English Literature

Michel Facoult once pointed out how private conversations among women constitute a world which plays a counter subversive role in relation to the male dominated society and prepares the way for securing women�s power at least in certain areas. Jane Austen�s novels amply illustrate the validity of Facoult�s speculation not simply because she was a woman novelist, but because she shows the inner landscape of women�s inner social world. In Sense and Sensibility the reader encounters an internal world wholly separated from the knowledge of the man folks. It is, however, not to suggest that this internal world is wholly an independent one, but to suggest that women in Sense and Sensibility create a space for them by being closely associated with one another. Perhaps it was because of her being a woman herself that she succeeded in understanding the close relationship existing among women in a male dominated society, where behind the Romantic talk of love a woman�s social position was to be ...

There arises a sharp controversy among critics as to whether or not Jane Austen, while writing her novels, consciously had in mind certain serious moral concerns of her times; whether or not as a novelist she wanted to pose as a teacher for her society. The problem which baffles the critics is that her oeuvre turns out to be multi-dimension and can be interpreted in various ways. It is often felt that the stories in her novels are oriented towards the education of the heroine/s. The same is true of the novel, Sense and Sensibility , all the more so as it lays equal attention to the two heroines, Elinor and Marianne, and presumably the title points towards that. But it must be emphasized here that the greatness of Austen as a novelist does not depend on whether she moralizes or not; in fact, her major works are complete in themselves and aesthetically independent of any moral concern. Deliberate or not, however, on her part, a moral design is discernible in the novel, Sense and Se...