Why Making Wollstonecraft into a Statue Still Matters
Debates over the value of feminist art remind us of the long fight for the equal rights that make democracy possible
Eileen H. Botting
16. Nov. 2020
Maggi Hambling’s sculpture of Mary Wollstonecraft
Newington Green, London. Photo: Grim23.
In London on November 10th, the unveiling of the first full-scale statue inspired by the eighteenth-century women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft — near her one-time home at Newington Green — faced great public controversy. In the same week that the world hailed Kamala Harris as the first woman to be elected Vice President of the United States, Twitter and the media erupted with criticism of the conceptual sculpture by the British artist Maggi Hambling.
Cast in light-catching silvered bronze, this abstract statue—made “for Wollstonecraft”—features the small figure of a strong nude “everywoman” flowering like a bud from a fluid stem of amorphous feminine forms.
The public reactions were fast and furious, especially from feminist writers. Some critics honestly wondered why the figure of the woman had to be so “tiny, shiny, and naked”? Others protested the representation of Wollstonecraft’s life, ideas, and legacies with a classical female nude akin to the muscular Medusa statue, recently unveiled in New York to similar feminist snark.
In a puzzling return to the Victorian prudery that had once labelled Wollstonecraft’s life and ideas too revolutionary for public consumption in mid-nineteenth-century London, one TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) group made a strange pilgrimage to Newington Green. They covered the naked body on top of the statue, as if to shield their own essentialist conception of biological womanhood from the onslaught of attacks on the work of contemporary feminist art. Despite their trans-exclusive belief that women should be solely identified by female bodies, the radical feminist group tried to hide a miniature sculpture of an idealized female form from the public’s lewd and objectifying stare.
The loudest chorus of responses to Hambling’s artwork observed yet another irony: the silvery statue seemed to idolize—even put on a literal pedestal—the classical standard of feminine beauty that Wollstonecraft sought to resist. Since she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in London, Lyon, Paris, Boston, and Philadelphia in 1792, Wollstonecraft has been world-famous for her condemnation of women’s forced compliance to conventional standards of feminine beauty. Because girls had to abide by these standards “from their cradles,” she contended, women had been rendered “objects of pity, bordering on contempt.” The worst consequence of this misshapen education was that women internalized the “prejudice” that their real value derived from their “sexual character,” or their perceived attractiveness and usefulness to men as lovers, servants, slaves, wives, mothers, or daughters.
Hambling deflected the full range of criticisms by returning the viewer’s gaze to the actual statue, not its historical inspiration. It was not a representation of Wollstonecraft, she repeated, but rather a contemporary statue both “for Wollstonecraft” and for people “now.”
An intentionally controversial painter and sculptor, Hambling joined a long-standing artistic tradition with her statue for Wollstonecraft. Public art about Wollstonecraft has been controversial since the late 1790s. Between 1785 and 1797, Wollstonecraft appears to have sat for several portraits with some of the renowned miniaturists and painters of the era, including James Sowerby, John Keenan, John Opie, and John Williamson. Her best-known images—painted with oil on canvas by her friend John Opie during the 1790s—have hung in the leading galleries in London since the second half of the nineteenth century.
John Opie’s last painting of
Mary Wollstonecraft, c. 1797.
After Wollstonecraft died in 1797—eleven days after giving birth to her daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the future author of the 1818 novel Frankenstein—she was soon immortalized in portraiture. An etching of Opie’s last painting of her, radiant in a white dress while with child, graced the front papers of her husband William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). This image quickly became iconic, as it was copied, allegorized, and caricatured by both fans and critics of Wollstonecraft alike.
1798 was the apex of anti-Jacobin (or anti-French-revolutionary) sentiment in Britain and the United States. In that year alone, two competing etchings of Wollstonecraft’s final portrait emerged in print. The faithful copy of Opie’s 1797 painting portrayed her in the revolutionary feminine fashion of the moment—with a V-necked, high-waisted white dress, fresh from Paris—which only accentuated her growing pregnancy. Next came a satirical political cartoon, which gave her a masculine profile and a man’s top hat, signaling her subversive commitment to the radically democratic, even gender-bending, ideals of the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft’s immediate posthumous reception in art and print set the stage for more than two centuries of repurposing her as a malleable icon of both women’s rights and modern forms of gender and sexuality.
Satirical cartoon.
Hambling continues in a more recent tradition of contemporary feminist art that has reimagined Wollstonecraft in abstract and provocative sculptural and pop-cultural forms. In her 1979 art installation, The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago depicted Wollstonecraft’s life and death as part of a table runner made with raised embroidery. The powerful feminist message of this traditional piece of women’s handicraft arises from its clash of domestic and gothic images: beneath Wollstonecraft’s life as an educator of young girls, we witness her death from childbirth, blood spilling onto the bed, as her young daughter Fanny looks on with horror.
As with all art, it is a matter of public opinion and debate whether Hambling—like Chicago and other artists before her—has succeeded in recasting Wollstonecraft’s historical meaning for audiences in the present or future. But the controversy over the Newington Green installation will not prevent the emergence of future art on Wollstonecraft. To the contrary, the abstract and fluid form of Hambling’s sculpture has already elicited an array of competing interpretations of Wollstonecraft in the international public sphere. The sculpture almost begs us to ask, with some feminist wit: Who, or what, should replace the image of the tiny, shiny, naked woman on top? Wollstonecraft emerges from Hambling’s hands as a strange and disturbing, metallic and futuristic icon of what she has, paradoxically, always been: a fearless woman in perpetual motion, whose image cannot be tied down to a single time or place.
In the politically tumultuous pandemic year of 2020, Britain and the United States saw a collective reconsideration of the value of public art for representing the political causes of their national pasts. Even as statues of slave owners, shipping magnates, and racists have been torn down from Bristol to Philadelphia in order to protest the racial, class, and gender injustices of the present and the past, public monuments to historic women’s rights advocates and abolitionists have risen on both sides of the Atlantic. Earlier this year, the Providence Athenaeum installed a classical bust of Wollstonecraft—based on the 1797 Opie portrait—alongside busts of Frederick Douglass and Louisa May Alcott.
We need more public art about Wollstonecraft and other early women’s rights advocates to follow the latest iterations in London and Providence. Though some may wish for the Hambling statue to be removed, covered, or forgotten, Wollstonecraft’s reception history suggests that the reverse is more likely to occur. Indeed, the Wollstonecraft statue at Newington Green has already served as a lightning-rod for conducting public opinion toward the still-revolutionary idea of women’s rights, and the live political question of how we think it ought to be represented in our public spaces, cultures, and laws.
By making and engaging public art concerning women and other historically oppressed people, we help to provide democratic role models to the next generation of citizens. Many youth in the United States and Britain have reached adulthood under the executive administrations of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson amid an ominous culture of rising authoritarianism and democratic backsliding. This is why seeing Kamala Harris celebrate her victory in her radiant white suit matters for the political aspirations of young people, especially girls, around the world. And so do new statues of Wollstonecraft and other women’s rights advocates matter for endowing citizens with a sense of historical appreciation for equal rights, like voting and free speech, that allow us to passionately critique both art and politics in the public sphere.
Eileen Hunt Botting is a professor of political science at Notre Dame. She is the editor of the two-volume set, Portraits of Wollstonecraft, which chronicles Wollstonecraft’s reception in art, literature, and philosophy from 1785 to the present (Bloomsbury Philosophy, 2021).
