Naomi #1
Similarly to the discussion that Alcoff’s article raised, Mary Wollstonecraft (in The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed) constantly inspired me to question for whom/to whom she was writing. While she acknowledges in her introduction that she intends to focus on the middle class, she attempts to speak for them, not necessarily to them. Her tone, language, back-tracking and references at times seemed contradictory: she clearly privileges women’s innate capacities yet anticipates her counter argument in a pseudo-dialog. Her tone tends at preaching to a public who may be apt to “help” the poor women who are trapped in roles which lack education and liberty. At first reading it this speaking “for” was problematic for me. Yet, thinking of it in context—the contrast of women’s writing from late 18th century to early 21st—I wonder what it is that we would consider “pioneering” today.
While I enjoyed the poetics of her writing, I found her main point to be muddled in the explanations and repetitions. I was troubled by what seemed to be a call for women to assert more aggressively what was already within them, the masculine (or traits she attributes to men). Wollstonecraft relies heavily on current practice—i.e. emphasis on beauty, passivity and subordination—to create a contrast; however, this contrast doesn’t come across with much momentum as she dilutes it with explanations and excuses of women’s behavior. While she seems to explain a certain class of women she ignores that she herself pertains to such a group herself. In this way I see how her writing could be more effective as it does not constantly remind her audience of her voice, there is distance. Three hundred years later, what sort of distance do we have to create in order to be heard?