Fracture Feminism

The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism

David Sigler

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438484877
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Feminist writers in British Romanticism often developed alternatives to linear time. Viewing time as a system of social control, writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld, and Mary Shelley wrote about current events as if they possessed knowledge from the future. Fracture Feminism explores this tradition with a perspective informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction, showing how time can be imagined to contain a hidden fracture—and how that fracture, when claimed as a point of view, could be the basis for an emancipatory politics. Arguing that the period's most radical experiments in undoing time stemmed from the era's discourses of gender and women's rights, Fracture Feminism asks: to what extent could women "belong" to their historical moment, given their political and social marginalization? How would voices from the future interrupt the ordinary procedures of political debate? What if utopia were understood as a time rather than a place, and its time were already inside the present?

Chapter 1

The Uses of History in Wollstonecraft’s Afterlives

Sonia Hofkosh lauds Mary Wollstonecraft for “her orientation towards a future time,” seeing the feminist philosopher as someone who is, in effect, “contemporary” with us.¹ It is true, I think, that Wollstonecraft was oriented toward the future, and I would agree that her writing can seem stunningly modern. Yet it was Wollstonecraft’s refusal to be contemporary—with her own generation or with anyone—that I value most. Wollstonecraft offers no assurance that we, as readers and feminists today, will be the cohort she was awaiting. I see her in a more deconstructive vein, a person writing about the present in the midst of “a future radically to come, which is to say indeterminate, determined only by this opening of the future to come.” She is not one of us; she stages, rather, in her own present, what Jacques Derrida would recognize as “indetermination en abyme.”² If, as Julie A. Carlson finds, “at the heart of Wollstonecraft’s novel writing, and of those multiple-staged scenes of writing in her novels, is the belief that eyes will eventually emerge that are capable of apprehending words written before their time,” then this, I would suggest, is a present-oriented feature in her work, a reckoning, in her current moment, with atemporality itself, rather than a prophecy or prediction.³

Wollstonecraft’s inclination to explore havens safe from time made her intensely compelling to other feminist thinkers of her era. But negotiating Wollstonecraft’s legacy became more difficult after her death in 1797. Her work, which was well known and well received in her lifetime (bearing in mind its radical content), fell into disrepute in 1798 once William Godwin published her Posthumous Works and his own devastating, if well intentioned, Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft’s unusual reception history helps us question the assumption that she was writing for the future. She was, I would rather say, writing from the future. Readers during her lifetime responded well, with either encomia or vicious ad feminam attacks, according to their political affiliations; this was what it meant to be taken seriously, and to make an impact, as a public thinker in an era of partisan reviewing. She cemented whole categories of public thought, such as the “female philosopher,” to which other writers then flocked.⁴ Her overtures from the future seem to have landed with her immediate contemporaries, and her death offered an occasion for them to affirm the presence of that future as an invisible, occluding element already manifest in the late eighteenth century, and even into the nineteenth.

This chapter discusses three feminist responses to Wollstonecraft’s legacy: the anonymously written short story “Ithuriel,” written six months after Wollstonecraft’s passing; Mary Robinson’s polemic A Letter to the Women of England, written in 1799 as a defiant act of mourning for the disgraced feminist hero; and Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “On the Uses of History,” a late-career essay by one of Wollstonecraft’s contemporaries, published posthumously in 1826, which doesn’t mention Wollstonecraft directly but builds on her intellectual framework and aspires to Wollstonecraftian ends. All three texts treat Wollstonecraft as the voice of a posthumous future that can reorganize the political world.

Even Barbauld’s text does this. At one time, scholars would cite Barbauld’s poem “The Rights of Woman,” also published posthumously, as evidence that she and Wollstonecraft were enemies or that Barbauld was an antifeminist. Wollstonecraft even accuses Barbauld, in the Vindication, of writing in “the language of men.”⁵ I, however, side with those who have seen in Barbauld’s work a “highly complex” relationship to Wollstonecraft’s legacy, rooted in a high degree of mutual agreement and a shared basis in the Dissenting tradition, as well as “a complex engagement with the rhetoric of rights which emerged from this framework.”⁶ Scholarship of the twenty-first century has revealed Barbauld to be a thinker whose supposed antifeminism was constructed posthumously by her more conservative (yet still feminist) niece and editor Lucy Aikin. If Barbauld could sometimes react oddly to feminist projects, including Wollstonecraft’s, it was, stresses William McCarthy, “not because she embraced gender convention, but precisely because she feared and hated it.”⁷ Wollstonecraft did once praise Barbauld’s essay writing, as E.J. Clery notes; ironically, that was specifically with regard to Barbauld’s opinion that one should not expect the impossible (i.e., from book reviewers).⁸ Yet a tendency to write the impossible, from when it least can be expected, is Barbauld’s greatest debt to Wollstonecraft.

Lacan writes Woman with a “slanted line” to indicate that “she is not-whole,” in the sense that her “supplementary jouissance” ensures that she “can but be excluded.”⁹ Each of the texts discussed in this chapter vindicates the jouissance of Woman, written as barred, as the mechanism that can open the question of rights from a moment internal to, yet held apart from, clock time. Lacan warns, however cryptically, that the asymmetry of sexual difference, with regard to systems of signification, can lead, through subtle shifts of negation, to “a time [however illusory] during which things are suspended.”¹⁰ That space, I will suggest, is the fracture of fracture feminism. The texts discussed in this chapter activate Wollstonecraft’s legacy, sometimes in unexpected directions, to dilate the duration of the present, as if one could extend the time of a current instant into a distant future, for the benefit of womankind and humanity. I have tried to keep in mind Ashley Cross’s observation that “Wollstonecraft’s reception functioned as a hotspot that would determine the longevity of women’s writing—her own as well as that of other contemporary women writers.”¹¹ The specific question of the longevity of women’s thought looms large throughout these texts, despite such thought being presented as an impossible thing, a promise fulfillable, paradoxically, only in death. If, as Scott Juengel suggests, “to think of the future is thus already to think of death,” then part of our task will be to theorize how and why these texts engage with death, through its affiliations with deferment and the future, to announce feminist uprisings in present.¹²

A Dead Feminists’ Society, Differently Constituted

Before we get to “Ithuriel,” A Letter to the Women of England, and “On the Uses of History,” I should briefly outline how Wollstonecraft’s most important text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, situates itself in the contemporary future through “indetermination en abyme.” My commentary is not meant to be an exhaustive or definitive reading of this endlessly generative text. I aim simply to highlight some of its best-known features, to indicate why later writers would affix themselves to this text, or text to come, despite the risks of being associated with its suddenly controversial author. These concerns move beyond the question of female education, bourgeois gender codes, and the social function of marriage, into analyses of the exclusivity of public debate, the fantasmatic structure of historiography, and the inexhaustibility of women’s writing. That is because, as Hofkosh rightly emphasizes, Wollstonecraft’s feminist “argument was pitched as part of a much larger set of concerns: the ‘revolution in female manners’ for which she calls in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was integral to a wider call ‘to reform the world.’ ”¹³ Yet such reform, as I will suggest below, was understood to be impossible, and even undesirable, by Wollstonecraft. A more radical act is needed, according to which “a justice that may never be realized on the stage of history,” to borrow David Collings’s words, could be stitched, through acts of remembering the dead, into the present moment.¹⁴ It is on this basis, as fracture feminists of the Real, that Robinson, Barbauld, and the author of “Ithuriel” take up Wollstonecraft’s legacy.

The problem with the contemporary marriage state, argues Wollstonecraft in Rights of Woman, is that “a future state of existence is scarcely taken into the reckoning when only negative virtues are cultivated” (VRW 141). By this, she means that the afterlife is too often disregarded when it comes to evaluating female morality. She uses this warrant to present women as always already immortal—that is, as only incompletely subject to the demands of time, even during their lives. This statement also implies that woman currently exists only as lack—that is, as not independent, not strong, not educated, and so forth—but that she can attain a kind of perfection in embodying this vortex of negation. Is not that women are uneducated, exactly, but that they are the culmination of a perverse education: they excel in a system designed to render its charges either “romantic and inconsistent” or “vain and mean” (VRW 143). This binds women to the present, in an unsustainable kind of negative subjectivity: they wither away because “virtue” gets measured only in terms of its immediate utility, and “the mind is left to rust” (VRW 145). Women as they currently exist have no relation to the future. They are “degraded by the same propensity to enjoy the present moment” (VRW 121). As a consequence, they are “reduced to a mere cypher,” such that the idea of “a man and his wife” is “an absurd unit” (VRW 215). There is no such thing as marriage, it would seem, because the woman does not exist. Wollstonecraft thus puts the fracture that is sexual nonrelation at the core of contemporary gender politics.

What is to be done?¹⁵ Wollstonecraft offers us no encouragement in this regard. She says: “In the present state of society, this evil can scarcely be remedied, I am afraid, in the slightest degree; should a more laudable ambition ever gain ground, they may be brought nearer to nature and reason” (VRW 143). Note how women, in this account, are not naturally natural; they must be made natural artificially. This, however, cannot happen yet: “Still there are some loop-holes out of which a man may creep, and dare to think and act for himself; but for a woman it is a herculean task, because she has difficulties peculiar to her sex to overcome, which require almost super-human power” (VRW 215). The project of justice, then, requires not merely allowing a woman to be a human being, so that she may enjoy the “rights of men,” but of building something “super-human” and titanic in scale.

Wollstonecraft, even as much as Marx, thinks in terms of an economic base and an ideological superstructure. She recognizes that even if sexual difference is only a social construction, that doesn’t mean that it will have been easy to reconfigure. “Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in,” she says: “It may then fairly be inferred, that, till society be differently constituted, much cannot be expected from education” (VRW 90). If women are to change, education will first have needed to change; yet education only reflects the interests of the ruling class, meaning that if education is to change, the underpinnings of society will first have needed to change. Is it conceivable to change those underpinnings? One would think that current events would have made it thinkable to Wollstonecraft. The second Vindication is a text, after all, written during the French Revolution, by a historian of that Revolution, who is calling for “a revolution in female manners” (VRW 114). Nevertheless, she says: “But for this epoch we must wait” (VRW 91). Women are simply too weak and pleasure oriented to rise up, “according to the present modification of society”; the revolution “may be impossible” (VRW 124, 90). “In the present state of society this evil can scarcely be remedied, I am afraid, in the slightest degree,” she matter-of-factly says, a statement that rules out even incremental change (VRW 143). Women will be worthy of rights only in the future, a future that seems far away and, from the present vantage, impossible: “These may be termed Utopian dreams” (VRW 105). It is not, then, a matter of reforming the education system and developing professional opportunities for women. The revolution can have been only a wishful act of supposition: “Supposing, however, that women were, in some future revolution of time, to become, what I sincerely wish them to be, even love would acquire more serious dignity, and be purified in its own fires” (VRW 188–189). It is not that women currently exist, but are oppressed; women cannot exist except as a radical act of imagining the impossible, and if there is to be a revolution, it will need to be a “revolution of time.”

How far away is this revolution, in Wollstonecraft’s estimation? The word “some” in “some future revolution” suggests that nothing is ready to hand. In her travel writings, she hazards an estimate of “a million or two of years.” Even then, there will be, of course, a catch. By then, the world would also surely be overpopulated. In a kind of proto-Malthusian nightmare, Wollstonecraft warns that “the earth would perhaps be so perfectly cultivated, and so completely peopled, as to render it necessary to inhabit every spot; … I really became distressed for these fellow creatures, yet unborn. The images fastened on me, and the world appeared a vast prison.”¹⁶ Accordingly, she will not entertain even the fantasy of a far, far distant future in which progress has been made. Even then, reform would be, in Wollstonecraft’s estimation, inescapably tied to the compromises and horrors of market capitalism, which, as Angela Keane has remarked, creates a ghastly double bind.¹⁷

Therefore, literally nothing is to be done. Women (i.e., “nothing”) should find a mode of present existence (“is”) at once lodged in the future (“to be”) and past (“done”). Rather than asserting themselves as a positive entity, women must learn to “ex-sist” as Woman rather than continuing to exist in negated form. It would involve finding a distant future that can also be contemporary. Hence, we hear “for this epoch we must wait,” from someone who is obviously there already—even beyond it, as the negation can only be made to ex-sist once it has been remembered. Only this combination of impossible temporalities, we are assured, would make possible the arrival of a female philosopher, or even philanalyst, that is, the author of the second Vindication. To mark the impossibility of the revolution is a, or “some,” revolution in time, just as queer time, according to Elizabeth Freeman, has been made out of “the shrapnel of failed revolutions,” for these are “moments when an established temporal order gets interrupted and new encounters consequently take place.”¹⁸

Wollstonecraft herself embodies such an ex-sistence, but, with characteristic humility, identifies Catherine Macaulay as the prototype. If Macaulay is to be admired, Wollstonecraft says, it will only be in times to come (e.g., “posterity, however, will be more just”), despite the fact that Wollstonecraft, writing in the present “as a philosopher,” is doing justice to her legacy right now (VRW 175, 103). Wollstonecraft remembers Macaulay, the recently deceased fracture feminist pioneer, as a woman from the future who must, in the future, be remembered: “Remember that Catharine Macaulay was an example of intellectual acquirements supposed to be incompatible with the weakness of her sex. In her style of writing, indeed, no sex appears, for it is like the sense it conveys, strong and clear. I will not call hers a masculine understanding” (VRW 175). This is no proto-Woolfian call for literary androgyny.¹⁹ It is a demand to write the retroactive history of the present, not in a proto-Foucauldian genealogical style,²⁰ but rather from the vantage of the not-all: it lionizes the voice of “no sex,” the sex that does not exist, not-feminine, not-masculine, impossible, and après coup. The past tense pertaining to Macaulay’s person (“was an example”) clashes with a present tense reserved for her texts (“appears,” “conveys”) and a future tense reserved for Wollstonecraft’s current act of writing, which is expressed through the negative (“I will not”). It is an imperative that Derrida would associate with the divine: “in the future, remember to remember the future.”²¹

Sexual difference, argues Wollstonecraft, arises out of differential relations to signification, through the pathways of free association. These are mental habits formed, “like the lightning’s flash,” without anyone’s conscious input:

The association of our ideas is either habitual or...