Abstract
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.
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