Thursday, March 17, 2011

Pride and Prejudice -- Jane Austen



"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." So begins Jane Austen's most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice. And, of course, a single woman in search of a good fortune must equally be in want of a husband who has one!
The difficulty for the Bennet sisters -- lovely, sweet-tempered Jane; beautiful, headstrong, intelligent Elizabeth (Lizzie); plain, bookish Mary; Kitty, who slavishly follows the lead of the youngest, the empty-headed and man-hungry Lydia -- is that because they have no brother their father's estate will pass to a cousin, the pompous clergyman Mr. Collins, and they will be left with very little to live on. Solution: at least one of them "must marry VERY well" -- meaning, marry money.
Enter a new neighbor, Mr. Bingley, a wealthy young man who takes a house in the neighborhood. The dithering, laughable Mrs. Bennet immediately selects him for Jane, and the young people oblige her by showing affection for each other. But Bingley's friend, Mr. Darcy, persuades the somewhat weak Bingley that Jane isn't serious, and Bingley begins to turn his attention elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Bennet has contrived for Lizzie to marry Mr. Collins, mainly to keep the family home and estate "in the family." But Lizzie simply isn't having it, and her father takes his head out of his books long enough to back her up.
Lizzie thinks Jane and Mr. Bingley are perfect for each other, and is furious when she realizes that the proud, imperious -- and VERY wealthy -- Mr. Darcy is keeping them apart. She has already concluded that Darcy "is the last man on earth I could ever be persuaded to marry" -- as indeed she tells him when he, fascinated and attracted in spite of his "better judgment" -- proposes.
But fate intervenes to bring Darcy and Lizzie into contact and she begins to realize there is another side to this proud man. That he is indeed a good man -- "the best man I have ever known," she concludes -- becomes apparent when he secretly intervenes to rescue the flighty Lydia, youngest of the Bennet sisters, from a fate worse than death: being seduced but not married by a genuine scoundrel.
Gradually Lizzie realizes that her first impression of Darcy's "pride" was, well, "prejudiced." And Darcy realizes there are factors in male-female relationships that class and fortune cannot dicate.
Jane Austen had a satiric eye and a ready wit, all of which are present in Lizzie. She accepted the social order of her day, even when she could recognize its absurdities.
Modern critics often see Lizzie as a pre-feminist heroine, a liberated woman ahead of her time. But she is not. She lives happily within the social constraints of early 19th century England (the Regency period), and she doesn't fight them. She doesn't burn her corset. She doesn't want a career. She accepts the unfair laws of entail that would rob her and her sisters of their father's estate, because it had to pass to a MALE relative. And she figures out how to have a happy, fulfilling life WITHIN those constraints, not by challenging them. Just like Jane Austen.

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