Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft Were Seemingly

Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft were seemingly writers with two distinctly different styles of writing who created a furor with their controversial styles of presentation. Though each wrote in different ways they were similar in conceptions of theme. Both Feminist writers, Austen and Wollstonecraft underlined the constrictions placed on women in society and the oppression they faced as their individuality was objectified in terms of beauty and societal class.

Consider that critics of Austen's stories contend that she gained popularity not because she offered escape through her fictitious depictions but rather because her protagonists were so "realistic" and presented in real terms the restrictive social conditions in which people, especially women, have had to live. Austen's stories are then based on strong women who struggle with the expectations society places on their actions. Though they may not always prove successful the strength is shown through the attempt rather than the final result. However, she did not openly oppose society. She created fiction that on the surface approved society and its 'values' and yet, all the while her characters rebelled in small ways that seemed inconsequential.

Mary Wollstonecraft, a contemporary of Austen's wrote "A Vindication Of the rights of women" when Austen was twenty-one. Wollstonecraft's writing is a direct contrast to Austen's subtlety. Wollstonecraft was educated in philosophy and held a great insight to the European Enlightenment thinkers and her work is then a reflection of that influence. Clearly pro-feminist she does not restrict her writing within the domestic and social circle but encompasses a wider area of debate. At a time when women writers were marginalized by the male worldview she presented her work targeted at women in society and attempted to create a political consciousness, unafraid of the controversy that she would raise with words like, "Men complain, and with reason, of the follies and caprices of our sex, when they do not keenly satirize our headstrong passions and groveling vices..."

Similarly, Austen is accepted as being a defender of late eighteenth-early nineteenth century English society and may seen as a reactionary yet, Austens characters become subtle rebels against the standards of morality. Austen underlined through her characters the importance of the individual rather than the values of the community. She was against the characterization of women, which restricted their roles in society within a masculine paradigm. However, she did not have the courage and determination that marked Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication Of the Rights of women." Vindication created an analogy between women and political colonization and slavery was compared to marriage. This rebellious attitude suggested that hers was a discourse that would create the feminist revolution later in time.

Austen's opposition to gender typecasting is best represented in the novel Mansfield Park where the unattractiveness of her protagonist became a focal criticism. Critics have seen Fanny as passive, uninteresting, ugly and morally debasing-everything in fact that undermined the concept of women at the time. This objection to Fanny's physical beauty then coincides with the belief that women of the time were objectified as sex symbols and their beauty became the core of their status in society.

Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication Of the Rights of Women," too suggested disgust toward the female body and her use of the disembodied woman as the emblem for the diseased body politic. Mary Wollstonecraft's concept of motherhood as public service in the interest of the republic suggested in her work presented the influence of women to be stronger than that acknowledged by men. As she wrote, "How grossly do they insult us who thus advise us only to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes!"

Mansfield Park can then be seen as Austen's most explicit statement of her position with reference to a woman's position in society. In Fanny Austen did not attempt to reconcile the role of women but rather, through her 'anti-heroine' she condemned the social institutions that created women like "Fanny" through their disregard for her condition. This was the most implicit similarity to Wollstonecraft, and her most open attack on a patriarchal worldview. As Claudia L. Johnson [1988 qtd in Walsh, 2002] wrote "by registering [their] impact on a heroine who, though a model of female virtue and filial gratitude, is betrayed by the same ethos she dutifully embraces.... This painful and richly problematic identification makes Mansfield Park Austen's most, rather than her least, ironic novel and a bitter parody of conservative fiction."