"I Am Elizabeth Bennet": Defining One's Self through Austen's Third Novel

I have always read Jane Austen as a political writer, a closet radical whose novels criticize patriarchal structures that limit female agency. In doing so, I have found her novels to be particularly effective in challenging stereotypes about gender that many of my students embrace. Until recently, however, I had little examined my assumption that I have both the right and the ability to pose such a challenge. Then I accepted a position in the women's undergraduate college of an Orthodox Jewish university. My experience teaching Pride and Prejudice to these students has forced me to confront the degree to which my own assumptions about oppression and gender inform my teaching. I have also become more aware of the extent to which students shape their own learning experiences. What follows, then, is an entirely personal reflection on what I have learned by teaching Austen as part of a women's literature course in this religious and cultural context.

To anyone at a secular institution, creating a course like "Women and Literature" probably seems straightforward. I thought so when I taught it at a public university in the Midwest. Now that I was employed by a private, religious institution, however, I had terrible doubts. Could I teach a course in which women were critical of all forms of patriarchal authority, including those manifested by religious institutions? Could I include novels in which heroines had sex before marriage when my own, unmarried students abstained? What about issues like lesbian desire, women's financial dependence, and the pressures exerted by social conventions? Would my students find such issues threatening? Would they be open to my view of the texts, ignore me, or (worse) run screaming to the administration? Colleagues reassured me that they taught all types of literature at this particular institution. However, they recommended that I establish trust before introducing students to material they might find offensive.

So I began the course with Pride and Prejudice. Keeping my ideological opinions to myself, I noted that Austen has been accused of both condoning and condemning the social, economic, and political structures that affect the families her novels describe. Over the next few weeks, as we read, we placed the novel in different contexts—we discussed John Locke's Theory of Human Understanding and how sensibility was thought to impede women's ability to reason. We considered the conservative backlash against Jacobin writers and spent time figuring out how much money was worth in Austen's day. We paid close attention to the characters' language and spent a great deal of time on Austen's rhetorical strategies.

Without exception, my students proved skillful readers. Despite some differences, their Austen—like mine—emerged sharply critical of the social structures and expectations that hampered the agency of Elizabeth Bennet, her heroine. But I was confused. How could these women reconcile what I saw as their own unreflective acceptance of patriarchal authority with their approval of such a subversive writer? My questions were met with silence. Eventually, I realized that my colleagues were right: trust was an issue and I was a stranger. Peer pressure, I learned, was also a factor. Many students were reluctant to express opinions that might appear offensive to their classmates. At the time, I merely assumed that my students had been trained to avoid drawing parallels between their own experience and those of heroines in secular texts.

I was mistaken. Once I began to read their journals and papers, I discovered that many identified strongly with Austen's heroine. "I am Elizabeth Bennet," one student wrote. Why, I wondered, were these students so passionate about Austen's novel? Gradually, I figured it out. As Orthodox Jews, my students live lives circumscribed by expectations of feminine conduct that resemble those that appear in the novel. Thus Pride and Prejudice is more obviously relevant to their own lives than it is to those of most...