ABSTRACT

This chapter demonstrates how the suppressed plot of Job's mother's womb pushes against the order of language in the Rights of Woman, undoing meaning at one level even as it struggles to coalesce on another. The Rights of Woman has not customarily been read as prophetic discourse despite its network of biblical allusions and Wollstonecraft's outspokenly theological premise that women should not be educated differently than men because Providence designed the same end for all souls. Wollstonecraft's opening image for women, then – the 'short-lived' or barren bloom' – is already constructed in different, and competing, orders of prophetic truth. Nor is the flower figure the only indication that Wollstonecraft is reading the Book of Job against other prophetic narratives of origin. Like the advice of Job's friends, darkness involved all the counsels of divine truth presented to women by prophets of all orders.