Gender Roles and Marriage

Gender Roles

Austen in her book Sense and Sensibility aggressively and successfully attempts to reconstruct fiction in patriarchal gender conceptions. The dissonance of a masculinized Dashwood and feminized Edward Ferrars amounts to a high degree of reconstruction of gender stereotypes. Traditional writers have urged women to come out strongly and condemn their discrimination by any means be it at family or community level. Moreover, Austen's female gender plays a subordinate role in the family.

Jane Austen is neither completely conservative in her fiction's themes, nor is she promoting a radical form of feminism she insists that something must usually hold a woman back, it may be economics, family background, or her own individuality and in any circumstances a compromise must be made between the individual and society.

At some point Austen seems to support the conventional values of a woman for example finding pleasure in their marriages although at some points she identifies loopholes in the way the society encourages certain modes of behavior

Austen appears to force people to look at their world in a unique way, in other words she does not present herself in a fully conservative way in this way, and Austen's heroines achieve an independence that can operate within convention. In most of her novels, women who are already married seem to have the most control. An example in her book Sense and Sensibility is where Fanny Dashwood is shown at the very beginning of the story to be manipulative over her husband. A look at the following excerpts from the book gives us more lightly on how she has acquired more powers in her marriage: "Mrs. John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his sisters…She begged him to think again on the subject" (Austen, Sense and Sensibility 9).

In this way Fanny Dashwood becomes successful in talking her husband out of giving his father's wife and daughters anything but the bare minimum.

In reflecting the ways society functions, the emphasis on marriage within

Austen's novels usually do come from an older, maternal figure in the work. Austen uses these characters as an opportunity to show that putting too much importance on social demands, in this case the demand being marriage, can be overdone and result in social ridicule. In Sense and Sensibility, Mrs. Jennings is often teasing the Dashwood girls about their romantic interests, the explanation being that "She had only two daughters, both of whom she had lived to see respectably married, and now she had nothing to do but marry all the rest of the world" (Austen, Sense and Sensibility 29).

Mrs. Jennings wants to know about the girls' admirers so she can be sure they are doing well for themselves. Sense and Sensibility, on the other hand, offers a more forgiving view of a vicar. Edward is one of the novel's romantic heroes and aspires to take orders. Austen reveals double standard of society when Edward's family believes such an occupation to be beneath him, yet at the time there is such weight given to Christian morality, which needs clergymen to guide the masses. Austen seems to make it a virtue of Edward that he does not listen to his mother and sister's ambitions for him: "But Edward had no turn for great men or barouches. All his wishes centered in domestic comfort and the quiet of private life" (Sense and Sensibility 14).

Marriage

When Jane Austen was writing, marriage was much more than a contract between two people who love each other enough to want to spend their lives together. In fact, love neither might nor even have been a consideration. For women, marriage provided the only way of financial security.

Legally, married women had nothing to own, property and money belonged to their husbands. In families with sons, there was little complication about who inherited the wealth - the eldest son. Daughters had to be allocated a portion of the family's wealth (a dowry) but this was really for use as bargaining power in the marriage marketplace.

During Jane Austen's short life (she was born in 1775 and died in 1817), there were many important events and changes in society. The most obvious point to make about her life is that it bridged the 18th and the 19th centuries. As far as literary history is concerned, there was a gradual change in attitudes and philosophy which also spanned the two centuries, so that it is possible to recognize typical 18th century views reflected in books written in that century as well as views typical of the 19th century. Broadly speaking, the 18th century has been called 'The Age of Reason' - the age of sense when there was a belief in a 'right way' for the universe to work and in 'true' human behavior. The 19th century saw a gradual move away from 'reason' towards human instinct and feeling, so that it became known as 'The Age of Romanticism' with the emphasis on sensibility. The influence of this transition was broad-reaching affecting attitudes to art, architecture, music, philosophy as well as literature.