Pride and Prejudice Read Online Free Page B
Author: Jane Austen, Vivien Jones, Tony Tanner
Tags: Fiction, Classics
[women] to come forward, and contribute their full and fair proportion towards the saving of their country. But I would call on them to come forward, without departing from the refinement of their character, without derogating from the dignity of their rank, without blemishing the delicacy of their sex. 13
The impact of the new femininity on conservative thinking is evident in More’s consciousness-raising call to women to ‘come forward’ into awareness of their central role in the nation’s survival. But, in opposition to Wollstonecraft, More aligns herself with a version of Burkean traditionalism – as that phrase ‘the dignity of their rank’ suggests. Rather than Wollstonecraft’s new and disruptive vision of a rational meritocracy, More appeals to women’s anxieties about the possible consequences of breaking established codes of femininity. She describes a comfortingly circumscribed form of involvement and defines female ‘excellencies’ in all-too-familiar terms. Her buzz-words are those of the conduct books, the popular manuals which instructed young women in appropriately decorous behaviour: works like James Fordyce’s
Sermons to Young Women
, which Mr Collins tries to read to the Bennet sisters (I, xiv), and which Wollstonecraft attacked in
Rights of Woman
as likely to ‘hunt every spark of nature out of [a girl’s] composition’. 14 For More and the conduct writers, femininity consists in ‘refinement’, ‘delicacy’ – and propriety: ‘Propriety is to a woman…the first, the second, the third requisite’. 15 In both More and conduct literature generally, such terms have a primarily moral meaning, but they are nevertheless terms which Wollstonecraft deeply mistrusted because they are complicit with more exclusively sexual definitions of women as decorative, vulnerable, in need of protection. In the first of the extracts I quoted above from
Rights of Woman
, for example, Wollstonecraft attacks the ‘false refinement’ which reduces women to creatures of sense rather than reason, and in her critique of Fordyce she contrasts ‘female meekness and artificial grace’ with the ‘true grace [which] arisesfrom some kind of independence of mind’. 16 In contrast with Wollstonecraft’s ideal of female autonomy, More’s view of women’s activity is seriously limited by the fear that they might blemish ‘the delicacy of their sex’. Laterin
Strictures
, for example, she offers a depressingly self-abnegating image of womanhood:
An early habitual restraint is peculiarly important to the future character and happiness of women. A judicious unrelaxing but steady and gentle curb on their tempers and passions can alone ensure their peace and establish their principles…
Girls should be led to distrust their own judgment; they should learn not to murmur at expostulation; they should be accustomed to expect and to endure opposition…It is of the last importance to their happiness, even in this life, that they should early acquire a submissive temper and a forbearing spirit. 17
Pride and Prejudice
could well be read as a critical exploration of More’s contention that women’s happiness is dependent on restraint and submission. I have already suggested that happiness is a central preoccupation in the novel; and the key terms from contemporary debates about women play constantly through Austen’s careful discriminations between the degrees and kinds of happiness expected not just by Elizabeth but by a whole range of female characters. Reason, feeling, passion, propriety, decorum, modesty, delicacy, elegance, independence: as in the work of polemicists like Wollstonecraft and More, this embattled vocabulary is under scrutiny throughout
Pride and Prejudice
. How, then, might we place Elizabeth Bennet and the novel’s other female characters against the versions of womanhood which it evokes?
Elizabeth is clearly much closer to Wollstonecraft’s rational femininity and ‘independence of mind’
The impact of the new femininity on conservative thinking is evident in More’s consciousness-raising call to women to ‘come forward’ into awareness of their central role in the nation’s survival. But, in opposition to Wollstonecraft, More aligns herself with a version of Burkean traditionalism – as that phrase ‘the dignity of their rank’ suggests. Rather than Wollstonecraft’s new and disruptive vision of a rational meritocracy, More appeals to women’s anxieties about the possible consequences of breaking established codes of femininity. She describes a comfortingly circumscribed form of involvement and defines female ‘excellencies’ in all-too-familiar terms. Her buzz-words are those of the conduct books, the popular manuals which instructed young women in appropriately decorous behaviour: works like James Fordyce’s
Sermons to Young Women
, which Mr Collins tries to read to the Bennet sisters (I, xiv), and which Wollstonecraft attacked in
Rights of Woman
as likely to ‘hunt every spark of nature out of [a girl’s] composition’. 14 For More and the conduct writers, femininity consists in ‘refinement’, ‘delicacy’ – and propriety: ‘Propriety is to a woman…the first, the second, the third requisite’. 15 In both More and conduct literature generally, such terms have a primarily moral meaning, but they are nevertheless terms which Wollstonecraft deeply mistrusted because they are complicit with more exclusively sexual definitions of women as decorative, vulnerable, in need of protection. In the first of the extracts I quoted above from
Rights of Woman
, for example, Wollstonecraft attacks the ‘false refinement’ which reduces women to creatures of sense rather than reason, and in her critique of Fordyce she contrasts ‘female meekness and artificial grace’ with the ‘true grace [which] arisesfrom some kind of independence of mind’. 16 In contrast with Wollstonecraft’s ideal of female autonomy, More’s view of women’s activity is seriously limited by the fear that they might blemish ‘the delicacy of their sex’. Laterin
Strictures
, for example, she offers a depressingly self-abnegating image of womanhood:
An early habitual restraint is peculiarly important to the future character and happiness of women. A judicious unrelaxing but steady and gentle curb on their tempers and passions can alone ensure their peace and establish their principles…
Girls should be led to distrust their own judgment; they should learn not to murmur at expostulation; they should be accustomed to expect and to endure opposition…It is of the last importance to their happiness, even in this life, that they should early acquire a submissive temper and a forbearing spirit. 17
Pride and Prejudice
could well be read as a critical exploration of More’s contention that women’s happiness is dependent on restraint and submission. I have already suggested that happiness is a central preoccupation in the novel; and the key terms from contemporary debates about women play constantly through Austen’s careful discriminations between the degrees and kinds of happiness expected not just by Elizabeth but by a whole range of female characters. Reason, feeling, passion, propriety, decorum, modesty, delicacy, elegance, independence: as in the work of polemicists like Wollstonecraft and More, this embattled vocabulary is under scrutiny throughout
Pride and Prejudice
. How, then, might we place Elizabeth Bennet and the novel’s other female characters against the versions of womanhood which it evokes?
Elizabeth is clearly much closer to Wollstonecraft’s rational femininity and ‘independence of mind’
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