Vindicating Paradoxes - Wilcox
Vindicating Paradoxes - Wilcox
Vindicating Paradoxes - Wilcox
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Boston University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studies in Romanticism.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
KIRSTIN
R. WILCOX
Paradoxes:
Vindicating
Mary
"Woman"
Wollstonecraft's
S MARY
SIGNIFICANCE
WOLLSTONECRAFT'S
FOR
INTELLECTUAL
HISTORY
xVhas
nation
ever
farther
from
current
feminist
concerns.1
Yet
Wollstonecraft's
in petticoats,"5
rather
than
the
tame
advocate
of "a woman
nursing
her children and discharging the duties of her station, "6 it is because
.
Recent
feminism within
broad
the
currents of late En
Gunther-Canada,
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Wendy
Rebel Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Politics (DeKalb: Northern
Illinois UP,
"A Disappearance
in theWorld: Mary Wollstonecraft
and Melancholy
2001); Jacques Khalip,
Skepticism," Criticism 47 (2005): 85-106; Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication ofPolitical Virtue: The
Political Theory ofMary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1992); Simon Swift, "Mary
Wollstonecraft
and the 'Reserve of Reason,'"
SiR 45 (2006): 3?24; Ashley Tauchert, Mary
Wollstonecraft and theAccent of theFeminine (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); and Barbara Taylor,
Mary Wollstonecraft and theFeminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003).
2. Taylor, Wollstonecraft 253.
3. Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700?1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford UP,
394-95?
4. Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes
Harvard UP,
1996) 18.
2000)
(Cambridge:
1989)
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
448
KIRSTIN
R.
WILCOX
authorial voice that emanates from this book defines the "Woman" whose
rights are vindicated very differently from the "women" who intermit
tently appear in it. In between those two instantiations of eighteenth
The
century.
weeks7
"a matter
of months")8
left gaps,
questions,
and
inconsistencies
that
ways
the many
other
treatises
eighteenth-century
on
gender
have
not,
to have
it.10 Instead,
penned
"Woman"
is an enigma
at the center
ofWoll
which
she
organizes
her
controversial
claims.
un
Wollstonecraft's
.Claire
of her
is one of many
thatWollstonecraft
Godwin's
Tomalin
time.
estimate
biographers
theRights ofWoman,"
ed. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker
(Peterborough, Ontario:
is quoted here). On
Broadview,
2001) 76 (207 for the language of the second edition, which
the use of the term "Amazon"
both by Wollstonecraft
and by her critics with reference to
her,
see Donna
Revolution
Landry, "Figures of the Feminine: An Amazonian
The Uses of Literary History, ed. Marshall
Brown
(Durham:
Literary History?"
1995):
in Feminist
Duke
179-228.
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
UP,
WOLLSTONECRAFT'S
.
Women
449
"WOMAN
As They Are
The
Wollstonecraft
to
national
prominence,
would
misrepresent
Wollstone
craft's project in her second Vindication: to raise the issue of just who
women are. The "Men" of her
reply to Burke and what it is to be manly
are ontologically sound concepts, somuch so thatWollstonecraft
can rely
on these signifiers to frame her ad hominem attack on Burke's
"unmanly sar
casms and puerile conceits."11 No such certainty
the
title of her
grounds
second Vindication. The women at issue in the second Vindication are, she
will argue, constituted by the inequities and prejudices that she decries. The
Vindication of theRights ofWoman seeks to vanquish these insidious precon
ceptions and to emphasize the gross disparity between "women" as they
are and the abstract "Woman" of her title, the formwomen would take in
a more
just world.
Wollstonecraft's
revolutionary and provisional efforts to envision not just
a new polemical language for thewomen of her time but a new kind offe
male subject have given her Vindication a currency that exceeds the content
of her argument. Wollstonecraft's claim that the inferiority customarily at
tributed towomen was the result of faulty education was neither new nor
controversial. Mary Astell, Poulain de la Barre, Judith Drake, and Cathar
ine Macaulay
had all made this point previously, and writers like Hays,
vative and evangelical Strictureson Female Education (1799). What was new
inWollstonecraft's
rendering of this key idea was her recognition that
ifbeliefs about women are shaped by false assumptions, flawed condition
ing, and faulty education,
thenwomen
their
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
450
KIRSTIN
R.
WILCOX
It is "with
reason,"
Wollstonecraft
asserts,
that "men
complain
. . .
of the follies and caprices of our sex,when they do not keenly satirize our
headstrong passions and groveling vices" (88). Portrayals of vicious, weak,
stupid, and frivolous women abound in the Vindication, asWollstonecraft
does not attempt "to extenuate their [women's] faults; but to prove them
to be the natural consequence of their education and station in society"
is
(266). In contrast, the enlightened, virtuous, and reasonable "Woman"
the female subject who would exist in a world where principles of reason
and justice prevail. In the absence of such a reality, however, "Woman"
cannot
be
her
known,
virtues
cannot
be
asserted,
her
intellectual
capacity
cannot be gauged. All that can be postulated is that she does not correspond
to the "women" who populate the corrupt world inwhich Wollstonecraft
lives.
Wollstonecraft
daughters,
more
believes
affectionate
that women
sisters, more
would
faithful
become
wives,
"more
more
observant
reasonable
would
even, much
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The
ambivalence.
man
over
woman,
in this passage
of "balance"
implicit metaphor
craft's
Does
"balance"
once
that
superiority
has
conveys Wollstone
in the
obtain
naturally
been
proved
of
"superiority"
by
experience?
Or
451
"WOMAN
WOLLSTONECRAFT'S
experience
might,
truth,
rather
than
as a consequence
of
convention,
that
bring
situation
about.12
registers no more
Wollstonecraft
education
improved
a more
and
rational
social
order, emerge as the intellectual and moral equals ofmen. "Let their facul
ties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength," she hedges,
"and then determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual
scale" (104).
At points, Wollstonecraft's
"woman
is naturally
weak"
apparent openness
rather
than
"degraded
to the possibility
by
a concurrence
cumstances"
that
of cir
she urges
Ifmen be demigods?why
let us serve them! And if the dignity of the
as
female soul be
disputable as that of animals?if their reason does not
afford sufficient light to direct their conduct whilst unerring instinct is
are surely of all creatures themost miserable! and, bent
denied?they
beneath the iron hand of destiny,must submit to be afair defectin cre
ation. (114)
It is difficult to take such lines at face value when every page of the Vindica
conviction that at least some women,
tion is infused with Wollstonecraft's
herself among them, have themoral and intellectual abilities that are sup
Wollstonecraft's deliberate ambigu
posed to be the domain ofmen. Yet if
were
on
the
women's
issue
of
abilities
only a rhetorical effect, itwould
ity
have little connection to other dimensions of her argument. As it is, this
strategic uncertainty is the organizing principle behind the unusual persua
sive tactics in thiswork.
To
sustain
the
indeterminacy
of
"Woman,"
Wollstonecraft
eschews
fa
in society, and
proper places"
the common
(68).
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
452
KIRSTIN
R.
WILCOX
"places her firmly outside the old querelle desfemmes, with its stylized dis
putes of sex superiority."13Apart from a brief mention of men's superior
physical strength in the Introduction (because "I cannot pass over itwith
out subjecting the main tendency of my reasoning to misconstruction"
[74]) and a few lapses in her discussion of chastity,Wollstonecraft succeeds
in
. . .
"avoiding
any
direct
of
comparison
the
two
sexes
collectively"
few women
from
who,
received
having
a masculine
ac
have
education,
and many
"[t]hese,
more,
may
be
reckoned
women
neither
heroines
nor
brutes;
but
creatures"
reasonable
are
and
exceptions,
to see
n.
14).
With
tence
of
admirable
more
exceptions
to
argue
that women
are,
on
the whole,
"reasonable
creatures."
woman-authored
fiction,
essays,
and
conduct
literature
abound
13- Taylor 87. Such themes have been "a staple of theWestern
literary diet" ever since
women writers of the Renaissance
to
literature
began responding systematically
misogynistic
and Barbara F. McManus,
(Katherine Usher Henderson
Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts
of theControversy about Women in England, 1540?1640 [Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985] 3).
and Butler's
edition of Wollstonecraft's
14. Todd
to the second
identifies changes Wollstonecraft
made
Vindication
edition
many
Robinson
as they expanded
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
O NE
W?LLS
CRAFT'S
453
"WOMAN
whereupon
"either
a prey
falls
to some
mean
fortune-hunter
who
. . .
represented that "it does not require a lively pencil, or the discriminating
outline of a caricature, to sketch the domestic miseries and petty vices
which such a mistress of a family diffuses" (118).
No such appeal to common experience reinforces the portrait of the sec
. . .
Fancy
for purposes
present"
of argument.
Not
surprisingly,
this
product ofWollstonecraft's
"Fancy" copes more effectively than the first
widow, using her inner resources to provide for her children; but even in
imagining this fictive construct,Wollstonecraft avoids depicting womanly
The
excellence.
second
widow
is "a woman
with
a tolerable
understand
ing, for I do not wish to leave the line ofmediocrity" (119). As a thought
to demonstrate
allows Wollstonecraft
experiment, this second widow
that the folly of the firstwidow was not inevitable, but the result of
16. On
Johns Hopkins
UP,
2000)
56-93.
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
454
2. Women
Determined,
"in
WILCOX
the Most
Natural
and,
on
the other
to convince
hand,
reconfigures
State"
women
what
R.
KIRSTIN
literature
of advice,
conception of
readers
that women
advocacy,
defense,
and
improvement.
Wollstonecraft
critiques a diffuse body of work in the Vindication, from
Lord Chesterfield's rakishLetters to John Fordyce's prim sermons, from the
embodied theoretical abstractions ofRousseau's Emile to theminute practi
cal advice conveyed by Hester Mulso Chapone's Letters on theImprovement
of theFemale Mind. Two significant problems unite these "many respectable
writers" inWollstonecraft's critique (25). First, individual programs of self
improvement offer limited scope for large-scale social change (Tomaselli
xi): "Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions
and manners of the society they live in . . . till society be differently consti
tuted,much cannot be expected from education" (90). The second and re
lated problem with "works for their [women's] improvement" is their fail
ure to recognize the full range of their readership (73).Wollstonecraft notes
that
. . . addressed
instruction
"the
to women"
is inadequate
for
accom
natural
state"
has
often
been
taken
as a move
to lend
her
own
stratum
servant
maid
. . . the
to take
servile
part
of the household
business"
is in
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
O NE
W?LLS
CR
AFT'S
455
"WOMAN"
existence
"in
the most
natural
so
is not
state" Wollstonecraft
much exalting those of her own social rank as she is groping toward an ab
stract female subject isolated from the acculturation of social hierarchy. By
"most
does
Wollstonecraft
natural,"
not mean
"most
essentially
or
female"
"normative" but "least distorted by the effects of rank." Her goal may well
be Denise Riley's "sociological"
conception of women, which "like the
modern
of
collectivity
. . . can
'women'
be
traced
to a
complicated
post
step
demarcation
forward
from
other
of the "middle-class"
eighteenth-century
marks
treatments
a
methodolog
of women
as a
whole. She improves upon works like JohnMillar's The Origin andDistinc
tion ofRanks (1777) andWilliam Alexander's The History ofWomen, from
Earliest Antiquity to thePresent Time (1779), which advanced what E. J.
Clery has termed "the enlightenment theory of feminizaci?n," the view
that "women's
condition
is ...
an
infallible
measure
or
index
of the civiliz
"20Such writers
ing process inmen.
sought to depict a broad historical cate
19. Denise
tish Enlightenment,
Palgrave,
2005)
30-52.
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
456
KIRSTIN
gory of women
a woman
be
R.
WILCOX
varies
not
across
only
time
but
it is to
recognition thatwhat
across
rank
as well.
Alexander,
or less, deprived
them (3).
Yet when Alexander moves from the evidence ofwhat he deems primitive
cultures and barbarous antiquity to the periods we now characterize as early
modern, his frame of reference changes fromwomen in general to the up
women
per-class
who
can
be
the object
of
"chivalry,"
glossed
as
"a
favor
able turn in the condition of the sex" (5). Class distinctions among women
get lost in a self-congratulatory historical trajectory ofwhich the capacity of
Alexander's
elite women
readers
("the
Fair
Sex")
to receive
"amusement
and instruction" from books like his is the culmination. In contrast to these
quasi-anthropological
treatments
of "women,"
invocation
Wollstonecraft's
out
of
concern
This
oppression.
gender
the realm
of self-improvement
moves
and
her
conduct
to women
exhortations
manuals
and
into
en
or theWrongs of
incomplete and posthumously published novel, Maria,
an even richer engagement with the issue of class in differentiating women's
displays
experience of gender oppression.
21.Wollstonecraft's
Woman
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
WOLLSTONECRAFT'S
of women
addressed
that it is possible
to men"
principally
457
"WOMAN
rather
than
as
the woman-centered
sion promised in the book's title and introduction (Johnson 24). The
opening chapters spell out the precept that underlies Wollstonecraft's argu
ments
about
women,
that
namely
the
arises when
Misery
are not
laws"
"reason,
virtue
and
knowledge"
but
to estab
deference
to be
in the
"most
natural
state."
No
social
stratum
is,
in her
view,
immune to the evils of unmerited social hierarchy, but those furthest from
either extreme of rank (those in themiddle) are less susceptible to this cor
ruption.
This
rather
on women
themselves,
allows Wollstonecraft
to assume,
rather
emerges
as a
self-evidently
arbitrary
distinction.
The
conduct
liter
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
458
KIRSTIN
R.
in two ways
"Woman"
WILCOX
exceed
the
content
of her
argument.
First,Wollstonecraft
sporadically falls back on images, assumptions, and
it
that
make
easy to conflate "Woman" with the emergent domestic
tropes
moment. Wollstonecraft's appeal to general princi
of
her
cultural
fantasy
ples
of human
nature
asserts
for achievement
potential
not
in all women,
just a few anecdotal exceptions. Yet thewomen "of themiddle class" (75),
who can represent "the sex in general" (77), "of tolerable understanding"
(119), take on contours in their
(119), and in "the line of mediocrity"
in
little to do with the social reali
this
book
that
have
fleeting appearances
ties ofWollstonecraft's
time. The most sustained of these inadvertently
"Of the Pernicious Effects
definitive moments occurs in Chapter Nine,
Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society,"
Which
when Wollstonecraft
imagines the scene thatmight refresh her after con
templating some of these "pernicious effects." In contrast to the "insipid
ceremonies and slavish grandeur" of an aristocratic family,Wollstonecraft
imagines "a woman nursing her children and discharging the duties of her
station," and she fills out the depiction with picturesque detail: such a
woman
and
character"
When
inherited
power"
are
which
"destructive
...
to
the
human
(214).
Wollstonecraft's
woman
in "the most
natural
state"
takes
on
spe
cific characteristics for the sake of argument, she is generally married, has
children,
does
for household
work
outside
not
engage
in remunerative
employment,
relies
on
servants
a related
cluster
of circumstances
that was
unavail
and
create
apparent
continuities."22
History
For
purposes
of
this es
of Identity," Critical In
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
WOLLSTONE
CRAFT'S
459
"WOMAN"
say, however, it is enough to note that this domestic ideal collides sharply
with the second adumbration of "Woman" that emerges from the Vindica
tion: that conveyed byWollstonecraft's depiction of herself as the female
author of thiswork.
Voice
3. Wollstonecraft's
In the portrait of "a woman nursing her children" cited above, Wollstone
craft inserts herself as a participant spectator, one who "hears the scraping
of thewell-known foot" and whose heart "has throbbed with sympathetic
connection to it (is she a friend or relation
emotion," butWollstonecraft's
of this family? a benefactor? a passer-by?) is entirely ambiguous: it is not
even clear if the episode is recollected or invented. All that authenticates
this
scene
isWollstonecraft's
vigorous
emotional
offered
response,
as a tell
ing gloss. This disembodied yet robust display of self is central toWoll
stonecraft's rhetorical strategy,which Wollstonecraft appears to model on
re
Catharine Macaulay's
1790 Letters on Education, which Wollstonecraft
viewed for Joseph Johnson's Analytical Review and cites approvingly within
the Vindication. "In her style ofwriting, indeed, no sex appears" saysWoll
stonecraft, "for it is, like the sense it conveys, strong and clear" (175).
Wollstonecraft specifies that "writing inwhich no sex appears" is not writ
ing inwhich male standards pose as gender-neutral norms ("because I ad
mit not of such an arrogant assumption of reason"; 175). Rather, this kind
ofwriting manifests personal virtues that are desirable formen and women
ments,
and
the
benevolence?"force
rhetorical
"sober
the reader
energy
and
to
weigh"
argumentative
her
argu
closeness,"
scrutiny in '"Passing
Sexual Underworlds of
of North
Carolina
1988): 234-60.
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
P,
460
KIRSTIN
R.
WILCOX
lead
to
conclusions.
inescapable
She
to
plans
"move"
her
audience
and well-intentioned
and
"experience
reflection."
at";
old
"In
the
same
. .
argument
strain have
I heard
men
."; "When
I treat
of
. .
argue
."; "I
the particular
come
duties
round
of women
to my
..."
Even
argument
sustains
an
unthreatening
valorization
that
stonecraft's
enclosed
ordinarily
authorial
voice
asserts
a woman's
appearance
its presence,
and
in
it makes
of
in the con
print. Woll
no
effort
to
hide its sex, but it does not lay claim to an existence within the flawed fa
milial and social frameworks that define gender. If the content of the Vindi
cation opens wide the question of what women might become in a re
formed social order, its style supplies an implicit answer that is at odds with
Wollstonecraft's claim to "rest thewhole tendency ofmy reasoning" upon
"this
truth":
that
"whatever
tends
to
incapacitate
the maternal
character,
takes woman out of her sphere" (248). Nothing connects the voice that
speaks forth from the Vindication to""a woman nursing her children and dis
charging the duties of her station.
Though thework as a whole ismeant to reflect "the dictates of experi
ence," the vivid self that appears in the Vindication is not an autobiographi
cal self (75).Wollstonecraft would be prepared in her 1796 travelogue, Let
tersWritten during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to
confess that "most of the struggles of an eventful life have been occasioned
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
WOLLSTONECRAFT'S
461
"WOMAN"
ions for her views, but she nowhere alludes to these important extraliterary
episodes in her life.Wollstonecraft only draws on her specifically female
experience to describe a few isolated phenomena that she has been particu
larlywell positioned to observe. "I have, probably, had an opportunity of
she points out
observing more girls in their infancy than J. J.Rousseau,"
(112). "Matters of fact,which have come under my eye again and again,"
include a "weak woman of fashion" (112), unmarried women thrust upon
the charity of their stingy sisters-in-law (134), and women of sensibility
who make poor mothers (137). Apart from such passing instances,Woll
stonecraft introduces no evidence from her own life to support her claims
about the subjection of women and the need for reform.
Nor
tion
does Wollstonecraft
readers
often
encountered
eighteenth-century
particu
commissioned
which
heart"
1992] in).
ofMary Wollstonecraft [New York: St. Martin's,
26. Frances Burney
and Cecilia],
[The Author of Evelina
Brief Reflections Relative to the
Emigrant French Clergy: Earnestly Submitted to theHumane Consideration of theLadies of Great
Career
Andrews
Clark Memorial
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Re
462
KIRSTIN
letter
tory
to M.
R. WILCOX
the
Talleyrand-P?rigord,
and
"Advertisement,"
the
Intro
duction) serves only to outline her project and situate itwithin contempo
rary debates. She does not use the space to explain her presence in the
public arena. Though shewas struggling financially to support herself and
others at the time she wrote the Vindication,Wollstonecraft does not use
that fact to justify her imposition on the reading public as belletristic con
temporaries like the poet and novelist Charlotte Smith did. Wollstonecraft
addresses the reading public with the entitlement of one who deserves at
tention
for no
other
reason
than
her
self-ascribed
acumen
in
"considering
the historic page" and "viewing the living world" and bringing her re
sponses into dialogue with those of other significant (and mostly male)
thinkers (73).
Floating free from frames, examples, or prefatory matter that link this
print persona to a sexed body in theworld beyond the printed page, this
unprecedented representation of the abstract female subject in general, and
the female author in particular, has eluded critical scrutiny.The critical de
bate about whether Wollstonecraft mimics a male voice, aspires towards
gender neutrality, or deliquesces into ineffectually female language reflects
from
voice
all
sexual
falls
upon
so as to attain
categories
many
ears
as
a neutral
a valorization
voice,"27
of masculinity.
this "neu
"Rarely
in
does she [Wordsworth] present herself as a woman speaking towomen"
the Vindication, says Susan Gubar,28 a view that critics like Cora Kaplan and
Joan Landes support with evidence of a disavowal of female sexuality em
bedded inWollstonecraft's
tropes.29 "Repudiating the female position, she
orients herself almost exclusively toward the male logos," claims Landes
on the other hand, identify a self
(135). Gary Kelly and Andrew McCann,
in
female
the
Vindication.
Whereas Kelly finds that
consciously
language
on
the
whole
McCann
says of the Vindica
language
empowering (109?55),
tion, "Despite
itswell
documented
27- Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and theWoman Writer: Ideology as Style in theWorks of
P, 1984) 80.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: U of Chicago
28. Susan Gubar, "Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft
and the Paradox of'It Takes
One
to Know
Devine
Jump
back
into a more
naturalized
of women"
(43).
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
WOLLSTONECRAFT'S
463
"WOMAN
in its rehearsal
of
sentimental,
proto-Romantic
language."30
female
voice,
nor
a voice
"distinguished
. . . from
all
sexual
assumptions,
and
expectations
that
circumscribe
femaleness.
This voice
Readers
and
the Public
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
464
KIRSTIN
R.
WILCOX
and
into a
whole.
thought-provoking
be
convinced
that
"a
little
. . .
cunning,
softness
of
outward
temper,
"them." She writes of women, "In how many ways do I wish, from the
to impress this truthupon my sex; yet I fear theywill
purest benevolence,
not listen to a truth that dear bought experience has brought home to
many an agitated bosom"
(220). At times she addresses her male readers
with similar indirectness: "I appeal to their understandings; and ... I en
treat them to assist to emancipate their companion, tomake her a help meet
for them!" (220). Elsewhere, an archaic "ye" signalsmoments of high rhe
torical
drama
hortation,
when
as when
Wollstonecraft
she urges
sex or
out one
singles
men
of
"ye
understanding"
the other
to "Be
for ex
just.
. . !"
(266). But Wollstonecraft does not consistently stand aloof from her sex. At
various points she uses a first person plural pronoun to unite with her fe
male
readers:
prejudices!
"Let
. . . Let
dear
us, my
us not confine
contemporaries,
all our thoughts
rise
...
above
to an
such
narrow
acquaintance
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
WOLLSTONECRAFT'S
465
"WOMAN"
to emotive
direct
address.
Yet
Wollstonecraft's
strong
authorial
pres
ence and her consistent tone of underlying urgency knit her argument to
gether around these rhetorical instabilities.31The sense ofwomen and men
alike drawn into conversation with Wollstonecraft's forceful print presence
pulls this text back from incoherence, at the same time that it extends to
women
readers Wollstonecraft's
emancipatory
conception
of
"Woman."
my comments ... all spring from a few simple principles and might
have been deduced from what I have already said; but the edifice
[Rousseau's depiction ofwomen] has been raisedwith such ingenuity,
that
it seems
ner. (147)
necessary
to attack
it in a much
more
circumstantial
man
This
an
exceptional
woman.
Wollstonecraft's
emphatic
yet
tacit
in
terpellation of such literate and critical female selves appeared tomany con
temporary readers to bespeak not her explicit concern for ordinary women
and her abiding commitment to enlightened motherhood but themargins
of her
argument,
where
"women
of a superior
cast
. . .
pursue
more
exten
believes
31. Kelly offers a different interpretation of these tonal inconsistencies, which he reads as
the consequence
ofWollstonecraft's
cobbling together of the disparate array of rhetorical
models
available to her.
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
466
KIRSTIN
R.
WILCOX
that "women in the common walks of life are called to fulfil the duties of
wives and mothers, by religion and reason," she "cannot help lamenting
thatwomen of a superiour cast have not a road open by which they can
pursue more extensive plans of usefulness and independence" (217). Three
brief paragraphs of the book propose "the art of healing," the study of his
tory and politics, and "business of various kinds" (including elective office)
as possible expansions of women's domestic roles (5: 218).32 Wollstone
craft's
discussion
of opening
traditionally
male
to women
occupations
man
ifests only a small and highly speculative part of her argument, and it in
volves a subset of the female population
thatWollstonecraft
herself
to
to
be
her
claims.
Yet
innova
Wollstonecraft's
acknowledges
tangential
tive voice so amplified these provocative suggestions, that critics could
and
inflated.
Wollstonecraft's
Consequently,
reputation
as an
iconoclast?
abhorrent tomany readers at the turn of the eighteenth century but entic
any engagement with her
ing to feminist readers of our century?precedes
to
work. Recent
has
sought
scholarship
replace the mythic feminist
a
more
accurate
with
of
the wide-ranging visionary
figurehead
depiction
Romantic-era
intellectual, but it has done so at the expense of some of
Wollstonecraft's most innovative and prescient thought.
Postmodern and poststructuralist feminism has been preoccupied with
identifyingwhich of themultiple valences of the term "woman" can be
most effectively appropriated within and alongside other dimensions of
identity and self-hood in order tomake theworld more just. The goal is to
get beyond a feminism whose history has been, according to Joan Scott,
"the history of the project of reducing diversities (of class, race, sexuality,
ethnicity, politics, religious and social economic status) among females to a
common identity of women."34 That reductive project
arguably begins
with
Mary
whose
Wollstonecraft,
32. Like-minded
Sargent Murray,
women
writers
and Catharine
category
of
"Woman"
is a more
capa
of the
Macaulay)
of Historical
Analysis,"
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
O NE
W?LLS
CRAFT'S
467
"WOMAN"
cious receptacle for other identities than any which had been advocated
west
previously, and who has been a touchstone for generations ofwhite,
ern middle- and upper-class feminists presenting their experience as uni
versal. Yet Wollstonecraft's determination to hold open the category of
"Woman" gives her a role in the larger historical trajectory that Scott ad
vances. Wollstonecraft works towards a timewhen principles of justice will
produce
"women"
who
are
so different
from
the products
of her
own
cor
time,
the concept
dence might
University
of "Woman"
that
she
invokes
shows
what
such
transcen
look like.
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This content downloaded from 128.210.126.199 on Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:49:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions