Wollstonecraft reading

A remarkable strategy of Wollstonecraft's cultural criticism, especially on the state of women, is her method of reading society as a text, a “prevailing opinion,” so she calls it in the title of chapter V of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. To regard the regulating forms of social existence as “opinion,” and not a dictate of divine law or natural order, is to identify a human construction – a set of ideas and practices – that may be subject to critical reading, to revision, to rewriting. Wollstonecraft's method of cultural criticism is at once assisted and logically enabled by her actual literary criticism, applied to such prestigious texts as John Milton's Paradise Lost (and its biblical bases), Alexander Pope's epistle To a Lady, Of the Characters of Women, Samuel Richardson's epic novel Clarissa, J.-J. Rousseau's influential “education” novels, Emile and Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, and such works of patriarchal advice as Dr. James Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women and Dr. John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to His Daughters. Reading the social text and its literary instances,Wollstonecraft sets her sights, and trains ours, on a lexicon (cherished by poets) by which women are flattered into subjection – innocent, delicate, beautiful, feminine – to expose a specious syntax of faint praise for “fair defects” of character and a suspect reverence for “angels” and “girls” rather than respect as capable, intelligent adults. She is particularly sharp on how notions of natural are summoned to rationalize a social text: worn into “the effect of habit,” a social system is “insisted upon as an undoubted indication of nature” (VRW 5:150). “Such is the order of nature,” Rousseau intones of man's claims to women's obedience (except in matters of pleasure, where she “naturally” directs him). Taking the form of factual statement about “the order of nature,” such assertions conceal a structure of values and power relations, what modern cultural critique would call “ideology.”