The Eloquence of Mary Astell (review)

Spare and elegant, Christine Mason Sutherland's Eloquence of Mary Astell shifts Astell from 'first feminist' to 'first feminist rhetorician,' disclosing Astell's pioneering development from private, conversational discourse (sermo) to fully engaged vituperative contests (contentio) and suggesting an affinity between Astell's theorization of sermo and modern feminist 'rhetoric of care.' Best known today for her Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) on behalf of women's education and Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700, 1706), occasioned by the dreadful marriage, scandalous life, and pathetic death of the Duchess of Mazarin, Astell also wrote Letters Concerning the Love of God (with John Norris, 1695), The Christian Religion (1705), A Serious Proposal (part II) (1697), several pamphlets against Occasional Conformity (1704–9), and early poems.

Sutherland sets Astell's life (1666–1731) and context briefly before us. Educated in Newcastle by an Anglican clergyman uncle, who died when she was thirteen, she struck out inexplicably for London alone at twenty-one. Archbishop William Sancroft rescued her from destitution and put her in contact with a bookseller and a circle of female patrons, who sustained her until her death from breast cancer at sixty-five. (A Reynolds portrait of a young woman makes an attractive but misleading , because unidentified, frontispiece.) As rhetorician, Sutherland argues, Astell's – and any woman's – principal problem was ethos: for a Renaissance woman to speak publicly was to destroy the character, ethos, that bent audiences in the speaker's favor. (Webster's The White Devil is a notable instance: Vittoria complains that the more ably she defends herself, the more her audience condemns her as a whore; yet Vittoria is a whore.) The extrinsic ethos of reputation being unavailable or counter-productive, Astell, like other women, was forced on to intrinsic ethos: the testimony of reason, integrity, and goodwill within the work itself. Publishing anonymously, yet as 'a lady,' laid claim to reason through the work's merits, to integrity and goodwill by veiling the authoress's name.

With admirable dexterity and economy, Sutherland sets out women's loss of ideological status in the Reformation and Renaissance. Equality of souls and preference for virginity in medieval Christianity gave way to subordination in marriage, the manly active life, and new national bureaucracies that excluded the feudal lady. In spite of Christian humanism, the ideal of the silent wife militated against women's studying rhetoric, the arts of public speech. A dominant philosophical tradition, from Aristotle, Jerome, and Aquinas, to Vio and Luther, held women to be defective in reason and morality, the basic elements of intrinsic ethos, and accorded women's public speech – indecorous by definition – no good will. Yet Astell could draw strength from Christian Platonists like her uncle, and Cartesians, the former holding the masculine imperfect without the feminine, the latter dissociating mind from body and thus freeing women from their traditional dominance by the body and its passions. Once man becomes machine, no gendered body dampens women's minds with its cold humours.

Sutherland analyses each of Astell's major works, including the pamphlets, for their logical argumentation, establishment of ethos, treatment of audience, and theorization of the discursive project. By publishing, Astell obtruded her gender, but concealed her name. Although acquiescent in most women's exclusion from the world's public business (saving the queen, Anne), she drew from exclusion a potential advantage – the greater contributions women of leisure could make to 'Sciences' and scholarship.

One puzzle Astell presents has been that high Tory conservatism seems an odd place to find a withering account of the tyranny exercised over women in marriage, particularly when Astell evidently believes in the divine right of both husbands and kings. Sutherland's account of Astell as rhetorician provides the necessary clue. Because Astell was not a Lockean or a Whig, she could use Whig arguments against husbands with their full force. Not bound by realistic social constraints, the full implications of Lockean reasoning, or hobgoblin consistency with an argument she did not espouse, she could launch...