Ill health, accident and death are themes common to all of Jane Austen's novels. Some illnesses are physical, whereas some of her heroines experience excessive psychological, emotional and spiritual traumas. These references are too numerous to be either coincidental, glossed over or ignored. Austen expressed an interest in the mind/body relationship, believing that illness could be brought upon in certain personalities by the sufferer herself, and it seems that she might have held theories similar to those advocated by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and even have anticipated those on feminine hysteria, and the effects of unconscious motives on behaviour, which were advanced by Freud in works such as The Interpretation of Dreams. This study examines Austen's novels, and the origin and purpose of physical and psychological illness in these, and looks at how Austen uses illness, accident and death, and more particularly how their roles progressively change and develop. For Austen's handling of these common issues appears to vary and to develop in line with the order of composition of her novels. She places increasing emphasis on them, not just to further plot, but also to reflect character change and development. Many of the parents or guardians of Austen's heroines are inadequate. And so Austen's heroines are often deprived of commendable models, left to find their own way, alone and in need of emotional support, to confront their youthful excesses, to work their way through these and to find their own destiny despite their handicaps. Self-improvement is neither pleasant nor easy, especially where one is young, inexperienced and alone. And, where heroines exhibit unhealthy or excessive interests in anything that diverts them from their paths of virtue or usefulness, the correction may frequently be painful. Thus most of the novels are, to a greater or lesser degree, filled with references to both physical and psychological ill health. This thesis examines how Austen used these illnesses, accidents and deaths in the various novels, both in the development of plot, as well as in the development of the character of the heroine in each instance. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

Jane Austen sprinkles deaths throughout her novels as plot devices and character indicators, but she does not tackle death directly. Yet death pervades her novels, in a subtle yet brutal way, in the lives of her female characters. Austen reveals that death was the definition and the destiny of women; it was the driving force behind the social and economic constructs that ruled the eighteenth-century woman's life, manifested in language, literature, religion, art, and even in a woman's doubts about herself. In Northanger Abbey Catherine Morland discovers that women, like female characters in gothic texts, are written and rewritten by the men whose language dominates them. Catherine herself becomes an example of real gothic when she is silenced and her spirit murdered by Henry Tilney. Marianne Dashwood barely escapes the powerful male constructs of language and literature in Sense and Sensibility. Marianne finds that the literal, maternal, wordless language of women counts for nothing in the social world, where patriarchal,figurative language rules, and in her attempt to channel her literal language into the social language of sensibility, she is placed in a position of more deadly nothingness, cast by society as a scorned woman and expected to die. Fanny Price in Mansfield Park is sacrificed as Eve, but in her death-like existence and in her rise to success she echoes Christ, who is ultimately a maternal figure that encapsulates the knowledge of the goddess, the knowledge that from death will come life. Emma Woodhouse in Emma discovers that her perfection, sanctioned by artistic standards, is really a means by which society eases its fears about death by projecting death onto women as a beautiful ideal. In Persuasion, Anne Elliotfindsthat women endure death while men struggle against it, and this endurance requires more courage than most men possess or understand. Austen's novels expose the undercurrent of death in women's lives, yet hidden in her heroines is the maternal power of women—the power to bear children, to bear language and culture, to bear both life and death.

Ill health, accident and death are themes common to all of Jane Austen's novels. Some illnesses are physical, whereas some of her heroines experience excessive psychological, emotional and spiritual traumas. These references are too numerous to be either coincidental, glossed over or ignored. Austen expressed an interest in the mind/body relationship, believing that illness could be brought upon in certain personalities by the sufferer herself, and it seems that she might have held theories similar to those advocated by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and even have anticipated those on feminine hysteria, and the effects of unconscious motives on behaviour, which were advanced by Freud in works such as The Interpretation of Dreams. This study examines Austen's novels, and the origin and purpose of physical and psychological illness in these, and looks at how Austen uses illness, accident and death, and more particularly how their roles progressively change and develop. For Austen's handling of these common issues appears to vary and to develop in line with the order of composition of her novels. She places increasing emphasis on them, not just to further plot, but also to reflect character change and development. Many of the parents or guardians of Austen's heroines are inadequate. And so Austen's heroines are often deprived of commendable models, left to find their own way, alone and in need of emotional support, to confront their youthful excesses, to work their way through these and to find their own destiny despite their handicaps. Self-improvement is neither pleasant nor easy, especially where one is young, inexperienced and alone. And, where heroines exhibit unhealthy or excessive interests in anything that diverts them from their paths of virtue or usefulness, the correction may frequently be painful. Thus most of the novels are, to a greater or lesser degree, filled with references to both physical and psychological ill health. This thesis examines how Austen used these illnesses, accidents and deaths in the various novels, both in the development of plot, as well as in the development of the character of the heroine in each instance. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

The aim of this study is to reveal how LBD adheres to postmodern tenets while also being ultimately suspicious of these principles. This suspicion of postmodern principles is reflected in the interaction between the main subject of the videos, Lizzie Bennet, and the audience. This examination invokes the questions of when, where, and how the audience experiences LBD. This illuminates the manner in which LBD functions as a postmodern literary text and how this text is critical of its digital composition. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This thesis argues that a ‘tradition of moral analysis’ between Jane Austen and George Eliot — a common ground which has been identified by critics from F.R. Leavis to Gillian Beer, but never fully explored — can be illuminated by turning to what this thesis calls ‘the reflective tradition’. In the eighteenth century, ideas about reflection provided a new and influential way of thinking about the human mind; about how we come to know ourselves and the world around us through the mind. The belief in the individual to act as his/her own guide through the cultivation of a reflective mind and attentiveness to a reflective voice emerges across a wide range of discourses. This thesis begins with an examination of reflection in the philosophy, children’s literature, novels, poetry, educational tracts and sermons that would have been known to Austen. It then defines Austen’s development of reflective dynamics by looking at her six major novels; finally, it analyzes Middlemarch to define Eliot’s proximity to this aspect of Austen’s art. The thesis documents Eliot’s reading of Austen through the criticism of G. H. Lewes to support a reading of Eliot’s assimilation of an Austenian attention to mental processes in her novels. Reflection is at the heart of moral life and growth for both novelists. This thesis corrects a tendency in Austen’s reception to focus on the mimetic aspect of her art, thereby overlooking the introspective sense of reflection. It offers new insights into Austen’s and Eliot’s work, and it contributes to an understanding of the development of the realist novel and the ethical dimension in the role of the novel reader.

This doctoral thesis analyses the evolution of responses to Jane Austen's fiction through continuations of her unfinished novel The Watsons (c.1803-5). Although the first full “appropriation” of an Austen novel ever published was a continuation of The Watsons and a total of eight completions appeared between 1850 and 2008, little research has been done to link the afterlife of The Watsons and changing perceptions of Austen. This thesis argues that the completions of The Watsons significantly illuminate Austen's reception: they expose conflicting readings of Austen's novels through textual negotiations between the completer's and Austen's voice. My study begins by examining how the first continuation, Catherine Hubback's The Younger Sister (1850), implies an alternative image of the Victorian Austen to that propounded by James Edward Austen-Leigh, Austen's first official biographer (Chapter 1). The next two chapters focus on the effects of World War I and II on modes of reading Austen. Through L. Oulton's (1923), Edith Brown's (1928) and John Coates's (1958) completions of The Watsons, this study examines the connection between Austen's fiction and different notions of Englishness, politics and the nation. Chapter Four addresses the contribution of the 1990s completions to the debate over Austen's feminism. Finally, Chapter Five analyses recent trends in Austenalia, which thwart the production of successful completions of The Watsons. My thesis presents the first substantial analysis of this body of work.

Three of the most notable English women authors, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot, explore similar themes of the individual, particularly the young woman, in relation to a hierarchical, patriarchal society, more specifically a crumbling paternalist society. My focus is on three Victorian novels' representations of society's transformation from a paternalistic nature to one of greater individualism; and in particular, I explore how women defined for themselves positions of power within these structures. So this study is twofold, one on representations of gender and the other of class; for the two are inseparable in discussing power relationships of Victorian women. Austen, Bronte, and Eliot understood and, to some degree, accepted the pervasive paternal values. Their novels, however, do not advocate radical social change; rather, their heroines willingly turn to domesticity. I aim to argue that each author, although dissatisfied with aspects of society, did not desire to radically alter women's role within society. The fictitious lives they created became both a representation and a critique of the ideologies surrounding them. The texts of Emma, Jane Eyre, and Middlemarch are representative of traditional social norms and yet question some of the culture's dominant codes, especially in relation to paternalism and gender. What strikes me about these novels is that although the female characters are limited by society, they are not ineffectual. Rather the authors portray women in control of their lives and able to make choices for themselves within the framework of society. My research includes social, philosophical, and political attitudes of the decades in which each novel was written, as well as personal philosophies held by Austen, Bronte, and Eliot in relation to gender and class and the influence of these philosophies in their art. Finally, my reading of the texts explicates evidences of the culture's and author's attitudes in relation to paternalism and gender.

There are many factors that contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gendered gaze in women's fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This thesis argues that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. My analysis of the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney shows that visuality — the nexus between the verbal and visual communication — provided them with a language within language capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that allowed for concealed resistance. It conveyed the actual ways in which women ‘should' see and appear in a society in which the reputation was image-based. My analysis journeys through physiognomic, psychological, theatrical and codified forms of visuality to highlight the multiplicity of its functions. I engage with scholarly critiques drawn from literature, art, optics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology to assert visuality's multidisciplinary influences and diplomatic potential. I show that in fiction and in actuality, women had to negotiate four scopic forces that determined their ‘looks' and manners of looking: the impartial spectator, the male gaze, the public eye and the disenfranchised female gaze. In a society dominated by ‘frustrated utterance,' penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, women novelists used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. This thesis thus offers new insights into verbal economy by reassessing expression and perception from an unconventional point-of-view.