The Ramifications Of Highbury In Jane Austen's The Awakening

Living in nineteen century England, where women were oppressed victims of a patriarchal society, subordinate first to their fathers and, then, to their husbands, Emma’s wealth and her indulgent father allow her a sense of independence few women had. Therefore, vastly different from most female characters of her time, Emma does not wish to get married and swears to stay by her Father’s side. In fact, Emma’s family situation provides for her a level of authority that is scarcely challenged in her Highbury social circle “The real evils, indeed, of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself”(3).

The Importance of Jane's Early Life at Lowood to Shaping Her Character in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

Jane Austen’s novel 'Emma' and Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, as significant and satirical reflections of Regency England and postmodern America respectively, indicate how the transformation process can shape and improve literacy, intertextual and logical importance. The transformation is evident in the compositions Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’ and Amy Heckerling’s ‘Clueless’ enabling us to investigate the assortment of logical subjects. Regarding ‘Emma’ the perspective throughout the Regency time frame examines the strict values of love and marriage inside the inflexible social hierarchy. Austen’s advances the significance of etiquette throughout the text. Austen reveals a neo-women’s activist perspective, shown in the female protagonist revealing the female protagonists’ scholarly capacity and social equity in an otherwise patriarchal society. However, the close resemblance of the story; ‘Clueless’, Heckerling composition conveys entirely transformed values, reflected through the actions of the current upper-working class of contemporary Los Angeles. The critical analysis of commercialism in the informal social class system of modern America reiterating social expectations of gender and social characterisation within the microcosm of the typical American educational system. The transformation in attitudes of Austen, reveals an exhaustive utilisation of setting, a close examination of dialect and various artistic procedure.

Thesis: Throughout the text of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen challenges gender and social norms in the Georgian Era through the development of Elizabeth Bennet as she interacts with characters in the novel.

Comparisons of Emma and Clueless pose critical explorations into the importance of context and its role in shaping social values. Heckerling’s appropriation of Jane Austen’s 19thC Emma, provides contrasting social ideals regarding gender and class which can be accredited as a result of their differing contextual settings. Values surrounding the importance of social hierarchy, gender disparities and education are prevalent themes addressed within each text. Due to shifts in social standards during the 2 centuries separating these texts, there are particular distinctions between the mechanisms underlying these themes. However, a key similarity linking these texts are their critiques on the morality behind the actions of those in privileged

The role of women in a patriarchal society is one of the most heavily enforced themes in ‘Emma’ and ‘Clueless’. Austen places great emphasis on how the dominance of men over women was of great importance within the patriarchal social structure of the regency period. Heckerling reimagines ‘Emma’, to show the ways that this perspective has been altered over the next century. Emma and Cher are both products of their own patriarchal, class-driven societies; they are affluent and repressed as women, which leads Emma Woodhouse- the heroine of Jane Austen’s “Emma”- to turn to charity and match-making to fill in her time along with domestic chores, painting and playing the piano, and Cher Horowitz - the

Amy heckerling revives Jane Austen’s Emma into a face-paced twentieth century America. Both texts are interconnected - the 1995 reinterpretation uses consistent core characters, themes and styles electic of the novel of manners whilst also embracing a new setting and set of social values - a recontextualisation into a “teen pic” film served to accommodate for an updated audience. We witness the transformation of setting, from the genteel village of highbury to the microcosmic commercially driven Beverly Hills. Despite the contemporisation, the primary plot and message resonates in clueless, and thus heckling did not ruin emma.

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey establishes the inner feeling of a woman based on her own personal experience which provides a vivid glance into her perspective. Correspondingly, it reinstates Gothic novels as an reflection marginalized by the experiences of women living in the upper class. For contemporary modern day, Northanger Abbey functions as a warning, depicting the danger of amorous and sexual exploitation from the opportunistic characters within a social environment. These dangers are a realistic theme even in today's society marking potential threat for women. Mostly importantly, it serves as a device that's depicts the social separation between the companionship of woman and the inhuman acknowledgement of women as objects, which fosters the necessarily development for both men and

Jane Austen is well known as a novelist for her satirical representation of female characters in late Georgian society. During this period, novel writing and reading was still a controversial topic, and as such was incorporated in her book Northanger Abbey (1817), which has at its core a young female protagonist obsessed with novels. We can clearly interpret Northanger Abbey as Austen’s satirical response to the social conventions decrying novel reading, as she uses an intrusive narrator and more subtle supplementary techniques to comment on and satirize the debate surrounding novels.

From my point of view, Jane Austen should be seen as a ‘feminist’ writer. As she wrote in one of her novel Persuasion, she considers that ‘Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything’ (Anne Elliot, in Jane Austen’s Persuasion). Such feminist ideas are expressed in many of her literary works. In her another novel Northanger Abbey, there are various issues discussed, which include not only marriage, social criticism and Gothic, but also feminism as well. The essay is to discuss Jane Austen and her feminist thoughts by analyzing Northanger Abbey.

Northanger Abbey is a classic written by Jane Austen. The novel is celebrated as a literary masterpiece that deals with the English social class system, along with the social rules and it shows the results of choices made by the characters. The story follows Catherine Morland, a girl who is heavily influenced by books, but is also very naïve to the outside world. Catherine lives in the modest town of Fullerton, and her life there has been mostly very protected and sheltered from lifestyles and habits of people outside of Fullerton.

When Charlotte Bronte said of Jane Austen’s novels ‘I should hardly like to live with their ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses’ she was referring to the physical confinement of an interior versus an exterior setting. This confinement of the setting mirrors the social confinement of a woman versus a man in the societal structure at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. While Austen studies the societal position of women in most of her novels, her early work Sense and Sensibility, is perhaps the most interesting to take into consideration when reviewing the issue of confinement. In it Austen juxtaposes the freedom of the countryside exteriors with the confinement of the city’s interiors. These settings serve as a backdrop for the exploration of two female characters whose social status has been set back as a result of the primogeniture of the time.

The political differences that were kin to the geographical locations between the North and the South strongly dictate the representation of the role a woman held within Victorian society. The calm country setting of the South created an obedient and domestic representation of women, while the hardships of urbanization in the North forced women to take on a more masculine role –where working is more typical and accepted –thus demonstrating the role of women in the North as more independent than women of the South, but still obedient to men. The female heroine of North and South, Margaret Hale, exemplifies the traditional role of a Victorian woman as demonstrated by Ellis’ The Daughters of England, where the “proper sphere” of women is within the “private and domestic life” and not the political or public world which is the sphere belonging to men (103). However, Margaret only demonstrates these expected Victorian womanly constraints when she is living in the South in Helstone. Once Margaret transgresses the geographical and physical boundaries of the South into the North (Milton), she breaks free from her expected gender role as the ‘quiet and obedient’ woman that the Victorian era stressed so heavily as ideal, and becomes part of the political and public sphere that is dominated by men. Once in the North, Margaret Hale is forced to adapt to Milton’s social standards which has her embodying a more masculine role in order to claim agency. Through Margaret’s constant

Pride and Prejudice is one of the most popular novels written by Jane Austen. This romantic novel, the story of which revolves around relationships and the difficulties of being in love, was not much of a success in Austen's own time. However, it has grown in its importance to literary critics and readerships over the last hundred years. There are many facets to the story that make reading it not only amusing but also highly interesting. The reader can learn much about the upper-class society of this age, and also gets an insight to the author's opinion about this society. Austen presents the high-society of her time from an observational point of view, ironically describing human behavior. She describes what she sees and adds her own

This essay will explore the function of setting in Jane Eyre, and will argue how Bronte used setting to portray, the oppression of women in a patriarchal Victorian society. The settings of Gateshead and Thornfield will be discussed in detail, to emphasise how Bronte’s representation of her heroine’s Gothic imagination depicted the feminist issues of the time. In addition it will consider differences, and similarities, between the protagonist Jane Eyre as ‘The Angel of the house,’ and the antagonist Bertha Mason as ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’. To ruminate this discussion, it will consider the critical essays of Robert B Hellman, Gilbert & Gumar, and Mary Poovey.