A new statue of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Maggie Hambling, was unveiled this week in London’s Newington Green. You can read about the controversy here.
Every now and then, when I type the word “public” too fast, I’ll write “pubic.” Because I have the mind of an immature ten-year-old, I can never help but giggle a lot before I correct it, reluctantly.
And yet, looking at Maggie Hambling’s new, let us call it a rendition, of Mary Wollstonecraft, I can’t help but think that this is exactly what we might refer to as “Public/Pubic Art.” In general, with rare exceptions, I avoid writing about artwork I haven’t seen in person but Hambling’s statue is, for now, inaccessible to me as someone who lives in the United States (with our high rates of infection and death, we are now learning what it means to be unwanted pariahs in the rest of the world: no one wants us, even with our fancy dollars). And for another, it’s not as if the statue is particularly difficult to imagine since there are photographs of it from every angle, and it looks pretty damn awful from every one of them.
My first response wasn’t shock at the nudity but, “What’s that where her genitals might be?” My second response was shock when I realised this was supposed to be pubic hair. For reasons unknown, the actual body of “Mary Wollstonecraft,” please note the quotation marks, is very tiny in comparison to the rest of the thing we are to call a statue. The whole effect is not un-pretty, a silver swoosh, something like an upwards-falling waterfall but the actual body of the person who is supposed to represent Mary Wollstonecraft is very small, and looks not unlike a stoic Romanian gymnast in the 1980s whose body is rippling against forced steroids. The pubic hair looks like a hedgehog burrowing inwards (and perhaps explains the expression), and the face is androgynous in a modern way, with a close-cropped hairstyle, again lending itself to that gymnast-of-a-particular-era look.
Maggie Hambling’s statue is one of the many reasons why women intellectuals like me fear becoming famous and actually dying (it’s the reason why, at 108, I still cling tenaciously to life). I won’t project what Wollstonecraft might have said or thought, but I know that if this happened to me I’d return from the netherworlds, screeching with rage and hurling trees at Hambling with all the might my non-corporeal being could summon. As critics like Rhiannon Lucy Coslett point out, “It is hard to imagine a male writer or thinker being ‘honoured’ by a sculpture of a tiny naked man, schlong out for all to see, ripped like a Ken doll, emerging from a mass of what we are told is ‘organic matter’.” Hambling’s dismissive response to such criticism has been that the statue represents “everywoman.” About the lack of clothing, she says that “clothes would have restricted her. Statues in historic costume look like they belong to history because of their clothes. It’s crucial that she is ‘now’. The whole sculpture is called ‘for Mary Wollstonecraft’ and that’s crucially important. It’s not an idea ‘of’ Mary Wollstonecraft naked… the sculpture is for now.”
On that, first: if this is “everywoman,” every woman is so, so screwed, in the worst possible way. Most of us will look nothing like this at age 38, which is how old Wollstonecraft was when she died. Most of us looked nothing like this at any age, except for fleeting moments of time unless our bodies were strictly disciplined in ways that involved some combination of state and cultural dominance. But most of all, if we even ignore the problem of gender, the statue’s biggest problem isn’t really that it somehow braves and bucks convention but that it simply doesn’t. In the end, it’s not even a particularly novel representation of “the female form.” As my friend and comrade Jayaprakash Satyamurthy puts it, “I haven’t seen a single photo in which this looks good. Do we now finally know what the platonic ideal of liberal aesthetics looks like?”
Even if we were to argue that, sure, this isn’t about representation, “for”and not “of” Wollstonecraft: what’s the point of it?
Mary Wollstonecraft was a feminist thinker who lived openly with at least a couple of men before finally marrying the anarchist William Godwin, in the eighteenth century when women could be cast out for less. She wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which remains, no matter what you think of it, a foundational text in the history of feminism. She died eleven days after giving birth to a daughter who became famous as Mary Shelley, the writer of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley was in turn part of an intense circle of intellectuals including her husband Percy Byshe Shelley, and their work and lives challenged and contested and formed the political and cultural ideals of their day.
Wollstonecraft’s life and mind are embedded in a rich and complex interweaving of political ideas and cultural contestations which have shaped our lives today. Those ideas aren’t just about the role of women but about the burgeoning empire she saw around her, about power, about domesticity, about the roles of women, and much more. People hated Wollstonecraft when she was alive, and they hated her for decades after her death, denying her the force of her intellect by dismissing her as a mere woman with too much to say.
Tracing and tracking all of that allows us to see Mary Wollstonecraft not as “everywoman” but as a very particular historical figure who was born of and in a particular time, and whose life story and work was long dismissed as inconsequential. We don’t need to see Wollstonecraft as some Grand Feminist Hero (and, frankly, calling her the “mother of feminism” as the statue’s sponsors reference her is unnecessary and needlessly imperialist) but we also ought not to erase the currents that swirled around her, the ways in which she was often almost made to disappear from history. She’s not “everywoman,” she’s Mary Wollstonecraft, in all her messy and conflicting glory, and that fact ought to matter to us. Hambling seems to think that history is an irrelevant, dead thing but it’s in fact the opposite: history is what animates our present, and it lives amongst us.
Let’s be honest: in a sense, every statue of a male intellectual has him with his schlong out, even if you can’t actually see said schlong. Every statue of a male intellect, whether posing its subject in earnest contemplation or brooding indifference, is a representation of the idea that intellectual work is a male domain. Every statue of a male intellect is in essence a penis but we’ve been conditioned to not see the phallic quality of intellectual work that’s being represented to us. The fact that it took two hundred years to get us to take Wollstonecraft seriously as a philosopher is depressing enough, that it took ten years to fund and make the statue a possibility is depressing enough. That it should have ended up becoming yet another erasure of the feminist mind as a vital, intellectual reality that both forms and contains our contemporary world is disheartening.
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For more on how women’s intellects are portrayed, see my “Domesticus Scientifica: Or, How Temperance Brennan Lost Her Mind And Became a Woman.”
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: Mary Wollstonecraft, by John Opie, c. 1797