Jane Austen For Dummies (36 page)
Read Jane Austen For Dummies Online
Authors: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
When Jane Austen was in her 20s and writing her first draft of
Pride and Prejudice
under the title
First Impressions,
England was debating the “Woman Question”: Are women really meant to be as Fordyce, Gregory (Chapter 12), and others prescribed and described? Women's suffrage was the least of women's problems in the early 1800's. Not only were women considered legally moot, but also they were deemed mindless and even encouraged to appear that way. Irate at such demeaning ideas, 18th-century feminists claimed that women had the same moral rights and capacity to reason as men. (Notice that they weren't even pushing for political and legal rights. All they wanted was the right to be considered rational.)
It's always amusing when people speak of Jane Austen as the simple storyteller of days when women were ladies, men were gentlemen, and true love appeared after some 300 pages of misunderstandings. Besides creating attractive female characters who're athletic, strong minded, well read, clever, and self possessed, Austen also advocates seeing women as rational, which in her day was a feminist view of women. So was Austen a feminist? You bet.
Two of Austen's strongest female characters tell the men to whom they're speaking that they're “rational women,” which the average man in Austen's day would consider an
oxymoron,
or self-contradictory pair of words:
Elizabeth Bennet:
In
Pride and Prejudice,
Mr. Collins proposes to Elizabeth Bennet. When she turns him down, he refuses to take “no” for an answer, insisting that “âit is usual for young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept.'” But Elizabeth rejects such silliness and forthrightly replies, “âDo not consider me now as an elegant female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from my heart'” (PP 1:19).
Mrs. Croft:
In Austen's final novel,
Persuasion,
Mrs. Croft, the extroverted, sharp wife of a naval admiral, says to her brother, Frederick Wentworth, “âI hate to hear you talking . . . as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational
creatures'” (P 1:8). In fact, before readers even meet Mrs. Croft, they hear about her from the lawyer who negotiates the leasing of Kellynch Hall, which the Crofts wish to rent. Recounting his meeting with the Crofts, the lawyer observes of her “âand a very well-spoken, genteel, shrewd lady she seemed to be . . . asked more questions about the house, and terms, and taxes, than the admiral, himself, and seemed more conversant with business'” (P 1:3). Fordyce and Gregory would faint at the thought of such a lady!
The most famous champion of women's rights was a contemporary of Austen: Mary Wollstonecraft, whose book,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792), was deemed revolutionary. Austen was 16 when
Vindication
appeared. It is very likely that Jane Austen read Wollstonecraft, and her novels certainly show Wollstonecraft's influence.
Wollstonecraft accuses Fordyce of creating “artificial grace” in females. Wollstonecraft advocates “true grace” arising from “independence of mind” (
Vindication
, 2). She wants women to have power over themselves by cultivating their reason, and she advocates schools for boys
and
girls, where both mind and body are strengthened. Women will be better wives and mothers because of the education. Notice that Wollstonecraft isn't so radical that she wants to see women joining the professions. She wants them to be better qualified for domestic life, life in the home.
As readers come to know female characters like
Pride and Prejudice
's Elizabeth Bennet and
Persuasion
's Anne Elliot and Mrs. Sophia Croft, we may wonder what their lives would've been like if professional opportunities had been open to them. In
Rasselas,
a fictional work written in 1759 by Austen's favorite moralist, Dr. Samuel Johnson, a female character, the Princess, plans “to found a college of learned women” (Chapter 49). But it would take over 100 years after Johnson's work appeared for women to get the educational opportunities that would enable then to have professional lives:
Oxford University: opened two colleges for women in 1878 and allowed women to attend lectures (but nothing about biology, anatomy, or other fields that would be embarrassing!!), and admitted women as full members of the University in 1920 (
http://www.ox.ac.uk/aboutoxford/history.shtml
)
Cambridge University: opened a college for women in 1869; allowed women to attend lectures in Cambridge (the town) in 1870, but at the University only in 1921, when women were first awarded “titles of degrees but no associated privileges” in 1921, but admitted them as full members of the University only in 1948 (
http://www.cam.ac.uk
).
The British Bar: admitted its first female barrister in 1922
The British Medical Association: admitted its first female member in 1873.
Being a “full member of the University,” like having “associated privileges,” means being allowed to participate and vote in University governance.
Austen's familiarity with
A Vindication
and her ability to adapt its ideas for her own purposes become quite clear when we look at one of the case studies Wollstonecraft presented in the chapter “The State of Degradation to which Woman is Reduced” (Chapter 4). Here Wollstonecraft offers a case of poorly educated females who rely on the “reason” and “bounty” of their brothers. “But when a brother marries,” his sister is viewed “as an unnecessary burden on the benevolence” of the brother and his new wife. Describing this wife as “a cold-hearted, narrow-minded woman,” Wollstonecraft claims that the wife grows “jealous of the little kindness” and “displeased at seeing the property of her child” being “lavished” by her husband on his “helpless” sister.
Anyone who has read
Sense and Sensibility
will notice that Wollstonecraft's little scenario provides a perfect summary of the crisis that opens the novel. Mr. Dashwood makes a deathbed request of his financially very comfortable son by his first (deceased) wife to look after his stepmother (confusingly called in the novel as she was during Austen's day, his “mother-in-law”) and three half-sisters, all under age 21. But in the novel's second chapter, the son's wife (Fanny Ferrars Dashwood) manages to convince her husband to give them nothing because anything he offers his mere half-sisters will deprive their “âpoor little boy'” â who ironically, at the age 4, has just inherited a wealthy country estate.
For a lady who fell on financial hard times and who had neither parent nor brother who could assist her, one occupation existed that was genteel enough for a lady: governess. But the job wasn't exactly like Mary Poppins makes it seem. That's because the governess lived in an isolated world of her own, even though she might be beloved by her little charges. As a lady â and a governess had to be a lady, because she was always with the children of the mistress and master of the estate â the governess was socially well above the household staff. She was well educated because she had to be able to teach. She usually spoke at least one foreign language: French. Frequently she also brought such talents as painting, drawing, and music. After all, the governess was a young lady once, and she had a young lady's education. But she was also a paid employee of the family she served: She was a member of the estate or household staff. This means she's not quite good enough to dine with the mistress and master when the children have outgrown dining in the nursery. But she's socially far above the rest of the staff in terms of birth, breeding, and education.
The typical governess of the day isn't the happy and beloved Miss Taylor, Emma's governess who, as Emma grows up, becomes “less of a governess than a friend” to Emma (E 1:1). Indeed, their relationship had “the intimacy of sisters.” Miss Taylor's life is so unusual for a governess that she even becomes a member of the gentry. She marries Mr. Weston who owns the Randalls estate, and she and Emma carry on as if they're sisters, instead of governess and former student. Austen shows society's perception of the governess when Mrs. Elton, albeit vulgar, registers surprise that Miss Taylor, now Mrs. Weston, a former governess, is “âso very lady-like . . . quite the gentlewoman'” (E 2:14).
Miss Taylor is the governess to break all stereotypes. But in the same novel, we meet a young woman, Jane Fairfax, who's to be a governess, for “the very few hundred pounds which she inherited from her father [made] independence impossible” (E 2:2). Austen wrote painfully about a governess's fate in terms of Jane Fairfax: “With the fortitude of a devoted noviciate, [Jane] had resolved at one-and-twenty to complete the sacrifice, and retire from all pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope, to penance and mortification for ever” (E 2:2). Jane Fairfax even describes the offices in town that deal with governess hiring as “offices for the saleânot quite of human fleshâbut of human intellect” (E 2:17), connecting being a governess with being a slave. (For information on the slave trade and England, see Chapter 2.)