Gender Roles and Marriage Essay

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Gender Roles

Austen in her book Sense and Sensibility aggressively and successfully attempts to reconstruct fiction in patriarchal gender conceptions. The dissonance of a masculinized Dashwood and feminized Edward Ferrars amounts to a high degree of reconstruction of gender stereotypes. Traditional writers have urged women to come out strongly and condemn their discrimination by any means be it at family or community level. Moreover, Austen's female gender plays a subordinate role in the family.

Jane Austen is neither completely conservative in her fiction's themes, nor is she promoting a radical form of feminism she insists that something must usually hold a woman back, it may be economics, family background, or her own individuality and in any circumstances a compromise must be made between the individual and society.

At some point Austen seems to support the conventional values of a woman for example finding pleasure in their marriages although at some points she identifies loopholes in the way the society encourages certain modes of behavior

Austen appears to force people to look at their world in a unique way, in other words she does not present herself in a fully conservative way in this way, and Austen's heroines achieve an independence that can operate within convention. In most of her novels, women who are already married seem to have the most control. An example in her book Sense and Sensibility is where Fanny Dashwood is shown at the very beginning of the story to be manipulative over her husband. A look at the following excerpts from the book gives us more lightly on how she has acquired more powers in her marriage: "Mrs. John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his sisters…She begged him to think again on the subject" (Austen, Sense and Sensibility 9).

In this way Fanny Dashwood becomes successful in talking her husband out of giving his father's wife and daughters anything but the bare minimum.

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In reflecting the ways society functions, the emphasis on marriage within

Austen's novels usually do come from an older, maternal figure in the work. Austen uses these characters as an opportunity to show that putting too much importance on social demands, in this case the demand being marriage, can be overdone and result in social ridicule. In Sense and Sensibility, Mrs. Jennings is often teasing the Dashwood girls about their romantic interests, the explanation being that "She had only two daughters, both of whom she had lived to see respectably married, and now she had nothing to do but marry all the rest of the world" (Austen, Sense and Sensibility 29).

Mrs. Jennings wants to know about the girls' admirers so she can be sure they are doing well for themselves. Sense and Sensibility, on the other hand, offers a more forgiving view of a vicar. Edward is one of the novel's romantic heroes and aspires to take orders. Austen reveals double standard of society when Edward's family believes such an occupation to be beneath him, yet at the time there is such weight given to Christian morality, which needs clergymen to guide the masses. Austen seems to make it a virtue….....

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