Content area
Full Text
The issue of primogeniture in Jane Austen's novels is most often discussed in terms of its effect on women, especially daughters. Shifting the focus to sons, however, allows us to read Austen's narratives in light of the seventeenthcentury debate about primogeniture and its effect on sons, in particular younger sons. The Genesis narrative, newly translated within the King James Version of the English Bible, became the flashpoint for both sides of the argument - a debate that ultimately led to a change in ideas about life, liberty, and property. Although each of Austen's novels features at least one younger son, echoes of the debate seem most prevalent within Sense and Sensibility. Austen's portrayal of sonship therein plays with both the Genesis narrative and the debate it fostered. Rather than taking sides, however, the novelist combines and synthesizes ideas in order to represent the complex effects of primogeniture - or power over property and wealth - on a young man's use or abuse of liberty.
Austen concerns herself with three types of liberty, one of her favorite themes: self-determination or the freedom to choose, self-realization or the freedom to act on one's choices, and self-perfection or the freedom to make moral choices.1 Like the sons in Genesis, each elder and younger son in the novel faces to some degree the tension between his freedom to choose and act as he pleases and his responsibility to do so rightly. For Austen, a son's successful pursuit of manhood ultimately depends on his expression of liberty.
Property is at issue with primogeniture, and three methods of tenure, or the manner in which property in land is held, existed in England prior to Jane Austen's time. Gavelkind, which allowed all of the sons to inherit equally, predated primogeniture and predominated up to the Norman conquest of 1066. Borough-English was a reversal of primogeniture, allowing the youngest rather than the eldest son to inherit. Primogeniture, a feudal practice, became popular after 1 066 as a way to preserve the estate intact over generations. The Statute of Wills in 1 540 gave landowners more liberty in the disposal of property; although it allowed the eldest son to be "entirely cut off from inheriting," it did not significantly reduce the practice of primogeniture...