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"Forced on Exertion"
| Title: | "Forced on Exertion": Employment and Boredom in Austen's Sense and Sensibility. |
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| Name(s): |
Yaun, Katherine, author Walker, Eric, professor directing thesis Faulk, Barry, committee member Warren, Nancy, committee member Department of English, degree granting department Florida State University, degree granting institution |
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| Type of Resource: | text | |
| Genre: | Text | |
| Issuance: | monographic | |
| Date Issued: | 2004 | |
| Publisher: |
Florida State University Florida State University |
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| Place of Publication: | Tallahassee, Florida | |
| Physical Form: |
computer online resource |
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| Extent: | 1 online resource | |
| Language(s): | English | |
| Abstract/Description: | This thesis examines the employment choices available to single women on a typical 19th-century Georgian estate, represented by Barton Park in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The word "employment" appears more than 65 times in her six novels, with approximately 13 references in Sense and Sensibility. Although "employment" signifies a variety of meanings throughout Austen's work, in this study I analyze the word's significations of a single concept, a concentrated activity contributing to a larger, individually-motivated project. Austen's repeated usage of "employment," coupled with her satiric exposure of Lady Middleton, indicate an underlying consciousness of the tensions associated with the landed gentry's elite status as a leisure class and the culture of boredom that permeated the estate, precluding the normalization of employment. In this work, I focus on a particular slice of the traditional private/public scholarship on 19th century British literature and argue that both male and female estate residents locate themselves in multiple positions along the continuum between boredom and employment. I analyze the characters of Lady Middleton, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood and Edward Ferrars in order to understand the variety of possible cultural responses to this continuum that Austen offers her audience. Sense and Sensibility, Austen's first published novel, tangibly exemplifies an employment choice available to single women of the landed gentry – reading and writing satire – and thus revises the intangible "nothingness" of Lady Middleton's boredom satirized in the novel. | |
| Identifier: | FSU_migr_etd-0990 (IID) | |
| Submitted Note: | A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. | |
| Degree Awarded: | Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2004. | |
| Date of Defense: | Date of Defense: October 27, 2004. | |
| Keywords: | Employment, Georgian Estates, Boredom | |
| Bibliography Note: | Includes bibliographical references. | |
| Advisory committee: | Eric Walker, Professor Directing Thesis; Barry Faulk, Committee Member; Nancy Warren, Committee Member. | |
| Subject(s): | English literature | |
| Persistent Link to This Record: | http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_migr_etd-0990 | |
| Use and Reproduction: | This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). The copyright in theses and dissertations completed at Florida State University is held by the students who author them. | |
| Host Institution: | FSU |
Yaun, K. (2004). "Forced on Exertion": Employment and Boredom in Austen's Sense and Sensibility. Retrieved from http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_migr_etd-0990
