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- Title
Mary Wollstonecraft's Religious Characters.
- Authors
Swift, Simon
- Abstract
A number of readings of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, from Godwin onward, seek to account for what they take to be its argumentative ruggedness and polemical uses of reason as an expression of the immaturity of its author. I argue that in interpreting the text biographically, such readers fail to notice the importance of an idea of character to Wollstonecraft's social philosophy. Paying attention to character in Wollstonecraft's writing, especially in Rights of Woman, resituates what appear to be contradictions or discontinuities in Wollstonecraft's argument as aspects of a religious philosophy that argues for the continuity between providence and human error. I situate this reading both in relation to the reappearance of "character" in recent cultural theory, and demonstrate how attention to Wollstonecraft's religious characters can also help to account in a new way for her relation to interlocutors such as Edmund Burke and Adam Smith. Finally, I compare the argument of Rights of Woman to Kant's Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, published one year later. Both Kant and Wollstonecraft set out from a critique of Rousseau's doctrine of natural goodness, and argue instead for the historical and cultural purposiveness of evil. I suggest that each argument risks atheism in its departure from prescribed interpretations of scripture, and explore the ways in which each mobilizes an idea of character in order to think through the continuities between the Supreme Being and reason. Finally, I explore how these arguments are supported by a model for reading scripture allegorically.
- Subjects
WOLLSTONECRAFT, Mary, 1759-1797; VINDICATION of the Rights of Woman, A (Book : Wollstonecraft); LITERARY characters; LITERATURE; RELIGION Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Book); RELIGION
- Publication
Dialogue (15749630), 2014, Vol 17, p131
- ISSN
1574-9630
- Publication type
Essay