Emerging Feminist Awareness:A Comparison Of Sense And Sensibility And Persuasion

Jane Austen is an outstanding English woman novelist at the turn of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. In her short writing career, Austen only accomplished six completed novels, all of which develop with the plot of women seeking marriages. This kind of plot makes Austen’s works the subject of frequent study under the microscope of literary feminists.Feminist criticism always concentrates on whether the themes of and the characters in Austen’s works reflect any feminist awareness. Studies on the changes of feminist awareness revealed in Austen’s works of different phases are relatively weak, so are the studies on the connection between the changes and the historical context.This thesis combines Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze theory and historical context to analyze Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion with the purpose of identifying the changes of feminist awareness in these two novels. It is hoped that this thesis can serve as a new approach to identify changes of feminist awareness in Austen’s works and offer a new angle to understand the differences between Austen’s earlier and later works within the historical context. The analysis shows that in Sense and Sensibility, the gazes of the characters reflect a relatively conservative and negative attitude towards feminist awareness, which conforms to the rigid hierarchal society, women’s subordinate status, female writers’anxiety of authorship and the features of Neoclassicism. While in Persuasion, the gazes of the characters reflect a more positive attitude towards feminist awareness, which conforms to the rising of middle class, the awakening of feminist awareness, confidence of successful female writers and the features of Romanticism. These changes were in line with the changing historical tide. Therefore, we may say that changes of feminist awareness can be identified in Austen’s novels of different phases and the changing historical context might be the possible root of these changes.