Feminist Theory
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Marriage, Patriarchal Entrapment, and the Invisibility of Compulsion in Jane Austen
PART A
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 patriarchy are persistent and shifting social elements.
PART B
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, are 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.
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.
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.
PART C
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.
Some have noted that Austen’s novels are profoundly interested in prevention (Wright). That society and its individuals seek to prevent a host of unseen and unknown activities in which it fears women will participate. Marriage, and its highly specific structures, are the ultimate prevention, and are simultaneously proffered to women as their greatest accomplishment. Against this, widowhood exists as a promise of a potentially liberated future, and that the threat of the single woman must still always be mitigated by marriage. That is, the middle ages woman who never married is all but invisible. Some scholars have explored other ways in which widowhood is both threat and lure (Brodie), all of which leads to understanding that marriage is not something someone does, but a state of being that alters the women who enter it in specifically patriarchal ways.
Female want is obscured or pathologized in patriarchy, and the primacy of masculine is absolute. Female want of friendship, respect, and sex, are transmuted and understood or forced to be the want of marriage, the very institution that will likely permanently sever the women in the novels from the lively future they long for. Just as the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice is about the falsity that rich men are all in want of a wife, the supposition that women want marriage is incorrect as well. Austen’s heroines want they believe marriage might contain, which is freedom from their fathers’ patriarchal control along with sex and intimate friendship. However the actual content of marriage is to become their husbands’ patriarchal subject and to solidify intimate prevention for the remainder of their lives.
This compulsion to marry is omnipresent on the one hand, they all feel it and express it. But the structures of patriarchy have normalized the compulsion and defined it as existing within the women themselves, and created narratives that make prevention the site of feminine resistance. That is, the women openly resist the preventions of their fathers, mothers, and patriarchal society, as single women. They all, at various point, decry the things that women cannot do. In the face of this, they are given marriage at the best escape from their patriarchal circumstances. That is, the patriarchy that single women experience is described to them as circumstantial, that it is because of their status as single, rather than as persistent and the result of patriarchy not women nor singledom.
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. Emma and Pride and Prejudice, use gender swapping to reveal the persistence of marriage structures across identities (Overmann). Darcy and Emma are similar people, while Elizabeth and George share many character features both as people and in contrast to their paramours. Taken together, and especially along with Persuasion, these novels reveal the depth of difference and effort that must be applied to marriage to yield even the smallest of concessions from its structures. Consider how notable it was that George conceded to live at Emma’s home, an event so minor in practice that its import could only be measured in relation to its implied social rebellion regarding the habits and strictures of gender in marriage.
Speech functions in Austen’s novels as both the means for resolving conflict, and the method of solidifying patriarchal entrapment. Throughout the novels, characters read one another bodies and habits as evidence of their thoughts and character. Harbus describes how Emma in particular is concerned with the embodiment of feeling. However, Harbus portrays this reading of the body as the resolution of conflict that stemmed from the presumption of knowledge. That reading ignores that the practice in Emma and other novels, is that conflict is ended when characters to speak to one another plainly, and as a result reveal their affections. However, it is not merely the conflicts of courtship resolved into romantic love that are addressed in this act of speech. The conflict of an unmarried woman to her patriarchal society is resolved, by the woman’s act of speech that is simultaneously framed as social rebellion! In other words, patriarchy provides avenues of false liberation that actually lead one deeper into the strictures of patriarchy.
In effect, in Austen’s novels, the silence and embodiment that are often portrayed as feminine weakness, are the protection of an interior life wherein women can function, if not free from patriarchy, free from renewed censure about the specificity of their personhood. That is, they are critiqued, but through silence they destabilize the critique and ensure that it can only be general. Once the self is exposed through speech, patriarchy through society, is able to critique and control the speaker specifically, and she is without even the benefit of an interior life distinct from patriarchy. Speech, and specifically the expression of romantic love, becomes the mode through which a woman gives herself intimately and socially to the patriarchy.
PART D
PART A
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 patriarchy are persistent and shifting social elements.
PART B
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, are 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.
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.
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.
PART C
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.
Some have noted that Austen’s novels are profoundly interested in prevention (Wright). That society and its individuals seek to prevent a host of unseen and unknown activities in which it fears women will participate. Marriage, and its highly specific structures, are the ultimate prevention, and are simultaneously proffered to women as their greatest accomplishment. Against this, widowhood exists as a promise of a potentially liberated future, and that the threat of the single woman must still always be mitigated by marriage. That is, the middle ages woman who never married is all but invisible. Some scholars have explored other ways in which widowhood is both threat and lure (Brodie), all of which leads to understanding that marriage is not something someone does, but a state of being that alters the women who enter it in specifically patriarchal ways.
Female want is obscured or pathologized in patriarchy, and the primacy of masculine is absolute. Female want of friendship, respect, and sex, are transmuted and understood or forced to be the want of marriage, the very institution that will likely permanently sever the women in the novels from the lively future they long for. Just as the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice is about the falsity that rich men are all in want of a wife, the supposition that women want marriage is incorrect as well. Austen’s heroines want they believe marriage might contain, which is freedom from their fathers’ patriarchal control along with sex and intimate friendship. However the actual content of marriage is to become their husbands’ patriarchal subject and to solidify intimate prevention for the remainder of their lives.
This compulsion to marry is omnipresent on the one hand, they all feel it and express it. But the structures of patriarchy have normalized the compulsion and defined it as existing within the women themselves, and created narratives that make prevention the site of feminine resistance. That is, the women openly resist the preventions of their fathers, mothers, and patriarchal society, as single women. They all, at various point, decry the things that women cannot do. In the face of this, they are given marriage at the best escape from their patriarchal circumstances. That is, the patriarchy that single women experience is described to them as circumstantial, that it is because of their status as single, rather than as persistent and the result of patriarchy not women nor singledom.
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. Emma and Pride and Prejudice, use gender swapping to reveal the persistence of marriage structures across identities (Overmann). Darcy and Emma are similar people, while Elizabeth and George share many character features both as people and in contrast to their paramours. Taken together, and especially along with Persuasion, these novels reveal the depth of difference and effort that must be applied to marriage to yield even the smallest of concessions from its structures. Consider how notable it was that George conceded to live at Emma’s home, an event so minor in practice that its import could only be measured in relation to its implied social rebellion regarding the habits and strictures of gender in marriage.
Speech functions in Austen’s novels as both the means for resolving conflict, and the method of solidifying patriarchal entrapment. Throughout the novels, characters read one another bodies and habits as evidence of their thoughts and character. Harbus describes how Emma in particular is concerned with the embodiment of feeling. However, Harbus portrays this reading of the body as the resolution of conflict that stemmed from the presumption of knowledge. That reading ignores that the practice in Emma and other novels, is that conflict is ended when characters to speak to one another plainly, and as a result reveal their affections. However, it is not merely the conflicts of courtship resolved into romantic love that are addressed in this act of speech. The conflict of an unmarried woman to her patriarchal society is resolved, by the woman’s act of speech that is simultaneously framed as social rebellion! In other words, patriarchy provides avenues of false liberation that actually lead one deeper into the strictures of patriarchy.
In effect, in Austen’s novels, the silence and embodiment that are often portrayed as feminine weakness, are the protection of an interior life wherein women can function, if not free from patriarchy, free from renewed censure about the specificity of their personhood. That is, they are critiqued, but through silence they destabilize the critique and ensure that it can only be general. Once the self is exposed through speech, patriarchy through society, is able to critique and control the speaker specifically, and she is without even the benefit of an interior life distinct from patriarchy. Speech, and specifically the expression of romantic love, becomes the mode through which a woman gives herself intimately and socially to the patriarchy.
PART D