Feminist scholarship aims at forging a new identity for women. The Women Liberation movement explored women’s identity by asking in Chris Weedon’s words “the very question what it is to be a woman, how our femininity and our sexuality are defined for us and how we might begin to redefine them ourselves”.(1) In the nineteenth century some women novelists used their writing to redefine it. (Gilbert and Gubar 44) All of Charlotte Bronte’s novels for example” deal to some extent, with a woman in search of her identity”. (Miles 39) In this paper I shall be looking at the ways in which women are represented in Austen’s texts. Jane Austen questions women’s inherited identity and creates women protagonists who display rounded characters. In addition, her work creates an awareness of the way in which woman’s identity has been constructed and a consciousness that women have artificially been endowed with qualities such as emotionality and natural mothering.
Assistant Professor, Dept.of English, B.D. A. College, Bermo, Bokaro (Jharkhand)
