Marriage And Love In Mary Poovey's The True English Style

Upon a comparative study of the texts Emma and Clueless, we can see that the quality of relationships in society bears strong similarities, despite their different contexts. Emma is set in 16th century England, where the rigid social structure dominated social interaction. This is contrasted to Clueless, which is set in 1990’s Beverly Hills where popularity was integral to determining a relationship. Being integral to modern society, relationships were used as medium to secure wealth and to find purpose in one’s life, in different contexts. Additionally, the restrictive nature of relationships has changed over the course of time despite still existing in a different sense. The strict class based society of the Regency Era limited relationships in Emma while social groups at school dictated the dynamics of relationships in Clueless. However, the popularity of marriages has decreased, with many teens opting to settle with dating before any further commitment. By discussing the different purposes and changes in relationships over the two texts we can develop clear ideas about the quality of relationships in society.

Jane Austen provides her readers with insight into marriage and English society within the 1800’s. In Emma, the story establishes the idea that society could not function without marriage and how the institution of marriage defined one’s social status.

The value given to marriage in the 18th century is examined by Jane Austen in pride and prejudice. These values are further explored and evaluated by Letters to Alice. Pride and Prejudice shows the urgency and importance placed on marriage as a vehicle for getting wealth, social status, and a home for women of the 18th century. Letters to Alice brings new insight into the context surrounding the motives of marriage in Pride and Prejudice, whilst also providing insight into the marriages of Weldon’s own era. Charlotte Lucas is characterised as a woman not ‘thinking higher either of men or matrimony,’ but she still marries Mr Collins

Marriage has always been a convoluted subject to every era of time, especially when wealth is brought into the equation of it. During the Romantic Era, the state of marriage illustrated women’s continued inequality in society. For instance, women lacked legal equality once they entered marriage due to coverture, which is the condition of a woman during her married life, when she is under the law of being the authority of and protection of her husband. This basically entails that once a woman marries, she is property of her husband. In later decades, women would make great strides to gain legal recognition. However, during the late eighteenth century, Romantic feminists voiced more practical concerns rather than that of law (Feldman 280). Before the nation could acknowledge women as equals, husbands must first accept their wives as true partners in marriage. This was considered not only logical, but practical. Feminists located one of the sources of inequality within women’s own behavior and the methods they employed to gain husbands. Women had been taught to use beauty and love to attract husbands, but beauty and love are only temporary states. These states do not establish a solid foundation for a lasting marriage. As illustrated in Jane Austen’s novel Emma, a successful marriage is founded upon the match between two personalities, and not upon looks.

Gaining fresh, innovative insights that appeal to modern consciousness entails the adaption of a text to a contemporary contextual environment, and by comparing both Jane Austen’s Regency Era novel, Emma (1815), and Amy Heckerling’s postmodern American film, Clueless (1995), it is evident that the film has been re-appropriated in such a way that Austen’s voice is still heard today, while simultaneously projecting Heckerling’s views on present-day society. While both Emma and Clueless fall under similar timeless themes, such as the social hierarchy, the social values of marriage and patriarchal society, which contribute to the female bildungsroman of their main protagonist who both go through a process of being childish, ignorant and surrounded by misconception to maturing, the texts are moulded by differing contexts. Where Austen’s representation is shaped by the Regency Era conception of marriage which wasn’t for the purposes of genuine love but to maintain social status, Heckerling’s portrayal is derived from 1990s American teen culture of consumerism, materialism and superficiality and where marriage is represented as romantic in nature.

Texts and their adaptations are significant when comparing the paradigms in place in their respective time periods. Throughout history, there has been a drastic change of belief on the importance of marriage. When Frank Churchill, in Emma by Austen, finally announces his hidden engagement to Jane Fairfax, there is a considerable uproar for many reasons. Personally, to Emma, she felt deceived as she thought she was beginning to develop real feelings for Churchill. Although, to everyone else in the town, this engagement was seen as a scandal; particularly as he was seen as much worthier status and finance than his fiancé. Also, this kind of ‘reckless’ behaviour is accentuated by valued character, Mr Knightley, who comments with high modality, “This is very bad. He had induced her to place herself, for his sake, in a situation of extreme difficulty and uneasiness”. With this negative response from the Highbury community,

Women were defined in accordance to their marital status dissimilar to clueless where a shift time era’s erases the necessity, urgency & intentions of marriage especially evident in the final cut of a wedding where Cher utters “As If! i’m only sixteen. and this is california not kentucky”. In clueless, the central value of marriage is substituted with sex - searching for an ideal boy to lose her virginity to becomes a priority as opposed to a suitor to marry, exemplified by Cher in the expression “you know how picky I am about my shoes and they only go on my feet”. Emma, happy with her current situation declares “I have none of the usual inducements of women to marry” and Cher maintains her superiority in the simile “Searching for a boy in high school is as useless as searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie.”- thus Cher’s virginity is equivalent to Emma’s heart. Amongst the shift in social and cultural context emerges sexual notions that directly align with the thematic concern and value of marriage explored in

Emma Goldman’s main claim is that love and marriage are not the same. She justifies this through explaining that majority of marriages taking place at this time are occurring simply for the couple to meet public expectations. A bulk of the marriages are not based on love and therefore, love cannot continue to grow throughout the length of the amalgamation. There are few cases where love thrives in married life and under these circumstances, it would have done so regardless of marriage. Goldman asserts that one would be able to compare an insurance policy to marriage except instead of paying money the women sacrifice her freedoms. While one would be able to refuse to pay for insurance it would prove to be much different in regards to marriage as a woman abandons her own life to become an attachment to her husband. While marriages also impacted husbands, their sphere was still broader than the common housewife who was confined to their own private sphere. Goldman makes it clear that marriages were just another form of oppression for women in comparison to free love. At this time it was ultimately a woman’s job to marry a man and give herself to him while simultaneously giving her already limited freedoms away.

If she had been able to procure the necessary husband, there is no doubt that her gentility would have become permanent. As it was, she married for love and the ‘intimacy between her and Emma must sink,’ that is, she has lost her albeit precarious hold on gentility.

Though at first glance, Emma appears to be a generic romantic novel about virtue and ladyhood, Austen actually challenges what the meaning of “ladyhood” is to the reader. We view Emma’s follies, trials, and triumphs through the eyes of the omnipotent narrator who first describes Emma as a stereotypical, wealthy young lady who is “handsome, clever…with…a happy disposition” (1). Through the use of irony, Austen employs a series of situations in which Emma, a “lady” of high standing within her community, challenges conventional thinking of what it means to be a young woman in the early nineteenth century, particularly her ideas concerning marriage and

Jane Austen’s ideas differed with the patriarchal system of her times. She elicited feminist concepts to contradict of the patriarchal structure; Emma’s first determined not to marry. When Harriet once asked why Emma never thought about marriage, she replied that most women were married because of insufficiently social ranking or money. She certainly had all of these privileges, so she won’t

Pride and Prejudice’ is concerned with the equality of personhood between characters in the story. For instance, the marriage of Charlotte Lucas marriage to Mr. Collins which can be demonstrate the fact that marriage in the 19 century England, was ultimately seen as being an economic institution, dictated primarily by economic means. Miss Lucas, whom is a woman with small fortune, recognized her requirement for a wealthy husband to ensure that her social and cultural sustainment and thus, she marries Mr. Collins for whom she does not feel any loving emotion, “it is impossible that every moment should be employed in conversing together”. Within this, Austen presents a more cynical view of marriage, that of happiness not as marital

Marriage has no always been about the love and happiness two people bring eachother; instead it was concidered to be more of a business transaction. Emma by Jane Austen takes place during the early twentieth century, this time period was completly absorabed in social classes and had a much different view on marriage than today. Through the young, bold, wealthy, and beautiful character Emma Woodhouse, Jane Austen exposes the protocol of marriage as well as the effects marriage held based on social standing during the early twentieth centuery.

It is undoubtedly incredible that Pride and Prejudice, a novel written and published in 1813, continues to have an impressive degree of relevance in the modern world. In the 19th century society that serves as the backdrop for Pride and Prejudice, perhaps the most important societal norm is getting married. Women are preoccupied with finding suitable husbands so that they can live a comfortable life, while reciprocally, men are hoping to find a wife for a potential financial benefit or property gain. Unfortunately, love is simply considered to be a bonus and Austen is horrified by this lack of consideration of people being unable to find their true loves because they are so focused on material circumstances. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen illuminates the literary theme of marriage by contrasting extrinsic motivation with romantic connections through the relationships between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Charlotte Lucas and Mr. Collins, as well as Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” (Austen) Pride and Prejudice’s, the novel, hook that continues to bare truth in our day and age. The misconception of love and the reasoning behind marriage runs for thousands of years through history. Whether it be the Mesopotamians who forged marriage contracts for the alliance of houses or more recently in our time the marriage of love, marriage plays multiple key roles in society. Marriage in ancient society was utilized to join families, but also for reproduction purposes and assure proper inheritance of property. Though not hard to believe love was a reason behind a few marriages, however, historians have shown that most marriages were for financial benefits. The idea of love is one that has versatile meaning as well as forms. In many cases selfish desires such as lust and avariciousness are falsely seen as love, however, true love is one that is cultivated from sacrifice and selflessness. Anna Quindlen describes the exemplary model of love in Pride and Prejudice as “a dance of attraction of two brilliant human beings who teach each other, through trial and considerable error, the folly of their great faults”. Following the theme of what makes a good marriage, Jane Austen elaborates the necessity of an equilibrium of finance and love in her novel Pride and Prejudice. Analyzing the novel character’s logic such as that of “Collins and Charlotte [which]