>>There Is Nothing Like a (Great 18th Century) Dame
By CARLIN ROMANO
A single comic-strip panel rarely makes it to icon status, but a mock panel by Roy Lichtenstein remains, after decades, pushpinned on the cubicle divider of many a professional woman's desk.
"Oh, my God! I forgot to have children!" a high-power Brenda Starr-type cries out, as if looking up from her workaholic career for the first time since college.
Put on the Umberto Eco semiotician glasses and the gesture conveys well-employed womankind's inside joke to itself, though the exact message may not be the same in every case.
"How dare society expect that from me?" some may be signaling. "Am I supposed to scream?" Others, graver in their irony, may be talking to themselves, maintaining a continuous wake-up call at their workstations. ("Don't end up like her!")
What does society ask of high-achieving women, of high-achieving women intellectuals? How does it value their romantic and sexual needs? The question, and unsatisfactory answers, stretch back to Hypatia, but two masterfully accomplished new biographies -- Maria Fairweather's Madame de Staël (Carroll & Graf) and Lyndall Gordon's Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (HarperCollins) -- breathe Enlightenment air into the debate. Their subjects remain chronologically close enough to us to bear resemblance to our own alpha females, yet distant enough to promise special lessons.
Though born only seven years earlier than Madame de Staël (1766-1817), Wollstonecraft (1759-97) seems the much older figure because she tragically failed to outrun the 18th century. Multiple earlier biographers provided her basics, occasionally fashioning an unsympathetic portrait of a whiny and narcissistic ideologue. Gordon likes her subject much more than that and draws on new information to shape perhaps the most positive account yet.
Born the second child of seven into the lower-middle-class English family of a despotic, often drunken patriarch, Wollstonecraft broke free. One of her most famous remarks captures her character. "I am not born to tread in the beaten path. ... The peculiar bent of my character pushes me on."
Contentious, melancholic, and perhaps, by contemporary science, a victim of clinical depression, Wollstonecraft always struggled. Denouncing marriage as "legalized prostitution" and skewering laws that gave a husband total control over his wife's property won her such accolades as novelist Horace Walpole's withering description, "A hyena in petticoats."
As Wollstonecraft abandoned traditional women's jobs like governess and schoolteacher to create, through herself, "a new genus of human being," she faced the money problems that dogged her all her life. Still she succeeded as that "new genus" -- independent freelance woman intellectual and lady of letters -- supporting herself and several family members by her writing, and publishing the feminist classic, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
At the same time, Wollstonecraft always believed in the "sacredness" of the heart. She fell powerfully in love with the married artist, Henry Fuseli, who claimed he turned down her offer of a ménage à trois, and more significantly with rascally and adventurous American businessman Gilbert Imlay, with whom she had a child. When Imlay cheated on her, she attempted suicide with laudanum. That failed, and she later made a second attempt by jumping from a bridge into the Thames. Resuscitated, she offered to live with Imlay and his mistress.
Only in her 17-month marriage to political philosopher William Godwin did Wollstonecraft enjoy something like happiness as the two iconoclasts experimented with a pre-Sartre-and-Beauvoir relationship in which they lived around the corner from each other and conducted partly separate social lives. (Wollstonecraft candidly wrote to her husband, "I wish you, from my soul, to be riveted in my heart, but I do not desire to have you always at my elbow.")
Finally, in a tragedy that still stings all who admire her, Wollstonecraft died of septicemia at age 38, the result of a bungled attempt to pull out her placenta after she gave birth to the future Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.
Unlike Wollstonecraft, Germaine Necker began life on a cloud as the adored only daughter of Jacques Necker, Louis XVI's Swiss-born Protestant finance minister. As a child, she mixed with the philosophes at her mother's salon. When she turned 20, her much-admired father arranged for her to marry mediocre Swedish diplomat Baron Eric de Staël, whose sole asset was his incipient position as ambassador to France. Madame de Staël rose to the opportunity once she reached Paris in 1786, uncorking her always-remarked-upon conversational and networking skills at court.
From that point on, and especially after inheriting her father's fortune, Madame de Staël built an enormous European reputation for herself as political activist, salon intellectual, and best-selling author of two autobiographical feminist novels, Delphine and Corinne. She saved aristocratic friends from the Terror and, in exile at her Swiss home, ran what Stendhal later called "the general headquarters of European thought." As Madame de Staël turned against Napoleon (and he against her), she helped coordinate the European response that brought his downfall.
What else did she accomplish? Coining the word "Romanticism" and bringing German literary culture to the rest of Europe through her book, De l'Allemagne. Becoming a celebrated philosophical refugee who roamed Europe, mixing with Goethe and Schiller, Coleridge and Byron. Though Goethe disappointed her as "a fat man" who didn't read newspapers, he had her translated into German. Fairweather emphasizes de Staël's "generous" nature, but also lets us in on her high self-regard.
"What I don't understand," she once explained, "is nothing." Talleyrand, commenting on why he'd married a much less intellectual woman than his once dear friend, remarked, "To understand the full value of such peace of mind, one would have to have lived under the same roof as Madame de Staël for a month!"
Yet, like Wollstonecraft, de Staël could never shut down her heart. She importuned men she sought as lovers and sometimes threatened suicide. Unlike Wollstonecraft, the peripatetic and moneyed aristocrat, always considered homely despite beautiful eyes and a substantial bosom that prompted pint-sized Napoleon to try looking downward, pursued a varied diet of sometimes simultaneous lovers.
Political philosopher Benjamin Constant, one of the pack but perhaps her most intimate true friend, found his marriage proposals rejected despite sometimes writing to de Staël five times a day and announcing that she had "enough talents to have made 10 or 12 distinguished men."
Nonetheless, de Staël forbade Constant to marry anyone else. When he grew "tired of being always necessary" to de Staël "but never enough," he married Charlotte von Hardenberg, but didn't tell his longtime paramour. Constant's bride threatened to poison herself if he didn't publicly acknowledge the marriage. Madame de Staël, finding out about it, threatened to stab herself if he did.
In her later years, de Staël traveled around Europe with her 20-year-younger nonaristocratic Italian lover, John Rocca, whom she eventually married. When a friend commented on Rocca's verbal ineptitude, she remarked, with characteristic tartness, "Speech is not his language!" At her death, at age 51, she'd given birth to four children, none of them conceived with her husband.
Now, I ask you: Is that kind of nerve still possible in a world where almost all leading women intellectuals become department chairs, or need to please one?
What delights about these biographies is that Gordon and Fairweather devote luxurious attention to their subject's romantic and sexual ambitions without even slightly implying, as male biographers might, that passion sharing space with reason in the control tower devalues one's philosophical or literary achievements.
Both biographers take pains to imply that the enormous need for love, romance, and children that we see in Wollstonecraft and de Staël, far from delegitimizing them, makes them role models for timid academic women intellectuals today, too often cowed by bureaucratic propriety or the tenure clock into becoming the kind of "dead-from-the-waist-down" scholars who love mankind in general, but no one in particular.
Everyone likes it -- or at least accepts it -- when a Type-A man declares, "I work hard and I play hard." Neither Mary Wollstonecraft nor Madame de Staël said, "I work hard and I love hard." But they might have.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University.
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