Womens inheritance rights in Jane Austens Sense and Sensibility: Feminist perspective

ABSTRACT

In reality, God creates men and women with differentiation naturally or biologically. Human’s life is like a colossal and which is played by them. ،They are playing the same important roles which have been given. And they also have the same right and duty in order to make the drama is performed well. However, when one side feels that they have the higher right, thus they effort to own the story, determine the plot, and finally eliminate the other sides. Therefore, the effects of this condition are the unbalanced and the discrimination. The illustration above represents women’s condition in human civilization for long time. Women are regarded as the second class; they have been forced to accept their bad destination being a woman. Thus, gender inequality and feminism are concerned with those social phenomena.

Through her novel Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen tries to elaborate the unfair treatment which is faced by women at that time, particularly women’s inheritance right and the bad condition of women because of their obvious limitation to their roles in family and also in social life. This novel consists of feminist perspective and that is why, this novel is suitable to be criticized with this perspective.

The purpose of this study is to explain broader about women’s inheritance right and the their position in the society which are found explicitly in Sense and Sensibility. Male primogeniture system in inheritance seems create a nightmare for women’s right worse. They have to face many obstacles in social life because of their limitation in inherit wealth and property.

In conducting this research, the researcher used literary criticism as her research design. The reason is because literary criticism is considered as the best choice doing this literary research. And the approach which was used in this research was feminist literary criticism. The researcher correlated the content of the story with the theory in the feminist literary criticism.

From the data we knew that about the fact of inheritance law with women’s inheritance right at that time did not take side by them. Male primogeniture system means that the wealth, the money, the estates and other properties went to the first son in the family, or to the closest male of the original owner Moreover, following the system of inheritance, women’ right to own property was weak. In addition, the disadvantageous of women’s position in social life can be found in Sense and Sensibility. ،The others restriction of womens right in social affairs are their rights in education, rights in marital status, and also the unfair treatment in society because of their sex.

From this research, the researcher hopes there will be other researchers who concern to this topic and explore the feminist perspective more details. It cannot be ignored that the wider and larger perspective in feminism and literature in this topic is still needed.