The limits of Barbauld’s feminism: re‐reading “The Rights of Woman”
2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/1050958042000338534
ISSN1740-4657
Autores Tópico(s)Literature: history, themes, analysis
ResumoAbstract This essay considers the evidence by which our critical understanding of Barbauld’s attitude toward eighteenth‐century feminist debates has been reconstructed and questions current critical interpretations of her position on the gender politics of the period. It focuses on her widely anthologized poem “The Rights of Woman” and examines why this text has been frequently interpreted as a reactionary response to Wollstonecraftian feminism. The essay challenges this assumption and, after considering a range of textual and contextualizing evidence, argues that far from revealing hostility to the cause of women’s rights, this poem actually offers a perceptive analysis of the ideological and legal impediments to that cause. Notes Penny Bradshaw is a lecturer in English in the School of Culture, Media, and Environment at St. Martin’s College. Correspondence to Dr. Penny Bradshaw, School of Culture, Media, and Environment, St. Martin’s College, Lancaster, Lancashire LA1 3JD, UK. Email: p.bradshaw@ucsm.ac.uk According to the “Anthologies Page” for Romantic Circles edited by Harriet Kramer Linkin, Laura Mandell and Rita Raley, “The Rights of Woman” is now in fact the most widely anthologized of Barbauld’s poems, appearing in fourteen of the twenty‐two anthologies listed. “Washing Day” is the next most popular, appearing in thirteen anthologies. “To Mr Coleridge” and Eighteen Hundred and Eleven currently hold a joint third place, both appearing in ten anthologies. The list here is fairly extensive, but see for example Moore (388), Ross (217), Barker‐Benfield (222), Todd (214), and Donna Landry (273). A slightly divergent and more interesting reading of “The Rights of Woman” has been suggested by Paul Hamilton in his article “The New Romanticism: Philosophical Stand‐ins in English Romantic Discourse.” He claims that the poem “presents the constraints on female emancipation in an extraordinarily knowing way” and suggests that it displays a cynicism about male “propaganda about women” right until the last line’s explosion of this cynicism (125). Hamilton’s tantalizingly provocative comments on the poem are, however, not supported by any close engagement with the text. He does not show how the cynicism can be seen to work, in a poem that other critics have read as deeply retrograde and conservative. Moreover, Hamilton goes along with the traditional reading in that he too reads the last line of the poem as regressive and in that he sees the poem as being set up in opposition to Wollstonecraft, claiming that it presents “an alternative to the feminist writing coming out of a Painite framework like Wollstonecraft’s” (125). I want to argue that the poem represents a complex engagement with the rhetoric of rights which emerged from this framework, rather than simply an “alternative” to this model. In an addendum to the text of the letter McCarthy notes that the handwriting is similar, although not identical, to Rochemont Barbauld’s usual writing and may possibly be that of his sister, Susannah (379). Other critics have noted that Barbauld tends to be seen as “anti‐feminist” when judged by the criteria of a particular model of feminism which values separatist solutions for women’s oppression. McCarthy argues that it is “[f]eminists of the 1970s—the ‘second‐wave’ feminists” who were “especially offended” by Barbauld’s rejection of female solidarity based upon biological sex difference (366), and Haley Bordo has pointed out in a recent article that criticisms of Barbauld’s attitudes toward feminism tend to measure her “merits against a radical‐feminist framework, thereby eliding the possibility of other modes of feminism, such as one that is not so much about a united women’s resistance as it is about enabling difference and critiquing the biological essentialism at the root of sexism” (187). There is evidence that Barbauld herself was fundamentally opposed to biological essentialism both in this letter to Edgeworth and elsewhere. In her poem to her brother “To Dr. Aikin on his Complaining that she neglected him, October 20th 1768,” she recalls their shared childhood education “when like two scions on one stem we grew,/And … from the same lips one precept drew” (27–28), and tries to suppress her “angry thoughts” and “envy” (35) at the later gendered division of their education. She declares that although “their path divides” (he went to Manchester to study Medicine while she stayed at home and helped with domestic management), there is in fact no fundamental gendered difference between their minds, which “were not cast” in “different moulds,” nor were they “stampt with separate sentiments and taste” (55–56). In his review of “Poems by Miss Aikin,” William Woodfall laments the absence of more feminine topics from Poems, commenting that “We hoped the woman would appear” (136). Aikin notes that “The Poems have been disposed, with some unimportant exceptions, in chronological order, as nearly as it could be ascertained” (lxii). The phrase “with some unimportant exceptions” is tantalizing and seems tantamount to an admission that Aikin did in fact deliberately alter the positioning of some poems for strategic purposes. Intriguingly Hamilton (125), Lonsdale (306), Breen (79), and Wu (25) all give the date of composition as 1795, but do not provide any supporting evidence for this unusual dating. The notes accompanying “The Rights of Woman” in McCarthy and Kraft’s highly influential 1993 edition of Barbauld’s Poems in fact claim that it was “probably provoked” by Wollstonecraft’s “sneer” regarding Barbauld’s poem “To a Lady with some Painted Flowers” and written as an “outburst of anger at Wollstonecraft” (289). Most other anthologizers, following McCarthy and Kraft’s lead, have gone on to reinforce the idea that the poem is written as a reactionary response to Wollstonecraft by appending a footnote to this effect. See for example Abrams (27), Lonsdale (530), and Wu (25). More recently, however, McCarthy has begun to cast some doubt on his own earlier reading of the text. In his article “Why Anna Letitia Barbauld Refused to Head a Women’s College,” published in 2001, he claims that a “careful reading of ‘The Rights of Woman’ suggests that it is a great deal more complex than a mere rebuke [to Wollstonecraft]” (371). Nevertheless, in their 2002 Selected Poetry and Prose, he and his co‐editor Elizabeth Kraft, continue to set the poem up as a direct response to Vindication both in their conjectural positioning of the text and in their introduction, in which they refer to it as “Barbauld’s reply to Wollstonecraft” (25). Although they do here question the idea that it necessarily has to be seen as a hostile response, commenting that it has “usually been taken—erroneously, we think—as a repudiation of Wollstonecraft’s ideal of sexual equality” (25), and observe in the headnote to the poem that its “relation to the Vindication needs to be re‐opened” (130). Wollstonecraft criticizes Barbauld’s metaphorical use of flowers to represent women in the poem, referring to it as “an ignoble comparison” and suggests that such an allusion, which “robs the whole [female] sex of its dignity,” has “ever been the language of men.” She also refers to Barbauld, however, as a woman of “superior sense” and critiques the poem primarily to register her surprise at finding Barbauld, of all people, falling back on such imagery (Wollstonecraft 144). See for example Bradshaw, Bordo, and Armstrong. In her essay “An Appeal to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts” Barbauld notes that “we want to bury every name of distinction in the common appellation citizen” (Works 361). Janet Todd notes that Mary Wollstonecraft was “nurtured in Dissenting circles” (197) and Ruth Watts claims that she was “much influenced by [Richard] Price’s views on the perfectibility of humankind, by the general Unitarian emphasis on reason and the need for all to develop their mental and moral abilities through education, and by their respect for women’s intellectual powers” (92). See my comments relating to her views on Warrington Academy and on male students in “Gendering the Enlightenment” (Bradshaw 355–357). Adrienne Rich’s description of this act of “looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” (35) seems particularly apposite to the recent re‐readings of women’s poetry of the Romantic period, since that body of work has for too long been read with eyes that were trained by the criteria established by male poets and critics. By the end of the eighteenth century the use of slavery as a metaphor for women’s condition in society was widespread. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft uses the metaphor repeatedly as a defining measure of women’s legal and social status, and Barbauld herself refers to the cultural expectations placed upon women in her allegory “Fashion: A Vision” as the worst kind of “slavery” (Legacy 94). All poetry quotations are taken from Poems edited by McCarthy and Kraft. Additional informationNotes on contributorsPenny Bradshaw Penny Bradshaw is a lecturer in English in the School of Culture, Media, and Environment at St. Martin’s College. Correspondence to Dr. Penny Bradshaw, School of Culture, Media, and Environment, St. Martin’s College, Lancaster, Lancashire LA1 3JD, UK. Email: p.bradshaw@ucsm.ac.uk
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