| This dissertation examines the influence of Cambridge Platonism and materialist philosophy on Mary Astell's early feminism. More specifically, I argue that Astell co-opts Descartes's theory of regulating the passions in his final publication, The Passions of the Soul, to articulate a comprehensive, enlightenment and body friendly theory of feminine self-esteem that renders her feminism modern. Previously, Astell's feminism has been viewed as elitist, effete and contradictory to her conservative political commitments as a Tory apologist in the last years of the seventeenth century. Recently, scholars have read her work in paradoxically contradictory ways---as barely feminism at all or as prefiguring radical feminist agendas that deny women's difference. To this point, only scant attention has been paid to Astell's treatment of the passions and, therefore, to her attunement to the problem of women's feminine embodiment in a Renaissance context. My analysis of Astell's theory of feminine self-esteem follows both textual and contextual cues, thus allowing for a reorientation of contemporary analyses of her early feminism vis-a-vis contemporary feminist theory.;The textual cues I analyze are found throughout her first four publications but especially in her second Serious Proposal to the Ladies, which constitutues a robust philosophical defense of her proposed academy for women. An entire chapter in this text is devoted to her use of Descartes's theory of regulating the passions to render women more substantial and inherently worthy. This rendering becomes more concrete in Astell's sarcastic fourth publication, Reflections Upon Marriage, as she employs the language of the social contract to depict wives as contractual slaves. Her assertion, I argue, is theoretically consistent when read in light of her, by then, fully developed theory of women's inherent worth, since this theory is based on the enlightenment principles of self-mastery, independence and self-preservation. Contextually, I align Astell's early feminism in a dialogic sense to the Continental "querelle des femmes," especially as presented in writings by Christine de Pizan and Agrippa. Astell, I argue, contributes to the "querelle" by framing the feminist problem she wishes to solve (women's inherent equality despite bodily "inferiority") in a robust philosophical manner that uncannily prefigures Wollstonecraft's call for the universalization of human virtues and the reform of women's education. |
