The Balance Between Sense And Sensibility

Nowadays, more and more young people take a rational way rather than an emotional attitude to marriage. However, no matter what form the marriage takes, people hope to get happiness. But how could we get happy marriage? What kind of view of marriage is appropriate? These questions have puzzled people's minds for thousands of years. Jane Austen—a woman writer, brought us a fresh wind about the view of happy marriage two centuries ago. According to Austen's view, marriage not only involves the man and the woman concerned but also is the product of certain social relations.This thesis attempts to reconcile the thematic conflict between sense and sensibility from the feminist critical method through Austen's early work Pride and Prejudice and her late work Persuasion. Austen's feminine consciousness is strikingly obvious in her view of marriage. Her works all focused on heroine-centered domestic live and she emphasized that the premise to women's blissful marriage should be based on the agreement between the ideal and the real, on the equality between men and women. She broke the traditional notion that female are"emotional creatures"and she advocated that women should also seek to maintain the harmony between spiritual and material pursuit in happiness of marriage. Her novels embody a beauty of balance between sense and sensibility from the beginning to the end.