A figuração de personagens femininas e feministas em romances de Jane Austen

Abstract

This research thematizes the representation of female characters in novels of Jane Austen, aiming to analyze the female protagonists of the novels Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). As methodology, it is used a bibliographic and qualitative analysis, based on authors as Gerda Lerner in The Creation of Patriarchy, Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Michelle Perrot in My History of Women, Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, Elaine Showalter in A literature of their own, among others. The aim, analyzing these protagonists, was to understand how they break or follow the patriarchy rules of their time. The analysis reveals how they move forward or backward the rules of the patriarchal society, now searching marriage as the happiness ideal, now searching autonomy, for instance. It is understood that the characters move between the literary feminist phases, because sometimes they seem to act as the women from the feminine phase, in a passive way, without questioning, but sometimes they are in the feminist phase ahead of their time, defying the patriarchal rules, in a clear representation of the small feminist advances of their time.