Framing the Corpus: Godwin's "Editing" of Wollstonecraft in 1798.(Mary Wollstonecraft; William Godwin)

Studies in Romanticism; 12/22/2000; RAJAN, TILOTTAMA

IN 1798 WILLIAM GODWIN PUBLISHED BOTH HIS MEMOIRS OF WOLLSTONECRAFT and his posthumous gathering of her works, including her unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman.(1) Godwin's Memoirs were so controversial that he was forced to issue a second, revised edition in the same year. Southey wrote that he lacked "all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked," through disclosures about her father's violence, her romantic relationships and the gynecological details of her death.(2) And although Mitzi Myers recognizes him as "something of an innovator in life-writing,"(3) Godwin's frank portrayal of his wife's relationships with Fuseli and Imlay has been blamed for the subsequent disfiguration of her name by anti-Jacobins such as Polwhele. His re-membering of his wife may indeed be "hurtful," if read against Wordsworth's association of epitaphs with monuments, and the latter's claim that memory should be selective, should "spiritualize and beautify" the deceased.(4) But Godwin does not necessarily share Wordsworth's use of memory to conserve the past and bury its failures. In "Of Choice in Reading" he locates the significance of a work (and, by extension, a life) not in its explicit moral but in a "tendency" opened by and to an uncertain future.(5) Writing Wollstonecraft's epitaph rather than her biography would contain these revolutionary tendencies within a morally acceptable summation of her life, as indeed the doctored version of the section on Fuseli tries to do.(6) Likewise, idealizing her innovations might be to fix as dogma the experimental and temporary responses she developed to the wrongs of woman, for instance in her educational writings, which reveal her construction by a propriety and Englishness she also sought to escape. Godwin's choice is rather to "romanticize" Wollstonecraft, in the sense that Novalis uses the word in writing (also in 1798) that the world "must be romanticized" through a "qualitative raising to the powers (Potenzirung)" in which the "lower self is identified with a better self."(7) Thus Wollstonecraft is all too real, all too human; but Godwin looks to the reader to potentialize the revolutionary idealism in such apparently base occurrences as her love for Fuseli and Imlay.

This paper thus suggests a method in what is often seen as Godwin's naivete and ineptitude. His editing of Wollstonecraft is his attempt to write the revolutionary subject into history so as to initiate the uncertain process of her future reading. Or to put it differently, Godwin's editing is a historiography that can be read with and through his other "experiments" (in essays, biographies, and fiction) with a history that is revolutionary and unsettled. This historiography sees the subject's re-formative potential as emerging only in a complexly negative dialectic both with herself and history. It locates her legacy not in the moral of specific texts and acts, but in a tendency often hidden from the author herself, and unconsolidated within existing discourses. Tendency, moreover, is not transparent: it is inseparable from a work's "effects," allowing genius a performative power, but also subjecting it to the accidents of its own disfiguration. Reading Wollstonecraft's texts as parts of her life, Godwin seeks to disclose the tendency within which specific writings on education or liberal reform emerge as experiments not reducible to their morality. His tendential reading of Wollstonecraft accounts for the unfinalized, fragmentary quality of her life in his portrayal. Sadly, among the. "effects" of this life, as Godwin wrote it, was the postponing of feminist justice for generations. Yet despite this fact, the Memoirs have also made possible our own

reassessment of Wollstonecraft and how she figures in the political unconscious. To give but one example, Gary Kelly's argument that her passion for Imlay was part of her revolutionary feminism(8) rests, perhaps unconsciously, on Godwin's sense of the dialogical integrity of her life and work. For it is Godwin's framing of Wollstonecraft's writings within the Memoirs that inscribes the concept of life as a form of intellectual work. Godwin's "editing" of his wife was seminal in other respects: in bringing out a romantic rather than enlightenment feminism(9) catalyzed by her stay in France, and in revisioning sensibility as a radical empiricism--a mode of knowing that responds to the revisability of ideas by life.

Godwin's sober portrayal of Wollstonecraft has to do with a sense that revolutionary genius is a lightning that finds only ambiguous conductors, and to his feeling (voiced by Milton in Eikonoklastes) that the construction of icons is an impediment to revolutionary history.(10) Indeed Memoirs casts a new light on the fictional idealization of Wollstonecraft in St. Leon (1799), where Marguerite is an icon whose uncritical acceptance might too quickly lead us to dismiss St. Leon's alchemy for a domesticity disengaged from history. As we shall see, the domestication of woman within the genres of educational writing and children's stories, is something that Godwin regards as a limitation in the "English" phase of his wife's career. In contrast to the premature idolization of Marguerite in St. Leon,(11) Godwin tries to present Wollstonecraft in the Memoirs not as stereotypically perfect, but as a subject-in-process whose life and ideas are unfinished. He shows her as constantly learning, her experiences being the stimulus for a life and work that employ several genres and faculties. Thus her father's domestic violence and the inadequacies of her mother's "system of government" (M 7) are the first provocations for her interest in upbringing and education, carried out through her school and her books. But her love for Imlay in the midst of Jacobin France is another kind of work, as it seeks to unpack the contradictions of a revolution that both gives women a voice and yet excludes them.

Godwin uses the word "project" (M 12,170), analogous to his own term "experiment" in "Of Choice in Reading," to suggest the transpositional quality of Wollstonecraft's activities. Thus the Vindication, with which he identified her in the subtitles of both 1798 texts, is but one plateau rather than the monument of her fame others have made it. Godwin describes it as an "unequal performance ... deficient in method and arrangement," and written in "no more than six weeks" (M 83,85). If it is nevertheless "bold and original" (M 80), this is because he thinks of "genius" (M 84) as power rather than knowledge, as a capacity to respond and initiate. Yet Godwin's sense of his wife's genius, and of her responsiveness to the challenges posed by each context through which she moves, is set against an awareness of those contexts as limiting. The Vindication, post-revolutionary but written before Wollstonecraft's residence in France, is praised for its "imagination (and) sentiment" but criticized for its "rigid" and "amazonian temper" (M 82). Commenting on her translations for the Analytical Review, Godwin says that such "miscellaneous literary employment, seems, for the time at least, rather to damp and contract, than to enlarge and invigorate, the genius" (M 66). Of a certain conventionalism even in her own work, he comments that he "find(s) occasionally interspersed some of that homily-language, which ... is calculated to damp the moral courage, it was intended to awaken" (M 67).

Godwin thus stresses Wollstonecraft's radical originality, but also its misrepresentation, its discursive construction by the circumstances of her life. These circumstances, or her reaction against them, impose on her a "character pro tempore" that is not her "fixed and permanent character" (M 82). Correspondingly, Godwin also emphasizes her restless travelling, her "repugnance" at returning to England (M 125), and by implication her search for different contexts of cultural judgment marked by the parallels he draws between her and Goethe's Werther (M 20, 112).(12) Indeed Memoirs (in its first version at least) de-anglicizes

Wollstonecraft by stressing sensibility rather than propriety. Though Godwin sees an essential continuity between her English and European phases, this being one reason he includes the Fuseli as well as the Imlay episode, he presents the French Revolution as radically opening Wollstonecraft's life to its own tendencies, through the "vehement concussion" it produced in the "prejudices of her early years" and her "respect for establishments" (M 74). Wollstonecraft one can argue, did not encounter the Revolution at a personal level until her stay in France, which resulted both in her book on the Revolution and her relationship with Imlay. The Revolution and its ambiguous aftermath raised the question of women's agency in history as well as in a politicized social sphere. Like Keats's chamber of maiden-thought, it resulted in an intensification of Wollstonecraft's insight "into the heart and nature of Man" and a new sense that the "World is full of Misery and Heartbreak." Through the Revolution "many doors [were] set open--but all dark--all leading to dark passages."(13)

Godwin's Memoirs are framed by the Posthumous Works, which produce a paratextual representation of Wollstonecraft quite distinct from that of the recent Picketing edition. And while the differences can be ascribed to a posthumous rather than collected format, Godwin's choices nevertheless have a direction. Though he should have omitted published work, he reprinted an essay on "Poetry" which had appeared (in shorter form) in the Monthly Magazine. On the other hand he left out the reviews for the Analytical Review that dominate Pickering's last volume, though they had appeared anonymously, and he also left out an abridgment of Lavater's Physiognomy mentioned in the Memoirs (65-66). That these choices are meant to romanticize Wollstonecraft is clear. Godwin omits a mode that places the critic squarely within the bourgeois public sphere: namely reviews that mediate standards to the general public. Instead he represents Wollstonecraft's literary criticism by the more private and ruminative mode of the essay. He thus mirrors a discursive shift also occurring in Germany, from an enlightenment concept of "criticism" as an activity that speaks for the public and its norms, to a romantic concept of individual genius.(14) Godwin's choices reflect the same tendency as in the Memoirs, to emphasize Wollstonecraft's creativity, and not her work as an arbiter of "taste" who is necessarily constructed by that taste.

Equally suggestive are the remaining contents, which ally Wollstonecraft not with rationalist discourse, but with sensibility, literature, and the fragment. The Pickering edition is arranged by categories such as reviews, translations, and political treatises. It produces a synchronic representation of Wollstonecraft as having worked in several genres, of which fiction was only one. Indeed a cursory glance at the seven volumes suggests that she was more a political and social commentator than a novelist. But Godwin's laying out of her work foregrounds the fiction, as he begins teleologically with The Wrongs of Woman and ends at the beginning of her career with The Cave of Fancy. Godwin offers Wollstonecraft's fiction as a corrective, indicating through the title of her last novel (The Wrongs of Woman) and the subtitle of his own volumes another side to the author of a "Vindication of The Rights of Woman." For the titles capitalize on the fame she acquired from the Vindication, only to mark a gap: the exclusion from public discourse of the literary, the affective and personal, and the persistence of "wrongs" that mobilize and threaten the liberal project of "rights." One could argue that the dominance of the literary is coincidental: these were simply the texts not published in Wollstonecraft's lifetime. But this editorial framing is corroborated by the Memoirs. For while Godwin grants that the Vindication was an "epocha" in the history of feminism (M 84), he suggests that his wife's real importance lay in her fiction.(15) Of her only published novella, the pre-revolutionary Mary, he concedes that "[t]he story is nothing" (M 59). Yet he insists that no other text from this period "is marked with those daring flights, which exhibit themselves in th[is] little fiction" (M 67). As for the Wrongs, it crosses new thresholds: "All her other works were produced with a rapidity, that did not give her powers time fully to expand. But this was written slowly and with mature consideration" (M 171-72).

"With mature consideration" seems to mean precisely that the text was not hastily finished, but was left open to further revision. Godwin's emphasis on the fiction reflects his sense of the experimental, unfinalized quality of Wollstonecraft's life and work. Indeed this provisionality, linked with his reluctance to write her into a monumental history, also emerges in the incomplete state of the works he transmits to us. Of the texts he includes apart from the private letters, only the essay on poetry is finished, though that too, as a revision, calls in question any editing of history according to final authorial intention. The two fictions (Wrongs and "The Cave of Fancy"), the "Lessons" for children and the "Letters on the Management of Infants" are fragments, as are the "Hints" for a second part of a Vindication and the "Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation." Posthumous Works is in a way Wollstonecraft's epitaph, and Godwin's archival honesty un-completes even published works that had seemed finished.(16) For the "Hints" reminds us that the Vindication itself was an unfinished project, with a further volume still projected. And the letter on the French nation does the same for the much longer book on the French Revolution, which is very much a work in process, deeply uncertain of where the Revolution will lead and of women's place in it.(17)

Moreover, while the Wrongs is unfinished, its editing fragments it further. Godwin reconstructed the text from at least two manuscript states, and informs us that it was revised "several" times (PW 1.iii-v), pointing to breaks in Chapter v (1.114) and at the end of Chapter XIV (1.iv; 2.120). He could easily have ended the novel with the court scene in which the judge refuses Maria's plea for a divorce. In that case the text would have been climactically fragmentary, echoing the published ending of Caleb Williams, and allowing us to imagine Maria and Darnford united outside the law in a revolutionary free love.(18) Instead Godwin appends a "Conclusion, by the Editor," which consists of "two detached sentences and some scattered heads for the continuation of the story" (PW 2.158). He thus echoes the unpublished ending of his own novel, in which the defeated Caleb goes mad and disintegrates. The scattered heads embed Wollstonecraft's fiction in her life, as they suggest Darnford's treachery, Maria's suicide or her survival to look after her child. Turning from public courage--the defiance of Maria's speech in court--to private fears, they return from rights to wrongs, and from revolutionary solidarity to the wound of gender. These scattered heads are avowedly the editor's conclusion in that we do not know their textual status.(19) Godwin's editorial notes, focusing as they do on the breaks that occur in the development of Jemima and Darnford, also point to revision as caught in aporias that inhibit the text's completion (PW 1.65, 114; 2.91). As against her earlier claims for a middle class feminism from which "the lower imperceptibly gains improvement" (PW 4.57), Wollstonecraft introduces Jemima in her revision of Mary as The Wrongs, thus trying to expand considerations of gender to include class. But she is uncertain how to handle the latter issue, and breaks off one stage of her revision of Wrongs in the midst of Jemima's story. Godwin likewise points to awkwardnesses in the handling of Darnford (PW 1.65), thus revealing his romanticization as Maria's saviour to be written over Wollstonecraft's deep uncertainties about the solidarity of revolutionary and feminist justice.

The ideological inconclusiveness of Wollstonecraft's "principal work" (M 171) is for Godwin one of its strengths. Or put differently, its ongoing revision is what makes Wrongs superior to other texts that are finished only because Wollstonecraft did not stop to rethink them (M 171-72). This need for revision grows from what Godwin calls "experiment" or experience. For by including the letters to Imlay as "works" while accompanying them with the Memoirs, Godwin foregrounds the autobiographical nature of Wollstonecraft's novel, and presents fiction as an experiment with life. Paradoxically, Wollstonecraft had an initial "aversion" to being considered "an author" (M 64), preferring the role of female philosopher. She also kept her "philosophy" apart from the controversies of her life. Godwin, by contrast, sees her life as

itself a theoretical statement. And he casts as its centerpiece a novel in which theory emerges from the life that remains its political unconscious. Wollstonecraft's early self-representation has been continued by political scientists who make her the mother of liberal feminism, thus conferring on her career a theoretical closure within a monumental history. Godwin, however, refigures that career, by placing her political and educational theory inside a narrative of her life that climaxes in a novel which puts life and ideas on trial as fiction. In effect Godwin, who also encouraged Mary Hays to "write" her life as Emma Courtney, helps to invent what I elsewhere call "autonarration."(20) In his representation, Wollstonecraft is the archetype of those Jacobin women (such as Mary Hays) who lived fiction and ideas as life, while rethinking life through fiction.

This intertextuality both "potentializes" life into "ideas" and uses fiction to chasten theory. A similar doubleness can be found in the highlighting of Wollstonecraft's "sensibility." For the Works' other feature is its scandalous inclusion of Wollstonecraft's letters to her American lover, Gilbert Imlay. Godwin tries to observe propriety by also including letters to Wollstonecraft's publisher Joseph Johnson, thus seeming to choose not specific letters but the epistolary genre. Still the letters bring Wollstonecraft's rational feminism strikingly closer to the life-work of her friend Mary Hays. They undress Wollstonecraft's own nervously middle-class condemnation of sensibility, to disclose her sympathy with Hays's bolder view that passions are only "another name for powers."(21) Interestingly it was Godwin who urged Hays to write a novel based on her unreturned and revolutionary passion for William Frend paralleled in Wollstonecraft's love for Imlay. Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney reworks actual letters to Frend and Godwin so as to rethink sensibility as a new form of sense. Godwin's curious correspondence with Hays--in which he symptomatically refuses to reply on paper--shows that he initially found her sensibility embarrassingly excessive. Hays in turn insisted that her epistolary publication of her private feelings was a form of rationality: these letters to the author of Political Justice were the only way that a woman could participate (un)equally in the realm of ideas, and thus she will not omit her more "philosophical letters" from her novel on the grounds of their being a form of "fanaticism." Indeed she will not allow that there is a profound difference between her advocacy of passion and Godwin's own exploration of the dark corridors of sensibility in Caleb Williams.(22) Godwin's memoirs of his wife are in a sense his response to Hays's reproach. For just as he rethought Political Justice after coming to know Wollstonecraft, so too his writing of Wollstonecraft is an oblique apology to Hays. Indeed his very structuring of Wollstonecraft's letters remembers Hays's novel. Thus just as Emma Courtney divides its correspondence between an absent lover and an older mentor, so too Godwin prints both the letters to Imlay and those to Johnson, so as to disclose a subject split between a body in revolution and a responsibility for maintaining communicative rationality.(23) In so doing, as we shall see, he also exposes Wollstonecraft's unease with the role of proper lady required by the rationality of communication and behavior in the social sphere.

Godwin's use of the letters has to do with his sense of the domestic as part of the political, intimated in his reflections on what makes up "true" history,(24) and continued in his own turn to domestic history in Fleetwood (1805). As important, through the letters, Godwin also writes Wollstonecraft's legacy not as a set of ideas, but as the sensibility that subtends them. Sensibility is often read in English studies through what Kant calls a "pragmatic" as distinct from "physiological anthropology," and thus through an anthropology focused on civic usefulness and on rationality as autonomy.(25) Though given some cognitive value, sensibility is seen as an excess, a trap of a specifically feminine nature, and a threat to autonomy. Godwin would not have known the more philosophical (and ungendered) theorization of sensibility by Novalis and Schelling, or its absorption into a general theory of illness by Hegel. But he might have known John Brown's Elements of Medicine, which was

published in English translation by Joseph Johnson in 1788, and was a key text in the series of cultural transfers by which sensibility and illness were rethought between British empiricism and German idealism.(26) Moreover, it is clear from his many references to Goethe's Werther (PW 3.i-ii; M 20,112) that Godwin was trying to think sensibility in European rather than English terms. In this context the reception of Brown's purely medical (and mechanist) theory exemplifies that larger "romanticization" of empiricism by idealism for which Godwin was reaching.

Brown takes over the German physician Albrecht Haller's terms "sensibility" and "irritability" and combines them in the concept of "excitability."(27) He traces disease to excitability, which he locates in the nervous system, but also sees as the very source of life, of "not being inert." Thus thought is a form of excitability, as are the passions, melancholy, and even "the exercise of the senses." Insofar as diseases result "not from want, but an overabundance of the support of life," sensibility can no longer be thought of as "debility." Thus Brown's radicalism lies in a convergence of the normal and the pathological that makes illness potentially vital.(28) In our own time this convergence has been used by Georges Canguilhem to see illness not as a "variation ... on the dimension of health" but as a "positive, innovative experience in the Jiving being," a "new dimension of life."(29) As David Krell brilliantly argues, Brown's approximation of health and disease is absorbed by Novalis and Schelling into a negative dialectic that involves creation in a "more general structure of infection and toxification." In this dialectic sensibility is both the agent and object of a "romanticization" that potentializes body into spirit through "a homology of higher and lower operations." Yet the homology is dangerously reversible, making "the ultimate source of life the germ of death ... the seed of torment."(30)

Such reversibility means that the "general structure" of a dis-eased history also includes "failed assimilation," or an "ingestion that remains incomplete and potentially lethal." Or as Krell says of Schelling, his desire is to "reveal `the concealed trace of freedom' in nature," but his idealism cannot cease "being tormented by the necessity of inhibition" (Krell 93, 74-76). Illness figures this inhibition, even as it contributes creatively to a teleological process).(31) As Syndy Conger points out, sensibility is an "illness of spirit" caused by "the spiritual starvation of [the] self" (II; my emphasis). For our purposes, moreover, "spirit" carries all of the connotations it has in German Idealism. Sensibility is spirit's inhibition by the (social) body, spirit's illness, which is its infinite, but infinitely inhibited activity: "From this point of view, each individual product of nature must be seen as `a botched attempt to depict the absolute.' The individual is but the means, the species the end. However, each species and each stage of development, in turn, is yet another such botching" (Krell 96-97).

Sensibility in the Posthumous Works is part of a similarly dark and unconcluded dialectic. Wollstonecraft's letters to Imlay entwine sexuality and desire with sensibility in a testing of limits that ends tragically. But even her letters to Johnson abound with references to illness, and speak a language at odds with our own sense of propriety. The first letter begins: "I am still an invalid--and begin to believe that I ought never to expect to enjoy health. My mind preys on my body--" (PW 4.61). The pervasive references to "misery," "fatigue" and "nerves" convey as irritability an unfocused, amorphous dis-ease with things as they are (PW 4.66, 72-73, 76-78). Yet it is significant that this malaise results from the mind preying on the body, not from the body unsettling the mind. Sensibility must therefore be read with care for its points of sensitivity, which include lack of a profession, having to deal with trade, marrying for security, trivializing of women's concerns, and--as a woman--being too exclusively in the company of children (PW 4.61, 64-67, 81-82). By thus emphasizing psychic pain, Godwin shows how irritations in Wollstonecraft's life "excite" the ideas put forward in the major

works. Yet he also turns ideology inwards to a wounded life as the face of its own possible failure.

And Godwin goes out of his way to stress this wounding. After all, it is Godwin who opens political romance back into personal history by printing The Wrongs with the letters, thus endangering the fiction of revolutionary domesticity(32) by connecting Darnford to Imlay. We can take as a further example the Lessons for children, which he curiously appends to The Wrongs (PW 2.172). The Picketing editors group this brief text with the educational writings, thus taking it at face value. In the same vein, Gary Kelly, in what is perhaps the most determined attempt to give it intellectual substantiality, describes the Lessons as showing how "the self and social relations are constructed through the structure of language" (Kelly 202). However, Godwin's framing asks us to read the Lessons not for its content but with and as sensibility. Thus he downplays its discursive importance, making it a metonym for the "miscellaneous papers," the loose ends left at the end of a life (PW 2.172). He connects the Lessons, "written in a period of desperation," with Mary's suicide attempt and the autobiographical Maria's legacy to her child (PW 173-75). In so doing he "romanticizes" the text in Novalis' sense. He gives it a depth it semantically lacks, and moves us to read it not for its moral but for tendencies of which its language is only the trace. Yet this way of writing the subject is not "prophetic" so much as cryptic. Godwin places the Lessons between fiction and life as a form of missed encounter. His "auto-graphing" makes it an awkward supplement, a displacement or imaginary resolution of social contradictions. In short, the Lessons--and Wollstonecraft's educational theory generally--build on despair, but are only a "botched" attempt at things as they should be. In a different way Wollstonecraft's other attempt at utopia, her revolutionary domesticity, is also a "failed assimilation," a premature and "potentially lethal" ingestion of the political into the domestic.

Godwin's framing of Wollstonecraft in terms of her sensibility, suicide attempts and death may be further approached through Hegel's theorization of illness in The Philosophy of Nature (1802-6), which is also part of the intertext between German idealism and British empiricism. Empiricism and idealism, in turn, are linked dispositions in romantic thought. Empiricism connotes not just Locke's tabula rasa (as opposed to Kant's prestructuring of experience by existing concepts), but a sensitivity towards the minute particulars that disrupt our concepts: particulars that must be developed towards their "ideality" (in Hegel's words) if we are to grasp their larger significance for these concepts. It is in this sense that Brown's bringing together of the normal and the pathological was influential for Hegel, even though Hegel was deeply unsatisfied with his approach. Taken as a "complete system of medicine" Brown's theory was "an empty formalism": his mere empiricism limited him to seeing the organism as a mechanism. Yet Brown also "direct[ed] attention beyond what was merely particular and specific both in diseases and remedies, to the universal in them as the essential element."(33) On this basis Hegel, as H. S. Harris argues, was able to construct a "transcendental" or philosophical as well as a more holistic theory of illness.(34) Moreover, illness for Hegel is not just physical: although grounding his symbolic discussion of illness in a medical account, Hegel includes "diseases of the soul" under illness, and notes that illnesses may be historical, national or social (PN 432, 431).(35) Like Canguilhem, Hegel theorizes illness "at the level of organic totality," as the experience of an "organism all of whose functions are changed" (Canguilhem 88). In effect he provides a phenomenology of illness, of what illness means in the (hi)story of spirit. This phenomenology is in turn a crisis in his own larger phenomenology. For on the one hand illness, as a form of negativity, has a transformative and utopian potential. The way fever works through the morbid matter in the physiological system promises a similar process in history. On the other hand illnesses are not always curable, and all the more so when we consider that though we "can recover from disease," disease is also in our "very nature" as a life born for death (PN 441). Because illness

is an organic process, it exhibits and participates in the larger process of negativity that operates in life and history (PN 432). But as such it is a particularization through which we must rethink the very dialectic of this larger process.

Hegel's theory of illness is closely linked to his exploration of negativity. Hegel defines illness as the separation of one part of the organism from the total system, and its introversion as what Blake calls a "selfhood" (PN 428). In illness one part or system of the body "makes itself the centre" and becomes "an isolated, independent activity;" it is then "shut off from the outer world ... [and] lives on its own resources" (PN 429-30). Illness involves a negative movement, a turning of the self "against its structure" so that "the negative thing" becomes "the structure itself" (PN 429). That Hegel does not simply see illness as a physical state is clear: "every disease," he says, "is a hypochondria of the organism, in which the latter disdains the outer world which sickens it, because, restricted to itself, it possesses within its own self the negative of itself" (PN 438). Kristeva will later describe how in "maladies of the soul" such as melancholia, the subject clings to her illness as a form of self-possession, thus constituting a "primitive self-wounded, incomplete, empty."(36) Wollstonecraft's letters to Imlay may well strike us, from a pragmatic viewpoint, as narcissistic. But it is this primitive self as the "negative" of the socially viable self that Godwin senses in them; and it was the sensibility of the Letters Written From Sweden that so drew Godwin to Wollstonecraft, as his hero Fleetwood was later drawn to the fictional Mary.

For Hegel too it is not enough to dismiss illness as an error of the (social) body and to reinvoke health or sense as a norm. For as Canguilhem says, disease "is both deprivation and change" (186). Illness is a negative condition, in that "one side [of the organism] is increased beyond the power of [its] inner resources," thus "usurping the self" (PN 429, 433). And yet this one-sidedness is able to live from "its own resources," as a new self, "the negative of itself" (PN 429-30). For Hegel as for Brown the pathological is entwined with the normal. In an earlier essay on "Natural Law," Hegel had already defined health as "a warfare of the functioning sub-systems," in which disease occurs when the struggle gets out of hand (Harris 101). Hegel places his discussion of illness in the third and last subdivision of the third section, at the very end (or crisis) of The Philosophy of Nature, because illness is at the heart of the enigma of life. Illness is what distinguishes living from inert matter: a stone cannot become ill, because if it becomes "the negative of itself" (if it becomes fluid), it is "chemically decomposed and its form does not endure." Illness, then, which is characteristically organic, is the ability to survive or subsist in negativity, so that the organism is both itself and not itself: "the negative of itself which overlaps its opposite," in a "dual life ... a differentiating movement" that disrupts "the stable universal self" (PN 429, 434). Or to put it differently, what characterizes an organism is not only its ability to survive and grow from illness, but also its ability-perhaps its tendency--to become the negative of itself in the first place.

Yet given this link between vitality and illness, Hegel is uncertain as to its implications. Is illness, which at times seems to come from inside the organism as its own decadence, rather than from outside as infection (PN 431), productive in the life of the organism? Linked as it is to life, does it thwart or forward the principle of life? And what is "life," if its essence is to culminate in death? Hegel's discussion raises more questions than it resolves. At times illness seems to be the assertion of an inorganic principle within the organism, as in Freud's account of the death drive: it is an "entanglement [of the system] with its non-organic nature" (PN 433, 440). At other times it seems that illness as negativity is a resistance to this inertia of a dead matter within spirit: illness occurs when one of the body's "systems or organs [is] stimulated into conflict with the inorganic power" (PN 428). Or as Hegel says, the organism's "original disease" is the "disparity between its finitude and universality," the removal of

which is the "repose of death." Insofar as death "overcomes the inadequacy of disease" (PN 441-42), life, as inadequacy, must then be disease.

Hegel's account of the "course of illness" tries to deal with these questions unwittingly raised by Brown's assimilation of the pathological to the normal. Hegel thus deploys the terminology of Brown and Hailer within a three-part dialectical process. Sensibility is the first stage of this process in which illness is "virtually present, but without any actual morbidity" (PN 433). Wollstonecraft's letters to Johnson betray this excessive sensibility. Sensibility, as we now understand the term, is a self-generated excess: it thus bears out Hegel's claim that illness exists "obscurely in the general foundations of the organism" as a form of decadence (PN 431). But inasmuch as illnesses can be specific to cultures, sensibility can also be seen as a care of the self and its dis-ease with things as they are. In Hegel's second stage the organism is "irritated" into conflict with its "being." Irritability involves a reaction against external stimulus and a "repelling" of what is "other" (PN 358-59). Importantly, Hegel uses the biomedical terminology to describe not just illness but the organism's normal "system of sensibility" and indeed the very process of self-consciousness (PN 359). Irritability is thus the stage in which the disease, following the process of self-consciousness itself, "becomes for the self" but is thereby also "turned against its structure" (PN 433, 429). It is an "active maintenance of self" against the outside, but as the negative of itself, a "determinate" and not a "free" self (PN 359, 433).

In the third stage irritability is transcended in "reproduction," a concept Hegel develops in two other contexts. In the Philosophy of Nature itself reproduction is mentioned as that which distinguishes animals from plants. Plants multiply by division in space, whereas reproduction is tied to an evolution in the species: "The animal is not a standing syllogism but a syllogism moving to the definite conclusion from which a new one can begin" (Harris 457). Reproduction is thus development or the production of something new. Reproduction is also linked to aesthetic activity, a context evoked here when Hegel describes the third stage as one in which the "dissolution" that is illness "passes over finally into the process of shape-formation (das Gestalten), into product" (PN 435). Gestalt is a term used throughout the Aesthetics, where art-works result from spirit "producing itself" externally. And yet the product in the case of illness is neither procreative nor creative; it is excretive, Hegel's example being the sweat that accompanies fever.

The productivity here derives from the organism finally doing something. In sweat the organism "reproduces itself" externally and thus "gain[s] mastery over itself." The mastery comes from a cathartic working through of morbid matter: in sweat "the organism attains to an excretion of itself, through which it eliminates its abnormality and rids itself of its morbid activity" (PN 435). In an attempt to make the course of the disease dialectical, Hegel also describes this excretion as "digestion." Through fever, he insists, the disease is "sublated, digested"; the "organism has produced itself as a whole" and has "digested itself" (PN 434-35). Digestion, as he explains earlier, is the "conversion" of the external into the "self-like unity" and the assertion of "power over [the] non-organic" [PN 393-95). Yet excretion is not quite digestion, as Hegel earlier concedes in a psychoanalysis of self-consciousness that powerfully prefigures Kristeva's abjection. It is rather the organism's "abstract repulsion of itself by which it makes itself external to itself" as its own excrement, "separating itself from itself" in disgust (PN 402-3), and thus precisely not producing itself as a whole. The conflation of digestion and excretion goes to the heart of the problem of whether negativity is productive or unproductive, or indeterminately both. And Hegel is profoundly divided on whether excrement is "unusable material" or "digested matter," pointing out that the organism does "not need to ingest anything useless or superfluous" (PN 405), and indeed using the fact that excretion is part of the economy of digestion. We must pose the same question with

regard to the acts or texts that are the "excrement" of life and creativity.. Are the unassimilated remainders of the psychic body or textual corpus merely wasted, or are they in some way ultimately productive?

Hegel's argument that there is no (psychic) matter that is not eventually productive is based on an analogy between self-consciousness and normal bodily function. But his attempt to read illness in terms of daily digestive functions risks unravelling this normality itself as pathological. It is never clear, in short, whether illness is normal, or whether in that case life itself is pathological. Reproduction as excretion is the most problematic version of a self-duplication that takes three forms: excrement, the "constructive instinct," and "the propagation of the species" (PN 404). These three forms are dangerously contiguous: it is just as likely that aesthetic products contain indigestible material as that excrement--even understood metaphorically--is productive. And indeed in the section on illness Hegel allows that some secretions or products are not productive: "critical secretions are very different from secretions arising from exhaustion, which are ... a dissolution of the organism" (PN 435). This same uncertainty about what the organism can digest from the material of experience haunts Hegel's attempt to protect acute from chronic illness. The dialectical theory of illness is predicated on the reassimilation of the negative into the (social) body. For this reason Hegel sees acute illness culminating in "crisis" as more amenable to treatment than chronic illness, in which the negative is not worked through (PN 432). Or to put it differently acute illness has a terminus, as in Freud's distinction of remembering from repetition: it can be remembered as something "belonging to the past," whereas in the chronic state the morbid matter is repeated "as a contemporary experience."(37)

Deploying this same philosophical thematic of illness, Wollstonecraft herself saw the French Revolution on the dialectical model of productive crisis. As Kelly argues, her Historical and Moral View ... of the French Revolution (1794), while ostensibly about the "good" revolution of 1789, has as its subtext the more violent Jacobin revolution of 1793, which betrayed feminist ideals.(38) Moreover, Wollstonecraft's letters confess what she could not think publicly: that her own life was caught in this self-poisoning of the Revolution, and in the historical problematic of its negativity. Thus she speaks of being drawn to Imlay by his writings on the desertion of women, yet points to the "barbarity and misery" that resulted from the gap between "theory and practice" in Jacobin radicalism (PW 3.109). This historiographical scar clearly surfaces in the Wrongs through Darnford, who is Maria's first reader, her deliverer and perhaps also her betrayer. Nevertheless in the View Wollstonecraft subordinates local "horrour[s]" to the larger progress already made in civic rights. With her "philosophical eye" she attempts a global view (W 6.235), a "cosmopolitan history" promising a dialectic of enlightenment.(39) In this context she portrays the Revolution--and perhaps her own life--on the model of acute illness, as a sick body which by its very excesses "works it's own cure":

as in medicine there is a species of complaint in the bowels which works it's [sic] own cure, and, leaving the body healthy, gives an invigorated tone to the system, so there is in politics; and whilst the agitation of it's regeneration continues, the excrementitious humours exuding from the contaminated body will excite a general dislike and contempt for the nation (W 6.235)

Kant, who is also much concerned with civic "health," shares in this Enlightenment romanticization of the negative as the sublime which is ultimately consistent with "Reason," and he too, a few years later, will see the excesses of the Revolution as consistent with perfectibility.(40)

Insofar as his editing of the past is an implicit historiography, it is less clear that Godwin shares this liberal confidence. For Godwin, as we have seen, deliberately frames Wollstonecraft's revolutionary writings within the unassimilated details of her life and death, scarring the texts with reminders of her two attempted suicides. His framing raises the question of how and whether (social) illness is productive, and indeed of what is accomplished by his reproduction of this illness in the Memoirs and Posthumous Works, and his repetition of it in his own subsequent fiction. It is no accident that the work of Wollstonecraft's he most valued has at its core the aporia of reproduction: whether it is repetition or the production of some new effect. In the Wrongs Maria reproduces her life in a text circulated to Jemima and Darnford, and intended for her child. But Maria's story is not completely read or heard, and the child may be dead, thus apparently cutting off reproduction from any development into the future. Clearly Wollstonecraft's political writings followed the path of a more conventional productivity in the public history of feminism. And yet as we know, the writing that engaged Godwin--the fiction and the Letters From Sweden--has not been unread or without effect.

Godwin's own later fiction is profoundly marked by Wollstonecraft, or rather by the way he writes her story. Both Fleetwood and Mandeville are novels of sensibility: both raise the question of whether sensibility, irritated into sheltering a wounded self that has the negative as its very structure, can result in reproduction, as the emergence of something new. Mandeville ends with the protagonist's self-mutilation, a kind of suicide but in a strange way an assertion of power whereby he "digests" the exterior that afflicts him in the form of his rivalry with Clifford. We can ask, then, what kind of "reproduction" is constituted by an earlier self-mutilation: namely Wollstonecraft's suicide attempts, and her production of her suffering as an act. Her written works, inscribed by Godwin in her life, are also a (re)production of that life, with all the ambiguities that surround reproduction in Hegel's account. Indeed, as we have suggested, they are equally Godwin's act of reproduction. For Wollstonecraft did not envision the publication of her letters with their irritations and private griefs--even if she set a precedent for it through her own publication of the Letters from Sweden. The letters in Posthumous Works and the Memoirs are thus just as much Godwin's reproduction of a life that by entering his own life had produced an irritation, indeed a "vehement concussion," in the "prejudices of [his] early years."

Interestingly, Godwin and the author of a Vindication were not drawn to each other when they first met in 1792, though he was later won over by what was not a part of her public persona: namely the "sensibility" with which she wrote of her "sorrows" in the Letters from Sweden (M 129-30). Godwin's response to Wollstonecraft moves from sensibility, through an unworking of his own earlier "prejudices" still evident in his correspondence with Hays, to his attempt to come to terms with this negativity in his reproduction of Wollstonecraft's works and life. But what is involved in these various reproductions of illness from the suicide attempts to the texts? And what is reproduced for Godwin when he places Wollstonecraft's texts in such close proximity to her suicide attempts, her survival of these attempts--which he emphasizes--and yet her subsequent death? For Hegel, though he will not admit it, it is far from clear if reproduction, as a remembering and repetition of spirit's trauma, is indeed its working through. Hegel wants to think his negative dialectic on the model of acute illness. But if the body contains "the inborn germ of death" from its very birth as an originary disease (PN 443), the negative becomes chronic rather than transformative. It becomes, moreover, a form of entelechy: the organism's morbid destiny. Hegel deals with these dark possibilities by thinking of death as the "sublating of the singular" into "the genus, the procession of spirit" (PN 443). From individual failure, something new is born that contributes to the species. Yet sublation is a form of memory as well as of transcendence. Thus it is appropriate that precisely in this "transition from Nature to spirit," Hegel introduces the "dissolution" of the

organism, and the eventuality of its decease. Disease, he concedes, may be overcome, but it always manifests and prefigures death (PN 444, 443).

Godwin too ends not with Wollstonecraft's revolutionary spirit but with her morbid body. For in a bleak, final chapter he concludes with her botched delivery and the "mortification" of her body as the placenta rots inside her (M 182). These anatomical details have a depressing effect on what should be a history of spirit, especially when we recall that the posthumousness of Wollstonecraft's fiction is prefigured in Maria's suicide attempt. And yet, as Godwin implies, it is the male doctor who seals Wollstonecraft's death by confining her to the sphere of women, too easily dismissing her symptoms because she is a woman to be looked after by women.(41) Is death, then, the relapsing of the ideal into a chronic negativity, or does it occur within a specific cultural moment? Godwin does not answer this question, either here or in his subsequent fiction. As I argue elsewhere, he seems compelled to reproduce the Wrongs in such a way as to discontinue its political project.(42) If in Caleb Williams he was able to sublate the failure of political justice into a new utopian ending, in 1798 he reprojects the mortality of this project onto his editing of Wollstonecraft. Arguably, Godwin never quite worked through her death, for which in Fleetwood and Deloraine he feels what Levinas calls an "infinite" responsibility. Infinite responsibility is not personal: it is unaccountable and excessive, perhaps another name for a trauma with which ethics cannot really deal. In Godwin's later work this unaccounted for guilt often merges into a fascination with morbid psychology that bespeaks a powerful sense of a traumatic core in history.(43)

In 1798, however, the issue of what death means for a history once conceived as perfectibility is less clear. Things seem to reach a dead end with the burial of Wollstonecraft's body, and the reproduction of her literary remains. The memorializing of Wollstonecraft in the twin texts of 1798 creates a contiguity between corpus and corpse. And yet, while the story of Fleetwood is morbidly driven by the inevitability of Mary's death, the Memoirs deals with death factually. Moreover, there is a strategy in what some have seen as this coldness. By eschewing melancholy or melodrama Godwin thinks death on the basis of time, and avoids thinking time on the basis of death. As Levinas says of Ernst Bloch, to think death as a form of time is to approach life as incomplete and as the repository of an unformulated utopian possibility.(44) And Godwin's editing tries to present this incompletion, this posthumousness of life as the work which remains. He arranges Wollstonecraft's corpus according to a recursive, not progressive, teleology. He places last texts first, so that The Wrongs precedes The Cave off Fancy and the letters to Imlay come before those to Johnson. He thus reads Wollstonecraft's life from its end to bring out its early tendencies, yet he also turns it back on itself in a negative dialectic. Thereby "getting the story crooked" lest we misread it as straightforward,(45) Godwin also knows that he cannot foresee the "effect" of a particular life or text. Godwin could not foresee, but does not foreclose, the ways in which death, by its very prematurity, can sometimes produce pragmatic and intellectual change. And in this sense perhaps Hegel is not entirely wrong to see in individual losses an unaccountable surplus that contributes to the "genus, the procession of spirit."

University of Western Ontario, Canada

(1.) William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (first ed. of 1798; rpt. Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1993), and Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 4 vols. (1798; rpt. Clifton: Augustus M. Kelley, 1992). Memoirs is hereafter referred to in the text as M and Posthumous Works as PW. Texts not included in PW are cited from Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, eds., The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 vols. (London: Picketing and Chatto, 1989), hereafter cited as W.

(2.) Quoted in Ford K. Brown, The Lift of William Godwin (London: J. M. Dent, 1926) 134.

(3.) Mitzi Myers, "Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft: The Shaping of Self and Subject," SiR 20 (1980): 301.

(4.) William Wordsworth, "Essay Upon Epitaphs 1" (1810), in Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth, ed. Paul M. Zall (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1966) 91, 101.

(5.) William Godwin, "Of Choice in Reading," The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1797) 106-9.

(6.) For instance Godwin deletes his suggestion that Wollstonecraft's feelings for Imlay were "no doubt heightened, by the state of celibacy and restraint in which she had hitherto lived." Instead he writes that to understand the delight she took in Fuseli's company "we have only to recollect how dear to persons of sensibility is the exercise of the affections." "Sensibility" is tamed by being absorbed into the affections and allied with a "sound morality" and with a "harmonizing" of the "soul." The revision in general forsakes narrative for sententious generalizations about "true virtue," "true wisdom," the "domestic charities," etc. Godwin's revisions to the Fuseli section are printed as an Appendix in Richard Holmes' edition of the Memoirs in Wollstonecraft and Godwin, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987) 274-77.

(7.) Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Werke, Tagebucher und Brief e, ed. Hans-Joachim Mahl and Richard Samuel, 3 vols. (Munich: Karl Hanser Verlag, 1987) n.334.

(8.) Gary. Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: the Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: St. Martin's P, 1992) 177.

(9.) Godwin's editing, in other words, deconstructs Wollstonecraft as an icon of rational (masculine) feminism and revisions her in more modern ways by bringing out her crossing of the boundaries between the public and private spheres, and her use of "life" and "affect" as a way of writing the body.

(10.) For a discussion of Godwin's revolutionary historiography in the context of Milton, see nay "Uncertain Futures: History and Genealogy in William Godwin's The Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton," Milton Quarterly 32.3 (October 1998): 75-86.

(11.) The idealization of Marguerite is no doubt of a piece with Godwin's attempt to sanitize the image of Wollstonecraft in his revised edition of Memoirs, and is his nervously corrective response to the storm of controversy that greeted the publication of the first version of Memoirs. St. Leon needs to be read on two levels: in terms of the "moral" it provides for the average anti-Jacobin reader, and in terms of the "tendency" discernible by more informed readers.

(12.) Syndy McMillen Conger, in Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility (London and Toronto: Associated UP, 1994) discusses Wollstonecraft's familiarity with and avowed sympathy for the character of Werther (8).

(13.) John Keats, letter of 8th April, 1818, in Selected Letters and Poems of John Keats, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959) 274.

(14.) See Klaus Berghahn, "From Classicist to Classical Literary Criticism, 1730-1806" and Jochen Schulte-Sasse, "The Concept of Literary Criticism in German Romanticism, 1795-1810," in A History of German Literary Criticism 1730-1980, ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988) 70-73. 99-109. Schulte-Sasse notes that A. W. Schlegel's Jenaische Allgemeine Literaturzeitung published nearly three hundred reviews between 1796 and 1799, but after 1801 completely stopped reviewing contemporary works.

(15.) Even in the Vindication what attracts Godwin is the "imagination" and "sentiment" that exceed its somewhat "amazonian temper" (82).

(16.) It is interesting, however, that Godwin destroyed the first sketch of a play by Wollstonecraft based on her own recent experiences, because he considered it "crude and imperfect." The play was a comedy, probably meaning, according to Emily Sunstein, that it had a "happy ending" (A Different Face: the Life of Mary Wollstonecraft [Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1975] 296). Its ending, rather than its autobiographical or unfinished status, seems to have struck a discordant note for Godwin.

(17.) Once again, Wollstonecraft writes of her Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the Elect it has Produced in Europe that she plans "two or three more volumes, a considerable part of which is already written" (W 6.5). These projected continuations are something of a romantic figure: Percy Shelley, for instance, promises a second part of The Defence of Poetry, while Byron promises a continuation of The Prophecy of Dante. The figure nevertheless points to the way romantic writers saw much of what they wrote as work-in-progress.

(18.) I sketch the form that such a "hermeneutic" completion might take in The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990) 177-80.

(19.) No manuscript of the novel survives, so that we do not know whether the "scattered heads" are taken from one of the notebooks from which Godwin edited the main story or from another notebook.

(20.) See my essay, "Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney," SiR 32.2 (1993): 149-76.

(21.) Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796; rpt. New York: Pandora, 1987) 86.

(22.) Mary Hays, letter of May 11th, 1796 in Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, ed. Marilyn Brooks (Peterborough: Broadview, 2000) 251-55.

(23.) The two sets of letters by Wollstonecraft are not contemporaneous, as they are in Hays's Memoirs. The letters to Johnson which, like Emma's letters to Mr. Francis, are personal yet maintain a professional distance, were written between 1787 and 1792. The letters to Imlay are from 1793-95. Following his emphasis on Wollstonecraft's later life as a perspective from which to read her earlier life, Godwin prints the letters to Imlay before backtracking to the earlier letters. He likewise places The Wrongs of Woman before The Cave of Fancy, written ten years earlier.

(24.) Godwin, "Of History and Romance" (1797), first published in Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1988) 364.

(25.) Immanuel Kant, Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978). Kant emphasizes pragmatic anthropology, which is concerned with what man "makes ... or should make of himself as a freely acting being" who is a "citizen of the world," over a physiological anthropology concerned with "what Nature makes of man" (3-4). In practice, however, he is fascinated by the latter, which he tries vainly to exclude.

(26.) Brown's Elements of Medicine, originally written in Latin, was published in an English translation around the period that Wollstonecraft's acquaintance with Johnson begins. Brown's theory of "excitability" draws on the concepts of "sensibility" and "irritability" developed by the German physician Albrecht Haller. On the transfers of neuropathological medicine between Germany and England see John Neubauer, Bifocal Vision: Novalis' Philosophy of Nature and Disease (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1971) 16-30. Brown himself does not foreground the terms "sensibility" and "irritability" in the way that Hegel and Schelling do. The association of these terms with Brown is a conflation of his work with Haller's.

(27.) Haller distinguishes the two as follows: "I call that part of the human body irritable, which becomes shorter upon being touched.... I call that a sensible part of the human body, which upon being touched transmits the impression of it to the soul; and in the brutes, in whom the existence of a soul is not so clear, I call those parts sensible, the irritation of which occasions evident signs of pain and disquiet in the animal" (quoted in Neubauer, Bifocal Vision 20). Hegel, as we shall see, makes the distinction differently, in terms of a dialectic in which the passivity of sensibility gives way to the negative activity of irritability and culminates in "reproduction."

(28.) John Brown, Elements of Medicine, 2 vols. (London: Joseph Johnson, 1788) I: 8, 12427, vii, 33, 38, 58, 92.

(29.) Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological (1943/1972), trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett, with an introduction by Michel Foucault (1978; rpt. New York: Zone Books, 1991) 97, 186.

(30.) David Farrell Krell, Contagion: Sexuality, Disease and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998) 93-94. The term "negative dialectic" is my addition, as Krell does not specifically discuss the place of sensibility in history.

(31.) See also Novalis: "With the power of sensation and its organs, the nerves, illness became part of nature. With it freedom, caprice were brought into nature, and with it also sin, transgression against the will of nature" (Philosophical Writings, trans, and ed. Margaret Mahony Stoljar [Albany: SUNY P, 1997] 161).

(32.) The phrase is Kelly's (171).

(33.) G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970) 437. This text is hereafter referred to as PN.

(34.) H. S, Harris, Hegel's Development: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801-1806) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 266, 296.

(35.) Harris notes that in a passage omitted from the Michelet edition on which English translations are based, Hegel compares organic disease to social crime (465).

(36.) Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1987) 12.

(37.) Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans, and ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) 288.

(38.) Kelly 153-54. Kelly argues that Wollstonecraft could not mention the Jacobin revolution for reasons of censorship, except through "a silence that nevertheless speaks in her book between the lines." While this is undoubtedly true, I would also argue that she could not write of it because she could not yet quite face the disintegration of "perfectibility" except in the private and hypothetical space of the novel she wrote three years later.

(39.) I borrow the term "cosmopolitan history" from Karen O'Brien's Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History From Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995). Although O'Brien does not discuss Wollstonecraft as part of this tradition (and deals only with male historians), the View follows the cosmopolitan model in placing French history within a broader European perspective going back to the Crusades, and in its faith in a general European progress towards perfectibility and enlightenment, in which France will play her part. Indeed Wollstonecraft sees the errors of the French as stemming to some extent from the French insistence on ignoring the experience of other countries (W 6.166).

(40.) Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992) 153, 159.

(41.) Having failed to properly remove the placenta, as Godwin tells it, Dr. Poignand observes that "`Mary had a woman, and was doing extremely well'" (M 178-79).

(42.) See the Supplement of Reading (180-83) and "Mary Shelley's Mathilda: Melancholy and the Political Economy of Romanticism," Studies in the Novel 26.2 (1994): 58-60.

(43.) For an important discussion of this traumatic core in Godwin's historical fiction, see Gary Handwerk, "History, Trauma, and the Limits of the Liberal Imagination: William Godwin's Historical Fiction," in Tilottama Rajan and Julia Wright eds., Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature 1789--1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 64-85.

(44.) Referring to Bloch's Principle of Hope, Levinas reads his negative dialectic between Hegel and Heidegger, allowing that time is an unfolding of possibility, but not as absolute knowledge; rather as "that which has in no way happened, not even under the form of a project." See Dieu, la mort, et le temps (Paris: Grasset, 1993) 113, and more generally 106--27.

(45.) "Getting the Story Crooked" is the subtitle of Hans Kellner's Language and Historical Representation (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989), which deals with the challenge posed to historiography by what has not been officially recorded, and sometimes what has not been able to "happen."