Jane Austen’s Novels and the Contemporary Social and...

Content Page: Content Page: 2 Introduction 3 3 1.Eighteenth-Century Conduct Literature 4 1.1. The Introduction to Conduct Manuals 4 1.2. Patriarchy in Conduct Literature 4 1.3. The Private Sphere as Woman’s Domain. 5 1.4. Characteristics of ideal female features 6 1.5. Conduct Manuals and the Novels 9 2. Romantic Novels. 11 2.1. Introduction to the Novel. 11 2.2. The Novel of Manners, Sentiment and Emulation. 12 2.3 The Gothic Romance. 13 3. Jane Austen and Her Novels in relation to the Contemporary Literature. 15 3.1. Austen’s Criticism about the Contemporary Fiction. 15 3.2. Jane Austen as a Conservative Writer and as a Social Critic. 16 3.3. Austen’s writing in her own perception. 17 4. Pride and Prejudice. 20†¦show more content†¦Conduct literature establishes what female qualities are deemed socially acceptable, and, in the process, reduces women to objects that passively conform to these dictates (39). 1.2. Patriarchy in Conduct Literature It is important here what the author means by the word ‘patriarchal’, because this expression is widely used throughout her research as a key word comprising men’s attitude towards women in the eighteenth century. Dobosiewicz presents the evolution of the very term, inclining mostly towards Sylvia Walby’s understanding of it in Theorizing Patriarchy (1990). Walby states there that patriarchy is a â€Å"system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women.† (quoted from Dobosiewicz, p. 38 ). Furthermore, Dobosiewicz claims that the power of patriarchy lies in the biological differences between sexes. The weaker sex, that is women, has to care for â€Å"different social tasks, primarily those of wife and mother†(Dobosiewicz 38). Such view gave males a pretext for assigning women to the private sphere. In patriarchal discourse the meaning and role of women are perceived †in relation to a norm which is male†(Dobosiewicz 38). That is why social tasks of women are defined as â€Å"different†, different from that of men. Another important aspect of patriarchy, which finds reflection in conduct literature is the view that patriarchy