ipl-logo

Beauty In Northanger Abbey And A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women

1053 Words5 Pages

During the romantic period, society judges women on their beauty, something that they have no control over. This idea of beauty was pushed on young girls and this made them feel as if beauty was the only thing that’s important, but the romantic period literature was going to change that. Beauty, shown as the single most important thing for women in Northanger Abbey and A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which is wrong because it’s degrading for women to be judged on something that they can’t control, this then affects how women are depicted in literature, changing the work’s tone to be satirical, making fun of this idea, or rebellious, in going away from these beauty standards.
Instead of degrading women based on their beauty, women should instead get compliments on their beauty. But most women had no way to change these standards, the only thing they could do was make them into a joke, which is exactly what Austen did in Northanger Abbey. By Austen writing in a satirical tone, her points were able to get across in a way that wasn’t dangerous to her. Main character Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey took on this role of being degraded because of her beauty, in order to illustrate how harsh society was. “At fifteen, [Catherine’s] appearances were mending” (Austen 3), this quote is just one example of how beauty standards were pushed into young girls heads. Even at such young ages, girls had these same extreme beauty standards as their mothers were, believing that they

Show More
Related

  • Beauty Myth Tobias Wolf Analysis

    436 Words  | 2 Pages

    • Paragraph 1 - 6: The author asserts that women gained rights and freedom after long silence but contemporary women are not free as they want to. She explains that “we are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism,” (Wolf 185) which the notion of beauty is poisoning women’s liberty and rights. The images of “beautiful” women are used against women’s advancement. • Paragraph 7 – 8: Wolf describes that “beauty” became very essential in women’s life. For instance, women must have beauty knowledge, pornography invaded the mainstream, eating disorder rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery controls women medically.

    Read More

  • Theme Of Honesty In Pride And Prejudice

    755 Words  | 4 Pages

    In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen uses her wit to attract readers deeply. Different from other authors, Austen portrays characters vividly and every character’s personality is distinct from each other. We also can find humor everywhere in Pride and Prejudice that Austen expresses through conversations between characters. The dialogue always makes readers smile knowingly because it reminds us the social issues behind the words. In addition, Austen uses a variety of ironies to express her own view on characters, both in her book and in her society.

    Read More

  • Pride And Prejudice: Gender Injustice

    763 Words  | 4 Pages

    Despite showing that women, such as Charlotte, need to marry men they do not love just to gain financial security, Austen clearly believes that women are just as intelligent and capable as men are. Through Pride and Prejudice, she also shows that women’s inferior status in society is unjust and should not allow for women’s physical and mental capacity to be broken. This is very much different than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where women were invaded, murdered and thrown to the side just for the purpose of plot progression. The feminist politics of Shelley’s novel exist only for the purpose of man-- women are used to encourage action and create a masculine of production Shelley’s women are objectified, used and easily discarded while Austen’s characters are developed, free-thinking individuals who are given a voice throughout the

    Read More

  • Edgeworth's Rhetorical Analysis

    598 Words  | 3 Pages

    For the purpose of this essay, we define satire as “ a style of writing used to criticize an aspect of society through the use of irony or exaggeration” (University of Illinois). In Edgeworth’s essay, we see these techniques used multiple times in order to ridicule the outrageousness of the way that society viewed women at the time. To begin, her letter is based off of a hyperbolical axiom: “that a lady can do no wrong” (Edgeworth 1). Edgeworth was a well educated woman and knew that “perfection [was] beyond the reach of mortals”, but chose to include the claim in her essay as a means of exaggeration (Edgeworth 1). This contributes to her satire, as she explains that “for many centuries, man [has been] allowed to be infallible

    Read More

  • Rest Vs Frankenstein

    772 Words  | 4 Pages

    Romance was always a heartache away, and priorities were led by their deep pockets, or lack thereof, and the women spun together in a web of complicated wants versus needs were given life by Austen's hand as she wrote their history and perspective. The emotional focus she brought was weaved and concealed through the society they all lived in, and the game they played to win the hand of the best well-off who had the ability to make their families well-off. The appeal her tale brought was highly appraised considering most women of her time were struggling with the same woes as Elizabeth Bennett and her sisters, and the audience became one who coveted the stories Austen provided as means to escape the lives chosen for them, as Elizabeth Bennett chose the life she wanted. With the form of reality molded around the fictitious world of love and choices, Elizabeth Bennett stood as a totem of hope, because in the end, she found the love she was looking for and the security her family yearned

    Read More

  • Similarities Between King George III And Frankenstein's Madness

    816 Words  | 4 Pages

    Dejected by the loss to the American Revolutionary War, George III lost the land acquired overseas and his mental stability. Later on, it was said that he suffered from porphyria, experiencing hallucinations, eventually leading up to his doomed derangement in 1788. The king’s psychotic perception not only mirrors Victor’s maniacal mind, but also paints the setting for Frankenstein, acting as a catalyst to an era of unorthodox vision, pandemonium, and creativity. In the early-to-mid 1700s, literature revolved upon concepts that were “driven by ideas, events, and reason”(“Enlightenment and Romanticism: a Comparison”).

    Read More

  • Shallowness In The Wife Of Bath's Tale

    931 Words  | 4 Pages

    In The Wife of Bath’s Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer uses the tale as a fable to reveal the human nature of shallowness by its plot and characters. The story begins from the ancient days of King Arthur, when the “hero” of the story condemned sexual assault, but then was saved by an ugly woman. Chaucer created characters that are lusty, greedy, materially desires, and amazingly shallow in order to compare and comment on the lifestyle of the higher classes at the time. From the start of the story, Geoffrey Chaucer illustrated how foolishly shallows the young Knight is in comparison to the upper classman.

    Read More

  • Mary Shelly's Frankenstein: Towards A Feminist Figure Of Humanity?

    1075 Words  | 5 Pages

    It may skew her thinking and at times be subjective. The intended audience is someone who is studying literature and interested in how women are portrayed in novels in the 19th century. The organization of the article allows anyone to be capable of reading it.

    Read More

  • Rhetorical Analysis In Pride And Prejudice

    794 Words  | 4 Pages

    In the Victorian era, women were forced to marry, as they needed the security of a man. However, Austen uses logos to question the real inequality in the Victorian era’s ideology, that a woman is incomplete without a man. This allows the reader to analyse the state of society from a different perspective. Austen also starts her sentence with an assertive tone further supported with her firm word choices, through using the words, ‘…truth universally acknowledged’. These words are important in her building ethos allowing her to deliver her controversial message.

    Read More

  • First Impressions In Jane Austen's Persuasion

    1106 Words  | 5 Pages

    Jane Austen shows the reader examples of how to correctly judge first impressions and ones impressions made after. She shows the reader that family lineage, appearance, and wealth are not what one should take into consideration when concluding their opinion on someone. For sometimes it is because of ones beauty, charm, and place in society that can turn them sour if they are not

    Read More

  • Elizabeth's Patriarchy

    1490 Words  | 6 Pages

    Austen’s novel outlines the feminist struggles of social independence, economic pride, and civil prejudices of the regency era as women felt the need to validate their existence, which ultimately came at the decency of the pride of those supporting

    Read More

  • Gender Roles In Jane Austen's Sense And Sensibility

    1277 Words  | 6 Pages

    Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is a great example of her works that looks at the role of women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Austen shows us the gender roles inflicted on women during this time period and how they are perceived. We see the strict gender roles that women were adhered to and the struggle for identity as a woman. Central to this novel is the vulnerability of women and the expectations surrounding gender influence everything and produce define results. Gender definitely determines and structures the world in which these characters live.

    Read More

  • Social Status Between Men And Women In Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice

    2801 Words  | 12 Pages

    Jane Austen lived in a period at the turn from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century, which was a period of mixed thoughts, which conflicted all the times. Among all the conflicts, the most important one was the disparity in social status between men and women. Not only men’s status was in the center of the society but also common people thought it was right that men were much more important than women were. In those days girls were neither allowed nor expected to study much because they did not have to work for a living. They were supposed to stay at home and look beautiful in order to get suitable husbands.

    Read More

  • Romanticism In Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice

    924 Words  | 4 Pages

    During Jane Austen’s work on “Pride and Prejudice,” Romanticism started to reach its complex, and had strong influence on people’s life, but Austen chose to reject the tenets of that movement. Romanticism emphasized on the power of feeling, but Austen supported rationalism instead. She substantiated traditional principles and the established rules; her novels also display an ambiguity about emotion and an appreciation for intelligence and natural beauty that aligns them with Romanticism. Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” is one of her most well-known works and even though the text is hard to understand, I would recommend it for high students because to me, it is the most characteristic and the most eminently quintessential work of Jane Austen.

    Read More

  • Persuasion Jane Austen

    366 Words  | 2 Pages

    Women at this time didn't have the opportunity to defy their families, it would be a scandal if a young women were to run off and marry a man that her family disapproves of. Austen makes it know that Anne is in pain from her prolonged absents from Wentworth. Austen uses

    Read More

More about Beauty In Northanger Abbey And A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women

Open Document