Dancing In Pride And Prejudice By Jane Austen

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Interestingly enough, Austen’s Irish friend was Tom Lefroy with whom she fell in love like Elizabeth falls in love with Darcy after becoming a target of his pride and ridicule. The scholarship argues that dancing helps in proceeding the plot, shows characters’ idiocyncraices, and reveals their personalities. It’s not only at the Meryton ball, where Elizabeth and Darcy couldn’t make a successful dance pair, it’s also a private but informal ball at Sir Lucas’s residence, which furthers Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s tussle with each other. In these conflicts that take place in the ballrooms, lie the roots of their understanding for each other. As Austen shows us, the more they are on the dance floor, the more their personalities are revealed, and …show more content…

Allison Thompson argues about the Meryton ball in her book, “this ball not only advances the plot but it also shows that some certain expectations are expected form the participants that they will politely engage themselves in discussions. But Mr. Darcy doesn’t take any advantage of this ball. (140). Though Darcy doesn’t take any advantage of the Meryton ball, as Thompson argues, but Austen’s underlying purpose is not just to bring her characters together on the dance floor for dancing, she manipulates ballrooms and the incidents that occur there for a larger purpose, which is to create and enhance understanding and harmony between them. Thus, Darcy’s refusal and pride, and Elizabeth’s prejudice are not portrayed by Austen randomly, behind them, there is a long-term planning of Austen to bring them closer through using first acquaintance of the Meryton ball. Obviously, this is for what Austen endeavors throughout the novel. It’s Austen …show more content…

The gap between these two states is mediated not directly – not by a simple offer of marriage – but through a provisional and playful domain of conventionalized attention of which dancing is one of the most prominent. Indeed, dance is such a sure sign of courtship that it often stands for that process as a whole” (92). It’s the very gap mentioned by Handler and Segal that Austen does enrich with the ballrooms dancing wherein the courtships of Jane and Bingley and Darcy and Elizabeth head towards their life-long companionships. In the case of Pride and Prejudice, dance literally stands for the process of marriage as a whole. Mr. Collins’ awkward movements of dance steps at the Netherfield ball foreshadows his elimination from the list of prospective marriage candidates of Elizabeth Bennet. Austen’s world of the ballrooms doesn’t allow for any quagmire in dancing. Neither Elizabeth nor Austen seem to bear up with those who are not capable of showing their decorum on the dance floor. Mr. Collins’ dance with Elizabeth ends in fiasco. “The first two dances, however, brought a return of distress; they were dances of mortification. Mr. Collins, awkward and solemn, apologising instead of attending, and often moving wrong without being aware of it, gave

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