ABSTRACT
Traveling with Rousseau and then Locke into the land of chimeras, Wollstonecraft pursues her utopian dream, women who are considered “human creatures,” as well as females. Wollstonecraft pursues “affectionate wives and rational mothers.” Despite the promise of Rousseau’s and Locke’s egalitarian political theory and pedagogy, neither state of nature theorist is able to put together the two parts of woman, the human and the female sex, in a manner that creates a whole, independent woman. As a consequence of the fractured character of woman, the relationship between man and woman is also corrupted. For Rousseau, it is the sexual passions and the differences between the sexes, which unite otherwise independent beings. In an effort to restore our familial and social bonds, Rousseau encourages the differences between the sexes in his prescriptions for educating young girls. The human part of woman is sacrificed for the sake of the female, according to Wollstonecraft. Lacking reason, the female part of woman is also corrupted. Rousseau’s “wild chimera” or “half-being” (VRW, 39), it seems to Wollstonecraft, is a dependent creature, who merely feigns affection for her husband in order to satisfy her own desires, which, at the close of the eighteenth century, are many and vicious. Furthermore, Wollstonecraft fears, the education Rousseau prescribes for the female does not prepare her to fulfill her duty to care for and to educate her children. Locke’s “half-being,” on the other hand, is educated to be strong in body and in mind. She is quite able to quiet her passions. And, as a result, she very competently performs her duty as mother and as citizen: she educates her children for liberal civil society. Although she is a rational mother, we can hardly say she is an affectionate wife. In his educational treatise, Locke does not allow us even a glimpse of this rational mother’s interaction with her husband and we are left with the impression that husband and wife are indeed independent of each other, perhaps to the point of indifference. Traveling with Rousseau, and then Locke, through the
land of chimeras, Wollstonecraft finds “half-beings,” albeit different fractions of woman.
