Politics from the Outside: Mary Wollstonecraft's First Vindication

ruuii^ rum m e uuisiae: iviarv W ollstonecraft’s FirstqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Vind ication M IT Z I M Y E R S With the pub lication of Reflections on the Revolution in France on 1 Nove mb e r1790, Burke b e came England’s le ad ing spoke sman for aristocratic conse rvatism, a figure e pitomizing the e stab lishme nt,orthod oxy , and authority whom score s of op­ pone nts rushe d to confront. The pamphle t war b e twe e n Burke’s antagonists and supporte rs re se mb le s a se cond b attle b e twe e n the ancie nts and the moderns; it raged two and a half years during which time some seventy works were published by the two sides. That a woman seems to have been the first to attack Burke’s passionate defense of the status quo is unusual in the arena of eighteenth-century political controversy.1 At this time, Mary Wollstonecraft was an obscure hack writer of thirty-one, but upon the appearance of A Vindication of the Rights of M en in the same month as the Reflections, she made her mark at once as a polemic writer. The book achieved, as Godwin notes, “extraordinary notice”: the anonymous first edition apparently sold out imme­ diately, and on 14 December a second edition was published with the author’s name on the title page.2 Discussions of Wollstonecraft’s eventful life far outnumber 113 114 cbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA / M IT Z I M Y E R S those of he rwork, and most criticism of he r writing ce nte rson he r most famous b ook,A Vindication o f the Rights o f W om an (1792). The first Vindication has received comparatively little recent attention despite its early success. Yet it is a seminal work for students of Wollstonecraft’s later thought: VRM gave her confi­ dence in her ability to articulate her ideas, established her stature as a commentator on morals, politics, and society, and laid the groundwork for the theories developed in subsequent works. Moreover, this earlier work merits consideration in its own right as a searching and sometimes compelling criticism of the Reflections. From Godwin on, Wollstonecraft’s critics and biographers have given the first Vindication a mixed press. On the one hand, the work has been highly praised for its uncompromising social criticism and its passionate humanitarian protest. G. S. Veitch, for example, calls VRM in some ways the best of the replies to Burke and the only one “adequate on the emotional side.”3 On the other hand, Wollstonecraft has been frequently censured for the vehe­ mence of her attack on Burke and the seeming lack of organi­ zation and connection in her arguments. Some critics have re­ buked her for relying too heavily on the appeal to reason as a corrective to Burke’s theories while others have reproved her for overemotionalism. In addition, she has been faulted for side­ stepping political science and constitutional theory: R. R. Fennessy remarks that she “accomplished the unlikely feat of writing an answer to Burke without treating at all either of the French revolution or of the English revolution of 1688” (p. 203). These criticisms must be examined and the grounds for praise elucidated before Wollstonecraft’s achievement can be measured. Neither Wollstonecraft’s merits and defects nor her general mode of operation in the first Vindication can be understood fully without taking into account the position from which she writes. Since she is both a woman and a radical intellectual, she is doubly outside of and in protest against traditional social structures. This position she characterizes as being “the first of a new genus.”4 Wollstonecraft’s coign of vantage is well described by Virginia Woolf: “If one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden M ary W ollstonecraft’s FirstqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Vind ication / 115 splitting off of consciousne ss, say in walking d own White hall, whe n from b e ing the natural inhe ritor of that civilisation, she b e come s,on the contrary , outsid e of it, alie n and critical.”5...