Using the theories of Michel Foucault as their guide, Casey Finch and Peter Bowen in their 1990 essay, The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury': Gossip and the Free Indirect Style in Emma", argued that the free indirect discourse in Austen validates Foucault's thesis that the Enlightenment was a fraud, an insidious form of oppression posing as liberation.Irvine, 99–100 Finch and Bowen argued that the voice of the omnipresent narrator, together with the free indirect discourse summarizing the thoughts of characters in Emma, were a form of "surveillance" that policed the thoughts of the character. Seen in this light, Emma Woodhouse's discovery that she loves Mr. Knightley is not an expression of her real feelings, but rather society imposing its values on her mind, persuading her that she had to engage in a heterosexual marriage to produce sons to continue the Establishment, all the while fooling her into thinking she was in love.Irvine, 100 By contrast, Lauren Goodlad in her 2000 essay "Self-Disciplinary Self-Making" argued that the self-discipline exercised by Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility was not an act of oppression as held by Foucault and those writing from a Foucaultian perspective, but was an "emancipatory act of political resistance", arguing that there was a tension between "psychology" and "character" since Dashwood must be the observer of her character, and used what she has learned to grow.Irvine, 104
