Vindication (34 page)

Early in June, at the same time as Mary Wollstonecraft was dispatched to Scandinavia, Captain Waak arrived again in Norway, now to take charge of the
Margrethe
and sail it to the nearest Swedish port of Strömstad for repairs. This was Mary 's first destination when she left Gothenburg in July for points north.

 

Mary's journey, ending on the River Elbe near Hamburg, tracks back along the ship's and treasure's path. It was their mysterious course that dictated
the course of her travels. On 1 July 1795 she suggested to Imlay that he meet her at her final destination at the end of August. This was a critical letter for their future, where Mary asks Imlay to decide what that future was to be. Imlay avoided a direct answer, but urged her on with the prospect of reunion in Hamburg. As usual, he wrote often: Mary's replies indicate there were at least ten letters from the time she took off for Strömstad. He understood how much her far-flung tasks depended on the comfort and promise of his words.

From now on the journey would be too arduous for a child. Fanny remained in the Backman home, while Elias accompanied Mary to see his ship at Strömstad. Their journey north took them to inns with feather beds so deep in their wooden frames they seemed to Mary like graves from which she would never emerge. Windows were shut even in summer, as though Swedes could never feel warm. An abundance of wild flowers in the vale of Kvistrum made her reflect that Sweden had been the right country to initiate the study of botany. Linnaeus's system of binomial classification according to genera and species was the source of the ‘genus' terms of her own self-making.

Flowers, alas, failed to compete with the stench of herrings, spread as manure near bleak log homes without paths or gardens, as though all energy had drained into the rudiments of survival through harsh winters. Female servants had to crack the ice in the streams and wash laundry with red and bleeding hands.

Would male servants ever help? Mary asked.

The answer was no.

Approaching Strömstad under heavy skies, she felt a little oppressed by its overhanging rock. This small town, a spa in the eighteenth century, is still a springboard for journeys to Norway, sails bouncing off the hills about the harbour. Rocky islets stretch far out to sea on every side. Here, in the harbour, Mary and Backman would have examined the damage to the ship and assessed the costs of repair. Records of extensive repairs have survived. These were going on from 16 June until 1 September, which is to say they were carried out over Mary's period in Scandinavia. One of the tasks of ‘Mary Imlay' was to oversee the sale of a seaworthy ship. It's on record
that ‘Marin Inclay' was able to finalise the sale of the ship for £250. The repairs cost three times as much, which, if Imlay was liable, explains his need to seek restitution from Ellefsen. Norway, then, was Mary's next destination.

Mary and Backman parted on 14 July. Leaving the harbour to cross the Oslo fjord in an open boat, she observed the difficulty of steering amongst a myriad islands. There were no beaches as far as she could see: the waves beat against bare rock. Mary wrapped her cloak about her and lay down on the bottom of the boat when a ‘discourteous wave' broke her sleep. Larvik, where she landed at three in the afternoon, proved a clean town with a wealth of ironwork. Travellers were so few that townsfolk gathered to stare. The questions in their eyes tempted Mary to adopt Benjamin Franklin's solution when he had travelled in America: to carry a placard with her name, place of origin and business. Her revolutionised French dress, light, unstructured, yielding to the curves of the body, appeared of particular interest to female starers. The only available transport was a rude one-horse vehicle with a half-drunk driver. As a sailor lumbered up beside her, Mary spied a gentleman emerging from an inn and eyeing her assorted party. She was further disconcerted when the driver cracked his whip for attention, but seeing the gentleman smile, she began to laugh. Off they dashed, at full gallop, with Mary musing ‘whether I can, or cannot obtain the money I am come here about'.

She had come to negotiate an out-of-court settlement, so her first move was to confer with Judge Wulfsberg, in Tønsberg to the north of Larvik. He had a reputation for solving cases, sometimes with the aid of a disguise, and later became Chief of Police for Christiania (Oslo). He was known too for his efforts to calm disputes–the kind of man Mary respected. As ever, she was drawn to benevolent men unlike her thuggish father.

Wulfsberg advised her in English. Matters must be allowed to move slowly, he warned; she should prepare to make Tønsberg her base for at least a month. Originally, she had intended to go to Arendal; now, Wulfsberg shifted her sights to Risør, where he had set up a further hearing for mid-August. Accordingly, she settled down at a pleasant inn with a view of the sea.

When Mary came to Tønsberg she still suffered some residue of the night sweats that had laid her low the previous winter. Now, energy surged back as she rode and climbed. Breezes fanned her sleep. Nature was her balm, while ‘employment' restored her agency. In the course of her rambles, she came upon a stream said to be rich in iron, and walked there each morning, seeking ‘health from the nymph of the fountain', though her improvement, she believed, came more from air and exercise. She took up rowing to a place where she could swim, the rhythm of the oars keeping time with her memories.

‘You have often wondered, my dear friend, at the extreme affection of my nature–but such is the temperature of my soul,' she reminded Imlay. ‘I must love and admire with warmth or I sink into sadness. Tokens of love which I have received have rapt me in elysium–purifying the heart they enchanted.–My bosom still glows…and if I blush at recollecting past enjoyment, it is the rosy hue of pleasure heightened by modesty.'

Reason warned that hopes of Imlay could be delusive. Yet without hope, there was nothing to sustain life, and life seemed precious again.

‘I cannot bear to think of being no more…nay, it appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organised dust,' she ruminated in the emerging voice of her travel book. ‘Surely something resides…that is not perishable.' This was the impetus to start what was to be her finest work. Here, at Tønsberg, she ‘turned over a new page in the history of my own heart'.

Again, she took on a well-tried genre, and again transformed it, blending episodes of travel with reverie, a new, Romantic voice, attuned to nature. As she dozed under a rock, she felt herself ‘sovereign of the waste', lulled by the ‘prattling' of the sea amongst the pebbles. Her soul seemed diffused through her senses until she felt a child again, resting–she liked to think–on the footstool of her Creator. Yet her allegiance to reason, and what she had seen of Parisian salons, led her to question a sentimental embrace of rural solitude. Even as it healed body and spirit, she derides Rousseau's ideal state of nature as ‘a golden age of stupidity'. An intelligent being wants the arts and sciences of civilisation. She asked herself whether
happiness lies in unconscious ignorance or the educated mind, and imagined Imlay with similar doubts in the wilds of America. Boldly, her
Travels
*
concede that ‘nothing so soon wearies out the feelings as unmarked simplicity'. The woods of Norway taught her that she would be as much an exile on the American frontier as she had been at Mitchelstown Castle. For a while, she might bury herself in the woods, but she would ‘find it necessary to emerge again'.

Wollstonecraft's
Travels
take the form of twenty-five letters to a friend, Imlay himself, unnamed but identified as the father of the traveller's child. Her private drama erupts through the lulling sea, like volcanic heaves as the traveller calls up a look in her correspondent's eyes. Can she revive his flush of ardour–through words, loyalty and far-flung business on his behalf, unprecedented for a woman in the eighteenth century to undertake alone? The ‘Mary' who signs publishable letters to her one-time lover has obvious links with the Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote more challenging private letters to Gilbert Imlay. The lifeline of her private journey was Imlay's promise to meet in Hamburg. Its immediate effect was to aid her recovery, but it held some danger. For Imlay broke promises casually as new schemes opened up. Mary, in contrast, had the tenacity to carry through plans conceived at a higher level as plans for existence itself. Her Fuseli plan–to live with the painter and his wife–had been unworkable. But, soon after, Imlay's novel in defence of women's rights had seemed to present a viable narrative: a chance to integrate desire with domesticity without the destructive scenes of seduction or marriage. When Mary found herself trapped in a traditional plot after all, it had struck at the root of her existence. In his frontier character Imlay had presented himself as her natural mate, a man of high-minded simplicity, and though she soon discovered her mistake, she did not give up. There was this extraordinarily protracted effort to draw out the American promise he had seemed to embody and which seemed to her still concealed in his core. For she believed in the perfectibility of human nature. It was her form of faith.

Norway was the high point of her journey: she felt kinship with the sturdy independence of its people, and their warmth towards a woman ‘dropping down from the clouds in a strange land'. She could not speak to them in Danish (the dominant language in Norway at the time), but they did manage to communicate sympathy for the French Revolution and reluctance to hear her call Robespierre ‘a monster'. At a Tønsberg party, yellow-haired women gathered round her, sang to her, pitied her singleness at thirty-six. They enquired after her needs, ‘as if they were afraid to hurt, and wished to protect' her, perhaps sensing the melancholy that hung about her whenever she contemplated the fading promise of her union with Imlay and the lost bond with Fanny Blood whose soft voice she still could hear. She felt more than a mother's anxiety for the future of Fanny her child. When she thought of ‘the dependent and oppressed state of her sex', she feared to unfold Fanny's mind ‘lest it should render her unfit for the world she is to inhabit–Hapless woman! What a fate is thine!'

Fears for Fanny were the obverse of retrieved command of her own fate. There is a decided contrast between the pleading letters to Imlay and her purposeful travel book. Although the
Travels
are presented as flowing instantaneously from her experience, the first six episodes were, in fact, composed retrospectively–the art lay in apparent artlessness–‘my desultory manner', as Wollstonecraft termed it. Impressions are to be tossed off ‘without…endeavouring to arrange them'.

The best place to seek the character of a country is in its provinces, she thought, not its cities where the inhabitants tend to sameness. It was therefore an advantage that her travels so far had taken her from a Swedish pilot-house with fresh white curtains and fragrant with juniper berries, to the poor log-shelters in the ‘fields of rock' near Strömstad, and then on to energetic towns along the greener Norwegian coast. Her comparisons of primitive with polished societies foreshadow anthropological travel, lending her intelligence to what she observes, for ‘the art of travelling is only a branch of the art of thinking'. She takes in women weaving and knitting to keep warm during the deep winter; the smell of children's bodies seeping through layers of linen; the hospitable warmth of peasants; and the communicative smiles exchanged with women who share no language. She is
detached enough to resist the vanity that might be excited by the attention she gets as an attractive woman travelling alone. Her glance at the rosy calm of her sleeping child, her wonder at the unextinguished shades of a summer night, and hints of unexplained estrangement from the man to whom she writes, give her a quickening presence, a traveller with a finger on her pulse at the very moment it beats.

From her Tønsberg base, Mary made forays along the south coast of Norway. Her first business was with lawyers back in Larvik. Since she thought them corrupt, we can assume they represented the Ellefsens and resisted her claim for compensation. To the indignation of Judge Wulfsberg, one lawyer named Lars Lind was ‘not even ashamed to say that as long as he is offered the right amount of money, the case will never be solved'. From Larvik, Mary then pursued Ellefsen himself along a ‘wild coast' to Risør, a westward journey by sea.

Risør turned out to be two hundred houses, red and ochre, huddled together, with planks for passages from house to house, to be mounted like steps, under a high rock which looked to her like a Bastille, a place ‘shut out from all that opens the understanding, or enlarges the heart'. To be born here was to be ‘bastilled by nature'. This constriction had to do with commerce, men immured in contraband and trickery, infecting the whole town. Wollstonecraft pictures these tricksters drinking and smoking in rooms whose windows are never opened; by evening their breath, teeth and clothes are foul. The obvious subtext is distaste for Captain Ellefsen and his supporters, for the actual landscape of Risør is not as claustrophobic as Wollstonecraft imagined. There is a steep rise to be sure, but further inland were oak woods, with logs for export floating down the rivers to the town at the outlet of three fjords. At the time, it was the third-largest shipping centre in Norway, and it's hard to believe Mary Wollstonecraft that all goods were contraband. She dined with the British Consul, who would hardly have been there were Risør merely a smugglers' haven. She pictures herself writing in preference to pacing up and down her room, as though imprisoned, but she has come of her own accord.

What she doesn't tell us is that she's at hand for another judicial hearing and that she herself confronted the accused, Peder Ellefsen.

At first, Peder behaved humbly with Mary when she reproached him for the damage she had assessed during her visit to Strömstad, and demanded compensation.