Weekly Response #6

Emily Schmitt

ENG 280

Natalie M. Philips

10/3/12

Weekly Response #6

Gilbert and Gubar: “For to be selfless is not only to noble, it is to be dead.” (Gilbert and Gubar 817.)

Pride and Prejudice: “I know you do; and it is that which makes the wonder. With your good sense, to be honestly blind to the follies and nonsense of others!” (Austen 53.)

Question: Austen portrays Jane as the archetype of the proper woman, in doing so does she inherently ‘kill’ any depth the character might have had?

Essentially what I am trying to bring up is that the archetypical woman in literature is doomed to be a dead uninteresting character. This is assuming that the archetypical woman is one who is selfless, beautiful, virtuous, dainty, flawless, etc. The example of this I use is Jane in Pride and Prejudice. The notion here is that even if Austen had wanted to deepen Jane’s character as perhaps a companion to Elizabeth, she would not have been able to do so without veering from Jane’s MO. That is being pretty, perfect, and bashful. The Archetypical woman is inherently flat, and as Gilbert and Gubar have noted, inherently dead. Women in these roles have absolutely no chance of becoming interesting until they loose some of the virtue that makes them what they are.