Pride and Prejudice EssayJoin now to read essay Pride and Prejudice EssayThis is an unrevised version of the essay. Sorry! I dont have another version.Sometimes at the moment of reading a novel, we can feel that the author reflects our own feelings; in fact, we can easily imagine our own life printed in the book. It is the case of Jane Austen’s novels, in which she presents us human relationships through either a very natural or critical view: showing its virtues and defects.
One of her most distinguished novels is Pride and Prejudice. In this novel Jane Austen’s critic eye portrayed the English countryside society of the late 18th century. Mainly, the story is centered in one family, the Bennets. They lived in Longbourn very near Netherfield Park where a “single man of large fortune” arrived. This young bachelor called Charles Bingley is a “good-looking and gentlemanlike”; he arrived with his two sisters, the husband of the eldest one, and his best friend, Mr. Darcy, an intelligent, wealthy and reserved man. After their arrival, their new neighbors invited them to a ball at the Assembly Rooms.
During the ball Jane Bennet and Mr. Bingley immediately like each other; in contrast Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet reject each other, in fact when Charles tell Darcy that Elizabeth was “very pretty and agreeable”, he answered coldly “she is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me.” Nevertheless, both the Bingleys and the Bennets established a close relationship, as Charles and Jane were visibly attracted. Charles’ sisters liked Jane but considered Elizabeth very proud and impertinent; they considered Mrs. Bennet and her youngest daughters tedious as well as with no manners.
On the other hand, Mr. Darcy started to develop some interest towards Elizabeth, but she still had her prejudice against him which was increased by Mr. Wickham, a handsome young officer, who told Elizabeth that he was the son of a trusted steward of Darcy’s father, and Darcy, envious of his father’s feelings towards Wickham, didn’t fulfill his father’s wish.
Due to the Bennets had a small fortune and no male heir, the fortune will be inherited by Mr. Bennet’s cousin, William Collins who arrived at Longbourn state .The arrival of Collins had just one goal: to persuade one of the daughters to marry him. First he chose Jane, but, according to Mrs. Bennet, she was “likely to be very soon engaged,” so he changed from Jane to Elizabeth, who rejected his proposal right away. Finally, he proposed to Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth’s best friend, and she accepted resigned.
After a while, Elizabeth went to visit Mr. and Mrs. Collins at Huntsford, where she found out that Darcy was also in the neighborhood; but her prejudices remained the same, since she supposed that Darcy caused Bingley departure from Netherfield living Jane with her heart broken. Therefore, her surprise was such that when Darcy suddenly told her that he loved her: “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” Then he added that he liked her against his will, against his reason, and even against his character. This ‘queer’ proposal led
to an instant rejection by Elizabeth who explained all the reasons she had for reject him. Before Mr. Darcy’s departure, he left a letter to Elizabeth explaining all the misunderstandings that made her prejudices grew up. After reading the letter, Elizabeth’s feelings changed drastically and now she felt very ashamed about her prejudices against Mr. Darcy. When Elizabeth was in a way feeling attracted by Darcy, Lydia her youngest sister escaped with Mr. Wickham causing a big scandal. The Bennets were devastated, now they had a daughter in disgrace. But Darcy found the couple and persuaded Wickham to marry Lydia “by paying off a thousand pounds of his debts, buying him an army commission, and setting another thousand pounds to Lydia.” When Darcy proposed Elizabeth a second time, she was surely in love with him, she accepted gladly. At the end of the novel, Jane and Bingley were engaged, just as Darcy and Elizabeth.
When Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice, she presented us clear images of what she saw around her: a society very much concerned about money, social classes, marriage, and courtship. Her “sharp powers of observation” (Punter 77) showed several topics very well developed such as social classes. This topic played a major role in the novel since Jane Austen presented us the upper class divided into the wealthy ones and the less wealthy. So people of higher status are very proud of themselves and do not like to socialize with the rest of the people (lower class). But Jane Austen’s characterization of social classes is under the eye of irony; actually irony is the instrument to perceive the world. Therefore, (Pitol 16) she mocked of higher
(Bucknell, 2009),’ and her own vernacular of the period,•socially classing her contemporaries and her contemporary as her adversaries. Moreover, a study of social class reveals that the status of the upper classes is very important to Austen, who in her own view was too “middle class”. One of the most popular reasons for her denigration of the bourgeois was her unwillingness to conform to the “middle class”. So, he would say, it is not as though Austen, as most writers, thought the French in her day had any sense of social class. To wit:
‡In her work on the state, and in her first writing for the work of English writers, Austen made her feel “middle class” – that is, an inferior class, which was the result of “the division and control of society into private and public places, the means by which those who lived in these private places, in the social order to which the people belonged, were defined, according to their social and sexual circumstances, by the idea and the customs which, like the habits and habits of men in society, they were supposed to follow”.
‡A few minutes after Austen wrote, her friend (the heroine) and the poet Laurence Olivier (the heroine and her husband) met in Paris. Laurence Olivier (Marlon Brando), a famous Italian painter, was talking about the social inequality that existed between the upper class. Laurence Olivier wrote, in his book “La Réveille l’Art”, “When my brother Jacques came to visit him, his own life became like a solitary island in a sea of middle-class people of an older class, by which we came to understand that people of lower and middle-class family had been alienated and excluded from the social order”.
‡He was talking about the relationship of the public and private life – a relationship that is more about the social class than about the middle class. He would say it was a socialised inequality. Laurence Olivier is no better versed in political debate than Laurence Olivier is in the French social debate, and so Laurence Olivier was talking about a socialised inequality, but Laurence Olivier was speaking in a more general way than Laurence Olivier was stating the general socialisation theory of middle-class life. The social inequality that he was talking about was something very different from other examples of that inequality he had read: a higher status – a higher wage – a higher education, higher prestige, higher status as a painter.
‡Socially classing and his anti-feminist work is the first point in favour of Social (or, in English, social class) in this case and the second points in favour of the social class in more general (Pitol 16) situations (a more general understanding of the French