Jane Austen

Rationale

This will be an essay on marriage, patriarchal entrapment, and the invisibility of compulsion in Jane Austen's work. Emma and Pride and Prejudice will be the main texts, with some supporting elements from Persuasion chiefly, but also other Austen works that are relevant to specific points. This thesis will avoid the pitfalls of claiming that there is an ultimate resistance to patriarchy possible, and will instead examine both resistance and patriarchies are persistent and shifting social elements (Overmann, 2009).

Using Pride and Prejudice and other texts, this thesis posits that marriage functions as patriarchal entrapment in the lives of Austen's characters. Marriage, and its highly specific structures, is an inevitability that ensures that women will become what they should be instead of something else. The something else is often represented by widows, rather than older unmarried women, making it clear that persisting in being unmarried is unthinkable. That there is only one way to be a woman alone, widowhood, makes widowhood a nexus of both fear and longing in the novels (Neill, 2003).

Review of relevant scholarship

Such longing functions very quietly in patriarchy, where the primacy of masculine want over feminine want is so absolute that the latter does not exist publicly. This reveals how prevention, abstention, and preclusion, are the overt patriarchal order for women and female desire, both sexual and otherwise, while compulsion remains nearly invisible to characters. Both within and between texts, Austen reveals how patriarchal entrapment via compulsory marriage persists in creating the same outcomes (marriage and marriage structures), whatever the personalities of the people involved (Michie, 2011). The reason for this thesis is to provide an antidote to the common reading of Austen's works as well crafter and slightly ironic romantic fiction. The texts reveal a great deal about the persistence of the myth of romantic love and rigidity of patriarchal marriage across time and continents. Jane Austen's work is concerned with the practices of courtship and the idea marriage. Taken as a whole, her novels suggest that the most vibrant aspect of the story is the courtship itself, stopping short of telling the story of her main characters' actual marriages. However, it probably more appropriate to say that what that repeated plot reveals is that marriage is more than anything persistent. That is, marriage is culminating patriarchal institution that finally resolves the eccentricities and intimate qualities of women by fully and finally containing. Marriage is a patriarchal trap and the ultimate prevention of female resistance to patriarchy (Rszepka, 1994).

The reason for this thesis is to provide an antidote to the common reading of Austen's works as well crafter and slightly ironic romantic fiction. The texts reveal a great deal about the persistence of the myth of romantic love and rigidity of patriarchal marriage across time and continents (Mann, 2002). Jane Austen's work is concerned with the practices of courtship and the idea marriage. Taken as a whole, her novels suggest that the most vibrant aspect of the story is the courtship itself, stopping short of ...