Cristina Nehring - A Vindication of Love

Women in Love

NO SOONER HAD HER CORPSE cooled than the stoning began. The thirty-eight-year-old author had been a whore, a hyena in petticoats. Venerable poets suggested she had wished to mate with an elephant. Womens rights advocates damned her imprudence and impolicy. Nineteenth-century suffragettes dismissed her as a silly victim of passion and strained to sever their cause from hers. Twenty-first-century feminists still frequently assail her misogynyor simply pass her over in embarrassed silence.1

Yet, Mary Wollstonecraft is the mother of modern feminism. Her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was the first tract of its kind in English; it provoked more admiration than opposition even in the benighted eighteenth century. This admiration only grew as the Western world came to accepteven to assumeWollstonecrafts argument. The problem with Wollstonecraft for many modern feminists is not what she wrote; it is how she livedor rather, how she loved.2 At once passionate and profoundly loyal, Wollstonecraft loved without stint, prudence, or reserveand often without luck.

There are few crimes which exact a worse punishment than this generous fault: to put oneself entirely in anothers hands and thus be at his mercy.3 So wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949)and so it has been for Wollstonecraft. If her life was nearly ended by the dashing American businessman who broke her heart, her reputation was nearly buried by a censorious international readership. And not onlyor mainlyby defenders of patriarchy, but by defenders of female emancipation: Her own sex, her own sisters exclaims one critic, condemned her pitilessly.4 To some degree, one can understand this: They did not want to make a model of a woman whowhile writing of female independencetwice attempted suicide for a man. The problem is more vexed than this, though; for feminists, over the decades, have damned not only those of their colleagues and foremothers who were unlucky in love, but those who were lucky.

Take Edna St. Vincent Millay. Ostensibly a poster girl for gender equality, Millay smoked a cigar, won a Pulitzer in poetry (the first ever accorded a woman), supported herself and several family members with her writing, entertained the occasional lesbian lover, consigned housework to her husband, and kept any number of important men permanently at her command. The problem is: She liked themthe men, that is. She liked them a lot, so much that she wrote many poems about them and expended not a little effort at cultivating an alluring sexual persona. She was a success at both: The premier literary critic of the day called her one of the most important American poets of all time.5 Men adored, obeyed, and afforded her much enjoyment. Hers may be as happy a love life as literary history allows us to glimpse. But after her death, she was punished for it.6

The onslaught started more subtly than with Wollstonecraft. A critic would remark upon her sexy demeanor, her sultry voice, and suggest that without it her poetry was rather bare. Another would wonder whether if all those men had not been so besotted with her shed have made it into the literary canonconveniently disregarding that her judges and admirers overwhelmingly had never laid eyes on her. Before long, Millays love life had eclipsed her literary achievement as effectivelyand disastrouslyas Wollstonecrafts amours had eclipsed A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 150 years earlier. Millays poetryso recently regarded as masterful and wrywas dismissed as lightweight and frivolousas inconsequential as its pretty, primping, sexually overactive author.7

An insidious dynamic seems to be at work here. For women authors in general, lovewhether it be reciprocal or spurned, happy or sad, chaste or promiscuousseems to be a public relations gaffe, a death blow to ones credibility as a thinker. It does not matter whether the woman in question made a mess or a model of her love life, the fact that she had one and assigned it obvious importance in her emotional householdsuffices to explode her intellectual credibility. If she felt deeply, she cannot, we seem to assume, have thought deeply.

To be respected as a thinker in our world, a woman must cease to be a lover. To pass for an intellectual of any distinction, she must either renounce romantic love altogether or box it into a space so small in her life that it attracts no attention. If a man, as William Butler Yeats once claimed, is forced to choose/Perfection of the life or of the work, a woman is too often forced to choose perfection of the heart or of the head .8 Should she choose to follow her heart, she neednt bother her head about philosophy or feminism because the world will mock her efforts. A strong mind, weve come to believe, precludes a strong heart. This, at least, is the mantra under which female artists have labored for centuries, and continue, to some extent, to labor still.

It has never been the mantra of male artists. Over the centuries, we find, in fact, almost the opposite assumptions shaping the valuation of male writers. From Ovid, Petrarch, and Dante, to Hemingway, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Michel Houellebecq, literary men have been admired rather than punished for their active amorous liveswhether or not their overtures were crowned with success. It does not diminish our respect for Petrarch that he spent his life in hopeless despondence over a married girl who would not give him the time of day. We do not see him as humiliated for this reason, as we see Wollstonecraft. His artistic and philosophical credentials are untainted by the turmoil of his erotic biography; indeed, they are strengthened. Generations of sonneteers and statesmen rushed to imitate his eloquent heartache during the English Renaissanceoften inventing a cruel mistress when they could not find one in real life, the better to prostrate themselves before her. It was part of ones manliness to surrender to love in the Renaissance, part of ones wealth as a human being. How lucky for us: The literature of amorous surrender has inspired many of the most resplendent poems of the English language. And it is rare indeed for its authorsfrom Shakespeare (who pined in vain for Dark Ladies and bright boys alike) to John Donne (who plunged into decades of poverty after eloping with his bosss niece)to be belittled by posterity as silly victims of passion.9

Nor are men penalized for promiscuity. Who has ever heard of a Boswell, Byron, or Shelley, a Jean-Paul Sartre or a Philip Roth being demoted as writers because of the number of their erotic adventures? Once in a while a moral reservation may be implied: it is unfortunate that Shelleys teenage bride committed suicide after he abandoned her, or that Byron placed his illegitimate daughter in a nunnery where she starved. But the moral admonitionif even venturednever touches the work. It occurs to no one to think less of Mont Blanc because of Shelleys emotional fiascos, or to discount the poetry of Byron as frivolous fluff because its author numbered his one-night stands in multiples of a hundred (as did Millay). Sartres temperament has provoked increasing criticism in recent years, but nobody dismisses his philosophy because he bedded dozens of groupies while paired with Simone de Beauvoir. No, it is her work whose seriousness is questioned for this reason. Why did she put up with it, we want to knowand how does it compromise her theories?10