1.        Few would disagree that, by most standards, Mary Wollstonecraft is key to Western feminism’s scene of origin, with all the weighty burdens and responsibilities—and only some of the romance—that goes along with being the origin of anything. Some might also suggest that Wollstonecraft is the original “feminist killjoy,” a term recently popularized by feminist scholar and activist Sara Ahmed. Ahmed’s ongoing blog, feministkilljoys, is subtitled “killing joy as a world making project.” Her wry and ironic appropriation conjures the specter of Wollstonecraft, the world-making feminist who has long had the dubious privilege of being associated with an emotional register that swings from one form of joy-killing affect to another (anger, resentment, jealousy, suicidal despair, murderous rage). I would argue, furthermore, that Wollstonecraft’s specific claim to being a feminist killjoy can be traced to the mid-twentieth century, when two American ego psychologists seized on her personal biography with a determined vengeance and forged the still unbreakable link between Wollstonecraft, feminism, and joylessness. Marynia F. Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg’s Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, published in 1947, was an instant bestseller. Written and published in the hothouse of American postwar anxieties about the need to redomesticate women, Modern Woman provided the pseudoscientific justification necessary for the argument that women must return to the home to fulfill their logical, natural role as mothers and domestic managers. Now remembered mainly for its central part in shaping postwar conceptions of normative family life, Modern Woman was crucial in popularizing the idea that feminism, in thrall to modernity, was world-destroying, and that Wollstonecraft, the “modern woman,” was largely responsible for this sad state of affairs. Modern Woman performs what Janet Todd has called, with great understatement, “an extraordinary retrospective psychoanalysis” of Wollstonecraft (728). With good reason, feminist commentators on Wollstonecraft have in the main refused to grant further authority to “a hostile team of Freudian epigones,” in the words of Margaret George, author of one of the earliest second-wave feminist biographies of Wollstonecraft (11). [1]  But the reluctance to engage with Modern Woman’s cartoonish depiction of Wollstonecraft has not, I would argue, been without its costs. A fuller reading of Modern Woman’s “analysis” goes a long way towards clarifying the source of some of the intensely negative affect that has long surrounded both Wollstonecraft and feminism. As seeming exemplars of the mid-twentieth-century social scientific establishment and its celebratory modernity—Farnham was a psychiatrist and Lundberg was a journalist and sociologist—the authors of Modern Woman were strangely passionate in their fierce defense of tradition. For Modern Woman, Wollstonecraft personifies the “killjoy” whose world-destroying modernity annihilates everything in its path and must be stopped.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Personality

2.        “Mary Wollstonecraft’s life reads like a psychiatric case history,” Farnham and Lundberg begin, speculating that had “psychoanalysis existed in 1792,”

3.        This referential ambiguity, the suggestion that Wollstonecraft’s “twisted personality” is the “book” to which feminism owes its very existence, is not without precedent. William Godwin’s 1798 biography of Wollstonecraft, written and published only months after she died, is entitled Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Yoking the author and her work, and substituting, moreover, the text for which she is most famous for the woman herself, Godwin’s title stands as the first in a long line of conflations of Wollstonecraft’s life narrative with the quintessential example of her life’s work. When A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in a new edition in 1844—the first since the 1790s—it included large sections of Godwin’s Memoirs in the preface, beginning the tradition of reading A Vindication of the Rights of Woman through the scandal-inflected lens of Wollstonecraft’s life, a lens through which the work was primarily read for generations. Modern Woman’s insistence on an equivalence between the “book and its author,” both of which purportedly “have been apostrophized again and again,” only added to the sense that Wollstonecraft and her best-known book were easily substituted, one for the other, and substituted, finally, in the mode of apostrophe. That is to say, the dead and absent author and the inanimate book were both addressed by the living, and both were made present or animate—anthropomorphized, even—by the apostrophic address. That Wollstonecraft was hardly apostrophized until at least the end of the nineteenth century proved to be no obstacle to the authors of Modern Woman, who hyperbolically (and counterfactually) declared that she was apostrophized “again and again,” and whose own voices were as a result thrown at times in the very manner of apostrophe. [2]  Ventriloquists after a fashion, Farnham and Lundberg occasionally put words in Wollstonecraft’s mouth, as we will see, or mocked her by speaking in her voice, thus unexpectedly producing the very effects of the apostrophic praise that they attributed to others.

4.        While Farnham and Lundberg seemed to be thin on the details of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, regularly misrepresenting its argument, they had amply absorbed, by contrast, its famously withering tone. Roundly criticized for her acerbic air, Wollstonecraft was no stranger to bombast, and was prone to an ostentatious style that the authors of Modern Woman themselves inadvertently flattered through mimicry, offering, for example, this declamatory summary of her central argument: “The all-powerful, all-evil male had contrived for long ages to enslave and degrade the delicate, weak, all-good female. Only now was she to be liberated—by Mary Wollstonecraft!” (145). The extravagance of this mock-heroic invocation of Wollstonecraft might seem merely to underscore Modern Woman’s unambiguous contempt for its subject, but I suggest that this figuration in fact revived rather than settled the ongoing question of Wollstonecraft and heroism. The figure of Wollstonecraft as feminist heroine and martyr framed the sympathetic treatments of her life starting in the late nineteenth century, with biographers such Elizabeth Robins Pennell arguing in 1885, for example, that “few women have worked so faithfully for the cause of humanity as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and few have been the object of such censure. She devoted herself to the relief of her suffering fellow-beings with the ardour of a Saint Vincent de Paul, and in return she was considered by them a moral scourge of God” (1). Modern Woman’s caricature of Wollstonecraft as chivalric protector, striving bravely to liberate women everywhere from male oppression, did less than its authors may have liked to undermine the stubborn association between Wollstonecraft and heroism: their mockery provoked second-wave feminists to defend her virtue and celebrate their feminist foremother as just the hero that the authors of Modern Woman accused her of considering herself. The problem that they inadvertently perpetuated becomes clear, however, when we remember the inconvenient fact that, as Barbara Taylor has quipped, Wollstonecraft was “never keen on heroines” (252). [3]  Aiming, we might surmise, to expose with their mock tribute any lingering or latent arrogance in Wollstonecraft, the authors of Modern Woman worked instead to reinforce in the minds of subsequent generations of readers an association of Wollstonecraft with heroism that Wollstonecraft herself would have readily critiqued, and that A Vindication of the Rights of Woman offered little ground to support.

5.        The authors of Modern Woman built their case against Wollstonecraft not only on an imprecise reading of A Vindication, but equally on a rather hyperbolic, not to say inaccurate, sense of Wollstonecraft’s reception in the nineteenth century. Most feminist literary historians agree that the publication of Godwin’s Memoirs inadvertently rendered his late wife’s name anathema in polite company for almost a century because of its candid discussion of details related to Wollstonecraft’s suicide attempts, illegitimate child, and torrid love affairs. As Barbara Caine observes, “Wollstonecraft was not so much unknown to mid-Victorian feminists,” as she was “carefully and consciously avoided, especially in their published and public work” (262). Describing Wollstonecraft as “one of the dark secrets of Victorian feminism, haunting it as a shadowy and disreputable presence,” Caine notes that it wasn’t until the 1880s that “Wollstonecraft was finally rehabilitated and acknowledged as the founding figure in modern feminism” (263). [4]  Whereas on Modern Woman’s account, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman “was reprinted many times during the nineteenth century,” and “many eulogistic biographies and biographical sketches of the author appeared,” in actual fact Wollstonecraft’s most famous book went almost fifty years before being published in a new edition in 1844. After this new printing, the book languished again until the 1890s, when new editions by Pennell and Millicent Garrett Fawcett were published. As for biographical treatments of its author, it wasn’t until Pennell’s 1885 publication of the Life of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin that Wollstonecraft’s life was again the subject of an individual biography, almost one hundred years after Godwin’s Memoir. [5]  Drawing heavily on Charles Kegan Paul’s biographical sketch in his edition of Wollstonecraft’s Letters to Imlay (1879), Pennell’s biography was, as we just saw, part of an earnest late-Victorian effort to restore Wollstonecraft’s sullied reputation, and to that end it trained its sights on the deeply sentimental image of Wollstonecraft as virtuous mother (Caine 269–72). All of which is to say, Modern Woman in some measure produced an impression that it otherwise claimed merely to record: namely, that a eulogistic aura surrounded Wollstonecraft through the nineteenth century. In the absence of any actual evidence that would substantiate that Wollstonecraft was continuously celebrated from the moment of her death, Modern Woman obfuscated with rhetoric what it was unable to confirm with fact. With its anxious repetitions, overstatements, and mock tributes—“reprinted many times,” “many eulogistic biographies,” “apostrophized again and again”—Modern Woman risked being mistaken at moments for the very praise it roundly censured (151).

6.        Compared to Wollstonecraft’s contemporary Hannah More, for instance, who was the subject of countless biographical treatments throughout the nineteenth century—and, as epitomized by Anne Stott’s biography, Hannah More: The First Victorian, was beatified by Victorian writers—discussions of Wollstonecraft’s life among the generations that followed her were scant and few. In contrast to Modern Woman’s assertion that during the nineteenth century there “was hardly a feminist who did not, at some time, pay tribute to A Vindication, and credit it with being the source and fountainhead of feminist beliefs,” the historical record would suggest that very few in fact even dared to acknowledge an influence (151). Harriet Martineau was famously no fan of Wollstonecraft’s, raising her predecessor as a topic of discussion in her Autobiography, as Caine argues, “only to dismiss her” (265). According to Caine, Martineau “took pains to deny that she had been influenced by Wollstonecraft,” and had no patience with Wollstonecraft’s unregulated emotional life. Martineau referred to Wollstonecraft in rather patronizing terms as “a poor victim of passion, with no control over her own peace, and no calmness or content except when the needs of her individual nature were satisfied” (400). [6]  For her part, George Eliot was more sympathetic than Martineau, but similarly distanced herself. Observing in an essay on Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller that there existed “in some quarters a vague prejudice against the Rights of Woman as in some way or other a reprehensible book,” Eliot asserted that “readers who go to it with this impression will be surprised to find it eminently serious, severely moral, and withal rather heavy,” and cited its weighty content as “the true reason, perhaps, that no edition has been published since 1796, and that it is rather now scarce” (201). [7]  Seemingly perplexed that readers conflated Wollstonecraft’s life with her work, Eliot raised the possibility that Wollstonecraft’s work went unread in the nineteenth century precisely because it was continually mistaken for her life. In the nineteenth century, few read the book because most conflated it with the supposed immorality of the life. The history of the reading of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman would thus have to include a history of its not having been read, or its having been overwritten by the life.

Homely Wollstonecraft

7.        By now it should be apparent that Modern Woman was marked by a pervasive sense of historical anachronism, one that was most noticeable and of greatest consequence when it came to the question of domesticity. If a primary goal of the book was to convince women to leave the workforce and to return to the home, then it is not surprising that the terrain of domesticity was a particularly charged one, and that this produced some intriguing distortions. Consider the following discussion from Modern Woman about men, women, work, and family:

8.        Such historical irony extends to Modern Woman’s discussion of the “program of feminism” supposedly laid out in Wollstonecraft’s Vindication:

9.        The most powerful example of Modern Woman’s blinkered view is by far its discussion of Wollstonecraft and “equality,” a term that bears enormous freight for Farnham and Lundberg’s text, and one whose origin in feminist thought the authors attempted to lay at the foot of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication. Seemingly unconcerned that A Vindication of the Rights of Woman invoked the term “equality” and its cognates a scant number of times over the course of hundreds of pages, the authors of Modern Woman forged ahead in their determination to hold Wollstonecraft responsible for what they perceived as the scourge of feminism. “The central and guiding idea of the book as a whole,” they argue, is “centered around the magic word ‘equality’—a fetish of the feminist movement ever since. The word is just as evocative emotionally to feminists today as it was to Mary Wollstonecraft” (147). The problem, however, is that the word “equality” had none of the talismanic force for Wollstonecraft that it did for the authors of Modern Woman. In a strange act of projection, the authors of Modern Woman attribute to Wollstonecraft the magical thinking about equality that they themselves embody. Modern Woman’s archaic fear of feminism is captured in the text’s anxiety about the potential for an abstract idea to come to life, and for Wollstonecraft, the personification of feminism, to speak from beyond the grave.

10.        Modern Woman reproduced the longstanding tendency to confuse Wollstonecraft and her book, the person and the thing. But Modern Woman’s “analysis” of Wollstonecraft is even more remarkable for, among other things, the degree to which the authors display a restless anxiety about the animating agency of their own writing about Wollstonecraft. The authors of Modern Woman give feminism a disfigured face, Wollstonecraft’s face, and then tremble at what they have created. This is all the more striking when we think about what is—inevitably—missing from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: a robust discussion of legal personhood and women’s political agency. Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792, soon after which discussions of the rights of women all but disappeared until late in the nineteenth century. [8]  Nineteenth-century Britain was dominated not by debates about women’s legal personhood but, rather, in the wake of Godwin’s Memoirs, by furtive whisperings about Wollstonecraft’s personal life, culminating in Modern Woman’s triumphant revelation of her “twisted personality.” Heather Keenleyside has argued that across the “modern disciplines,” such as “sociology and ethnology” but also “political economy, law, and psychoanalysis,” “writers turn to personification to establish their own modernity, repeatedly defining this modernity against a primitive confusion of persons and things” (447). One would think that as representatives of the social scientific establishment in postwar America, with its burgeoning inquiry into the study of personality, the authors of Modern Woman would be firmly on the side of the moderns. But in an ironic reversal, it is the social scientists here who are premodern, producing the modernity of Wollstonecraft—and feminism—as an effect of their own “primitive” fear.

11.        In a further, awkward attempt to pathologize feminism, to insist on its very origin in one woman’s “twisted personality,” the authors of Modern Woman linked it to the violent dramas of the Wollstonecraft family:

12.        It is clearly not difficult to find fault with Modern Woman. Since its initial publication it has been controversial, with opinions varying wildly even as it climbed the best-seller list. The anthropologist Margaret Mead was keenly alert to peculiarities of voice and tone, and observed in a 1947 review in the New York Times that Modern Woman was written “in assorted styles and moods, which suggest that the book had not two authors but four or five, or that it was written over a long period of time during which the mood of each changed markedly.” She went on to note that “perhaps most puzzling of all are the sixty pages devoted to a savage attack on the feminist movement,” with a good portion of those sixty pages devoted to a savage attack on Wollstonecraft (BR18). Mead’s comments are suggestive in indicating that, even at the moment of its publication, Modern Woman was understood as the product of a highly erratic—even “twisted”—voice, one that shifted, morphed, and was projected, or, in the idiom of apostrophe, thrown. Reading Modern Woman, one senses the instability of that voice, and the uncertainty about where it is coming from. At times patronizing, clinical, and detached, and at others possessed by an unrestrained contempt for its subject that feels impossibly personal, Modern Woman constitutes an attack on Wollstonecraft that is so total and complete, as if to suggest that without Wollstonecraft and her “twisted personality,” the world would have been spared the scourge of feminism entirely.

13.        What emerges from these inconsistencies is Modern Woman’s massive overinflation of Wollstonecraft’s power: it fetishizes her by turning her into a totemic figure far more dangerous than she in fact was. “Only deeply disturbed women,” they write, “disturbed by the nature of their childhood upbringing in the shattered home and the constricted circumstances they encountered in adult life,” could have “drawn what they supposed was pure wisdom from A Vindication” (161). The authors of Modern Woman feared the affective contagion that would spread if women read Wollstonecraft’s work, and wanted to ensure that no woman—let alone the “deeply disturbed”—derived “wisdom” from Wollstonecraft’s writing. As they put it: “Mary Wollstonecraft hated men. . . . Hers was hatred of creatures she greatly admired and feared” (145). One wonders, finally, about the degree to which the same sentiment is true of the authors of Modern Woman, with respect to the subject of their “analysis.”

Living Feminism, Killing Joy

14.        The sheer vitriol contained in Modern Woman’s screed about Wollstonecraft still has the power to shock, not only because of the bewildering intensity of its affect, but also because in the twenty-first century it is, quite simply, difficult to imagine Wollstonecraft as threatening. Far easier is to imagine her simply as irrelevant, or perhaps complicit with a blinkered view of progressive modernity, especially as second-wave celebrations of feminism’s founding mother gave way to third-wave critiques of Wollstonecraft’s proximity to imperialist logics, bourgeois sexual morality, even misogyny as such. [9]  In our own historical moment, Wollstonecraft’s name has little of the frisson it used to carry. The uttering of her name produces—as it did in the nineteenth century—neither fear, nor muted silence, nor secret desire. Long subsumed to a feminist historiography organized along generational lines of inheritance and succession, Wollstonecraft’s name conjures for many the feeling reserved for an aging and distant female relative. [10]  To cast an eye over the writing—popular, academic—of feminists in the twenty-first century is to find Wollstonecraft nowhere, and not because her name is only spoken in hushed tones and anxious whispers. It seems not to be spoken much at all.

15.        But it would be a mistake to conclude that because Wollstonecraft’s name isn’t on the tip of every feminist’s tongue today that she somehow doesn’t matter. The very title of Ahmed’s recent book, Living a Feminist Life (2017), which she wrote while working on her blog, feministkilljoys, reveals close affinities—perhaps not immediately apparent—with Wollstonecraft. [11]  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a critique of male-authored conduct books for women even as it is itself a conduct book, after a fashion. The same might be said, in some measure, about Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life. Ahmed’s effort to distinguish her book from something like prescriptive feminism is apparent on the first page: “Living a feminist life does not mean adopting a set of ideals or norms of conduct,” Ahmed insists, “although it might mean asking ethical questions about how to live better in an unjust and unequal world” (1). Ahmed continues:

16.        This tripping or stumbling over tense is not surprising when we think about the persistence of the logic of progressive modernity that informs feminist historiography. Each successive wave of feminism understands itself as having absorbed the lessons, mistakes, and hard-won knowledge of the previous wave. But what Ahmed registers at the start of her book is the degree to which arguments about feminism and moral authority are alive and well: the feminist killjoy lives. Feminism in the twenty-first century is still in some measure about a right and a wrong way to live a feminist life. [12]  To be a killjoy, moreover, is in some sense to be an affect, to be the murderer of joy, to be joylessness. Ahmed writes about moving through the world as a feminist killjoy and about the way it feels to be the one to make others uncomfortable, to bring to a halt otherwise congenial conversation and sociability: