In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, and: An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting
  • Helen Thompson (bio)
Mary Astell. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. Patricia Springborg. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002. 300pp. US$13.95; CAN$17.95; £8.99. ISBN 1-55111-306-6.
Jane Collier. An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, ed. Audrey Bilger. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003. 218pp. US$12.95; CAN$15.95. ISBN 1-55111-096-2.

In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694–97), Mary Astell asks her readers the ringing question "Why shou'd not we assert our Liberty, and not suffer every Trifler to impose a Yoke of Impertinent Customs on us?" (120). Astell's appeal is elucidated by her editor Patricia Springborg, who explains that "Freedom Astell understands classically as the capacity to embrace a principle of conduct and follow it" (28). Serious Proposal promotes a vision of "Liberty" realized as the practice of both rational and impassioned virtue when women "use due endeavours to procure a lively relish of our true Good" (144). Astell's endorsement of "Religious Retirement" (73) as a means to this end—a woman "who is a Christian out of Choice, not in conformity to those about her; and cleaves to Piety, because 'tis her Wisdom, her Interest, her Joy, not because she [End Page 398] has been accustom'd to it"(70)—disavows any pretence to "usurp Authority where it is not allow'd; permit us only to understand our own duty, and not be forc'd to take it on trust from others" (81). But a woman's lively understanding of her "own duty" does significantly encroach upon the "Authority" that would enforce rotely feminized "conformity" (or, as Astell also puts it, "Nauseous repetition" [205]): "For we find a Natural Liberty within us which checks at an Injunction that has nothing but Authority to back it" (201). Astell's defence of the strenuously virtuous use of "Natural Liberty" inversely repudiates the arbitrariness of the masculine authority that, in order to turn women into "little useless and impertinent Animals" (76), refuses to acknowledge them "as capable of Learning as Men are" (83).

Springborg's introduction and notes vitally amplify Serious Proposal's generic, political, and philosophical ambitions. By showing Astell's pervasive debt to Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole's Port Royal Logic or the Art of Thinking (1683)—credited by Astell when she explicates "the Method of Thinking" and "Natural Logic" (166)—Springborg illuminates a line of intellectual filiation too easily obscured when one reads Serious Proposal from a solely Lockean vantage. Springborg recaptures the urgency of the tension between epistemological certainty and less epistemologically secure sensation systematized by René Descartes's Rules for the Directions of Mind (Latin, 1701), the Port Royal Logic (Arnauld read Descartes's Rules in manuscript), and Astell's Serious Proposal as "those different Modes of Thinking, which for distinction sake we call Faith, Science, and Opinion" (149). Springborg likewise shows the profundity of Astell's engagement with the Cambridge Platonists—notably John Norris, with whom Astell wrote Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695)—as well as with authors such as Robert Boyle, Nicolas Malebranche, Richard Allestree, Madeleine de Scudéry, and, Springborg suggests, Aristotle. Springborg's account of Serious Proposal's generic prehistory and afterlife—in particular, the unacknowledged inclusion of its chapter 3, sections 1–5 in George Berkeley's The Ladies Library of 1714 (23)—opens new assessments not only of its philosophical precursors but also of the extent of its future reach. This edition's appendices include Judith Drake's An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696), Daniel Defoe's An Essay upon Projects (1697), and a selection from the Tatler 32 (1709) on the "order of Platonic ladies" (280). By so amply restoring the urgency and specificity of the connections that made Astell, as Springborg affirms, "one of the most theologically serious and philosophically competent theorists of her age" (9), this edition marks a transformative event in the eighteenth-century literary and philosophical canon.

I would identify Astell's indictment of "nothing but Authority" as a feminist iteration of John Locke's Two Treatises...

pdf

Share