Henry Wilkinson 4/18/17 Response

I really enjoyed the essay "Jane Addiction" by Melissa Sue Kort for a few reasons- one, she examines the cultural fascination with Jane Austen and adaptations of Austen's work, and two, she talks about how the works are either feminist or non-feminist. Me personally, I believe Jane Austen creates feminist characters in a non-feminist world. An example of this is the story of Sense and Sensibility, one of my two favorite Austen novels (the other being Emma). In Sense and Sensibility, the main characters are forced to move from their manor into a small house, a mother and her three daughters, and they are forced to live a life they have never lived before. Of course love and marriage features in the story, but the characters are well-developed, central in their own lives, and are most importantly active. Also, as Kort points out, many fail to see the satire of Austen's novels and the fact that the marriage and hetero-normative romance is merely a "scaffolding for a critique of the patriarchy embedded in every novel."  Austen asks if it is possible to have traditional goals like financial security and marriage while still being independent, and while this is not usually addressed in feminist conversations, it is an interesting and important question nonetheless. As Kort says, "while Austen falls short of advocating revolution, her heroic women characters manage to maintain their self-esteem and independent principles," and it is this independence and positive self-esteem that makes the characters wonderful female role models, and thus, feminist.