Jane Austen's rejection of Rousseau: A novelistic and feminist initiation

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 1994 by Cohen, Paula Marantz

It is here, in what constitutes the respective demands attached to the male and female role and their basis in natural law, that Austen's adoption of Rousseau's ideas warrants close scrutiny. What we learn in comparing Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice is how completely Austen in the later novel reverses her attitude toward sexual education and embraces a view of the marriage relation which more closely approximates the social contract which Rousseau proposed as a democratic political ideal rather than a sexual one.

III

Northanger Abbey is a satirical novel, and yet its satire is not intended to undermine social institutions and established truths but to support them. Many Austen critics have argued this point indirectly. In writing of Austen's parody of gothic conventions in this novel, for example, Marvin Mudrick contends that by turning them on their head her anti-types "suggest the corresponding Gothic types by being so different" (30). Lionel Trilling makes a similar point when he maintains that Austen is really interested in emphasizing the "reality" of the gothic experience (207). If we take these comments to apply not only to gothic conventions but also to established sexual conventions (which the gothic genre, after all, rigidly upholds), we can see that they point to an essential conservatism in regard to sexual role-playing in this novel.

Catherine Morland is brought up very close to Rousseau's "state of nature." She lives in the country, is one of ten children, and is left to pursue occupation as the spirit prompts her. Yet at the age of awakening sexuality, Catherine begins to embrace the preoccupations of her sex. Her "training" in the female role is underway as she begins to read novels and study the behavior of popular heroines like Camilla, Belinda, and Cecilia. She becomes interested in and begins to practice those skills of self-adornment and social grace which will be valuable to her if she is to perform properly in the female role as Rousseau defines it: "to please men, to be useful to them, etc."

Although Austen gently parodies the young girl's awkward entree into her role, she clearly supports, in this novel, the conventional initiation process as proper to female development. Indeed, the brunt of the novel's satire is directed, not at Catherine, but at those who, as poor role models, would seek either wittingly or unwittingly to thwart her progress or pervert it to some other end than that of being pleasing and useful to the man whom she will eventually marry. These are Mrs. Allen, the older woman who accompanies Catherine to Bath and whom Austen characterizes as "one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them" (42-43) , and Isabella Thorpe, the friend Catherine makes after arriving there. Since Isabella has none of the charm of the novelist's later controlling women, Austen clearly intends her to perform an unmixed didactic role in this novel: she is an object lesson to Catherine about how not to behave. Moreover, by portraying female self-assertion in such negative terms--as both esthetically crude and morally degenerate--Austen demonstrates how unwilling she is at this point in her novelistic career to challenge Rousseau's model.