Seeing Feminism In Jane Austen
...way critics had once believed. Instead of exalting the value of tradition and virtue in her writing style, Austen defied it and made a case for feminine rights. Whether we see Austen as a feminist because we are looking for evidence in her text or because she truly was a feminist is something that we may never be able to discern.
Austen was not blatant in her feminism and if you weren't looking for it, you might not have noticed the stance she took. She was well known for writing about young women who only had an interest in marriage, and she was often underestimated because of this. Though if you study her work, you will find her understated feminist tendency.
While most of Austen's characters did want to marry, they always wanted to choose their own suitors and marry for love which is something that was unheard of during Austen's lifetime. For example, Elizabeth Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, who will be dependant on her family and at the mercy of Mr. Collins, who is to inherit the family house, if she never marries, only wants to marry if she can find ‘the deepest sort of love’. Elizabeth is a very intelligent character, but she is not the only smart female that held this sort of strong feminine notion about marrying for love.
In close examination of Austen’s perspective, we see that Austen ignores some of the innate laws and social norms of her culture in a way that opens a potential for feminist readings of her work. Because “the intellectual woman will try all the more zealously because she fears failure; but her conscious zeal is still an activity and it misses its goal” (De Beauvoir, 342). The thing is that Austen may have harshly criticized the social structures of her era, but she was not an activist; and she did not want to lay shame upon her family. But, It can perhaps be argued that Austen was a forerunner of the feminists, not only for the...
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