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The Depiction of Women in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emily Bront's Wuthering Heights In their classic novels, Emily Bront and Jane Austen create realistic portrayal of the various roles of women in Victorian society in their depiction of Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights, Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, and the Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility. In Wuthering Heights, instability is continuously introduced into solid structures in order to disclose their dangerousness and their ability to change. This is a major source of the novels radical force. The characters in Pride and Prejudice reveal their own moral shortcomings; nearly every character mirrors the moral character in the world.
The novel Sense and Sensibility displays Austen's contemplation and adjustment of the concept of authority. The novel depicts fathers who control their children but regulate the social identities and inheritances of subsequent generations. The novel represents the possibility of feminine authority. In Wuthering Heights, Bront's text affirms the instability of the world that it enters by embracing change and disclosing unsteadiness of the structures it mobilizes. Wuthering Heights is a "delirious" text that characterizes delirium.
Also, it shows how the text incorporates its own instability. Characters are continuously being reborn into different roles throughout Wuthering Heights, identities are also continuously being displaced and remade. Catherine is changed from a disobedient girl at the Heights to an arrogant lady at the Grange. The heights is split between Catherine's rebellious identification with the alien energies that she represents. Wuthering Heights offers a critical allegory of Catherine's development into a socially authorized feminist. The rebellious side of Catherine is evident when she loses the love of her life.
Catherine Earnshaw is a complex character. She is loving and violent, gentle and passionate, and affectionate and willful. She is shown to be a rebellious daughter and delirious wife at the Grange. Catherine has a fatal weakness. She finds herself attracted to the gentility of Thrush cross Grange, to the calm of the lovely old house. The wuthering of Catherine's identity materializes the deliriousness of her illness.
Catherine dies before the book is half over, but her spirit continues to rage in the turbulent air of Wuthering Heights. She comes back as a ghost of her former self. Catherine Earnshaw is usually characterized as a "wild, wicked slip, " also one who refuses her father's authority over her. Throughout Wuthering Heights, Catherine is read as one that transgresses or eludes the identifications that trope it.
Catherine continues to haunt the text with her unreconciled desire even though the second Catherine's love life is more domestic than the first. It has also been said that Catherine Earnshaw played a role of a female Satan; she is described as a disturbing and disruptive person, characterizations that which puncture her selfhood. Being a subject of desire, she is also a subject of alteration (Vine 91 - 3, 96 - 111). Emily Bront uses Wuthering Heights to give substance to her myth.
The feminist concern of this myth derives from the fact that it is a distinctively nineteenth-century answer to the question of origins. It is the myth of how culture came about, and how nineteenth-century society occurred (Gilbert 79) The typical Victorian novel is large; it usually incorporates a great deal of material for its own interest. Wuthering Heights is an outstanding novel because of Emily Bront's form. Instead of gradually aligning the reader's outlook, Bront brings it into line with the various limited perspectives of her characters. No visuals are given, only variations of the shortsightedness.
Bront seemed to be impressed by the multiplicity of the outlook and the relativity inherent in any point of view, like most Victorians (Bloom 79, 83, 89). Like Emily Bront, Jane Austen also makes the assumption that a person's outward manners mirror his moral character. In the novel Pride and Prejudice, it is safe to assume the character is truly good if he or she always displays good manners. The problem of judgment is not a question of penetrating behind the disguise of the manners to the reality of moral character; it is rather a question of perceiving and estimating the nature of an individual's manner with a reasonable degree of accuracy. The definition of what truly proper manners are actually have an extraordinary importance. Elizabeth Bennet's standards of decorous behavior do not grate upon the reader's sensibilities as Elinor Dashwood's conception of propriety sometimes does.
Elizabeth's standards of propriety are being presented as identical to the best standards of the novel as a whole. The definition of true propriety in Pride and Prejudice is a healthy respect for the conventional rules of social behavior (Nardin 7 - 8). An important difference between Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility is the rules of propriety. In Sense and Sensibility the rules are justified by their connections the concept of duty. Pride and Prejudice's standard of propriety suggests that the truly proper individual must disobey the rules whenever sound common sense and good morality approve. Many characters in Pride and Prejudice are characterized as immoral or stupid because of the rules of propriety.
However, characters in Sense and Sensibility are not like that. Pride and Prejudice assumes a simple, direct relationship between conventional good manners and good moral characters. Pride and Prejudice is told in a readable prose without a single nonessential word, and it frequently breaks into a dialogue so lively and so revealing of characters that entire scenes have been lifted from the novel and reproduced as screenplays (Goode 21). In Pride and Prejudice interpersonal and internal aggression are used. The personal relations between Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are dominated by the aggressive elements in their characters. The aggressive impulses at play in the comic arena are categorized in the "courtship" of the protagonists.
Also they are categorized as conflicts inside the egos of both the lovers. The substance of debate between Elizabeth and Darcy are real. It expresses the deepest divisions in the way the protagonists see the world and experience the circumstances of their place in it. Austen's moral solution to these is exactly what the solution would be in real life.
Austen brings the pattern of abuse to a climax by a dual psychological transformation. The interpersonal aggression is internally used in both the hero and the heroine (Bloom 6 - 7, 22 - 3). Every society has its rules of social behavior. Manners are much less important today then they were in Jane Austen's time. Austen's world was dominated by social rituals that had built-in rules. In Pride and Prejudice Austen demonstrates her view that these rules are necessary.
She is often critical of characters who break the rules and sometimes makes fun of them. It is clear that Austen approves of the correct forms of social behavior. Pride and Prejudice is mostly written from the objective point of view of an external observer. Sometimes the novel leaves the objective story to approach the feelings of a character.
The structure of Pride and Prejudice is very simple. Jane Austen is known for her perceptive depiction of relationships. In Pride and Prejudice she shows many kinds of marriages, none of which are alike. She also shows many other relationships: sisterly relationships, friendships, and closeness of families (Goode 9 - 13, 16 - 22).
In Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Bennet is the leading female character. She is not as pretty as her older sister, Jane, but she is still attractive. Elizabeth is quick to make fun of people's absurdities and hypocrisies. She is also quick to express her feelings. She is too loyal to criticize her father openly; however she does not agree with many of the things he does. Lydia Bennet is the youngest daughter.
She is not beautiful like her other sisters, but her youth and high spirits make her attractive. She has little common sense, no judgment of right or wrong, and no understanding of the suffering she puts her family through. Lydia was the first to marry, but she did not consider the consequences of marriage. However, she does take much pride in being the first to marry.
Charlotte Lucas is Elizabeth's best friend; she is intelligent but plain. Charlotte has no fortune of her own, and has little chance of attracting a husband of her own choosing. She does accept the proposal of Mr. Collins, a man who is foolish and egotistical. The only thing this marriage would have is security, which Charlotte believes is enough.
She says happiness is a matter of chance. Jane Austen gives a picture of the reality that ordinary young women of her class would have to face. Charlotte could only try to achieve security, whereas Elizabeth could very well marry because of her beauty. Like Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility is a comedy that ends with many marriages, closeness of families, and desire for public ritual or social convention.
Sense and Sensibility is full of laughter, most of which is hollow. The novels most self-conscious heroines are Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Sense and Sensibility corrects the typical moralistic emphasis by refusing to choose between Marianne and Elinor. While Sense and Sensibility expresses metaphors of masculine authority, it also presents the possibility of a feminine authority. Austen draws a social and literary code of the second half of the eighteenth century: Sensibility. Though sensibility was by no means presented only by women, Austen attributes it in this novel primarily to female characters as a way of establishing a gender-specific opposition to authority.
Sense and Sensibility suggests that the results of maintaining the code of sensibility are devastating to women. Austen insists that its effects are antisocial, like so many of her other works. Identity of feminine authority is illicit and immoral. Female assertiveness constitutes a transgression. Both, the metaphors of masculine and feminine authority, show some characteristics. The novel registers disapproval of not only feminine authority but also all of its human forms.
Austen believes authority belongs to the self-consciously powerless. It is achieved by recognize...
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