A Battle Over Language: Burke Versus Wollstonecraft

       What strikes me as especially artful about Wollstonecraft’s rejoinder to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is how she uses his own words—one word in particular—to feminize his argument. Although Burke only says sensibility on five occasions in his book, each time he either commends its exercise or deplores its absence; therefore, he ascribes a positive, masculine meaning to the term. Yet the word had a distinctly feminine connotation to genteel eighteenth century Europeans. The “cult of sensibility” revolved around the idea that women have a delicate nervous system, which manifests itself in frequently “crying, blushing and fainting” and in the extreme by weakness, feebleness, and gullibility ((Earle NP).[1] As Wollstonecraft begins “A Vindication Reflections of the Rights of Men” (the unabridged version), she associates Burke’s ideas with feminine words like excitement, vanity, and beauty. She then digs her knife deeper in the fifth paragraph with a backhanded compliment: “Even the ladies, sir, may repeat your brightly sallies, and retail in theatrical attitudes many of your sentimental exclamations.” In the next sentence, she leverages Burke’s positive meaning of sensibility. “Sensibility is the “manie” of the day,” she declares, as if the nexus of each of Burke’s 407 paragraphs turns on the word. Completing her sentence, Wollstonecraft marries sensibility—by juxtaposition if not grammatically—to its darkest connotation: “. . . and compassion the virtue which is to cover a multitude of vices, whilst justice is left to mourn in sullen silence, and balance truth in vain” (123). This statement also lays the groundwork for her main argument, that Burke’s political philosophy sanctions injustice. But Wollstonecraft also continues to feminize Burke’s use of the term: his sensibility becomes pampered sensibility; his flights of metaphor become pretty flights; and his reflection inflames his imagination.

Modern liberals could take a cue from Wollstonecraft. Right-wingers already have, as evidenced by the adhesiveness of terms like panty-waist and bleeding-heart. Could Frank Luntz be the Mary Wollstonecraft of our age? Although the above epithets probably originated before the boy wonder of Fox News was born, he is credited with renaming the estate tax the death tax. But Burke and Wollstonecraft viewed the issue of inheritance in different terms: he favored continuation of prigmoniture, she the right to divide one’s estate “amongst all the children of a family” (126). The locus of the debate on inheritance is radically different today. Ironically, Warren Buffett’s argument in favor of the inheritance tax has Burkean overtones. Buffet says that the rich owe part of their wealth to the nation’s infrastructure—schools, roads, public safety. Is this not similar to the debt that Burke says we owe our forefathers for their “spirit of philosophical analogy” (115)? Of course, Burke could argue that the dead cannot collect taxes. (ha ha!)

Burke tries a linguistic tactic of his own with reason, by associating the word with power—“the empire of light and reason”—and primitivism—“our naked shivering nature” (119). In Burke’s revered pre-enlightenment society, however, power was “gentle” and obedience “liberal.” But Wollstonecraft appropriates this word too, capsizing it by using it as a verb: “Quitting now the flowers of rhetoric, let us, Sir, reason together” (125). How can Burke deny such a gracious invitation?

Work Cited (other than course texts)

Earles, Megan. “The Cult of Sensibility.”  

ww.unc.edu/courses/2006spring/engl/021/006/REFERENCES/CultofSensibility.html

Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Vindication of the Rights of Women. 1792. Project Guttenberg. www.guttenberg.org.

Burke, Edmund. The Sublime and the Beautiful. 1757. Bartleby.com. www.bartleby.com

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[1] Wollstonecraft articulates this view in her 1792 book, The Vindication of the Rights of Women: “Their [women’s] senses are inflamed, and their understandings neglected; consequently they become the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility (my emphasis), and are blown about by every momentary gust of feeling” (NP). Burke himself expresses the idealistic side of the paradigm in The Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). In the chapter on Delicacy, he writes: “The beauty of women is considerably owing to their weakness, or delicacy and is even enhanced by their timidity, a quality of mind analogous to it” (III.16).