SOURCE: "The Vindication of the Writes of Women: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Rhetoric," in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Maria J. Falco, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, pp. 105-23.

[In this essay, Brody analyzes Wollstonecraft's rhetoric as an inversion of the bodily imagery that had been used during the Enlightenment to describe sound writing; through this rhetorical transformation, Brody contends, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman "dramatically vindicates that a woman may write polemically."]

Mary Wollstonecraft intrigues us all. Consigned to oblivion after her death (her relationship with Gilbert Imlay had embarrassed many of her friends and the times were uncongenial to political rebels), at her two-hundredth birthday she has been richly re-read. Her life has been turned into a novel, her childhood has been examined for trauma, and her writings, finished and unfinished, have been made available for close scrutiny and scholarly debate.' She has been generous to us after her death. We can all find what we are looking for. One reader may argue that Wollstonecraft is a reformer, advocating the limited advances of education for women, but reserving sexual spheres of work that consigned them to the domestic or private half of human labor. Another may claim that Wollstonecraft is a revolutionary, more radically undermining prevailing codes and masculine genres in the apostrophes, expostulations, and digressions that mark her texts.

Perhaps most intriguingly, whether as Enlightenment reformer, French Revolutionary radical or commonwealth speaker, Wollstonecraft's representation of women as sexual beings has invited interpretation by readers. Such readings have discovered a sexual puritanism in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman at odds with the claims Wollstonecraft made in her own personal life for sexual freedom. I follow up on this interest readers have in Wollstonecraft's treatment of the woman's body, but I depart from a literary or political analysis of Wollstonecraft's rendering of the body in order to locate her participation in the tradition of rhetoric and its long-standing project of discovering probable truths with the tools of human language. As philosophers of rhetoric have argued that language must be more than meaningless babble, that it must have properties to describe probable truths about our world, these writers have used bodily imagery to describe linguistic excellences and failures. Wollstonecraft joins this tradition and changes it.

In the Vindication, Wollstonecraft challenged and transformed the prevailing rhetorical metaphor about sound and virtuous writing. At the same time Wollstonecraft set the stage for a new woman on the scene of writing, a woman mighty like herself. Wollstonecraft was, as she said, "the first of a new genus," a woman making her way on her merits as a professional writer, out to make money (Paul 1876, 191). She was certainly as well the first of another kind of "new genus," a woman writing political argument. For while the later eighteenth century was giving birth to the novel (and a mighty feminine birth it was), the idea that a woman might engage herself in the masculine world of political debate was a double monstrosity: women not merely picking up the pen, but doing so to preach to men about the way the world should be run.

The Vindication, as it asserts the rights of women, dramatically vindicates that a woman may write polemically. With this vindication, Wollstonecraft finds a subject position for her own sex in the discursive tradition of rhetoric, an authorial space that required she rewrite the idea of a woman's body. To the eighteenth-century mind, such a preoccupation with the idea of writing would be less surprising than it strikes us. During the British Enlightenment, rhetoricians debated the constitution of the English language, fixing its spelling and grammar and subordinating its various dialects to the speech and writing of the university-educated elite. As part of this debate, and of even longer standing than the British Enlightenment, the merits of a plain or ornate style of writing meant more to writers than simply taste. Writing style, the choice between plain or ornate language, and moral agendas seeking perfectable societies were interwoven in the discourse of rhetoric. As I shall suggest, when Wollstonecraft entered the debate about writing style, she appropriated its gendered and embodied terms for her argument about women's rights. An argument about writing style in the rhetorical tradition is entangled in body imagery, charged and eroticized as soon as plain and ornate language are imagined as a writer's choices. When Mary Wollstonecraft made space for women-authored arguments, she confronted the problem of the body imagery with which rhetoricianshad long described good and bad writing. This reading of the Vindication 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.

Certainly Mary Wollstonecraft appropriated masculinized values for the description of language to assist her argument that women may participate in the political debate in public life. In so doing, the Vindication bears a relationship to a network of texts I have elsewhere called "advice to writers," texts in which the British Enlightenment adapted Roman rhetoric to its own purposes.² In this rhetorical tradition, writing had been sanctified as a masculine endeavor, no less so in Wollstonecraft's time, in spite of the increasing number of women who would not only read but write in the emerging genre of the novel. Rhetoric texts, however, having engaged in the training of the public orator, claimed the oldest lineage in idealizing and masculinizing verbal excellence. As described in the classical literature in which all educated men were well versed, Cicero gave muscular imagery to the widespread notion of the virile speaker; persuasive writing literally must move one's auditor, as if the speaker is employing physical strength. "Eloquence," explained Cicero, "is one of the most eminent virtues," "more beautiful and noble" because "it can impel the audience withersoever it inclines its force" (1963, 207): Often called the agon tradition of rhetoric, the inculation of linguistic skills trained the young rhetorician to "impel" his force in the manly engagement of verbal battle. The virtuous quest for truth in language was rendered in the Enlightenment reception of classical rhetoric as a masculine excellence, a blend of muscular and intellectual power. If one worried that such muscularity might be destructive of the commonweal, Quintilian (1856) added that the "art of which we are speaking [oratory] can be conceded only to good men," fusing muscular strength to a virtuous intention and naming the vir bonus tradition of rhetoric (2.15.1).

Such manly excellence was, however, held in place by its resistance to an insidious and pervasive Other. Implied in every reference to manliness or its opposite, effeminacy, the failure to apprehend such truth was feared as a feminine invasion that both softens muscle and weakens resolve. When we accredit the act of writing the political essay as an agonistic endeavor that had always been interpreted as requiring manly courage, we apprehend the anomaly of a woman writing argument.

It follows that a woman must defend the act of her "writes" as more than simply "rights," when she enters the gendered discourse of public persuasive argument. She must put forth her persuasive argument within a structure of ideas that requires she write at the expense of her own sexual effacement or accept that her production is a monstrosity, an illness, a failure. Wollstonecraft's problems were legion, writing a persuasive argument to an audience she imagined often as male and certainly dedicated to a man.³ Nor were her female readers sympathetic. Hannah More, bluestocking and writer of improving tracts for the poor, said of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that there was something so patently ridiculous in the title she would certainly not read it. A woman writing such a document must indeed be a mutant or monstrosity, part woman, part something else, the "hyena in petticoats" as Hannah More's friend, the Tory and sometime gothic romancer Horace Walpole (1905) imagined her (337-38). Walpole's suggestive imagery implied that Wollstonecraft was one of the rampaging viragoes of the French Revolution, demonized at the time of the Vindication as sharp-toothed hounds in lace. Wollstonecraft writing the Vindication, such metaphor would contend, is the archetypal demonic feminine who underlies the civil state and threatens continually its bloody eruption, challenging the very terms on which authorship was conceived as male.

Wollstonecraft's response to this paradoxical situation of the act of writing, a situation that commanded either her sexual obliteration or textual failure, overturned the masculinized terms of rhetorical discourse, although she left in place some of its gendered economy. Opening up new space in the conceptual domain of authorship, Wollstonecraft described a writer she called the "exceptional woman," a woman whom she idealized as "not masculine," a woman whose position depended on the naming of lesser women, called "mediocre" or "the woman of fashion." These rhetorical positions, at their extremes, argued that agencies of persuasive meaning-making belong to "exceptional" or unusual women who have triumphed over their gendered constraints, their triumphs more spectacular because "mediocre" and "fashionable" women have variously succumbed to the traditional feminine roles the patriarchy had assigned. Claiming the "exceptional" woman is rational and productive while the "fashionable" woman is vicious and sterile, Wollstonecraft transposed traditional rhetoric's idealizations of writing styles as manly and effeminate into feminized states.

To understand the anomaly of a woman entering the public space of political writing, some exegesis of the deeply gendered imagery in the canonical texts of rhetoric is helpful. In these texts, the making of meaning is not only imagined as masculine, but also as consonant with larger societal agendas of building nations and conquering nature. The valorous truth-seeker and nation-builder came to language as a craftsman came to his tools.⁴ Newly concerned with describing the English language, Enlightenment thinkers imagined the English speakers in a relationship to their language similar to their relationship in law to native liberty. The regulation and production of speech was to be as necessary to the well-being of a harmonious and productive community as the legislating of fundamental human freedoms. The intellectually generative community of political radicals and religious Dissenters who gathered in Newington Green around the Reverend Richard Price in the 1780s or at the hospitable tables of Joseph Johnson, publisher of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, would have been familiar with the works of the new rhetoricians of the Scottish Enlightenment published in the preceding decade. Included among them was Mary Wollstonecraft; reading Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters in 1783, she found them "an intellectual feast" (Kelly 1979, 276). Such rhetoricians as Blair and his fellow members of the Scottish Enlightenment George Campbell and Adam Smith had taken the rhetorical texts from the classical world and refashioned them for Britain undergoing the early stages of its industrial revolution. The agonistic struggle of argument contending with argument that had been described in the classical world as an inherently masculine enterprise still required muscular strength to bespeak the mental agility required in the law court, the senate, and the legislature.

The new rhetoricians, receiving such texts from the ancient world, rescued classical rhetoric from the ashbin of history to which the Royal Society, convened in 1665 to advance the new learning of science, had consigned its naive epistemology. Seeking new pathways between language and the natural world congenial to the empiricism of early industrialism, these rhetoricians left the gender of the truth-seeker as masculine, productive, and healthy. Small wonder that this network of ideas survived the new learning. The masculinization of writerly excellence had a long history.

While the association between manliness and rhetorical excellence was widespread in classical rhetoric, its most graphic portraiture was given in a telling aside in a few pages on style in Quintilian's (1856) Institutes of the Orator, the longest text on rhetoric to survive antiquity. Quintilian, a Spanish-born rhetorician who plied his trade in Rome early in the Christian Era, had entered into a debate on the manner of declamation and described the ornamented body of a eunuch to metamorphize the assault on virtue and truth he imagined in the heavily nuanced and gestured school of Senecan oratory, against which he posited his own preference for a plain style. Such ornamentation of language, he explained, was like a eunuch:

there being the same evil practice among declaimers, assuredly, as that which slave-dealers adopt, when they try to add to the beauty of young fellows by depriving them of their virility. For as slave-dealers regard strength and muscles, and more especially the beard and other distinctions which nature has appropriated to males, as at variance with grace, and soften down, as being harsh, whatever would be strong if it were allowed its full growth, so we cover the manly form of eloquence, and the ability of speaking closely and forcibly, with a certain delicate texture of language, and, if our words be but smooth and elegant, think it of little consequence what vigour they have. But to me, who look to nature, any man, with the full appearance of virility will be more pleasing than a eunuch; nor will divine providence ever be so unfavourable to its own work as to ordain that weakness be numbered among its excellences; nor shall I think that an animalis made beautiful by the knife, which would have been a monster if it had been born in the state to which the knife had reduced it. (5.12.17-20)

Quintilian's charged imagery of emasculation, vice, luxury, and illness became a commonplace in the British Enlightenment advice literature of rhetoric, surviving the scientific revolution that rendered obsolete syllogistic deductions as descriptions of the natural world. Newly concerned with productivity, now reimagined as the ability to remake the natural world along Bacon's gendered description of a phallic assault, the quest for rhetorical truth (such truth that must be made with human language) is expressed as a masculine endeavor requiring manly writing and fearing effeminacy.⁵ Hugh Blair (1965), who avowed he found everything "instructive" and "useful" in Quintilian, reissued his maxims that good writing is "manly, noble, and chaste" and coined the highest literary tribute in the phallic excellence of the moral Sublime (2:244, 1:48-54). His teacher, Adam Smith, whose lectures on rhetoric Blair attended, while never renaming Quintilian's eunuch as such, found the feminine Shaftesbury as emasculated, effete, and unproductive, a writer of insufficient substance unqualified for the new agons of science (Smith 1963, 53, 54). In the condensed triumvirate of virtues that Quintilian recommended, the Enlightenment codified the excellence of independence or nobility, necessary to the disinterested pursuit of scientific truth, and the excellence of simplicity of style, imagined in the restraint and decency of chastity. Chaste and noble, the writer was also manly.

We may surmise, then, that the problem of a woman who intended to write an argument was that her body had already been defined as the agency that undermines rational discourse. As codified in Quintilian's eunuch and translated in Enlightenment rhetoric as the "unmanly" writer, the body of the woman having invaded the man suggested the capacity of language to fail to represent the world it claimed to describe. She, like language, might deceive. To take up the cudgels of argument and write about argument for the British Enlightenment, then, was to incorporate a tradition that imagined such an argument was empowered by a male body whose moral and physical health conduced a rhetorical truth. Inscribing an image of writing failure, excess of ornamentation, absence of meaning, Quintilian had offered the eunuch as that which is unnaturally made, a violation of nature, a deception in itself to conduce vice and lawless desire. The charged language of manliness and effeminacy, with which latter-day rhetoricians seasoned their discussions of style, occupied a site of meaning that was held in place by a void, the body of the castrated man. Rhetorically, the eunuch represented ornamented language covering over a lack; the eunuch was empty and vicious speech. At the same time the eunuch implied by his negation his ideal other, the full body of the full-speaking man, words attached to "things," full of their object, productive of seed, productive of meaning. Not only was public speech and writing masculinized in this tradition, failure to make meaning was graphically imagined as a feminized male; ifthe agency of failure was feminine, to imagine a woman writing well required renaming the body with which good writing was associated. Perhaps nowhere is this problem of vocabulary more apparent than at the outset of the Vindication when Wollstonecraft (1992) must play with the name "masculine" as a description for women:

From every quarter have I heard exclamations against masculine women, but where are they to be found? If by this appellation men mean to inveigh against their ardour in hunting, shooting, and gaming, I shall most cordially join in the cry; but if it be against the imitation of manly virtues, or more properly speaking, the attainment of those talents and virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character, and which raises females in the scale of animal being, when they are comprehensively termed mankind, all those who view them with a philosophic eye must, I should think, wish with me, that they may every day grow more and more masculine. (80)

The masculine woman whom Wollstonecraft ironically names in defiance of her detractors becomes the exceptional woman of the Vindication, someone who, as I shall describe below in Wollstonecraft's description of Catherine Macaulay, is renamed "not masculine." Insisting on all manly virtues for this new genus who is "not masculine," Wollstonecraft has claimed the tradition of writing for women.

The Woman Writer as the Exceptional Woman

Wollstonecraft never names herself as the woman whose achievements might argue that women should be encouraged to excellence in public life. Yet she might have credibly imagined she was such a woman. In 1787, she had arrived penniless in London as a young woman to earn her own keep as a writer, and a few years later, barely thirty years old, she dared to answer Edmund Burke's rebuke of her mentor, the Reverend Richard Price, with her vitriolic A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Shortly after, writing her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft asks "When do we hear of women who, starting out of obscurity, boldly claim respect on account of their great abilities or daring virtues?" (148). Certainly she must have entertained the notion that she was one such woman deserving of notice. While claiming she is interested only in the condition of her sex in general, Wollstonecraft makes plain that she has in mind exceptions to the general category "woman" whose vindication she was addressing. "I plead for my sex, not for myself," she insisted in her dedication to Talleyrand, adding that "independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath" (85). "I shall not lay any great stress on the example of a few women who, from having received a masculine education, have acquired courage and resolution," she argues, conserving their naming for a footnote: "Sappho, Eloisa, Mrs. Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Madame d'Eon, etc. These and many more, may be reckoned exceptions" (172, 172n). In the unspecified" etc." Wollstonecraft located herself and named the "exceptional" woman someone whose status might argue for an extension of woman's sphere. Later, in asides qualifying her hopes for women's progress, in compliments paid to notable women, or describing the derision they must tolerate (for example, "a woman of more cultivated understanding" being eclipsed in conversation by a flirt [297]), the exceptional woman appears and reappears, legitimizing the very act of writing that names her.

Wollstonecraft reserves the most dramatic moment of baptism for Catherine Macaulay, the historian and essayist whose reformist social criticism had preceded and influenced her own. Describing Macaulay, Wollstonecraft names the ideal writer she means herself to be and compels such a vir bonus into a separate position from the traditional manly excellence such good rhetoric had always required:

I will not call hers a masculine understanding [Macaulay's], because I admit not of such an arrogant assumption of reason; but I contend that it was a sound one, and that her judgement, the matured fruit of profound thinking, was a proof that a woman can acquire judgement in the full extent of the word. Possessing more penetration than sagacity, more understanding than fancy, she writes with sober energy and argumentative closeness; yet sympathy and benevolence give an interest to her sentiments, and that vital heat to arguments, which forces the reader to weigh them. (206-7)

This woman whose excellence is "not masculine" surfaces in the Vindication, with some suggestion of an anxiety attending the revolutionary challenge of this new gendered position. "I speak of the improvement and emancipation of the whole sex," writes Wollstonecraft, "for I know that the behaviour of a few women, who, by accident, or following a strong bent of nature, have acquired a portion of knowledge superior to that of the rest of their sex, has often been overbearing" (296). She finds it important to add reassuringly, "there have been instances of women who, attaining knowledge, have not discarded modesty, nor have they always pedantically appeared to despise the ignorance which they laboured to disperse in their own minds" (296).

Such women, laboring to disperse ignorance in themselves, are fit, she goes so far as to argue in the Vindication, to govern others, permitting for this small number, these "exceptional" few the public stage of the agon and its project of social reform. "I cannot help lamenting," Wollstonecraft argues late in the Vindication, "that women of a superior cast have not a road open by which they can pursue more extensive plans of usefulness and independence. I may excite laughter, by dropping a hint, which I mean to pursue, some future time, for I really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government" (259-60).

If we wish to understand the prerogatives of the exceptional woman, we may locate them by understanding the more limited spheres of women who are not exceptional. Indeed, Wollstonecraft makes quite clear that she may be reserving a quite different status for most women. "I do not wish to invert the order of things," she claimed, allowing women to be less strong than men (109). Having laid out her argument for the education of all women so they may work to improve society, she describes how such a woman should conduct herself so as to be virtuous. In these fateful passages she exercised the repression of sexuality that has intrigued so many of her readers, claiming that a good marriage is one in which there is a "natural death of love," friendship replacing passion. A close reading of this passage, however, finds it preceded by an interesting qualification. "Let fancy now present a woman with a tolerable understanding," writes Wollstonecraft, "for I do not wish to leave the line of mediocrity" (138). It is the "mediocre" woman to whom Wollstonecraft recommends a cooler and less passionate relationship with her husband. It is not necessarily, then, the "exceptional" woman, distinguished by a more powerful exercise of reason, whose sexual repression is required of an improved society. A reader may imagine a woman "not mediocre," the full vigor of whose body might tolerate desire without loss to virtue.

If the exceptional woman is given only slight reference, she is significant nonetheless in that she identifies Wollstonecraft herself. Like the vir bonus, the exceptional woman is more clearly articulated by what she is not. "Not masculine," nor "mediocre," the woman writer is defined dramatically by a despised "Other," whose failure to engender meaning establishes the boundaries of an identity against which both the mediocre and the exceptional stand in relief. Just as the idealized image of the full-bodied man required the emasculated body of the eunuch as the Other, so too the "not masculine" writer, the exceptional woman, the "cultivated woman" of sober judgment requires its Other, whose fundamental lack signals the fullness of meaning of virtuous speech. Mary Wollstonecraft finds this Other in the body of the "woman of fashion," and inscribes in this site the same mix of sterility, illness, and vice that Quintilian bequeathed to the British Enlightenment as a simulacrum for a failure to be meaning-full. She finds such a woman in the enervated aristocratic lady, the "lady of fashion."

The Weak Woman of Fashion

"I once knew a weak woman of fashion," wrote Wollstonecraft, "who was more than commonly proud of her delicacy and sensibility. She thought a distinguishing taste and puny appetite the height of all human perfection, and acted accordingly. I have seen this weak sophisticated being neglect all the duties of life, yet recline with self-complacency on a sofa, and boast of her want of appetite as a proof of delicacy that extended to, or perhaps, arose from, her exquisite sensibility; for it is difficult to render intelligible such ridiculous jargon" (130). As Wollstonecraft's biographers have pointed out, the model for the "woman of fashion" whom Wollstonecraft pillories in the pages of the Vindication was undoubtedly Lady Kingsborough, the chatelaine of the Irish house that employed young Mary Wollstonecraft as a governess for two daughters. A more theoretical influence, Adam Smith's description of the uselessness of the aristocracy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), provided Wollstonecraft with the argument by which she would condemn such ladies as Lady Kingsborough. Citing at great length Smith's essay, Wollstonecraft claims the same opprobrium for women of fashion that Smith had heaped upon the rich. The rich, argues Smith, have not risen "by knowledge, by industry, by patience, or by self-denial, or by virtue of any kind" (Wollstonecraft 1992, 149). "Women, in general," writes Wollstonecraft, "as well as the rich of both sexes, have acquired all the follies and vices of civilization, and missed the useful fruit" (151). With the parenthetical "in general," Wollstonecraft has excluded "the exceptional woman."

Dissipated by vanity and admiration, the woman of fashion is unable to be virtuous because her body is weak. Wollstonecraft insists that "strength both of body and mind" are required in the virtuous work of regulating a family, educating children, certainly for the extraordinary work of public writing (155). "Shakespeare never grasped the airy dagger with a nerveless hand, nor did Milton tremble when he led Satan far from the confines of his dreary prison" (124). The woman of fashion has been made proud of her own delicacy, "though it be another fetter, that by calling the attention continually to the body, cramps the activity of the mind" (171). More specifically, these "false notions of beauty and delicacy stop the growth of their limbs and produce a sickly soreness," making it less likely that they can "find strength to recur to reason and rise superior to a system of oppression" (221). Like the eunuch, the woman of fashion is sterile. Figuratively sterile, she ignores the responsibilities of motherhood, abandoning her children to servants. Literally sterile, the "weak and enervated" woman produces only "half-formed beings" or, appropriated by the licentious men they seem to attract, are so riven with disease they become "barren" (249-50).

Women's Bodies/Writing Style

Unlike the woman of fashion who represents vice, illness, and failure to (re)produce, the exceptional woman represents the virtuous production of argumentative writing engaged in good work. No vir bonus nor hyena in petticoats, the exceptional woman is the standard-bearer of an enlightened feminized productivity for the age of reason perfecting itself. Since a new woman entering the scene of writing would inevitably cause tremors of anxiety, ease of reception is facilitated by anchoring innovation within a reassuring and familiar conceptual topography. As Wollstonecraft located a new subject position, the woman who writes argument, she stabilized the revolutionary nature of an appropriation of masculine privilege by accepting the gendered terms of cosmeticdisguise with which linguistic ornamentation was reviled as feminine excess. It is perhaps less apparent to an age not so interested in writing style as Wollstonecraft's how important to the Enlightenment was choosing words for argument. Societal and linguistic improvement were interrelated meliorative processes in the eighteenth-century mind. In a few opening remarks in "a rough sketch of [her] plan," Wollstonecraft assumed a fusion of bodily illness and language as she described a style of writing she intended to make her own, continuing canonical rhetoric's obsession with ornamented language as a charged mix of illness and desire: "I shall disdain to cull my phrases or polish my style. I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, or in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings" (82). More than simply the aftermath of her debate with Burke, Wollstonecraft's disdaining the affectation of "culling" and "polishing" would be recognized by her eighteenth-century readership as part of the familiar contempt rhetoricians expressed for ornamentation in general. As we trace the antipathy toward sexual feeling that invades Wollstonecraft's arguments, we have located such revulsion in this argument as consistent with the Enlightenment's reading of classical rhetoric's idealization and denigration of the body as a body of language. The description of Quintilian's eunuch illustrated that not merely upon the male body did canonical rhetoric visit its hopes for truth and its fear of failure, but upon a deeply eroticized notion of the body. The eunuch's lack defined the borders of articulation in which the idealized rhetor could imagine himself as phallic and victorious. Quintilian's description of the eunuch implied desire because the eunuch was an object of desire and implied revulsion with desire because the eunuch, made beautiful by the knife, was a corruption of the natural. At the very installation of canonical rhetoric's obsession with the excellence of manliness, a revulsion and desire co-inhabit the space between the writer and writing. Mary Wollstonecraft revisits this erotically charged mix, already in place in the discursive tradition of writing about writing, when she describes her intention to write at the outset of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

In her introductory plan, Wollstonecraft described her revulsion with "pretty superlatives, dropping glibly from the tongue" that "vitiate the taste," and "create a kind of sickly delicacy," imagining truth instead as "simple" and "unadorned" (82). Imagined in language as that artfully constructed layer of "style" upon meaning, ornamentation is at once necessary and sadly a deficiency. Aristotle had described rhetoric's ambivalence with ornamentation, supplying the logic of a widespread distrust of imagery as the weapons of deceivers that Plato had articulated fully in his dialogues against the rhetoricians.⁶ Words that stand in for things should be enough and would be enough were it not for a human weakness for pretty language. Purchasing a familiar distinction between language and world that Quintilian described "as that whichis expressed, and of that which expresses" (3.5.1) Wollstonecraft announced, "I shall be employed about things, not words," continuing that she is "anxious to avoid that flowery diction which has slided from essays into novels, and from novels into familiar letters and conversations" (82).

As Quintilian himself had written in the Institutes of the Orator, and as Smith, Campbell, and Blair had served up rhetoric's advice for the eighteenth century, the more ornamented the language, the more "flowery the diction," the more disguised the natural world that language eternally and imperfectly attempts to describe. Played out on bodies, the imperfection of language is cosmetic adornment personified in women, dangerous when emulated by men. Ultimately Wollstonecraft's complicity in the charged ambivalence toward the woman's body as a site of desire and revulsion leaks through in her numerous references to disgust with bodily function, eating, certainly, and, we may extrapolate from her dismissal of the importance of sexual pleasure, with desire itself. "And what nasty indecent tricks do they not also learn from each other," she warns, criticizing girls' boarding schools, "when a number of them pig together in the same bedchamber" (282). If indeed Wollstonecraft feared female desire more than she did male desire, as Mary Poovey suggests, rhetoric's locus of such lawless desire in the body of woman, as it apparently takes over the man in the eunuch, part and parcel of the logic of ensuring rational argumentation, was also a logic that Wollstonecraft has assimilated through the discourse.

While no one would suggest that the rhetorical tradition fully explains Wollstonecraft's attitudes toward sexuality, this tradition superimposes itself easily on such ambivalent representations of bodily function that we may find in the Vindication when rhetoric valorizes and despises notions of public engagement measured against the manliness of the writer. So doing, rhetoric has given Wollstonecraft a vocabulary for claiming that the virtuous language of truth may emanate from a female body. By borrowing rhetoric's revulsion with the feminized male, Wollstonecraft insisted on the investiture of the writing subject for the woman who was "not masculine," nor a lady of fashion.

Such a female writer announced her entitlement to writing by the way she wrote, the words she chose. Because Enlightenment rhetoricians conceived that prose might be ameliorative in society's ongoing mission of reforming itself, one's writing style was extricated. in moral choices. As British republican and scientist Joseph Priestley argued in the Rudiments of English Grammar (1761): "The chief use of written language must be to record, extend, and perpetuate useful knowledge" (61). Taking up Priestley's injunction, Wollstonecraft merged the ameliorative project of the Enlightenment, perfecting society through language, with rhetoric's traditional disparagement of ornamentation. Disparaging the "mellifluous" precepts of James Fordyce, the Scottish Presbyterian minister and author of advice literature foryoung women (1765), Wollstonecraft maintained that "his discourses" were "written in such an affected style" that for this reason alone she would not "allow girls to peruse them." "I particularly object to the love-like phrases of pumped up passion," she continues. Instead, "speak to them [young girls] the language of truth and soberness' (193). Good language may be ameliorative—such language as Wollstonecraft herself claimed she intended to write.

When a writer has not spoken the language of truth and soberness, one must expect illness and moral degeneracy rather than amelioration. Wollstonecraft argued that the contaminating discursive flow of "pretty superlatives" fed to women "from essays into novels, and from novels into familiar letters and conversations" engendered a "sickly delicacy that turns away from simple unadorned truth." Worse, the "deluge of false sentiments and overstretched feelings, stifling the natural emotions of the heart, render the domestic pleasures insipid, that ought to sweeten the exercise of those severe duties, which educate a rational and immortal being for a nobler field of action" (82). In other words, sick language threatens motherhood itself, contaminating women and rendering them unfit for reproduction. The same enervating delicacy that afflicted the woman of fashion may be traced to a linguistic corruption of an excess of writing. As the "jargon" of the woman of fashion made her ridiculous, diseased writing, those "sweet" superlatives, was at once repellent and seductive. To yield to its attractions placed in peril the reproductivity of a healthy and improved civil state.

Challenging the gendered discourse of rhetoric, Wollstonecraft, argue some of her critics, formed herself as a "masculine intellectual" (Poovey 1984, 55) or subsumed the rhetorical virtues of the vir bonus, Quintilian's "good man" (Kelly 1979, 276). Indeed, it would appear that the discourse permitted no other point of entry. The Wollstonecraft we read against the strictures of such a gendered notion of argument strained, however, against this masculinization. Mary Wollstonecraft played with polarizations familiar to her in the rhetorical tradition about writing style. She used "reason" and "passion" rhetorically to create a position for the woman writing. If in the end we must agree with Virginia Sapiro that Wollstonecraft "remained caught in a gender-bound language that was part of the mechanism of her own thinking" (1992, 221), I argue that she has transformed the fetters of this constraint in a daring appropriation of the masculinized values of rhetoric in order to enable the idea of a woman writing.

In the Vindication a new cast of characters commands the stage of writing. Where once the muscular intellectual warrior proposed and defended virtue in the agons of the marketplace, Wollstonecraft heroicized the exceptional woman writer; where the effete dandy held sway, the nemesis of the intellectual warrior, Wollstonecraft carved out the site of the woman of fashion. While these idealizations and abominations served Enlightenment arguments advancing the new bourgeois virtues of a middle station, they werealso discursive responses to a long-standing rhetorical tradition that had obsessively canonized male virility as the driving force of rational persuasion.

Wollstonecraft, having visited upon the female body the familiar play of virtue, health, and productivity that canonical rhetoric had imagined on the male body, has indeed, as Cora Kaplan (1985) has argued, fatefully dichotomized the choice for Enlightenment women between a life of reason or passion. Yet, in order to invert a long-standing tradition of masculinized excellence in writing, Wollstonecraft apparently has accepted the dichotomous terms of rhetoric's vision of virtuous and vicious practice only in order to appropriate the idea of body for her own use. Wollstonecraft's female icon is a reversal, then, of Quintilian's trope of the emasculated man, the eunuch who occupied the site of such failure in the canonical transmission of advice on rhetoric. With such a sleight of hand, Wollstonecraft deployed on the body of her own sex the same projection of illness, depletion, and infertility that had represented the failure to be sufficiently manly in the Enlightenment transmission of classical rhetoric.

Not only did Wollstonecraft reverse Quintilian's trope of writing failure, emasculation, by positing the body of a diseased corrupted woman; she also literalized the "fecundity" that Quintilian had imagined as the manly production of virtuous speech. Insisting on reason as a female provenance, Wollstonecraft returned such notions as "fertility" and "production" to the material body from which traditional rhetoric had abstracted them as masculine virtues describing good writing. No disembodied productivity, writerly fecundity and bodily reproduction fuse in Wollstonecraft's insistence on rational motherhood.

Wollstonecraft turned canonical rhetoric on its head: not the "good man," but the "good woman"; not rhetorical evil as emasculation, but rhetorical evil as spoilage of the uterus. The outcome of vitiation is imagined still as a barren, corrupt body, but as the body of a woman; the outcome of virtue is imagined as reproduction of the body and production of the mind, a separate and different female virtue to contend for space in the pantheon of human values.

In transposing the site of virtuous and vicious practice from the male body to the female, Mary Wollstonecraft enabled a public sphere for a woman writing. Indeed, one might add that in imagining herself the exceptional woman writer Wollstonecraft has not entirely foreclosed a woman's more integrated and cohesive emotional and rational life. Through the rhetorical act of insisting on exceptions, Wollstonecraft undermined the logic by which limitations on a woman's sphere may be argued as inevitably and naturally emanating from her sexual condition.

Moreover, imagining the woman writing, Wollstonecraft redefined the nature of sterile viciousness. Vice, conducive to sterility, failure to produce, is no longer the besetting ill of a male body invaded by the feminine. Rather than the subverting attractions ofthe feminine, vice is described as the besetting ills of inherited privilege, aristocratic indolence similarly inviting sterility when illness reproduced itself in diseased "half-formed" beings. More particularly, Wollstonecraft, in claiming the viciousness of inherited privilege, denied the legitimacy of inherited privilege itself, of which the oldest is that of the male. The woman who claimed when she arrived in London that she was the first of a new genus transmogrified the "good man" tradition of rhetoric to make a space for another author, womanly, independent, and no slave to passion, someone who might dispel the ghosts of Horace Walpole's hyena from the scene of writing.

Notes

¹ Readers are probably familiar with the recent novel by Frances Sherwood based on Mary Wollstonecraft's life (New York, 1993).

²1 explore this discursive masculinized tradition in my work Manly Writing: Rhetoric, Gender, and the Rise of Composition (1993).

³ Mary Wollstonecraft dedicated the Vindication to the French minister Talleyrand, hoping her words might find a more sympathetic audience among those who were advancing the rights of man. She directly addresses both men and women as she writes. She reassuringly cajoles "but, fair and softly gentle reader, male or female" (259) or, often in the diction of a jeremiad, when she exhorts "O my sisters" (238) or "Be just then, 0 ye men of understanding" (319). All references to the Vindication of the Rights of Woman are to the Penguin edition (1992).

⁴ See John Barrell's (1983) historical account of class and language in the eighteenth century.

⁵ Bacon (1955) wrote of "turning with united forces against the Nature of Things, to storm and occupy her castles and strongholds" (x). He described nature as "under constraint and vexed," "forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded" "by the hands of man" (447).

⁶ Aristotle said, "We ought in fairness to fight our case with no help beyond the bare facts: nothing, therefore, should matter except the proof of those facts. Still, as has been already said, other things affect the result considerably, owing to the defects of our hearers. The arts of language cannot help having a small but real importance, whatever it is we have to expound to others: the way in which a thing is said does affect its intelligibility" (Rhetoric 3.1.1404A).

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