How Does Mary Wollstonecraft Present 'masculine Woman'?

With unswerving determination, a voice speaks out from the pages of the treatise A Vindication on the Rights of Woman to convey a new politic on women: it boldly offers the argument that women require the same rational treatment as men in order to break away from a courtly model of corrupt femininity. Within just the first few pages of the treatise, the writer does not hesitate to confront its readers with a question that immediately targets the tensions in hand. It is a question that is posed with such directness that it immediately demands attention, much like the voice that articulates it. Our writer asks, "from every quarter I have heard exclamations against masculine woman; but where are they to be found?" and continues:

...If by this appellation men mean to inveigh against their ardour in hunting, shooting, and gaming, I shall most cordially join in the cry; but if it be against the imitation of manly virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character, and which raise females in the scale of animal being, when they are comprehensively termed mankind;- all those who view them with a philosophic eye must, I should think, wish with me, that they may every day grow more and more masculine.

Presented, then, is 'masculine woman': soldering together two words that presuppose entirely conflicting associations, it is a concept that seeks to transfer to woman, as culturally constructed by the patriarchal society within which she belongs, the virtues that are attributed to rational man. It is intended to exemplify the arguments established within the treatise. Yet, as much as 'masculine woman' is born from the politics that she represents, she is also deeply rooted in, and tailored by, the figure behind the voice, Mary Wollstonecraft: daughter, wife, lover, mother, and woman. It is this voice which Wollstonecraft struggles to reconcile with the discursive means available to her, in order to break into writing previously marked as masculine territory.

Wollstonecraft describes her own voice in the Vindication as one which speaks the "language of truth" . Indeed, it is a voice which speaks through the guise of rational argument and rhetoric, in order to break into a discourse traditionally associated with the male sphere of writing. For, during the 18th century, there was no neutral, ungendered style of writing available to her. Works of political theory, in particular, were heavily characterized by their association of rhetorical excellence with masculinity, since the power of reasoning necessary for the creation of such discourse tended to be attributed to men only. In order to write to persuade, therefore, under the rhetorical and stylistic demands of political discourse, Wollstonecraft had to concede to a style that would not overtly connect her to feminine literary presentations and thus hinder her argument for, and presentation of, rational woman. Wollstonecraft appears to have inserted her Vindication into this discursive tradition with relative success: a review in the Whig Monthly Review demonstrates the vindication's favourable reception amongst her contemporary readership. The writer talks of "performance" , noting "the author is possessed of great energy of intellect...and command of language..." The reviewer accepts the author's arguments as rational, and he also points towards a possible discursive strategy that Wollstonecraft employs in order successfully to insert her own voice within the debate.

Indeed, Wollstonecraft's approach in the Vindication is marked in the degrees to which it closely mirrors the literary conventions employed by contemporary male writers of political theory, such as Priestley and Paine, for example. Structurally, the writer establishes her writing right from the outset as a formal, and therefore logical, argument. The Vindication is divided into a series of carefully considered chapters that outline the progression of the writer's argument. Wollstonecraft leaves no gaps in the architecture of her argument, following a recognized convention of enumerating points within each of the chapters. She begins her treatise "I shall first consider..." and continues to separate her points. Of clear comparison is the declaration of an anonymous "Real Friend to the People" who goes to great lengths to enumerate every point of his argument, declaring "First, that the government of this realm..." , until "sixthly and lastly" he states the final point of his argument.

Whilst the employment of a first person speaker is typically found within political discourse of the period, following suit from writers such as Priestley, Wollstonecraft takes care to establish, as best as possible, a detached position from her subject: rarely does she use possessive pronouns when referring to women ("my sex" or words to that effect, occur but three times in the text). Furthermore, she ascertains from the start that her treatise will "address the head than the heart" , and to reflect this, rarely does she use the first person to offer a personal or emotional response; rather, it is used to stress and define a certainty or an imperative: "I shall..." "I am certain..." Surveying the political polemics of the period, they, too, are peppered with such usages of the first person speaker. Take Joseph Priestley's Essay on First Principles of Government where the first use of 'I' is followed by "assert" . This detached and definitive use of the first person speaker clearly aims to establish from the outset an argument that will be reasonable. It is a voice which seeks to convince.

Style, too, is tailored in accordance with this aim: predominantly in her Vindication Wollstonecraft rejects the fragile "flowery diction" of sentimental literature, and opts instead for language that is bolstered with images of emasculation: she constantly aligns the improvement of the female mind with the strengthening of "bodies of men" , with "standing armies", and they must perform like "disciplined machines" . Physical strength and fitness are interlocked with a strong sense of masculine identity; an identity which is of course connected to superior reasoning powers. Wendy Gunther-Canada also acknowledges that Wollstonecraft "continually returns to gendered language" as a necessary means "to support her argument": speaking through such images, her voice assumes a masculine and therefore more accepted identity and her readers are more readily persuaded by its rationale. This is her 'strategy', as the reviewer of the Whig Monthly Review suggests, and one which determines the means through which 'masculine woman' is presented. For, to present woman in this way to contemporary society though her writing, then adopting political discourse and its gendered style is essential step in convincing her readership of her argument. Communicating through this voice is a bold, yet entirely necessary, move: aptly communicating on the same intellectual level as her male contemporaries, Wollstonecraft presents herself as rational woman, and thus successfully exemplifies 'masculine woman'. Furthermore, her text is open to the same readers as the writers whose style she is trying to replicate, with the intention that her work might be accepted on the same terms.

Wollstonecraft's Vindication may speak only "the language of truth and soberness"; however, we must not be so quick to define the presentation of 'masculine woman' under these terms. Amongst several critics to unsettle this judgment, John Whale contests that "Wollstonecraft is engaged in an act of ventriloquism" , and argues that she is merely "adopting the macho language of the Enlightenment rationalist and suppressing her feelings" . This accusation forces us to consider the figure behind the puppet; and, indeed, on closer inspection, there are moments in the Vindication when the woman behind the words appears to speak out. Where footnotes might lead to citations of sources and evidence, the reader finds instead asides and exclamations. One note to a quotation from Rousseau reads simply "What nonsense!" . In two words Wollstonecraft reveals a voice that is both passionate and enthusiastic, so contradicting the voice that is meant to appear calm, deliberated, and therefore judicious. Elsewhere in the text readers discover energetic outbursts or lyrical intrusions where the writer becomes momentarily impassioned with argument. With poetic zest she illustrates the case of woman who "will soon find that her charms are oblique sunbeams...when the summer is passed and gone" .

The external structures of rhetoric seem to be a wall behind which her charged emotions range. This suggests that Wollstonecraft is struggling to fit the reality of her own experience as a thinking, feeling woman, against the defined shell of 'masculine woman' whom she is trying to extol. The circumstances of her life could not further complicate this attempt at reconciliation between the prototype and the person further. As daughter to an impecunious drunkard and governess in early adulthood, hardship was not alien to Wollstonecraft. Neither was loss: she never forgot the death of her childhood bosom friend Fanny Blood, nor did she really conquer her despair over her lover, Gilbert Imlay, and his defection of her. Yet, these trials of living and of experience were not particular to Wollstonecraft's life. Hardship and loss were known to many women it is simply that Wollstonecraft writes publicly of such experiences, through the discursive means available to her. Through her adopted discursive strategy, then, Wollstonecraft tries to veil a wealth of experience that, if given direct expression, would connect her to a weak femininity identity. Afterall, who, of her contemporary readers, would be convinced by 'masculine woman' as workable within society, if the chief advocator could not herself prove exemplary? Unlike Wollstonecraft's fellow political writers she could not act as critic participating from outside the debate in, what was for them, a neutral discursive space. Writing had been tailored to express man's experience and not necessarily the female subjective: firstly since it had traditionally been taken up by man, and therefore organised around his view of the world, and secondly, writing was yet to cater for subjective experience. The novel, man's first real attempt to accurately record subjective existence, was developing, and therefore we are talking about a woman trying to enter a discursive space that did not cater for the subjective, and not simply woman alone.

Small disruptions in style and occasional outbursts from our speaker, hint at the difficulties of presenting 'masculine woman' in Wollstonecraft's non-fictional work; yet, it is in her fictional work that these minor inconsistencies seem to manifest most acutely, even to the extent that we are presented with an altogether different understanding of 'masculine woman'. If, as the Vindication maintains 'masculine woman' addresses "the head than the heart" , then how must we place the titular heroine of Mary, who asserts that sensibility provides essential moments of spiritual enlightenment and "expands the soul" ? For this woman, "sensibility is the most exquisite feeling of which the human soul is susceptible" , not rational powers.

Chronologically, Wollstonecraft's Vindications came after her first fictional attempt, Mary, A Fiction, and we might therefore choose to see the former as a revision on the latter. However, if Maria, as seems possible, was meant to replace the proposed second volume of the Vindication, then confusingly our writer returns to a similar model of woman as that in Mary, a fiction. Again, the protagonist repeatedly falls into sentimental effusions, entertaining the very "romantic expectations" that the same writer of Vindication condemned. Wollstonecraft seems to present female characters for whom the engagement, exploration, and development, of their emotional capacities is as necessary as, if not more essential than, the improvement of their rationing powers. A different presentation of 'masculine woman' takes shape, one which perhaps reflects a more realistic model of woman in society because it encompasses the female subjective experience. This 'masculine woman' is the product of testing theory against the practices of reality, all be it a fictional one.

Wollstonecraft asked at the beginning of her Vindication, 'masculine women'- "where are they to be found?", and much further into her treatise she is still searching: "When do we hear of women who...boldly claim respect on account of their great abilities or daring virtues? Where are they to be found?" . We might contest over who 'masculine woman' is- the embodiment of the Vindication, a Mary, or Maria- but it remains that the writer, herself, can not find a satisfying presentation of 'masculine woman'. It is not how we define 'masculine woman' that marks Wollstonecraft's discursive presentation, but rather it is that there exist conflicting presentations within the work of the same writer. A significant shift occurs between such presentations, which loudly points to the extreme difficulties of conveying the paragon that the writer herself must become, without even the neutral discursive means to do so. Confined by the patriarchal society against which she is rebelling, Wollstonecraft cannot define a 'masculine woman' that satisfies both her theory, and experience, of being a woman, and for this reason she asks "Where are they to be found?" and is unable to supply an answer. But a presentation of it, however constrained, has been put forwards, and it is a shell to which Wollstonecraft's successors can add definition and life.

Bibliography:

Primary sources:

Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication on the Rights of Women, Dover Thrift Editions, (New York: Dover Publications, 1996).

Wollstonecraft, Mary, Mary and Maria, Penguin Classics, (London: Penguin Books, 1992).

Secondary sources:

Craciun, Alexandra (ed.), A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication on the Rights of Woman, (London: Routledge, 2002).

Dickinson, H.T. (ed.), Politics and Literature in the Eighteenth Century, (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1974).

Maria J. Falco (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).

Moore, Jane, Mary Wollstonecraft, (Northcote: Northcote House Publishers ltd. 1999).

Sapiro, Virginia, A Vindication of Political Virtue, The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft, (Chicago: The University if Chicago Press, 1992).

Taylor, Barbara, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.