11 - Gender

Summary

Introduction

It was inevitable that Austen’s irreverent purpose would be directed towards the stifling absurdity surrounding the concept of ‘gender’, or, to use a critical term introduced at the time of her early adulthood in the 1790s by Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘sexual character’. The cultural construction of sexual difference, as distinct from biological sex, had been recognized. Chapter 1 of Northanger Abbey, while operating as a satire of novels of sensibility, is also a comic anticipation of Simone de Beauvoir’s aphorism: ‘One is not born a woman, one becomes one’. Catherine Morland, we are told, was during her infancy ‘fond of all boys’ plays’ and preferred cricket to dolls. Aged 10 she has ‘a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features’, and although ‘seldom stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome, and very kind to the little ones’ is ‘noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house’. But from the age of 15 she begins to curl her hair and for the next two years is ‘in training for a heroine’; that is to say, she is not only making preparations to feature as the main protagonist in a fictional adventure, but also equipping herself with the superficial literary education and the techniques of personal grooming that constitute gender identity among the adolescent girls of the propertied classes, and provide the essential passport to the social interactions of the marriage market (NA 1:1:5–7).