Friendship in the Life and Work of Mary Wollstonecraft: The Making of a Liberal Feminist Tradition

• Published in: Literature and history Vol. 17; no. 1; pp. 19 - 35
• Main Author: Pedersen, Joyce Senders
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.05.2008; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Families & family life; Feminism; Friendship; Ideology; Intimacy; Personal relationships; Politics; Traditions; Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
• ISSN: 0306-1973; 2050-4594
• DOI: 10.7227/LH.17.1.3

[...]a]lthough self-interested commerce begins to dominate in society, it does not abolish the more generous and noble intercourse of friendship.'4 From this tradition, Silver argues, a strain of thinking about friendship emerged that was ideologically charged. [...]whereas men only occasionally find themselves competing with one another, women 'are very differently situated with respect to each other - for they are all rivals.'71 In the present state of affairs, Wollstonecraft concluded: 'I allow that more friendship is to be found in the male than the female world.'72 For the most part, Wollstonecraft felt a greater affinity with men. According to Fuseli's friend and biographer John Knowles, Wollstonecraft and Fuseli were initially drawn together by their mutual sympathy for the French Revolution75 Wollstonecraft came to admire Fuseli enormously, commenting on his 'noble qualities, that grandeur of soul, that quickness of comprehension, and lively sympathy'76and finding his company wonderfully improving: 'I always catch something from the rich torrent of his conversation, worth treasuring up in my memory, to exercise my understanding.'77 Wollstonecraft's friendship with William Roscoe, a Liverpool lawyer, political poet and polemicist, also seems to have developed from shared political commitments. The vain fears and fond jealousies, the winds which fan the flame of love ... are both incompatible with the tender confidence and sincere respect of friendship.106 Wollstonecraft was not entirely consistent, however, and sometimes distinguished between 'love, considered as an animal appetite, [which] cannot long feed on itself without expiring' and 'love, as an heroic passion, like genius, [that] appears but once in an age.'107 Love 'such as the glowing pen of genius has traced', (endowing it with 'celestial charms'), exists only in the 'exalted, fervid imaginations that have sketched such dangerous pictures.'108 But she added a caveat: 'it is not against strong, persevering passions; but romantic wavering feelings that I wish to guard the female heart by exercising the understanding.'109 Elsewhere she wrote 'let love to man be only a part of that glowing flame of universal love, which after encircling humanity, mounts in grateful incense to God.'110 Aided by 'imagination' and 'reflection', 'passion', it appeared, could be 'an instrument to raise him [humankind] above this earthy dross, by teaching him to love the centre of all perfection.'111 Both Wollstonecraft's life and her Fiction suggest that although she never thought that "friendship" could be based on erotic attraction, she thought friendship and passion might coexist, if the relationship were freely chosen and nourished by rational esteem.