In many ways, domestic life is at the center of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, as it is a novel concerned with the home and the family. In general, it could be said that domestic life in the novel is reflected as the single most important factor in determining one's station, comfort, and status in life. For instance, the landed gentry (Darcy's social class) enjoy the fat of the land and can move freely about in elite social circles without worrying about needing to work. The Gardiners, however, while not poor by any means, occupy a lower rung in the social ladder simply because their family has made its wealth through trade. As such, the Gardiner family is thought of as lesser than those families, such as Darcy's, who have inherited their wealth through the ownership of land. Here, we can see that domestic life is dominated by the reputation (and usually a monetary reputation) of one's family.
Thus, there is understandably a scramble to "marry well," which means marrying into a rich family, as doing so will secure a stable social position for the future. It is this impulse that provokes Mrs. Bennet to tirelessly hunt for husbands for her daughters and Darcy to be initially hesitant and rude in his pursuit of Elizabeth. By focusing the novel so intently on this scramble to secure an eligible family, Austen also illustrates the importance of one's domestic life during the era in which the book takes place.
Saturday, June 18, 2016
How is domestic life reflected in Pride and Prejudice?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
There are a plethora of rules that Jonas and the other citizens must follow. Again, page numbers will vary given the edition of the book tha...
-
The poem contrasts the nighttime, imaginative world of a child with his daytime, prosaic world. In the first stanza, the child, on going to ...
-
The given two points of the exponential function are (2,24) and (3,144). To determine the exponential function y=ab^x plug-in the given x an...
-
The only example of simile in "The Lottery"—and a particularly weak one at that—is when Mrs. Hutchinson taps Mrs. Delacroix on the...
-
Hello! This expression is already a sum of two numbers, sin(32) and sin(54). Probably you want or express it as a product, or as an expressi...
-
Macbeth is reflecting on the Weird Sisters' prophecy and its astonishing accuracy. The witches were totally correct in predicting that M...
-
The play Duchess of Malfi is named after the character and real life historical tragic figure of Duchess of Malfi who was the regent of the ...
No comments:
Post a Comment