Gender Roles

Austen in her book Sense and Sensibility aggressively and successfully attempts to reconstruct fiction in patriarchal gender conceptions. The dissonance of a masculinized Dashwood and feminized Edward Ferrars amounts to a high degree of reconstruction of gender stereotypes. Traditional writers have urged women to come out strongly and condemn their discrimination by any means be it at family or community level. Moreover, Austen's female gender plays a subordinate role in the family.

Jane Austen is neither completely conservative in her fiction's themes, nor is she promoting a radical form of feminism she insists that something must usually hold a woman back, it may be economics, family background, or her own individuality and in any circumstances a compromise must be made between the individual and society.

At some point Austen seems to support the conventional values of a woman for example finding pleasure in their marriages although at some...
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