For this close reading I chose to focus on Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies , specifically the first paragraph that Jack Lynch provided and numbered for readers on his site. Not only is this first paragraph the introduction to Astell’s revolutionary model of early-feminist arguments, but the language she uses to entice her audience is remarkable in the sense that she practically insults our gender in her first line, “Ladies, what a pity it is, that whilst your Beauty casts a lustre all around you, your souls which are infinitely more bright and radiant (of which you had but a clear idea, as lovely as it is, and as much as you now value it, you wou’d then despise and neglect the mean Case that encloses it) should be suffer’d to over-run with Weeds, lie fallow and neglected, unadorn’d with any Grace!”. In her first 5 words, she calls out the women of her time for how pitiful it is that we allow our souls to be hindered with darkness. Astell doesn’t specifically use the word “darkness”; in fact, she describes the Soul as “bright” and “radiant”, but I believe she is referring to the potential souls have to be bright and radiant if we recognize what is hindering their growth and water the areas that need attention, which leads them to be “over-run with weeds”– the opposite of “bright” and “radiant”. Astell speaks with confidence as she tells her readers, more than likely women, that there is more for women to pride themselves on than material fashions and to attract the eyes of men. She sarcastically plants this seed in her readers, “…And not entertain such a degrading thought of our own worth, as to imagine that our Souls were given us only for the service of our Bodies, and that the best improvement we can make of these, is to attract the Eyes of Men.” It’s comical that she writes this line, because I am a woman reading this over 300 years later and to this day women are still very good at finding their value in other men; as there is a notion of the desirability of being taken care of or loved. Astell wants women to understand that they can be the backbone of a partnership as well, in saying, “Let not your Thoughts be wholly busied in observing what respect is paid to you, but a part of them at least, in studying to deserve it.” Astell could have titled her work anything but what she did, but I find the word “proposal” most interesting. This idea literally had to be proposed, or persuasive enough, to get through to the minds of women — and men — that this is a very real issue and concept, that however polarly opposite from the “inherent” norm, women’s’ souls must be cultivated as much as men’s.
The Breakfast Social 