Ewa Badowska
Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 1998), 283-303

This essay argues that Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) frames feminist concerns in terms of anorexic logic, as Wollstonecraft advances a practice and aesthetic of restraint: she identifies wordiness and excessive use of rhetorical figures with the gluttony characteristic both of men who prey on women and of the women they seduce. Wollstonecraft imagines a new woman who neither eats nor speaks too much and so embodies an impenetrable (to men) integrity and masculine strength. Paradoxically, then, the woman whom Wollstonecraft envisions as carrying the early feminist banner repudiates her body and its needs, yet like an anorexic is intensely preoccupied with its significance.