FEMINISM AND SEXUALITY

Relationship between Ideals of Feminine Conduct and Sexuality by Jane Austen

[Name of the Institute]

Relationship between Ideals of Feminine Conduct and Sexuality by Jane Austen

Introduction

Jane Austen was an English novelist of the eighteenth century, whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Austen began writing at an early age for the entertainment of her family and friends. Many of the earlier juvenilia are brilliant burlesques of the sentimental novels of the day, but these gradually give way to more ambitious attempts and an increasingly sharp and satiric observation of the social world in which she lived. The original versions of Sense and Sensibility (”Elinor and Marianne”), Pride and Prejudice (”First Impressions”), and Northanger Abbey (”Susan”) can be traced to these final stages of Austen's juvenile experiments and to her early hopes of publication. In 1797, her father offered “First Impressions” to a publisher who rejected it unseen, but Austen continued revising and polishing her work for many years. In 1803, she succeeded in selling the manuscript of “Susan,” but, frustratingly, it remained unpublished, and in 1809, she was enabled to buy it back again (Looser, 1995, pp. 14-17). She attempted to revise this also, changing the heroine's name to Catherine, but the lapse of time apparently proved too much of an obstacle. The novel was shelved, and appeared only posthumously, in 1818, as Northanger Abbey. In this paper I will be discussing the concept of feminism and sexuality portrayed by Jane Austen in her novels. I intend to examine the way in which the discourse of sex situates itself as the fundamental concern of the novel of manners.

Critical Analysis

There is a great deal of feminism and sex in the novels of Jane Austen. However, agreement on Austen's exact position regarding sexuality and the significance of sex in the novels is a little more difficult to come by. In recent years an outpouring of criticism on the sexuality in Austen's texts has made use of a variety of approaches to the Big Six. Gender issues figure largely in the general critical landscape as feminists locate Austen in relation to the discourses surrounding women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Sexuality in Austen is also discussed from the point of view of theories of desire, political theory, and cultural/materialist histories. It is my contention that sex, presented as the secret of the discourse of the novel and presented as a case on which the reader must pass judgment, serves strategic purposes in the discursive moment of which the text is a part (Wiltshire, 1992, pp. 15-21). I argue that the discourse of sexuality in Eritrea is situated within a discursive field in the early nineteenth century that is concerned with the definition and affirmation of emerging cultural norms. On the one hand, I look at the situation of sex in the context of the historical moment, on the other, to examine the ...