A View from Confinement: Persuasion’s Resourceful Mrs. Smith (original) (raw)
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The Main Character’s Marriage in the Novel Persuasion by Jane Austen
Jurnal JOEPALLT (Journal of English Pedagogy, Linguistics, Literature, and Teaching), 2022
This study examines the marriage of the main character in the novel Persuasion, a classic novel written by Jane Austen, which reflects the concept of social class classification. The method used in this research is a qualitative descriptive research method. Anne Elliot is a wonderful person, charming, friendly, intelligent, open-minded, multi-talented and helpful. The issue that women at that time was considered powerless to make decisions and had to obey the rules of her family and society, did not prevent Anne from fighting to get what she really wanted. Anne, who came from a prominent family where her father was in a high position at work, was willing and able to break the rules against relations of different social status and class. Her awareness and power to make decisions eventually lead her to true love and true happiness, without interference, coercion, and persuasion from others. Trying to fight for her love with Captain Frederick Wenworth. Namely a simple young man and also loves Anne. The theory used is based on the theory of social class according to M. Arifin Noor in general, social class can be classified into three groups, namely the upper class, middle class and lower class.
The depiction of Widows and Widowers in the Austen canon
We are badly served by the documents we use to study widows and widowes with: they distort the realities. While Austen's writing has some limitations (she depicts gentry), it is of use as a corrective and reveals her complex attitudes and the realities of the era. Fear of widowhood pervades her fiction for women; the men seek to remarry, but not wisely; we see how when one parent dies, the one who is left may abuse the child; how unwise remarriages inflict damage on those near. The widowhood of her great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Weller Austen stands out in its poignant defiance of her family as she sought minimal economic independence and gentility for her children; the depiction of Henry Austen as a widow has been overlooked; also her own obsessive depictions of death, and wild antipathetic stances. The frequency of death in people's lives from a young age in Austen's era is not enough to account for her uses of widowhood: in the case of women, as a disastrously precipitating factor in her fiction; in the case of men covering up a previous daily tyrannies and inflicted worry and frustration for the now dead wives; and in the case of children, powerlessness before an abusive parent or new step-parent. Austen delineates and attacks not just those who confront their disasters with strong sensibility to show the high price such people and their involved relatives pay for feeling and/or finding themselves in vulnerable places in the social and economic arrangements of the later 18th century.
Social Mobility And Struggle For Women’s Right To Choose Spouses In Jane Austen’s Persuasion
2013
This research aims at: (1) finding out the effects of social mobility in the novel to the changing of human thoughts and attitudes; (2) scrutinizing the female main character’s struggle for her right to choose her spouse; and (3) revealing the relation of British social background in nineteenth century and Jane Austen’s Persuasion’s story. The qualitative research is carried out by making use of the descriptive method. The researcher analyzes the data by using feminist and sociology of literature. The analysis is used for: describing the extrinsic elements of the novel including the background of the novel’s production and Jane Austen’s life; analyzing the psychological motivations of changing thought and attitudes of each character of the novel. Based on the result of the data analysis, the research findings are: (1) The social mobility happens in Austen’s Persuasion. brings about some influences to the characters’ attitudes and thought; (2) the female main character do some strugg...
is credited with key developments in the novel, including the refinement of free indirect discourse, pithy dramatic dialogue, the deft descriptive sketch, and the masterful use of irony.¹ My focus will be on her interest in persuasion. Persuasion permeates the conversations that make up the larger part of Austen's stories, giving center stage to eloquent female protagonists. They and their families, friends, and acquaintances engage in discussions that take up personal matters as well as their communities' critical issues, bringing to life the parlors and ballrooms that in fact are otherwise only fleetingly described. Austen's persuasion relies on forces of personality and conversation more than on longstanding formal rhetoric. She employs a new discursive technology, the novel, to foster a style of civil discourse and behavior that in her view allows for women's participation and makes space for social change. In doing so, Austen's work, as I will suggest, offers insight into contests of persuasion among current feminists as well as the issue of "cancel culture" in our own time. In a Romantic period where, it has been argued, rhetoric was "thoroughly evacuated from the realm of imaginative expression, "² Austen nonetheless created characters whose powers of and responses to persuasion are key to plots, themes, and meanings. Austen encourages readers to ponder the roots of social sway and moral growth-and/or immoral deterioration-stemming from people's capacity to persuade and be persuaded. She focuses not on traditional rhetorical schooling but on the power of interpersonal interaction in everyday social situations and in the effects of the available social media. In particular, from her own experience Austen knew the power of the novel to absorb and influence readers. She understood the anxieties of the novel's detractors about that power, and she defends the genre by engaging those concerns in a comic context. The breezy widow Lady Susan, for instance, "talks very well with a happy command of language, which is too often used, " as her uptight antagonist Catherine Vernon frets, "to make black
WOMAN PERSPECTIVE IN JANE AUSTEN'S PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
2017
Jane Austen is one of the most famous women writers of the nineteenth century. Her novel Pride and Prejudice (1813) deals with the position of women and their social expectations, most of which are related to marriage. The protagonist of this novel represents a unique response to those expectations, which is a product of her way of thinking. Women in the nineteenth century did not have much choice when it came to their future. They could either get married or become governesses if they were educated enough. Their life was shaped mostly by their families which tried to find them a husband who would support them. Austen's heroine Elizabeth, is self-reliant and unconventional woman who marry the man she love. The other characters, such as Lydia and Mrs. Bennet represent women whose ultimate goal in life is connected to marriage. Charlotte Lucas represents women who marry out of necessity and Jane Fairfax embodies the women who are strong and ready to do anything in the name of love. Accordingly, all those women represent different female responses to social norms and to their own position in the society. Jane Austen was a British writer who was dynamic during the Regency period. Pride and Prejudice (1813) is her most popular novel. It deals with the life of Elizabeth Bennet, who is the second of five daughters in the Bennet family. The main aim of this paper is to demonstrate that these characters speak to a female representation to certain social standards concerning their life. This paper depicts the identities of Elizabeth, Mrs. Bennet, Jane Bennet, Lydia and Kitty are the important characters from Pride and Prejudice. The description concentrates on the women characters identities and their social circumstance in order to show how their actions and decisions are formed by their position in and their view on society. Pride and Prejudice is based particularly in the mid nineteenth century under the Victorian Age. Even when a female representative was administering the nation, women did not have any options for their lives, they were viewed as ideal, saints and pure, so as saints they had no
How Jane Austen Uses Marriage to Get What She Wants
As a biochemistry major approaching the subject of Jane Austen and feminism, I found the dichotomy between pleasure readers and critical readers interesting. How can books that are almost 200 years old draw so much attention from both quarters still today? In my thesis, I use Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma to discuss how Austen uses the marriage plot in the context of the 18th century. This plot device allows her to point out problems with marriage as a market, such as emphasis on wealth and the social setup that requires women to be "taken care of" by men. Her strategy works because it is a mixture of the pleasurable and the critical: one cannot read Austen without enjoying the romantic love stories and learning deeper lessons. This intriguing overlap is one of the reasons Austen continues to impact the modern world.
Bad parenting in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park
2016
Family relationship and the topic of parenting in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park are discussed. The position of the parents and the upbringing or lack of it in the two novels is put into social context of Austen's time, in which the individual is still subjected to social norms and accepted behaviour patterns, but which also reflects the new ideas of a more balanced distribution of power and autonomy within the family unit. The focus is on two heroines Elizabeth Bennet and Fanny Price and the emergence of a new domestic female that dictates the path of courtship and marriage. In Pride and Prejudice, the domestic reform comes in the form of assertive and outspoken Elizabeth Bennet. In Mansfield Park, it comes through the recognition and incorporation of the poor cousin into the family. Elizabeth's father Mr. Bennet neglects his parental role, and Mrs. Bennet's main preoccupation is to see her daughters married. Fanny's substitute father Sir Thomas is an oppressive parent who alienates his children, and his wife Mrs. Bertram is a non-existent mother. Fanny's birth parents are equally inadequate. However, all parents make themselves inadvertently of use to the heroines. Mrs. Bennet's habitual impropriety and her father's neglect challenge Elizabeth's passivity and provoke her into action. By distancing herself from her parents and learning from their mistakes, Elizabeth is able to grow and eventually achieve happiness through marriage. The negligence from her substitute and birth parents causes Fanny to further develop her sense of propriety and ultimately make her the moral compass of the story. In the end, the heroines achieve a balanced union between their private lives and the requirements of their society. Through the marriages shown in the novels, the idea is asserted that marriages based on love and esteem are more likely to endure the test of time than those contracted for material gain.
2016
This study examines Jane Austen’s realistic interpretations of eighteenth-century English society with a particular focus on representing women’s oppressions in Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. Austen, in these three novels, criticizes several issues related to women’s status in English society and focuses on how men and women should be treated equally. In the novels, she argues that English society creates social order, women’s oppressiveness, and gender inequality through arbitrary social norms and traditions. This paper mainly focuses on two areas that restrict women’s roles in their society: the marriage plot and the educational system. Austen’s purpose of presenting these issues is to voice women’s rights and improve their conditions. She also offers her readers unusual descriptions of female characters in order to correct the stereotypical images of women during the period. Finally, this paper aims to show Austen’s success in redefining women’s status and change the misconceptions of women in British society.
The Discourse of Gender and Marriage in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion
Jane Austen's reputation as a great English novelist, and as one who was able to raise the female voice at such a time when women could not be heard, or even get published, had been recognised by the likes of Leavis, Richards and Bloom – who consider her works as examples of the best that had been thought of and said in the world – thus worthy of inclusion in the great tradition. This paper examines Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion as products of a feminist state of mind. This way, it presents the pitiable depiction of the female in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries – a period characterised by the need for women to preserve themselves from want through the institution of marriage. The paper also explores how Austen employed the narrative form which allows her heroines to recreate and redefine themselves through the medium of dialogue and feminine thinking.