@article{oai:nagoya.repo.nii.ac.jp:00027922,
 author = {Chiba, Urara},
 journal = {IVY},
 month = {Oct},
 note = {In this essay, I investigate the relation between Pride and Prejudice (PP) and generic conventions of the domestic novel. The domestic novel is a didactic narrative written for a female educational reform. Its rise is in alliance with the middle class ideology. By focusing on Austen's use of its generic conventions, I demonstrate her self-consciousness about a deception of the middle class ideology. The middle class supplanted aristocratic hegemony by a gender-based value system. They separated the domestic sphere from the public one, and situated the former as a moral center of the whole society. They also insisted that women should contribute to a moral social reform indirectly through domestic surveillance. We can call this mystification of the engendered domestic sphere "domestic ideology." However, while acknowledging the constructive nature of woman's mind, the middle class inherited a principle of "coverture" which defined unequal legal status of woman's in the marriage. That is, as Hannah More's Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education exemplifies, domestic ideology is a conservative one with a progressive disguise. PP seems to be a prototype of domestic novels in a sense, for it depends on their generic conventions structurally. However, on the other hand, the novel consistently questions gender distinctions and keeps critical detachment from its own form. That is, PP is characterized by duplicity. This duplicity becomes clear in comparison with Fanny Burney's Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (Cecilia). Both novels employ the domestic novel formula. However, while didacticism works as authoritative in Cecilia, it is contested in a dialogic context in PP. In Cecilia, femininity as a social construct is internalized in the heroine's subject and restricts her passions as the "inward monitor." On the other hand, Austen's detachment from domestic ideology brings about moral relativity in PP. Actually, duplicity characterizing PP is also observed in middle class women's discourse. That is, in PP, "cultural duality" specific to them is juxtaposed with the conventional narrative structure. The internal tension dramatizes a complex relationship between dominant ideology and women's critical voice. The two are not so much mutual exclusive as defining itself in terms of the other. Self-reflexivity of the authorial narrator and Elizabeth Bennet epitomizes this dialectics. In conclusion, we may say that Austen applied a method of parody in PP. It is critical of didacticism intended by domestic ideology, but still depends on its conventions structurally. Through this repetition with critical distance, parodic discourse in PP suggests that the intrinsic flaw of ideological discourse can never be explained away., This essay is an expanded and revised version of the paper presenter at the 47th General Meeting of the Chubu branch of the English Literary Society of Japan on October 7, 1995.},
 pages = {69--92},
 title = {The Domestic Fiction vs. Women's Culture in Pride and Prejudice},
 volume = {29},
 year = {1996}
}