| It could be said that Jane Austen's novels are formulaic. Three or four country families and their quiet lives. A young woman of marriageable age and her sisters go from picnic to ball to dinner all the while on a hunt for a husband. A difficult young man of fortune enters the picture and after initially rebuffing him, the young woman realizes she has loved the difficult man all along and that he's not as difficult as she once thought. All ancillary characters are paired appropriately or if they remain unmarried it is because of bad behavior on their part. Yet within these seemingly formulaic novels provide us a psychological insight into human nature as it surrounds the marriage ritual in the eighteenth-century. In describing the marriage ritual of the minor gentry and middle classes, Austen exposes the realities of the marriage economy and how, to varying degrees of effectiveness, women manipulate this economy.; If one looks at marriage as a form of commodity and the act of courtship and marriage as a type of economy, the theories of Karl Marx regarding use value and exchange value are useful ways of examining this economy.; This thesis examines Emma and Mansfield Park and the marriage economies in each of these novels using use value and exchange value, as well as the idea of a sphere of consumption which young women enter when they become "out" in society and depart upon their marriage. The thesis discusses how women and men manipulate their own and others' use and exchange value in these transactions, to varying degrees of success. |
