Thinking and Feeling

Some of you may recognize elements of this post from a post from about a year and a half ago. I revised it for an assignment for my creative writing class.

She stood on the edge of Putney Bridge, overlooking the wide swath of the Thames beneath her, raindrops dimpling the surface. All her ideals, all her hopes for a better life for all women, would be swept away by the current, along with her heartache and disappointment. Her lover had rejected her. She had once written that reason must overcome all affections. Some part of her perhaps wrestled with the reality that with all her powers of intellect, she could not bear the weight of grief that had brought her there that wet November day. But though she tried, she did not succeed in taking her life. Mary Wollstonecraft lived on, her ideals tempered by the anguish she suffered.

Mary Wollstonecraft was a firebrand among intellectuals, navigating a man’s world of thought and philosophy. She was a feminist in eighteenth-century Britain before the term had any meaning, railing against the most mundane, most accepted and entrenched customs of society that limited and, in her view, dehumanized women. She attacked vanity, materialism and complacency. She even denounced the institution of marriage.   

I think about Mary Wollstonecraft as I lie watching my two year old son, who is sick, fall asleep. I have been holed up with my laptop and books, studying ideas, and philosophies, the histories of men. But his need is present and pressing and he pulls me away from assignments, deadlines, papers and exams. I watch feathery dark lashes float down, flutter back up. Down... asleep. His lips stand out red. The delicate criss-cross of pink veins across his eyelids and the light pink splotch of birthmark on his forehead are just visible in amber lamp-light. He wakes up half an hour later, moaning, flushed and feverish.

Wollstonecraft found love again in her relationship with William Godwin. They married. Six months later their daughter, Mary, was born.  But Wollstonecraft lived at a time when childbirth still posed a deadly risk. When she died her daughter was just ten days old. I hold my child in my arms and I ache for him. I think of the ache for her new family Mary Wollstonecraft must have known when she realized she would not live much longer.

Some might say in the end Wollstonecraft conformed to society when she married William Godwin, compromising her own ideals. But perhaps in suffering she had learned how to feel. Could she have recognized her role as wife and mother as a chance to change, albeit in a small, slow way, the injustices she was brilliant enough to see? If she’d lived, could she have found contentment, a balance? I hope so. I hope that had she lived to raise her family, she would have had the brightness of spirit to be the kind of mother I most want to be: both thinking and feeling.