Mary Astell: feminine reformism and topian conservatism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30972/nvt.1826004Keywords:
Mary Astell, Utopía, Reforma, Conservadurismo, FeminismoAbstract
Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) has received much attention among scholars in recent decades. One interpretation indicates that the type of isolated female community defended in the work can be read in a utopian key. Another interpretation, on the contrary, points out a closer link with what Michel Foucault calls heterotopy. This study proposes an intermediate reading that qualifies both interpretations. In the first place, together with a minimal description of the social, political, and intellectual field in which Astell was inserted towards the end of the seventeenth century, the nature of her public interventions as an author is reconstructed and A Serious Proposal to the Ladies is presented in its controversial context and within the wider picture of her complete work. Then, I consider to what extent A Serious Proposal does not fully conform to the regular structure of the classic utopian genre. For this, Thomas More’s Utopia is taken as a model, although Tomasso Campanella’s The City of the Sun and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis are also taken into account. Thirdly, some reasons are given as to why the alternative of thinking of the Astellian community as a Foucauldian heterotopy is also not entirely satisfactory. Finally, the fruits of the previous discussions are collected and based on some of Karl Mannheim's classic remarks, the notion of utopia is revisited to think about Astellian feminist reformism in its conservative matrix.
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