Great Riddlers: Jane Austen

by Justin James Zablocki

Jane Austen was an English novelist who wrote all her popular novels in the early nineteenth century, and is famous for her critiques of the status of most women in society and their dependence on marriage. She is most well known for her novels 'Sense and Sensibility', 'Pride and Prejudice', and 'Mansfield Park'. All of these novels made her very successful and she is still commonly studied to this day. Aside from the novels she is so well known for, she was also very talented at writing poetry. During her career as a writer she wrote many charades. Although charades are now a game in which everyone just acts out clues and guesses, the term used to also mean riddles in verse or prose that describes a word or phrase syllable by syllable. These riddles are fun because they come in two pieces: first you must figure out what each of the verses mean and then you must put them all together and figure out what word or phrase they combine to be.

Jane Austen's early feminist views of the world dictate a lot of what she writes about. Although it is not obviously apparent how these views fit into her charades and riddles, most of them do include gender to some extent. Some of these riddles do take some sort of stand on sex, but it is not perfectly apparent what stance they take with regards to gender or what they are critiquing, if anything. Her riddles/charades do not demand solutions, per se, but most of them do have solutions. These riddles have purpose and substance not only in their meaning, but also for their implications on language. These riddles imply that words can mean a lot more than their dictionary definition; they can also have meaning in a social context. In addition to this, the words resulting from the riddles are derivative of the syllables that are generated by the riddle as well. These individual syllables can be taken as having meaning significantly related to the final and complete answer.

One of the more popular riddles written by Jane Austen goes as follows:

"My first doth affliction denote
Which my second is destin'd to feel.
And my whole is the best antidote
That affliction to soften and heal."

The answer to this riddle is woe-man, or woman. This riddle is entertaining and fun to solve, but it also has some social implications as well. By breaking down the word woman into the separate words woe and man, it implies that women are like men with great sorrow and distress. This could be construed as meaning that women are responsible for all of the woes of the world and for combating them, while men are without these sorrows.

Jane Austen was a very talented person who accomplished a lot in her lifetime and did a lot to improve the common ideals of women. Her writings are still culturally relevant and will be studied for centuries to come.

For more on Jane Austen visit her Wikipedia page.

For some more great riddles visit Good Riddles Now.

Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Justin_James_Zablocki

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