On the very first page of Modern Virtue, Emily Dumler-Winckler makes sly and stylish use of two epigraphs to show the significance of the argument that follows. Dumler-Winckler quotes the worries of Samuel Miller and Charles Hodge—two of the defining faculty members of Princeton Theological Seminary in the nineteenth century—that if the views of Mary Wollstonecraft prevailed, then women might hold every kind of office (Miller) and there would be “an end to all social subordination” (Hodge). The impact of what Wollstonecraft called a “revolution in female manners” would be all-encompassing, and, Hodge feared, “all virtue would speedily be banished.” Dumler-Winckler shows that Hodge was wrong on this last point: virtue persisted, even flourished, in Wollstonecraft’s thought. But she hopes that Hodge and Miller will be right in their wider prediction that Wollstonecraft’s influence would lead to greater opportunities for women and an end to domination. The fears of Miller and Hodge define the hopes that animate Modern Virtue. That the book began life as a dissertation at the seminary they once dominated make the irony especially delicious.

Modern Virtue joins a more recent tradition that has flowed through both the university and the seminary in Princeton, especially since the publication of Jeffrey Stout’s Ethics After Babel (1988) and Democracy and Tradition (2004). Stout’s works resisted the twin caricatures that drove the narrative in Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981). MacIntyre described a modernity that renounced tradition, knew nothing of virtue, and so could not resolve moral arguments or form good characters. He contrasted this with pre-modern traditions that offered scant support for notions of rights, equality, or dissent, at least as they play out in modern societies. Against MacIntyre’s narrative of decline, Stout showed resources for moral reasoning within the “Babel” of modernity and sketched a modern democratic tradition with the kind of virtues, exemplars, and practices for resolving disputes MacIntyre’s story said modernity could not sustain. That project has been deepened, expanded, and transformed in myriad ways by a number of scholars who studied in Princeton, including Jennifer Herdt, John Bowlin, David Decosimo, Molly Farneth, and Alda Balthrop-Lewis. Individually and collectively, their work represents some of the finest and most influential scholarship in the field of religious ethics in the last three decades. To say that Dumler-Winckler joins this tradition as a peer with Modern Virtue begins to suggest both the excellence of the book’s scholarship and the nature of its contributions.

Dumler-Winckler frames her argument against those she identifies as “virtue’s defenders,” on the one hand, and “virtue’s despisers,” on the other (“designers” of new lists of virtues occasionally join the despisers). Against defenders like MacIntyre and Hodge who worry that modernity erodes any notion of virtue or tradition, Dumler-Winckler shows how Wollstonecraft had a lively (and decidedly modern) sense of virtue. She further locates Wollstonecraft in a tradition that flowed through Dissenters, Nonconformists, and other free-thinkers who built academies, places of worship, and other institutions in and around Newington Green in what is now North London. Dumler-Winckler presses these same notions of modern virtue and a tradition of dissent against those she calls despisers of virtue, like feminist ethicists Ann Snitow and Sarah Conly. Against despisers’ arguments that notions of virtue reflect sedimented relations of power, and so are inherently patriarchal, Dumler-Winckler shows the emancipatory and feminist potential in Wollstonecraft’s modern virtue and the tradition of dissent in which it comes to life.

If Dumler-Winckler’s representations of virtue’s defenders and virtue’s despisers are always on the edge of tipping into straw men, they still create a strong frame that makes the central argument of the book clear. It is especially strong in extending Stout’s argument against MacIntyre to a new generation of self-appointed defenders, with Brad Gregory’s Unintentional Reformation featured in repeated engagement. In making the case for the centrality of virtue to Wollstonecraft’s thought, Dumler-Winckler does not just find the word “virtue” sprinkled throughout her texts. Through readings that are both very close and nearly comprehensive, she develops a thick account of what Wollstonecraft means by virtue and how virtue functions in her thought. Dumler-Winckler’s depth of knowledge of both Wollstonecraft’s work and the secondary literature in multiple disciplines sets up the book’s most important contribution: establishing Mary Wollstonecraft as a thinker who must be reckoned with in religious ethics. 

Wollstonecraft was hardly unknown before this book. She was already a major figure in the fields of philosophy, English literature, and historical studies. And religious and theological ethicists like Lisa Sowle Cahill, Jean Porter, and Jeffrey Stout had all made reference to her. But Dumler-Winckler reads Wollstonecraft into the conversations of religious ethics in a sustained and purposeful way that is without precedent. She shows what Wollstonecraft might contribute to long-running conversations on topics like love, justice, and the relationship between the two. And she suggests the potential for much more. 

Modern Virtue’s careful work with early modern texts invites a series of questions about the role of historical studies in ethics. I don’t think these questions are unique to Modern Virtue, nor do I think they necessarily grow out of shortcomings of the book. They might be asked of many different works in ethics that engage history—including my own. But the work in Modern Virtue is rich enough to let them arise with particular clarity.

I want to raise three questions in particular. First, how should we construe the temporal relationship between the thoughts of past and present thinkers? There is a tension in Dumler-Winckler’s book around this question. When she is making her case against virtue’s defenders, she needs to speak of Wollstonecraft clearly in the past tense. Wollstonecraft’s location in the latter decades of the eighteenth-century matters, for it shows that notions of virtue survived into this time and flourished as part of a tradition of dissent. To establish that tradition, Dumler-Winckler needs some thinkers to be before Wollstonecraft and others to be after her. She needs a diachronic relationship between the thinkers she is considering. But when she wants to make clear Wollstonecraft’s contributions to contemporary debates, she tends to establish a synchronic relationship between thinkers in a timeless philosophical present. She might write that Wollstonecraft “seems to agree with Dewey” on one page (236) and then, just a few pages later, name Wollstonecraft’s affinities with Augustine (239). A single page might put Wollstonecraft in conversation with Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Henry David Thoreau, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas (127). It’s a rich conversation, but an ahistorical one. The book tends to oscillate between these diachronic and synchronic modes, considering Wollstonecraft in the dense network of her actual early modern interlocutors on one page and then putting her into a timeless conversation with a syllabus of thinkers from many different centuries on the next. 

The synchronic mode is so tempting because it promises contemporary relevance. It’s what lets the work feel like ethics, and not just a history of ethics. But the whole idea of tradition—even a tradition of dissent—requires the diachronic mode. That commitment is what sets the stakes in relation to which Modern Virtue’s core argument for a tradition of dissent matters. It’s too much to leave behind. What would it be like to stay in this diachronic mode—to think about ideas in history, or, more baldly, just to insist that it matters that some thinkers lived before others—even as we aspired to make normative claims upon the present? One way would be to follow Modern Virtue’s pointers towards a tradition of dissent and connect that tradition to the present. Dumler-Winckler makes promising hints at a tradition of interpreting Wollstonecraft that runs through nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminists like “Theodosia Bartow Burr, Lucretia Mott, Emma Rauschenbush-Clough, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Virginia Woolf, and Emma Goldman” (17). That list might be extended to canonical North Atlantic readers of Wollstonecraft like Simone de Beauvoir (who does get mentioned in the book) and Betty Friedan; it might be broadened with readers like Olive Schreiner of South Africa; it might get more personal with more extensive consideration of Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary Shelley; it might grow sharper in contrast to detailed assessments of critics like Samuel Miller and Charles Hodge. Pointers to many of the building blocks for such a tradition are already in Dumler-Winckler’s book (and even more are in Eileen M. Hunt’s Portraits of Wollstonecraft: The Making of a Feminist Icon1). The task is to string them together, however loosely, into a tradition of dissent that connects a thoroughly historical Wollstonecraft to contemporary debates. Such a narrative would show the making and remaking of the “wardrobe of the moral imagination” that Dumler-Winckler attributes to Wollstonecraft (and Burke). If a long narrative assumes too much continuity, one could tell shorter stories of moments of bricolage that retain a diachronic relation between thinkers. The challenge might be resolved in still other ways. The main thing is to take it up.

A second question is closely related to the first: How should we think about the relationship between a thinker’s biography and her ideas? Dumler-Winckler is surely right that William Godwin’s publication of his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798, not even a year after Wollstonecraft’s death, gave her opponents tools for discounting her thought. The power of Dumler-Winckler’s intellectual portrait of Wollstonecraft helps overcome this marginalization. Dumler-Winckler does not deny the details of Godwin’s account of his wife’s life, including lovers she did not marry, a child born out of wedlock, and a suicide attempt. But she also does not let these biographical details too close to the arguments of Wollstonecraft that she wants to advance. This lets her position Wollstonecraft as the precursor to someone like Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1–2), who was married to one man in an egalitarian but otherwise fairly traditional relationship for more than fifty years. It remakes the wardrobe passed on by Wollstonecraft into the respectable professional feminism of Kamala Harris’s white pantsuit and pussy-bow blouse (310–11).

But if Wollstonecraft’s life is seen as connected to her thoughts—if we assume some degree of agency, courage, and consistency on her part, even under difficult circumstances—we might imagine a more radical legacy. What difference would it make for our understanding of Wollstonecraft’s contributions to debates about sex, love, reproduction, and marriage if we let her own choices count as part of what she has to say, not displacing but supplementing her written work? And what difference would it make to reflections on what it means to live in imitation of Christ (as in Dumler-Winckler’s chapter 3) if we took seriously Wollstonecraft’s attempted suicide and comment afterwards that it was “one of the calmest acts of reason” (cited on p. 25)? What would it mean for how we understand what Wollstonecraft has to say about reason? It is to Dumler-Winckler’s great credit that she lets the embodied life of Wollstonecraft on to the page to open these doors to further thought. Now I’d like to follow her through them.

A third question arises as something of a particular version of the second: How can we make sense of a past thinker’s entanglement with prevailing forms of domination of her time? Wollstonecraft was committed to feminism, democracy, and the abolition of slavery in ways that were remarkable among white Europeans in the eighteenth century. As Dumler-Winckler helpfully acknowledges, she also used orientalist tropes of the subjugation of women to make her case for gender equality. Wollstonecraft was, Dumler-Winckler cites Joyce Zonana as arguing, “at once explicitly feminist and orientalist” (72). Dumler-Winckler further notes Willie James Jennings’s argument that Wollstonecraft saw the Black abolitionist writer Olaudah Equiano in a “middle position”: human, but beneath “those with extra ordinary powers” (72).

Dumler-Winckler acknowledges these “now-obvious unjust prejudices” as parts of Wollstonecraft’s worldview (73). But she argues that Wollstonecraft is still working towards a more democratic taste, especially in her valorization of poor and working-class people. She further argues that Wollstonecraft “provides the resources for an immanent critique of her own work and of the Scottish Enlightenment’s racialized stage-theory of civilization” (73). I think that’s right. The next step is to actually perform a detailed version of that immanent critique. What happens to Wollstonecraft’s arguments for gender equality without an assumed hierarchy of civilizations? What happens to her rhetoric if orientalist tropes are seen for what they are? How do her arguments emerge on the other side of the refining fire of immanent critique? What’s the shape of modern virtue after whiteness?

Pursuing questions like these would strengthen the book’s response to those Dumler-Winckler labels as virtue’s deniers. She can find some thinkers who want to jettison the whole notion of virtue, even normativity itself, and the book’s arguments hold up against these totalizing critics. But arguing that we need some kind of normativity, some notion of virtue, doesn’t really touch Jennings’s argument against Wollstonecraft’s dismissive reading of Equiano in The Christian Imagination.2 Jennings’s critique is fully normative. It does not depend on denying all virtue; it just denies the virtues of a particular imaginary that privileges whiteness. It argues that a particular notion of virtue—one Wollstonecraft shares—is implicated in a pattern of domination that was powerful in her time. Likewise, Judith Butler does not argue against normativity as such in their more recent work. Rather, they argue for an ethic that “is not an ethic that seeks to destroy the constitutive violence of all norms. It is a mobilization of that same violence against a particular violent outcome for the purposes of nonviolence.”3 Here Butler, like Jennings, calls for something like what Dumler-Winckler calls immanent critique. Critics like Butler and Jennings cannot be positioned as deniers, and Dumler-Winckler’s arguments against deniers do not fully answer them. They rather help define the task before one seeking to make a critical retrieval of Mary Wollstonecraft’s modern virtue. 

Each of these questions, at its heart, asks Dumler-Winckler for something more. That is not because this ambitious, learned book does not offer enough. It is because it offers so much: a model of historical research for the sake of ethics, an important argument about modern virtue, and, most of all, a fresh presentation of the thought of Mary Wollstonecraft that significantly enriches the whole field of religious ethics. I am grateful for the book and for the chance to join this early conversation around it.

Emily Dumler-Winckler’s Modern Virtue is a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary book. Prof. Dumler-Winckler is herself a professor of constructive theology, with a PhD from a religion and society program, and the book is about an eighteenth-century philosopher who is known as the mother of first-wave feminism, intriguingly presented here as a guide to rethinking virtue—a term and area of ethics variously maligned or celebrated as synonymous with normative commitments. My own research areas don’t immediately identify me as an obvious contributor to this discussion. I was trained as a historian of Christianity, with a particular focus on medieval and early modern materials, and I’ve never researched or taught Wollstonecraft’s work. I have written on virtue, in an article about Puritan marriage and covenantal theology’s account of obligatory love, yet learned when doing so (from the perplexed responses to that article offered by two ethicists in my department) that my understanding of virtue is idiosyncratic at best and muddled at worst.1 On this account, I am avowedly unqualified to respond to this book. All of my work is, however, animated by what I take to be Modern Virtue’s extraordinary achievement: to demonstrate that traditional sources are often more radical than critics or caretakers allow them to be (radical in the sense of rootedness as well as dissenting: because they draw so deeply from alternative imaginaries that they provide new perspectives on problems and possibilities today). 

Imagine, then, the pleasure I felt reading a book that combines the laudable clarity typical of those trained in virtue ethics with a capacious and generous engagement with feminist, womanist, and queer theory suspicious of virtue talk’s normativity and convincing in their claims that attention to virtue is more likely to inhibit than enable human flourishing, particularly insofar as that flourishing is associated with human freedom and creativity. This is a book that both knows and explains the nuances of traditional accounts of virtue and its modern defenders, and at the same time a work that refuses the boundaries imposed by the canonical—which is to say, almost exclusively Greek, Roman, and Christian male—accounts of tradition. Modern Virtue is, in short, a book urgently concerned with the present, unafraid of contemporary culture’s complexity, and yet convinced that the past offers invaluable lessons we have not yet learned. 

Was it persuasive in arguing that Mary Wollstonecraft is an inspiring guide to a culture of dissent? Did it convince me to follow her lead, to make virtue central to my thinking and teaching and living? I posed these questions to myself the same week I was teaching the English mystic Julian of Norwich in a medieval Christianity class and, in other contexts, listening to  political historian Samuel Moyn discuss his recent book about the crisis of liberalism with a self-described conservative who agreed with Moyn’s diagnosis of the problem although not his solution.2 The difference between Moyn and his interlocutor—self-described as liberal and conservative—turned on the question of how to evaluate what Moyn described as liberalism’s highest value: human creativity, and the conservative, Daniel McCarthy, was inclined to dismiss as liberalism’s pathological hedonism. What do I make of Wollstonecraft’s virtue compared to Julian’s emphasis on compassion and Moyn’s on creativity? Does the nineteenth-century feminist better prepare me to dissent from the destructive norms of contemporary society than does the visionary anchorite? Or the sophisticated, optimistic, male defender of liberalism?

Julian of Norwich is now most famous for a profoundly calm reassurance, “All will be well, all manner of things shall be well.” Julian arrives at this assurance, however, through a long process of interpreting visions she had when, near death, she focused all her attention on a crucifix that an attending priest held before her face. The opening pages of Julian’s short vision, and her longer account written fifteen years later, meditate in extraordinarily visceral detail on Christ’s suffering body, on the appearance of his face, the viscosity of the blood dropping from his pores.3

I teach these passages to students because they dramatize a significant version of medieval Latin Christianity’s understanding of imitatio Christi: to imitate Christ, many Christians thought, with a creative fervor that spread and deepened over the course of the twelfth century and permeated devotional culture in subsequent centuries, is to suffer as Christ suffered, to feel the bond of compassion—shared suffering that is the site and source of shared love. This is not the same imitatio Christi embodied by Francis of Assisi (d. 1226), stripping naked in the middle of the street to rejecting the affluence of his cloth merchant father, or Clare of Assisi (d. 1253), spreading the word about devotion to lady poverty. In the thirteenth-century model exemplified by Francis (and curtailed, because of gender, for Clare) to imitate Christ is to live as Christ lived, like the birds of the field, without care for the morrow, forsaking family and convention to wander and preach as Christ did with his followers, fed by those who are moved to give food to beggars, without even the institutional support provided by monasteries or ecclesial titles. Each of these possibilities differs also from the imitatio Christi of Francis’s stigmata, and then again from yet another authoritative model: the sacramental and quasi-monastic framework of Thomas à Kempis’s popular devotional text, de imitatione Christi (ca. 1418).4 

These examples, each unconventional in its own way, are a far cry from the imitation of Christ interpreted—as Dumler-Winckler points out this devotional model is so often interpreted—in terms of “blind obedience” or “repressive ‘moral realism’” (149). The questions that arise when teaching Julian, or Francis, or Clare of Assisi are not about repression or obedience but about excess and extremes. Is Julian encouraging masochism? Or compassion? Does her text encourage readers to celebrate and seek pain? Or does she reveal that shared vulnerability deepens the mutuality of a loving relationship? For many students, the masochism subsumes the compassion, for reasons that won’t surprise most of you. The voice of the objection was expressed most clearly in my medieval Christianity class this year by a gay ex-evangelical woman, who hears in Julian’s voice her mother’s oppressive dictate, that suffering is one’s lot in life, to be born with silent patience just as Christ bore the burden of humanity’s sins on the cross. This is the perspective that womanist theologian Shawn Copeland critiques, in a line Dumler-Winckler quotes, condemning the way that “Christianity of the plantation…sought to bind the slaves to their condition by inculcating caricatures of the cardinal virtues of patience, long-suffering, forbearance, love, faith, and hope.” Crucially, Wollstonecraft, too, insists on the danger of this version of Christian suffering: “when forbearance confounds right and wrong, it ceases to be a virtue” (VRW 102, quoted in Modern Virtue, 155). 

Elaborating this point, in a remarkable reading of a frontispiece William Blake provided to Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (2nd ed. [London: Joseph Johnson, 1791]), Dumler-Winckler acknowledges the obvious reasons to object to a version of imitatio Christi that focuses on the cross. “Mortification, humility, self-denial, and forbearance unto death, are not these precisely the Stoic virtues exemplified in Christ? Are these not the very divine attributes Wollstonecraft calls girls and women to imitate? Had she not repeatedly praised a “God long-suffering” and insisted “those most resemble him who practice forbearance” (ED 36, 37, quoted in Modern Virtue 154). Yet alert to the oppressive effect of this teaching on women in particular, Wollstonecraft in fact refuses what a casual reader might assume she accepts by defining forbearance in opposition to submission. Praiseworthy gentleness, she says, is godlike. A “submissive demeanour of dependence…silently endur[ing] injuries; smiling under the lash at which it dare not snarl” (VRW 102, quoted in Modern Virtue 154)— all this is only a semblance of the true virtue. 

Julian of Norwich provides nothing like Wollstonecraft’s (and Copeland’s)5 clear-eyed denunciation of how the imitatio Christi tradition might create as well as compound potential dangers. To entice students to consider the ways that Julian’s message was compassionate rather than masochistic, I could not point to a single sentence where the anchorite draws the contrast for us or denounces a form of patient acceptance that “confounds right and wrong.” Instead, we had to linger on the many things she says about love, how God’s love is abundant, infinitely generative even in the smallest thing. That sin is a wound to be healed rather than a fault to be punished.6 That God is as desirous of human love as humans are desirous of God’s. Blood, as Julian experiences it, is as much about birth as death, the fluid that imparts life from mother to child, linking humans to each other and Christ to all humans. Julian experienced her visions as themselves expressions of her godly will, a will that confirms the connection embodied in Christ’s incarnation. We are never separate from God, Julian maintains, and cannot be separate from God. Her image of Christ’s bodily suffering was accompanied by a spiritual sight of his “familiar love.” Christ is “our clothing,” she explains, “wrapping and enveloping us for love, embracing us and guiding us in all things, hanging about us in tender love.7 This is the message of love. “Do you want to know what your Lord meant? Know well that love was what he meant.” The passage concludes by switching back to a confident first-person voice: “And I saw quite certainly in this and in everything that God loved us before he made us; and his love has never diminished and never shall.”8 

Julian is a visionary not a moralist, a fifteenth rather than a nineteenth century Christian, and a recluse whose way of life had liturgical sanction and who lived, quite literally, within a space defined by the walls of the church. Wollstonecraft, by contrast, had no institutional shelter for her unconventional independence (unless we count the school she founded, which could not survive her absence), she lived by her pen, at least intermittently; her poverty was involuntary; and her feminism explicit. Much separates these two women. 

Their accounts of love likewise cannot easily be aligned. What kind of love, and what connection between love and virtue, does Wollstonecraft offer? In her published writing, aligned with her emphasis on virtue, readers encounter the “calm pleasures of affectionate friendship,” description of sublime admiration, a theologically sophisticated account of agapic ascent from earthly to heavenly love, a charitable expansion from devotion to one to care for many, and “solidarity and self-love” that may also “demand self-sacrifice.” In her writing, and indeed in the words that conclude her last published essay, she speaks of how a preference for the “calm pleasures of friendship” rather than the “sensual tumult of love” could be reassured that “reason, mixing her tranquillizing convictions, whispers, that content, not happiness, is the reward of virtue in this world” (12). Anyone reading an account of Wollstonecraft’s life can understand why she herself might have longed for calm pleasures rather than sensual tumult. I was also moved, even inspired, by her extraordinary devotion to friends as well as lovers and the intense suffering, even unto death, that she observed as well as experienced because of these commitments. Perhaps, then, when it comes to love, Wollstonecraft and Julian are not so different after all, each finding in it peace as well as painfully transformative and revelatory intensity. 

This observation, about how Wollstonecraft and Julian might be compared leads me to two questions. First, a question of periodization, perhaps most clearly posed in relation to the following quote: “Wollstonecraft names and addresses a twofold conundrum, which becomes increasingly difficult to ignore in modernity: relations and systems of domination distort our concepts and cultivation of the virtues, and virtues are integral to just sociopolitical transformation” (12) This insistence on the distinctiveness of modernity comes up in a couple of different ways (as also in this reference to “late-modern” purposes: “In denying sexual virtues—specifically ‘gentleness, docility, and a spaniel-like affection’ as the ‘cardinal virtues of the sex’—Wollstonecraft replaces the gendered pseudo virtues of the early-modern virtue tradition with virtues suited to late-modern purposes” (167). How committed is Dumler-Winckler to the idea that modernity poses unique challenges? Is it because the need for sociopolitical transformation is greater now than in the past? Because our conceptions of virtue are disputed now in a way they were not in the past? Is she affirming the idea that social norms were once more hegemonic than they are now? Or is this just a claim that virtues were agreed upon in a way they are no longer? It is of course a difficult thing to measure, but all too easy to assume, I think (with a recent experience of re-reading Emmanuel La Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou in mind, proving that even a very small community of fourteenth-century French peasants could and did disagree on fundamental Christian doctrines and indeed judgments of who should be counted virtuous, and why). 

Second, a query about this book’s commitment to virtue. Ultimately, I think Dumler-Winckler gives us someone better understood as a visionary than a moralist. It is a central contention of Modern Virtue that Wollstonecraft is “an ideal figure to recommend a rapprochement between virtues’ defenders and despisers.” She makes that case with admirable subtlety and thoroughness. Anyone seeking a rapprochement should look to Wollstonecraft. And those (i.e. virtues’ defenders and virtues’ despisers) who have not yet realized that they want to reconcile should be persuaded by reading this book that they do. In that sense, the book is wholly successful. Still, I wonder if positioning Wollstonecraft in this way obscures what is most wondrous in the achievement of this feminist foremother and her modern commentator. In short, the visionary Wollstonecraft seems more important than the mediator, the adventurous and restless writer more enticing than the comprehensive pedagogue, and the passionate friend the truer model than the theorist of virtue formation. My point is not that some of Wollstonecraft’s writings or some facets of her life or personality are more important than others. I am instead contending that Dumler-Winckler made all of it seem extraordinarily important because of the way it exceeded the bounds of virtuous categories and the careful categorization of virtues. 

On the one hand, one could well conclude that this observation affirms the success of Dumler-Winckler’s stated mission. “Precisely,” she might say: “Wollstonecraft breaks the bonds currently constraining defenders as well as critics of virtue. That’s my central claim!” But I wonder if she would be interested in reflecting on what the other hand might hold. This would—or so I’m suggesting—be the true provocation of the reading of the Blake frontispiece and the unsettling implication of Wollstonecraft’s appeals to imitate Christ, and God. The neatly dressed and sprightly teacher, guiding her pupils, is also a figure of humiliation, helplessness, and sorrow, not just one “dependent on God”9 but something queerer, more like Julian’s Christ: mother and father and co-conspirator and fellow sufferer and trinitarian redeemer, all at once. Likewise, the imitation of Christ and God might be characterized by moderation. On this account, for Wollstonecraft, imitating God involved the cultivation of devotional practices, “impressing ‘habits of order on the expanding mind’ through dialectical readings and prayer”; training in the capacity for good judgment—including resistance to unjust laws and relations of domination and adherence to just authorities and norms; and the cultivation of generosity, and sympathy, and friendship. Yet for Wollstonecraft, to imitate God is also to “adore attributes that, softened into virtue may be imitated in kind, though the degree overwhelms the enraptured mind” (VRW 104, quoted in Modern Virtue 141). This imitation of the divine is to remain alive to that which is not “softened into virtue” and to be still and always possessed of an “enraptured mind.” Is this enraptured mind virtuous?

We were asked, when invited to be part of this panel, to consider what new conversations Modern Virtue might open up, and it is with this in mind that I will close by linking together the brief earlier reference to Moyn, the extended description of Julian, and these concluding questions. I asked at the outset whether this book was persuasive in arguing that Mary Wollstonecraft is an inspiring guide to a culture of dissent? Yes! Not, however, because she is readily contained and directed toward the concerns of our moment, as a direct model for the dissenting virtues I might seek to cultivate in myself and my students. Rather, Wollstonecraft seems an inspiring guide because she evades that containment. She is not simply or clearly proto-modern. Above all, the unruly devotional tradition of imitatio Christi creates the context for her engagement with the relatively tame tradition of virtues. This disruptive devotional tradition—constituted by individuals and groups responding to the extraordinary generative energy of the doctrine of the incarnation, the paradox of the duality of Jesus Christ’s singularity, of a Savior who is both human and divine—could never only be conventional or uniform or synchronic. Thus, the possibility of puzzling and enlivening comparisons. It is in the incongruities as well as the alignments between Wollstonecraft and Julian, for example, in the gaps as well as the continuities, that I can glimpse new possibilities, feel the energy of unexpected insights, and confirm that the creativity Moyn hails as liberalism’s highest value cannot be readily aligned with a singular historical moment or one limited political philosophy. 

Emily Dumler-Winckler sets out her signposts early: her subtitle, Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent, evokes Jeffrey Stout’s 2004 Democracy and Tradition; and the title of the introduction, “Who’s Wollstonecraft? Which Traditions?,” directly invokes Alasdair MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality?1 MacIntyre is among the most prominent purveyors of the widespread narrative that Western modernity is characterized by the disappearance of attention to virtue and its replacement by deontological and utilitarian moral theories. Against these narratives, Dumler-Winckler argues for the persistence of attention to virtue, or more specifically attention to and valuing of virtue, in Mary Wollstonecraft, whom for many represents the turn to rights that purportedly did away with virtue. In a manner that parallels Stout’s argument that democracy is a tradition—rather than being at odds with tradition—Dumler-Winckler contends that dissent is itself a tradition, not simply a rejection of tradition. Similarly, her main title, Modern Virtue, is—she contends against MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank, and Brad Gregory—not an oxymoron. As she pithily states in her conclusion, “Modernity is not the dark ages of the virtue tradition” (314).2

This is an outstanding book that has done much to correct—and I use this strong language deliberately—my own reading of Wollstonecraft. Dumler-Winckler’s knowledge of and engagement with Wollstonecraft extends far beyond Wollstonecraft’s most famous works, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, demonstrating not only deep familiarity with Wollstonecraft’s writings across time periods and very different genres but also why we must attend to this range of materials in order to best interpret Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft is both a brilliant rhetorician and, for the same reason, challenging to interpret; her political concerns and the multiple audiences to which she appeals lead her to craft arguments intended to persuade diverse interlocutors in light of their commitments. Dumler-Winckler’s engagement with the broad corpus is vital to judging which are Wollstonecraft’s own driving commitments and which she is ventriloquizing (a point to which I return).

Her interpretation extends that of David Bromwich in centering Wollstonecraft’s appropriation of Edmund Burke’s metaphor of revising a wardrobe: “Like an expert tailor, she used the tools at her disposal to augment the wardrobe of the eighteenth-century moral imagination” (310).3 In Dumler-Winckler’s reading, this metaphor provides an interpretive key to much of her work. Wollstonecraft neither rejects her inheritance nor thinks that we do it justice if we seek to simply replicate it. As Dumler-Winckler writes in relation to justice, “this autodidact weaves together the strands of various traditions to make a coherent whole. She provides a bricolage that innovatively combines elements of her education…” (184). The image of weaving these elements into a new garment contrasts starkly with MacIntyre’s post-apocalyptic vision of incoherent fragments.4

If I read Dumler-Winckler correctly, she can accommodate this point. Nonetheless, passages such as this stress the importance of independence for Wollstonecraft to a greater degree than Dumler-Winckler brings into focus. Moreover, they suggest a keener awareness of the potential dangers of emulation than Dumler-Winckler brings to the fore. The call to “steel” ourselves against those who have done so much to form us is powerful language, and it suggests that the concern is not just with those who would impose themselves upon us by demanding obedience but even those we admire and respect.5

This concern with models of formation that rely too heavily on discipline is also apparent in her concern with professions that thwart genuine virtue and freedom. Wollstonecraft discusses soldiers as well as the clergy. With regard to the latter, she notes that “the blind submission imposed at college to forms of belief serves as a novitiate to the curate, who must obsequiously respect the opinion of his rector or patron, if he mean to rise in his profession.”6 Again, Dumler-Winckler will rightly highlight that Wollstonecraft here focuses on enforced submission, rather than what we might think of as the voluntary emulation of exemplars. Yet I would suggest that part of the reason Wollstonecraft uses the language of “steeling” ourselves against undue influence is that she—like much of the tradition of reflection on habituation on which Dumler-Winckler draws—is keenly aware that the line between forced and chosen submission to authoritative models is not a clear one to draw. My point is not that Wollstonecraft conceives of dependence as a stage to be left behind or as completely overcome but that her concern with its dangers forms a prominent element of project.

On Imitatio Christi

The concern to recognize the extent of Wollstonecraft’s refashioning of the wardrobe she inherits also arises in the prominence that Dumler-Winckler gives to the notion of the imitation of Christ, making it the title of arguably the core chapter on Wollstonecraft’s account of virtue. Dumler-Winckler makes a convincing case for the importance of exemplars for ethical formation. She also identifies numerous instances in which Wollstonecraft at least alludes to the rich traditions of imitatio Christi as she sets out exemplars. She leans heavily on William Blake’s frontispiece for Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (142–47). Even if we follow Dumler-Winckler’s reading of Original Stories by taking Mrs. Mason as a Christ-like figure on whom the children might model themselves, however, this begs the question of the extent to which Wollstonecraft’s refashioning of the tradition entails a perduring normative authority for Christ as such or more transformatively redeploys elements of this tradition in a new outfit. As Dumler-Winckler notes, the imitatio Christi on offer here is pluralistic: “The image is not singular but infinitely diverse, and we are at best flawed approximations” (170). For Dumler-Winckler, “Wollstonecraft democratized and radicalized the imitatio Christi tradition … by inviting her readers to recognize the incarnate Christ among ordinary women, from Mrs. Mason, Mary, Maria, and Jemima to those selling fish and vegetables in French markets” (313). Even if we grant this point, I am still left with a question: Particularly since Wollstonecraft does not generally explicitly link these multiple models to Christ, what is at stake—for Dumler-Winckler—in ordering them and so much of her conception of virtue in relation to Christ? More specifically, does Wollstonecraft actually preserve a notion of these exemplars as “flawed approximations” of an ideal that is associated with Christ? I believe there is a broader issue here about interpreting Wollstonecraft’s use of Christian language, traditions of thought, and tropes.7 Because it implies that others do not understand—or are not being forthright about—what actually motivates them, ideology critique can thwart democracy and we should resort to it sparingly. I share Stout’s concern. Yet I am also profoundly concerned by the role that these zombie narratives play in the world today. I think of the writings of Patrick Deneen and the comfort that he gives to right-wing movements as well as of then-attorney general William Barr’s widely discussed 2019 talk at the University of Notre Dame. Since reams of excellent scholarship demonstrating the historical inadequacy of these narratives of modernity have been unable to stop this current—even in a range of scholarly circles—should we be shifting more of our scholarly energies toward explaining their persistence in relation to the ideological interests they serve? In this moment, when these zombie narratives arguably play such a significant role in our common life, is it perhaps time to call the hermeneutic ambulance?

Having had the good fortune to hear Dr. Emily Dumler-Winckler present an earlier version of this work—on virtues, their semblances, and the practices of discernment that help discriminate between them in the context of movements toward just social change, it is a pleasure to read and respond to the final publication. I am excited to continue the dialogue with Dr. Dumler-Winckler and the symposia contributors.

Dumler-Winckler’s beautiful book chronicles how eighteenth-century proto-feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft deftly navigates an intractable modern debate between what Dumler-Winckler calls virtues’ “defenders” and virtues’ “despisers” or “designers.” Briefly, according to Dumler-Winckler, defenders charge modernity with abandoning virtue, subordinating the good to the right, and eliminating the theological precepts that give rights discourse coherency. Enter catastrophic pluralism, relativism, and skepticism. Despisers worry that standards of virtue, among other shortcomings, naturalize virtues that are in fact contingent, close critique into the best kind of life, and exclude would-be exemplars based on concealed prejudice. Extending the critique of despisers, designers offer constructive proposals for virtues of their own design, manifest in exemplars from their own religious and philosophical communities.

Wollstonecraft, for her part, charts a third way, embodying what Dumler-Winckler calls a “tradition of dissent,” that avoids getting mired in “culture war” style debates. Demonstrating Wollstoncraft’s refashioning of her inheritance from pre-moderns and her contributions to modern and late-modern debates, Dumler-Winckler’s masterfully rehabilitates Wollstonecraft as a resource for contemporary ethical debates surrounding, virtues and rights, critique, and the common good. Specifically, Dumler-Winckler’s Wollstonecraft argues unequivocally for a nonsexed account of the virtues, endeavoring to help her largely Christian readership distinguish between true virtues and their (sexed) semblances. Cultivation of and contestation about virtues, Dumler-Winckler argues, is essential to Christian communities and democratic societies.

Dumler-Winckler argues that Wollstonecraft does not set out to provide her readers with a detailed analytic account of the virtues, rather the rich moral vocabulary imbuing her writing insists that virtues are good habits, acquired through habituation, education, and mimesis of exemplars. Virtuous independence follows. Rather than offering such a thoroughgoing account, like Aquinas before her, Wollstonecraft was more intent on using her premodern inheritance to aid in distinguishing true virtues from their sexed semblances.

Questions on which I invite further discussion from Dumler-Winckler are related to claims throughout Modern Virtue that virtues such as love and charity perfect passions. It would be helpful to hear Dumler-Winckler say more about the moral psychological picture that leads Wollstonecraft to distinguish among passions and the virtues that perfect them. In addition to considering the upshots and impetus behind her particular moral psychological picture, I’m curious to engage potential pitfalls, on which I conjecture below. 

Wollstonecraft’s moral psychology, following Burke’s, suggests that passions (such as anger and sympathy, for example) rather than being considered virtues themselves are better understood as passions that can be shaped by vices or virtues such as justice and love. Thinking with the Womanist and feminist ethicists (several of whom Dumler-Winckler draws our attention toward), what might be the upshot of considering such passions as virtues themselves rather than passions to be perfected by love? What practical and moral reasons might there be for considering such things virtues in themselves? Why resist the enumeration of a class of “burdened virtues”? What is the significance of calling things like anger and sympathy passions, that can be perfected by virtues, rather than virtues themselves? Might training the passions according to love and charity lead those struggling under systems of domination (women, persons of color, queer and gender non-conforming persons) to temper that which might aid in their recognition of themselves as competent judges and legitimate authorities? What are potential costs in naming something a passion to be made vicious or virtuous (via love and justice)?

Dumler-Winckler argues, and I agree, that virtues (on Wollstonecraft’s and Burke’s moral psychological picture) are sometimes in danger of (and never exempt from) becoming corrupted. Dumler-Winckler illustrates well, via contemporary example and adept interpretation of Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre, that semblances of virtue, exercised toward unjust ends, are vicious. This is not only because of their unjust ends, but also because groups that lie outside dominate cultural paradigms are vulnerable to aping those vicious habits. And yet, consider the potential danger of tempering what Wollstonecraft calls passions by virtues such as love and charity. In contexts of domination, exploitation, and oppression, considering anger as a virtue itself rather than a passion to be moderated by virtue might better befit a particular community. For example, those suffering under the weight of systemic oppression, such as women, persons of color, or LGBTQ folks, might be well-practiced in the virtues of forbearance, charity, and love. 

Educating and habituating these communities in virtues that they may be well formed in already may be pernicious to the imaginative, creative, and critical impulses that are less exhorted within these various communities. Tempering anger or contempt, for example, with love is a familiar refrain. There may be value also in tempering charity and mercy with anger. Consider historical examples (many of which Dumler-Winckler herself acknowledges) of dominant classes aiming to preserve the status quo by exhorting forbearance, charity, and love. We see such rhetoric aimed at movements articulating the value of Black lives, where concerns arise over anger’s potential fracturing of civic bonds, among other ills. Women, too, when working in resistance to sex and gender subordination continue to be exhorted to temper their anger with charity. Consider also the shift in protest tactics among gay and lesbian persons in the United States in the 1980s. Memorial practices of grief and mourning gave way to confrontational activism, which not only helped inaugurate various legislative victories, but also helped protestors recognize their capacity for and claim to pride (rather than shame surrounding their sexual identities) and righteous anger (at prejudice-fueled systemic failures in and beyond public health). Dumler-Winckler compelling argues that Wollstonecraft contends not only with recognitional defects of those perpetrating and advocating for eighteenth-century women’s continued subordination, but also Wollstonecraft didn’t take for granted that women themselves would recognize the capacity for virtuous judgment among their own ranks. Perhaps viewing anger as itself virtuous, rather than as enhanced by virtue, might go some way in the important achievement of self-recognition. Regarding self-authorship and self-recognition, it matters what a group calls themselves. Dumler-Winckler’s rich analysis of Maria: Or, The Wrongs of Woman Illustrated illustrates Wollstonecraft’s creative effort to enable her readers to recognize as qualified judges those who may not be recognized as such. Dumler-Winckler herself notes that the virtuous female critic will appear “quite mad” (76). She interprets this madness as akin to genius, and yet I wonder just how pregnant is this account of madness? Might it include fury?

Terms that Wollstonecraft favors, such as “taste,” “manners,” and “modesty,” might be particularly fitting for her readership. Might these values give pause to those with Womanist, feminist, or queer sympathies in a similar way that love and charity as tempering the passions of anger and sympathy might have? I’m deeply sympathetic to Dumler-Winckler’s desire to hold together premodern inheritances with Wollstonecraft’s tradition of dissent. I think Dumler-Winckler is right that no virtues are beyond critique, and there is always the danger that virtue might become vicious or semblance may masquerade as true virtue. And yet, persons working for social change in their communities, based on their experiences and needs, I think, are at varying risk for developing such deformities. Why is it that, according to Dumler-Winckler’s Wollstonecraft, without love the oppressed is doomed to become the oppressor (155)? Dumler-Winckler aptly notes that Christian masters instilled in enslaved persons caricatures of the cardinal virtues to have them endure their condition (155). Exalting love and friendship as perfecting potentially hostile passions may not be a fitting tailoring of the dissenting garment, especially for communities living under conditions of domination and systemic oppression. The virtues required to moderate passions that have grown excessive may not be the same virtues needed to augment passions that have been woefully (and violently) diminished.

To a contemporary audience, Mary Wollstonecraft can come off as—what I can only describe as—judgey. If we define judgey as a readiness to share one’s judgment about what is right or fitting in a given situation, then yes, Wollstonecraft is judgey. She puts forth a robust account of moral virtue and offers specific examples of what these virtues might look like. She is not a fan of pajamas at the breakfast table (preferring a person come to the table indicating their readiness to meet the challenges of the day); she strongly favors breast feeding over the exploitations of wet nursing. Furthermore, she often relies on a sharp sense of humor to castigate ladies who appear to have internalized what we would call sexist notions of femininity. As a scholar and teacher, I have often wondered why I’m not more bothered by my disagreement with certain practical recommendations that Wollstonecraft makes. If I find her account of virtue to have so many merits, why can I dismiss the practical applications with which I disagree? Am I simply utilizing the historically situated assumptions of my own epoch to reject the parts of Wollstonecraft which my own society cannot accept? What is my method of extraction? These are just a narrow sub-set of questions to which Emily Dumler-Winckler’s Modern Virtue offers promising answers. This substantial volume does significant work to evidence not only what Wollstonecraft says, but also how Wollstonecraft’s own method of proceeding answers readers’ suspicions about the limits of her moral exemplars. Her practical examples are not intended to be dogma in a Wollstonecraftian program, so much as invitations to critical consideration and to revision of these models—especially over time. In other words, Wollstonecraft shows us how to critically engage her own examples. She does not suggest that hers “will be our examples, nor that any given set of exemplars could identify once and for all the standards of refined taste” (71) or virtues in practice. If we define judginess as a lack of humility or openness to alternative views—then Wollstonecraft is not so judgey after all. Furthermore, in our own moment, plagued as we are by our own culture wars and the readiness to judgment that they bring, such an account of judgment is incredibly welcome. 

This notion of Wollstonecraftian judgment as well as the broader argument of Modern Virtue has substantial implications for a variety of concerns and audiences. In addition to being the first sustained treatment of Wollstonecraft in theology, Dumler-Winckler speaks directly to current debates about virtue and virtue theory in a quite compelling way. The book is presented as “an alternative to two influential and competing narratives about the virtues in modernity”—virtues’ overzealous defenders and virtues’ despisers (6). The overzealous defenders treat modernity as a story about the demise of the conditions for the practice of virtue (Alasdair MacIntyre and Brad Gregory to name a few). Virtues’ despisers worry that virtue theory tends toward a rejection of modern pluralism and presents standards that “tend to naturalize the contingent, deny the disputable, and conceal prejudices that should be abandoned” (9). Here Dumler-Winckler looks especially closely at Judith Butler’s 2000 lecture, “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue.” In response to such poles, Modern Virtue quite convincingly points out a Wollstonecraftian via negativa out of such divisions. For instance, like virtues defenders, Wollstonecraft is interested in elaborating moral exemplars and in existing traditions that might be drawn from to do so. However, her notion of refinement renders these moral exemplars less immutable pillars and more invitations to critical engagement.1 These models specifically call on a person to exercise their own judgment—to assess, revise, and embody the virtues in new contexts. Indeed, one of her primary concerns about the status of women in her society is the way in which they have been encouraged to merely ape the behaviors of elites, rather than to engage their own judgment in examining the exemplars they are given. To this end Dumler-Winckler offers a quite compelling and original interpretation of Wollstonecraft’s pedagogical writings—especially as they illuminate the frontispiece to Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories by William Blake. She is, to my knowledge, the first to recognize the illuminating parallels between this illustration of Wollstonecraft’s call to independent judgment, her notion of the imitatio Christi, and Blake’s “The Crucifixion: ‘Behold Thy Mother’” (147). 

One of the ways that Modern Virtue evidences this more pluralistic theory of judgement is through a consideration of Wollstonecraft’s contributions to eighteenth-century debates about a so-called standard of taste. Much like contemporary readers navigating a public discourse in which one person’s noble protestor is another person’s vicious rioter, eighteenth-century disputes tended to focus on how disagreements of taste might be resolved. Like Hume and Burke, Wollstonecraft concludes there is a firm distinction between true and false taste, between qualified and unqualified judges. However, she emphasizes the ways that an oppressive society fails to recognize those most qualified to judge. Furthermore, Wollstonecraft resists an overly foundationalist account of what a “standard of taste” might entail. This is one of the places that Dumler-Winckler’s emphasis on Wollstonecraft’s theology proves especially helpful. For instance, she underscores that when Wollstonecraft refers to God’s attributes as a standard, she is doing so within a dissenting tradition and consequently an understanding of the many ways that these attributes are disputed and disputable.2 Citing Wollstonecraft’s “repeated insistence that ‘the High and Lofty One…doubtless possesses many attributes of which we can form no conception’” (42), Modern Virtue makes a convincing case that, for Wollstonecraft, principles derived from God’s nature are “a matter of good religious taste, not an indisputable foundation” (42).

Though Wollstonecraft offers potential orientations that might aid us in refining taste—orientations toward God, nature, and simplicity—Modern Virtue emphasizes that these are starting points rather than rigid standards.3 When Wollstonecraft appeals to “the immutable attributes of God” as a “standard” for moral development she is not presenting these principles as “given in advance of dispute or ethical inquiry” (41). Instead, these are invitations to judgement and hence to dispute. Wollstonecraft’s frequent references to God’s nature have led many to see her as having “precisely the sort of naturalized and universalized standards that many contemporary feminists and gender theorists find troubling” (60). However, Dumler-Winckler illustrates that this appeal is not quite so universal by emphasizing the distinction between first and second nature as Wollstonecraft would have understood them. First nature—something that is a given—and second nature—something that is acquired. In an Aristotelian sense—we are born with certain inclinations and capacities—a certain telos. However, the attainment of a virtue is importantly a matter of second nature—a matter of the habits that support living out and practicing certain virtues of which we are capable.4 Such a reading supports a more pluralistic and less Kantian reading of Wollstonecraftian principles. The ramifications of this more open-ended Wollstonecraft are apparent if we return to the initial question of “judginess.” When Wollstonecraft puts forth an example of a virtue, like modesty, she is not claiming to know for certain that the exterior garments a person wears are (or are not) an indication of true modesty. She is not “judgey” in this way. On the contrary, “she views modesty as a virtue like any other that can be cultivated through a variety of bodily and social practices” (174). Furthermore, this notion of virtue is bolstered by her theology. “All human beings are invited to grow in the image and likeness of God (VRW 104), yet we each do so in our own particular way” (170). In a deep sense, I cannot know a person’s virtue—or whether their self-presentation is the result of true taste or judgment simply by looking at them. Furthermore, attempts to do so are likely to be foiled by the many semblances of virtue. For instance, Wollstonecraft worries about the “priestly collar” (174), religious garb more broadly, and other uniforms that can hide a myriad of vices.

Modern Virtue is compelling both as interpretation of Wollstonecraft and as an effort to present a better story about virtues in modernity. It is, therefore, as a reader quite convinced by Dumler-Winckler’s arguments, that I point toward some added considerations. I wonder whether, in addition to Judith Butler, the voice of a contemporary feminist and queer theorist like Sara Ahmed, might illuminate some nuanced concerns about modern virtue? Take for instance worries about an over-reliance on mere habits. Dumler-Winckler suggests that “Wollstonecraft has other anxieties, …but habit and habituation are not among them” (130). This might overstate the case, given the extent to which Wollstonecraft worries about a historical pattern of educating women into the mimicry devoid of either reason or sentiment. She is, to my mind, quite concerned about mere habituation. Nevertheless, Wollstonecraft does lack certain anxieties about habituation that contemporary authors might better draw out. For example, the queer phenomenology of Sara Ahmed is attentive to the ways in which existing habits—more broadly the ways we are already situated—absorb what is different, distinct, what she refers to as “slanted” in the sense of what does not conform to—for instance—heteronormative binaries.5 In this sense, existing structures and narratives often swallow new critical revisions, silencing by co-opting such distinct presences.6 For example, Ahmed points out the way in which norms operate to push the jagged edges of queer family into a framework that can be understood—and so elided into existing “family lines.”7 For this reason, Ahmed’s framework suggests that a Wollstonecraftian call to revise tradition likely necessitates a more vigorous “call to disorientation” if it is to succeed.8

In the last lines of Modern Virtue, Dumler-Winckler appreciates challenges implied by Wollstonecraftian pluralism. She suggests that taking up Wollstonecraft’s call will require carrying the pieces of our history “whole and shattered” and to “feel their weight” (Sabrina Orah Mark as cited on 326). As an added challenge, Ahmed underscores what is required to ensure that we do actually feel the weight—specifically of the shattered pieces. To use the guiding metaphor of the book, Ahmed helps us to consider in what ways our existing garb—the inherited garb of the moral imagination—resists our attempts at editing. In what ways might this inheritance be creating path-dependencies that make it very difficult for us even to see the “slant” as a slant, as a possible existence, or way of living? How will a new revision of a tradition be reduced to a prior fashion, a return of the same? Wollstonecraft can’t offer us the certainty we might crave, but as a starting point she does appreciate the double-edged quality of the aesthetic, moral, and social formation she is proposing. “Habits, she understands, can be deliberate or thoughtless, virtuous or vicious” (130). Vigilance to these dual possibilities is vital as, more often, it is the original and the jagged adaptations of the wardrobe that get watered down. Ahmed therefore offers a helpful qualifier; be sure to seek out the rough edges and to weigh more heavily the shattered parts.