Pride and Prejudice as a Domestic Novel
Of all the truisms about Jane Austen, the favourite
for the past centuries is that a little interest is taken by her in the broad
concerns of national life. It is a proposition which seems quite obvious to the
readers of Pride and Prejudice or any other of Austen’s works. Winston
Churchill exclaims, “What calm lives they had, those people! No worries about
the French Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars!” Chesterton writes “a story as
domestic as a diary in the intervals of pies and puddings.”
Criticism of this kind indicates the essentially
narrow focus of an Austen novel in which the novelist seems to pen activities
about her neighbours while the dynasts were fearing the world to pieces and
consigning millions to their paves.
Admittedly Jane
Austen stands aside from the ideological convulsions that accompanied and
followed the French Revolution. But detachment is not the quality that
evidently strikes the critic cited above. Her detachment from the larger world
guarantees a brilliant narrowness of focus upon a domestic world which in Pride
and Prejudice centres on marriage and money.
Also Read:
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👉Character Analysis of Elizabeth Bennet
But the marriage and money theme operates on many
levels. It is even more baffling when Austen’s heroine comes to marry. The fact
remains that Elizabeth does make of what from the materialistic point of view
is a glorious match the most glorious of any Austen’s heroines and that its
material splendour is pointedly put forward. The question that naturally arises
is: what is the connection between the heroine’s personal progress and the
minor characters’ husband – hunting this novel as a conservative novel and
marriage should be and is the fulfilment of personal moral quest. This applies
to Elizabeth more than to any other characters. Personals matters and personal
attitudes are made the themes of social interaction in the novel on the most
important plane, they involve moral implication and often assume religious
overtone.
In fact the subject of Pride and Prejudice is what the
little indicates: the sin of pride obnoxious to the Christian, which takes the
form of complacency about the self and correspondingly borrow a lower opinion
or prejudice about others. Darcy’s pride is humbled midway through the novel
when he proposes to Elizabeth and to his astonishment is rejected the lesson he
has to learn is that he has to earn his right to consideration by respect for
others.
Elizabeth’s corresponding sin is more subtle and her
enlightenment requires the space for the whole book. She seems unconscious that
she suffers from pride at all. Quick of observation encouraged by her father’s
example to take delight in the follies and vanities of others, she sees
everyone’s mistakes but her own. The false assurance of friendship from Miss
Bingley and Mrs. Hurst do not deceive her. She already has too low an opinion
of them. She sees and enjoys the follies of Mr. Collins. But she also quite
unreasonably persists in thinking ill of Darcy, and just as perversely, in
thinking well of Wickham, even when the evidence that he is a fortune-hunter is
placed before her.
In
Jane Austen's novels the maneuvering by which a man presents himself to a woman
and her parents as a possible husband often comes before any signs of love.
Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice offers the most tough-minded and
unsentimental analysis, counseling that Jane Bennet should secure her rich
husband first and think about love only after they are married. 'Happiness in
marriage is entirely a matter of chance'.
The
marriage of a young woman is the protocol of Jane Austen’s time. Lydia Bennet
marries at 16 and her mother talks of her sister Jane attracting the
attentions of a well-qualified suitor at the age of 15. At a certain age,
somewhere between 15 and 19, a young woman was said to be 'out'. That meant
that she could be courted. . In 1802, aged almost 27, Jane Austen herself accepted
a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither, the brother of family friends,
only to change her mind by the next morning.
The
marriage choices that
Jane Austen's characters make are absolute. Mr. Bennet, Austen tells us,
married Mrs. Bennet because he was captivated by youth and beauty, but then
discovers her true nature. 'Respect, esteem, and confidence had vanished for
ever; and all his views of domestic happiness were overthrown.'
Questions of status and class are a major
preoccupation of Jane Austen's characters, and of the novels themselves.
Professor John Mullan considers both the importance of social status and its
satirical potential. There is certainly no association in her novels
between high rank and any great virtue or ability. Aristocrats are at best
buffoons, at worst paragons of arrogance.
There has been a curious tendencies to take ‘pride’
and ‘prejudice’ to be polar qualities, like ‘sense’ and ‘sensibility’ where as
in the course of the novel we generally see them associated within the same
character. The proud lady Catherine is certainly prejudiced and the prejudiced
Elizabeth can be accused of pride. Caroline Bingley declared that her manners
are “a mixture of pride and impertinence.”
Austen’s domestic world is thus not quite simple in
which characters are personified abstractions – like ‘pride’ and ‘prejudice’, ‘insolence’
and ‘folly’, ‘irresponsibility’ and ‘jealousy’. Narrow and domestic though the
world is, it is nevertheless quite rich in suggestion and implication. To apply
such term as ‘narrow’ or ‘domestic’ is to ignore the richness and complexity of
Pride and Prejudice.
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