‘Women in Literature are often portrayed as dependent on men.’ By comparing Sense and Sensibility with Mrs Dalloway, discuss how far you have found this to be the case.
21st of February 2021
Elizabeth Quigg
‘Women in Literature are often portrayed as dependent on men.’ By comparing Sense and Sensibility
with Mrs Dalloway, discuss how far you have found this to be the case.
In Jane Eyre (1847) and Sense And Sensibility (1811), women’s insecure, dependent economic
positions render them vulnerable to the predatory advances of men or exposes them to extreme
poverty and premature death unless they secure the protection of a benevolent patriarch. In Mrs
Dalloway (1925) contemporary notions of gender roles demand that women’s identities are dependent
on their relationship to men. Thus whilst Bronte and Austen focus primarily on women’s economic
dependence upon men, Woolf focuses on a more nuanced, psychological and social perspective.
Throughout Jane Eyre and Sense and Sensibility, the lack of a benevolent and attentive patriarch is
strongly tied to images of misery, death and suffering which suggests the necessity of a beneficent
patriarch to the physical and bodily safety of their female characters. The nature of Eliza Williams’
death is inextricably linked to patriarchal economic mechanisms and exploitation by men. Eliza’s
divorce leaves her vulnerable to the formation of a series of insecure, exploitative ‘guilty connections’
which leave her ‘disgraced’, ‘confined’ and isolated from her community. The insecure nature of these
‘connections’ intersects with a lack of economic security explicit in her accumulated ‘debt’ and the
insufficiency of her ‘legal allowance’ to form the necessary conditions for Eliza’s illness and
subsequent death. The slow nature of her death, attributed to 'the last stages of consumption’ is
emphasised through Brandon’s descriptions of her ‘faded’ and ‘worn down’ visage indicative of
‘acute suffering’. It is necessary to consider Jenifer Mary Curtis’ analysis of the function of women’s
illness within Nineteenth-Century literature as a metaphor for the incessant erosion of women’s
psyche and autonomy under patriarchy, a position acutely demonstrated in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
1892 short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Applying Curtis' aforementioned interpretation, it may be
argued that Austen constructs Williams’ death to exemplify the ways in which economic dependence
upon men subjects women to ‘short’ lives and premature deaths but also that her death acts as the
physical manifestation of the deterioration of once ‘young’ and ‘pretty’ women when they are
expelled from the safety bestowed by a patriarch and are defenceless against male predators and
financial ruin; the death of Eiza Williams is constructed to represent the pain and suffering endured by
young women under patriarchy and the death of feminine ‘youth’ and ‘innocence’.
Following the exposition that Rochester has attempted to entrap Jane within a ‘sham’ marriage, Jane
attempts to leave the employment of her ‘master’. Bronte clearly represents Jane’s retreat from the
patriarchal sphere (encapsulated by Thornfield Hall) as the compulsion towards the matriarchal sphere
(encapsulated by nature). Jane’s feminine consciousness embodies maternal qualities, instructing her
as a ‘mother’, to ‘flee temptation’. Despite Jane’s initial characterisation of nature as ‘the universal
mother’, ‘ benign and good’ who ‘loved me, outcast as I was’, it is revealed to be barren and
inhospitable to human life, with ‘nothing to supply [...] the human being’s wants [...] or needs’.
Ultimately, Jane’s exclusion from patriarchal spheres renders her an ‘outcast’, subject to ‘cold,
drenched ground’, ‘exhausted’. If she is to ‘survive’, then she must return to society. Reflecting on
female dependence, Linda Gill states that even “fantasized female power is continually tethered and
troubled by the realist narrative of social determination and patriarchal imbrication”. Bronte illustrates
the intersection between capitalism and patriarchy at this moment, as Jane is told that the only factory
owner and prospective employer will hire only men. Devoid of the ability to sell her labour, Jane is
forced to implore the help of a patriarch St John Rivers. Jane’s dependence upon St John at this
moment is undeniable, as she remains ‘in all likelihood [of] death’ if she is ‘turned away’ by him.
Jane’s life, like Eliza’s hinges on the whim of a patriarch. This moment explicitly illustrates the
extreme levels of helplessness and subordination experienced by women in the 1820s, necessitated by
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