Sublime Reason and Beautiful Rhetoric: Wollstonecraft and Burke on the Natural Rights of Man

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797) in her A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), written in response to a lengthy letter by Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), expresses her radical and proto-feminist views. Wollstonecraft provides an enlightened criticism of Burke’s conservative writing, referring to such key notions of the long eighteenth century as common sense, sensibility, wit, and judgment (cf. the Scottish Enlightenment’s, John Locke’s and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s impact). While taking the author’s earlier political ideas into account, the text’s allusions and digressions echo Burke’s early “revolutionary” writing on the aesthetic (and sexist) approach to the sublime and the beautiful (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757). In my article, I follow this thread running through Wollstonecraft’s critique, and I also focus on the way how she responsibly confronts Burke with his own thought and rhetorical (mis)demeanours in the discussion of man’s natural rights. In contrast to Burke’s beautiful rhetoric, Wollstonecraft defends sublime reason, and she also presents her humanist view, discussing the importance of proper manners and education.