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: 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. Gynocentrism is the examination of “the female literary tradition to find out how great women writers across the ages have felt, perceived themselves, and imagined reality” (334). The British theory tends to be more political. The British tend to have less emphasis on the differences between the sexes and more on the oppression of women in history. This theory taken with the American concept of gynocentrism can be used to explain Jane Austen’s feminist stance in Emma in the passage above. Austen's Statement
Austen uses Harriet in the marriage passage to show how women of the time were supposed to view marriage.