A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft | Steven Blakemore (essay date winter 1992)
Steven Blakemore (essay date winter 1992)
SOURCE: Blakemore, Steven. “Rebellious Reading: The Doubleness of Wollstonecraft's Subversion of Paradise Lost.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34, no. 4 (winter 1992): 451-80.
[In the following essay, Blakemore argues that in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft engages in a radical, systematic subversion of John Milton's Paradise Lost and, further, that she subverts the feminist myth she herself creates.]
In 1784 Immanuel Kant published his famous essay in which he defined “enlightenment” as man's emergence from self-imposed nonage and challenged people to begin liberating themselves by pursuing knowledge instead of relying on tradition: “Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.”1 Kant's paradigmatic equation of childhood with...
[The entire page is 13112 words long]
Navigate
