Feminine Passion as Feminine Power: Challenging Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘Rational Woman’ in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets

Abstract

Describing the feminist ideology central to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Anne Mellor identifies an ‘unreconciled tension between female sexual passion and female self-control’ (Mellor, 1993: 44) evident in Wollstonecraft’s attempt to define a woman’s rightful place in the late eighteenth century. This article investigates this tension alongside other paradoxes in Wollstonecraft’s argument and their impact on the presentation of feminine passion in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784) and Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), and uses Vindication as a framework to analyse the presentation of femininity, emotion and power in these works. The article explores the connotations of novel reading and feminine sensibility as presented in Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland and argues for the autonomy and power that can be gained from this, alongside analysing the similar representations of feminine-coded power in Smith’s poetic representations of the connection between humans and nature. Finally, the article concludes that both Austen and Smith reconcile the tension identified by Mellor through their proposal that feminine power (for Wollstonecraft only attainable through rationality and ‘self-control’) and feminine passion not only can co-exist, but are, in fact, complementary.