Civilized, Sense And Sensibility, By Jane Austen

Jane Austen's 1811 novel "Sense and Sensibility" puts across an account involving two English sisters who come across a series of hardships in their endeavor to find their personal identities in a relatively hostile environment. Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are forced to leave their home, the estate at Norland Park, consequent to their father's death. The two experience economic problems and come to see the world with different eyes as they move in a small house and as they interact with people who are primarily motivated by finances. Even though the two sisters have diverging personalities, they go through similar experiences and they come to have similar perceptions of society.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was first published in 1813(Gary vii) a time when women had “few legal and economic rights or even receiving little respect, women can be seen as oppressed victims of a patriarchal society, subordinate first to their fathers and, then, to their husbands who had, of course, been selected by their fathers” (Swords, 76-82). At first glance one might think that Pride and Prejudice reinforces sexist stereotypes, however upon further examination of Jane Austen and her heroine Elizabeth it is clear that Pride and Prejudice in fact erodes the sexist stereotypes of women.

Jane Austen's groundbreaking novel Sense and Sensibility is a relationship-driven account of female protagonists. Sense and Sensibility shares much in common with other novels by and about women. Themes like autonomy versus independence and the role of women in a patriarchal society are explored in Sense and Sensibility. Using two sisters to symbolize the different directions the female spirit can be pulled, Austen shows the variable ways women respond to political, social, and economic oppression. The women of Sense and Sensibility are both trapped by, and breaking free from, the conventions of marriage and motherhood. Marriage and motherhood are portrayed ironically as the natural course of women's lives, but also as the chain that prevents their self-fulfillment. The social norm of patrilineal inheritance leaves Elinore and Marianne Dashwood, and their mother, penniless and dependent on distant male family members. Marriage and motherhood are restrictive roles for women, and yet Austen never provides a satisfactory alternative for Marianne. Marianne seems willing to break free from patriarchal social norms, but she ends up being a slave to heterosexual romance. The message in Sense and Sensibility ends up being rather bleak: women remain socially, economically, and politically oppressed because they cannot envision or enact suitable independent alternatives.

While the men look around for bold indication of why this happened, the women looked around at the smaller details of the home and tried to relate to the wife. As the men looked around the kitchen they concluded there was “nothing here but kitchen things”. as they went on to search through her cupboards making remarks about her worrying about her preserves while being held for murder. They went on to discuss that women are used to worrying about trifles and what we would do without them. The way the men spoke about women made it clear that they believe that the women were only good for housework and worrying about the little things such as kitchen work. throughout the discussion, the two other women huddled closer together as if forming a bond as the men discuss their daily work as if it is merely little to nothing.

The play examines the relationships between husbands and wives and reflects stereotypes of gender, particularly a marriage that ended in murder. The setting, a messy kitchen, reflects to me that the women stand together, emphasizing both the way they have been pushed together by their male-dominated society but also, possibly, their loyalty to each other over their husbands, a topic explored in the play. The men repeatedly dismiss things as beneath their notice if they are things such as the canning jars of fruit that are, in their opinions, women’s concerns. The men never recognize that they have forced the women to be concerned about these things, by not allowing them to be concerned about anything else. The men’s dismissal reflects a larger mindset of devaluing women and their opinions and interests in general.

Henry’s shocked, “dearest Miss Moreland, what ideas have you been admitting?” not only crushes Catherine’s “visions of romance” and humiliates her of all the gothic tendencies she had entertained throughout the novel, but it also serves to humble the reader; who presumably acted as eagerly as Catherine did in seeing the superficial and assuming that General Tilney was a terrible villain. However this overt satire of gothic literature and its heroines, who “plain as any” Catherine openly defies, also acts as a platform where Austen can criticise her society and how they value texts that openly objectify and demean women to superficial creatures. When Austen says, “gentlemen read better books,” in Miss Austen Regrets, the intertextual link in her words and the use of lighting and shadow elongates her face and emphasise the bitterness of her words. Allowing the responder to understand Austen’s own awareness of the confines that she as a female author experienced in the patriarchal and classist society of 19th Century England. This translates to Northanger Abbey when the mockable Catherine says, “if I could not be persuaded into doing what I thought wrong, I never will be tricked into it.” Revealing a deep level of integrity and honesty that the more socially accepted Isabella seems to lack. Austen mocks Catherine as a means of openly addressing the contemptuous nature of gothic literature, however she imbues Catherine with qualities integral to a wholesome human being to showcase to the responder, especially in the context of 19th Century England, that society’s gender roles not only shapes female relationships negatively but also shapes the characterisation of women in literature which contributes to the misogynistic mindset of the time and the

Austen has set out to save the rising art form of the novel. In this address to the reader she glorifies what a novel should be: the unrestrained expression of words conveying the wide range of raw human emotion. This veneration of the novel is necessary to the development of Catherine's fiction-loving character as it justifies the narrator's right to remain fond of this flawed heroine.

Sense and Sensibilities relevance to Simone de Beauvoir Jaspreet Tiwana 214 146 427 Deborah Clipperton HUMA1950, Concepts of Male and Female in the West 19 November 2015 The novels, Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen and the novel Simone de Beauvoir by Agonito Roosemary are interconnected through the characters and the stereotypes. The stereotypes in Simone de Beavoir relate and reflect the characters in Sense and Sensibility.

Jane Austen’s first book to be published was Sense and Sensibility. Austen’s story depicts the life of a family who loses everything because of the death of their father. The father’s wealth goes to his son, John Dashwood. Mr. Dashwood doesn’t help his sisters because his wife, Fannie, doesn’t think it’s a good idea. When all hope is lost, Edward Ferrars enters the story and takes an interest in the eldest daughter, Elinor. Throughout this story, Austen introduces many characters, some of which have minor roles. Margaret Dashwood, Lucy Steele, and Mrs. Jennings are a few of the characters that partake in minor roles, but have a huge importance to the plot.

On December 16, 1775, Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, England. She was born into a middle-class family. Her father was Reverend George Austen, a member of the clergy, and her mother was Cassandra Leigh who came from a higher social rank. Jane was the second daughter of a family of eight, and she was closest to the eldest sister Cassandra. From this information alone, there is a pattern present in Jane’s work. She tends to write romance fiction novels about middle-class England. Her characters in Sense and Sensibility are generally from the middle class, and the main characters are females and siblings. Likewise, the eldest sister has amiable traits, and the younger sibling admires her as Jane views her eldest sister in real

Julian North, noting that critics have often read Elinor’s triumphant sense as validating an anti-individualist reactionary viewpoint in which “the self must submit to the moral and religious order of society,” offers a contrasting opinion (39). Other critics “read adherence to conservative ideology as a ‘cover story’…for the ‘implicitly rebellious vision’…of a writer acutely conscious of the confinements of patriarchy” (North 39). This feminist reading of _Sense_ is most cogent when the reader is privileged to Elinor’s own thoughts. Elinor’s sense, manifested in her stoic silence and inner thoughts, contrasts with Marianne’s sensibility, notably with her emotive soliloquies and dialogues, to offer a verbal resistance to their mutual misfortune. The discourse between sense and sensibility in the book offers a means to combat the misfortune the women in the novel suffer, and each temperament leads its possessor to ultimate happiness, even if sense is clearly favored.

As Austen's narrative strategies are analysed, one is closer to revealing the reasoning behind her immense success as a novelist.

Chuck Leddy, a notable critic, stated "Upon her death in 1817, English novelist Jane Austen was completely unknown in the literary world". Why would someone as brilliant as Jane Austen not be world known? By 1817, Austen had already published one of her masterpieces Sense and Sensibility, and it seemed to not bring in as much success as it would later on in life. But the dry spell would eventually end. Two hundred years after Jane Austen's death, her books gained a lot of attention (Leddy). Although Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma were not well known in the early eighteen hundreds, Jane Austen novels grew a substantial amount of popularity after Jane Austen's

Jane Austen a very talented writer wrote six books in her entire life time, the books are namely Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, out of which her top novels are Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. She was vastly appreciated for her realistic way of writing and was highly valued for her clear and meaningful messages conveyed through the novels. Some of the cretiques argues that her book Sense and Sensibility is not that convincing and appealing to the audience compared to Pride and Prejudice. Though the books she wrote were all about all about “women and outlined her books with marriage plot” (Southam, "Criticism, 1870-1940", the Jane Austen Companion, 102) some say