Getting intimate with Wollstonecraft: In the republic of letters

Political Theory

Volumn 33, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 344-369

  Wingrove, Elizabeth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

Print culture; Public sphere; Rhetoric; Sensibility; Wollstonecraft

Indexed keywords

EID: 18844373050     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591705274748     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 vols., ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: William Pickering, 1989), vol. 5: 76; emphasis in original.
2. Virgina Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
3. Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 130, 134.
4. See Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Maria Falco (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 1996). The quote is from Wendy Gunther-Canada's contribution to this collection, "Mary Wollstonecraft's 'Wild Wish': Confounding Sex in the Discourse on Political Rights," 77.
5. See, for example, Laura Brace, "'Not Empire, but Equality': Mary Wollstonecraft, the Marriage State and the Sexual Contract," Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (2000): 433-55;
6. Eileen Hunt, "The Family as Cave, Platoon and Prison: The Three Stages of Wollstonecraft's Philosophy of the Family," Review of Politics 64 (Winter 2002): 81-119;
7. Virginia Muller, "What Can Liberals Learn from Mary Wollstonecraft?" in Feminist Interpretations of Wollstonecraft, 47-60;
8. and Sapiro, Vindication of Political Virtue, esp. chaps. 5, 8, and 9.
9. The familiarity of the claim dates at least to Joan Scott's early formulation of gender as "a primary way of signifying relationships of power"; Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis," American Historical Review 91 (December 1986): 1053-75.
10. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984);
11. Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: St. Martin's, 1992);
12. and Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
13. See also Mary Favret's reading of Wollstonecraft's travel narratives through the lens of epistolary relations, in Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
14. Carol Kay, "Canon, Ideology, and Gender: Mary Wollstonecraft's Critique of Adam Smith," New Political Science 15 (Summer 1986), 63-76, at 71.
15. Wendy Gunther-Canada, Rebel Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Politics (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 78.
16. See also Miriam Brody's reading of Wollstonecraft as a conscious contributor to her era's "discursive tradition of rhetoric": "The Vindication of the Writes of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Rhetoric," in Feminist Interpretations of Wollstonecraft, 105-24.
17. Poovey, Proper Lady and Woman Writer, 77;
18. Gunther-Canada, Rebel Writer, 79 and 90 ff.;
19. and Kay, "Canon, Ideology, and Gender," 72. Consider also how Brody anchors her approach: "This reading of the Vindication [of the Rights of Woman] searches for the transformations we may anticipate in rhetoric's traditional misogynist imagery when a woman, writing a politically emancipatory argument on behalf of her own sex, turns to describe her own prose";
20. Brody, "Writes of Women," 106-7.
21. David Bromwich, "Wollstonecraft as a Critic of Burke," Political Theory 23 (November 1995): 620.
22. Linda Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 3.
23. Zerilli, Signifying Woman, 2-15.
24. My concerns here parallel Zerilli's insistence on the need to incorporate "historically variegated meanings" into any psychoanalytically informed analysis of signifying practice; Zerilli, Signifying Woman, 12.
25. Vindication of the Rights of Woman (hereafter VRW), 76.
26. Here my argument shares important interpretive turf with and yet diverges substantially from Nancy Armstrong's influential retracing of the genealogy of the middle-class subject through the figure of the "domestic woman" that circulated in eighteenth-century fiction; Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). I address this overlap and divergence in the concluding section.
27. A wealth of interpretive work has taken off from this observation; see, among others, Sapiro, Vindication of Political Virtue, 197-206;
28. Poovey, Proper Lady and Woman Writer, 59-68;
29. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 23-30;
30. and Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism, 89-99.
31. A Vindication of the Rights of Men (hereafter VRM, in Works of Wollstonecraft, vol. 5:29. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the body of the text.
32. VRM, 20. Wollstonecraft here quotes Burke, who was responding to the dissenting minister Richard Price's comment that the king is "more properly the servant than the sovereign of your people."
33. Analytical Review vol. III (1789), in Works of Wollstonecraft, vol. 7: 82; emphasis in original.
34. VRM, 45. Wollstonecraft is referring specifically to the habits of colonial slave-holding women.
35. VRM, 50;
36. and VRW, 101. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the body of the essay.
37. VRM, 30, 44, 50.
38. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 7, 23.
39. Ibid., 2.
40. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
41. See, for, example, Julie Ellison, Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999);
42. and Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
43. Kay, "Canon, Ideology, and Gender," 71.
44. Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph Wardle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 263.
45. For an extended discussion on Rousseau's use of the term, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
46. Elizabeth Wingrove, Rousseau's Republican Romance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
47. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 66.
48. The standard political theoretical source for construing this earlier moment remains J. G. A. Pocock; see The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
49. For a helpful overview of intellectual historical critiques of Pocock's work, in addition to the author's own, see Mark Jurdjevic, "Virtue, Commerce, and the Enduring Florentine Republican Moment: Reintegrating Italy into the Atlantic Republican Debate," Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (4): 721-43.
50. Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989).
51. This is not to deny the chastening tone that often animates Wollstonecraft's writing, or the fact that she was greatly vexed by the errata pages typical of eighteenth-century publications. Her publisher's decision to print the pages of VRM as she composed them exacerbated the problem of errata, and perhaps fueled her "crisis" over whether or not to finish the work; see Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 163-64.
52. For explorations of other, material and rhetorical, forms of circulatory mediation from the perspective of literary critics, see Virginia Jackson, "Dickinson's Figure of Address," in Dickinson and Audience, ed. Martin Orzech and Robert Weisbuch (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 77-103;
53. Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003);
54. and Michael Warner, "Publics and Counterpublics," Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (4): 413-25.
55. For an explication of apostrophe and an analysis of how it "hails," see Jonathan Culler's entry, "Apostrophe," in Critical Terms for Literary Studies, ed. Franck Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
56. In this same vein, Michael Warner warns against a "technological determinism" that supposes printing to come equipped with its own "internal logic," capable of "exert[ing] causative force in human affairs"; Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 5, 6.
57. Betty Rizzo offers a helpful overview of the literary and grammatical "ill repute" suffered by the distinctly feminized dash in "Banter and Testimony, Supplication and Praise, in the Letters of Christopher Smart," in Sent as a Gift: Eight Correspondences from the Eighteenth Century, ed. Alan McKenzie (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 82-86.
58. Sapiro, Vindication of Political Virtue, 205;
59. and Gunther-Canada, Rebel Writer, 87-88.
60. Analytical Review, vol. IV (1789), in Collected Works, vol. 7:120. Wollstonecraft's comments appear in a review of a novel titled Louis and Nina, or an Excursion to Yverdon (no author given).
61. VRW, 75.
62. Poovey, Proper Lady and Woman Writer, 67.
63. Ibid., xiii-xiv, 77.
64. R. N. Janes, "On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman" Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 293-302.
65. Ibid., 299.
66. VRM, 30-31.
67. These I take to be widely held (but by no means final) lines on Wollstonecraft's representation of maternity and female sexuality; see, for example, Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere,
68. and Carol Poston, "Mary Wollstonecraft and The Body Politic,'" in Feminist Interpretations of Wollstonecraft, 85-104.
69. Although, the urgency with which many feminist scholars insist on the relevance of Wollstonecraft's life to her political thought is striking; see Todd, Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, ix.
70. See Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971): 127-86.
71. Don Herzog points out that in a 1795 pamphlet (Godwin's Memoirs were published in 1798)
72. William Cobbett rails against "that political lady" by pointing to the "well known fact" that writing Vindication of the Rights of Woman caused Wollstonecraft's "fine black hair" to turn white (A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats, pt. I [1795],
73. quoted in Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998], 415). This might be perversely complimentary: unlike the laudatory reviewers cited by Janes (see note 34), most of whom read Wollstonecraft as a thoughtful advocate of women's education, Cobbett places her squarely within the rough and tumble world of politics.
74. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 51;
75. Warner, Letters of the Republic, 40;
76. and Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 29; emphasis in original.
77. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
78. Ibid., 4, 8-9.
79. See, for example, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
80. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Reflections on the Origin and Spread on Nationalism (London; Verso, 1991).