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Happiness and Conflict in Literature


Nina Auerbach comments on the society's expectations at the time reducing women to simply wait for men to do something. A perfect example Auerbach gives is the anticipation and waiting at the drawing-room, "before the gentlemen came." The door is described as the "point on which all her chance and pleasure for the evening must depend." The whole concept of courtship is based upon the man acting first, repressing women to an extent. It makes women "economically, politically, artistically and socially subordinate to men," as Auerbach phrases it. Men command, inherit and enjoy; women wait.
             Austen suggests that most females were like Charlotte Lucas who could not think beyond fortune and social status of a potential husband or like Jane who let the potential husband dictate the status of their relationship, this is a restriction on personal happiness by the shackles of society. If a female of that time were lucky, like Jane, she entered a marriage of love and fortune, and if unlucky, like Charlotte, a marriage without love and happiness. From an optimistic view, even if Jane hadn't been so lucky, if all of the three females followed Elizabeth's example of learning, would they have all ended up happily in marriages of love and fortune (i.e. does Austen use Elizabeth's story as a formula for female readers to follow so they can find marriages of love and fortune?)? Or, from a more pessimistic view, did the marriages of these three females, Elizabeth, Jane, and Charlotte, turn out the way they did greatly because of their personalities and therefore, there is a limit on how much a female can control her destiny even if she desired to learn (i.e. Elizabeth was the lively mind that had capacity to learn, Jane was gentle and generous, and would have been bowled over if she hadn't been lucky, and Charlotte was unimaginative and resigned herself to a tolerable existence)?  This sense of control and restriction on women of the era could be reflected in the control and lack of freedom and privacy in Orwell's "1984.


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