Conclusion

Abstract

‘Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything’, says Anne Elliot with uncharacteristic adamancy in the penultimate chapter of Persuasion. We have seen that even when the pen was in women’s hands, as had become increasingly common by Jane Austen’s time, it had to conform to the norms set up by the dominant patriarchal culture, which provided the inescapable context of publication. Women’s texts were thus implicitly made to endorse certain assumptions. The motif of the frail, frightened and nubile heroine who has to scuttle through a minefield of aggressive virility, illustrates two such interrelated assumptions: that woman is essentially the object of male sexual desire, and that chastity is the supreme female virtue.