Jane Austen's Rejection of Rousseau: A Novelistic and Feminist Initiation

Abstract

The question of Jane Austen's feminist credentials has long been a puzzling one for critics.(1) The six novels - those little bits of Ivory on which she worked so fine a Brush - hardly seem the canvas for revolutionary expression. However, we may be wrong trying to find Jane Austen the kind of explicit message that we associate with more modern feminist writers. Instead, I contend that Austen responded to prevailing ideas concerning sexual stereotyping a highly controlled and consistent fashion and that the emergence of what can be called a feminist perspective her novels actually paralleled her growing mastery of the conventions of novel-writing. A comparison of two Austen novels particular demonstrates this thesis. Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice are the products of Austen's period. Northanger Abbey was her first mature novel; Pride and Prejudice is generally viewed as the last of her early works and the precursor to her later phase.(2) Both are novels of education, but they differ their representation of what constitutes the proper ends of the educational process for men and women. They can, fact, be seen as mirror images of each other their presentation of contrasting responses to the philosophy of education (as it relates to sexual role) first proposed by Jean Jacques the mid-eighteenth century. The different applications of the Rousseauist model these two novels traces a formal and a conceptual evolution for jane Austen - a movement from novice to mature author, and from social apologist to independent and indeed feminist thinker. I Rousseau's influence on Austen must first be said to have been stylistic. The sentimental style popularized by was the prevailing model for writers throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Although Samuel Richardson may have introduced sentimentalism the form of his characters' refined sensitivity to virtue, was the first to link the concept to stylistic and thematic conventions involving highly descriptive and effusive language, a preoccupation with natural landscape, and a nostalgic attitude toward past experience. Margharita Laski reports that Austen's brother Henry edited a newspaper at Oxford 1789-90 to which he contributed essays in the sentimental school of Rousseau (30). The gothic and romance novelists of the period (Fanny Burney, Charlotte Lennox, Maria Edgeworth, and Ann Radcliffe particular), all of whom Austen read and admired, were also followers of this school. But if Austen did an apprenticeship the sentimental style, it is with a difference. Love and Freindship, Lesley Castle, Lady Susan, and most of the of juvenilia are parodies of sentimentalism and, as such, reflect Austen's early dependence on the sentimental style while anticipating her ultimate rejection of it. By the time she wrote Northanger Abbey she had developed a distinctive style which was markedly unsentimental without being directly parodic of that style (though traces of her early satirical approach to sentimentalism still linger the novel's theme and the rendering of Isabella Thorpe's dialogue). But if Austen outgrew her dependence on the sentimental style by the time she wrote Northanger Abbey, she still relied, at this stage her career, on Rousseau's model for male-female role characteristics to facilitate her plot structure and character development. This model had its origin Rousseau's two most novelistic works: Julie, or The New Eloise and (especially) Emile, or on Education. Both books were translated into English almost as soon as they were written (in 1761 and 1762, respectively) and enjoyed an extraordinary popularity, especially among women, both France and England during the time Austen began writing her novels.(3) Insofar as jane Austen adopted the Rousseauist model for male-female role-playing Northanger Abbey, she was still profoundly imitative of Rousseau, and the novel continues to represent an apprenticeship. …