Artikel
Civilization and the rights of woman : liberty and captivity in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft
Verfasst von:
Neill, Anna
in:
Wallingford:
2001
,
98 - 117 S.
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| Einrichtung: | Ariadne | Wien |
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| Verfasst von: | Neill, Anna |
| In: | |
| Jahr: | 2001 |
| Sprache: | Englisch |
| Beschreibung: | |
| Recent scholarship has shown how, in her political writing, Mary Wollstonecraft developed a troubling evaluation of femininity - one that ironically brought her sexual politics into line with those she attacked in Edmund Burke's account of the French Revolution. This article identifies a different contradiction in her feminism. It argues thar her challenge to the lingering conservatism in Enlightenment philosophy relied on a model of social history that put reasoning women at the center of a civilized culture threatened by a savage periphery. It suggests that Wollstonecraft's strong critique of the contradiction in Enlightenment political thought, which say women as lacking in civic character, is organiuzed rhetorically around the contrast between polished civil subject and violent savage. Because this distinction rests to a large extent on the assumption that domestic virtue is a central feature of more advanced societies, her argument finally locates women in a morally invigorated domestic sphere rather than in public life. In the second half of the article, the author examines how wollstonecraft's fiction shows her political philosophy depending, to a large extent, on the logic of the captivity narrative - a logic according to which female virtue must be protected against the horros of a savage wilderness. By reading both the "Vindications" side by side with "Maria", we can see how Wollstonecraft's political arguments are tied to the domestic plot of conjectural history and how, as a result, she is unable to free women entirely from the sentimental narrative of captivity that defines and limits their civic lives | |
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