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

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

Austen, unlike Rousseau, views nature as the product of an inter-textual system. Language, social conventions and books express what is natural by serving as the material through which the natural ideal is shaped. This view of a constructed nature dominates Northanger Abbey; for even as this novel duplicates Rousseau's model of male-female relationships, it does so by fashioning this model out of a novelistic tradition: Catherine Morland is introduced to us at the outset as a "real" heroine by being compared to other novel heroines whom the narrator claims are artificial. Later in the first chapter, Catherine begins to develop female characteristics by reading novels; she is, the narrator declares, "in training for a heroine" (39). Now the heroines which earlier served as anti-models are used in an opposite sense--as models for imitation in the heroine's "natural" development to womanhood. Finally, the heroines of other novels will once again serve a negative function in being responsible for Catherine's misguided behavior at Northanger Abbey. But they will also serve as a bridge to a true understanding of her situation and, in this sense, will prove necessary even as they mislead her. It would seem that for Catherine Morland no text is in itself good or bad but all texts are potentially recruitable in the service of self-definition.

Just as Catherine develops into a Rousseauist female through her imitation and rejection of other novel heroines, so too Jane Austen develops her novel by placing it in a series of changing relations to other novels. "Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?" (58), queries the narrator. If we can interpret this as Austen's self-conscious declaration that she must depend on other texts for the creation of her own, this implies a potential plasticity in the code of behavior which governs her novels; hence, the natural ideal she espouses for male-female relationships is modeled by social forms and not sought through them. This assumption, I would argue, permits Austen to reverse Rousseau's model for male-female interaction in Pride and Prejudice, having once mastered it in Northanger Abbey. The reversal reveals both her debt to the structural contribution of Rousseau and her rejection of the absolutism inherent in his idea. It also testifies to her increased self-confidence as a woman and a writer capable of shaping a model for male-female interaction in which both sexes are at last governed by the same principles.(7)

FOOTNOTES

1 In the past ten years, a number of books have attempted to situate Austen in a feminist context. Most notable are Margaret Kirkham's Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction, Claudia Johnson's Jane Austen: Women, Polities and the Novel, and Deborah Kaplan's Jane Austen Among Women. Kirkham concentrates on identifying affinities between Austen's thought as expressed through covert or indirect references in the novels with that of English Enlightenment feminists. Johnson manages to read a feminist agenda into all Austen's work. Kaplan takes a more tempered stance, arguing for a "cultural duality' that splits Austen's allegiances between a conservative gentry culture and a more subversive and progressive women's culture. Kirkham and Johnson make only passing reference to the influence of Rousseau (seeing Austen as following Mary Wollstonecraft in rejecting Rousseau's idealization of female sensibility). Kaplan fails to mention Rousseau directly but refers to Austen's mixed response to the domestic ideology from conduct books, much of which was derived from Rousseau. My interest in concentrating on Rousseau as a source and counterpoint for Austen in this paper is to highlight the developmental quality of her feminism and to suggest that it would be in keeping with her increasing confidence as a writer that she would engage in a struggle with Rousseau, a philosopher whose domestic ideology would be a more tempting--because a more apparently weighty--antagonist than the conduct books.