaflets. Not only was he sentenced to two years in prison–he might have hanged when a government spy discovered that France had approached him to inform on Ireland. In fear for his life, he had escaped from Dublin Prison and fled to Paris. On arrival, he had been sickened by the blood that had literally washed his feet where he stood a hundred yards from the guillotine, witness to the orgy of executions that ended the Terror.

A letter to his wife in Ireland describes a post-Terror fête to celebrate the reburial of Mirabeau (for Wollstonecraft the pre-eminent leader of the Revolution, in contrast to his murderous successors) in the
Panthéon. Rowan's attention was caught by ‘a lady who spoke English, and who was followed by a maid with an infant in her arms, which I found belonged to the lady. Her manners were interesting, and her conversation spirited, yet not out of the sex.' A friend whispered that she was the author of the
Rights of Woman
.

Exiled from all he held dear, Rowan began to ‘croak' his dark reveries to Mary, and passed messages between her and his level-headed wife. In doing so, he felt himself a connoisseur of female accomplishment. Since everyone addressed Mary as Mme Imlay, he assumed she had submitted to a ‘republican marriage' for the sake of security, but whatever the legal situation, her connection with Imlay ‘had with her all the sanctity and
devotedness of a matrimonial engagement'. At the same time she persisted in her opinion ‘that no motive upon earth ought to make a man and wife live together a moment after mutual love and regard were gone'.

This made Rowan reflect on his treatment of his wife, and wonder if her attachment to him had been impaired.

Mary assured him he ‘had no reason to be alarmed; for when a person whom we love is absent, all the faults he might have are diminished, and his virtues augmented in proportion'.

 

Imlay continued to summon Mary to London–somewhat against her will. For she still had hopes of the Revolution, and wished Fanny to grow up in France.

Finally, in April, she agreed, and Imlay sent a servant to ease her journey. Passing through Le Havre, she prepared their house for Archie Rowan, who was to stay there en route to America. France was too beset by war to interest itself in the fate of Ireland, and Rowan left for Philadelphia in July. He carried an introduction to Mary's brother Charles Wollstonecraft, and went on to went on to lose money in a calico printing factory they set up together in Wilmington, Delaware.

Ten or so days before Mary was due to sail for England, she weaned Fanny, hoping to endear the child to her father. She glanced across the Channel with a half-ray of hope hardly daring to light her eyes, but ready to return at a signal from Imlay. He did seem to give this signal when he wrote to her: ‘Business alone has kept me from you.–Come to any port, and I will fly down to my two dear girls with a heart all their own.'

‘I do not see any necessity for your coming to me,' she replied on 7 April, wary, suddenly, of lending herself to his endearments. ‘I cannot indulge the very affectionate tenderness which glows in my bosom, without trembling, till I see, by your eyes it is mutual.' On the brink of her crossing, her almost extinguished hope held to only the thinnest edge of life:

When Mary docked at the fishing port of Brighthelmstone (Brighton) on Saturday 11 April, she let Imlay know she would meet him at his London hotel the following evening: ‘I hope you will take care to be there to receive us.' By ‘us' she meant the child of a friend whom she had undertaken to escort from France; Fanny's French nursemaid, Marguerite Fournée; and ‘our little darling' of eleven months who, done with the breast, was ‘eating away at the white bread'. ‘But why do I write about trifles?' she adds. ‘Are we not to meet soon?–What does your heart say!'

Imlay had a furnished house waiting for her at 26 Charlotte Street, Rathbone Place (off Oxford Street, running north), only a block away from her old flat in Store Street. Though they shared the house, Imlay was evasive, claiming the demands of business. Fuseli, to whom she turned, snubbed her. Mary's wish to hide her distress made her lie to Bess. Already, her sisters had wondered at Mary's staying in France, and wondered too at Imlay's avoidance. (So far, Imlay had distanced himself from Bess, while appearing the devoted husband: ‘I am in but indifferent spirits occasioned by my long absence from Mrs Imlay, and our little girl, while I am deprived of a chance of hearing from them.') The sisters' needs, as so often, centred on money–Bess, in particular, looked for rescue from her drudgery as governess-and here there was scope for misunderstanding: a husband was expected to help his wife's family; one reason Mary had not married Imlay was to protect him from that obligation. She had to disabuse her sisters of a rumour (from their brother James) that Imlay had made £100,000. At the same time she was aware that Bess expected to join her married sister in Charlotte Street. Mary now made a bad blunder: in order to disguise the facts that she was not married and that the relationship was just then falling apart, she told Bess it would mar her happiness to have a third person with them. This blow to Bess led to permanent estrangement.

Towards 20 May it was revealed that Imlay had taken up with an actress from a strolling company. Mary had long feared something of this sort, but
the truth overwhelmed her. The fiction of living as a family ended when Imlay left the house, and she found herself cast in the mistress character she most despised: a discarded mistress whom a dutiful man continues to support despite his pressing debts. Support of this kind was insupportable. It was more than the loss of a lover. His explanations were ‘cruel' because they locked her into the routine, age-old story of sexual surrender and betrayal. At the deepest level, it was a denial of the new genus, a threat to its continued existence. Explanations, she said, might convince the reason, ‘whilst they carry death to the heart'.

Imlay protested his attachment to her.

‘My friend–my dear friend,' she replied, ‘examine yourself well–I am out of the question; for, alas! I am nothing–and discover what you wish to do–what will render you most comfortable–or, to be more explicit–whether you desire to live with me, or part forever? When you can once ascertain it, tell me frankly, I conjure you!'

Imlay's unwillingness to hurt her with a straight answer prolonged the torment. During the last days of May she not only lost hope but seemed to have lost her very self: ‘My soul has been shook.'

There were efforts to be calm. She even had Imlay to dine, promising to greet him with a cheerful face and avoid contention–yet at the centre of her calm was a ‘whirl' of grief she could not subdue.