THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

luxurious by the relaxing pleasures which wealth procures.” Enslaved by a commercial
culture that transformed women into “alluring” objects, women were forced to rely upon
man to “lend them his reason to guide their tottering steps aright.” 50 In her poem Epistle
to William Wilberforce, written after parliamentary defeat in the spring of 1791, Anna
Letitia Barbauld suggested the political crisis was a moral crisis. Noting Britain’s
“shrinking soul,” Barbauld denounced an indifferent British public, which had been
influenced by “[t]he artful gloss, that moral sense confounds.” Barbauld compared
colonial and metropolitan corruption and suggested both had been infected by the
commercial connection with slavery. The “contagion,” she suggested, was a “monstrous
fellowship” of female virtue and corruption:
Lo! Where reclin’d, pale Beauty courts the breeze,
Diffus’d on sofas of voluptuous ease;
With anxious awe, her menial train around,
Catch her faint whispers of half-utter’d sound
. . . See her, with indolence to fierceness join’d,
Of body delicate, infirm of mind,
With languid tones imperious mandates urge;
With arm recumbent wield the household scourge;
And with unruffled mien, and placid sounds,
Contriving torture, and inflicting wounds.
In Barbauld’s narrative, “voluptuous ease” slid easily from civilized to savage. Under the
influence of the “seasoned tools of Avarice,” manners melted and hearts hardened until
50 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Vindications: The Rights of
Men, The Rights of Woman, ed. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview
Literary Texts, 1997), 282.
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