Title: Jane Austen Shows her Feminist Side in Emma - Owlcation
Headings: Jane Austen Shows her Feminist Side in Emma
Jane Austen Shows her Feminist Side in Emma
Jane Austen: Conformist or Radical Feminist?
Thoughts on Marriage...
Feminist Critics
Austen's Statement
Works Cited
Comments

Content: Austen is therefore not a conformist, as she is so often viewed. According to Claudia L. Johnson, in her book Jane Austen Women, Politics, and the Novel,
If Austen enters the canon because she seemed to deny or devalue her authority, Emma has been the heroine critics have loved to scold… Emma is often charged with the same transgressions – being ‘arrogant, self-important, and controlling’ or ‘narcissistic and perfectionist’ – from which critics diligently attempted to exempt Austen… (Johnson 122). The American feminist critics take a broader approach. Some even base their criticism on “nonfeminist disciplines,” such as Marxism or psychoanalysis (Peterson 334). In general, Americans look at text from a female perspective, and attempt to bring unknown women writers to the forefront. An example of this would be when Alice Walker, a successful female writer in her own right and self-named ‘womanist,’ brought Zora Neale Hurston’s writing out of the dusty stacks by going to locate Hurston’s hidden gravesite and writing about Hurston and her work. Feminist critics find this a necessary task because, “women writers commonly took on urgent, social, political, and theological questions, since assigned to the ‘masculine sphere,’ and they have dropped out of later versions of literary history altogether as a result, leaving scarcely a trace” (Johnson xv). This was not necessary in Austen’s case since she was viewed as a conformist writing in the feminine style and therefore published. In her article, “What is Feminist Criticism?,” Peterson states that American feminist critics also analyze works using gynocentrism.