PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, ELIZABETH'S CHARACTER.

Review:tammanna
Jane Austen is a familiar name with a layman and a scholar alike. She is one of the evergreen artistes immortalized in Pride and Prejudice, an eternal favourite amongst booklovers. The novel was published in times of great political upheaval. It was the time after the French revolution characterized by downfall of feudalism, demands for political rights for lower class men, Napoleonic wars and upcoming democracy. Her detractors have accused her of not talking about these events of historical significance in the novels. Austen is silent about the political turmoil of her times, but that does not mean ignorance. She argued that a nation’s history is not made only of big political events, but also of social happenings. The domestic lives, private spaces and the influence pf public events on private lives constitute a nation’s fabric of everyday existence. Austen presents, in Pride and Prejudice, the social milieu in which she lived. She makes the gentry her subject of exploration. Through the novel, she critically examines the society and its ideology. In her times, the kind of novels being written, especially by women authors were sentimental novels. In these novels there was no questioning of the oppressive notions of femininity, of patriarchal suppression of women and marriage as the be all and the end all of a woman’s life. Mary Wollstonecraft was perhaps the first writer to criticize the denial of equal education and rights to women. She proved the stereotypical depiction of femininity as irrational and emotional to be social constructs. In her revolutionary document, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she advocated the concept of rational woman. Austen carries forward this idea of rational woman through Elizabeth. Elizabeth is a markedly different heroine than other heroines of sentimental novels. Unlike them, Elizabeth is not characterized by certain ‘feminine virtues’ like innocence, fragility, physical weakness and intellectual inferiority to men. She is depicted as a rational woman marked with exuberant energy, vitality and armed with a wit that could humble the most arrogant of intellectual men. She subverts the notion of femininity as existed in her society. Marriage was the ultimate goal of a woman’s life. The option of working was not open to them, so marriage was their sole hope to escape from a life of poverty and want. This compulsion for marital bliss is interrogated in the text through a family of five daughters whose future is a life of poverty and dependence after their father’s demise. A woman’s necessity to get married is personified in charlotte. She marries Collins out “pure and disinterested desire for establishment.” But, Austen’s heroine considers it beneath her dignity to bend down to societal pressure and marry without love.

Elizabeth too wants to make her future secure and she also indulges in husband hunting, but not at the cost of her self-respect She would rather live a life of adependent spinster than marry for money. She cannot love Darcy and be sycophantic like Miss Bingley because he is a rich aristocrat. However, critics like Marilyn Butler regard the marriage of Darcy and Elizabeth as the folly of the novel. She says that her marriage restricts her. However, I beg to differ. Her marriage is not her containment, but a triumph over prejudices, class distinctions and a model for other women. Mr. Bennet’s words in the novel, “ I know that you could neither be happy nor respectable unless you… looked up to him as your superior” is oft-quoted by critics to point out the fact that Elizabeth after all, submits to a superior man like all other heroines. This viewpoint, although true to some extent, does not represent the major theme of the novel in totality. It is not just Elizabeth who undergoes an educational process, but Darcy too is humbled. The rich aristocrat who is proud of his connections and inferiorizes Elizabeth’s has to learn to unlearn his aristocratic arrogance. Elizabeth’s rejection of Darcy’s proposal in this light is very important. It makes him realize that Elizabeth will come with her baggage of low family ties and he will have to respect her as an equal if he wishes to get the same in return. Elizabeth says to Lady Catherine, “ he is a gentleman and I am a gentleman’s daughter, so far we equal”. We must not forget that Austen was writing in times of tumultuous change. The aristocracy was dying and mercantilism was coming up. It was a time when both the landed gentry and the upcoming bourgeoisie had to offer something to each other and accommodate themselves in a progressive looking society. It definitely would not be incorrect to say that the marriage is conservative as it brings together two feuding classes—aristocracy and bourgeoisie—but we must remember that austen was writing in a conservative society like that of the Victorian age. It must also be remembered that the means of reaching this conservative ending is not at all conservative and therein lies the genius of Austen—subtly questioning and subverting the accepted norms of behaviour.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, ELIZABETH'S CHARACTER. Originally published in Shvoong: http://www.shvoong.com/books/novel-novella/218919-pride-prejudice-elizabeth-character/