Mary Astell's words in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (part I), a lexicographic inquiry with NooJ

In the following article we elected to study with NooJ the lexis of a 17 century text, Mary Astell's seminal essay, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, part I, published in 1694. We first focused on the semantics to see how Astell builds her vindication of the female sex, which words she uses to sensitise women to their alienated condition and promote their education. Then we studied the morphology of the lexemes (which is different from contemporary English) used by the author, thanks to the NooJ tools we have devised for this purpose. NooJ has great functionalities for lexicographic work. Its commands and graphs prove to be most efficient in the spotting of archaic words or variants in spelling. Introduction In our previous articles, we have studied the singularities of 17 century English within the framework of a diachronic analysis thanks to syntactical and morphological graphs and thanks to the dictionaries we have compiled from a corpus that may be expanded overtime. Our early work was based on a limited corpus of English travel literature to Greece in the 17 century. This article deals with a late seventeenth century text written by a woman philosopher and essayist, Mary Astell (1666–1731), considered as one of the first English feminists. Astell wrote her essay at a time in English history when women were “the weaker vessel” and their main business in life was to charm and please men by their looks and submissiveness. In this essay we will see how NooJ can help us analyse Astell's rhetoric (what point of view does she adopt, does she speak in her own name, in the name of all women, what is her representation of men and women and their relationships in the text, what are the goals of education?). Then we will turn our attention to the morphology of words in the text and use NooJ commands and graphs to carry out a lexicographic inquiry into Astell's lexemes. I. About the Author and Remarks on the Text 1. 1. Who was Mary Astell? In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, part I, first published anonymously in 1694, Mary Astell makes a rather odd suggestion (for the period!): women should withdraw from the world in a “blest abode” that she even dares to call a convent (in a country where all convents had been closed down). There they might enjoy each other’s company, spend their time in study, good works and prayer (without forgetting daily church attendance). This place could also be a refuge for heiresses and unmarried women who need to escape the assiduities of adventurers and fortune seekers. Her book was widely discussed in her day and satirised by the moralist Richard Steele in the Tatler in 1709, calling Astell the leader of “an order of Platonick Ladies” bent on celibacy and “resolv'd to join their Fortunes and erect a Nunnery” in Steele (1709). According to the historian Antonia Fraser (1984, 404), what inspired Astell to write her proposal was the life of her friend Hortense Mancini, Duchesse de Mazarin, King Charles II’s ex-mistress, who was the subject of numerous scandals, such as “the running away in Disguise with a Spruce Cavalier”! Astell was convinced her friend’s “unhappy shipwreck” pointed out “the dangers of an ill Education and unequal marriage” (1700, 3). A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, part I, is signed “by a Lover of her Sex” and was first published anonymously in 1694 when the author was only 28. Part II (which will not be tackled here) is an application of Descartes’ and Malebranche’s philosophy to the education of women. 1. 2. From the Text to the Digital Text OCR software could not be used for this text so we had to type the text preserving the original spelling and punctuation. NooJ does not keep the italics, hence the literary effects created by Astell’s use of italics are lost. In 17 century printing, most nouns are capitalised. The last word (or its last syllable) on the page is repeated at the top of the next page: here “ous” and “home” in illustration 1. Illustration 1: Frontispiece and Excerpt from A Serious Proposal to the Ladies 1.3. Astell’s point of view We first focused on the semantics, to examine how Astell builds her vindication of the female sex, which words she uses to sensitise women to their alienated condition and promote their education. As the object of this study is a literary text, it is interesting first to study point of view, which can be examined by focusing on the use of personal pronouns and possessive adjectives in Astell’s text. 1.3.1. Personal pronouns. The study of personal pronouns highlight different aspects of Astell’s rhetoric: she exhorts with the personal pronoun “you”, denounces with “they”, creates complicity with we, and seldom uses the first person “I”. The hortatory aspect of the text may be highlighted when we extract the sentences in which the pronoun “you” is used (locate pattern you): “How can you be content to be in the World like Tulips in a Garden, to make a fine shew and be good for nothing; have all your Glories set in the grave...” This functionality enabled us to extract expressions such as “I pray you”, “I entreat you”, “render you”, “persuade you”, I “would have you”, “all that is required of you”. The text is a protrepsis, an exhortation to women to change their lives and shake off the yoke of ignorance and superficiality. The frequent use of the pronoun “we” is meant to encourage identification with the author and with a community of women sharing the same fate in a male-dominated society. By contrast, the occurrences of “I, me, my” account for 4.56 % of pronouns. Astell does not use the pronouns “I” and “me” very much: these self-references (84) account for only 0.44% of the words of the text, which points to her self-effacement as an author, to be linked with that of the female author in the 17 century. Incidentally, it should be noted that her book is signed “by a Lover of her Sex”, and not under her own name. In her preface to Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695,4), Astell says she wants “to slide gently through the world without so much as being seen or taken notice of.” Personal pronouns occurrences Total by group Me/ my self / my / I 12 / 5 / 15 / 52 84 Thou / Thy / thine 0 0 She / her 129 / 183 129 He / him / his 18 / 24 / 24 631 We / us / our 141 / 88 / 144 373 You / your 125 / 81 206 They / them / their 148 / 111 / 159 418