Jane Austen And The Dynamics Of Domestic Ideology Within

Jane Austen And The Dynamics Of Domestic Ideology Within

Jane Austen and the Dynamics of Domestic Ideology within
Mansfield Park and Pride and Prejudice

The novels of Jane Austen famously restrict their attention to a narrow consideration of their middle-class characters’ lives, and since Austen consistently adopts the point-of-view of a young female character on the cusp of entrance into society and marriage, readers spend most of their time considering the kitchens, bedrooms, and drawing rooms in which Marianne Dashwood, Anne Elliot, and their sisters must define their identities as fully-fledged members of society. Those domestic spaces have received a good deal of critical attention in recent years, as scholars explore the balances such women might strike between controlling and defining the domestic spaces they occupy and being controlled and dominated by those spaces. Most often, such studies have concluded that the balance is consistent throughout Austen’s work. I want to explore the possibility that what is true of the novel must often studied in terms of domestic space – Mansfield Park- is not necessarily true in, one of Austen’s most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice.

In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen contradicts and manipulates the standards of domestic ideology, which are represented by Mansfield Park, in her quest to reconstruct the traditional roles of women as possibly empowering, rather than oppressive and in doing so, takes a proto-feminist stance in the anti-feminist discourse of domestic ideology of spaces. According to Aileen Douglas, “domestic ideology conceives of moral and intellectual life in terms of spaces;” (152) the typical Austen heroine, represented by Fanny, of Mansfield Park, establishes her moral and intellectual identities through her experiences in domestic spaces, whereas the typical Austen male’s identity can be derived from either public or private spaces.   Although, according to the domestic ideology, males are mostly active in public spaces.   Men provide...