Feminism in Britain: From William Shakespeare to Mary Wollstonecraft
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Date
2012
Authors
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Publisher
Université Mouloud Mammeri
Abstract
This thesis entitled Feminism in Britain: From William Shakespeare to Mary
Wollstonecraft falls within the category of research on gender studies or feminist
scholarship. It sheds light on the origin and evolution of Liberal feminism and its
contradictions during the period stretching from the Renaissance to the
Enlightenment. It focuses on the shift of paradigms of thoughts and discourse about
the place of gender in the public sphere. The humanist episteme promoted the spread
of the feminist discourse because of the very contradictions inherent to the liberal
ideology. In an attempt to prove that British feminism evolved from a sympathetic
attitude reflected in the writings of the Renaissance to a defensive type during the
Glorious Revolution to reach towards the end of the eighteenth century an offensive
phase with Mary Wollstonecraft who broke into the public sphere and entered a
fierce debate with many of her contemporary philosophers and writers, I selected six
authors, three male, William Shakespeare, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and
three female, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft and Susanna Haswell Rowson as
representative authors. The thesis is divided into three main parts, with three
chapters each. Part One “Shakespeare’s England and Women” discusses how the gender
issue emerged in Shakespeare’s time. Chapter One “Women in Shakespeare’s England:
Humanism and Reformation Influences” considers the status of women in Shakespeare’s
England. Chapter Two “Shakespeare, Patriarchal Bard or Feminist Sympathiser?” views
Shakespeare as a patriarchal Renaissance man who sympathises with women. Chapter Three
“Shakespeare, Empire and the Tuning of Feminist Sympathies According to the Ethnicities of
Empire” deals with the impact empire had on the emergence of feminist sympathies in
Shakespeare’s time. Part Two “Hobbes, Locke, and Mary Astell: Dialogue and
Polemics” considers the dialogue and polemics between Thomas Hobbes, John Locke
and Mary Astell with regard to the gender issue. Chapter Four “An Overview of the
Revolutionary Ideas of the Enlightenment” is devoted to the historical and
intellectual background behind the birth of the stated dialogue and polemics. Chapter
Five “Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and John Locke’s Second Treatise on
Government: Theoretical Foundations of the ‘Myth of the State’” analyses the
manner Hobbes and Locke for the first time in modern European intellectual history
theorised differently about the separation of the public from the private realm.
Chapter Six “Mary Astell’s Some Reflections upon Marriage: a Feminist Reading of
Locke’s Hypothesis” considers Astell as the first liberal feminist to stand against the
bourgeois man’s confinement of women in that bourgeois conjugal family’s internal
space without access to the economic, the political, or cultural spheres of the private
realm. Part Three “Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Gender in Eighteenth Century
England” argues for the evolutions within British feminism in the eighteenth century.
Chapter Seven “Gender, Nationalism, and the French Revolution: Mary Wollstonecraft vs.
Male and Female Writers” is devoted to an analysis of anthologized essays from The
Tatler and The Spectator to show how these early eighteenth-century periodicals
instituted the cultural and social norms of Enlightenment Britain and beyond. Chapter
Eight “Mary Wollstonecraft: Dialogue on the Political Rights of Women” analyses the
works of Wollstonecraft to illustrate how the expanding world of letters constitutive
of the bourgeois public sphere of civil society was intruded into by her works due to
the political radicalism unleashed by the French and American revolutions. Chapter
Nine “Mary Wollstonecraft’s and Susanna Rowson’s Liberal Feminism and Orientalism”
considers the contradictions of the liberal feminism of Wollstonecraft and Rowson,
who re-tooled orientalism in defence of women’s rights.
Description
310 f. ; 30 cm (+ CD-ROM)
Keywords
Britain, Feminism, British literary
Citation
Civilisation