Discuss the themes of love, money and marriage in Pride and Prejudice.
Love and marriage are the chief themes in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. This is nothing novel as the themes had been a matter of concern to many playwrights and novelists ever before. Of them, Shakespeare is there, handling the theme of love and marriage in their multifarious dimensions. What is important is that Jane Austen, unlike Shakespeare, handles themes as ground reality, in the context of social environs in the late 18th century. Shakespeare also does not evade the question of money in a marriage, and the best example is The Merchant of Venice which is markedly different from The Midsummer Night’s Dream. The criticism that Austen moves within a two-inch box of ivory is invalid as the box may be two-inch in size, but it is not made of ivory. Austen’s world is the world she lived in and knew, and she made no attempt to flint her imagination beyond the boundary line. The middle class society in its necessary intercourse with the aristocracy and the tension that necessarily springs out in a classified society constitute the workshop of Austen. Naturally, the themes of love and marriage as handled by her have their own sociological, psychological and artistic implications. Hence, marriage which is a social institution is not handled by Austen as the ultimate result of love however it generates. Matrimony in Pride and Prejudice always involves the role of money.
Austen’s main subject in Pride and Prejudice is courtship and marriage, and not love leading to marriage. The motive force is the sternly real and universally acknowledged fact that the mother, and the father, of three marriageable daughters, must be in search for young men of good fortune for their daughters. In the novel, there are seven marriages ( Mr.& Mrs Bennet; Bingley & Jane; Elizabeth & Darcy; Charlotte &Collins; Lydia & Wickham; the Lucases; the Gardiners ), five of them very important,(and the marriages) as they provide perspectives to judge what are the requirements of a good marriage. It is obvious that in Jane Austen’s view a marriage based on pure economic considerations is a bad marriage. ................TO GET COMPLETE STUDY MATERIAL JOIN NSOU ENGLISH COACHING
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