Thoughts on Wollstonecraft & Stravinsky

Dear Readers,

Today, I find myself thinking a bit about Mary Wollstonecraft and her battles with depression, particularly after being left destitute by her lover, the painter Gilbert Imlay.  I have never been quite sure why William Godwin, her future husband, who after her death penned his infamous Memoirs of the Writer of Vindications of the Rights of Woman (1797), felt the need to go into such detail about Wollstonecraft's two suicide attempts, once in October of 1795 and once earlier.  Wollstonecraft at the time was a single and somewhat pennyless mother of an infant, alone Scandanavia at one point and not much better situated when she returned to England.  What I find even more interesting in that in that period of fall of 1795 is that Wollstonecraft began writing a series of lessons for her daughter Fanny to be used after she was gone (she describes them as directed at a motherless child).  I am beginning to consider the larger ramifications of her depression (a depression shared, not incidentally, by her protagonist in her final, incomplete novel Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1797)).  I wonder if Wollstonecraft's much-derided suicide attempts can be read within their historical contexts as, yes, cries for help, but also for the result that she dreamed of a kind of a utopian social equality for women that could never be realized in her time.  Perhaps her realization that it was just not going to come about for her and women in her times was just too much knowledge and insight for her to bear.

[The reflections above are not only written in relation to my own reading and rereading of Wollstonecraft, one of the authors I turn to again and again in my teaching and thinking, but also in relation to Rebecca Davis's Written Maternal Authority and Eighteenth-Century Education in Britain: Educating by the Book, which I am reviewing for the academic journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction. It is an important book and one I hope to celebrate in my review.]

I also wanted to share my response to a recent recording I received of Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird, performed by the Seattle Symphony under the direction of Gerard Schwartz and available on Naxos. (I had actually ordered an earlier and better recording of this work that has recently come out on LP at our local Barnes and Nobles and carelessly the cashier placed an order for this other edition.  I decided to keep it when it came in, for can you really have too many copies of a favored classical work?)  The sound quality on this recording is in dire need of assistance.  While I love the ballet (I am in general less thrilled with the "filler" work Naxos included, his Fireworks, but then again I don't like fireworks much anyhow), the softer parts are set at a recording level that is too quiet to hear them unless the volume is way up; then the louder parts become too loud.  This is a problem with some classical recordings that just does not happen in a concert hall.  With much modernist music that I like, such as that by Stravinsky and Shostakovich (my favorite modern composer; check out his symphony 13), the soft lyrical portions are achingly beautiful and, like much in life, achieved with great angst and dexterity.  It is a shame to lose them in a weakly-balanced post-production product.

Cheers!