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The Gothic novel plays on the exaggeration of prescribed sex roles and uses various narrative techniques to produce a social commentary on gender politics and to illustrate the consequences of a destroyed social structure. Through the examination of the construct of the Gothic narrative and its fragmentary style, the novels of Horace Walpole, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Jane Austen reveal similar treatments of the sexuality of their characters. The implementation of key Gothic elements—such as the castle, tyrannical father, and distressed damsel—serve to propel the novels’ questioning of the patriarchal system, the theme of women as commodities, and the economic value of sexuality. In addition to creating bizarre atmospheres of suspense and mystery, the authors artfully weave the fantastic elements of the Gothic into real responses to the changing culture and sexual anxiety of eighteenth-century England.

This thesis addresses the significant but often overlooked relationship between Jane Austen's works and the body of criticism about them and the two major craft movements of the nineteenth century: the Handicraft Movement and the Arts and Crafts Movement. The connections occur at two important moments during that century—first, at the moment of Austen's career during the Regency/Romantic period, and second, at the Victorian moment of the years surrounding the 1869 publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh's Memoir about Austen. In both of these moments, critics and reviewers repeatedly respond to Austen's life and works by using craft-related diction. This diction and the coetaneous nature of the craft and critical movements are indicative of the ongoing struggle throughout the nineteenth century to negotiate, eliminate, or redefine the art versus craft aesthetic binary. During the Regency moment, this negotiation begins to emerge in the heyday of the Handicraft Movement and its love for ornamentation. However, it is not until the years surrounding the publication of Austen-Leigh's Memoir that the interdisciplinary ideologies of craft and literary aesthetics burst forth. This period of overlap is short-lived, lasting approximately two decades. Nevertheless, by acknowledging its existence and examining its influence upon the Memoir and the criticism surrounding it, we can gain a greater appreciation for the aesthetic context in which the Memoir was published and for the image of Austen crafted by Victorian reviewers—an image that would ultimately become the literary inheritance of readers and scholars in the twentieth century.

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The least popular of all her novels, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) depicts a heroine, precariously situated in the margins of the aristocracy, who is intellectually educated rather than accomplished. As the timid Fanny Price navigates the morally fraught social world of Mansfield Park, Austen comments on the exclusion and mistreatment of women in the British public sphere at large as well as criticizes the practice of educating women into accomplishment as exemplified by the sparkling socialite, Mary Crawford. This thesis positions Austen in context with educational writers William Cowper, the poet, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the philosopher. I analyze all three writers’ messages about education, along with the implications of the genre/form with which they choose to enter public discourses, including the poem, the political tract, and the novel. Considering the historical and cultural conceptions of the novel as trivial and feminine during Austen’s day, her decision to employ this form suggests that she is interested in reforming the novel into a platform for serious public engagement. Austen ultimately anticipates the Victorian novel by revealing the form’s potential value as intellectual exercise and an important tool for women to join public conversation. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Though some scholars have maintained that Jane Austen closely adheres to the ideology of courtesy novels and conduct literature, I argue that Austen uses her knowledge of this ideology to reveal the flaws in reader assumptions about the presumed commonsensical nature of the courtesy novel and its feminine ideal. Austen is familiar with the conventions of eighteenth-century fiction, but, rather than adopting its tropes in her own work, she uses realism to parody its excesses and improbabilities; this realism then works against reader expectations and exposes paradoxes inherent in the courtesy novel and in conduct-book literature itself. In my thesis I observe how Austen uses courtesy novel tropes to expose or even mock the courtesy novel's inherently unrealistic qualities, and I do so by examining the act of "reading" in her novels: specifically, I argue that the literal reading that Austen's characters engage in does not produce the expected outcomes predicted by conduct books and courtesy novels; that the figurative reading of one character by another demonstrates the dangerousness and unsuitability of the heroine as "open book," as conduct books and courtesy novels urged her to be, as well as the irrationality and hypocrisy of acting the part of "closed book" to her intended lover; and, finally, that the act of reading an Austen novel is intended to prevent the absorption or interpretation of unrealistic ideals, through insistence on (more) realistic outcomes and through narrative intervention.

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Novels of manners exhibit social economies that bear some metaphorical resemblance to literal economies. In England and America, before the women's movement and the introduction of large numbers of women into the workforce, this was the woman's economy: the economy of manners. This thesis examines three novels of manners and argues that there is a sustaining economic metaphor to characterize each author's attitude toward the manners economy they portray. In Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, social economies are controlled by an invisible hand that can be trusted to reward deserving economic agents, and punish the undeserving. William Thackeray's Vanity Fair shows how social economies can be impacted by speculative bubbles, when some commodities are temporarily given more value than they really hold. Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth portrays a society which has gone off the gold standard of virtue, that values its social currencies without that organizing principle of virtue to give them stability. Each novel has some relationship with the codes of etiquette of its day, and contains many of the same currencies, though valued at dramatically different rates in each context. Female protagonists must take stock of the prevailing economic conditions, but their success or failure will have as much to do with the function or dysfunction of those conditions as with their own social choices. / Master of Arts / Novels of manners exhibit social economies that bear some metaphorical resemblance to literal economies. In England and America, before the women’s movement and the introduction of large numbers of women into the workforce, this was the woman’s economy: the economy of manners. This thesis examines three novels of manners and argues that there is a sustaining economic metaphor to characterize each author’s attitude toward the manners economy they portray. In Jane Austen’s <i>Mansfield Park</i>, social economies are controlled by an invisible hand that can be trusted to reward deserving economic agents, and punish the undeserving. William Thackeray’s <i>Vanity Fair</i> shows how social economies can be impacted by speculative bubbles, when some commodities are temporarily given more value than they really hold. Edith Wharton’s <i>The House of Mirth</i> portrays a society which has gone off the gold standard of virtue, that values its social currencies without that organizing principle of virtue to give them stability. Each novel has some relationship with the codes of etiquette of its day, and contains many of the same currencies, though valued at dramatically different rates in each context. Female protagonists must take stock of the prevailing economic conditions, but their success or failure will have as much to do with the function or dysfunction of those conditions as with their own social choices.