Redeeming Professions: Wollstonecraft, Austen, and Vocational Choice

Abstract:

Jane Austen’s novels insist that readers notice characters’ professions and vocational choices. This essay argues that Austen’s ideas develop from—and expand on—Wollstonecraft’s claims about the power and potential of vocational choice to benefit self and society. In A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft famously critiques clergy, soldiers, and sailors because too often men in these professions were—like women of the time—without choice of career and without self-determination within those careers. Austen illustrates novelistically many of the complaints Wollstonecraft levels against men in clerical and military professions, but she also offers examples that redeem these professions and the men who intentionally adopt them. Previous studies of Wollstonecraftian influence on Austen have largely overlooked Austen’s insistent attention to men’s careers and the ways in which they affirm Wollstonecraft’s critiques as well as extend the possibility of moral and social benefits to be realized from vocational choice, equipping men, too, to be better marriage partners and citizens. This essay provides an overview of Wollstonecraft’s theories about vocational choice and Austen’s fictional echoes of these theories within the context of contemporary ideas of vocation and the professions. Then it turns to two case studies from Austen’s fiction and two characters who most directly and extensively discuss their choices of profession: Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park (1814). Bringing these elements together not only illuminates another aspect of Wollstonecraft’s influence on Austen that has received scant critical attention but also reveals Austen’s contribution to changing notions of profession and egalitarian marriage partnerships.