| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文學系 === 105 === Women in eighteenth-century England need to deal with many difficulties. They need to rely on their fathers, brothers and husbands for financial support. Marriage is the primary way by which women obtain financial security. Propriety helps women to become an ideal marriage partner. Eighteenth-century conduct books represent and promote the ideal of female propriety. It instructs not only young ladies but also their family members who are responsible for those ladies’ education at home. These books help the whole patriarchal society to build a solid system to control women. Although being a proper lady is a strategy of survival, propriety comes with a heavy price. Women have to efface themselves to live up to the social norm.
Jane Austen in her novel Mansfield Park also conveys the importance of propriety. Fanny Price, the female protagonist who insists on being proper, is rewarded with a marriage with her cousin, Edmund, at the end of the novel. However, in this novel, to be proper means to follow men’s rules implicitily. Propriety requires women to be silent/silenced. Jane Austen praises the morality of being propriety, but at the same time, she does not ignore the problems of propriety— the self-effacement of women. To help those silent women, she offers a creative tool of self-assertion— smile.
In this dissertation, I try to find out how women assert themselves. My argument will be divided into three parts. First, I focus on the importance of propriety to people in eighteenth-century England and on the problems of being proper. Second, I focus on female laughter, which supposedly has the potential to challenge patriarchal hegemony but which fails to work in Mansfield Park. Finally, I will discuss the power of female smiles in Mansfield Park and how they enable women to assert themselves.
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