Paper Summary:

Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft were writers with two distinctly different styles of writing, who created a furor with their controversial styles of presentation. The paper shows that although each wrote in different ways, they were similar in conceptions of theme. Both feminist writers, Austen and Wollstonecraft underlined the constrictions placed on women in society and the oppression they faced as their individuality was objectified in terms of beauty and societal class. The paper examines these issues as they are reflected through Austen's works such as "Mansfield Park" and Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication Of the Rights of Women."

From the Paper:

"Austen's opposition to gender typecasting is best represented in the novel Mansfield Park where the unattractiveness of her protagonist became a focal criticism. Critics have seen Fanny as passive, uninteresting, ugly and morally debasing---everything in fact that undermined the concept of women at the time. This objection to Fanny's physical beauty then coincides with the belief that women of the time were objectified as sex symbols and their beauty became the core of their status in society.
Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication Of the Rights of Women," too suggested disgust toward the female body and her use of the disembodied woman as the emblem for the diseased body politic. Mary Wollstonecraft's concept of motherhood as public service in the interest of the republic suggested in her work presented the influence of women to be stronger than that acknowledged by men. As she wrote, "How grossly do they insult us who thus advise us only to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes!""

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