Jane Austen’s Crypto-feminism [Archives:2005/824/Education]
Dr Murari Prasad
Faculty of Education
Sada'ah
There was a long tradition of passive revolution in support of women's mobility and uplift before the term feminism gained currency around 1890 and, eventually, flowered into a widespread vibrant movement in the 1970s.In this unorganized empowering project of the Western provenance literature, particularly fiction, has played an important part. In this brief essay I would wish to look at Jane Austen's engagement with the issue of women's position in the early 19th century English society.
Jane Austen was born in 1775, five years after Wordsworth, four years after Walter Scott, and three years after Coleridge. She was twenty-two years of age when Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of Vindication of the Rights of Women, died. Despite Wollstonecraft's unorthodox views on women's role in society and her plea for female autonomy, women writers chose to suppress their progressive views in the conservative atmosphere. The popular conduct books of Jane Austen's time are full of advice and ideas about women's physical debility and dependence on men. Hannah More provides a representative sample of the dominant male-centred views on women:
Greater delicacy evidently implies greater fragility: and the weakness, natural and moral, clearly points out the necessity of a superior degree of caution, retirement and reserve They find their protection in their weakness and their safety in their delicacy.
Obviously, in the midst of prevailing social norms women had no access to professions and productive pursuits; they were supposed only to fill familial slots.
What was Jane Austen's position on the iniquitous social conventions? Of course, she does not unleash oppositional rhetoric. Nor does she state any ideological position or express her outrage against exclusion and oppression of women. Her ideological reticence as well as the placid texture of her novels has been taken as her conformity to the order and stability of society. On both sides of the Atlantic she was for long considered a conservative and uncritically orthodox writer. As the head of the Great Tradition in the English novel in F.R. Leavis' estimation she does not come out in full-dress evaluation. It was only in the 1980s that her novels were viewed through the lens of feminism. What does a feminist perspective on her fiction yield?
The restrictive social practices of her time prevented her from articulating her assumptions and attitudes. She even suppressed her name in the title-page of her novels)they merely said that they were 'By a Lady'. Probably the only novel in which the traditional gender pattern is overtly resented is Persuasion. Chafing under limitations imposed by patriarchal society, Anne Elliot expresses her views on women's fate in a conversation with Captain Harville: “We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, and business of some sort or other to take you back into the world immediately.” However, her views on female autonomy and her questioning of traditional sex roles are voiced in the witty sallies and emotional independence of her heroines. To configure her ideological alignment we need to look at her feisty and forthright heroines, such as Catherine Morland, Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse.
Unlike their fragile fictional stereotypes, these robust women make no bones about their fondness for outdoor life and open air. Catherine Moreland in Northanger Abbey is lively and boisterous, “noisy and wild”, and detests confinement. Far from being a husband-hunter, or seeking after crutches for social standing, she eats to her fill and falls asleep for nine solid hours after her suitor fails to show up at a ball. As a conventional role model, she could be seen mooning over her truant lover. Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is a sensible, sharp and self-possessed girl. Unlike Miss Bingley, she does not angle for Darcy's attention or approval while proclaiming her identity. She is incapable of fainting like Richardson's Pamela or Goldsmith's Olivia.
The traits of these heroines represent Austen's views on women's selfhood and space in family and society. Elizabeth Bennet does not hesitate to violate the code of female propriety when she decides to walk through the muddy countryside to see her sick sister. Jane Austen's subtle authorial observation is conflated with Elizabeth's curt reply to Mr. Collins, “Do not consider me now as an elegant female, intending to plague you, but as a rational creature.” She makes measured and mature response when Lady Catherine asks her whether she and her sisters have acquired the conventional feminine accomplishments like playing and singing. Lady Catherine can hardly hide her obvious discomfiture:
“Upon my word,” said her Ladyship, “you give your opinion very decidedly for so young a person.)Pray, what is your age?”
“With three younger sisters grown up,” replied Elizabeth smiling, “your ladyship can hardly expect me to own it.”
Lady Catherine seemed quite astonished at not receiving a direct answer; and Elizabeth suspected herself to be the first creature ho had ever dared to trifle with so much dignified appearance!
Jane Austen undercuts the conventions in the market economy of marriage through strategic interventions in the form of her heroines' witty rejoinders. For instance, Elizabeth's reaction to Mrs Gardiner, who had cautioned her against marrying Wickam, on the double standard of morality in matrimonial transactions:
Pray, my dear aunt, hat is the difference in matrimonial affairs between the mercenary and the prudent motive? Where does discretion end and avarice begin? Last Christmas you were afraid of his marrying me, because it should be imprudent, and now because he is trying to get a girl with one thousand pounds. You want to find out that he is mercenary.
In the same vein, Fanny Price in Mansfield Park protests, “Let him [Henry Crawford] have all the perfections of the world a man [need not] be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like”. Emma Woodhouse in Emma is equally self-assertive, “A woman is not to marry a man merely because she is asked or because he is attached to her”. These heroines do declare their personal and private choices, without capitulating to the pressures of the patriarchal community. They are arguably too tenacious to be tenuous moulds of the given feminine ideal. Jane Austen exposes the burden of female passivity and mocks the dominant paradigm of gender.
She could not afford to be an aggressive debunker of the prevailing ideology. Nevertheless, as a crypto-feminist, she subverts the values imposed by the custodians of orthodoxy and undermines the iniquitous gender construction by manipulating plot dynamics, by interweaving ironical jabs in conversations and asides, and these narrative devices go against the conservative grain of the novel. The tensions surrounding the emancipation of women and their role in society are built into the plot and it is not difficult to see her implicit endorsement of the passion and desire of her unaffected and intelligent heroines.
——
[archive-e:824-v:13-y:2005-d:2005-03-14-p:education]
