“I CALL BEAUTY A SOCIAL QUALITY”: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND HANNAH MORE'S REJOINDER TO EDMUND BURKE'S BODY POLITIC OF THE BEAUTIFUL

Abstract

This article considers Mary Wollstonecraft's and Hannah More's responses to Edmund Burke's theory of beauty. In his influential aesthetic treatise A Philosophic Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke argued that beauty elicits the feelings of love that are the foundation of society; he also asserted that women are more beautiful than men. If Burke's aesthetic theory made women's beauty instrumental to the body politic, Wollstonecraft and More questioned whether the fair sex or society really benefited from the valorization of the exterior of women's bodies. In Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and More's Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), both women writers pointed out the antisocial consequences of the fetishizing of women's beauty. Despite the similarity of their criticisms of Burke's aesthetics, they used their critiques to advance radically different visions of women's place in society. While much scholarly attention has focused on Wollstonecraft's and More's politics or theories of education, this article points out how aesthetics were central to their critiques of the social order.