Fortune and status play a major role in shaping many characters' attitudes toward marriage in this text. Consider Lady Catherine de Bourgh's high status and the way it affects her view of marriage: she longs to keep both her daughter's and nephew's fortune and status intact, and so she hopes they will marry one another. Mrs. Bennet's lower status and fortune make her desperate to marry her daughters off, even to strangers, and to marry them off well (a.k.a. to men of fortune and status). In any case, for many characters, including Caroline Bingley, the desire to retain or acquire fortune and status is the major factor in making a marriage match.
A character's sex (and the restrictions or opportunities provided by society for that sex) often plays a role in shaping their views of marriage as well. For example, Mr. Collins wants to marry because he believes it will make him happy and is appropriate for a man of his profession. However, his eventual wife, Charlotte, doesn't marry for happiness, but for security. Her options, as a woman of 27, are extremely limited, and she fears becoming a burden on her family (something a man, who can make his own fortune, would be much less likely to fear). Likewise, Mr. Bennet seems as though he couldn't care less about his daughters' marriage prospects, while the very same topic seems to occupy almost every one of Mrs. Bennet's waking thoughts.
Sunday, December 31, 2017
What factors were most significant in shaping a character’s attitude toward marriage in Jane Austen's 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 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 ...
-
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...
No comments:
Post a Comment