Jane Austen's Sense & Sensibility and Pride & Prejudice
Summary:
This is an essay based around feminism with Jane Austen's Sense & Sensibility and Pride & Prejudice as examples. Analyzes the lives of female characters in both texts and describes the social restrictions that they endured.
Feminism became a recognized movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it didn't effect the lives of many women until the twentieth century. Sense & Sensibility and Pride & Prejudice, by Jane Austen, are two brilliant examples of this. The female characters in both books had little money, and few family connections. They faced serious social restrictions, and, because of unwritten social rules, spent most of their time in the company of other women. There were also social expectations for upper class women, concerning everything from dress to language.
Many women in the nineteenth century, even if they were born into upper class, were not born wealthy. 'Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know it is money' - Gerald Brenan. Money was literally the most important thing in the lives of most upper class females in the 1800's. It decided what quality of food you had, what style of dress you had and the size and whereabouts of your living. And these three things determined your social status. Jane Austen's S&S and P&P give good examples. Both the Dashwoods and the Bennetts are poor, and aim to have someone marry high. If you had little money, the only way to get rich was to marry someone richer than you. There was only one problem in this, that, generally, those of high social class were reluctant to marry poor people, unless they were considered attractive. And to be considered attractive, it was a good idea to have clothes that best showed you off, and for the best of those, you needed money. So you generally came in a huge circle. There was one other way to gain money, and that was to work. But, for the upper class, to work was scandalous. So if you were born poor, most of the time, you stayed poor, unless you had the good luck to marry well.
In the twenty-first century, a lot has changed. It is acceptable to work for your money, and there are many solutions to the problem of money-lacking (including Lotto!). But there are still a lot that needs to changed, with the distributions of money between men and women, because women only own 1% of the world's property, and earn just 10% of the world's income.
Another difficulty in the 1800's for the upper class woman were the social restrictions of a woman. 'Man for the field and woman for the hearth; Man for the sword and for the needle she; Man with the head and woman with the heart; Man to command and woman to obey' - Lord Alfred Tennyson. In the nineteenth century, women spent most of their social lives with other women. Men were "not trusted" alone with a woman, and rarely met them except in public situations. So a woman in the 1800's spent her unmarried life idly with other women. 'Women are much more like each other than men: they have, in truth, but two passions, vanity and love; these are their universal characteristics' - Earl of Chesterfield. Generally, this didn't form too many different types of personalities. It was dull and uncomfortable, but, as Jane Austen's books show, the women in the nineteenth century had lived that way their whole lives, and were used to it. Regency life for a female was hard and demanding, but most women coped the social restrictions.
In the twenty-first century, men and women are socially equal, and are all free to pursue their own interests, and in relation to what they feel they are good at. In this respect, feminism has won and succeeded. Sociality in the twenty-first century has few restrictions, and both men and women can spend any time in anyone's company.
Social expectations were a major constraint in the nineteenth century. 'The woman is so hard upon the woman' - Lord Alfred Tennyson. In the 1800's, there was an unwritten code for everything social: dress, behavior, etiquette, etc. To be considered socially acceptable, a woman had to have an array of agreeable, "feminine" talents, concerning largely music, literature and sewing. Men had all the fun of life in the 1800's, they were fairly free with their pursuits, and didn't have nearly as many social rules as the women did. A woman was expected to stay at home and be quiet. They also had dress expectations, language expectations, emotional expectations and behavioral expectations. If the requirements were not met, you were a social outcast. And if you were a social outcast, you would not accompany women to social occasions, and therefore not meet a man to marry, and so would be socially unacceptable, and so, again, you come around in a circle. S&S and P&P display this well, with most of the female characters having most or all of these talents, for example, one of the reasons Marianne Dashwood in S&S was attracted to the infamous Mr. Willoughby was that he had the same taste in music and poetry as she, and when he scorned her, she made up her mind to devote her life solely to educational pursuits and her family. This proves that women weren't just expected to have these talents and skills, but it was second nature for them to acquire them and perfect them.
In the twenty-first century there are behavioral, language and dress expectations in polite society, but they are nowhere near as strict as in the 1800's, and they also apply to both men and women. 'It is impossible, in our condition of society, not to be sometimes a snob' - W. M. Thackeray.
Jane Austen's Sense & Sensibility and her Pride & Prejudice are both excellent examples of the difficulties and the constraints of an upper class women in the nineteenth century. They show the need for money in that time, the social restrictions on women and the social expectations of a woman. But until feminism came along, not much of it changed. 'A perfect woman is a one nobly planned, to warn, to comfort, and command'. - William Wordsworth. Thankfully, in modern times, a lot has changed.
This is the complete article, containing 1,016 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).
