Can a statue breathe? The Linguistic (un)coupling of Godwin and Wollstonecraft

The relationship between Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin can be seen as a paradigmatic Romantic coupling on a number of levels. They were both authors who contributed important works to the Romantic canon. They were both at the centre of a web of friendships which included many of the most eminent writers and thinkers of the Romantic period. Their relationship initiated an important Romantic genealogy: their daughter, Mary, was to elope with P. B. Shelley, and herself write a seminal Romantic text, Frankenstein. Furthermore, at a symbolic level their relationship neatly represents the meeting of two different strands of the Romantic inheritance. Godwin can be seen as a son of the Enlightenment, a man who valued thinking over feeling and who once wrote that should a chambermaid be trapped in a burning house with the author Fenélon, it was the duty of a bystander to rescue Fenélon first, even if the chambermaid was the bystander's mother or wife. Wollstonecraft, by contrast, can be seen as a daughter of sensibility, a woman who repeatedly flouted social convention in the pursuit of emotional freedom, and who exclaimed in one of her political tracts 'Sacred be the feelings of the heart! concentred in a glowing flame, they become the sun of life'. On closer consideration, of course, these schematic characterisations become rather more complex. Godwin was simply not as unfeeling and coldly rational as his reputation suggested, nor was Wollstonecraft the passive hostage of her own feelings. This encourages speculation about their possible effects on each other. Did Wollstonecraft give reason a more important role in her later writings because of Godwin's influence? Did Godwin's relationship with Wollstonecraft, and particularly her death, lead him to re-evaluate the role of feeling? In this essay I shall consider their relationship from the perspective of their linguistic thinking. I shall start by outlining their contrasting attitudes towards language, and then consider whether they succeeded in reaching any kind of linguistic reconciliation. The purpose of this study is twofold. First, it provides an informative perspective on Godwin and Wollstonecraft's individual thinking, as well as their relationship. Second, it illuminates some of the debates which were being fought out over linguistic issues during this period. Godwin and Wollstonecraft were both committed political writers who were deeply involved in the pamphlet wars surrounding the French Revolution. Inevitably, questions of language use were key in these debates. How could a writer convince the public of the accuracy of his or her opinions through the language that he or she used? Were some styles inherently untrustworthy? Could a particular style act as a guarantee of the writer's sincerity? Despite their similar experiences, however, the perspectives from which Godwin and Wollstonecraft approached these linguistic questions, and the ways in which they sought to achieve this all-important linguistic sincerity, could not have been more different. The nature of their relationship allows us to witness a direct debate between these two different perspectives. In An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice Godwin argues that a child is born without any innate principles, and develops his beliefs, habits and prejudices through receiving physical sensations and then reflecting on them. Thus the infant develops away from total dependence upon his physical sensations towards a greater reliance on the exercise of his reason. Godwin evinces a firm belief in the perfectibility of mankind, but asserts that the perfect state will only be achieved if each individual is free to exercise his own understanding, and to behave in accordance with his own deductions: Anything which prevents each individual from exercising his right to private judgement is a hindrance to …