The Veil of Chastity: Mary Astell's Feminism
1980; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/sec.1980.0004
ISSN1938-6133
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Economic and Social Studies
ResumoThe Veil ofChastity: MaryAstell’s Feminism RUTH PERRY One of the first English thinkers to consider systematically the place accorded to women in the culture was the politically conser* vative, religiously devout daughter of a Newcastle coal merchant named Mary Astell. Her conclusions about women are inseparable from her religious faith, her belief in political authority, and her com* mitment to philosophical rationalism. Nevertheless, this was the first issue on which she addressed the public, the first cause which drew her into print. By 1700 she had published 570 pages on the subject. This article is not intended to outline the intellectual sources of her feminism, her complicated allegiance to her own intelligence, to rea* son, or to absolute authority. Nor is it intended to spell out her at* titudes towards particular men, attitudes as various as the men them* selves: her unqualified admiration for Henry Dodwell, the scholarly nonjuror, her contempt for Shaftesbury and his sophisticated Deism, her comradely criticism ofJohn Norris and of Francis Atterbury, and so on. But there is in her feminism a component of sexual disaffec* tion, a rejection of physiological womanhood, and a satiric dismissal of men as a class, and it is the context of this attitude which this study explores. For it is not enough to recognize and label this strain 25 26 / RUTH PERRY in Astell’s thought without also making clear how unfavorable were the conditions in her culture to the biological female. And although the energy of Astell’s prose discloses something of the psychological motivation behind her solution to the problem of sexual relations with men, to a historian considering women’s alternatives in that era, the choice of celibacy—however repressive it may seem to post-Freudians —has the ring of emancipation. Jeremy Taylor, whom Astell read and admired, described chastity as “the circumcision of the heart, the cutting off all superfluity of nautiness and a suppression of all irregular desires in the matter of sensual or carnal pleasure.” It was grace which forbade and restrained sexual excess, by which he meant “fornication, adultery, . . . volun tary pollutions . . . unnatural lusts and incestuous mixtures,” as well as “all immoderate use of permitted beds; concerning which judg ment is to be made, as concerning meats and drinks: there being no certain degree of frequency or intention prescribed to all persons; but it is to be ruled as the other actions of man, by proportion to the end, by the dignity of the person in the honour and severity of being a Christian. . . J’1 He assumed that restraint made one a better Chris tian because of the way the ascetic habit of self-denial loosened one’s grasp on the material world and left more time to spiritual involve ment, to meditation and prayer. Mary Astell was comfortable with these intellectual conceptions of chastity, having been raised on seventeenth-century Platonism, and thought of love clarified of the flesh as the ideal—an ideal best ap proximated by religious feeling. Her uncle, who according to tradi tion directed what little formal learning she had, attended Cam bridge in the 1650s, during the heyday of the “Cambridge platonists.” Ralph Astell was first admitted as a pensioner to St. John’s College, but briefly emigrated to Emmanuel College, then very much under the sway of Ralph Cudworth, Benjamin Whichcote, and John Worthington. There were the moral philosophers who led the attack on Hobbes’ materialism by asserting the preeminence of ab solute spiritual values which proceeded from God and governed the universe. For them, the moral life consisted in discovering these in nate, immutable ideas by reason, and then trying to live by them. Mary Astell undoubtedly imbibed some distillation of this idealism Mary AstelVs Feminism / 27 from her uncle Ralph. She, too, believed that the intellect could as certain the moral dimensions of ordinary experience—and had responsibility to do so—not so much by identifying moral feelings as by thinking abstractly through to absolute moral ideas and judging action in terms of them. The appetites and senses had a different pur pose; they were to preserve the body, and could not be trusted to assess the spiritual meaning of experience. Steady...
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