SOURCE: "Nasty Tricks and Tropes: Sexuality and Language in Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman," Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer 1993, pp. 177-210.

[In this essay, Furniss examines Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman in an attempt to understand her feminism, at least in part, as an extension of the middle-class struggle for the "rights of man" and the establishment of a bourgeois society—both of which, Furniss claims, problematize Wollstonecraft's relevance to contemporary social issues.]

The following discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman necessarily raises general questions about the textual analysis of texts which have become important in the history of a political movement. It is intended as a deconstructive reading of Rights of Woman which traces and analyzes the contradictions of its project by situating it within a network of texts which constitutes one of its discursive contexts. In this way, it attempts to restage the text's crucial intervention in the Revolution Controversy and its bid to influence the deliberations of the National Assembly. But although the reading thereby suggests that Wollstonecraft's feminism can be partly understood as an extension of an essentially middle-class struggle for, and theory about, the "rights of man," this is not to judge the text from a historical moment which "knows better" (for one thing, "middle class" means differently now than it did at the end of the eighteenth century). One of the consequences of the following reading, therefore, is implicitly to question the supposition that Rights of Woman contains a "relevance" which can be unproblematically extracted and appropriated for contemporary struggles which are at once continuous with it and crucially different. To search this text for relevance is potentially to fail to recognize its difference (fromitself as well as from ourselves), and hence overlook the challenges it can pose to sympathetic and unsympathetic readers alike. As Gillian Beer argues, "The encounter with the otherness of earlier literature can allow us to recognize and challenge our own assumptions" as well as "those of the society in which we live."¹

One of the most significant political lessons we are still learning from deconstruction is that no position is immune from or able to stand outside of the unpredictable "tricks" of the textuality it encounters. It is especially important for the discourse and criticism of radical politics to open itself to this possibility, since it habitually claims to ground itself in some reality or truth outside discourse. Producing gaps and contradictions in the texts of the past which have been assigned the warning label "reactionary" has come to be seen as a radical reading practice, yet all too often such reading strategies are carried out as if from a place of safety—on the assumption, perhaps, that if we take the necessary precautions we will not be affected, or infected, by the texts we encounter. Beer suggests that such reading practices assume that we can stand outside history "like those late nineteenth-century doctors who described their patients and yet exempted themselves from the processes of disease and decay they described." We must ask ourselves, therefore, whether "Our necessary search for gaps, lacunae, as analytical tools may have the effect of privileging and defending us," allowing us to think that we read from a place of "authority and externality" (Beer 69). In other words, such guarded encounters with "reactionary" texts may end up repeating the reactionary position which they set out to read against and undo.

A radical reading, then, can neither simply condemn reactionary texts nor appropriate radical texts: "Radical reading is not a reading that simply assimilates past texts to our concerns but rather an activity that tests and de-natures our assumptions in the light of the strange languages and desires of past writing" (Beer 80). This is to acknowledge that texts actively affect the position from which they are read—that they might unsettle, or "read," the assumptions which are brought to bear upon them. This means that there are risks involved in producing radical readings of "reactionary" texts. Our reading of texts labelled "radical" will involve even greater risks in proportion to the extent that particular readings of such texts constitute the grounds of our own politics. But if we cannot avoid that risk (unless we abstain from reading and thinking altogether), and if we cannot limit these effects except by transforming our radicalism into a conviction criticism which unwittingly shares aspects of the conviction politics it seeks to criticize, then perhaps we ought to be alert to the ways a more "open" radicalism might result from such encounters with the otherness of other texts.²

To represent the relation between a reading and a text in terms of encounters and infections (and relations) is clearly to invoke, and be informed by, contemporary questions of sexuality and sexual politics. Such metaphors also inform—though in ways whosedifference we must be open to—Wollstonecraft's reading of questions about sexuality and gender at the end of the eighteenth century. I will suggest that such metaphors come to inhabit Wollstonecraft's text partly through her encounter with the texts of Edmund Burke—in which, at different moments, women and revolutionary thought are figured and resisted as sources of an infection fatal to human and political constitutions. The irony, and the interest, of Wollstonecraft's critique of Burke is that while she identifies and criticizes this figurative pattern in Burke it also infects and energizes her attempt to isolate and resist it. A reading of Wollstonecraft's reading of Burke can therefore become an exemplary reading of the complexities of reading.

I. Reading Burke's Aesthetics Against his Politics

One of the principal projects and strategies of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is to turn Rousseau's egalitarian principles against his negative characterization of women in Emile (1762).³ The arguments of Rights of Woman are based on Wollstonecraft's answer to the recurrent question of whether inequality arises from nature or from culture. Wollstonecraft stresses throughout her text that the weakness and sensuality attributed to a certain class of women in eighteenth-century Europe are not part of their biological nature but the inevitable results of their education and social conditioning. She states her "profound conviction that the neglected education of my fellow creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore, and that women, in particular, are rendered weak and wretched by a variety of concurring causes."⁴ One of the central assumptions of Rights of Woman is that a transformation of education and social mores would bring about a transformation in women which would in turn transform the whole of social and political life. Wollstonecraft thus offers her book as "a treatise … on female rights and manners" designed to counter the prevailing tendency to make women "alluring mistresses [rather] than affectionate wives and rational mothers" (RW 79).

But although the physical, intellectual, and moral debility of women is culturally produced and therefore susceptible of being transformed by cultural transformations, Wollstonecraft is at pains to stress that she does not intend to transgress the natural order of things:

In the government of the physical world it is observable that the female in point of strength is, in general, inferior to the male. This is the law of Nature; and it does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favour of woman. A degree of physical superiority cannot, therefore, be denied, and it is a noble prerogative! But not content with this natural preeminence, men endeavour to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment. (RW 80)⁵

Not wishing to violate nature's law, Wollstonecraft wrestles with those cultural forces which extend and exploit natural differences through defining the feminine as a more than natural weakness. In thus attacking the predominant representation of women, Wollstonecraft implicitly concurs with the eighteenth century's negative valuation of the "feminine."⁶ At the same time, however, she sets out to redefine "masculinity" as a set of "manly virtues" which, since they consist of "those talents and virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character," may be cultivated by both sexes. Since the acquisition of such virtues "raises females in the scale of animal being," Wollstonecraft expects that "all those who view [women] with a philosophic eye must, I should think, wish with me, that they may every day grow more and more masculine" (RW 80).

Although his name is relegated to the footnotes of Rights of Woman, the paradigms Wollstonecraft engages with and employs in these passages indicate that Right of Woman is a critical response to Edmund Burke as much as to Rousseau.⁷ I want briefly to sketch how Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) exposes the way the politics of Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) draws upon the aesthetics Burke develops in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757/59). This will allow me to argue that Wollstonecraft's great insight in Rights of Men is that the political assumptions embedded in Burke's early aesthetics are inimical to the politics Burke appears to promote in Reflections towards the end of his life.⁸

In the Philosophical Enquiry, the aesthetic distinction between the sublime and the beautiful is underpinned by a distinction between masculine and feminine respectively. The beautiful (ie. the feminine) is associated with relaxation and luxury and is represented as dangerously debilitating for the body. Burke claims that although beauty is alluring, it has potentially fatal effects on the human beings who cultivate or admire it. When we observe beauty, Burke argues, we experience "an inward sense of melting and languor"; this is because "beauty acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system."⁹ The consequences of this relaxation are quite alarming since it "not only disables the members from performing their functions, but takes away the vigorous tone of fibre which is requisite for carrying on the natural and necessary secretions." Even more alarming is the suggestion that

in this languid and inactive state, the nerves are more liable to the most horrid convulsions, than when they are sufficiently braced and strengthened. Melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder, is the consequence of the gloomy view we take of things in this relaxed state of body. (PE 135)

Immediately prior to this, Burke argues that terror—theprimary source of the sublime—induces "an unnatural tension and certain violent emotions of the nerves" which produces pain accompanied by a delight which is utterly different from the pleasure associated with the beautiful (PE 134). The bracing effects of the sublime (ie. the masculine) is thus constituted as the most effective preventative against the relaxing effects of the beautiful:

The best remedy for all these evils is exercise or labour … Now, as a due exercise is essential to the coarse muscular parts of the constitution, and that without this rousing they would become languid, and diseased, the very same rule holds with regard to those finer parts we have mentioned [ie. the imagination and the other "mental powers"]; to have them in proper order, they must be shaken and worked to a proper degree. (PE 135)

Frances Ferguson shows how Philosophical Enquiry implicitly suggests that the beautiful is equally dangerous for the body politic and for the body, and that the antidote for both is the same—the "masculine" exertions involved in the sublime.¹⁰ Reading between the lines here, Burke seems to be suggesting that society, and each member of that society, can only resist or prevent "horrid convulsions" by being "shaken and worked to a proper degree."

In Refleetions, on the other hand (as Wollstonecraft was the first to point out), Burke seems to abandon the political position implicit in this aesthetics. The most well-known instance of this is his defense of monarchical beauty in the person of Marie Antoinette, whose treatment by the revolutionary crowd at Versailles on 5-6 October 1789 becomes a micro-drama of the Revolution's violation of the ancien regime. Shortly before his celebration of the queen's beauty, Burke has her escaping "almost naked" from a "band of cruel ruffians and assassins" who invade her chamber." This becomes the occasion for Burke's lament for the passing of the age of chivalry—a code of behavior which ought to be valued because,

Without force, or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, [and] compelled stem authority to submit to elegance. (170-71)

In other words, whereas the beautiful in Philosophical Enquiry is alluring but potentially fatal to body and body politic alike, in Reflections it is presented as a crucial corrective to the sublime aspects of political power. Curiously, the beautiful is explicitly presented as a set of "pleasing illusions" constituting a necessary supplement or fiction figured as a drapery which the Revolution threatens to tear away:

All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moralimagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature … are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. (Refs 171)

If this passage makes an analogy between the fate of the queen at Versailles and that of European civilization as a whole (in that both are left exposed and vulnerable), the consequences of this are concentered in the change in the way men will henceforth regard women:

On this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general… is to be regarded as romance and folly. (Refs 171)

If a particular kind of woman (or way of regarding women) forms a paradigm of that which is being destroyed by the Revolution, another, seemingly very different, class of women epitomizes the most uncontrollable forces of destruction. As a prelude to his eulogy of Marie Antoinette and lament for the passing of the political culture she represents, Burke figures the Revolution's chief protagonists as a set of lower class women more brutal and inhuman than their male counterparts (Refs 159-65). In Burke's text, these women are not only the unrepresented (because of their class and sex), but the unrepresentable—an excess which society would overlook and exclude but which never-theless returns with a vengeance. Since, for Burke (as for Rousseau), women's power over men ought to derive from weakness rather than strength (see Emile 322), the "brutal" behavior of these "masculine" women represents a terrifying revolution in manners.

I have reviewed these passages in Reflections, which are almost too well-known, in order fully to register how insightful Wollstonecraft's readings of Burke are and how these readings have a crucial impact on the feminist assumptions developed in Rights of Woman. In her two Vindications, Wollstonecraft directly encounters the sexualized nature of Burke's representation of ancien regime politics and aesthetics. Wollstonecraft endorses Burke's negative conception of feminine beauty in Philosophical Enquiry in order to remount the critique of the ancien regime which is implicit in that text, and to turn its aesthetic theory against the politics of Reflections. If, in Reflections, Burke laments the passing of the age of chivalry, Wollstonecraft celebrates and hastens that passing; if Burke is terrified by the prospect of "masculine" women and eulogizes Marie Antoinette as a feminine icon, Wollstonecraft would eliminate (through their own exertions) the "femininity" of monarchs, aristocracy, soldiers, and so on, as well as that of fashionable women.

Wollstonecraft's attempt to rewrite Burke's aesthetics is centralto this project. Although her politics lead her to value the sublime as an aesthetic which promotes individual exercise and labor, the philosophical basis of that politics also impels her to claim that reason, far from being antithetical to the sublime, as Burke argues, is the most sublime of human faculties. In addition, she attempts to articulate a "good," almost neoclassical conception of the beautiful to set in opposition to "feminine" beauty. This radical recasting of Burke's aesthetics begins in the opening pages of Rights of Men:

truth, in morals, has ever appeared to me the essence of the sublime; and in taste, simplicity the only criterion of the beautiful.

truly sublime is the character that acts from principle, and governs the inferior springs of action without slackening their vigour.¹²

Responding to Burke's anxiety that the revolution in manners which took place on 5-6 October 1789 exposes woman as an animal not of the highest order and transforms homage to women in general into romance and folly, Wollstonecraft counters that it is courtly homage itself, rather than revolutionary politics, which reduces women's humanity: "such homage vitiates them, prevents their endeavouring to obtain solid personal merit; and, in short, makes those beings vain inconsiderate dolls" (RMen 54). The feminine beauty cultivated by and characteristic of the ancien regime is, for Wollstonecraft, mere "animal perfection" (RMen 114). One of the effects, she suggests, of Philosophical Enquiry is to induce women themselves to cultivate this debilitating image of the beautiful by convincing them "that littleness and weakness are the very essence of beauty" (RMen 112). But the crucial point here is that Wollstonecraft's understanding of both feminine beauty, which "relaxes the solids of the soul as well as the body" (RMen 115), and her antidote to it, concurs with Burke's in Philosophical Enquiry:

you have clearly proved that one half of the human species, at least, have not souls; and that Nature, by making women little, smooth, delicate, fair creatures, never designed that they should exercise their reason to acquire the virtues that produce opposite, if not contradictory, feelings. (RMen 113-14)

In fact, as an antidote to feminine beauty, Wollstonecraft's "good" beauty might also be called "manly" beauty—since it is characterized and brought about, like the sublime, through exertion. Wollstonecraft points out that the logical consequence of Burke's analysis of the beautiful in Pholosophical Enquiry ought to be that "we must endeavour to banish all enervating modifications of beauty from civil society" (RMen 115), but she imagines and sponsors a quite different kind of beauty to this which would bebeneficial to human and political constitutions:

should experience prove that there is a beauty in virtue, a charm in order, which necessarily implies exertion, a depraved sensual taste may give way to a more manly one—and melting feelings to rational satisfactions. (RMen 116)

This "manly" beauty, however, can only be achieved in an egalitarian society and so Wollstonecraft looks forward to what the members of the National Assembly can achieve through "active exertions that were not relaxed by a fastidious respect fo the beauty of rank" (RMen 117).

Of particular importance for the following discussion of Rights of Woman is the way Rights of Men distinguishes these different kinds of beauty as the naked and the clothed:

Is hereditary weakness necessary to render religion lovely? and will her form have lost the smooth delicacy that inspires love, when stripped of its Gothic drapery? … is there no beauteous proportion in virtue, when not clothed in a sensual garb?

Of these questions there would be no end, though they lead to the same conclusion;—that your politics and morals, when simplified, would undermine religion and virtue to set up a spurious, sensual beauty, that has long debauched your imagination, under the specious form of natural feelings. (RMen 120-21)

Wollstonecraft seems, then, to share Rousseau's impulse to "strip man's nature naked."¹³ This is driven by an anxiety that although the pleasing illusions of life may be figured as if they were merely clothes ("Gothic drapery," "sensual garb"), they work to surreptitiously "undermine" the human forms and/or institutions they seem to decorate or protect and to "debauch" the imagination which contemplates them.

2. Deflowering the Language

The necessity of Wollstonecraft's celebration of the "manly" is clear in that it forms a paradigm by which radicalism can differentiate its political structures and theories of language from those corrupted and corrupting forms which it identifies as characteristic of the ancien regime. In the second Vindication the notion of the "manly" allows Wollstonecraft to rescue a certain class of women ("those in the middle class, because they appear to be in the most natural state" [RW81]) from women's association with the corruptions of a feminized ancien regime—as well as from the regime of sexual difference itself. Such women are presented as being able to realize, through self-effort and through a different political system and culture, their "true" nature (which, like men's, is a "manly" blend of rationality and authentic feeling).

In defining her program to encourage women toward such attainments, and in her reasons for doing so, Wollstonecraft's reading of Burke's Philosophical Enquiry becomes apparent:

I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinements of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt. (RW 82)

That reference to "soft phrases" indicates how much Wollstonecraft's project is bound up with questions of language and suggests that her conceptions about language are gendered according to the gender codes she inherits from reactionary and radical discourse alike. Unexpectedly concurring with Hamlet's vitriolic attack on women, Wollstonecraft asserts that they sacrifice "strength of body and mind … to libertine notions of beauty," that their desire merely to marry well makes animals of them, and that "when they marry they act as such children may be expected to act—they dress, they paint, and nickname God's creatures." The "pretty superlatives" current in fashionable society "vitiate the taste, and create a kind of sickly delicacy that turns away from simple unadorned truth" (RW 83, 82).¹⁴ Thus it is possible to see that figurative analogies are being developed in Rights of Woman between sexuality, political systems, and rhetorical language. All three domains are discussed in terms of the relationship between dress and body, and in all three Wollstonecraft's politics impel her to distrust the clothed and to valorize the unadorned.

This necessarily leads Wollstonecraft into a consideration of her own rhetorical practice:

Animated by this important object, 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, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart. I shall be employed about things, not words! and, anxious to render my sex more respectable members of society, I shall try to avoid that flowery diction which has slided from essays into novels, and from novels into familiar letters and conversations. (RW 82)

Wollstonecraft's concern to deflower her language here draws on a general set of assumptions about language and its relation to politics articulated in the discourse of radical politics at the end of the eighteenth century. We will see, however, that the claim to employ a straightforward, transparent language as part of a critique of the "false" rhetoric through which the old order maintained power (a claim which has been reiterated by radicalthought across history) is a founding rhetorical gesture in what is actually a densely and complexly rhetorical text—an enabling fiction which potentially undermines the distinction between radical and reactionary discourse it is used to establish.¹⁵

Although Rights of Woman can be read as a critique of male-centered radicalism which turns its egalitarian principles against its failure to extend them to women,¹⁶ there are many similarities between Wollstonecraft's Vindications and Paine's Rights of Man—the second part of which was published almost simultaneously with Rights of Woman. Both make the rhetorical gesture of discarding rhetoric in the process of criticizing the false rhetoric of the old order, and both figure the adornments of the ancien regime as feminine and dangerous. Both prescribe the same panacea—the masculinization of society through fundamental reforms in politics, language, aesthetics, and ethics. This process can be seen, for example, in Paine's critique of monarchy:

what is called monarchy, always appears to me a silly, contemptible thing. I compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to be open, and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter. (RMan 204).

In contrast to this,

In the representative system of government, nothing of this can happen. Like the nation itself, it … presents itself on the open theatre of the world in a fair and manly manner. Whatever are its excellencies or its defects, they are visible to all. It exists not by fraud and mystery … but inspires a language, that, passing from heart to heart, is felt and understood. (RMan 204)

Paine's figuration of monarchy—in terms of its displacement of affect onto dress—aligns it with Burke's and Rousseau's representation of femininity, whereas representative government is at once "fair and manly." The "manly" representative system stands naked on the world's stage, openly displaying its own excellencies and defects (in marked contrast to Burke's desire to cover the "defects" of our naked shivering nature). Behind monarchy's implicitly feminine veils, on the other hand, Paine hints that there is nothing to see at all.

For Paine and Wollstonecraft, then, "masculine" and "feminine" are paradigms for two opposed systems of thought and practice. The feminine characterizes the ancien régime in a range of ways which become correlatives of one another: its language is ornate and polished but lacks both force and a motivated relation to "reality"; its political arrangements are said to be based on little more than a conventional, though mysticized relation between rulers and ruled (in which the masses are seduced into submissionby ceremonies and splendor, and in which the signs of authority—robes, ornamentation, custom—dazzle the sense and distract attention from the lack of substance behind them). The converse and antidote of these is the "manly"—that which is on open display, which says what it means, and is genuinely representative without reserve or equivocation.¹⁷

And yet the company's burst of laughter in Paine's text is perhaps an uneasy one. For although representative government is on open display, Paine's figure does not quite reveal the whole truth about monarchy. We are assured that we would laugh if we accidentally saw behind the curtain, but we are not told what we would laugh at. Paine's own figure thus turns out to conceal as much as reveal, and his open, representational language, "passing from heart to heart," seems unwittingly to repeat the deceptive structures it claims to expose. Paine's language therefore retains its power of arousing speculation through a concealment analogous to the one he criticizes. The attempt to distinguish the "sexual difference" of different governmental forms and between different rhetorical structures unexpectedly confuses the difference between them. One of the concerns of the present paper is to trace the way Wollstonecraft's texts become entangled in their own particular version of this endemic problem in late-eighteenth century radical thought.

3. Prescribing to the National Assembly

We have seen that Wollstonecraft's argument is grounded on the possibility that "masculine" and "feminine" are not anatomically determined, and that both men and women are capable of achieving "manly" virtues through self-effort and education. The Protestant work ethic, Enlightenment rationality, and the commercialization of society are combined in representing the middle class capitalist ethos as a masculinization of society open to men and women alike. This is urgent for Wollstonecraft, because the condition of women in prerevolutionary societies is shown to be symptomatic of an endemic cultural malaise. I want to begin this section by examining the way this set of assumptions informs Wollstonecraft's prescription for the National Assembly, in which she suggests that the continued feminization of women would inevitably undermine the new society being developed in France. This allows me to argue that the repression of the feminine is for Wollstonecraft both a means of liberating women and a way of preventing women from undermining the bourgeois enterprise.

If the argument and concerns of Rights of Woman are shaped by its response to Rousseau, Burke, and Paine, Wollstonecraft's text also addresses itself to a still more immediate political context. Wollstonecraft's dedication of Rights of Woman to M. Talleyrand-Périgord shows that her book is conceived not only as a treatise on female manners and language but as a practical political intervention on behalf of women's rights. The National Assembly was considering a national system of education with Rousseau as its principal inspiration, and Talleyrand had prepared a report on public education for the Constituent Assembly which had failed to extend Rousseau's egalitarian ideals to the equal education of women. This is why "In 1792 … between the fall of the Bastille and the Terror when A Vindication was written, it must have seemed crucial that Rousseau's crippling judgement of female nature be refuted" (Kaplan, "Pandora's Box" 156). Although Wollstonecraft claims she has "read [Talleyrand's report] with great pleasure," she finds it defective with regard to women's education and seeks to "induce" him "to reconsider the subject and maturely weigh what I have advanced respecting the rights of woman and national education" (RW 85).¹⁸

Wollstonecraft addresses the Assembly through Talleyrand, thinking it "scarcely possible" that, having read her treatise, "some of the enlarged minds who formed your admirable constitution, will [not] coincide with me" (RW 85). Indeed, Wollstonecraft's argument in the dedication is eloquent and forceful; the principles which make the rights of men irrefutable apply equally, and with the same effect, to women:

Consider, Sir, dispassionately, these observations, for a glimpse of this truth seemed to open before you when you observed, "that to see one half of the human race excluded by the other from all participation of government, was a political phenomenon that, according to abstract principles, it was impossible to explain." If so, on what does your constitution rest? If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of woman, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test; though a different opinion prevails in this country, built on the very arguments which you use to justify the oppression of woman—prescription. (RW 87).¹⁹

Thus, on the question of women's rights, even the Revolution seems to mimic Burke's recourse to the long usage of custom in order to justify things as they are. This style of argument is employed by "tyrants of every denomination," and "if women are to be excluded, without having a voice, from a participation of the natural rights of mankind," then "this flaw in your NEW CONSTITUTION will ever show that man must, in some shape, act like a tyrant" (RW 87 and 88). Thus, if the revolutionary government were to ignore the question of women's rights and education, it would build into its constitution the same "flaw" which had brought aristocratic society to its own crisis. This one prejudice (an opinion formed prior to reason) will necessarily prejudice (injure or impair) a constitution which claims to be formed upon principles of reason.²⁰ Thus Wollstonecraft closes her dedication with the request that "when your constitution is revised, the Rights of Woman may be respected" (RW 89).

4. Towards a Revolution in Female Manners

In the same moment that Wollstonecraft makes the unprecedented suggestion to the National Assembly that "women ought to have representatives" (which she expects will "excite laughter"), the potentially more radical implications of women's ambiguous place in prerevolutionary societies are touched upon:

But, as the whole system of representation is now, in this country, only a convenient handle for despotism, [women] … need not complain, for they are as well represented as a numerous class of hard-working mechanics. (RW 259, 260)

Such parallels between women and disenfranchised men continue throughout her text. Responding to Rousseau's suggestion that women should have "but little liberty [because] … they are apt to indulge themselves excessively in what is allowed them" (Emile 333), Wollstonecraft suggests that the reason for this tendency "is very simple":

Slaves and mobs have always indulged themselves in the same excesses, when once they broke loose from authority. The bent bow recoils with violence, when the hand is suddenly relaxed that forcibly held it. (RW 179)

Again answering Rousseau, Wollstonecraft says that his argument that some should not be educated like men is in "the same strain" as those of men who "argue against instructing the poor":

"Teach them to read and write," say they, "and you take them out of the station assigned them by nature." An eloquent Frenchman has answered them, I will borrow his sentiments. "But they know not, when they make man a brute, that they may expect every instant to see him transformed into a ferocious beast." (RW 154)

Elsewhere, and for similar reasons, Wollstonecraft likens women to "the poor African slaves," to "savages," and to "Butler's caricature of a dissenter" (RW 257, 311, 318). Regardless of which class they "properly" belong to, then, women have a political kinship with the most subjected or marginal groups in aristocratic societies. This is potentially to collapse the difference between queens and the women of the Revolution—though we will see that Wollstonecraft excludes both lower and upper class women from the revolution she envisages.

Wollstonecraft goes on to show that the analogy between women and the poor does not fully bring out the implications of Rousseau's objection to educating women:

"Educate women like men," says Rousseau, "and the more they resemble our sex the less power they will have over us." This is the very point I aim at. I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves. (RW 154; see Emile 327)

Women's "power" in Rousseau is paradoxically proportional to their educational inferiority to men. The relation between men and women is therefore not straightforwardly translatable into that between rich and poor because the sexuality of the relation introduces certain contradictions which subvert the apparent hierarchy.²¹ For Patricia Parker the power which Sophie's weakness gives her over Emile "introduces … a crucial instability" into "the binary opposition of strength and passivity" (Literary Fat Ladies 203). In fact, Wollstonecraft's own text draws out the contradictory place of women in an aristocratic order, for if they are in many ways analogous to the oppressed and disenfranchised, women are also "a sex, who, like kings, always see things through a false medium"; a sex who "The passions of men have … placed … on thrones"; and a sex whose condition—since they are born "with certain sexual privileges"—is compared to that of "the rich" (RW 128, 146, 148). The situation and consequent effects of women and the rich are the same:

Weak, artificial beings, raised above the common wants and affections of their race, in a premature unnatural manner, undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through the whole mass of society. (RW 81)

As both Vindications recognize, and as Frances Ferguson theorizes, the danger of the beautiful—or of what Wollstonecraft identifies as "mistaken notions of beauty" (RW 182)—is that it can be contagious, surreptitiously recreating (and therefore undermining) the onlooker, and eventually a whole society, in its own image.²²

Thus the obsessions and occupations women are educated to adopt allow parallels to be drawn between their condition and various central institutions of traditional society—including the monarchy, the aristocracy, military forces, and even the clergy.²³ In prerevolutionary societies, women occupy, precariously but perhaps subversively, the place at once of the highest and the lowest in society. They are equivalent both to the class which governs but does not represent, and to those classes which are unrepresented and unrepresentable. Dress, manners, custom, and chivalrous gallantry appear to keep up the distinction between women as monarchs and women as slaves, but are in fact precisely the means of enslaving women (and men) at one and the same time. These "pleasing illusions" seem to exalt women, but such exaltation is also their debasement. Such social mores render women equivocal, ambiguous, irresolvably oxymoronic—they are, Wollstonecraft ironically writes, "the fair defects in Nature" (RW 160).²⁴ Women so constituted are potentially disruptive of the society which constitutes them: akin at once to the monarchy and to the mob, they show how monarchy and mob might be mirror images of, or mutually implicated with, one another. By foregrounding and extrapolating the implications of such figurations of women, Rights of Woman thus shows how those images which have been identified as paradigmaticof aristocratic society also undermine its central institutions and hierarchies.

This is to offer a second opinion on Burke's diagnosis of the crisis in civilization facing Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. For Wollstonecraft, the disease is not French revolutionary thought (whose egalitarian principles are rather the antidote), but the maintenance of hierarchical institutions which have become prejudicial to society itself: "It is the pestiferous purple which renders the progress of civilization a curse," and the "baneful lurking gangrene is most quickly spread by luxury and superstition" (RW 99). This was Rousseau's diagnosis too, but he failed to realize that "the nature of the poison points out the antidote" (RW 99). In other words, for Wollstonecraft, the European crisis cannot be treated by reestablishing feminized institutions and manners, as Burke argued, nor by chaining women to femininity, as in Rousseau, but by instituting rational, egalitarian—in a word, "manly"—political organizations and cultural codes. This radical revolution can only take place if it simultaneously transforms (through effort and education) gender roles as well as class divisions. This is why the burden of this text is to help "effect a revolution in female manners" in order that women might "labour by reforming themselves to reform the world" (RW 132).

5. Deconstructing Differences: Manners and Modesty

Part of Wollstonecraft's radical importance is that she tries to show that gender and sexuality—at least in the ancien régime—are not only socially constructed but have an unstable and shifting relation to biological sex. Femininity is neither a natural quality of the female sex, nor is it confined to that sex. Defined as an undue attachment to appearance (to pluming and plumage) rather than substance, femininity crosses gender divisions and begins to confuse them. It thus undermines the distinction between the sexes in a society which is in many ways founded on such distinctions. But although Wollstonecraft's antidote is to make women (and men) more "manly," her position is more ambivalent and potentially conservative than it would appear. Her description of sexuality in the ancien régime is an anxious one, but it is not clear that the problem would be resolved by introducing a different set of images or an alternative social structure. If "Riches and hereditary honours have made cyphers of women" (RW 106), then Wollstonecraft attempts utterly to distinguish between "secondary things," such as dress and ornamentation (RW 151), and that which ought to be primary and proper to women as human beings: women "have been stripped of the virtues that should clothe humanity, [and] have been decked with artificial graces that enable them to exercise a short-lived tyranny" (RW 121). But there are uncomfortable parallels here between the cause of the disease and its cure: for if women "have been stripped of the virtues that should clothe humanity" (my emphasis), virtue seems to be a custom or costume in much the same way as the "artificial graces" which women have been"decked with." Thus Wollstonecraft shies away from stripping woman naked—perhaps because she fears that behind the dress and before social conditioning there may be no essential self at all, merely (as Burke notoriously puts it) an animal not of the highest order.

Instead of simply stripping away the false ornaments which have corrupted them, then, Wollstonecraft also seeks to dress women more "wholesomely." In the dedication to Talleyrand, she distinguishes between manners and modesty: "a polish of manners … injures the substance by hunting sincerity out of society," while "modesty … [is] the fairest garb of virtue" (RW 86). According to this, neither manners nor morals—neither "polish" nor "garb"—are intrinsic to the "substance" or "virtue" (of society or individual), but are added to it. Both, then, are supplements to what Burke calls "our naked … nature." For Wollstonecraft, the difference between modesty and manners is that the polish of manners "injures the substance," while the garb of modesty seemingly protects and reinforces it. Thus manners and modesty are distinguished in the way that Jacques Derrida finds Rousseau desperately trying to distinguish between the benign and the dangerous supplement.²⁵ Wollstonecraft is therefore caught up in the same problematic as Rousseau and Burke—though she would argue that both of them have offered the wrong solution by mistaking the dangerous for the benign supplement. For Wollstonecraft, such a "mistake" is peculiar to and characteristic of the historical and political moment she intervenes within:

Manners and morals are so nearly allied that they have often been confounded; but, although the former should only be the natural reflection of the latter, yet, when various causes have produced factitious and corrupt manners … morality becomes an empty name (RW 86).

In a healthy (middle class, egalitarian) society, then, manners are the "natural reflection" or authentic representation of morals and attain to a degree of naturalness in their own right. But although it is only in a diseased society that manners become "factitious and corrupt," the logic here suggests that such manners—making morality "an empty name"—are at once symptom and disease. Manners are presented as either a natural representation of morals or as destructive of morality. But it might be that this all-important distinction is one without a difference, since the relation of manners to morals, of representation to represented, is the same in each case. For dress is presented here as simultaneously that which undermines and that which defends body, mind, and state. Thus dress—and its range of equivalents: manners, decorum, habit, custom, modesty—functions according to the "strange economy of the supplement": "A terrifying menace, the supplement is also the first and surest protection; against that very menace."²⁶ In this way, the supplementary relation of dress to body—which society has made women's central obsession—means that women have become a paradigm for a whole cultural problematic.²⁷

6. Maintaining Class and Sexual Difference in the Classroom

By recognizing that the ancien régime has made men "feminine" Wollstonecraft at once diagnoses its enervating effects and shows that "masculine" and "feminine" are not anatomically determined. Indeed, that "masculine" and "feminine" are political and ethical qualities is precisely why she can argue that women should become more "masculine." But the possibility that masculine and feminine are not straightforward reflections of anatomy is one of the problems Rights of Woman wrestles with as well as being the enabling grounds of its argument. The fact that Wollstonecraft does not rigidly associate the manly with men or the feminine with women begins to appear uncannily like one of the symptoms she is trying to prescribe for rather than the basis of a remedy.²⁸ If there is nothing natural or anatomical which might legitimize gender roles and behavior, then Wollstonecraft's argument is based not on the distinction between the natural and the artificial, as she often claims, but on that between two sets of social conditioning which are presented as "artificial" and "natural." If gender roles and women's characters are formed discursively (through education, example, and the world's opinion), they are susceptible of being transformed through (and for) alternative ideological and aesthetic values. But this analysis also opens up the possibility that women (and men) have no essential character prior to social conditioning. Wollstonecraft attempts, therefore, to limit the transformations which her argument both depends upon and makes possible: "I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour" (RW 147). Thus although Wollstonecraft argues that "the sexual distinction which men have so warmly insisted upon, is arbitrary" (RW 318), sexuality yet retains a differential function in the egalitarian society she envisages. Although she insists that there is no essential difference between men and women,²⁹ Wollstonecraft urgently reinscribes the difference when faced with what she believes to be monstrous transgressions of gender roles in sexual and political behavior. But if Wollstonecraft (like Burke in Philosophical Enquiry) would exclude femininity as negative, unstable, deceitful, we will see it return in her text as a troublesome problem which frustrates her efforts to establish an unequivocal politics, language, and gender.

The tensions and resistances within Wollstonecraft's text may be traced in moments where issues of education, sexuality, and class intersect. Consistent with her general argument for more openness and straight-talking—which is exemplified by her claim to have conversed "as man with man, with medical men on anatomical subjects" (RW 229)—Wollstonecraft suggests that young children should be given a basic education on sexual matters in order that the attempt to "obscure certain objects" might not "inflame their imaginations" (since "it is the modesty of affected modesty that does all the mischief"). And yet in her discussion of women's sexuality Wollstonecraft's text becomes secretive and obscure:

In nurseries and boarding schools, I fear, girls are first spoiled, particularly in the latter. A number of girls sleep in the same room, and wash together. And though I should be sorry to contaminate an innocent creature's mind by instilling false delicacy, or those prudish notions which early cautions respecting the other sex naturally engender, I should be very anxious to prevent their acquiring nasty or immodest habits; and as many girls have learned very nasty tricks from ignorant servants, the mixing them thus indiscriminately together, is very improper. (RW 234)

Wollstonecraft's project, then, turns out to depend upon a crucial but problematic distinction between "false delicacy" (the modesty of affected modesty) and that true modesty needed to prevent "immodest habits." This distinction rests, in turn, upon maintaining what seem inherently unstable class divisions. The "indiscriminate" mixing of the classes and/or young girls (the syntax does not allow us to discriminate) leads to sexual impropriety, since the "very nasty tricks" learnt from "ignorant servants" are inevitably passed on, like diseases, to other girls. Far from stripping woman's nature naked, Wollstonecraft would prohibit girls from seeing each other without clothes. Her language correspondingly drapes its subject in mystery, introducing elements of obscurity and modesty in a text which originally set out to remove them. Faced with delicate, and indelicate, subjects, her text becomes delicate and evasive, taking on the very "feminine" traits it seeks to condemn, as if "manly language" were constitutionally incapable of broaching female sexuality.³⁰

But if the improper mixing of the classes leads to sexual impropriety, there is no suggestion that the coming bourgeois order ought to erase class difference; however ignorant, servants will be necessary to free middle-class women from the chains of domestic duty. Thus in aristocratic and bourgeois society alike, differences and distances ought to be kept up—between young girls and between girls and their servants—for otherwise they might discover what makes them the same: if girls need assistance in washing, "let them not require it till that part of the business is over which ought never to be done before a fellow creature" (RW 235). "To say the truth," Wollstonecraft concludes, "women are in general too familiar with each other, which leads to that gross degree of familiarity that so frequently renders the marriage state unhappy" (RW 234). The representation of the female, here, seems in many ways to parallel that which Wollstonecraft is ostensibly writing against: girls, female servants, and women in general are presented as being in need of constant restraint; their sexuality is seen as tending almost irresistibly towards unspeakable corruptions. According to her own metaphor, Wollstonecraft seems to restring the bow in the very moment she seeks to relax the hand that holds it.³¹

In this moment of caution, the eighteenth-century's conception of the intimate relation between female sexuality and madness seems to resurface. This can be seen by juxtaposing Wollstonecraft's scene of female corruption with a passage Michel Foucault quotesconcerning the correction wards of La Salpêtrière:

"The correction ward is the place of greatest punishment for the House, containing when we visited it forty-seven girls, most of them very young, more thoughtless than guilty.… And always this confusion of ages, this shocking mixture of frivolous girls with hardened women who can teach them only the art of the most unbridled corruption."³²

Thus Wollstonecraft's concern to maintain women's "proper" sexuality for the marriage state seems compounded of an array of interrelated concerns—not only that women should form rational and virtuous companions for their husbands, but also that they might not be the vehicles for an outbreak of that madness which the age of reason lived in constant fear of.³³ Masturbation or lesbianism—practices which her "manly" language cannot openly speak of—are therefore regarded as "nasty tricks" which are dangerous not only for individual body, mind, and morality, but for the well-being of society as a whole. It is not that boys are incapable of getting up to similar kinds of tricks—Wollstonecraft also condemns the "nasty indecent tricks" which boys learn from each other in boarding schools, "not to speak of the vices, which render the body weak, whilst they effectually prevent the acquisition of any delicacy of mind" (RW 282)—but that, as this quotation shows, these unspeakable practices render the body and mind dangerously weak—ie. "feminine." "Feminine" thus becomes associated with any kind of sexual activity which lies outside the procreative act. Although Wollstonecraft might want to confound sexual difference, this would require both sexes to become more "masculine" by limiting their sexuality to reproduction.

One way of attempting to impose such limitations is to intervene in that area which most encourages sensuality—women's reading habits. Wollstonecraft distinguishes between women's and men's imaginative activity by suggesting that while male artists are able to embody their imaginings in art objects or texts, "in women's imagination, love alone concentrates these ethereal beams" (RW 156 n. 8). Debarred from creative production, women's imagination is subject to and manipulated by the imaginative creations of other people:

Novels, music, poetry, and gallantry, all tend to make women the creatures of sensation.… This overstretched sensibility naturally relaxes the other powers of the mind, and prevents intellect from attaining that sovereignty which it ought to attain to render a rational creature useful to others. (RW 152)

Reading "the unnatural and meretricious scenes sketched by the novel writers of the day" becomes an unnatural outlet for women's repressed sexuality (RW 309). With the "passions thus pampered, whilst the judgement is left unformed, what can be expected to ensue? Undoubtedly, a mixture of madness and folly!" (RW 152). Such novels provide women with a mere replica of humanpassion and a borrowed language:

the reading of novels makes women, and particularly ladies of fashion, very fond of using strong expressions and superlatives in conversation; and, though the dissipated artificial life which they lead prevents their cherishing any strong legitimate passion, the language of passion in affected tones slips for ever from their glib tongues, and every trifle produces those phosphoric bursts which only mimic in the dark the flame of passion. (RW 309)

As Kaplan puts it, Wollstonecraft thus "sets up a peculiarly gendered and sexualized interaction between women and the narrative imaginative text, one in which women become the ultimately receptive reader easily moved into amoral activity by the fictional representation of sexual intrigue" ("Pandora's Box" 160). Once again, Foucault provides a discursive context: if women were thought to especially enjoy theatrical spectacles "that inflame and arouse them," novels were thought to be "a still more artificial milieu, and … more dangerous to a disordered sensibility":

The novel constitutes the milieu of perversion, par excellence, of all sensibility …"The existence of so many authors has produced a host of readers, and continued reading generates every nervous complaint; perhaps of all the causes that have harmed women's health, the principal one has been the infinite multiplication of novels in the last hundred years… a girl who at ten reads instead of running will, at twenty, be a woman with the vapours and not a good nurse."³⁴

Yet although this description of the impact of novels on women's sexuality, language, and health seems to identify the source of corruption as cultural rather than natural, Wollstonecraft can also appear to represent women's potential corruption as arising from the female anatomy and as being in need of cultural control. In her discussion of the results of over-familiarity between females the underlying concern seems to be about female genitals and their various processes and functions. That which ought to be kept covered is at once an anatomical part or process which should not be seen and a tale which should not be told:

I could proceed still further, till I animadverted on some still more nasty customs, which men never fall into. Secrets are told where silence ought to reign; and that regard to cleanliness, which some religious sects have perhaps carried too far, especially the Essenes, amongst the Jews, by making that an insult to God which is only an insult to humanity, is violated in a beastly manner. How can delicate women obtrude on notice that part of the animal economy, which is so very disgusting? (R W 235)

Once again, an analogy is formed between women's sexuality and a secret which should not be told (even among women). And once again, Wollstonecraft's own text at once refers to female secretsand refuses to tell them. While Wollstonecraft prides herself on being able to talk as "man to man" about anatomy, she can also suggest that excessive familiarity between women is dangerous for women's moral being: "That decent personal reserve, which is the foundation of dignity of character, must be kept up between woman and woman, or their minds will never gain strength or modesty" (RW 326). Men never fall into these "nasty customs" not because they are more naturally modest, but because Wollstonecraft seems to be obliquely referring to processes characteristic of the female body. The reference to the Essenes is doubly suggestive in that this branch of the Pharisees "conformed to the most rigid rules of Levitical purity," being "particularly careful that women in the menstrual state should keep apart from the household," as well as adhering to the law which "enjoins modesty in regard to the covering of the body lest the Shekinah [i.e. the presence of God] be driven away by immodest exposure."³⁵ Woman's anatomy is her destiny here, making necessary an unremitting modesty and surveillance.

However ironic Wollstonecraft's "delicate women" might be, that irony rebounds back on the general tendency of her text to criticize the cultivation of delicacy in women. In wishing that these women would cultivate delicacy and cover up those parts of the "animal economy" which are so "disgusting" and "beastly," Wollstonecraft repeats Burke's anxieties that the stripping of Marie Antoinette reveals even the highest of women as "an animal not of the highest order" (Refs 171). If the Essenes go too far in conceiving female anatomy and its functions as an insult to God, Wollstonecraft still finds them "an insult to humanity"—a secret best kept hidden. Such anxiety spurs Wollstonecraft's text into a revealingly Burkean passage:

Perhaps, there is not a virtue that mixes so kindly with every other as modesty. It is the pale moonbeam that renders more interesting every virtue it softens, giving mild grandeur to the contracted horizon. Nothing can be more beautiful than the poetical fiction, which makes Diana with her silver crescent, the goddess of chastity. (RW 327)

Rather than exposing the naked truth of women's sexuality, Wollstonecraft's text retreats into a set of beautiful poetic fictions in a way which seems to repeat Burke's recourse to the pleasing illusions of life. Tales which should not be told are displaced by an all-too-familiar tale about women and modesty. For this repeats Rousseau's view that while men are endowed with reason to control their desires, women, being by definition lacking in reason, have been given "modesty" with which to restrain their "boundless passions" (Emile 323). Thus Wollstonecraft unexpectedly cedes to Burke's and Rousseau's view that women must be kept within the bounds of modesty's "contracted horizon." Her resolution to be employed about things rather than words breaks down when confronted with female sexuality and retreats into a language and a representation of women (a "beautiful … poetic fiction") whichit sets out to refute.

The restraint on the habits and nasty tricks women seem so prone to is linked, again, to a concern with language, since women's "sexual tricks" are associated with double entendre. Wollstonecraft objects to women's development of what she calls "bodily wit" which evolves from the "jokes and hoyden tricks" which are learnt while "shut up together in nurseries, schools, or convents," and which resemble "the double meanings which shake the convivial table when the glass has circulated freely" (RW 236). Breaking out in such enclosed female spaces, remote from the influence of men, "bodily wit" therefore seems to arise from women's potentially "corrupt" nature and is only then brought into society to engage men's wit and gallantry. What Wollstonecraft refers to by "bodily wit" is, like many of the terms in these passages, left obscure. A reading of Rousseau, however, suggests that "bodily wit" might refer to those bodily and sartorial signs through which women communicate the sexual messages which propriety denies to their verbal language. Rousseau advises the would-be lover to become proficient readers of this second language:

Why do you consult their words when it is not their mouths that speak? Consult their eyes, their colour, their breathing, their timid manner, their slight resistance, that is the language nature gave them for your answer. The lips always say "No," and rightly so; but the tone is not always the same, and that cannot lie. Has not a woman the same needs as a man, but without the same right to make them known? Her fate would be too cruel if she had no language in which to express her legitimate desires except the words which she dare not utter. (Emile 348)

Thus woman becomes an equivocal sign composed of two contradictory messages (her words say "no" but her body sometimes says "yes"). Bodily wit is women's equivalent to verbal gallantry—allowing them to pursue "coquetry" yet keep "within bounds"—and men need all their wit to participate in the dialogue.³⁶ Women's body language thus emerges as the very reverse (or betrayal) of the manly language Wollstonecraft would have both men and women cultivate. These passages imply that such a double language is almost inevitable in women without the constraints of modesty, decorum, and delicacy. In other words, the (supposedly dangerous) supplements Wollstonecraft would strip away from the body and the body politic are immediately replaced by another set of (supposedly benign) supplements indispensable to her own sociosexual ethics.³⁷ Yet the sheer complexity of Wollstonecraft's dilemma is indicated by the fact that, for Rousseau, women's bodily wit is produced precisely because they are subjected to the constraints of decorum.

Wollstonecraft is perhaps still more troubled about what she sees as the dangerous ambiguity introduced into gender by homosexuality, which she conceives to be the extension and inevitable result of a society whose sexuality has become a question of mere sensualityrather than of love and reproduction. Her analysis towards this conclusion is revealing. Nature—which "must ever be the standard of taste"—is "grossly … insulted by the voluptuary," whose "casual lust" reduces "a very considerable number of women" to "standing dishes to which every glutton may have access" (RW 248). But Wollstonecraft argues against the suggestion that prostitutes, by offering themselves to such gluttons, spare women in general. This is because prostitution and marriage are not mutually exclusive institutions but deeply implicated with one another. Married women are forced, by the false tastes which men develop through contact with prostitutes, "to assume, in some degree, the same character themselves" (RW 249). For the origin of prostitution, and of the weakness cultivated by married women in order to pander to their husbands' tastes, is one and the same: "want of chastity in men" (RW 249). But if this seems to counter the suggestion that women's sexuality is the "contagion" which debilitates society, in fact the feminine remains the problem in the form of the feminization of men. The appetite of unchaste men becomes so depraved "that a wanton stimulus is necessary to rouse it," and men are led to forget "the parental design of Nature" through a taste for "the mere person, and that for a moment" (RW 249). Once sexuality is separated from its reproductive purpose, the "person" of the object of desire entirely displaces the "natural meaning" of the act:

So voluptuous, indeed, often grows the lustful prowler, that he refines on female softness. Something more soft than women is then sought for; till, in Italy and Portugal, men attend the levees of equivocal beings, to sigh for more than female languor. (RW 249)

Wollstonecraft's doubled emphasis on the "more than female" softness and languor of these "equivocal beings" underlines the anxiety that sexuality may become detached from its meaning (its basis in reproductive anatomy) and become pure excess or irreducibly ambiguous. The beautiful recreates men in its own image and more.

For Wollstonecraft, this leads in turn to yet further depravity, since women endeavor to recreate themselves in the more than female image held up to them—becoming ever more soft and languishing in order to gratify men's tastes, but in the process depriving themselves and sexual relations of their "proper" meaning. The result of this is to render women unfit for the role which their anatomy destines them:

Women becoming, consequently, weaker in mind and body, than they ought to be, were one of the grand ends of their being taken into account, that of bearing and nursing children, [no longer] have … sufficient strength to discharge the first duty of a mother; and … either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast if off when born. (RW 249)

Poston reads this as implying that "The lascivious father spreads syphilis to his wife, who for her part is so unhealthy and weak that the embryo is naturally aborted or the child is born blind and misshapen by venereal disease" (Norton 139). But to emphasize syphilis as the prime cause of these problems in generation is to overlook both the immediate context of the passage and the larger discursive network we have been tracing. Both these contexts suggest that the more pervasive "disease" is the enervating model of femininity developed by and characteristic of late eighteenth-century aristocratic culture. The effect of this endemic epidemic is to plunge that culture into a crisis which threatens its very survival:

The weak enervated women who particularly catch the attention of libertines, are unift to be mothers, though they may conceive; so that the rich sensualist, who has rioted among women, spreading depravity and misery, when he wishes to perpetuate his name, receives from his wife only an half-formed being that inherits both its father's and its mother's weakness. (RW 249)³⁸

This is why Wollstonecraft is concerned both to eliminate femininity by making men and women more masculine and yet maintain the sexual difference involved in "proper," reproductive sexuality.³⁹

In this way, Wollstonecraft extends Burke's analysis in Philosophical Enquiry of the dangerous, yet seductive, effects of the beautiful in order to show, by implication, that Burke's celebration of the beautiful in Reflections will inevitably precipitate a crisis in the hereditary principle which forms the very basis of the society he appears to defend. Wollstonecraft's analysis suggests that if, as C. B. Macpherson argues, Burke is actually seeking to institute bourgeois capitalism by introducing it under the guise of traditional forms (or by assimilating the new order to the old), then those forms would be just as inimical to the new as to the old order.⁴⁰ In the same way, for the Revolution to ignore the question of women's rights and education would be to build into its constitution the same "flaw" which had brought aristocratic society to its own crisis. A concept of the masculine—constituted as the repression of sexuality and sensuality save for the supposedly "natural" function of reproduction—is thus developed and promoted as an antidote to the sexual confusion and debilitation which supposedly characterizes a feminized social order.

Taking advantage of the possibility that gender might have a conventional rather than natural relation to sexual anatomy in order to redefine masculinity as an ideal for both men and women, Wollstonecraft is nevertheless impelled to anchor her cultural and ideological project in "nature"—the biological reproduction of the species—and to limit the masculinization of woman through reference to "one of the grand designs of her being." This is achieved by distinguishing between "natural" reproductive functions and"unnatural" sensuality, and between aristocratic and bourgeois mores as sexual cultures which respectively impair and conform to nature. (This counters the suggestion sometimes made that Wollstonecraft was horrified by sensuality and argues instead that the repression of sensuality is inevitable to the logic of her text and the discursive network it intervenes and gets embroiled within.)

Although Wollstonecraft proposes the introduction of schools in which the sexes (and the social classes) would be educated, and dressed, alike—"to prevent any of the distinctions of vanity they [the classes? the sexes?] should be dressed alike"—she also suggests that,

After the age of nine, girls and boys, intended for domestic employments, or mechanical trades, ought to be removed to other schools, and receive instruction in some measure appropriate to the destination of each individual, the two sexes being still together in the morning; but in the afternoon the girls should attend a school, where plain work, mantua-making millinery, etc., would be their employment.

The young people of superior abilities, or fortune [of both sexes], might now be taught, in another school, the dead and living languages, the elements of science, and continue the study of history and politics, on a more extensive scale, which would not exclude polite literature. (RW 286, 287)

In other words, what in its context is an enlightened and innovative program of education is also a state apparatus for constructing new class and gender differences conductive to capitalist production. Children from the "lower orders"—those "intended" for domestic and mechanical trades—are educated into their "destined" places (a word which recalls Burke's rationale for class division), while the middle classes (marked by their "fortune" or "superior abilities") are correspondingly educated to fulfill their own "destiny." The division of education after the age of nine perpetuates, for a new political order, the different levels of language use which Olivia Smith identifies as one of the central distinctions of traditional society which radical politics set out to remove.⁴¹ Literature (as well as advanced history and politics) is reserved for middle-class children in a way which anticipates the distinction in French schools between basic and literary uses of language which Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey suggest is fundamental to the institution and maintenance of the hegemony of the bourgeoisie in France.⁴² Sex equality in secondary education is therefore reserved for middle class children—the girls of the "lower orders" being expected to learn skills "appropriate" to their "destined" adult lives (and appropriate, incidentally, to conventional ideas of women's "proper" employment). In this way, rather than dismantling the old order's ideology of destined or natural hierarchies, radical bourgeois capitalism—even in its feminist guise—simply reorganizes those hierarchies for a differentpolitical and economic interest. The revolution in female manners is reserved for middle class women—who "appear to be in the most natural state" (RW 81)—while those women who are most problematic for Burke and Wollstonecraft alike (aristocratic women and women from the "lower orders") are excluded as "unnatural" and irrecuperable. Nor is there an attempt, Wollstonecraft confesses, to "emulate masculine virtues" or "to invert the order of things" (RW 288, 109). In the end, she sums up her argument as follows: "Make women rational creatures and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives and mothers" (RW 299). Rather than being equivocal figures (undermining sexual roles and the distinction between aristocracy and mob), female citizens will dutifully fulfill their natural destiny and meaning in a bourgeois society.

Notes

¹ Gillian Beer, "Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past," The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, ed. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (London: Macmillan, 1989): 63-80 (67). Beer suggests that reading the literature of the past for its contemporary "relevance" reproduces the attitude to the past, and to the texts of the past, currently adopted by the Conservative government in Britain (67-68). For an impressive reading of Rights of Woman which both traces its historical specificity and shows how it foregrounds for analysis the assumptions of a strand of feminism in the late 1980s, see Cora Kaplan, "Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism," Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986) 31-56.

² I am alluding here to Jacques Derrida's scattered remarks about the possibility of an "open Marxism"—see, for example, James Kearns and Ken Newton, "An Interview with Jacques Derrida," Literary Review 14 (18 April-1 May 1980): 21-22; or Jacques Derrida, Positions (1972), trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981; London: Athlone, 1987) 62-67. For a full-length study which attempts to develop the possibilities raised by these hints, see Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critidal Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982).

³ Patricia Parker points out that "If the work of Rousseau is the first major attempt to justify equality among men … [Emile] also does much to elaborate … a justification of the inequality of men and women" (Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property [New York: Methuen, 1987] 203). The significance of Emile in the constitution of bourgeois gender roles is still being reconstructed by feminist critics—see Parker 201-17, and Cora Kaplan, "Wild Nights," in Sea Changes 31-56, and "Pandora's Box: Subjectivity, Class, and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism," Sea Changes 147-76.

⁴ Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) 79. This text is based on the second edition of 1792. All quotations from Rights of Woman in the present article are taken from this edition, hereafter cited as RW.

⁵ The first edition reads "the female, in general, is inferior to the male. The male pursues, the female yields—this is the law of nature; and it does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favour of women" (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston [New York: Norton, 1988] 8n).

⁶ For a discussion of Wollstonecraft's acceptance of the eighteenth century's degradation of the feminine, see Kaplan, "Pandora's Box," Sea Changes 157-59.

⁷ Wollstonecraft's only explicit mention of Burke in Rights of Woman, comes in a footnote (RW 216n). Poston discovers only two other allusions to Burke (34 and 64), but although it would certainly be possible to trace more allusions, I am arguing that Rights of Woman engages with Burke intertextually rather than simply through the occasional reference. The figuration of women which Wollstonecraft attacks in Rousseau is endemic to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (witness her guarded criticisms of Milton and Pope), but it is more urgent for Wollstonecraft to focus on Emile because of Rousseau's importance for late eighteenth-century radical thought. Even more troubling is that Rousseau's conception of women appeared to coincide with that which had become so powerfully politicized in Burke's Reflections. Yet Rousseau's formulations about women and their education can also be strikingly similar to Wollstonecraft's—see, for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (1762), trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Dent and Dutton, 1947) 329, 330, 335. These similarities perhaps indicate that Wollstonecraft attacks those passages in Rousseau which most resemble Burke and quietly overlooks those which are akin to her own ideas.

⁸ For a more extended account of this, see Tom Furniss, "Gender in Revolution: Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft," Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution, ed. Kelvin Everest (Milton Keynes: Open UP, in press).

⁹ Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757 / 59), edited with an introduction by James T. Boulton (Oxfod: Blackwell, 1987) 149-50, hereafter cited as PE.

¹⁰ See Frances Ferguson, "The Sublime of Edmund Burke, Or the Bathos of Experience," Glyph: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies 8 (1981): 62-78.

¹¹ Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) 164, hereafter cited as Refs.

¹² Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), introduced by Eleanor Louise Nicholes (Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1960) 2 and 6, hereafter referred to as RMen.

¹³ See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (1781), trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953) 362.

¹⁴ See Hamlet III.i.146-47.

¹⁵ Miriam Kramnick points out that "In spite of Wollstonecraft's best intentions … her prose is an imitation, and not a particularly felicitous one, of the rounded sentences of eighteenth-century prose" (Introduction to Rights of Woman 41). For a discussion of the complexities of Paine's similar attempt to write a clear language as part of his response to Burke, see Tom Furniss, "Rhetoric in Revolution: The Role of Language in Paine's Critique of Burke," Revolution and English Romanticism: Politics and Rhetoric, ed. Keith Hanley and Raman Selden (New York: St. Martin's; Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1990): 23-48.

¹⁶ In the first volume of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791), the distinction between the sexes—in contrast to that between classes—is presented as divinely ordained: "The Mosaic account of the creation," Paine writes in his counter-attack on Burke, "is full to this point, the unity or equality of man. The expressions admit of no controversy. 'And God said, Let us make man in our own image. In the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.' The distinction of sexes is pointed out, but no other distinction is even implied" (Thomas Paine, Rights of Man [1791/92], edited and introduced by Henry Collins [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969] 88-89, hereafter cited as RMan). Finding that Rousseau's egalitarianism is reserved for men and that he cultivates a "male aristocracy" ascendent over women, Wollstonecraft ruefully notes that "The rights of humanity have been … confined to the male line from Adam downwards" (RW 185). As Kaplan notes, "When feminists sought to appropriate liberal humanism for their own sex they had to contend with the double standard prominently inscribed within radical tradition, as well as with its suffocating and determining presence in dominant ideologies" ("Wild Nights" 33).

¹⁷ This conventional distinction between masculine and feminine is given its most powerful formulation for eighteenth-century readers, even as it is undone, in the description of sexual difference in Paradise Lost IV. 295-318.

¹⁸"Rapport sur L'Instruction Publique, fait au nom du Comite de Constitution (Paris, 1791). France's present system of compulsory free education owes a great deal to the model recommended over 150 years ago by Talleyrand" (Carol H. Poston, RW [Norton] 3, n. 2). Claire Tomalin records Talleyrand's visit to Wollstonecraft, in acknowledgement of her dedication, while he was in London in February 1792 (Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977, first published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974] 146-47).

¹⁹ Poston suggests that the passage in quotation marks might be "a liberal translation from Talleyrand's Rapport …: 'sur quel principe l'un des deux pourroit-il en etre desherite par la Societe protectrice des droits de tous?'" (RW [Norton] 5, n. 6). She also points out that "In France's Constitution of 1791 only males over twenty-five were citizens. Women were not to get the vote until 1944" (5, n. 7).

²⁰ For Wollstonecraft's explicit attack on Burke's defense of prejudice in Reflections, see RW 216-17.

²¹ Rousseau talks of "the shame and modesty with which nature has armed the weak for the conquest of the strong" (Emile 322).

²² See Ferguson, "The Sublime of Edmund Burke" 76. Rousseau seems to recognize such a danger when he says that "The exaggeration of feminine delicacy leads to effeminacy in men" (Emile 329). His antidote against such a danger (young girls should be encouraged to engage in "pleasant, moderate, and healthy exercise" [329-30]) suggests that Wollstonecraft exaggerates the tendency of Rousseau's prescriptions for women, and that in some instances the two writers are in concord.

²³ In a phrase which ironically echoes Burke, for example, soldiers are said to be "a set of idle superficial young men, whose only occupation is gallantry, and whose polished manners render vice more dangerous, by concealing its deformity under gay ornamental drapery" (RW 97). Their "air of fashion … is but a badge of slavery," and "Like the fair sex, the business of [soldiers'] lives is gallantry; they were taught to please, and they live only to please" (RW 97, 106). In a footnote, she asks "Why should women be censured … because they seem to have a passion for a scarlet coat? Has not education placed [women] more on a level with soldiers than any other class of men?" (RW 106).

²⁴ Wollstonecraft returns to such formulations throughout her text (see 118 and 145). Poston refers the reader to Paradise Lost x.891-92: "This fair defect / Of nature"; and to Pope, Moral Essays II: 44: "Fine by defect, and delicately weak" (Norton 34, n. 9). Burke's and Rousseau's representations of women in the same veinare much more disturbing and immediate for Wollstonecraft than Milton's or Pope's.

²⁵ See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967), trans, and introduced by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1976) 163.

²⁶Of Grammatology 154. There is a suggestion, running through the texts of Rousseau, Burke, and Wollstonecraft, that woman is the supplement of society—that which both civilizes and endangers it, both its disease and its cure. If, in Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft would "grub up" the ivy which threatens the oak, in Rights of Woman she identifies Rousseau's conception of woman's relation to man as that of a "graceful ivy, clasping the oak that supported it" (104). Thus, women have "parasitical tendency" (153), and are treated as an "afterthought of creation" (178). Patricia Parker traces the way "the second sex" functions as a supplement in Genesis, Milton, Rousseau, and Freud (Literary Fat Ladies 178-233).

²⁷ For Wollstonecraft's attack on the idea that women have an innate love of dress, see RW III; but for her acknowledgement that women have been successfully conditioned into a harmful preoccupation with dress, see RW 170.

²⁸ My analysis of the complicated relation between disease and cure in Wollstonecraft's reading of Burke is influenced by Derrida's discussion of "Plato's Pharmacy," in Dissemination (1972), trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 61-171.

²⁹ "i wish to sum up what I have said in a few words, for here I throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues, not excepting modesty. For man and woman, truth, if I understand the meaning of the word, must be the same" (RW 139; also see 105, 119, 121, 124, 128).

³⁰ For Wollstonecraft's "refusal to acknowledge female sexuality," see Mary Poovey, "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Female Sexuality" (included in RW [Norton]: 343-55 [353]). Poovey suggests that "the surprisingly vitriolic language" of these passages reveals Wollstonecraft's "vehement disgust with female sexuality." This directly impinges on Wollstonecraft's language: "We can see one consequence of this evasion [of sexuality] in her own use of euphemisms and circuitous phrasing. Whenever Wollstonecraft approaches a subject that arouses her own volatile emotions, her language becomes both obscure and abstract; she shuns concrete nouns as if they were bodies she is trying to cover over" (350, 352).

³¹ Miriam Kramnick points out that although Wollstonecraft's "criticism of… aristocratic and would-be aristocratic ladies resembles the more scathing of the misogynist satirists of theeighteenth century," her anger arises over "what she perceived was a waste of potential and because she realized that it was women themselves who, by their ignorance and uselessness, provided the fuel for the traditional anti-feminists" (Introduction to RW 48). It is important to hold this in mind, but I am arguing that Wollstonecraft's project has a more complex relation to that which arouses its indignation than Kramnick allows. As Kaplan suggests, Wollstonecraft's use of the sexual metaphor of the bent bow recoiling with violence indicates that her figurative language, like the imaginary force of female sexuality itself, is "out of control" ("Wild Nights" 44).

³² Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (London: Tavistock, 1971) 208, quoting La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt.

³³ It is suggestive that much of the action of Wollstonecraft's late, unfinished novel—which sets out to dramatize the issues of Rights of Woman in the same way that Caleb Williams does Political Justice—takes place during its heroine's unmerited incarceration in a madhouse. See The Wrongs of Woman. Or, Maria (1798), reprinted in Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980).

³⁴ Foucault 218-19, quoting Edme-Pierre Beauchesne, De V influence des affections de 1'ame dans les maladies nerveuses des femmes (Paris, 1783) 31.

³⁵The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1903) v: 224-26.

³⁶ See Emile 348. The analogy between "male wit" and "female beauty" is pursued throughout Wollstonecraft's two Vindications (see RW 146 and 311), while Rights of Men repeatedly condemns Burke as a wit (see RW 4, 7, 139, and 142).

³⁷ "Delicacy" and "decorum" can mean opposite things in Wollstonecraft: she writes against that "decorum" which Rousseau suggests is the "constant and severe constraint" which women must be subject to all their lives (RW 178); she condemns decorum as a supplement harmful to women (197); yet she praises a "man of delicacy" for requiring "neither weakness nor sensibility" in women, but "affection" (232-33).

³⁸ For a discussion of the contrasting effects of poverty and luxury on generation, see Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd in two volumes (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979) 1: 96-97.

³⁹ This is an anxiety Wollstonecraft shares with Rousseau—for whom the distinction between the sexes is vital to uphold civilization itself (Emile 326). Rousseau writes that "In the present confusion between the sexes it is almost a miracle to belong to one's own sex" (356). Foucault reveals how the transgression of gender boundaries—and especially men's imitation of female qualities and roles—is associated with madness in the eighteenth century. Foucault records one representation of the night-time activities of a house of confinement which is clearly influenced by De Sade: "'There, the most infamous excesses are committed upon the very person of the prisoner; we hear of certain vices practiced frequently, notoriously, and even publicly in the common room of the prison, vices which the propriety of modern times does not permit us to name. We are told that numerous prisoners, simillimi feminis mores stuprati et constupratores; that they return from this obscure, forbidden place covered over with their own and others' debaucheries, lost to all shame and ready to commit all sorts of crimes'" (Foucault 208, quoting H. Mirabeau, Observations d'un voyageur anglais [Paris, 1788] 14). A tentative translation of Mirabeau's (appropriately) corrupt Latin would be "a manner very like the ravished and ravishers of women."

⁴⁰ See C. B. Macpherson, Burke (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980) 51-70 (69).

⁴¹ See Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791-1819 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) 1-34.

⁴² See Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, "On Literature as an Ideological Form," Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) 79-99.