“I Am Elizabeth Bennet”: Defining One's Self through Austen's Third Novel

Abstract

I have always read Jane Austen as a political writer, a closet radical whose novels criticize patriarchal structures that limit female agency. In doing so, I have found her novels to be particularly effective in challenging stereotypes about gender that many of my students embrace. Until recently, however, I had little examined my assumption that I have both the right and the ability to pose such a challenge. Then I accepted a position in the women’s undergraduate college of an Orthodox Jewish university. My experience teaching Pride and Prejudice to these students has forced me to confront the degree to which my own assumptions about oppression and gender inform my teaching. I have also become more aware of the extent to which students shape their own learning experiences. What follows, then, is an entirely personal reflection on what I have learned by teaching Austen as part of a women’s literature course in this religious and cultural context. To anyone at a secular institution, creating a course like “Women and Literature” probably seems straightforward. I thought so when I taught it at a public university in the Midwest. Now that I was employed by a private, religious institution, however, I had terrible doubts. Could I teach a course in which women were critical of all forms of patriarchal authority, including those manifested by religious institutions? Could I include novels in which heroines had sex before marriage when my own, unmarried students abstained? What about issues like lesbian desire, women’s financial dependence, and the pressures exerted by social conventions? Would my students find such issues threatening? Would they be open to my view of the texts, ignore me, or (worse) run screaming to the administration? Colleagues reas-