Jane Austen har blivit en av den engelskspråkiga litteraturens klassiska författare med sina romaner som handlar om unga kvinnor under det sena sjuttonhundratalet och det tidiga artonhundratalet. En av hennes första romaner, Northanger Abbey (1818) är ett av hennes mest humoristiska och ironiska verk. Den är inte en av hennes mest omtalade eller kändaste romaner men det är, med mina egna ord, en av de mest underskattade av hennes romaner. I Northanger Abbey reflekteras de faktiska klasskillnader, könsroller och könsförväntningar som fanns i Englands samhälle under hennes samtid. Med hjälp av genusteori med en biografisk förankring undersöker denna uppsats hur Austen använder satir för att kritisera samhället. Genom en djupgående analys av romanen finner uppsatsen att samhällskritik kan skönjas, där kvinnans förutsättningar, roll och ställning, sociala konventioner, patriarkatet och samtidens populära genre gotiken kritiseras. Uppsatsen kommer fram till att Austen använder humor, ironi och parodi som ett verktyg för att kunna säga vad som var offentligt otillåtet och romanen kritiserar därmed samhällsnormerna. Austen har skrivit en roman som innefattar ett flertal budskap och visar feministiska förtecken då hon tar ståndpunkt för kvinnors rättigheter och ställning. Genom dess rika omfång visar sig Northanger Abbey vara ett lämpligt material att använda i skolan för att främja elevernas utveckling och lärande, i muntlig likväl som skriftlig form. / Jane Austen novels deals with young women in the late eighteenth century and early twentieth century and have made her one of the classical writers of the English literature. Northanger Abbey (1818), one of her first novels, is also one of her most humoristic and ironic productions. Although, it is not her most mentioned or most famous novels but it is, in my own words, one of her most underestimated novels. In Northanger Abbey, the actual class differences, gender roles and gender expectations that existed in England during her time are reflected. This paper uses gender theory with a biographic foundation to examine how Austen uses satire to criticize society. Through an analyze of the novel, social criticism can be distinguished where women’s conditions, their role and position as well as social conventions, the patriarchy and the popular gothic genre are criticized. The essay concludes that Austen uses humor, irony and parody as tools to be able to say what was publicly forbidden to say and the novel thereby criticizes the social norms. Austen has written a novel that includes a number of messages and shows feministic signs as she takes a stand for women’s rights and status. Through Northanger Abbey’s rich content it proves to be a suitable material to use in the school to promote the students’ development and learning, in oral as well as written form.

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Le thème de cette thèse est le droit des femmes à la fin du dix-huitième siècle dans les romans de l’auteure britannique Jane Austen. L’abus psychologique (et parfois physique) entre femmes est omniprésent au moment où le sujet de l’égalité entre hommes et femmes est à son apogée. Depuis la publication du volume Jane Austen and the War of Ideas de Marilyn Butler, on ne limite plus nos interprétations aux significations littéraires des romans, au contraire, elles se multiplient dans les champs culturels, sociaux, économiques... Ceci permet de mieux comprendre l’époque reflétée dans ses oeuvres. Les interactions humaines se compliquent: les mères essayent à tout prix de « vendre » leurs filles à l’homme le plus riche. Pour ce faire, ces mères résistent aux normes patriarcales. De plus, les femmes veuves sont problématiques car leur statut social ne peut pas être défini. Austen peint et critique les veuves autonomes qui essayent vigoureusement d’exercer leurs pouvoirs à travers leur sexualité et en manipulant leur vocabulaire dans le but de monter dans l’échelon social. En fait, les femmes de tous âges et toutes classes essayent de manipuler les autres pour leurs gains personnels. L’obtention de pouvoir fait en sorte que ces femmes compétitives ne créent pas une société inclusive: elles se marginalisent encore plus. Ce combat interne permet d’autant plus aux hommes d’injurier les femmes. Finalement, avec la montée du cinéma de nos jours, les oeuvres d’Austen sont traduites pour atteindre un grand nombre de spectateurs. Parmi la panoplie de films, l’abus est traduit et interprété à différents degrés. / The focus of this study is women’s rights in Jane Austen’s novels. Despite the increasing awareness of individuality and human rights, psychological (and often physical) abuse exists. After Marilyn Butler’s seminal study Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Austen is better understood within the contexts of her time. Human relationships are much more complicated as mothers try to “sell-off” their daughters to the highest bidder. These women attempt to secure their own financial future regardless of their children’s wishes or patriarchal norms. Moreover, widows who once exercised power through their husbands see this power relinquished, as society tries to identify their social status. Austen criticizes independent widows who try to obtain power by using their sexuality and manipulative language. The need for control spreads to all females no matter their social standing. This develops a competitive nature amongst them that limits the growth of society. This lack of unity allows men to abuse women themselves. Finally, with the advent of film studies, it is important to look at Austen novels translated into this media. Directors interpret abuse in various degrees, but most acknowledge its presence.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

This study examines the settings in Jane Austen's six novels. Chapter I introduces the topic generally, and refers briefly to Jane Austen's aims and methods of creating her settings. Short accounts are given of the emphasis put on setting in the criticism of Jane Austen's work; of the chronology of the novels; and of the use made of this aspect of the novel in eighteenth-century predecessors. Chapter II deals with the treatment of place in Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. The consideration of five novels together makes it possible to generalize about aspects of place common to all , and to discuss particulars peculiar to individual novels without, I hope, excessive repetition. The chapter may be thought disproportionately long, but this aspect of setting is most prominent and important in the delineation of character. Chapter III discusses the handling of spatial detail and time in these five novels. Chapter IV offers a fuller analysis of what is the chief concern of this thesis, the nature and function of setting, in respect of the single novel Persuasion, and attempts to draw together into a coherent whole some of the points made in Chapters II and III. Persuasion separates conveniently from the other works, not only because it was written after them, but more importantly because in it there is a new development in Jane Austen's use of setting. Some critics, notably E.M. Forster and B.C. Southam, have found startlingly new qualities in the setting of Sanditon, and, certainly, the most striking feature of the fragment is the treatment of place. But Jane Austen left off writing Sanditon in March 1817 because of illness, and the twelve chapters make up too small and unfinished a piece to be considered in the same way as the other novels. The Watsons, too, except for some references to it in Chapter I, does not come within the scope of this dissertation. Another introductory point needs to be made briefly. Where it is necessary, the distinction between Jane Austen and the omniscient narrator is observed, but generally, partly because it is clear that Jane Austen's values are close to those of the narrator, and partly because it is convenient, traditional and sensible to do so, the name "Jane Austen" is used to refer both to the actual person and to the narrator of the novels.

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.

In recent decades there have been many attempts to pull Austen into the fold of high Romantic literature. On one level, these thematic comparisons are useful, for Austen has long been anachronistically treated as separate from the Romantic tradition. In the past, her writings have essentially straddled Romantic classification, labeled either as hangers-on in the satiric eighteenth-century literary tradition or as early artifacts of a kind of proto-Victorianism. To a large extent, scholars have described Austen as a writer departing from, rather than embracing, the literary trends of the Romantic era. Yet, while recent publications depicting a “Romantic Austen” yield impressive insights into the timeliness of her fiction, they haven't fully addressed Austen's participation in some of the most crucial literary debates of her time. Thus, it is my intention in this essay to extend the discussion of Austen as a Romantic to her participation in Romantic-era debates over emergent literary categories of authorship and realism. I argue that we can best contextualize Austen by examining how her model of authorship differs from those that surfaced in literary conversations of the time, particularly those relating to the high Romantic myth of the solitary genius. Likewise, as questions of solitary authorship often overlap with discussions of realism and romance in literature, it is important to reexamine how Austen responds to these categories, particularly in the context of a strictly Romantic engagement with these terms. I find that, though Austen's writing has long been implicated in the emergence of realism in literature, little has been written to link this impulse to the earlier emergence of Romantic-era categories of authorship and literary creativity. I contend that Austen's self-projection (as both an author and realist) engages with Romantic-era literary debates over these categories; likewise, I argue that her response to these emergent concerns is more complex and nuanced than has heretofore been accounted for in literary scholarship.

This paper examines the expansive history of literary tomboys in the century preceding Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868). Applying concepts from gender performativity theory, it explores earlier and previously overlooked portrayals of tomboys (or, alternatively, "hoydens" or "romps"), especially in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's A Trip to Scarborough (1777), Isaac Bickerstaffe's The Romp; A Comic Opera in Two Acts (1786), Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1817), and E.D.E.N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand (1859). Because the tomboy phenomenon emphasizes that gender roles must be learned and can be resisted, tomboy characters are implicitly making a feminist point. As such, in the gap between Austen and Southworth, texts with minor and derogatory mentions of tomboys connect tomboyism with the prevailing anti-feminism of the early nineteenth century. By examining the developmental arc of tomboyism throughout literature and culture, this essay develops a greater understanding of how tomboyism fits within different historical periods and was a fully recognizable type in Britain and America decades before Alcott's Jo March supposedly normalized it in popular culture.

Les romans de Jane Austen sont souvent perçus comme étant une narration parfaite de la vie domestique au dix-neuvième siècle. La plupart des intrigues sont centrées autour de quelques familles et d'une héroïne qui, à la fin du roman, est récompensée à travers son mariage avec l'homme de son choix (qui s'avère souvent riche et muni d'une bonne position sociale). Puisque les romans d'Austen se terminent généralement par un mariage conventionnel et apparaissent d'une envergure limitée, les analyses des thèmes féministes sous-jacents ne sont pas apparues avant le vingtième siècle. Plusieurs études ont révélé qu'au dessous de ces romans à caractère domestique se cache des arguments féministes en faveur de l'éducation des femmes et une critique des inégalités entre les sexes et des codes de conduite. L'étude qui suit comparera le féminisme d'Austen à celui de Mary Wollstonecraft, à partir de ses essais A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, ainsi que ses romans Mary et The Wrongs of Woman. Cette analyse portera aussi sur trois des romans d'Austen : Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility et Mansfield Park. Ces romans reflètent clairement la situation des femmes de l'époque et s'attardent sur l'importance de l'éducation des femmes, les stéréotypes socialement définis, les relations homme-femme et les situations de violence dans le mariage et la famille. En comparant son engagement avec cette problématique aux oeuvres de Wollstonecraft, cette étude démontre que, au travers de ses romans, Austen était beaucoup plus consciente et engagée avec la société dans laquelle elle vivait qu'on ne l'imaginait