Pride and Prejudice Read Online Free
Author: Jane Austen, Vivien Jones, Tony Tanner
Tags: Fiction, Classics
was very definitely political. Edmund Burke’s anti-revolutionary
Reflections on the Revolution in France
, published in 1790, had eloquently defended feudal traditions of paternalism, property and aristocracy in terms which put sexual mores and the family at the centre of the political agenda. Burke famously lamented the passing of ‘the age of chivalry’, of ‘generous loyalty to rank and sex’, and argued that ‘we begin our public affections in our families’: ‘To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.’ 6
He was attacked by, among many others, Mary Wollstonecraft, professional writer and member of radical intellectual circles in London, and well known today as one of the first modern English feminists. In
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790), Wollstonecraft defended revolutionary ideals, and argued that a ‘libertine imagination’, a predatory masculinity which reduced women to sexual objects, lay at the heart of Burkean traditionalism. For Wollstonecraft, Burke’s idea of the family enshrined sexual inequality. Two years later, in
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, she developed that insight in amore sustained application of revolutionary principles to sexual politics.
Rights of Woman
claims liberty, equality and citizenship for women, and offers a devastating critique of the process by which women come to identify themselves as exclusively sexual beings, incapable of rational thought or independent action:
In short, women in general, as well as the rich of both sexes, have acquired all the follies and vices of civilization, and missed the useful fruit…[Women’s] senses are inflamed, and their understandings neglected, consequently they become the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility, and are blown about by every momentary gust of feeling. Civilized women are…weakened by false refinement…All their thoughts turn on things calculated to excite emotion and feeling, when they should reason… 7
The kind of traditionalism represented by Burke was based on hierarchies of all kinds, including a sexual hierarchy within the family which took it for granted that the sexes are innately different. The egalitarian polemic of writers like Wollstonecraft did away with essential sexual difference by invoking a common human identity. Contemporary definitions of sexual difference tended to assign reason to men and feeling to women. In the passage just quoted, as throughout
Rights of Woman
, Wollstonecraft denies that opposition. She assumes that women’s capacity for reason is equal to that of men, even if, through inadequate education, that capacity often remains undeveloped. For Wollstonecraft, it is culture, not nature, which dictates that women behave like merely passive creatures of feeling, just as it is culture, not nature, which has allowed a self-perpetuating ruling class to reach a similar state of decadent self-indulgence. The ideal which she offers as an alternative to both – and to Burke’s defence of tradition – is that of the professional middle class, where education is a process of self- as well as public improvement:
In the middle rank of life…men, in their youth, are prepared for professions, and marriage is not considered as the grand feature oftheir lives; whilst women, on the contrary, have no other scheme to sharpen their faculties. It is not business, extensive plans, or any of the excursive flights of ambition, that engross their attention; no, their thoughts are not employed in rearing noble structures. 8
Women have only one route to self-improvement: ‘To rise in the world, and have the liberty of running from pleasure to pleasure, they must marry advantageously, and to this object their time is sacrificed, and their persons often legally prostituted’. 9 Instead, Wollstonecraft envisages the possibility of women becoming more publicly active
Reflections on the Revolution in France
, published in 1790, had eloquently defended feudal traditions of paternalism, property and aristocracy in terms which put sexual mores and the family at the centre of the political agenda. Burke famously lamented the passing of ‘the age of chivalry’, of ‘generous loyalty to rank and sex’, and argued that ‘we begin our public affections in our families’: ‘To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.’ 6
He was attacked by, among many others, Mary Wollstonecraft, professional writer and member of radical intellectual circles in London, and well known today as one of the first modern English feminists. In
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790), Wollstonecraft defended revolutionary ideals, and argued that a ‘libertine imagination’, a predatory masculinity which reduced women to sexual objects, lay at the heart of Burkean traditionalism. For Wollstonecraft, Burke’s idea of the family enshrined sexual inequality. Two years later, in
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, she developed that insight in amore sustained application of revolutionary principles to sexual politics.
Rights of Woman
claims liberty, equality and citizenship for women, and offers a devastating critique of the process by which women come to identify themselves as exclusively sexual beings, incapable of rational thought or independent action:
In short, women in general, as well as the rich of both sexes, have acquired all the follies and vices of civilization, and missed the useful fruit…[Women’s] senses are inflamed, and their understandings neglected, consequently they become the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility, and are blown about by every momentary gust of feeling. Civilized women are…weakened by false refinement…All their thoughts turn on things calculated to excite emotion and feeling, when they should reason… 7
The kind of traditionalism represented by Burke was based on hierarchies of all kinds, including a sexual hierarchy within the family which took it for granted that the sexes are innately different. The egalitarian polemic of writers like Wollstonecraft did away with essential sexual difference by invoking a common human identity. Contemporary definitions of sexual difference tended to assign reason to men and feeling to women. In the passage just quoted, as throughout
Rights of Woman
, Wollstonecraft denies that opposition. She assumes that women’s capacity for reason is equal to that of men, even if, through inadequate education, that capacity often remains undeveloped. For Wollstonecraft, it is culture, not nature, which dictates that women behave like merely passive creatures of feeling, just as it is culture, not nature, which has allowed a self-perpetuating ruling class to reach a similar state of decadent self-indulgence. The ideal which she offers as an alternative to both – and to Burke’s defence of tradition – is that of the professional middle class, where education is a process of self- as well as public improvement:
In the middle rank of life…men, in their youth, are prepared for professions, and marriage is not considered as the grand feature oftheir lives; whilst women, on the contrary, have no other scheme to sharpen their faculties. It is not business, extensive plans, or any of the excursive flights of ambition, that engross their attention; no, their thoughts are not employed in rearing noble structures. 8
Women have only one route to self-improvement: ‘To rise in the world, and have the liberty of running from pleasure to pleasure, they must marry advantageously, and to this object their time is sacrificed, and their persons often legally prostituted’. 9 Instead, Wollstonecraft envisages the possibility of women becoming more publicly active
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