preview

Essay on Pride and Prejudice Versus Marriage and Tolerance

Decent Essays

In Jane Austen's novel, Pride and Prejudice, Austen reveals a sparkling comedy of love and marriage, wit, form, and feeling that achieve some type of balance between pride and prejudice. Mr. and Mrs. Bennett illustrate how comic characterization can be used to reveal different marital situations. Pride and Prejudice shows many aspects of marriage and demonstrates how one can make the most of their life regardless of the circumstances. Elizabeth and Darcy have discovered themselves through their differences and the loss of their pride and their prejudices. The traits pride and prejudice can be seen as desirable merits: self-respect and intelligence. Pride and Prejudice shows that human nature can be …show more content…

Bennett's desire to have her children married, through her expression of that desire reveals the defects of her character in a richly comic manner, is itself natural and laudable; "for girls of negligible fortune genteelly brought up must secure their man while they may, or face a precarious shabby genteel spinsterhood with few opportunities of personable satisfaction or social esteem," (Daiches 751).



Marriage is a form of unison that allows two people to come together and be as one. In spite of this, Elizabeth Bennett is proposed to by Collins and declines to be part of the blessed unison. Mrs. Bennett threatens to disown her daughter because of her fear of Elizabeth becoming an old maid. Elizabeth's best friend, Charlotte Lucus, then accepts Collins. Though it may seem that Charlotte settled in her marriage to Collins, she handles it very well. Charlotte, "knows it is her last chance, and she takes it deliberately, weighing her future husband's intolerable character against the security and social position he offers," (Daiches 752). Rather than face life with no economic security and no social prospect in an age when few means of earning an independent livelihood were opened to daughters of gentlemen, Charlotte married the grotesque Mr. Collins.

Get Access