Jane Austen e a História: um olhar sobre as relações entre mulheres, espaços e classe em "Razão e Sensibilidade" e "Emma" (1811-1815)

Abstract

This Dissertation produces a historiographical analysis of how public and private spaces were constituted in the South of England through the feminine experience. For this purpose, two novels are used as objects of analysis: Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, and Emma, published in 1815, both authored by the English novelist Jane Austen, who lived, wrote and published during the British Georgian Era (1714- 1830). The research chose as temporal cut the years from 1811 to 1815 and it is based on the publications of the chosen sources and what they provide, which means that setbacks and advances in time in relation to this cut will have to be made for issues that the author’s own work requires and because she herself lived between 1775 and 1817; for this reason, the temporal context is inserted between the transition from the 18th to the 19th century, a period in which the sources were elaborated, and which is seen by many as a moment in English history marked by transformations that are still considered fundamental nowadays for the contemporary industrialand technological world. That was a starting point for progress, arising from the Industrial Revolution, an event that was intensified from the 19th century onwards and transformed almost all areas of that society. It was in that period of transformation that Jane Austen wrote about the daily life of gentry’s families and their properties in villages located in the English countryside, an environment that was opposed to the industrial frenzy of the cities, but which was still influenced in some way by the new changes underway. For this reason, the exercise of this research goes beyond a readingofwhat the authorwrote: itwas necessary to interpret what was not written in order to circumscribe everything that served as a relevant issue for her works. From there, we used the stimmung (or the climate of that time), and as proposed by the German theorist Hans Gumbrecht, to understand the process that drove the author’s dissatisfaction with regard to the condition ofthe women of her time, which made her transform such living nuisances into Literature. In addition, the gender theories proposed by the American philosopher Judith Butler are incorporated in this research, in order to allow an observation of the spatial manifestations of various social groups and to understand how their cultural practices could build different geographical spaces; thinking from the intersections established between gender relations and other identity belongings. In the case of this work, both gender and class relationsserveasvariablesto understandtheprocessesofexperience and space transformation. Allied to this perspective, the thinking of the British geographer Doreen Massey becomes very relevant for this research: after all, to think about the multiplicities of spaces and how they can be experienced in different ways, it is necessary to understand the positions that each person occupies in society.