Courtship and marriage as a form of women’s empowerment in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and George Eliot’s Middlemarch

Abstract

The thesis will examine the portrayal of women and their roles in courtship and marriage in three nineteenth-century novels: Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), showing how gender differences played a significant part in Victorian society and more significantly, in the private sphere of the family. The significance of gender roles and how men and women interact with each other in the private sphere will be analysed in the social and historical context of the early to the mid-nineteenth-century England, using the historical criticism provided in Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (1987) which examines the significance of gender roles in the life of the provincial English middle class. According to Davidoff and Hall, gender roles are a basis for the construction of the provincial middle class’s values, outlook, family life, religious ideology and economic structure (29). They observe that in historical texts and studies of the age, women are almost always neglected and they argue that women played as much part in shaping history as men did, giving evidence of women’s subtle influence, which often goes unrecorded or overlooked by other historians, in shaping the political, economic and philanthropic actions of men. This thesis will seek to explain that within the restricted social expectations, female writers of the nineteenth century have portrayed some of the strictest institutions of all, courtship and marriage, as a form of female empowerment against the dominating patriarchal world.