<P> One of the most fruitful and contentious arguments has been the consideration of Austen as a political writer . As critic Gary Kelly explains, "Some see her as a political' conservative' because she seems to defend the established social order . Others see her as sympathetic to' radical' politics that challenged the established order, especially in the form of patriarchy...some critics see Austen's novels as neither conservative nor subversive, but complex, criticizing aspects of the social order but supporting stability and an open class hierarchy ." In Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), perhaps the most important of these works, Marilyn Butler argues that Austen was steeped in, not insulated from, the principal moral and political controversies of her time, and espoused a partisan, fundamentally conservative and Christian position in these controversies . In a similar vein, Alistair M. Duckworth in The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels (1971) argues that Austen used the concept of the "estate" to symbolise all that was important about contemporary English society, which should be conserved, improved, and passed down to future generations . Duckworth argued that Austen followed Edmund Burke, who in his 1790 book Reflections on the Revolution in France had used the metaphor of an estate that represented the work of generations, and which could be only be improved, never altered, for the way that society ought to work . Duckworth noted that in Austen's books, one's ability to keep an estate going, which could only be improved, but never altered if one was to be true to the estate, is usually the measure of one's good character . Butler placed Austen in the context of the reaction against the French Revolution, where excessive emotionalism and the sentimental "cult of sensibility" came to be identified with sexual promiscuity, atheism, and political radicalism . Butler argued that a novel like Sense and Sensibility, where Marianne Dashwood is unable to control her emotions, is part of the conservative anti-revolutionary literature that sought to glorify old fashioned values and politics . Irvine pointed out that the identification of the "cult of sensibility" with republicanism was one that existed only in the minds of conservatives, and in fact the French Republic also rejected sentimentalism, so Butler's challenge is to prove Austen's call for emotional self - restraint as expressed by a character like Elinor Dashwood is in fact grounded in conservative politics . Butler wrote "the characteristic recourse of the conservative...is to remind us ultimately of the insignificance of individual rights and even individual concerns when measured against the scale of' the universe as one vast whole"'. Irvine wrote that a novel like Sense and Sensibility appears to support Butler's thesis, but a novel like Pride and Prejudice does not, as Elizabeth Bennet is an individualist and a non-conformist who ridicules everything, and who to a certain extent has to learn the value of sentiment . </P> <P> Regarding Austen's views of society and economics, Alastair MacIntyre in his 1981 After Virtue offered a critique of the Enlightenment as leading to moral chaos and decay, and citing Aristotle argued that a "good life for man" is only possible if one follows the traditional moral rules of one's society . In this regard, MacIntyre used Austen as an "Aristotelian" writer whose books offered up examples of how to be virtuous, with the English country estate playing the same role that the polis did for Aristotle . By contrast, Mary Evans in her 1987 book Jane Austen and the State depicted Austen as a proto - Marxist concerned with the "stability of human relationships and communities" and against "conspicuous consumption" and the "individualisation of feeling" promoted by the Industrial Revolution . In her 1987 book Desire and Domestic Fiction, Nancy Armstrong, in a study much influenced by the theories of Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, argued that all of Austen's books reflected the dominant political - economic ideology of her times, concerning the battle to exercise power over the human body, which determined how and whether a woman was considered sexually desirable or not . The Marxist James Thompson in his 1988 book Between Self and the World likewise depicted Austen as a proto - Marxist searching for a realm of freedom and feeling in a world dominated by a soulless materialism promoted by capitalism . By contrast, Beth Fowkes Tobin in her 1990 article "The Moral and Political Economy of Austen's Emma" depicted Austen as a Burkean conservative with Mr. Knightly as a responsible land - owner taking care of his family's ancient estate and Emma Woodhouse symbolising wealth cut off from any sort of social role . David Kaufmann in his 1992 essay "Propriety and the Law" argued that Austen was a classical liberal in the mold of Adam Smith, who felt that virtue was best exercised in the private sphere of the family life rather than in the public sphere of politics . Kaufmann rejected the claim that Austen was influenced by Edmund Burke, arguing that for Austen, virtue was not something passed down from time immemorial from a landed elite as Burke would have it, but rather was something that any individual could acquire, thus making Austen into something of a radical . Lauren Goodlad in a 2000 article rejected Kaufmann's claim of Austen as a classical liberal, arguing that the message of Sense and Sensibility was the failure of liberalism to reconcile alienated individuals from a society that only valued money . As Rajeswari Rajan notes in her essay on recent Austen scholarship, "the idea of a political Austen is no longer seriously challenged". The questions scholars now investigate involve: "the (French) Revolution, war, nationalism, empire, class,' improvement' (of the estate), the clergy, town versus country, abolition, the professions, female emancipation; whether her politics were Tory, Whig, or radical; whether she was a conservative or a revolutionary, or occupied a reformist position between these extremes". </P> <P>--Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) </P> <P> In the 1970s and 1980s, Austen studies was influenced by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's seminal The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), which contrasts the "decorous surfaces" with the "explosive anger" of 19th - century female English writers . This work, along with other feminist criticism of Austen, has firmly positioned Austen as a woman writer . Gibler and Gubar suggested that what are usually seen as the unpleasant female characters in the Austen books like Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park, Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice and Mrs. Churchill in Emma were in fact expressions of Austen's anger at a patriarchal society, who are punished in guilt over her own immodesty in writing novels, while her heroines who end up happily married are expressions of Austen's desire to compromise with society . The Gilbert - Gubar thesis proved to be influential and inspired scholars to reexamine Austen's writings, though most have a more favorable opinion of her heroines than Gilbert and Gubar did., Other scholars such as Linda Hunt have argued that Austen used realism as a way of attacking patriarchy from the outside as opposed to subverting it from within by irony as Gilbert and Gubar claimed . The interest generated in Austen by these critics led to the discovery and study of other woman writers of the time . Moreover, with the publication of Julia Prewitt Brown's Jane Austen's Novels: Social Change and Literary Form (1979), Margaret Kirkham's Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction (1983), and Claudia L. Johnson's Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (1988), scholars were no longer able to easily argue that Austen was "apolitical, or even unqualifiedly' conservative"'. Kirkham, for example, described the similarities between Austen's thought and that of Mary Wollstonecraft, labelling them both as "Enlightenment feminists". Kirham argued that by showing that women were just as capable of being rational as men, that Austen was a follower of Wollstonecraft . Johnson similarly places Austen in an 18th - century political tradition, although she outlines the debt Austen owes to the political novels of the 1790s written by women . </P>

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