Gardner makes use of a wide array Wollstonecraft’s many writings, including her novels, letters, and reviews, to formulate her interpretation of Wollstonecraft’s notion of true sensibility. Gardner claims that Wollstonecraft’s “sensibility” is a distinct form of emotional responsiveness—one that must be cultivated in order to appreciate the truly beautiful things of life. In addition, Gardner claims that, for Wollstonecraft, a developed sensibility is necessary in order to live a moral life. It encourages love of others, which can potentially develop into love of God (or perfect love). According to Gardner, Wollstonecraft’s view can be expressed this way: “Women must be allowed the freedom to feel genuinely, and for their feelings—guided by Christian principles—to direct them towards virtue” (110).*
According to Gardner, when Wollstonecraft’s works are taken as a whole, “sensibility” can be seen through two noteworthy qualities of Wollstonecraft’s writing. The first quality, somewhat counter-intuitively, is the simplicity and lack of polish in her writing. Wollstonecraft admires this quality in other writers, due to her belief that (in Gardner’s words): “the writer who has true delicacy of taste will write genuinely and simply, and speak the truth, while the writer of artificial feelings will write empty, self-conscious, rhetoric” (100). The second quality, especially noticeable in the Vindication, is Wollstonecraft’s use of “’flights of imagination’ as well as frequent bursts of dramatic—even apparently rambling—hyperbole” (96). According to Gardner, this quality of writing can also be explained as genuine sensibility—as moments when Wollstonecraft’s intense feeling and imagination come through in the text most strongly. Gardner argues that when sensibility is recognized in Wollstonecraft’s work, it is clear that the Vindication is not an Enlightenment treatise. Gardner’s point is that by intentionally using sensibility to inform her “rational” arguments, Wollstonecraft is challenging the reason/passion dichotomy. Since that dichotomy, according to Gardner, is the foundation of rationalist and Enlightenment thought, Wollstonecraft did not, and did not intend to, write a traditional Enlightenment treatise. With this in place, many of the supposed weaknesses of Wollstonecraft’s writing, including her apparent adoption of a “masculine” form of rational discourse criticized bitterly by some modern feminists, no longer apply.
* This ideal of true sensibility in contrasted with what Wollstonecraft saw as the over-developed sensibility of many women. When not tempered by reason and understanding, this type of sensibility leads to sensualism and false morality, as well as an occupation with trivial concerns and no care for serious ones. Wollstonecraft despised this type of sensibility, from which came her critique of the flowery diction typical of much writing by and for women during her time.