IN what way exactly does a tiny, highly sexualised statue pay appropriate tribute to the pioneering and empowering work of the “Mother of Feminism” Mary Wollstonecraft? People were left scratching their heads when the statue, paid for by 10 years of crowdfunding, was unveiled in London last week.
The explanations offered up by its sculptor Maggi Hambling only added to the confusion. It wasn’t supposed to be Wollstonecraft herself, the critics are missing the point, said Hambling. “It was supposed to be every woman, I gave her the body we all want to have,” she added, leaving many feminists wondering if we are regressing to the 1970s.
Her supporters also argued about the aesthetics of the artwork itself, sneering at detractors as Philistines unable to appreciate art.
Let’s be clear: this is nothing to do with “good” art or “bad” art. Nor is this criticism borne of prudish outrage at the sight of a naked body. It is about whether the legacy of a woman whose work was years ahead of its time and which literally changed the world is best served by a Barbie-sized figure with an “ideal” woman’s body. It’s about how on earth the committee and the artist got it so wrong. It is for political and philosophical reasons that this statue rightly faces criticism.
I certainly don’t believe that statues of great women should ape male statues with a warlike pose on a plinth. They can be wildly imaginative or modern or abstract. Bu surely they should capture at least some of the spirit of the person they are honouring.
Wollstonecraft was a philosopher and a pioneer of feminist writing and politics. She was born in 1759 in London and suffered abuse at the hands of her alcoholic father. She educated herself and opened a school for girls by the age of 25 and wrote about the rights of women 100 years before the suffragettes. Her analysis of the condition of women in modern society retains much of its original radicalism. Her first publication was on the education of daughters. She was horrified that girls should see their horizons only in the eyes of the men who flirted with them. She was best known for her Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman (1792). As an unmarried woman she gave birth to a daughter Mary Shelley, who would go on to become a famous author herself.
Statues are a hot topic, when the politics of public art have been played out all over the globe, with the tearing down of the statue of Edward Colston in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and anger over monuments which honour slave traders.
Wollstonecraft herself railed against slavery and the slave trade as an “atrocious insult to humanity”. The crowdfunder to put “Mary on the Green” was a chance to break with the prosaic and predictable convention that being nude and nameless is the only way for a woman’s image to be presented for public consumption; a chance to inject the brilliance of Wollstonecraft into modern discourse.
Instead we’re not talking about rejecting patriarchy. We’re not talking about discovering radical new relationships and ways of living. We’re talking about the artist rather than the subject of the art. We’re talking about a woman’s naked body.
Mary Wollstonecraft and her memory deserves so much more than this.
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