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Essay / Class System In Jane Austen's Emma And Persuasion
The works of Jane Austen are characterized by their classic depictions of love among the nobility of England. Most of Austen's novels use the lens of romance to provide social commentary that is both realistic and ironic. Austen's first published bookThe central conflicts of Jane Austen's two novels, Emma and Persuasion, are based on the structure of class systems and the resulting societal differences between the nobility and the proletariat. Although Emma and Persuasion were written only a year apart, Austen's treatment of social class systems differs significantly between the two novels, allowing us to trace the evolution of her beliefs regarding nobility and its role in society through the analysis of Austen's different treatment towards social classes. class systems in Emma and Persuasion. The society depicted in Emma is based on a much more rigid social structure than that of the naval society of Persuasion, which Austen embodies through her strikingly different female protagonists, Emma Woodhouse and Anne Eliot, and their respective conflicts. In her final novel, Persuasion, Austen explores the emerging idea of a meritocracy through her portrait of the male protagonist, Captain Wentworth. The evolution from a traditional society based on aristocracy in Emma to that of a contemporary society based on meritocracy in Persuasion embodies Austen's own development and illustrates her subversion of almost all social attitudes and institutions that were at the heart of his first novels. When it comes to Austen's treatment of the class system in Persuasion, the novel can be divided into two somewhat contradictory halves. Austen spends much of the first half of the novel trying to convince the audience of the importance of a system of good manners, middle of paper...... Emma's voice in order to narrate the ideology interior, while simultaneously using a somewhat ironic third-person narrative voice in order to provide critical social commentary on the social attitudes of Highbury society depicted in Emma. Emma's voice allows the reader an unflinching insight into the lives of the people of Highbury, providing the narrative with a somewhat similar dichotomous technique Austen uses in Persuasion, in which she divides the novel into two halves - l 'one in which argues for the traditional system of formality, and another which aims to eradicate the same system that she so praised during the first half. Under the misleading guise of “political inaction,” Austen actually comments on the underlying social and political issues that permeate the novel through the literary technique of heteroglossia (Parker 359).