| This study examines the role of relationships among women in the novels of Jane Austen, and explores the pedagogical implications of a feminist critical perspective that would focus on such relationships. The complex networks of these relationships, when placed at the center of critical attention, point towards the existence of subversive elements in Austen's novels and thus provide a fresh perspective from which to problematize and critique patriarchal ideology through a new understanding of Austen's work--an understanding predicated on an active examination of cultural assumptions that inform our teaching of literature.;Two conduct manuals, James Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women and Thomas Gisborne's Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, are used to situate Austen's novels historically and ideologically, elucidating the way womanhood was constructed by a dominant ideology and providing deeper insights into the specifics of a historical location of Austen's texts.;When Austen's novels are read in relation to these manuals, we can observe how the production of specific notions of female identity by conduct literature has maintained specific forms of political authority and how, at the same time, relationships among women as depicted in Austen's novels tend to subvert some aspects of patriarchy. In the historical context provided by conduct books, a close reading of Austen's novels, focusing on female relationships--mother/daughter relations, sisterhoods, and friendships--reveals that although all of these relationships are to a certain extent inscribed by patriarchal modes of constructing womanhood, they also offer a possibility for a critique of these patriarchal assumptions by giving Austen heroines a chance to question and modify such traditional determinants of identity construction.;An analysis of Austen's novels focusing on the importance of relationships among women in constructing female identity may serve as a means of developing critical consciousness of college-level literature students. |
