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Thesis
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF COEXISTENCE
University of West Florida
Master of Arts (MA), University of West Florida
2018
Abstract
Through their central female relationships, Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie address womanhood and its transatlantic connections. The novels underscore late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century womanhood and its limitations in accounting for the complexities of women's experiences during the turn-of-thecentury shift from uninhibited sensibility to Romanticism's distanced sentimental sympathy. In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne and Elinor's struggle with feeling and duty depicts the possibilities and impossibilities in the period's literary and political development of womanhood. Hope Leslie expands on these points through Hope and Magawisca's similar conflict to explore the consequences of limiting womanhood to domesticity. Both novels not only depict how allowing difference within female relationships encourages women's questioning of their societal restrictions but also how containing this questioning within these dynamics undoes the potential of such challenges. Consequently, an understanding of Sense and Sensibility centered in the development of a womanhood that would come to pervade early nineteenth-century Anglo- American societies provides the context for one facet of the impossibility of coexistence in Hope Leslie.
Details
- Title
- THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF COEXISTENCE
- Resource Type
- Thesis
- Publisher
- University of West Florida
- Format
- text
- Identifiers
- 99380090725006600
- Academic Unit
- English
- Language
- English
- Awarding Institution
- University of West Florida; Master of Arts (MA)
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Arts (MA), University of West Florida