[In the following essay, Wang argues against readings of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as a text that represses female imagination in favor of male reason, seeing the work as a complex study about repression, reason, gender, and imagination.]

It is uncannily fitting that Mary Shelley should dedicate her famous Romantic novel, Frankenstein, to her father, William Godwin, and not to her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. The literal—and literary—gap between mother and daughter is an appropriate emblem for the discontinuity between Wollstonecraft's theoretical writing and the work of contemporary feminist literary critics. This discontinuity is largely due to a public monumentalization and disfigurement of Wollstonecraft by her contemporaries that is similar, I would suggest, to the posthumous process that afflicted the writer she both admired and criticized, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.¹ Much of the initial hostility toward both figures was associated with English horror at the French Revolution. Just as counterrevolutionaries viewed Rousseau's social thought and the politics of the French Revolution as one and the same, so too did many people view Wollstonecraft's Protestant bourgeois radicalism as an irrevocable contamination of her feminist position.² In both cases, conservative critics saw the Reign of Terror as an inevitable consequence of each thinker's writing. A second, more important similarity was the extent to which late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century readers connected each thinker's theory with his or her biography.³ In each case, a theory associated with Enlightenment reason was subverted by a life of unrestrained passion and immoral activity. For such readers of Wollstonecraft and Rousseau, this subversion of theory by biography allegorized again what was occurring in France, a rational agenda of emancipation overcome by the uncontrollable demands of an irrational Reign of Terror. It is this early nineteenth-century monument of Wollstonecraft, as an individual aspiring to rational discourse while hopelessly repressing irrational emotion, that we have inherited and that has haunted even the most sympathetic perceptions of her by contemporary feminist critics.⁴

This is not to say that this reputation has remained completely the same since its inception. One change in this monument has been what exactly constitutes the “proof” of Wollstonecraft's unstable personal life. In its incarnation at the turn of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft's emotional instability was signified by every aspect of her lifestyle: her various love affairs, her illegitimate child, the “unconventional” form of her relationship to Godwin, and her attempted suicides. Today, only Wollstonecraft's attempted suicides can carry any of the same biographical weight. But just as the signs for her personal emotional life have changed, so too has the evaluation of those signs. Instead of seeing that life as a set of negative traits, a mark of Wollstonecraft's hypocrisy and limitations, most contemporary feminists see her private life as an emotional resource that Wollstonecraft heeded too little. For contemporary feminists, the emotional traces of Wollstonecraft's life are unstable, but in a positive sense; they represent needs and desires that have the potential to subvert patriarchal norms as much as Wollstonecraft's “reasoned” Enlightenment agenda. Indeed, they have become needs and desires tragically or inevitably hampered by that agenda.

Two things concerning Wollstonecraft's reputation, moreover, have remained relatively constant over the last two centuries. The first is the basic duality underwriting that reputation, reason versus imagination; the second, the genders assigned to the terms of that duality. No one has argued, in other words, with Mary Jacobus's description of the rational side of that duality as “the predominantly male discourse of Enlightenment Reason, or ‘sense.’”⁵ Opposing this discourse is the Otherness of Wollstonecraft's writing and biography, a chain of signifiers that links together such terms as femininity, imagination, irrationality, sensibility, and passion. In even the most sympathetic readings of Wollstonecraft, contemporary critics such as Cora Kaplan, Mary Poovey, and Mary Jacobus have portrayed her as trapped by this duality—at best, as reproducing the problems of this trap for our contemporary edification.⁶ In all cases Wollstonecraft remains an individual experiencing an identity crisis; if she is no longer as the nineteenth century represented her, an unstable woman whose life proves her error, she remains an individual reacting to the interpellating textual and personal effects of two opposing discourses, male reason and female imagination.

Associated with this perception of Wollstonecraft's identity is a literary history that narrativizes her texts in terms of a progress from her critical work, The Rights of Woman, to her unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria. The basic form of this narrative is one in which Wollstonecraft is more able, in her later works, to face the Otherness of her life—whether that be female desire or the “imaginative and linguistic excess” of female writing—that she represses or attacks in favor of male reason in The Rights of Woman.⁷ I want to argue against this view of The Rights of Woman as a text that is somehow blind to the insights of Wollstonecraft's other works. The Rights of Woman is a much more complex work about repression, reason, imagination, and gender, than the present monument of Wollstonecraft allows. My reading of Wollstonecraft differs from that expressed by the present monument in three ways. First, rather than seeing Wollstonecraft as being caught between the gender demands of male reason and female imagination, I see her text actively trying to disrupt that duality's assignation of gender, by strategically associating “woman” with a variety of local, contradictory identities.⁸ The second difference is that I also see Wollstonecraft's text preempting that very duality by destabilizing the opposition between reason and the host of terms the text contrasts with reason. The complicated relationships between reason and those terms underwrite not only Wollstonecraft's critique of the “feminine” imagination but also her critique of that imagination's structure of repression. Those complex relationships also underwrite the very semantic and stylistic tensions of her text that contemporary critics have only been able to recognize as a repression of female Otherness by male reason. Finally, the third difference is that I see these textual tensions also pointing to a certain reflexivity within Wollstonecraft's work, a reflexivity for which The Rights of Woman is given too little credit. Far from being a text blind to the limits of its own political and didactic discourse, The Rights of Woman carries out an ideological critique of its own teleological and millennial aspirations, precisely through its dissolution of the semantic identities that separate reason from passion.

I want to take up first the issue of what “woman” means in The Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft is most famous for equating “woman” with “human,” that beneficiary of both Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment theories of democratic principles. It is in that spirit of a humanistic, democratic discourse that Wollstonecraft addresses the beginning of her book to M. Talleyrand-Perigord, the influential member of the new Republic of France, the nation most strongly associated with those democratic, anti-monarchist ideals. It is also in the spirit of that same discourse that Wollstonecraft chastises Talleyrand for not extending, in a government pamphlet, the human rights of education to women as well as to men:

I wish, Sir, to set some investigations of this kind afloat in France, and should they lead to a confirmation of my principles, when your constitution is revised the Rights of Woman may be respected, if it be fully proved that reason calls for this respect, and loudly demands JUSTICE for one half of the human race.⁹

As Wollstonecraft's words imply, the discourse she wants to enter primarily associates the human with the other half of the race, man. This fact has been turned against her, in that critics have accused Wollstonecraft of being blind to what happens to the feminine within such a discourse.¹⁰ Such a critique argues that a universal term such as “human” hides inequality and sexual difference; by equating woman with human which equates with man, Wollstonecraft can only reproduce that elision. But this critique ignores the possibility of a metaleptic effect caused by Wollstonecraft's incursion, that she is in fact introducing the alterity of sexual difference into this supposedly universal discourse, and thus enabling, as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe claim, “the birth of feminism through the use made of it in the democratic discourse, which was thus displaced from the field of political equality to the field of equality between the sexes.”¹¹

Nor does “woman” signify only democratic humanism in The Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft associates the feminine with a variety of oftentimes contradictory qualities and positions. Because of these other significations, the equivalence between the feminine and democratic humanism does not reach the critical mass of an essential equation. Rather, this equivalence and the other instances of gender assignation operate as localized semantic moments, dependent upon the situational strategy of a fluid political polemic.

These local moments in The Rights of Woman comprise an argument by analogy, a strategy whose ubiquity must then be taken into account when we wish to determine the ontological status of those analogies. Yet, while the very number and variety of these analogies make them non-essentialist, they are not arbitrary. That is, all of Wollstonecraft's analogies are determined by the same theme; each analogy links women to a role of power—or powerlessness—at a different position within the socio-historic world of late eighteenth-century England. But while the theme of power thus structures Wollstonecraft's analogies, power itself is denied any essential signification. That is, in each example of women's empowerment or victimization, power is constituted by a different combination of codes of age, class, and gender. The result is a concrete depiction of the condition of women in the late eighteenth century that simultaneously repudiates the idea that there is any essential character to its catalogue of women's empowered and victimized identities.

In repudiating such a character, Wollstonecraft employs a linguistic method that denies what Laclau and Mouffe call “a fully sutured space” to both the patriarchy and the women it oppresses. Such a space posits an identity so sealed from outside signification that the identity achieves the “transparency of a closed symbolic order.”¹² It is precisely this symbolic closure that the variety of Wollstonecraft's analogies denies. Yet, simultaneously, because of their role in articulating the position of women within eighteenth-century patriarchy, these analogies still deal with the brute fact of power and oppression.

Thus, while Wollstonecraft's polemic for women's rights utilizes the equation between woman and the human race, her critique of women's present condition associates women with the Others of democratic discourse: eastern princes, Roman emperors, monarchs and the aristocratic class. Here woman signifies a power that is not based on self-determination but on the analogy between the unearned, arbitrary trappings of despotic privilege and the equally capricious influence of physical beauty. Hence we have Wollstonecraft's rejection of such sexual influence in her famous reply to Rousseau: “I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves” (62; chap. 4).¹³ But the tyrant's/woman's power over the people/man is also a powerlessness that must be constituted through other analogies, where the fact of women's limited opportunities and helplessness is signified by children and the lower class. Thus women are slaves oppressed by men who are tyrants, whose power is actually like that of women limited like children and the poor. Women are oppressed, but by a master/slave dialectic that resists any easy condensation of gender or class identities.

One might object that while women have been either “slaves or despots,” The Rights of Woman still associates the utopian democratic ideal with the “manly.” That opposition certainly does operate in Wollstonecraft's text. Yet, that duality becomes a fundamentally reified part of Wollstonecraft's thought only when we ignore the other positions and roles of gender that crisscross that duality, such as the fact that the discourse of the monarch rests on examples of male despotism—for example, Louis XIV—and that the politically progressive concept of modesty is chiefly associated not with the masculine, but with the feminine. Likewise, Wollstonecraft disparages Lord Chesterfield's worldly letters to his son as “unmanly”—that is, effeminate—for their libertine exploitation of women (106; chap. 5), while at the same time she begins her attack upon Mrs. Piozzi's statement, that “all [women's] arts are employed to keep the hearts of man,” by calling Piozzi's ideas “truly masculine sentiments” (102; chap. 5). Certainly Wollstonecraft does not want Piozzi to be less masculine in the way Chesterfield is, nor does she want Chesterfield to be more “manly” in the way Piozzi is. “Unmanly” and “truly masculine” do not constitute the intrinsic identities of gendered subjects, nor is Wollstonecraft downgrading them as such; rather, they are each a sign of a particular position within eighteenth-century English patriarchy, a position whose deadly denotative force Wollstonecraft dramatizes through the semantics—and politics—of gender.

By having the feminine and the masculine occupy, at different strategic moments, the key position of both her negative critique and utopian polemic, Wollstonecraft is, in effect, deconstructing the intrinsic identity of a gendered subject. Just as important, Wollstonecraft sees this deconstruction taking place within the context of an English androcentric society demanding the opposite of this deconstruction from its female population, so that

a virtuous man may have a choleric or a sanguine constitution, be gay or grave, unreproved; be firm till he is almost over-bearing, or, weakly submissive, have no will or opinion of his own; but all women are to be levelled, by meekness and docility, into one character of yielding softness and gentle compliance.

(95; chap. 5)

It is in this spirit, of an attack upon the “one character,” that we should read Wollstonecraft's famous dictum that boys and girls should study together in order to produce “modesty without those sexual distinctions that taint the mind” (165; chap. 12). Wollstonecraft is not trying to efface sexual difference here; instead, she is attempting to disrupt the imprisoning codification of sexual identity as constructed in invidious social distinctions. Similarly, when Wollstonecraft criticizes the French educative system by saying, “[young girls] were treated like women [i.e., coquettes] almost from their very birth,” she is not consigning “women” to an eternal identification with “coquetry” (81; chap. 5). Rather, she is trying to break up that singular identity imposed upon those girls, by exposing the identity's dependence upon linguistic and pedagogical structures: “they were treated like women almost from their very birth. …”

This strategy of gender disidentification is clear in one footnote commenting upon how men behave differently in front of women, depending upon the degree to which women stress their own “feminine” identity: “Men are not always men in the company of women, nor would women always remember that they are women, if they were allowed to acquire more understanding” (123; chap. 7). Upon which term of “men” or “women” should we confer originary status, to start this sentence's chain of signification? And who is the second “they”? Consider, also, how the meaning of the first clause and its relation to the rest of the sentence change, depending upon which, and how many, of the gender terms are placed in italics. This syntactical and grammatical indeterminacy succinctly dramatizes the dizzying spiral of signification that structures the absolute necessity and irreducible problem of sexual identity in The Rights of Woman. It is the text's consciousness of this indeterminacy that redirects the rage of sentences, such as the following one, away from an essential “woman” and toward the host of social, psychological, and linguistic forces that work to shore up the ontology of that identity: “This desire of being always women, is the very consciousness that degrades the sex” (99; chap. 5).¹⁴

By thus attacking the concept of a single feminine identity, The Rights of Woman escapes being located only within a duality of male reason and female imagination. It is precisely the hegemonic forces of that duality that Wollstonecraft disrupts, by deploying the feminine in a host of contradictory roles. But Wollstonecraft also disrupts this duality by subverting the unitary identities of imagination and reason. She emplots gender, repression, reason, and imagination in a narrative that is more complicated than the one that the duality of male reason and female imagination implies.

In order to understand this narrative, I want to examine two moments in The Rights of Woman in which Wollstonecraft appears explicitly to repress the female imagination in order to preserve male reason. One moment occurs when Wollstonecraft asserts that young children of the same sex should not be housed or educated together, so that they will not learn from each other the “vices, which render the body weak,” specifically, masturbation (164; chap. 12).¹⁵ Here, one can image the female imagination as a feminine interest in sexuality and pleasure, an interest which Wollstonecraft must repress in the name of a disembodied male rationality. The other moment occurs during Wollstonecraft's introductory remarks on style, when she promises not “to cull my phrases or polish my style … 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 …” (10; intro.). Here, the female imagination can be reinscribed within a feminine discourse of sensual and emotional rhetoric that Wollstonecraft also dismisses in favor of a more masculine type of writing and style of reason. Thus, one could argue that, through these two instances in the text, The Rights of Woman attempts both thematically and formally to repress a feminine alterity in favor of a masculine ontology of Enlightenment reason. Seemingly disparate, Wollstonecraft's view on writing and her prohibition against masturbation are connected, but not by the particular model of repression that I sketched above.¹⁶

First, let us consider Wollstonecraft's words against masturbation. Her interdiction comes as part of a broader polemic, against the “wearisome confinement” women experience at school together, which is even worse than what young men suffer. In a passage just before the one on masturbation, Wollstonecraft describes the negative effect of this confinement in vivid terms.

The pure animal spirits, which make both mind and body shoot out, and unfold the tender blossoms of hope, are turned sour, and vented in vain wishes or pert repinings, that contract the faculties and spoil the temper; else they mount to the brain, and sharpening the understanding before it gains proportionable strength, produce that pitiful cunning which disgracefully characterizes the female mind—and I fear will ever characterize it whilst women remain the slaves of power!

(164; chap. 12)

We notice immediately that Wollstonecraft has, as she often does, characterized the female in negative terms. But more important is the specific way she characterizes the female as negative. In this passage, the “female mind” is the consequence of the “souring” of the “pure animal spirits”—“spirits” charged by a sensual articulation, verging on the explicitly sexual for both the male (“shoot out”) and female (“tender blossoms”) organs. How do we reconcile Wollstonecraft's positive evaluation of these terms with her words against masturbation? I would argue that, instead of a simultaneous acknowledgement and repression of sexuality, this passage is a parable that warns against the repression of sexuality—the “animal spirits.” More precisely, Wollstonecraft's sexual language provides a biological metaphor for the process of social growth that Wollstonecraft opposes to the deforming and stunting socializing process women must undergo under England's contemporary educational system. The product of this system is “woman”—the “female mind”—whose essential consignment to this gender identity is undercut, not only by Wollstonecraft's visionary cry (“whilst women remain …”) but also by the male configuration of masturbation and loss that structures the entire procedure (“animal spirits … turned sour”), which itself is undercut, in turn, by the biological gender of Wollstonecraft's subjects: ghettoized young girls who are “obliged to pace with steady deportment stupidly backwards and forwards … instead of bounding … in the various attitudes so conducive to health” (164; chap. 12).

These young girls, moreover, are not the sole victims of this oppressive system of single-sex confinement. For in the next paragraph, Wollstonecraft shifts her attention from the girls to the “boys [who] infallibly lose that decent bashfulness” in the setting of a single-sex school (164; chap. 12). Thus, while it is the confined group of girls whose “animal spirits” metaphorically “turn sour,” it is the equally segregated group of boys who actually learn the “vices, which render the body weak.”

Thus, masturbation functions not only as a sign for this whole pedagogical system of “souring” but also as the final figurative and literal consequence of this system: the vice that girls and boys will experience because of their isolation from one another.¹⁷ By attacking that final consequence, Wollstonecraft is weighing in against the entire system, in which masturbation functions not as an expression but as a repression of the potential of mind and body. As such, the passage on masturbation exemplifies one particular target of Wollstonecraft's polemic, the repression of women's full emotional life by the schizophrenic identity men impose upon them: both coy mistress and chaste wife. (The fact that school boys specifically fall prey to masturbation stresses, for Wollstonecraft, how both sexes suffer the consequences of this repression.) Wollstonecraft's critique of this identity underscores the reason why she distinguishes between modesty and the desire for a good reputation. Modesty is the state of life one achieves after experiencing passion and the vicissitudes of life, whereas the desire for a good reputation is the hypocritical, deforming state that passes ignorance off as innocence, and whose end result is a titillation caused by the repression of desire. Thus Wollstonecraft does not repress passion in favor of a repressive reason; instead, she attacks passion when it has been repressed, when it is not allowed to become part of a lived experience, but instead is exploited as the fuel for what amounts to a solipsistic, masturbatory imagination.¹⁸

This is Wollstonecraft's critique of a certain type of “feminized” and “Romantic” imagination. By looking at this sensibility in The Rights of Woman more closely, we can understand more fully the implications of her introductory attack upon a writing style of supposed sensuality and feeling. Her emblem for this imagination is none other than Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, as the writer of Emile, lays out in his education of Sophie the most specific blueprint for this particular kind of “feminization” of the female subject. But Rousseau is also the chief example of someone who indulges in this type of imagination:

Even [Rousseau's] virtues also led him astray; for, born with a warm constitution and lively fancy, nature carried him toward the other sex with such eager fondness, that he soon became lascivious. Had he given away to these desires, the fire would have extinguished itself in a natural manner; but virtue and a romantic kind of delicacy, made him practice self-denial; yet when fear, delicacy, or virtue, restrained him, he debauched his imagination, and reflecting on the sensations to which fancy gave force, he traced them in the most glowing colours, and sunk them deep into his soul.

(my emphasis, 91; chap. 5)

If Rousseau had given into his lasciviousness, if he had actually met, rather then just gone toward, the other sex, his “animal spirits” would not have gone “sour,” and his imagination would not have been “debauched.”¹⁹ Here, virtue and self-denial are not continuous with modesty and reason; rather, the former terms are part of the moral ideology that is also responsible for the isolation of young girls in education and the specific type of “female mind” that is the result of such an isolation. Moreover, that literal isolation reminds us that the effects of feminine delicacy and virtue differ for Rousseau and for the women defined by this same code. For Wollstonecraft, Rousseau's Romantic imagination underwrites the identities of both women and men, but it assigns them to asymmetrical positions of power.

It is true that, for his contemporaries and later critics, Rousseau signified a sensibility that was always figured pejoratively in feminine terms.²⁰ We might then be tempted to see Wollstonecraft's critique of Rousseau's imagination as merely reproducing the hierarchy of gender values she is trying to attack. Our analysis of the circulation of gender in Wollstonecraft—especially in her interdiction against masturbation—should warn us against that temptation. But Wollstonecraft also subverts the temptation by assigning that sensibility to the premier patriarch of her day, Edmund Burke. Wollstonecraft's association between Burke and this sensibility goes back to her A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), which portrays Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) as the reaction of an individual overcome by an unreasonable and emotional sensibility.²¹ This emotional sensibility, like Rousseau's, victimizes women with a particular type of feminization, even as it exemplifies that feminization.²² In much the same way, The Rights of Woman attacks the tautological reasoning of Burke's valorization of prejudice in the Reflections by likening that type of argument to “what is vulgarly termed a woman's reason” (113; chap. 5). Wollstonecraft's point is not that women essentially reason through prejudice but that Burke reasons in a way that patriarchy has “vulgarly” associated with the feminine.²³

By identifying Burke and Rousseau with a “sensibility” that they and others have imposed on women, Wollstonecraft has, in effect, deconstructed their sexual politics, foregrounding the contradictions of their own logic of gender and identity. This is the context of Wollstonecraft's attack upon a writing style full of the “turgid bombast of artificial feeling.” That is, Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries attacked Burke's Reflections on the very issue of a contradictory style, on how he described the French Revolution as a hysterical event, even though hysteria more aptly described his own emotional, oftentimes lurid prose. This sensational style of Burke's is the target of Tom Paine's The Rights of Man (1791, 1792) and Wollstonecraft's own Rights of Men.²⁴ By thus condemning a style of “sickly delicacy” and “false sentiments” at the beginning of The Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft is not so much repressing a feminine style in favor of a male rationality as devaluing that style and disrupting its gender by associating it with one of the leading English fathers of the day.

One could still argue that, because of Wollstonecraft's own rambling and passionate style, she merely reproduces the irrational emotion she finds in Burke, even as she makes claims for the rational nature of her own work.²⁵ That argument would carry more force if the duality operating in Wollstonecraft's passage really was between reason and emotion. Yet she dismisses the “turgid bombast of artificial feeling” because it comes “from the head” and “never reach[es] the heart” (10; intro.). In fact, the duality dominating this passage is one between “false sentiments” and “natural emotions of the heart” (my emphasis, 10; intro.). Without the experience of such “natural emotions” one cannot become a “rational and immortal being”; instead, like the confined school girls, one's life—and writing—is stunted by the titillating “sickly delicacy” exemplified by the inflamed imagination of Rousseau. I would also stress that, for Wollstonecraft, these “natural emotions” must be experienced. Indeed, “false sentiments” are “false” only because they have not been experienced, since the purpose of the “natural emotions” is in fact to lead one to reason through error. Elsewhere, Wollstonecraft is explicit about how the experiential negativity of the passions is fundamentally involved in this dialectical progress toward reason, and how that progress has, in Wollstonecraft's time, been gender coded:

I must therefore venture to doubt whether what has been thought as an axiom in morals may not have been a dogmatical assertion made by men who have coolly seen mankind through the medium of books, and say, in direct contradiction to them, that the regulation of the passions is not always wisdom—On the contrary, it should seem, that one reason why men have superior judgment and more fortitude then women, is undoubtedly this, that they give a freer scope to the grand passions, and by more frequently going astray enlarge their minds. If then by the exercise of their own reason they fix on some stable principle, they have probably to thank the force of their passions, nourished by false views of life, and permitted to overleap the boundary that secures content.

(110; chap. 5)

Thus, “superior judgment and … fortitude” depend upon a prior experience of emotions that allows us to learn through our mistakes and our incorrect beliefs. One might argue, however, that such a schema accepts the passions as a fundamental part of life, only to relegate them still to a secondary role in relation to the final goal of this entire process, reason; that is, the passions are important only insofar as their negativity paves the way to our final attainment of reason. This critique is valid, insofar as it refers to one major aspect of The Rights of Woman, the utopian teleological impulse of the book, which images society and the individual as progressing toward the realization of their full potential, figured through the twin goals of God and reason. This Enlightenment diachronicity underwrites much of Wollstonecraft's polemic, insofar as Wollstonecraft opposes this diachronicity to a “propensity to enjoy the present moment” imposed upon and internalized by women, which stunts their political and social potential as much as their literal confinement in school (52; chap. 4). Yet this diachronicity and its politics do not exhaust Wollstonecraft's book. Her teleological movement toward reason is in direct tension with the epistemology structuring the critique that paradoxically pushes her teleological argument forward. Passion and reason imbricate this epistemology not diachronically but synchronically. That is, at any given moment, Wollstonecraft's feminist critique involves a reflexivity that resists any simple progress from passion to reason.

Wollstonecraft dramatizes this reflexivity, and the new complex dialectic between reason and passion it engenders, in the remarkable “Pisgah vision” she has right after the passage on the “regulation of the passions” I quoted at length above. “Pisgah” refers to the name of the mountain from which Moses was allowed to view the Promised Land; a Pisgah vision, then, was a mode of political prophecy that late eighteenth-century writers used to articulate their own feelings about the fate of the French Revolution and, by extension, the political future of Europe and England. One of the most famous visions of that period was that of Dr. Richard Price, an ardent supporter of the Revolution; Burke's Reflections is in large part a vehement attack upon Price's vision.²⁶ Wollstonecraft's own Rights of Men defends Price against Burke; Wollstonecraft's use of the vision is thus no mere Biblical allusion but her own contribution to a specific form of political discourse, with which she was intimately familiar. At once an elaboration and critique of this form, this contribution structures itself around Wollstonecraft's complex perception of the dialectical interplay between reason and passion.

After Wollstonecraft's statement on how reasonable men should actually thank the “force of their passions, nourished by false views of life,” these lines follow:

But if, in the dawn of life, we could soberly survey the scenes before as in perspective, and see every thing in its true colours, how could the passions gain sufficient strength to unfold the faculties?

Let me now as from an eminence survey the world stripped of all its false delusive charms. The clear atmosphere enables me to see each object in its true point of view, while my heart is still. I am calm as the prospect in a morning when the mists, slowly dispersing, silently unveil the beauties of nature, refreshed by rest. In what light will the world now appear?—I rub my eyes and think, perchance, that I am just waking from a lively dream.

(110; chap. 5)

Wollstonecraft has introduced a vision that apparently simulates the telos of her Christian diachronic narrative, in which she has reached—indeed, climbed to—a vantage point from which her perspective is influenced by neither “false delusive charms” nor “a lively dream.” Instead, the “charms” of that “dream” will become the subject of her newly found, clear vision. By echoing the “false views of life,” these “false delusive charms” present themselves as the erroneous but necessary catalysts for passion that will bring people to reason.

This is what Wollstonecraft first views:

I see the sons and daughters of men pursuing shadows, and anxiously wasting their powers to feed passions which have not adequate object—if the very excess of these blind impulses, pampered by that lying, yet constantly trusted guide, the imagination, did not, by preparing them for some other state, render short-sighted mortals wiser without their own concurrence; or what comes to the same thing, when they were pursuing some imaginary present good.

(110; chap. 5)

At first, this passage appears to reproduce Wollstonecraft's teleological narrative, with the “excess of these blind impulses” preparing people for the state of reason. Yet we can also read this passage another way, in which the exact moment of sublation from passion to reason is never clear; that is, the blind impulses and lying imagination “render short-sighted mortals wiser without their own concurrence”—while these mortals are in error and negativity. These mortals are not prepared for reason by realizing their error; rather, they reach preparation the more they are in error and the more they cannot see their error. Passion and reason still relate, but in a way that problematizes any easy shift from one to the other.

The next part of Wollstonecraft's vision reinforces this more problematic reading. The vision blasts “the ambitious man consuming himself by running after a phantom” and observes how hard it would be for him to change his way even if he could clearly see the fallacy of his situation (111; chap. 5). Wollstonecraft then observes:

But, vain as the ambitious man's pursuits would be, he is often striving for something more substantial than fame—that indeed would be the veriest meteor, the wildest fire that could lure a man to ruin.—What! renounce the most trifling gratification to be applauded when he should be no more! Wherefore this struggle, whether man be mortal or immortal, if that noble passion did not really raise the being above his fellows?

(111; chap. 5)

Again, there is “something more substantial” in, not beyond, the ambitious man's pursuits—something that neither preempts nor coincides with the desire for fame, that which by itself would “lure a man to ruin.” Here Wollstonecraft's irony folds in upon itself. Mocking both the pettiness of fame and those who would dismiss fame as only petty, she describes fame as the “trifling gratification” that deals with death. “That noble passion,” then, neither works toward nor depends upon a release from the blindness of fame; instead, that passion raises the individual even as it works through its earthly double, the desire for fame.

The next part of Wollstonecraft's vision appears to retreat from this new problematic of passion's role. Discussing the follies of love, Wollstonecraft describes the process in which an individual creates a desired object with “imaginary charms.” When those charms disappear—when the individual is no longer in error—it is reason that saves the mistaken passion from devolving into mere lust:

And would not the sight of the object, not seen through the medium of the imagination, soon reduce the passion to an appetite, if reflection, the noble distinction of man, did not give it force, and make it an instrument to raise him above this earthy dross, by teaching him to love the centre of all perfection; whose wisdom appears clearer and clearer in the works of nature, in proportion as reason is illuminated and exalted by contemplation, and acquiring that love of order which the struggles of passion produce?

(111; chap. 5)

Here, we are raised “above this earthy dross” and taught “to love the centre of all perfection” by reflection, contemplation, and reason, all of which appear at and beyond the level of passion's struggles. Wollstonecraft has apparently reverted to her teleological narrative of God and reason. Yet she then completely scrambles this narrative in her next paragraph:

The habit of reflection, and the knowledge attained by fostering any passion, might be shewn to be equally useful, though the object proved equally fallacious; for they would all appear in the same light, if they were not magnified by the governing passion implanted in us by the Author of all good, to call forth and strengthen the faculties of each individual, and enable it to attain all the experience that an infant can obtain, who does certain things, it cannot tell why.

(111; chap. 5)

Wollstonecraft has, in effect, turned her teleological narrative inside out. First, she has transformed it into a genetic narrative, giving originary presence, moreover, not to reason but to “the governing passion implanted in us” by God. The process initiated and managed by this passion marginalizes reason even more so with the figure of the child, whose actions operate outside of the child's cognition, even as their existence calls forth Wollstonecraft's approval. While not simply erasing Wollstonecraft's teleological narrative, the genetic model does heighten the sense of disequilibrium the entire vision brings to bear on that teleological narrative, even at the moment when the vision appears most ready to fall back into that narrative.

Just as disorienting as the genetic model is the passage's doubling of passion. Not only does Wollstonecraft invoke the primary “governing passion,” she also contrasts “any passion” and the knowledge (of passion? or reason?) it attains with the “habit of reflection”—only then to collapse the main difference between them. She associates both of these epistemological modes with error; both can be turned upon objects that are “equally fallacious,” and both modes can still be productive, as long as they are redeemed—“magnified”—by the “governing passion.”

It is this leveling of the hierarchy between reason and passion that Wollstonecraft finally recuperates out of the dizzying deployment of both these terms in her vision. Thus, even if we could foresee the error passion will bring, and

had the cold hand of circumspection damped each generous feeling before it had left any permanent character, or fixed some habit, what could be expected, but selfish prudence and reason just rising above instinct? Who that has read Dean Swift's disgusting description of the Yahoos, and insipid one of Houyhnhnm with a philosophical eye, can avoid seeing the futility of degrading the passions, or making man rest in contentment?

(112; chap. 5)

Yet Wollstonecraft's point does not seem to be that we can or should find a middle ground between, or a synthesis of, Swift's Yahoos and Houyhnhnms. Instead, the moral is the dialectical limit reason and passion impose on each other's perceptual powers. Wollstonecraft stresses this limit with startling force when she turns her moral upon the truth claims of the Pisgah vision she has just had. Thus, before the passage on Swift, she writes,

I descend from my height, and mixing with my fellow-creatures, feel myself hurried along the common stream; ambition, love, hope, and fear, exert their wonted power, though we be convinced by reason that their present and most attractive promises are only lying dreams. …

(111-12; chap. 5)

Several paragraphs later, she adds,

The world cannot be seen by an unmoved spectator, we must mix in the throng, and feel as men feel before we can judge their feelings. If we mean, in short, to live in the world to grow wiser and better, and not merely to enjoy the good things of life, we must attain a knowledge of others at the same time that we become acquainted with ourselves—knowledge acquired any other way only hardens the heart and perplexes the understanding.

(112; chap. 5)

Though Wollstonecraft recognizes that a descent from her vision will be into the error and “lying dreams” of passion she still descends. She does so not only because she must but also because of her recognition of the undependability of her position in that vision. What is her position in that vision but that of the “unmoved spectator” above the throng that she observes, but with whom she does not mix? The knowledge and wisdom that Wollstonecraft wants us to acquire echo those parts of her vision that imply that reason and insight are unknowingly found in, not through, passion and error. As such, the position of this knowledge and wisdom is radically antithetical to the epistemological position of the Pisgah vision—a vision that, for all intents and purposes, is the telos, the utopian vantage point of reason and clarity toward which Wollstonecraft's Enlightenment narrative moves.

Wollstonecraft's vision and its aftermath allegorizes a fundamental and irreducible tension in The Rights of Woman between a diachronic longing for an unambiguous political progress from passion to reason and a synchronic apprehension of the shifting epistemological boundaries between passion and reason, wherein reason functions not as a final goal but as a constant imperative toward critique, toward even the unmasking of its own dependency on the shadowed “wisdom” of passion. (We can recall that, much in the same way, the gender indeterminacy of the sentence, “Men do not always act like men …,” is set off by the intervention of “understanding.”) As a reflexive meditation upon the exigencies and duplicities of vision, this passage is as powerful an example of “literariness,” the insight into blindness and insight, as the one Paul de Man valorizes in the work of Wollstonecraft's own subject, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. More important, as an example of blindness and insight explicitly taking place within the context of a feminist politics, the passage at once powerfully acknowledges and critiques Wollstonecraft's text's own ideological inscription—a simultaneity given all the more force by Wollstonecraft's unreflective use of “man” as the human agent of the Pisgah vision.

Thus, Wollstonecraft's use of passion and reason, her critique of the Rousseauistic Romantic imagination, and her deployment of gender all resist her monumentalization as one who repressed her female Otherness in favor of a male identity of Enlightenment rationality. Indeed, the complex circulation of political, epistemological, and gender signs in The Rights of Woman reflect a discursive deftness that exceeds the aporia of writing Mary Jacobus finds only in Wollstonecraft's fragmentary The Wrongs of Woman, insofar as The Rights of Woman uses the errancy of language to press for an explicitly political, oftentimes didactic rhetoric. Perhaps the most uncanny thing about The Rights of Woman is that the text's (still unacknowledged) theoretical density and the text's given identity as political praxis occupy the same space without scandal. That is a doubling, repressed or unrepressed, from which we might do well to learn.

Notes

1. As Katherine M. Rogers writes, “Widely admired during her lifetime, Wollstonecraft shortly after her death was vilified by her enemies and her work was ignored by her friends. Her reputation was so bad by the nineteenth century that several leading feminists repudiated her. … Even Wollstonecraft's friend [Mary] Hays omitted her from her five-volume Female Biography in 1803” (Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England [Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982], 3, 5).

2. Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England, 3. See also Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 9-12, and Alice Browne, The Eighteenth Century Feminist Mind (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 170. Wollstonecraft, needless to say, saw a necessary continuum between her two positions. For a discussion of England's reception of Rousseau, see Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley's Critique of the Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 37-53.

3. Just as Rousseau's Confessions affected the interpretation of his political and social theory, so too did Godwin's biography of Wollstonecraft provide anti-Jacobinists and anti-feminists with the tools to attack The Rights of Woman. For a discussion of the effects of the publication of Rousseau's autobiography in England, see Duffy, Rousseau in England, 32-53; for a discussion of how Godwin's biography of Wollstonecraft affected her intellectual and political reputation, see Browne, The Eighteenth-Century Feminist Mind, 170-73.

4. My notion of the historical “monument” develops out of Paul de Man's use of that term in his seminal essay, “Shelley Disfigured,” in Harold Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979), 39-73. See also Orrin N. C. Wang, “Disfiguring Monuments: History in Paul de Man's ‘Shelley Disfigured’ and Percy Bysshe Shelley's ‘The Triumph of Life,’ ELH 58, no. 3 (Fall 1991)—forthcoming.

5. Mary Jacobus, “The Buried Letter: Villette,” in Reading Women: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 59.

6. Thus Mary Poovey portrays Wollstonecraft's duality in the ideological terms of the two literary discourses open to her as a women, sentimental fiction and the “how to” texts of “the proper lady.” Relying heavily on Wollstonecraft's biography, Poovey turns Wollstonecraft's life and texts into a seamless narrative of a figure—“Wollstonecraft”—who is, on the whole, blind to the limits of the discourses structuring her life and writing (The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984], 48-113). Likewise, Cora Kaplan sees in Wollstonecraft's supposed privileging of male reason over female sentiment a fear of the female body—a fear that duplicates current debates over the role of female sexuality and pleasure in contemporary feminist agendas (“Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism,” in Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism [London: Verso, 1986], 31-57). Both Kaplan and Poovey primarily associate imagination in Wollstonecraft with a sexuality that the Romantic writer tries to occlude; in contrast, Mary Jacobus associates Wollstonecraft's imagination not only with passion but with the irreducible errancy—the “madness”—of language itself (“The Difference of View,” in Reading Woman, 33-34). Thus, unlike Poovey, Jacobus looks for the repressed effects of imagination not in Wollstonecraft's biography but in the rhetorical effects of her writing. Still, Jacobus has not really altered the Wollstonecraft paradigm that she, like Poovey and Kaplan, has inherited. She merely transfers Wollstonecraft's subversive Otherness from Wollstonecraft's biography to her literary works.

   An influential recent precursor of this critical plot that emphasizes the duality in Wollstonecraft as one between femininity and masculinity is Margaret Walters' “The Rights and Wrongs of Women: Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, and Simone de Beauvoir,” in The Rights and Wrongs of Women, ed. Anne Oakley and Juliet Mitchell (London: Penguin, 1976), 304-29.

7. For a reading of Wollstonecraft's acknowledgement of female writing see Jacobus, “The Difference of View,” 32-33; for a reading of female desire, see Kaplan, “Wild Nights,” 35, 159. For Poovey the movement from The Rights of Woman to The Wrongs of Woman is both a progress and a decline. On the one hand Poovey sees The Rights of Woman as exhibiting a frustration over the split between Wollstonecraft's professional and sexual identities, a split that the later works confront more directly; yet Poovey also sees this later confrontation hampered by a reification of the bourgeois self that The Rights of Woman seeks to deny (The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, 80-81, 94-113). For the argument that The Wrongs of Woman actually has more in common with The Rights of Woman than Wollstonecraft's first novel, Mary, A Fiction (1788), see Laurie Langbauer, “An Early Romance: Motherhood and Women's Writing in Mary Wollstonecraft's Novels,” in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 209-11.

8. As Denise Riley points out, one can refute the essential nature of “woman” while still believing in some other hypostatized agent, such as “women.” (See her “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988], 2-3.) In my critique, however, I do not distinguish between the terms “woman,” “women,” and the “feminine” precisely because I see Wollstonecraft's rejection of the gendered duality between reason and imagination as a rejection of the ontological assumptions that would allow for the reification of all three terms.

9. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 6; intro. All further references to this work appear in the text. So that readers may easily locate my references in other editions, I have cited chapters as well as page numbers.

10. See Timothy J. Reiss, “Revolution in Bounds: Wollstonecraft, Women, and Reason,” in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 12-21, 39-44. From the same book, see also Frances Ferguson's rebuttal to Reiss, “Wollstonecraft Our Contemporary,” 51-62.

11. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 154.

12. “Hegemonic practices are suturing insofar as their field of operation is determined by the openness of the social, by the ultimately unfixed character of every signifier. This original lack is precisely what the hegemonic practices try to fill in. A totally sutured society would be one where this filling-in would have reached its ultimate consequences and would have, therefore, managed to identify itself with the transparency of a closed symbolic order. Such a closure of the social is, as we will see, impossible” (Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 88). Also see Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 127-34.

13. The quote by Rousseau that Wollstonecraft responds to is: “Educate [women] like men. The more women are like men, the less power they will have over men, and then men will be masters indeed” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxely [London: J. M. Dent, 1911], 327).

14. I do not exaggerate when I claim that Wollstonecraft's analysis operates at the level of “forces”; the sentence I cite is in her chapter entitled “Animadversions on Some of the Writers Who Have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt,” which, as its title suggests, surveys and evaluates the cultural effect of a century's worth of literature aimed at conferring onto “woman” a single identity.

15. I am indebted to Richard A. Strier for pointing out to me that Wollstonecraft's reference to masturbation (“vices which render the body weak”) is specifically aimed not at girls but at boys. Earlier, Wollstonecraft does refer to girls who might learn “nasty or immodest habits” from one another in nurseries and boarding schools (127; chap. 7).

16. While she does not refer to the same passage on masturbation that I analyze, the most vivid example of this model of repression, articulated at the level of both style and sexuality, is offered by Kaplan, “Wild Nights,” 34-50.

17. After this passage Wollstonecraft once again refers to the “bad habits which females acquire when they are shut up together,” thus stressing that masturbation is a literal fact for girls as well as boys (165; chap. 12).

18. Richard A. Strier has pointed out to me that, for someone like Wollstonecraft who came out of the Protestant tradition of dissent, this solipsistic imagination would also have been associated with a Catholic sensibility. For a recent reading of Wollstonecraft with a view on sexuality and experience similar to mine, see Langbauer, “An Early Romance,” 210. Also, Wollstonecraft's critique of sentimental fiction is inscribed within the same polemic against female confinement and repression:

    There are the women who are amused by the reveries of the stupid novelists, who, knowing little of human nature, work up stale tales, and describe meretricious scenes, all retailed in a sentimental jargon, which equally tend to corrupt the taste, and draw the heart aside from its daily duties. I do not mention the understanding, because never having been exercised, its slumbering energies rest inactive, like the lurking particles of fire which are supposed universally to pervade matter.

    (183; chap. 13)

    Thus, sentimental fiction actually keeps the mind from experience, confining understanding and rendering it passive, much like the way schools restrict the exercise and activities of young girls. (And while the negative view of fiction does privilege reason over emotion, the analogy between reason and the school girls disrupts any facile reification of the male reason/female emotion split.) In the same vein Wollstonecraft also argues that the reading of sentimental fiction is better than no reading at all, since such fiction at least gives women some experience, even if it is the wrong kind (184; chap. 13).

19. There is evidence that suggests that Wollstonecraft paints this picture of Rousseau with knowledge of his own literary references to masturbation. Consider, for example, this passage from a review of The Confessions in the Analytical Review which critics have attributed to Wollstonecraft:

    His most enthusiastic admirers must allow that his imagination was sometimes rampant, and breaking loose from his judgement, sketched some alluring pictures, whose colouring was more natural, than chaste, yet over which, with the felicity of genius, he has thrown those voluptuous shades, that, by setting the fancy to work, prove a dangerous snare, when the hot blood dances in the veins.

    (Analytical Review 11 [December 1791]; quoted in Duffy, Rousseau in England, 48)

    As Duffy writes, “The Analytical's critique of Rousseauean sensibility coincides exactly with the anti-Rousseauean message of [Wollstonecraft's] Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (48-49). We can also note the similarity between the Analytical's passage, the Wollstonecraft quote, and this piece from The Confessions, in which Rousseau explicitly connects the imagination to masturbation:

    I had preserved my physical but not my moral virginity. … The progress of the years had told upon me, and my restless temperament had at last made itself felt. … [I] learned that dangerous means of cheating Nature, which leads in young men of my temperament to various kinds of excesses, that eventually imperil their health, their strength, and sometimes their lives. This vice, which shame and timidity find so convenient, has a particular attraction for lively imaginations. It allows them to dispose, so to speak, of the whole female sex at their will, and to make any beauty who tempts them serve their pleasure without the need of first containing consent.

    (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen [London: Penguin, 1953], 108-90)

    The most thorough treatment of Rousseau and masturbation is, of course, Jacques Derrida's “… That Dangerous Supplement …” in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 141-64.

20. “There is indeed much in [Rousseau's] make-up that reminds one less of a man than a high-strung woman. … By subordinating judgment to sensibility Rousseau may be said to have made woman the measure of all things” (Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism [1919; Boston: Houghton Mifflin; Cleveland: World Publishing, 1955], 130-32).

21. Throughout your letter [i.e., Burke's Reflections] you frequently advert to a sentimental jargon, which has long been current in conversation, and even in books of morals, though it never received the regal stamp of reason. A kind of mysterious instinct is supposed to reside in the soul, that instantaneously discerns truth, without the tedious labor of ratiocination. This instinct … has been termed common sense, and more frequently sensibility; and by a kind of indefeasible right, it has been supposed, for rights of this kind are not easily proved, to reign paramount over the other faculties of the mind, and to be an authority from which there is not appeal.

    … [This sensibility] dips, we know not why, granting it to be an infallible instinct, and, though supposed always to point to truth, its pole star, the point is always shifting, and seldom stands due north.

    (Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men [Albany, NY: Delmar, Scholar's Facsimiles, 1975], 68-69)

    For an extended analysis of Wollstonecraft's critique of Burke's emotional sensibility, see James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 168-76.

22. Thus Wollstonecraft attacks the assumptions of gender that underwrite Burke's duality between a masculine sublime and feminine beautiful in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), and then she asserts that Burke is himself actually inscribed not in the sublime but in the beautiful (The Rights of Men, 111-21, 138-42).

    Wollstonecraft also associates Burke's sensibility with a “personal pique” and a “hurt vanity”—those very traits of egomania that Burke attacks in Rousseau (The Rights of Men, 110).

23. Elsewhere, in praising the writing of Catherine Macaulay, Wollstonecraft takes pains not to associate Macaulay's thought with the masculine:

    I will not call [Macaulay's] a masculine understanding, 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.

    (105; chap. 5)

24. See Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, 58-59, and James K. Chandler, Wordsworth's Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 63. See also note 21.

25. This is exactly Boulton's final point about The Rights of Men (The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke, 172-76).

26. For a discussion of Price's vision and Burke's repudiation of it, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 144-46.