Feminism Theme Analysis

The unique experience of being a woman in both the personal and professional spheres recurs throughout Aunt Fay’s letters in Letters to Alice. At times, female identity is depicted as a liability, while it is an asset in other instances. Through the examples of Fay, Alice, and Jane Austen, Weldon builds an argument for reading and writing as feminist pursuits, through which individual women can reconcile conflicting sets of societal expectations and construct their own identities.

Fay notes that Jane Austen herself sometimes seems to reproduce the misogynist attitudes of her society. Fay speculates that Austen’s novels reflect both the oppressive gender roles of her society and her own efforts to forge an identity within them. In her very first letter to Alice, Fay writes that Austen’s novels generally reflect the realities of gender roles, rather than criticizing them: “She chides women […] men, on the whole, she simply accepts.” Fay also invokes Virginia Woolf’s concept of the “Angel of the House,” who whispers in the ear of young women and reminds them to be sympathetic and charming rather than confrontational. Austen’s genteel works, in Fay’s opinion, demonstrate the persistent presence of that oppressive figure. In her discussion of Mansfield Park, Fay suggests that the presence of two completely opposite female characters—sweet Fanny and disrespectful Miss Crawford—might point to Austen’s struggle to accept her own identity as both a “good woman” and a “bad” one. Fay notes that the real Austen was both intellectually rebellious and loyal to her family, and wonders whether “the split between good and bad never, in Jane Austen, quite reconciled.” In this case, even where Austen’s work reproduces oppressive gender roles, it may also give its author a chance to come to terms with them.

However, Aunt Fay also identifies countless examples of writing working to counter sexism and misogyny, in both Jane Austen’s time and in the 1980s, when Letters to Alice is set. In each case, the act of writing serves as a form of rebellion, in which a female author is able to use her work to shape her own reality rather than accepting the oppressive rules of her society. The immediate physical danger that women faced in Jane Austen’s era, especially from childbirth, is perhaps the most striking example of the oppression that Fay describes throughout her letters. She notes that Austen is often criticized for seeming to ignore these dire circumstances, but Fay argues that by creating thoughtful heroines and happy endings, Austen was successfully imagining a different, less dangerous model of womanhood. In Pride and Prejudice especially, Austen turns the stark reality of a woman’s practical need to marry into a pleasant, often comical romance. Living in a world that limited her agency as a woman, Austen seems to use her novels as a way to regain the power of self-determination. Although Fay does not face the same kind of peril that women of Austen’s day did, she is still burdened by expectations tied to her identity as a female writer. She hints at the danger she faces when traveling alone for her work, and at the idea that readers take issue with her unflattering descriptions of men and boys. Fay also tells Alice that Alice’s father, Edward, views Fay as “dangerous to the structure of society” because she is a feminist. Nonetheless, Weldon shows Fay continuing to write her way toward an improved society, in this case by directly rebelling against Alice’s father and advising his daughter to become a feminist writer herself.

Although Fay does not claim that literature has the capacity to erase oppressive gender roles, she nonetheless concludes that it is a meaningful way for women to gain power and live out feminist ideals. Discussing Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey, Fay describes the protagonist’s love of reading novels and quotes a section in which Austen writes: “If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?” The inclusion of this text hints at the literary bonds between Fay, Alice, Austen, and even Weldon herself, underscoring how works of literature can bring women together and help them find shared strength in their creative powers. At the novel’s conclusion, Fay tells Alice that she expects her reconciliation with Alice’s parents to go well as long as she does not talk about writing or feminism, among other subjects. Clearly, the world in which Fay lives continues to challenge her attempts to define her own identity as a woman. But again, Fay nonetheless insists that “the City of Invention will stand,” finding joy and selfhood in the continued process of creation and exploration that literature affords her.