The Enlightenment's Linguistic Dimension, or, How We Came to be Socially Constructed

Abstract

While a traditional source of controversy, the modern critical interplay between humanism and the Enlightenment can be used to excavate the way we have come to think of ourselves as posthuman even within a historicist field. This essay posits conceptualizing the Enlightenment to allow for ambivalence and messy boundaries, without requiring an artificial separation between Enlightenment and postmodern or poststructuralist thinking. Its primary method uses a close reading of Miltonic and other poetical texts—and the innovative writers who read him, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Eliza Haywood—to show how Enlightenment thinking helped to prize open a linguistic dimension of humanistic thought well in advance of the twentieth century. For writers like the latter three, wary as they were of patriarchal structures, there comes the gradual realization that "woman" is not a referent but a mutable sign, and that humanity itself is not so self-evident to Enlightenment writers as a more traditionally foreclosed version of literary history would have us accept.