ABSTRACT
The Reflections on the Revolution in France contains the worrying suggestion that tradition may be merely a more persistent form of fashion. Artistic originality is, then, situated rather oddly in relation to consumption, perhaps not always sufficiently distinguished from fashion. But this older eighteenth-century discourse of original poetic genius was reinforced and broadened to become more widely socially applicable by two key strands of thought: first, that of Rousseauian primitivism and, second, the dissenting emphasis on intellectual and spiritual autonomy. Wollstonecraft's use of the concepts of fashion and taste makes it evident that her insistence on originality is more than, as Gallagher puts it, an attempt to 'stress her hard-won freedom from the shackles of tradition imprisoning the minds of other authors'. Wollstonecraft suggests that instead of using 'art' to attract men, siting themselves as constructed cultural objects, women should position themselves as aesthetic judges. Hence she disapproves of an education in artistic display.
