Elizabeth Bennet. Emma Woodhouse. Marianne Dashwood. Jane Austen has been responsible
for creating some of the most frequently adapted and analyzed women in the English literary canon.
Along with BuzzFeed quizzes asking “which SATC or Little Women” character you are,
there is always fanfare about which Jane Austen heroine you are.
But beyond the big three. Well mostly … big two. Who are the women of Jane Austen’s completed
novels? How do they reveal to us, her modern audience, any insight into her growth as an
author, her politics, and just how she feels about what makes a girlboss and a #girlboss.
This is Austen lady’s night. Oh, What a Night.
Let’s go in reverse cool girl order and start with
Fanny Price, the heroine of Austen’s second-longest novel, Mansfield Park.
Unlike a lot of Austen’s other protagonists, Fanny is poor-poor, and is only spared an orphan’s
existence because her aunt married well. She is brought in as the poor cousin to the rich Bertram
family to be a companion to their daughters. All the while, Fanny is constantly being reminded by
everyone, especially her aunt Mrs. Norris, that she is here as charity. She doesn’t belong.
Well, everyone but her cousin Edmund who is her love interest in the story. And yes,
I said cousin. First cousin. But it’s regency-era England and they are pretty okay with that.
Fanny is not an active player in her story. Years of being told she is nothing,
has done immense damage to her self-esteem. As a result, the reader is constantly in her head,
frustrated at how little mobility Fanny has to change her fate.
In the journal, The Eighteenth Century, George Haggerty says of Fanny:
“Austen creates a heroine who stands apart from the central action of the narrative.
None of her other heroines behave this way, but then none of them is wrenched out of her
home and forced to come to terms with a family in which she is not fully welcome. [...] The novel
shows nothing more vividly than it shows Fanny's mettle; for even when she is most frustrating,
she is struggling to be herself in a world that is distinctly un-friendly. In a sense,
the real action of the novel takes place in Fanny's responses to everything around her,
for if she is shunted off to the side of what seems
at times like the main action of the novel, then so are the readers who attend to her.”
What makes Fanny interesting from a character standpoint is she is a victim of emotional
abuse. She has been mistreated so deeply but remains almost martyr-like in her devotion.
We also see that the Bertrams may be rich, but have no moral fortitude which might be Austen’s
own political commentary since it is established that part of their money comes from slavery.
Clara Calvo, professor of English at University of Murcia (mur-SEE-a), has called Fanny “priggish”
but I think what makes Fanny so unlikable is that she isn’t Gilmore Girls poor.
A noble, wish-fulfillment poor where you’ve somehow pulled yourself up,
are endlessly witty and have your pick of fine suitors.
Fanny is broken and does not have the mobility, money, or opportunities to have more in her life.
She can only endure because that is what she has been trained to do.
It’s not fun, but it’s real.
Continuing our class discourse there is Anne Elliot the heroine of Persuasion.
Persuasion was the final completed novel to be published by Austen
and in it you see the continued evolution of Austen as a writer.
Anne Elliot is 27-years-old when we meet her, unmarried. So she is basically a #spinster
to everyone around her. We find out that she was once engaged to marry a man named Frederick
Wentworth, a young fine common naval officer. Who was clever, but poor.
Sadly, the people in her life had never seen Aladdin
and persuaded (heh-heh), her to break off the engagement.
Now, nearly a decade later, Wentworth is a self-made rich hottie and a Navy Captain.
So now Anne is singing Sk8er Boi to herself watching the guy she used to knowwwww
be hot and cool.
Also, is Sk8er Boi an adaptation of Persuasion? Let us know in the comments below.
Classwise, Austen tears the hereditary aristocracy to shreds and portrays its men as either villains,
wasteful or vain, in contrast to Wentworth who created his own money. Unlike the rest
of Austen’s heroines, it is Anne who comes from money and her partner is lower class.
Unlike Darcy or Edmund or any of the other men in Austen's novels, Wentworth isn’t a savor from poverty.
He is a savior from blind elitism. And through Austen’s very insular writing of Anne
we get a character, who is considered to be the most perceptive heroine.
As Harvard Professor Deidre Shauna Lynch explains, “… [Austen] casts her protagonists as the silent
and sympathetic observers of other people’s stories and the repositories of their secrets
Their participation in situations of spectatorship and secret-sharing
endows Anne Elliot and Elinor Dashwood, in particular, with the qualities that novel
readers in Austen’s lifetime were learning to associate with third-person narrators; likewise
the capacity that each has for a self-possession that seems to numb her sense of self-interest.”
Like Fanny, Anne is not a sexy heroine, but she represents the growth of Austen’s authorship.
Her work was very class conscious and these two books have some of her most
thoughtful commentary on class, wealth, and love.
… And then you get Northanger Abbey. Northanger Abbey is a satirical coming of age novel
that pokes fun at gothic novels, but let's be real here—it's a YA novel.
Our leading lady, Catherine Morland, is a “heroine in training” who loves gothic novels
a lot. Due to her lack of real life perspective--coupled with a rampant imagination
she creates realities in her mind in order to fill in the gaps within her own social naivety.
Catherine is … fine. She’s kind of boring because her story doesn’t have that many stakes.
She’s just silly and eventually stops being silly.
If anything what makes Abbey a fun novel is seeing how petty Jane Austen felt about the gothic novel
with it’s overly perfect characters. Catherine is made plain and middle class. Her life interest,
Henry Tilney, is a passive soft boy instead of a handsome brave hyper-masculine man.
It is interesting as literature, but not as a story.
The Big Three of Jane Austen novels are Emma,
Pride & Prejudice, and Sense & Sensibility. If they were 90s/2000s teen movies they would be
Jawbreaker, Mean Girls, and Clueless, respectively.
Emma is the Jawbreaker of the big three of the Jane Austen novel
because while it is a teen classic, it is a little bit more cutthroat.
Especially because while people might find Fanny boring and Anne a little too clean cut,
Emma is kind of a mean girl and that has been rubbing people wrong since 1815.
And yes, I know that Clueless is based on Emma,
but for the sake of this argument the point is moot.
Emma is rich, in fact the novel begins with saying that Emma Woodhouse is
“handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition... and had lived
nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."
Throughout the novel, convincing herself that she is an apt matchmaker attempts to
manipulate the love life of her friend Harriet Smith. However, due to her elitism, she almost
ruins Harriet’s own chance for happiness when the girl falls in love with a handsome farmer,
who Emma deems not socially good enough for her friend.
Jane Austen even said that with Emma she wanted to create a heroine that
only she would like. Emma is spoiled, over-confident, and likes to meddle in
the lives of people like dolls because she simply has the standing in society to do so.
But that is intentional.
As Austen Scholar, John Mullan, so aptly puts it concerning Emma’s snobbery:
“Of course she is. But Austen, with a refusal of moralism worthy of Flaubert, abandons her
protagonist to her snobbery and confidently risks inciting foolish readers to think that the author
must be a snob too. Emma’s snobbery pervades the novel, from that moment when we hear Mrs Goddard,
the mistress of the little girls’ boarding school, and Mrs and Miss Bates described as “the most
come-at-able” denizens of Highbury (meaning that they are at the beck and call of Emma and her
hypochondriac father). Austen has the integrity to make Emma snobbish even when she is in the right.”
This might come as a shock but, female characters
are allowed to be unlikable. Character development is good actually.
Sense & Sensibility is Austen’s first novel and it is a very good one. It gave us the Dashwoods,
and the two important sisters of the novel, Elinor and Marianne
who encompass the titular Sense & Sensibility.
Elinor is a pragmatic softy who tries to hold it together, but she is brimming with lust
and just wants to hold hands very much with Edward Ferrars. In the novel she finds out
Edward made a promise to marry Lucy Steele when he was younger and forces himself to give up Elinor.
Both make the noble decisions and are rewarded for it with a happily ever after.
Marianne meets a bad boy named John Willoughby, she falls in love with f-boy, but later finds out
that he’s not that innocent. He is a rake who has already seduced a 15-year-old girl, then abandoned
her although she was pregnant. He was cut off from his family and therefore in need of a rich wife.
He loves Marianne, but she’s broke, so he abandons her. This leads to Marianne becoming
distraught but eventually she returns the affections of the older,
more stable, and secretly low-key Byronic, Colonel Brandon.
This ending has been seen as controversial for some as some
feel Marianne is shamed into not loving as deeply.
A lot of fanfic explores the idea of Willoughby being redeemed,
why is that explored, and even hinted at—but not canon?
Cultural historian and literary critic, Mary Poovey, makes the following point: “Consistently,
Elinor makes the prudent choice, even when doing so is painful; almost as consistently,
Marianne’s decisions are self-indulgent and harmful, either to herself or to someone
else. But this neat design is less stable than an absolute and authoritative moral system would seem
to require. Many readers have found Marianne’s “spirit” more appealing than Elinor’s cautious,
prim, and even repressive reserve, and they have found Marianne’s passionate
romance with Willoughby more attractive than the prolonged frustration to which Elinor submits.”
Marianne’s passion and young love is engaging and beautiful in some ways. Especially since she does
meet a great love, but the moral is not that loving deeply is bad.
Instead it is more that love without respect and morality means nothing.
Which brings us to … Elizabeth Bennet, the Final Boss of Jane Austen heroines.
Lizzy THE Bennet, the protagonist of Jane Austen’s second novel, Pride and Prejudice.
Published in 1813, Pride and Prejudice concerns itself with the fortunes and misfortunes of the
Bennet family; the family’s patriarch, Mr. Bennet, is a gentleman farmer with a modest income of 2000
pounds a year and five daughters—meaning none of his children can legally inherit any of it,
because, you guessed it, systemic misogyny. You've seen Downton Abbey, you know how it goes.
Likewise, Mrs. Bennet has no fortune to her name, and thus the predicament that spurs on the plot:
Will the Bennet sisters be able to find suitors rich enough to care for them before their father dies?
Enter Lizzy Bennet, the sarcastic, high-spirited second daughter,
who watches as her elder sister Jane falls for the gentle Mr. Bingley,
a wealthy bachelor that has moved into a nearby estate—-who, much to Lizzy’s chagrin,
seems to always be accompanied by his grumpy and blunt friend, Fitzwilliam Darcy.
Much of the novel follows the constant misunderstandings and reconciliations
between Lizzy and Mr. Darcy as they grow close to one another, while family and society seem to
do everything they can to keep them apart—whether it’s Mrs. Bennet’s attempts to marry Lizzy to her
male cousin set to inherit the Bennet estate (ew, mom), Mr. Bingley’s vain sister who also has her
eye on Mr. Darcy, or Mr. Darcy’s cold aunt, who would have him marry her sickly daughter Anne.
Lizzy is the most popular Austen heroine. Why? Is it because she made Darcy into a simp?
Is it because she has the best bars? Is it because she gives lower-middle-class brown haired girls
hope they can marry into wealth? Not unlike Elinor, Lizzy’s wellbeing is outwardly presented
as solely dependent on good marriage and her love for someone above her social standing.
Says Jane Austen scholar, Claudia L. Johnson:
In all of Austen’s novels, but especially in Pride and Prejudice, pursuing happiness
is the business of life. Austen trots out character after character before our attention
so that we may consider what pleases, or conversely, vexes and mortifies them,
thus inviting us to assess the quality and durability of their happiness.
What sets Lizzy apart from other Austen heroines her absolute disregard for the mores of courtship
and station that would have added to Elinor’s distress—Lizzy doggedly listens to no one—she
spurns the snobbery of Miss Bingley, bites back at Mr. Darcy’s aunt when she is mocked.
She is not gifted with the station Emma has, nor does she have any taste for social engineering.
While it still ultimately has to bend to early 19th century conventions,
Lizzy is the mistress of her own happiness in Pride and Prejudice
in a way that her other beloved characters or not, and the novel asks us to consider
what happiness means in a world with limited opportunity. To an extend, all of the Bennet
sisters go through this journey—Lydia’s scandalous love affair vs what society would say of it,
quiet, moralizing Mary and her disinterest in love games, and Jane, who’s happy ending is dangled in
front of her from the very beginning and might have been the protagonist in any other book.
And then there’s…. Mrs. Bennet. Do we have time to discuss Mrs.Bennet?
Do I have the mental energy to discuss whether or not she’s a villainous caricature
or a misunderstood mother doing the best she can? No I do not.
Academic and writer Janet Todd condenses the eternal appeal
of the ladies as Jane Austen best, saying:
“...what strikes me as contributing most to Jane Austen’s universal popularity
[is] her ability to create the illusion of psychologically
believable and self-reflecting characters. Her novels are investigations of selfhood,
particularly female, the oscillating relationship of feeling and reason,
the interaction of present and memory, and the constant negotiation between desire and society.”
Inasmuch as the world has changed over the last two hundred years,
along with societal expectations of how women are supposed to be have and what roles and dreams they
can aspire to, the conflict between duty and self-fulfillment will always be present—and
so, the eternal appeal of dance cards, rainy encounters with the love of your life,
and the enduring spirit of Jane Austen’s characters remains.
When you look at the heroines of Jane Austen’s books you see the evolution of a fiercely
independent author building upon the foundation of female authors before her (shout out to Frances
Burney who never appeared on the show. But I love. And she is great. Wikipedia her). Austen died at 41. If she had lived who knows what kind of heroines she would have
created. What politics would she have explored? But in six novels
she has delivered the stories of six amazing women who make up the most amazing Buzzfeed
personality quiz that everyone cheats at anyway to get Lizzy Bennet in the end.