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“I Have Looked Steadily around Me”: The Power of Examples in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman has been thoroughly discussed as a text in which its feminist arguments and its rhetorical maneuvers not only inform each other, but become an inseparable dyad for analyzing her work. Scholars have recognized Wollstonecraft’s critical edge and the ingenuity of her rational argument, but they also pointed to the work’s rhetorical inconsistencies. Indeed, while Wollstonecraft wants to contrast her style to the sentimentality of Burke (in her first Vindication) or the sensuality of Rousseau, she at times slips into the very sentimental modes she tends to critique. Moreover, her Vindication reveals another tension that is at work in the text and seems to remain unresolved or open to various interpretations. An “Enlightenment feminist,”1 Wollstonecraft faces a dilemma of either entering into a public sphere of men (by appropriating the rhetoric of masculine rational discourse) or trying to forge a rhetoric of feminine reasoning by inevitably falling back on the feminized, sentimental, irrational writing. While the first option denies her the vantage point she needs as a woman writer, the second option short-circuits possibilities for revolutionary feminism. To be sure, her politics begins with rhetoric and her rhetoric to no lesser degree furthers her politics. In an attempt to refine our understanding of Wollstonecraft’s politics, scholars have been