THE BALANCE BETWEEN SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
---- A FEMINIST EXPLORATION ON
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND PERSUASION
by
Wang Aihua
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate School and College of English
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree of Master of Arts
Under the Supervision of Professor Zhang Dingquan
Shanghai International Studies University
May 2011
Acknowledgements
I am greatly indebted to my supervisor Prof. Zhang Dingquan, whose utmost
patience, insightful suggestions and invaluable materials in the preparation of this
dissertation have contributed immensely towards its completion, and whose
painstaking efforts in revising the manuscript have made this paper a better one than I
can ever possibly produce. The title of the dissertation is given with his help as well.
During the past half a year I have benefited greatly from doctoral candidate Xu
Yuanxue’s enlightenment in the domain of the English Literature. She has helped me a
lot and given me much valuable advice although she was very busy. I would like to
express my heartfelt thanks to her.
I should extend my gratitude to my parents who have always encouraged and
supported me with heart and soul during the course of my study for Master of Arts.
THE BALANCE BETWEEN SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
---- A FEMINIST EXPLORATION ON
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND PERSUASION
Abstract
Nowadays, more and more young people take a rational way rather than an
emotional attitude to marriage. However, no matter what form the marriage takes,
people hope to get happiness. But how could we get happy marriage? What kind of
view of marriage is appropriate? These questions have puzzled people’s minds for
thousands of years. Jane Austen—a woman writer, brought us a fresh wind about the
view of happy marriage two centuries ago. According to Austen’s view, marriage not
only involves the man and the woman concerned but also is the product of certain
social relations.
This thesis attempts to reconcile the thematic conflict between sense and
sensibility from the feminist critical method through Austen’s early work Pride and
Prejudice and her late work Persuasion. Austen’s feminine consciousness is strikingly
obvious in her view of marriage. Her works all focused on heroine-centered domestic
live and she emphasized that the premise to women’s blissful marriage should be
based on the agreement between the ideal and the real, on the equality between men
and women. She broke the traditional notion that female are “emotional creatures”
and she advocated that women should also seek to maintain the harmony between
spiritual and material pursuit in happiness of marriage. Her novels embody a beauty
of balance between sense and sensibility from the beginning to the end.
Key words: Jane Austen, sense, sensibility, feminism, balance
摘要
今天，越来越多的年轻人以理性的态度对待婚姻。但无论采取何种婚姻方式，
人们都希望获得幸福。我们何以得到幸福的婚姻生活呢？哪种婚姻观是正确的？
这样的问题一直困扰着人们的心灵。简·奥斯丁，这位女性作家在两个世纪以前
就以一种全新的方式向世人展现了她对愉悦婚姻的看法。根据奥斯丁的观点，婚
姻不仅涉及两性关系，而且也是社会关系的产物。
本论文试图从女性主义的角度，通过对奥斯丁的早期作品《傲慢与偏见》和
她最后一部作品《劝导》的分析，来调和“理性”与“感性”之间的摩擦与碰撞。
奥斯丁的女性意识在她的婚姻观里非常显著，她的作品情节都是围绕女主人公的
家庭生活展开，着重强调女性幸福婚姻的前提需基于理想与现实之间的一致，男
性与女性两者的平等。她打破了女性是“感性动物”的传统概念，提出了女性在
婚姻中应当同样保持精神与物质上的融合。她的小说至始至终体现了一种“理性”
与“感性”的平衡之美。
关键词： 简·奥斯丁，理性，感性，女性主义，平衡
Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................1
Chapter One Jane Austen and Feminist Criticism..........................................................4
1.1 An Overview of Feminism...................................................................5
1.2 Jane Austen and Feminism...................................................................6
Chapter Two Pride and Prejudice: Ideal Marriage for Women……………..….........13
2.1 Elizabeth’s Independence and Intelligence…………………………13
2.2 Elizabeth’s Defiance against the Patriarchal Ethics………………...17
2.3 Views of the Real Felicity—Balanced Sense and Sensibility………21
2.4 Feminist Consciousness on Elizabeth’s Marriage…………………..25
Chapter Three Persuasion: Agony and Happiness in Pursuit of Marriage……….….29
3.1 Anne’s Initial View of Marriage………………………...…………..30
3.2 Anne’s Sense of Independence in Growth…………………………..33
3.3 In Pursuit of Happiness……………………………………………..38
Conclusion……………………………………………….…………………………..42
Works Cited………………………………………………………….………………46
Introduction
Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon rectory in Hampshire.
The Industrial Revolution of the 18th century made women’s liberation possible and
“In late 18th century and early 19th century England, a strong feminist voice was eager
to make itself heard through novels”. She was among the first English women to break
the male-dominated of novel writing. “Though Austen is not a conscientious feminist
novelist, her novels, such as Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, express female
dignity and a longing for equality with man” (Zhang and Wu 202). In England of that
time, the traditional regulations of the society and family roles were highly strict for
men and women. This thesis mainly chooses Jane Austen’s early novel Pride and
Prejudice and the late novel Persuasion as the textual object to analyze her balanced
view on marriage through studying of the social background, cultural ethics and the
feminist approach of the time. That is to say, I will focus on the balance between
Austen’s feminine consciousness and masculine voice in the patriarchal society. Her
novels embodied the harmonious beauty from the beginning to the end. Many
ambivalent themes at last turned to be harmonious ones and there were many
rationalists’ comedies as well as many emotional tragedies in her novels. At last,
Austen accomplished her balanced portrayal that the rationalists’ could develop their
relationship to a happy ending only with the sensibilities and lovers could adjust their
relationship to a healthy condition only with the help of sense. Austen was against the
view that human experience had been synonymous with the masculine experience, and
she challenged sexual stereotypes in her novel but kept an objective attitude towards
marriage at the same time. While holding the rebelling feminine consciousness,
Austen was simultaneously attempting to reconcile with the masculine tradition.
Balance originates in differences, and then from these differences among them, it
moves towards integration. Balance also originates in contradiction, and then it moves
towards unity from contradiction. This seeming contradiction was handled in the
Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion in such a way that it resulted in a balanced
relationship between sense and sensibility, which showed the conciliatory human
1
nature of men and women. So, what is sense and what is sensibility? As I looked up
the meaning of the words, sensibility seems to have a different connotation at the time
when Jane Austen wrote the novel. I used to think that sensibility in the novels meant
receptiveness to impression and acuteness of feeling. Somehow, it meant capacity for
deep emotion and passion as the instinctive reaction by the heroines. As for the word
“sense”, it still means sound practical intelligence accompanied with sensible and
reasonable actions as illustrated most of the time by the witty heroines. In her novels,
Austen thought that it was most important for women to remain consistent in
appreciation and love in their marriage. Austen put forward that it was wrong to marry
for money; marriage is combined with social status and property but is not determined
by them; without true love happy marriage can not be obtained. Balance resulted in
her unique artistic style.
Austen depicted a real image of woman, different from previous writers who
divided women into “angel” and “devil”. In maintaining the double consciousness,
Austen skillfully presented a vivid life picture of the country gentle folks in an
ordinary social routine wherein “the female self-awareness expressing itself in the
novels” (Showalter 9). The women in Austen’s novel, either positive or negative,
either rational or emotional, were as the same as the man. The heroines, compared
with the subordinating gentlemen in her works, had their own strong and weak points.
Even menial women could be found equally talented as men in Austen’s works. All in
all, she argued that women were not the intellectual inferiors to men but in the society
where “there is inequality in the sexes, and that for the better economy of the world,
the men who were to be the lawgiver, had the larger share of reason bestowed upon
them” (Monaghan 105). Notably, Austen declared the ideal egalitarian relationship
based on fraternal qualities. She suggested by implication that relationships between
the sexes based on ‘fraternal’ values were more equal, fairer to women and more
enduring than those based on unrealistic romantic notions. Austen implied that men
and women need to possess the same qualities such as responsibility, gratitude, fidelity,
compliance which were usually believed the values embraced separately either by
man or woman. She focused on the common qualities that human beings need to
possess, regardless of gender, in order to be admired.
2
In the main body of my thesis, I will analyze the Jane Austen’s feminist vision in
Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion. Darcy-Elizabeth and Wentworth-Anne’s
marriage showed the power of love and happiness to overcome class obstacles and
prejudices. The emphases of the two novels lie in the perfect marriage that arrived at
the combination of physical life and mental life. Austen used the characters of the
novels to show her consciousness of women. She described various ladies and several
subordinating gentlemen, giving prominence to the heroines’ intelligence,
self-knowledge, courage, and independence. Austen presented her heroines as the
active speakers to tell women’s own stories and their own feelings. In her novels,
Austen denied the marriage without love and she also disapproved the marriage with
little fortune. According to Austen’s view, both money and social relations—balanced
sense and sensibility were important in marriage in her time. As we all know, sense
and sensibility are all virtues, but drawing an absolute line between them easily leads
to fallacies. Meaningful sensibility can not do without coordination of sense. In
Austen’s works, “sense” and “sensibility” are an interdependent perpetual and
mutually balanced theme. They both are interwoven and contradictory complex. From
the two novels, we can get a whole understanding of women’s social status in Austen’s
time and her feminist consciousness; they enable us both to understand earlier time
better and to examine with greater insight our own attitudes and actions within the
moral and social conditions of life in our own time, and they also enable us to
determine ways in which our decisions about love, marriage, and proper behavior
reflect our own truths about what is ultimately right and wrong. This is also the
practical value to our nowadays people.
Austen’s novels have been loved and criticized for almost 200 years. Austen’s
works seldom touched upon important historical or political subjects. This might be
considered the limitation of Austen by some critics. Nevertheless through the simple
plot, we can see Austen’s brilliantly witty, elegantly structured satire, sharp
observation and profound comprehension of life. As readers of today, we are able to
relate to the experiences of her characters, to put ourselves in their place, and to try to
determine what we would do in similar situations. Thus, her novels remain fresh,
providing not only an enjoyable reading experience but an opportunity to examine
3
human nature in a different historical setting. These made her adopt an acceptable
style to achieve her purpose, and the smooth surface and dramatic effect of her writing
delight her readers, thus Austen has enjoyed steadily growing popularity, especially in
the 20th century, and she has sometimes been ranked among the truly great English
novelists by critics and literary historians.
4
Chapter One
Jane Austen and Feminist Criticism
1.1 An Overview of Feminism
“Feminism” is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing and
defending equal social, cultural, political, and economic rights and equal opportunities
for women. It is a campaign against gender inequalities and it strives for equal rights
for women. Feminism can be also defined as the right of every single woman so that
she can make a choice to live a life which is non-discriminatory and to be able to
access all the necessary information based on the principle of social, cultural, political
and economic equality and independence. Feminist theory emerged from these
feminist movements and includes general theories and theories about the origins of
inequality and in some cases, about the social construction of sex and gender, in a
variety of disciplines. Feminist activists have campaigned for women’s rights—such
as in contract, property and voting. They also promote women’s rights to bodily
integrity and autonomy and reproductive rights. They have opposed domestic violence,
sexual harassment, and sexual assault. In economics, they have advocated for
workplace rights, including equal pay and opportunities for careers and to start
businesses.
Feminists and scholars have divided the movement’s history into three “waves”.
The first wave refers mainly to women’s suffrage movements of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries (mainly concerned with women’s right to vote). The period
described as first-wave feminism refers to feminist activity during the nineteenth
century and early twentieth century in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Originally it focused on the promotion of equal contract and property rights for
women and the opposition to chattel marriage and ownership of married women (and
their children) by their husbands. However, by the end of the nineteenth century,
activism focused primarily on gaining political power, particularly the right of
women’s suffrage. Yet, feminists such as Voltairine de Cleyre and Margaret Sanger
were still active in campaigning for women’s sexual, reproductive, and economic
5
rights at this time.
The second wave refers to the ideas and actions associated with the women’s
liberation movement beginning in the 1960s (which campaigned for legal and social
equality for women). Second-wave feminism refers to a period of feminist activity
beginning in the early 1960s and lasting through the late 1980s. The scholar Imelda
Whelehan suggests that the second wave was a continuation of the earlier phase of
feminism involving the suffragettes in the UK and USA. Second-wave feminism has
continued to exist since that time and coexists with what is termed third-wave
feminism. The scholar Estelle Freedman compares first and second-wave feminism
saying that “the first wave focused on rights such as suffrage, whereas the second
wave was largely concerned with other issues of equality, such as ending
discrimination” (Freedman 464). Second-wave feminists saw women’s cultural and
political inequalities as inextricably linked and encouraged women to understand
aspects of their personal lives as deeply politicized and as reflecting sexist power
structures.
Third-wave feminism began in the early 1990s and continuing to the present as
a response to perceived failures of the second wave and to the backlash against
initiatives and movements created by the second wave. “The third wave embraces
contradictions, conflict and irrationality and attempts to accommodate diversity and
change” (Tong 285). Third-wave feminism seeks to challenge or avoid what it deems
the second wave’s essentialist definitions of femininity, which over-emphasize the
experiences of upper middle-class white women.
1.2 Jane Austen and Feminist Criticism
Jane Austen was the seventh of eight children of the Reverend George Austen
and his wife. She was educated mainly at home and never lived apart from her family.
She had a happy childhood and whom Mr. Austen tutored. Even as a little girl, Austen
was encouraged to write. Her father’s extensive library provided her wide literary
materials for forming her original writing style. Austen is often regarded as the
greatest one of English women novelists on the strength of her six completed novels
(Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger
6
Abbey, Persuasion). As the Napoleonic Wars (1800-1815) threatened the safety of
monarchies throughout Europe, the government censorship of literature exploded.
Publishing anonymously prevented her from getting the authorial reputation, but it
also enabled her to preserve her privacy at a time when English society associated a
female’s entrance into the public sphere with a reprehensible loss of femininity.
Additionally, Austen might have sought anonymity because of the more general
atmosphere of repression pervading her era.
“Without boasting or giving pain to the opposite sex, one may say that Pride and
Prejudice is a good book. At any rate, one would not have been ashamed to have been
caught in the act of writing Pride and Prejudice. Yet Jane Austen was glad that a
hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in. To Jane
Austen there was something discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice” (Woolf, A
Room of One’s Own 51-52). Woolf pointed out that not only did Jane Austen lack a
room of her own, having had to write her novels in the very public sitting-room, she
had to hide her manuscripts or cover them with a piece of blotting-paper, as observed
by her nephew James Edward Leigh in his Memoir of Jane Austen. Although Austen
was encouraged to write in her family, the general social environment was friendly
towards a woman writer at her time. Meanwhile, novel-reading was regarded as
shameful in the upper-class society, and this situation is reflected in Pride and
Prejudice: “Mr. Collins readily assented, and a book was produced; but on beholding
it (for every thing announced it to be from a circulating library), he started back, and
begging pardon, protested that he never read novels” (Pride and Prejudice 92). If a
woman wrote, she would have to be usually secretive and often interrupted. Miss
Nightingale was so vehemently to complain—“women never have a half hour…that
they can call their own”. Anne Finch said: “A woman that attempts the pen, such an
intruder on the rights of men”. Those literary theoreticians from Aristotle to Hopkins
prevented many women form “attempting the pen”—to use Anne Finch’s
sentence—and caused great anxiety in generations of those women who were
“presumptuous” enough to dare such an attempt. And one hundred years later, in a
famous letter to Charlotte Bronte, Robert Southey rephrased the same concept:
“Literature is not the business of a woman’s life, and it can not be”. It can not be, the
7
metaphor of literary paternity implies, because it is physiologically as well as
sociologically impossible. If male sexuality is integrally associated with the assertive
presence of literary power, female sexuality is associated with the absence of such
power,
with
the
idea—expressed
by
the
nineteenth-century
thinker
Otto
Weininger—that “women has no share in ontological reality.” As we could see, a
further implication of the paternity/creativity metaphor is the concept that women
exist only to be acted on by men, both as literary and as sensual objects.
“Noted particularly for their sparkling social comedy and accurate vision of
human relationships, they are still as widely read today as they have ever been”
(Austen, Persuasion Preface). She pictured women’s daily life and presented women’s
self-independence and self-awareness. She noted that women had long been deprived
of equitable opportunities in education and employment. Men were rich, women were
poor; men got to roam the country and travel the world, women had to be satisfied
with the domestic life. Men were great writers, poets, playwrights, women had to
concede to find fulfillment in “making puddings and knitting stockings”. Men had
rooms to work, to rest, to create…women, the average, middle class women, seldom
had a room of their own. Though Austen never travelled; she never went through
London in an omnibus or had lunch in a restaurant alone. Her gift and her
circumstances matched each other completely. She had to hide in her world, kept a
sharp lookout for the people around her and expressed her emotion’s claim by words
in the silent and mild way. At that time, women were supposed to be obedient
generally and they suffered from a rigid restraint in many fields.
Austen’s novels have always been studied in the three waves of feminist criticism.
At the first stage, Virginia Woolf called Austen “the most perfect artist among
women” and regarded Austen as the miraculous example of the female artist of
androgynous mind as the author and as a woman. The argument that Jane Austen
critically explored the “women problem” appeared in 1938 in Mona Wilson’s linking
of Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft—Austen’s contemporary “feminist writer”.
During the second stage, Jane Austen and her works were commented from new and
diverse feminist perspectives. Lloyd W. Brown assumed that Jane Austen is probably
a ‘feminist’ writer in 1973, “Jane Austen is not involved with questions of
8
androgynous marriages, so-called ‘new’ moralities in sex, or with the socioeconomics
of equal opportunities…her themes are comparable with the eighteenth-century
feminism of a Mary Wollstonecraft insofar as such feminism questioned certain
masculine assumptions in society” (Brown 324). Another critic Alison Sulloway
suggests that Austen offers “a new human archetype, the gentle woman struggling for
responsible autonomy” (LeRoy 3). When comparing the theme of Austen’s to
Wollstonecraft’s in the questioning of certain masculine assumptions, in 1979 Warren
Roverts argued that Austen took a feminist position in her first three novels by
criticizing the world of female gentility from a perspective similar to Wollstonecraft’s.
At the last period of the feminist criticism, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s analysis
of Austen’s position in the history of literature about “woman problem” is the most
influential and assertive in The Mad- women in the Attic and the Nineteenth-Century
Literary Imagination. As far as they are concerned, Austen is the key women writer
since she achieved a distinctive female “duplicitous voice” by “simultaneously
conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards” (111). The female
stereotypes of “angel” and “devil” are simultaneously accepted and deconstructed.
They argued that the “decorous surface” of Austen’s works conceal an “explosive
anger”. “It is shocking how persistently Austen demonstrates her…dissatisfaction with
the tight place assigned women in patriarchy and her analysis of the economics of
sexual exploitation” (112). By exploring the very conventions, Austen demonstrated
the power of patriarchy as well as the ambivalence and confinement of the female
writer. Austen always referred to the economic, social and political power of men as
she dramatized how and why female survival depended on gaining male’s approval
and protection. Austen represented a series of extremely powerful women, each of
whom acted out the rebellious anger suppressed by the heroine and the author.
Austen, living in the Eighteenth century England, was unavoidably influenced by
the social atmosphere at that time, so she experienced the first feminism wave. As Zhu
Gang said: “this was also a golden age for literary women: Austen, the Brontes, Eliot
and Dickinson” (228-229). We can see that feminist elements in her novels. Austen’s
irony to the gentlemen in her works intensified her idea that women were not inferior
to any men and her strong claim to educate women was easily spotted to her readers.
9
First wave feminism stressed equality, rights and liberation. At the same time, it
insisted that sexual identity is not inessential. Just as Austen expressed in her works,
women were not seen as “relative creatures” or “objects” in male-devised scenarios,
but as equal human beings with the man. She considered that women and men were
subjected to the same moral principles to detest the unequal treatments to them, such
as the women’s restricted role. Her sense of female worth was significant in all her
works. No wonder Virginia Woolf labeled Jane Austen as a “woman writer” and Ian
Watt argued that Austen’s novels “dramatized the process whereby feminine and
adolescent values are painfully educated in the norms of mature rational and educated
male world” (Watt 218).
Austen’s novels are the summit of a line of development in thought and “deserve
to be called feminist since it is concerned with establishing the moral equality of men
and women and the proper status of individual women as accountable beings”
(Kirkham 3). In this sense, Austen was progressive compared with most female
novelists of her day, but she differed from them in her rejection of contemporary and
traditional conceptions of the heroine or of the lady. The woman who is “innocent as
an angel and artless as purity itself” (Bradbrook 96) was satirized by Austen. Although
Austen is frequently labeled as conservative, we can be quite sure that intelligent and
sensitive as she is, Austen is fully aware of women’s problems of her society.
Therefore, it extends to the portrayal of women and their situation even though
Austen’s works are applied to only a narrow social problem. These factors have in
turn make Austen an important writer to literary feminists. As we know, Austen
explored the moral nature and status of women, female education, marriage, rights and
authority, and was concerned with women’s position which is clear to any reader of
her novels.
To sum up the above portrayal, Austen’s feminist consciousness is quite obvious
in her works. Firstly, she believed that the essential idea of feminism is the equality of
women with men. As David Monaghan said that “there is inequality in the sexes; and
that for the better economy of the world, the men who were to be the lawgiver, had the
larger share of reason bestowed upon them” (105). Austen argued that women are not
intellectually inferior to men, and women and men should be treated equally in a
10
moral sense. Secondly, Austen praised women’s intellectual power. She insisted that
women are inherently as rational as men. All those brilliant heroines in her novels are
young women who could be judged by their own merits, made their own decisions
and voiced their own thoughts rather than kept silent and stayed obedient. Thirdly,
Austen expressed her view of marriage from a feminist point of view. She stressed
that women’s marriage should be based on the harmony of sense and sensibility, on
the agreement between the ideal and the real, on the equality between men and women.
Fourthly, Austen showed her concern for women’s role in the society. She argued that
women’s self-worth is achieved through playing an important role in the society, but
not their devotion to the family and the services to their husbands. Austen never
thought women’s position inferior to that of men. In her eyes, the interdependence and
cooperation between men and women is the very foundation of the human society. A
woman who only cares for the welfare of her own family can’t show her value fully as
a human being. In Austen’s opinion, the favorite female image should be the one who
is sincerely concerned with others and genuinely takes an active part in social life.
Austen’s ideal heroines were consistently those passionate women who devoted
themselves to their society, especially to helping other women.
Feminism has some general basic principles: the feminist should be aware of the
unequal and unfair treatments suffered by the female in a concrete society, and of the
consequent helplessness and disadvantages. The other is that the feminist should
confirm female self-value and the sense of it. Austen echoed the profound meaning of
feminism, and she exhibited her attention to the moral nature in her novels. In her
novels, Austen, different from the previous writers, apparently did her best to subvert
the male-dominated values system and unfolded a vivid life-like women and she
expressed her special feminine idea about the limited education of girls, the female
behavior, female accomplishments and the triviality of female values.
Feminist consciousness is the central theme of feminism. It concentrates on the
heroine’s inner thoughts of the self-development that that is portrayed by the authoress
in the feminine works. Feminist consciousness exists as rooted in the concrete,
practical and everyday experiences of being, a sort of interpretation of the experience
of being a woman. The existing of feminist consciousness is helpful for women to
11