Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) is one of the most characteristic replies to Burke’s rhetoric of obscurity. Like other radicals, Wollstonecraft could not evade the contradictions inherent in a rationalist discourse which was at once sympathetic and opposed to the straightforward manipulation of the passions typical of the rhetoric of obscurity. Clarity had to be rhetorical in order to have an influence. Wollstonecraft accounted for this problem by appealing to a ‘genuine’ enthusiasm underwritten by a narrative of individual progressivism which mirrored the collective, human progressivism of the new rhetoric.64 Thus the ‘impassioned’, ‘genuine enthusiasm of genius,’ for Wollstonecraft, ‘seldom appears, but in the infancy of civilization; for as this light becomes more luminous reason clips the wing of fancy - the youth becomes a man’.65
This is consistent with Michaelson’s claim that, while in France ‘arguments supporting the Revolution were predominantly secular’, ‘[i]n England, by contrast, most political beliefs had a religious component’.66 We have already seen this problematic conflation of the scientific and the spiritual in Paine’s appeal to perpetual revelation and the interchangeability of inspiration, and it was a destabilising aporia which contributed to the decline in radical optimism. Tim Fulford, in Romanticism and Masculinity, follows the history of the decline of faith in the rhetoric of clarity, which he calls the style of ‘sincerity’,67 and demonstrates the internal tensions which led Wollstonecraft (along with Godwin and Coleridge) to seek a new form of progressive language. The complications of the gendered roles (and the potential for a recursive pattern of gender inversion that approximates androgyny)68 adopted and appointed by writers in the revolution controversy is pointed up by Stephen Blakemore’s claim that
by relentlessly characterizing Burke in the pejorative language of feminine vulnerability and weakness (imagination, sensibility, and hysterical madness), Wollstonecraft suggests that Burke’s emotional, fanciful account of the Revolution is a tissue of illusions and lies, while her own masculine representations (based on personal strength, labor, reason, and judgment) reflect truth and reality.69
Particularly for Wollstonecraft (and later for Coleridge), an outright rejection of Burkean sublimity was irreconcilable with the necessity of obscurity in religious contemplation: ‘Wollstonecraft was left grappling with the difficulty of dislodging from herself her remaining complicity with the gendered and ideological discourses which she explicitly opposed.’70
Other doubts arose in relation to the difficulty of communicating complexity, and eventually led to the notion that the charge of obscurity is as often made in a mode of prohibitive self-defence as it is in a mode of critical perspicuity. But Wollstonecraft was always aware of the power and inevitability of doubt (something other radicals were often unwilling to admit), and in an early invocation of the rhetoric of Romantic obscurity she related the positivity of doubt to the positivity of labour:
[t]o argue from experience, it should seem as if the human mind, averse to thought, could only be opened by necessity; for, when it can take opinions on trust, it gladly lets the spirit lie quiet in its gross tenement. Perhaps the most improving exercise of the mind, confining the argument to the enlargement of the understanding, is the restless enquiries that hover on the boundary, or stretch over the dark abyss of uncertainty.71
But as usual such qualifications were submerged under the weight of more typical injunctions of inspiration and immediacy. Asking her own rhetorical question ‘[w]hat is truth?’, Wollstonecraft answers: ‘[a] few fundamental truths meet the first enquiry of reason, and appear as clear to an unwarped mind, as that air and bread are necessary to enable the body to fulfil its vital functions’.72 Elsewhere she defines common sense as ‘a quick perception of common truths: which are constantly received as such by the unsophisticated mind, though it might not have sufficient energy to discover them itself, when obscured by local prejudices’.73
The commitment to emotion in Wollstonecraft’s rhetoric of clarity in ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ appears perversely in this context as an obfuscating, self-contradicting assertion that could have been made just as well by her enemies:
I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for, wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste time in rounding periods, or in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart.74
In such passages, the interchangeability of reciprocal figuration functions as a rough index of the decline of the rhetoric of clarity: the rejection of emotion was inevitably emotional, the rejection of suspicious rhetoric suspiciously rhetorical. Perhaps an even more important rhetorical complication for Wollstonecraft, however, is her antipathy to Burke’s politics and her simultaneous affinity with traditional Christian religious figures and commitments which she could not, or would not, abandon. Wollstonecraft makes the anxiety resulting from this opposition apparent in a caveat immediately following the passage quoted above, which criticized a Burkean ‘implicit respect’ for God’s ‘unsearchable ways’:
[b]ut, let me not be thought presumptuous, the darkness which hides out God from us, only respects speculative truths - it never obscures moral ones, they shine clearly, for God is light, and never, by the constitution of our nature, requires the discharge of a duty, the reasonableness of which does not beam on us when we open our eyes.75
Without question, Abraham (and, anachronistically speaking, Kierkegaard)76 would certainly have been troubled but that last claim. In any case, it is clear that Wollstonecraft here serves only to multiply, rather than to resolve any contradictions inherent in her radical ideology. The appeal to an indeterminate intuition which will necessarily ‘beam on us when we open our eyes’ reflects the more basic radical elision of any developed first principles of reason, and the knotty claim that God is inherently shrouded in darkness and is nonetheless light is not unravelled. The problematic confluence of a scientific rationality with revealed religion is more transparently communicated in her claim, later in the second ‘Vindication’, that ‘[r]ational religion… is a submission to the will of a being so perfectly wise, that all he wills must be directed to a proper motive - must be reasonable’.77 So much for the problem of evil.
The impending decline of the radical rhetoric of clarity evident in Wollstonecraft’s Vindications has been discussed at length by various critics. Steven Blakemore’s comment in Intertextual War is typical of this critical consensus concerning the ultimate, preromantic metarhetorical interchangeability of the rhetorics of clarity and obscurity: ‘Wollstonecraft and other revolutionaries replicate the representations they resist – they are profoundly implicated in the system of representation that they reject. They hence produce readings hauntingly similar to the ones they rebel against’.78 This decline is related to the problem of metarhetoric, which programmatically adopts the rhetoric it critiques in the very act of criticism. Speaking figuratively, in either of the two twilights there is no discernible difference between the dove and the raven. In their reflections on the Reflections the radicals merely mirror it, and ‘Paine and Wollstonecraft find themselves bound to follow Burke’s lead: to refute his position, they must treat it at length’.79 Perhaps the most apposite study of this element of radical rhetoric in relation to the first Vindication is James Boulton’s in The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke. In his section on the Vindications,80 Boulton lucidly demonstrates in detail Wollstonecraft’s appropriation of Burkean rhetoric, and argues that inversive, parodical appropriations of Burkean rhetoric ultimately lead radical rhetoric into an indiscriminate identity with Burkean rhetoric: thus Wollstonecraft ‘condemns Burke and, by the same token, is herself condemned’.81
To represent the wider range of the ‘response’ to Burke in which this rhetoric largely formed itself, I will now examine Wollstonecraft’s An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and the Progress of the French Revolution (1795). Written five turbulent years after the Vindications, after the outbreak of Terror and war, Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View participates in the radical response to the Reflections in the significant sense that it is, in part, an attempt to explain why Burke’s predictions largely came to pass. Simultaneously, it maintains a disagreement with Burke’s conservative foundation for these predictions. It is also important as a document which appears amidst the decline of radical confidence in the positive, clear and final outcome of revolutionary delay, like that which Wollstonecraft expressed in a letter to the radical publisher Joseph Johnson on 15 February 1793: “look beyond the evils of the moment, and do not expect muddied water to become clear before it has had time to stand”.82 As such, it is an important record of the decline of the 1790s radical rhetoric of clarity.
Wollstonecraft engages throughout the Historical and Moral View in rhetorical figurations typical of the inversive rhetoric of clarity. As Ronald Paulson notes, Wollstonecraft consistently invokes
the complex imagery often encountered in the years following 1789, energy-fire-illumination of dark areas combined with the suggestion of returning spring and fruition…. She draws on the basic transvaluation of the French light/dark that followed from the sun’s being the source of light, warmth and power, as God and therefore as his vice-regent the king.83
In order to give a broader historical view of the Revolution, Wollstonecraft also engages in primitivist reflections typical of the new rhetoric and revolutionary radicals, claiming that the ‘first social systems were certainly founded on passions’.84 These ‘paroxysms of passion’ are, again typically, dangerous, and ‘flash out in those single acts of heroic virtue, that throw a lustre over a whole thoughtless life; but’, we are reminded, ‘the cultivation of the understanding, in spite of these northern lights, appears to be the only way to tame men, whose restlessness of spirit creates the vicious passions, that lead to tyranny and cruelty’.85 It was precisely the victory of passion and the defeat of reason or the understanding which led to the descent of the revolution into tyranny. Wollstonecraft chooses as the best example of this defeat the moment of the revolution’s greatest apparent victory, the passing of various significant proclamations (including the declaration of rights) on August 4, 1789.
This glorious day, ‘the renowned 4th of August!’86 represented for Wollstonecraft not the triumph of revolutionary principles, but rather the failure of the National Assembly to act in accordance with the calm deliberation of reason. ‘It too frequently happens’, she ominously asserts in the midst of her description of the inversive events of that day, ‘that men run from one extreme to another, and that despair adopts the most violent measures’.87 ‘Thus’, we are told, ‘the nobility, whose order would probably lose most by the revolution, made the most popular motions, to gain favour with the people’.88 The accelerating account of proclamation after proclamation, rather than becoming a portrait of well-deliberated and just liberal actions, becomes instead a portrait of the distorted productions of unhealthy and excited imaginations. The following dash-filled account of the last hours of the day is a good example of this intemperate torrent of reform, and deserves to be quoted in full:
[a] number of propositions, more or less important, brought up the rear. The suppression of the first fruits; the rights of wardenship; and the abrogation of those barbarous vows, which fetter unfortunate beings for life.—In short, full and entire liberty for the non-catholics.—Admission of all the citizens into all offices, ecclesiastical, civil, and military.—Abolition of the plurality of ecclesiastical pensions.—And then, not forgetting their national character, it was proposed, that a medal should be struck in commemoration of this night; and a decree also passed, conferring gratuitously on the king the august title… of RESTORER OF FRENCH LIBERTY.89
Such a ‘disorder which made sensibility predominate over legislative dignity’ was, of course, impossible to sustain, and Wollstonecraft playfully suggests that ‘[i]t is very possible, that the next morning the different parties could scarcely believe, that they had more than the imperfect recollection of a dream in their heads’.90 Although other cases of the disastrous triumph of passion over reason abound in Wollstonecraft’s detailed account of the early days of the revolution, it is this failure in the constitution of government (where the language of clarity, and not of dimly conceived passing thoughts, should have held sway), that best represents the primary, primitive cause of the revolution’s failure. In Wollstonecraft’s rhetorical account it was, in other words, the transformation of the rhetoric of reason into the rhetoric of Burkean bombast which ultimately undermined the cause of the revolution and ironically brought his turgid prognostications into being.
The second cause of the revolution’s failure to bring about lasting reform was the state of French culture and sensibility, which had been poorly conditioned by a history of oppression for the responsibilities of sudden freedom. ‘The french people’, writes Wollstonecraft, in a sort of retrospective prophecy, ‘had long been groaning under the lash of a thousand oppressions…. It was, therefore, to be apprehended… that they would expect the most unbridled freedom’.91 This sudden burst from a tyrannical yoke was a common trope in evaluations of the revolution, but Wollstonecraft goes further, anticipating the Coleridgean Romantic obscurity of difficulty and labour, claiming that the French had been suppressed in everything but the pursuit of pleasure, rather than, presumably, some sort of judicious mortification. This resulted in the production of a ‘polished slavery’ which ‘so effeminated reason, that the french may be considered as a nation of women, and made feeble, probably, by the same combination of circumstances, as has rendered these insignificant’.92 Clearly they did not possess the ‘unwarped minds’ required for the solicitous fusion of sensibility and reason deemed necessary for post-revolutionary peace, and their feminisation is, for Wollstonecraft, an index of their warping. But it is a curious feebleness which results in the blood of Terror. In any case, the French were only as a result of their history constitutionally incapable of producing a workable constitution. The blame lay not, as it did for the misguided Burke, in the principle of a popular movement against the inviolability of hereditary power, or the power of the church, or the monarch. Rather, it was this power itself which was responsible for having contingently rendered a positive revolution impossible. But the clarity of tradition is still the strongest guarantee for a prophetic review of the course of culture and politics. There can be no clear birth from a dark womb.