Burks, Paine, Wollstonecraft, De Gouge, and The Marquis de Lafayette were all engaged in an ongoing discourse concerning this new creature, the rights of persons. I see the connections between their input and Jefferson and Locke. It seems one piggy backed onto each other: The Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, the French revolution. I see the ties between kings, religion, and the uprising of the oppressed.
But what I find amazing, and amusing, is that instead of freedom for the people, each replaced one form of tyrant for another, they became what they hated and fought against. In England, the fear of a Catholic king coming to the throne; continued to abuse those in Ireland and elsewhere. In America, while we were crying for our freedom, slaves still suffered on plantations and elsewhere. The French beheaded the king and queen and then went on to terrorize its citizens.
I also see the progression of the idea of “rights.” The Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789, written by The Marquis de Lafayette, the “savior” of the American Revolution, and The American Bill of Rights, were written in the same year. Then “The Rights of Woman” 1791 reads, or “answers” the “Rights of Man.” It seems the world caught fire all at once! All this reminds me of the Woman’s Rights Movement in America. In 1915 Alice Duer Miller wrote a book of poems, Are Women People? (1915). In it she plays with the silly notions of why not to give women rights. The dangers she would be exposed to if she were able to vote, ride the train alone, have pockets, etc. The one that I see where she brings home the point for the need for Women’s Rights and using the antithesis of “The Rights of Woman” is her poem,
“Our Own Twelve Anti-Suffragist Reasons” 1. Because no woman will leave her domestic duties to vote.
2. Because no woman who may vote will attend to her domestic duties.
3. Because it will make dissension between husband and wife.
4. Because every woman will vote as her husband tells her to.
5. Because bad women will corrupt politics.
6. Because bad politics will corrupt women.
7. Because women have no power of organization.
8. Because women will form a solid party and outvote men.
9. Because men and women are so different that they must stick to different duties.
10. Because men and women are so much alike that men, with one vote each, can represent their own views and ours too.
11. Because women cannot use force.
12. Because the militants did use force.
I was, at first, suspicious of Bromwich’s use of Lord Rochester’s poetry, as Rochester writes very negatively about women in another of his poems, The Imperfect Enjoyment, in which, as an example of his disdain for women, writes, “A touch from any part of her had done't:/Her hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt.” And, “What oyster-cinder-beggar-common whore/Didst thou e'er fail in all thy life before?/When vice, disease, and scandal lead the way,/With what officious haste dost thou obey!” (Wilmot) but then I got to thinking that maybe Bromwich did use Rochester’s work to prove the point that literature was written by and for the “better off” white men.
As far as how literature relates to politics, hasn’t it always? Consider Politics by Aristotle written in 350 B.C.E. In Book I, Part II he writes, “Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal” (Aristotle).
Literature, as well as history, started out as a tool for the “winners,” the individuals that held the power. This power structure slowly showed cracks in its foundations. Disgruntled subjects and people began to speak up and out. Revolutions became the “voice” of that dissatisfaction; it became a weapon of terror for those that were the target of change. The marginalized organized and their voices are now heard.
Charles Taylor makes the claim, “Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being” (25).
Taylor is saying that ““minority or "subaltern" groups” have a distorted mirror of themselves because of the prevailing societal image. As an example, in the book, Borderlands by Gloria Anzaldua, she struggles with her identity, not only as a Latina, but a lesbian as well. Afro-
Americans are struggling with identity. While some of them have found a “center” to themselves, some are still struggling. The danger of assimilation is the loss of identity, multiculturalism also causes some to feel a guilt.
Anthony Bogues seems to suggest, in “The Haitian Revolution and the Making of Freedom in Modernity,” that there is a sense of freedom implicit within the claims of the Haitian Revolution that differs from the dominant Enlightenment conception. I am not entirely clear on this point. Please explain.
Bouges brings Berlin into the conversation about the “positive” and “negative” forms of freedom, and the “ancient” and “modern” forms of it. The ancient form was, “sharing of social power among the citizens of the same fatherland … the aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of security in private pleasures individual liberty … is the true modern liberty” (Bogues 1). The negative, modern form is what Bourges writes is, “from” and the “distant space between political authority and the self” (Bogues 2). I gather that the positive form of freedom is what he quotes of the first page of Civic Republicanism, ‘" may be realized through membership of a political community in which those who are mutually vulnerable and share a common fate may jointly be able to exercise some collective direction over their lives … freedom is related to participation in self- government and concern for the common good"’ (Bogues 3). What these forms of “modern” freedom are not concerned with is the fact that in some of these there is “…a form of human domination that was embodied in racial slavery” (Bogues 3).
Works Cited
Aristotle. "Poetics." 2022. Perseus. tufts. Electronic. 28 11 2022.
Bogues, Anthony. "The Haitian Revolution and the Making of Freedom in Modernity." Academia (2010): 1-33. Print.
Miller, Alice Duer. Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1915. Print.
Rochester, John Wilmot Earl of. "The Imperfect Enjoyment." 1680. Print.
Taylor, C. 1997, “The Politics of Recognition”, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition: An Essay, Princeton University Press, pp. 25-73.