The Clash of Gendered Referents in Mary Wollstonecraft‟s A Vindication of the Rights of Men Gariti Mohamed Department of English, Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria Sabrina Zerar Department of English, Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria Abstract—Whenever critics talk about Mary Wollstonecraft’s commitment to feminism, they very often turn to her A vindication of the rights of woman for illustration. Her A vindication of the rights of men is rarely referred to in this regard, though it constitutes the conceptual basis of her later reflection on gender power relationships. Taking its bearings from Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1999) dialogic theory of discourse and the sociological theorization of space developed by Jurgen Habermas (2010) in his The structural transformation of the public Sphere , this paper argues that A vindication of the rights of men, much more than its sequel A vindication of the rights of woman is the one discursive space wherein Wollstonecraft clashes with the best male brains of her time (Burke, Rousseau, etc). The clashes concerned include, though not entirely confined to British constitutional history, the bourgeois family, aesthetics, and the impact of civilization on the shaping of the new society heralded by the French Revolution. Index Terms—Wollstonecraft, Burke, dialogism, French Revolution, feminism, Rights of Men I. INTRODUCTION The French Revolution (1789-1799) and the debate it generated about the rights of man among liberal circles and radicals such as: Joseph Price, Joseph Johnson, Thomas Paine, and William Godwin prepared for the re-emergence of the feminist voice and presence in the public sphere at the turn of the eighteenth century. A century earlier, the Glorious Revolution had allowed for the development of similar feminist concerns in Britain. If two British women authors have to be chosen as representatives of the redeployment of emancipation discourse against the exclusion of females from the public sphere during these two critical periods, Mary Astell and her namesake Mary Wollstonecraft will certainly come to mind. Just as Astell had appropriated the prevalent libertarian discourse of the Glorious Revolution in defence of women‟s emancipation in works like Some reflections upon marriage, Wollstonecraft in A vindication of the rights of men borrowed similar conceptual bases from the rhetoric developed around the French Revolution to dislodge the separation of the private from the public sphere in the bourgeois patriarchal order. This parallel will not be continued here, for Wollstonecraft‟s work alone is sufficient for arguing the point that the circulation of emancipation discourse in revolutionary times is often appropriated by committed female authors for abrogating the empire of man over woman by widening male thinkers‟ claims for man‟s liberation to include that of woman. The widening of claims across gender lines often takes the shape of what Bakhtin calls a “clash over referents” such as gendered spaces, aesthetics, histor y, and the patriarchal family. To date, Wollstonecraft‟s feminist commitments have been discussed in relation to her A vindication of the rights of woman, overlooking the crucial place that her A vindications of the rights of men holds in her discussion of human rights across the gender lines. It is particularly in this work that on can see at work how the writer appropriates the prevalent, contemporary, male discourses about aesthetics, civilization, the family, and history in order to abrogate the major presumptions underlying the exclusion of women from the nascent political kingdom. Through both hidden and overt polemics, Wollstonecraft subverts the gendered discourse of her male contemporaries speaking in defense of gender-inclusive human rights and freedoms. II. DISCUSSION For a proper discussion of Wollstonecraft‟s feminist outlook, it would be more convenient to consider the principles or conceptual bases from which she tried to dismantle female sensibility as an ideology of femininity. This engagement is best revealed in A vindication of the rights of men, published in the form of serialized letters in Joseph Johnson‟s Analytical review in the last months of 1790 before being published anonymously in December of the same year. It was written in prompt response to Edmund Burke‟s Reflections on the revolution in France that appeared on 1 November 1790. Wollstonecraft‟s immediate rejoinder to Burke‟s essay was followed up by Paine‟s The rights of man (1791) and Godwin‟s Political justice (1793). The publication of these essays, sometimes in several reprints, and their wide ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 4, No. 10, pp. 1994-2000, October 2014 © 2014 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/tpls.4.10.1994-2000 © 2014 ACADEMY PUBLISHER