Frankenstein’s Grandmother

 “Oh, for goodness sake,” I shouted at the radio, “When will we learn?”

I then spent the rest of the day ranting at anyone who would listen. 

The cause of my rant? An interview with Maggi Hamblin about her latest sculpture. You might not know Maggi Hamblin but you will know the seashell sculpture on Aldeburgh beach and you might have sat to have a conversation with Oscar Wilde near Charing Cross. On the radio, Maggi sounds like a man. Her latest work was commissioned as a statue of Mary Wollstencraft. 

Again, you might not know Mary Woolstencraft but if you are a woman then you have benefitted from something she wrote. I stumbled upon her on a visit to, I think, the Tate with my mum.  I was taken with a portrait of a plain woman with a book. She could have been me. I was plain and frequently had my nose in a book. She was different from other women; there was no glamour; she wasn’t in her finery; or naked; she just sat there, reading her book, as though we’d just caught her doing what she does every day.

I remember being particularly taken with it because she had an unusual name. I liked unusual names and this happened at the beginning of my love for telephone directories, where I had noticed that everyone listed with my surname was actually related to me. I imagined that Mary was also checking out the lack of other Wollstonecrafts in the book.

I showed my mum. She thought she looked interesting too and wrote her name in her sketch book for the next time we went to the library.

What treats awaited us when we found out about her! Not only was she brilliant, advocating for all women to be educated to the same level as men because it would be better for society but also because her daughter went on to write Frankenstein, which I had just read.

I’ve written before about the lack of statues of women. I think it’s a real problem. We assume that it is because women haven’t done anything. Women get wiped from history because we don’t tell their stories, not because they weren’t there. We have this bizarre idea that women had no agency in the past but I’ve been studying the censuses from the 1800s and women are there, as the head of the household, running bakeries, selling beer, keeping lodging houses. They chose to leave their wealth to other women, rather than their male children or married daughters, however, we persist with the thought that everything women did was for or because of a man and that all women were there for is to produce the next men.

I’m not the only person that has noticed the lack of female statues and campaigners (or bloody feminists) have hoped for more. When they commissioned a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft they must have been thrilled. This was the perfect woman to exemplify. Getting Maggi Hamblin on board must have felt like quite a coup too.

However.

This is the statue.

Can you see a problem? 

Maggi was asked, on the radio, if the statue was meant to be Mary. She laughed.

“Oh no, she’s meant to represent all women. It is the perfect woman rising out of the forms of all women.”

This is what my mum used to refer to as ‘art bollocks’.: The justification of the art you’ve made to please the thinking art world. If Ms Hamblin wanted to make a sculpture like this then that’s fine but it’s really not the statue that should have been commissioned. 

Twitter got as upset as I had and Maggi was interviewed. She laughed at the prudishness of society and suggested that we’d all missed the point. “You can’t be naked enough, can you? The point is that clothes define people. We all know clothes define people and she has to represent everywoman.”

And that’s where the people commissioning the artist missed the point. I realise that there are too few statues of women but we don’t fix that by making the few we have represent every woman. Worse, to make the perfect female form to appeal to  sexual desire. We can honour individual women, as we do men, with clothes on. Maybe even put her in a skirt with pockets!

This phenomenon of ‘all women’ makes me furious. The Diana memorial is a water feature, the women of world war 2 are empty coats and now Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of feminism is a naked nymph.

Maybe for balance, when they make a statue of Boris Johnson they could just have a huge todger and hang some male clothes on it: a Johnson to represent all men.