The First Voice Of Feminist Literature: A Feminist Analysis Of Jane Austen & Pride And Prejudice

Jane Austen is a distinguished writer in the literary history. Her works, although small in number, are all of high literary value. As a woman writer, she showes a great deal of concern about the prevailing gender discrimination against women of her time and forms her individual notions on this problem, which are implied in her novels.There has been a disputation among critics about whether Jane Austen can be regarded as a feminist. In our opinion, although Austen herself had never declared herself belonging to the feminist group, nor had she ever publicly expressed views against female oppression, her female consciousness of protesting patriarchal injustice to women, sort of meek and limited though, does exist in her works; and her writing indeed promoted the feminist development in the budding period of it.This paper tries to prove the significance of Jane Austen's writing by studying the social and literary circumstances of her time, and clarify her feminist views and limitations through the analysis of her most popular work, Pride and Prejudice.After exploration we find that the general condition of that time was to a great extent unfavorable to women's writing. The notion of women's being intellectually inferior was so deeply rooted in the society that many male critics had a prejudice against women writers, which we call the critical 'misogyny', represented most obviously in their personal attacks to women writers in literary criticism; and that they were inclined to adopt a 'protective' attitude toward the other sex, which presented itself mainly as the subjective denial of their conscious efforts in literary cultivation and the scorn of the commonplace subject matters of their works. In such a disadvantageouscontext, Jane Austen's taking up writing and adhering to her style is, in itself,a feminist act; besides, in more than one aspect, she adopt the same viewswith Mary Wollstonecraft------the well-known feminist. All the above factsare indicative of Jane Austen's being a precursor of feminism in the literary...