The Marriage Market in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (original) (raw)
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"Sneering Civility": Female Intrasexual Competition for Mates in Jane Austen's Novels
EvoS Journal: The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium, 2020
Recent developments in evolutionary theory and research strongly suggest that women are highly competitive in vying for access to and retention of high-quality mates. However, since female tactics are often subtle and indirect, they are difficult to study empirically. Popular fiction may provide rich material for developing and testing psychological theories. I examine representations of female intrasexual competition for mates in the novels of Jane Austen. Their enduring and cross-cultural popularity strongly suggests that they capture something important about human nature and human individual variations. Austen's female characters employ all the competitive strategies identified by modern psychologists but with a significant difference in the tactics of the antagonists and protagonists. Female antagonists often advertise their beauty and social status, use competitor derogation and competitor/mate manipulation. In contrast, female protagonists rely almost exclusively on relatively non-aggressive self-promotion emphasizing traits such as intelligence, honesty and loyalty. Protagonists' displays of positive traits prove more successful in attracting and retaining high-quality mates than antagonists' overt competitiveness. Although fictional stories may contain elements of wish-fulfilling fantasy, they also promote attitudes and behaviors that minimize aggression and maximize cooperation and social cohesion.
Variation in women's mating strategies depicted in the works and words of Jane Austen
We hypothesize that distinct mating strategies are identifiable in the female characters created by popular British author Jane Austen. Although Austen wrote her novels in the early 19 th Century, and consequently the novels reflect social constraints not applicable to similarly aged women in modern Western societies, we contend that research participants can accurately identify the mating strategies of characters and express relationship preferences consistent with their own fitness interests. Austen's characterizations of women's mating strategies are remarkably similar to depictions in the modern literature of evolutionary psychology. We use personality descriptions of four primary characters assembled from passages in Austen's novels, Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. When selecting characters with whom to form a hypothetical long-term romantic relationship, participants preferentially chose those who successfully established longterm relationships in the novels. Participants generally favored characters who exemplified short-term mating strategies, such as those who generally valued partners more so for the direct benefits they provided rather than emotional connection, for noncommitted sexual relationships. These results provide stronger empirical support of our hypotheses than earlier efforts.
Two Lovers in an Austenian Novel of Manners: The Impact of Social Status in Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice is a novel that reflects the reality of life at all times. True love must come through all kind of obstacles such as reputation and class. In Austen"s novel, the beauty, manner of speech, artistic and musical skills determine the women"s values. Set in society during the Georgian era, where marrying for wealth and social status is more common than marrying for love and suitability, Elizabeth makes the definite choice to wait for love even though she knows it may never come. The social context of literature provides insight into the ways society has progressed and changed or even maintained its social values. Pride and Prejudice is still a timeless novel that examines relatable events within today"s society. The power-dynamics between men and women and their effects on marriage and understanding one"s place and purpose is clearly shown in Austenian literarily approach. Social class is an underlying factor, and the idea of marrying among higher or own class still continues, although it dwindles.
Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 2010
Empirical Literary Darwinists investigate how themes and patterns predicted by human evolutionary theory are evident in fictive works. The current study fills an important gap in this emerging literature, and provides additional information in an area currently underrepresented in human evolutionary research in general. Previous research demonstrated how proper and dark male heroes in British Romantic literature represent high paternal investment and high mating effort strategies, respectively. This past work showed that people infer reproductively relevant behaviors from brief character depictions, and report preferring interactions with these characters in ways that would enhance their own reproductive success. We conducted a similar experiment investigating variation in female reproductive strategies depicted by six female characters in novels written by Jane Austen. Three women were described as loyal, quiet, "mother" figures, while three were described as active, boisterous and untamed "lover" figures. Results show that men recognize the distinct strategies, expressing a preference to marry the "mother" and realizing that the "lover" would be more likely to cheat on them. Women recognize that men would prefer the "lover" for sexual relations, and believe that the "mother" would be better with children and a better mother. Once again, people intuitively recognized reproductively relevant behavior from brief character sketches. Austen's intuitive evolutionary psychology may be one reason why her works remain so popular and well respected nearly 200 years after their publications.
Integrity, Pride and Love as Power in Jane Austen's Novel: Pride and Prejudice
Surakarta English and Literature Journal
This study aims to find out that relative power (P) variables are not only social status, age, education and wealth. Another aim is to show that negative politeness strategies do not always belong to someone with higher social power. Relative power is one element of social variables that decides politeness strategies. Pride and Prejudice reveal that integrity, pride and love are also variables of relative power. They can also prove that though someone’s social status is not high and her social distance from another participant is asymmetric, she could have power over someone with higher social status. Power characterized by integrity, pride, belief, and freedom from being dominated is called personal power; meanwhile, it is a power determined by a good personality, attractive physical appearance, and referent power. This study uses a qualitative method, and the data is mainly from Pride and Prejudice. The main character of Pride and Prejudice shows us that integrity, pride, and love...
The Blush of Modesty or the Blush of Shame? Reading Jane Austen's Blushes
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 2006
Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body". Even as she rebukes the writers of novels who disown their own creations, the narrator of Jane Austen"s Northanger Abbey famously attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of the female-authored novel, commending Cecilia, Camilla and Belinda, and calling for team spirit. (Northanger Abbey, pp.32-33). 1 Austen rightly recognises an extensive contemporary body of opinion against the novel: "no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are as many as our readers". But she also insists that "our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world" (p.32). Austen reacts in a variety of ways to her contemporaries" diatribes against reading the novel: by attributing a fear of the novel to the idiotic Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice, for example, she neatly exposes the idiocy of the fear; in Northanger Abbey she legitimises the novel by claiming for it the qualities more commonly attributed to the irreproachable periodical essay; by exposing and regendering stereotypes such as that of the girl led astray by romances in Sanditon, she indicates the gendered absurdity of such stereotypes. Her own sane and rational novels, with their emphasis on the domestic and the everyday, and their small cast of characters and limited social milieu, form a corrective both to the more absurd and melodramatic of her contemporaries" works, and also to the critics and readers who tar all novels with the same brush. I would like to suggest here that Jane Austen"s prose style enacts a similar corrective to notions of the novel"s frivolity, demanding the kind of strenuous reading more commonly associated by eighteenth-century moralists with the reading of non-fictional prose. Mary Poovey argues that Austen, like Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft, was driven by the dictates of propriety, as manifested in the domestic ideology, to use strategies of "indirection and accommodation", which appear at the level of content and form "as resolutions blocked at one level of a narrative and then displaced by other subjects that are more amenable to symbolic transformation". An example is "Austen"s imposition of a romantic resolution on the realistic premise of Pride and Prejudice". 2 Throughout this article, I agree with Poovey that Austen employs strategies of indirection that are grounded in conduct-book notions of propriety. Where she sees such strategies as limiting and defensive, however, I argue that they are in fact pleasurable and defiant, forming part of the games of "Ingenuity" that Austen plays with her readers. "I do not write for such dull Elves / As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves", Austen
A QUEST FOR FEMININE IDENTITY IN JANE AUSTEN’S PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
PUNE RESEARCH, 2021
Literature has always acted as a mirror to the society. As the human society evolved slowly and gradually, literary writings, especially the novels played a pivotal role in reflecting and expressing the social scenarios and defining the human psyche. Women are the most integral part of the social discourse. Since centuries, they have strived hard in search of their true identity and worth. Turning through the pages of literary history, we can easily trace the footmarks of the transformation in the position of the females through societies and ages. Women writers and critics have given a glimpse of the social norms and structures prevalent during their times through their writings. Jane Austen is one such poignant writer from the Romantic Period of English Literature who broke apart from the traditionally accepted storyline through her youthful spirits and portrayal of strong female protagonists, who could think for themselves and take their own decisions. Born in a society that hugely discriminated between the rights given to men and women, Austen, since her childhood developed an internal anguish against the unjust social system. This even resulted in her being unmarried throughout her life and continued writing as a profession to be financially independent. Austen always advocated marriage in her novels, but she believed in marriage for love and not for gaining social status. Women during Austen’s times were expected to be submissive and timid. They were considered incapable of thinking wisely and hold own individuality. Her novels parodied the then conventional novel plot of love, marriage and courtship through youthful playfulness and subtle irony. Her female protagonists were the heroes of her novels; they were progressive as well as headstrong. They did not believe in social conformity in the male dominated society.