Not Subordinate: Empowering Women in the Marriage-Plot--The Novels of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen

Abstract

For the most part, feminist critics have found the marriage-plot novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries disappointingly un successful at challenging the patriarchal ideology of the period, an ideology best characterized as teaching women to view themselves as subordinate to, dependent upon, and at the service of the men in their lives. According to critics of the genre, there are two ways of at tempting to challenge that ideology within the marriage-plot struc ture: by including Bildung plots for the heroine, plots usually defined as being about the heroine's growth to maturity in ways that have lit tle to do with her relationship with her male protagonist,1 and by providing heroines who depart from the period's reigning view of proper women as self-effacing, tractable, and inferior in courage, drive, and intellect to men, but who are, nonetheless, virtuous and hence deserving of reward.2 The argument insists, however, that even when such attempts have been made, the genre remains capable only of presenting women as relational creatures and as objects of other's desires—not as desiring, acting subjects with their own autonomy. By consistently concluding with the heroine's wedding—by presenting marriage to the male protagonist as the virtuous heroine's best re ward—such novels compromise their challenge to conventional views of proper femininity both by suppressing the heroine's move ment toward autonomy under the plot of her movement toward rela tionality, and by reinscribing even refreshingly unconventional fe male characters into the conventional role of subordination for women, the role of wife.3 Part of what has proved disturbing to feminist critics is the near ubiquity of this plot form in heroine-centered novels from the mid eighteenth through much of the nineteenth century. The dearth of