Effeminate Edmund Burke and the masculine voice of Mary Wollstonecraft

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the gendered and nationalist rhetorical strategies Mary Wollstonecraft used in her work The Vindication of the Rights of Man which was written as an open letter of response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France . While a number of scholars note Wollstonecraft’s adoption of a masculine voice in her systematic feminizing of Burke, this article also pays attention to the ways in which Wollstonecraft impugns Burke with the taints of being crypto-Catholic, Irish, and quasi-French. We notice how Wollstonecraft’s masculine voice is rational, combative, righteously passionate, middle-class, patriotically English and critically Protestant. We compare the fashioning of Wollstonecraft’s voice with contemporary political caricatures of John Bull and the cartoon depictions of Edmund Burke that appeared as Wollstonecraft was composing her VRM. Wollstonecraft’s VRM gained her considered attention and her critique of Burke’s character, (and what this article claims is her misreading of his aesthetic treatise), have been remarkably influential even to the present day. The characteristics of the distinct voice created in Wollstonecraft’s first Vindication are also evident in her second and more famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman. However, the rhetorical commitments entailed in Wollstonecraft’s public voice created challenges for her arguments in the second Vindication that demand careful attention.

KEYWORDS:

• Wollstonecraft
• Burke
• public sphere
• masculine
• effeminate
• John Bull

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Dr Christian Dupont and all the staff at Boston College’s John J. Burns’ Library for their assistance in using their fine collections including wonderful material on eighteenth century visual culture. My thanks also to Prof. James H. Murphy, Director of Boston College Irish Studies and to Prof. James M. Smith (BC English Dept.) for facilitating a visiting fellowship to the Burns Library that made this work possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine O’Donnell

Katherine O’Donnell is Assoc. Prof. History of Ideas, UCD School of Philosophy and is a member of Justice for Magdalenes Research (JFMR). She was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to study for a Masters in English Literature at Boston College. She won a further fellowship to study at the University of California at Berkeley while completing her Ph.D. thesis on the Gaelic background to Edmund Burke’s political thought. She was Director of UCD Women’s Studies Centre, a position she held for ten years until 2015. In 2016 she taught modules in Feminist Philosophy on the University of Oxford’s B.Phil programme. In 2017 she was appointed to her current position as Assoc. Prof. in the History of Ideas at UCD. She has won a number of academic prizes (including UCD President’s Gold Medal for Teaching) and a number of prizes for creative fiction (including Chancellor of UCAL Berkeley’s prize for prose) and with JFMR she has shared in a number of activist honours (including the Irish Labour Party’s Thirst for Justice award). She is published widely in the history of sexuality and gender; and the intellectual history of Eighteenth Century Ireland