Thursday, January 16, 2014

Does Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" share the same Feminist sentiments as Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen?

I would want to answer this question by talking about the
relationship of Marianne as defining sensibility to the kind of image of women that
Wollstonecraft argues against in her essay. Wollstonecraft seems to argue for women to
try and become more rational and defined by sense, rather than the image that men have
of women, which is defined by sensibility. Note what Wollstonecraft argues for in her
essay:



I wish
to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to
convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and
refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those
beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its
sister, will soon become objects of
contempt.



It would be easy to
see some of these adjectives as suitable for describing Marianne and her sudden,
powerful attachment to Willoughby. Clearly, the relationship between these two texts
would be that Wollstonecraft would argue that Marianne is a symbol of all that is wrong
with women, and that women should strive to become more like Elinor: ruled by sense
rather than sensibility.

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