Jane Austen's Representations Of Women

Jane Austen’s Representations of Women There is an old saying that literature is an epistemic way to know about any culture. Literature aims to study society and gives a realistic representation of life and people who live in that culture. This study will focus on the interpretation of English culture in the eighteenth century. Each literary work focuses on different issues and has hidden purposes from presenting these issues. As such, the significance of the literature results in the readers’ better understanding of the society. Jane Austen’s fiction portrayed the social world of English society in the eighteenth century. Austen’s fiction also demonstrates the values of the English gentry class, women’s position in English society …show more content…
As a controversial writer in her rational opinions about women, Austen has contemporary views of female characters. She represents the females as strong and intellectual figures. Even though these female characters obtain only a home education, they have the ability to play music, sing, draw, and speak modern languages. They are also interested in reading literature and expressing their own thoughts on the arts. These females have a verbal rhetoric skill that enables them to superior to men in conversations, as it will be represented later in Sense and Sensibility. Austen breaks the boundaries of male dominant society through her novels. She shows what distinguishes women’s culture from male society by illustrating the significance of sisterhood, female friendship, emotional support, offered guidance for other women, and appreciation of women’s effort of both motherhood and wifehood. Further, Elizabeth, in Pride and Prejudice, Elinor and Marianne, in Sense and sensibility, and Emma, in Emma, are female characters of sense, not sensibility, show that they have the ability to present their unique personalities through refusing to imitate the social norms of English society. Indeed, Jane Austen represents that English society creates gender and class oppression through arbitrary social …show more content…
Mrs. Bennet is eager to see all her daughters married to genteel men. Elizabeth, who is the heroine of the novel, is the pride and the spoken of the author. Actually, She shares Austen the same class and personality. Elizabeth belongs to a middle class family without plenty dowry. Her father, Mr. Bennet, is a landowner who has a modest income that is not enough for his five daughters to get married. Because Mr. Bennet has no son to inherit his land, Mr. Collins, who is a distant relation and a clergyman, is eligible to inherit Mr. Bennet’s property. Even though Elizabeth is an educated and intelligent woman, it is difficult for her, at Austen’s time, to marry a gentleman because of lacking wealth. Fortunately, Austen makes Elizabeth a high spirit, courage, and wit character who influences the arrogant and wealthy gentleman, Darcy. Elizabeth’s critical behavior and perception affect Darcy ' personality that he ends up by marrying her at the end of the story. Austen keeps repeating the same issues, which women without wealth have less chance in marriage, in order to assure to the readers how women struggle to get married and how love should be the ultimate purpose of marriage. Austen rejects the idea of economic or social marriage as she highlights how Elizabeth rejects Mr. Collins’s proposal that he stands to inherit her father’s property. Austen