This articles analyses the two works of Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility and Emma, and their three films from the perspective of "the Proper Lady", which is the social decorum demanded to the 18th-century and the 19th-century women. Austen`s ideal v...
This articles analyses the two works of Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility and Emma, and their three films from the perspective of "the Proper Lady", which is the social decorum demanded to the 18th-century and the 19th-century women. Austen`s ideal vision is "the Proper Lady" for whom Austen puts more emphasis on the sense than sensibility. For instance, Elinor`s sense is highly esteemed than sensibility of the impulsive Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, and Emma becomes an intellectual and altruistic "the Proper Lady" through her self-awakening. However, Austen`s unconscious attraction to sensibility is suggested in her two works, and sensibility is put to the foreground more strongly in the three films; the proportion of sensibility in the three films is more heightened than in the original texts. As a result, it becomes necessary to view Austen`s position from Austen`s first work, Sense and Sensibility to her final work, Persuasion from the larger perspective. Austen becomes to put on emphasis on sense soaked with sensibility through Anne`s choice in Persuasion, though she emphasized more sense than sensibility as a condition of "the Proper Lady" despite her favor to sensibility in her early two works. This change of "the Proper Lady" can be interpreted as Austen`s development in her feminist consciousness. Elinor, Marianne, and Emma, seems to be on the way to the maturer, more open and widened "the Proper Lady" of Anne. Here we can guess the cultural topography in the 19th-century English society, as "the Proper Lady" is a product of the contemporary sexual ideology that oppresses the intense passion and excessive sensibility of women as dangerous ones.