During a time in which women were expected to stay quiet, Jane Austen wrote characters who couldn’t stand silence. In fact, she wrote characters who were ridiculously loud and sassy; who weren’t afraid to say no to the men in their lives and carried aspirations beyond that of being a housewife or homemaker. She also wrote comparatively satirical characters who in reality acted as the typical eighteenth century woman—covertly pointing out the nonsense of pigeonholing women into a dehumanizingly specific archetype. Elizabeth Bennet’s insistent refusal to marry Mr. Darcy until finally falling in love with him plays a stark contrast to the boy-crazed Mrs. Bennet, whose reason to live rests in marrying off each of her daughters.
Her work is not feminist in the who-run-the-world maximalism we see today, but instead through the subtleties of bickering and quips. Though her novels are set in the comfort of English nobility, Austen encourages women to be sassy and proud of their womanhood. Through each of her books, Austen wields satire and humor in order to convey the general senselessness of patriarchal noble england. From the very first line of her infamous Pride and Prejudice, Austsen’s disdain for gender conformities is apparent. The phrase, “it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” forces readers to see the true absurdity of the social conforms of the time. Austen doesn’t outright say, “hey this is ridiculous,” but rather pushes the reader to see the ridiculousness, and come to that conclusion on their own.
Though Pride and Prejudice remains her most iconic and well-known, the same can be said for all of her books. Emma features a world in which the ploy of marriage serves as a means to justify a woman’s submission to the patriarchy rather than a commitment to love and care for another human being. Austen pushes back the curtain in order to prove that female characters are limited due to their constant forfeit to the patriarchy. Though the book plays as Austen’s “Much Ado About Nothing” satirical take, she humorously (yet passive aggressively) pushes women to see the ridiculousness of their social standing.
Of course, Austen practices what she preaches. By choosing to remain unmarried her entire life and write books for a living, she proved that women could support themselves, even in a field as male-dominated as writing.