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L'hypothèse à la source ce mémoire est que, dans le roman Emma, Jane Austen nous place devant le problème de l'incomplétude humaine et suggère que sa meilleure solution réside en une relation amoureuse fondée dans l'amitié vertueuse. Notre premier chapitre montre, en relevant les erreurs que commet Emma dans ses liens avec ses trois amies et trois amants, les conséquences néfastes d'un aveuglement sur la finalité naturelle de l'être humain, qui a besoin d'autrui pour se perfectionner et atteindre le bonheur. Notre second chapitre analyse et hiérarchise trois solutions offertes dans Emma au problème de l'incomplétude. Il conclut que le couple Knightley, qui est fondé dans une estime réciproque et un souci mutuel de rectitude morale et intellectuelle, incarne la forme supérieure de sociabilité humaine: ce couple est en mesure de s'entraider, de s'entr'éduquer et de s'entreconnaître, ce qui comble au mieux l'incomplétude qui est le lot de l'humanité.

The eighteenth-century female of sensibility was characterized by delicate nerves that allowed her to feel her surroundings and enabled her to choose virtue over vice more consistently than males. While females were considered virtuous, their "innate" delicacy or weakness became their dominant trait and the true focus of male admiration. Although critics have already observed that Jane Austen's novels work against this idealization of feminine weakness, not one has recognized exactly how Austen transforms the female of sensibility tradition. Austen dissociates a female's delicacy from her virtue, making the primary source of virtue intellect and, in doing so, relocates male desire on to a female's inner self. Her novels work in progression to achieve this goal. Sense and Sensibility exposes delicacy's negative effects. Subsequent novels transform the sensibility tradition using two strategies. In Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, several relationships demonstrate the different ways a dissociation and relocation can occur. Emma and Persuasion employ the second strategy: the problem of illusion. The existence of a weak female as attractive proves only to be delusive and is ultimately rejected by the novels' characters and readers. Hence, these five novels progressively use not only male and female interactions but characters' and readers' perceptions to eliminate the idea of feminine weakness in Austen's fictional world. / Graduation date: 1999

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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.