Mary Poovey, from “Ideological Contradictions and the Consolations of Form” [from The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer]
This essay is drawn from Mary Poovey’s influential book The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (1984), which analyzes these three writers’ self-expression within a bourgeois patriarchal culture that valued modest, self-denying “proper ladies.” In the following excerpt from her chapter on Austen, Poovey focuses on Sense and Sensibility and its dramatized conflict between the “potentially anarchic power of feeling” and the restraining influences of propriety, rectitude, and “sense.” Poovey argues that Austen uses various techniques of narration that, while allowing feminine passion a presence in the novel, keep its dangerous potentialities contained.