Austen, Cinderella Complex and beyond: An analysis of Austen’s portrayal of her Heroines in Juxtaposition to the Cinderella Complex

Abstract

Jane Austen is one of the most prominent writers of the 19th century. In terms of chronology, her six novels fall between the 18th-century neoclassical formality and the effusive romanticism after the 19th century. Her novels portray the socio-political and cultural landscape of Regency England even though her prose style, manner, and approach held no resemblance to her contemporaries. Austen seems to operate in a limited landscape and writes about what she is most familiar with birth, love, marriage, death, faith, and judgment. She details the tedious business of living of the gentry in her society and displays unrivaled knowledge of the upper middle class. Even though issues of women were at the crux of Austen’s writing, Austen is not considered to be a staunch feminist writer. She concentrated on upper-middle-class women whose marriage, and courtship were the cynosure of her plots as she thoroughly examines the right basis for marriage in her work. However, most of her heroines have been written off critically as the selfsame Cinderellas. Therefore, the monotonous aura engulfing Austenian heroines who are in search of marital bliss has been inadvertently appendaged to the Cinderella Complex and hence the prejudiced critique. Austenian heroines are said to lack passion and vibrancy and by extension, character. This paper intends to analyze the portrayal of two Austenian heroines in view of the Cinderella Complex with the objective of exploring these portrayals beyond the Cinderella archetype. Keywords: Victorian women, Cinderella Complex, marriage, self-discovery, happiness