MANSFIELD PARK – JANE AUSTEN (LECTURE – 5)

MA II Semester, Fiction I, May 2020

Prepared by Dr Ivy Hansdak, Dept of English, JMI, New Delhi

Feminism in Jane Austen’s Novels:

Jane Austen’s six novels have traditionally been seen as epitomizing conservatism in an age of
Romantic excesses. Many of her early readers considered her to be a woman writer who
unquestioningly accepted the norms of patriarchy and believed in the institution of marriage as
bedrock of stability. This conservative view was further strengthened by two of her early
biographies, written by her brother, Henry Thomas Austen (1818) and her new, J.E. Austen Leigh
(1871), both of whom emphasized her “maiden-aunt” image and spoke of her many feminine
accomplishments that included singing, music and needlework.

This view came to be questioned in the 1980s after the publication of Gilbert and Guber’s
influential book, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). In 1982, the journal, Woman and Literature,
brought out a special issue on Jane Austen, followed by Margaret Kirkham’s book, Jane Austen:
Feminism and Fiction (1983), which placed her in her rightful place within the intellectual tradition
of Western feminism. Here, Kirkham points out that Jane Austen actually supported many of the
views expressed by the English feminist writer, Mary Wollstonecraft, especially her views on
women’s education. But the publication of William Godwin’s Memoirs in 1798 and the severe
repercussions that followed it, prevented Austen and other women writers from openly aligning
themselves with the feminist cause. Yet Jane Austen managed to introduce new ideas into her
novels through the use of comic irony.

According to Meenakshi Mukherjee, Austen’s “crypto-feminism” is revealed in various ways:

firstly, in her delineation of women characters as individuals faced with choices, secondly, in her
treatment of marriage and thirdly, in her subversion of the conventional narrative mode.

The age that Austen lived in had closely followed the Augustan Age when thinkers stressed the
importance of reason in human behaviour. This, however, was not applied to women, leading to a

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basic contradiction in English society. In matters of feminine behaviour, a romantic weakness was
idealized with its corollary of affectation and pretence. This feminine weakness was seen as
attractive and one of the qualities that a woman played upon to captivate her husband. Rousseau
even believed it to be a legitimate part of her armoury.

The idealization of female weakness was reflected in literature through the cult of the “fragile
heroine” who fainted very often and pined away when wronged in love, as expressed in
Richardson’s heroine, Clarissa and Goldsmith’s heroine, Olivia. In both of them, feminine virtue
was linked with physical frailty. By contrast, Jane Austen created many robust and forthright
heroine, such as Catherine Moreland in Northanger Abbey, Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and
Prejudice and Emma Woodhouse in Emma. This was combined with a negative representation of
many weak and affected woman characters, such as Isabella Thorpe, Louise Musgrove and Miss
Bingley.

Similarly, Austen’s stress on rationalism is seen in her heroines. In Pride and Prejudice, when
Elizabeth Bennett rejects Mr. Collins’ marriage proposal, he interprets it as a ploy to “increase his
love by suspense” in the manner of an elegant female. Elizabeth retorts that he must consider her
not as an elegant female but as “a rational creature speaking the truth”. In Emma, the heroine’s
fanciful nature is gradually subdued and replaced by rationality. After Harriet Smith confesses her
love for Mr. Knightley and speaks of marrying him, Emma blames herself for encouraging
Harriet’s vanity. She then resolves that the future would find her “more rational, more acquainted
with herself”. Besides rationality and good sense, Austen also ascribes wit and humour to almost
all her heroines.

Austen’s treatment of marriage may be considered as ambivalent. While marriage is the major
theme of all her novels and she seems to conform to the conventional discourse on marriage, she
also introduces some ideas that serve to de-romanticize marriage. To begin with, there are many
mismatched couples in her novels, such as the Bennetts, the Collins, the Palmers, and the Allens.
These couples provide examples of the negative possibilities of marriage.

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This ambivalent approach is also seen in her frank discussion of income and dowry. Mansfield
Park begins by stating that Miss Maria Ward, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good
fortune to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram and thereby rise to the rank of a baronet’s lady. Similarly,
Pride and Prejudice begins with the oft-quoted line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a
single man, in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”. For Austen’s female
characters, marriage is not just an idealized culmination of romantic love but also a means of social
mobility and economic comfort. In conventional fiction, only villains are supposed to be
mercenary. This is not so in Austen’s novels. In Pride and Prejudice, when Charlotte Lucas sums
up her pragmatic approach to marriage by saying, “I am not a romantic, you know. I ask only for
a comfortable home”, we are led to sympathize with her.

Austen’s subversion of the conventional narrative form is revealed mainly in her use of comic
irony. Her critical comments on patriarchy as often disguised as humour. Hence, Meenakshi
Mukherjee comments that “the apparently placid texture of her novels conceals a tension between
protest and acceptance, rebellion and conformity, held in equilibrium by the controlling device of
comedy.” To conclude, Jane Austen’s “crypto-feminism” is today an accepted feature of her work.
To it may be attributed the multi-layered complexity of her novels.