Ideals of Womanhood and Pride and Prejudice as a Conservative Text

And the third, what my professors (though not me) considered my best paper in my first year of college.

Ideals of Womanhood and Pride and Prejudice as a Conservative Text

By Nathan Turowsky

Feminist readings of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice tend to go in one of two directions. The first reading is that with the character of Elizabeth Bennett Austen sought to create a subversive female figure who belies the gender roles of the time by ending up in the best possible marriage on her own terms (Brown). The other is that Austen was a deeply conservative and antifeminist writer who sought to vindicate traditional marriage and female subjugation to the whims of men (Handler and Segal). Both perspectives take as a fundamental given the idea that there was a generally accepted order in Britain at the time, in which men uncontroversially exercised the upper hand.

            But Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century was not a socially monolithic country and even the most conservative parts of society were not as conservative with regards to gender roles as modern feminists seem to imagine. When Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she was addressing it to a Frenchman, Bishop Talleyrand, from a Britain in which questions of things like education, job opportunities, and social standing for women were already more relevant and heavily debated than in any country since time immemorial (Wollstonecraft; Dedication to M Talleyrand-Périgord).

            Edmund Burke noted the issues that interested Wollstonecraft—women, republicanism, and Romanticism—but took diametrically opposing views from hers on many of them. While Wollstonecraft introduced a conflation of women’s issues and republican rhetoric with the Vindication (references passim but did not raise an actual argument), Burke fiercely argued that at least some semblance of hereditary prestige was actually good and even necessary for traditional British freedoms:

You will observe that from Magna Charta (sic) to the Declaration of Right it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers…without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves a unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties from a long line of ancestors…People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors (Burke, Reflection II, Chapter 3, § (b), paragraphs 1-2; emphasis Burke’s).

Burke here argues that the radical principles of Wollstonecraft and others, deriving from abstraction rather than nature, are bound to founder on the rocks of man’s nature (Burke took a generally dim, Anglican-Hobbesian view of man in a natural state). Inheritance is a concept that most everybody understands, and to Burke these ideas are the best foundations on which to build structures of rights, privileges, and duties.

            It is unclear that Burke particularly cared about the nascent feminist movement of his time. He used his argument against the French Revolution specifically and rationalist radicalism generally, but the idea of the ‘conformity to nature in our artificial institutions’ informed the idea of male dominance via the idea that life was divided naturally into ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ spheres.

Writers such as John Locke, Montesquieu and Voltaire occasionally touched on the position of women…but, more fundamentally, the preoccupation of eighteenth-century writers with the problem of knowledge, with the nature of human psychology, with the study of the passions, meant more detailed exploration of the differences between the sexes, and much more explicit discussion of how far such differences were innate, how far they were moulded by the environment (Rendall 8).

There was a great deal of perceived overlap between the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ spheres, but areas such as politics and war were perceived as solely male due to the seemingly natural way in which the family ordered itself, with the paterfamilias as representing the political and general social interests of the family as a whole, rather than a ‘one person, one vote’ principle (Boswell, 7 April 1778).

            The list of things that an ‘accomplished woman’ was expected or allowed to be familiar with was, however, very long, especially among the gentry and middle class, less so among the working class and nobility. Austen puts almost the full list into the mouth of Caroline Bingley:

‘A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and all modern languages, to deserve the word [accomplished]; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved.’

            ‘All this she must possess,’ added Darcy, ‘and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading’ (Austen, Volume I, Chapter VIII, paragraphs 50-51).

Women’s competence in the arts was in some areas of society considered an accepted part of life by the turn of the nineteenth century. Ann Radcliffe, née Ward, was one of the most popular writers of the time, whose The Mysteries of Udolpho is parodied in Austen’s Northanger Abbey.

            In matters of marriage and family, things were a bit more complicated. Johnson, always the consummate cerebral conservative, had several very well-mulled-over rationales for his opinion, shared by most conservatives of the time and many moderates and liberals, that it was good for a woman to marry young, both for society and for the woman—although, on 25 March 1776, he said that marriage was ‘more necessary to a man…less able to supply himself with domestick comforts’.

            Although there was more freedom in some ways for unmarried women at the time, there was certainly far more security in life for married women. Wollstonecraft in some of her novels depicts marriage as ‘legal, economic and personal despotism’ (Rendall 59)—hypocritical, perhaps, for a happily married woman, but an idea that enjoyed wide frequency among radicals of the time (including, yes, others who were married themselves) above the conservative Johnsonian viewpoint, based as it was on the fact that unmarried women frequently entered prostitution and related professions and were in that position especially liable to be victimised by society (Boswell, 28 July 1763).

            I shall not here attempt to justify, nor to pass judgment on, either of these general views current in the late eighteenth century as they stood at the time. Both had their merits and demerits when one looked at the reality of late-Enlightenment and early-Romantic British life. I see much, however, in Austen’s work, particularly in Pride and Prejudice, to lead me to the opinion that she tended more towards the Johnsonian view of things than the Wollstonecraftian (though, likely, she was more gracious to her own sex than Johnson, something of a gynophobe, was). Pride and Prejudice treats Elizabeth’s marriage to Darcy as an unambiguously happy ending brought about through traditional channels (though not a traditional sequence of events in the characters’ emotional lives) (Austen, Volume III, passim). The idea of marriage as a boon and something to secure the girls’ future, even those like Elizabeth and Mary ‘I should infinitely prefer a book’ Bennett who have interests and accomplishments (in the Bingleian sense) of their own, is indeed the main driving force of the plot, as is made evident in the first chapter of the novel and indeed in nearly everything Mrs Bennett says or does.

            The idea of Pride and Prejudice as a ‘feminist’ or ‘anti-feminist’ novel in the modern sense is in many ways a useful one, but, like all applications of these terms to works that predate them, it is unhelpful in attempts to meet the text on its own terms. Pride and Prejudice, with its vindication of the rights of women in the context of marriage and family life, can, however, be argued to be a conservative text, in the Burkean and Johnsonian rather than in a modern politicised sense. Mr Collins, the most conservative character in the novel, is not depicted favourably, but Austen’s disdain for the libertine Kitty and Lydia is redolent, to the extent that as Brown points out she does not even bother to characterise them very well even though she obviously had enough talent and skill as a writer.

            Pride and Prejudice read as a conservative-as-opposed-to-revolutionary text makes far more sense than Pride and Prejudice read as an antifeminist-as-opposed-to-feminist text. It is unlikely that issues of feminism and antifeminism weighed much on Austen’s mind, but given the time period, as Bagehot incessantly points out, it was practically impossible for anybody in Europe not to think at least a little about tradition and revolution.

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. London: T. Egerton, 1813.

Bagehot, Walter. The English Constitution. London: Published via The Economist, of which Bagehot was editor-in-chief, 1867.

Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. London: Unknown publisher, 1791.

Brown, Lloyd W. “Jane Austen and the Feminist Tradition.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 28.3 (1973): 321-338. Directory of Open Access Journals. Serials Solution. Alumni Lib., Great Barrington, MA. 25 Mar. 2009.

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: J. Dodsley, 1790.

Handler, Richard, and Daniel A. Segal. “Hierarchies of Choice: The Social Construction of Rank in Jane Austen.” American Ethnologist 12.4 (1985): 691-706. Directory of Open Access Journals. Serials Solution. Alumni Lib., Great Barrington, MA. 30 Mar. 2009.

Radcliffe, Ann Ward. The Mysteries of Udolpho. London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1794.

Rendall, Jane. The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France, and the United States, 1780-1860. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984. Page numbers refer to the American edition published by Schocken Books.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1792. The Boston printing was the first known commercial edition of Vindication, the British edition having been printed by an unknown publisher.