Empowering women: Spaces of conflict in Maria Edgeworth's educational fiction

Date

2001-08

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Publisher

Texas Tech University

Abstract

Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) has long been considered a major contributor to late eighteenth and early nineteenth century educational theory. This dissertation examines six novels written for adults to pinpoint the ways they represent her educational theories. This dissertation focuses on how adult characters respond to their early education and not on her children's fiction. Edgeworth's educational theory stresses several points: women have the same right as men to learn from experience, men as well as women must be properly educated, well educated women balance reason and obedience as well as sentiment and reason, and women must be educated in order to become good wives and mothers. Edgeworth accepts her culture's insistence that women should remain in the domestic sphere, but, I argue, her novels provide for women an empowered space within that sphere. Edgeworth insists that properly educated women have power in spite of cultural limitations but that improperly educated women do not. Without education, she argues, women have no power at all.

Modern feminist critics have condemned Edgeworth for her support of the limit placed on women; her restriction of women to domestic space, they argue, supports the patriarchal system and, therefore, the limits that system places on women. These critics object to what they consider Edgeworth's romanticizing of domestic space, which in turn romanticizes women's oppression. However, I argue that Edgeworth's female characters are empowered in that limited space, and thus they push against these limits. Although Edgeworth's empowered space leads later to the Victorian idea of the angel in the house, nonetheless Edgeworth's novels offer real power to women within carefully circumscribed arenas

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Keywords

Women -- Social conditions, Edgeworth, Maria, 1767-1849 -- Criticism and interpretation, Self-actualization (Psychology), Women in literature -- History and criticism, English prose literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism, Education in literature, Women -- Education -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century

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