Pride And Prejudice Women Analysis

Love is an important part of today’s society; there is an entire genre of movies and books that revolve around the theme of falling in love and finding a soulmate. It has turned into a genre where the plot can be summarized as a boy meets a girl or vice versa and some problems arise, but in the end their love is pure and lasts. This rarely comes true in modern times. Love has turned into a fantastical and mystical dream women everywhere have; wanting to fall in love in the perfect way that Nicholas Sparks portrays it in his identical twenty or so books. Looking back in history and seeing how the way women have been portrayed, they have not changed much. In Pride and Prejudice, Twelfth Night, and I Want a Wife, the role women have in society

revolves around the way they fall in love, or forced to fall in love based on societal expectations.
Jane Austen in her book Pride and Prejudice, went against what society in her time was saying and wrote a love story with actual love in it. She opens the entire book with the famous quote, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (Austen 1). This summarizes how people imagined marriage and how there is no love in it whatsoever, only financial stability. Mrs. Bennet wants this for all her daughters. Since she has no sons, they have to marry a man who has enough money to support the daughter and her family once Mr. Bennet dies. It should be acknowledged that Mr. Bennet does not agree with his wife’s views. They are a prime example of how their characters are similar to what people in Austen’s era embody, just marrying for money.
Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth’s best friend, is another prime example of how marrying for money is only to meet society’s expectations.

She at first exhibits some potential to being similar to Elizabeth when Charlotte talks with her about her plan for marriage and how “happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance...They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life” (Austen 45-46). In his essay “Chance and the Hierarchy of Marriages in Pride and Prejudice,” Joel Weinsheimer explains this by saying “the pathos of Charlotte's marriage is that, because of her intelligence, her ignorance must be a pretense. And thus she never arrives” (Weinsheimer 408). She ends up settling for Mr. Collins when Elizabeth rejects his marriage proposal. Charlotte does it offhandedly and Weinsheimer describes it as her “[setting] the pretended ignorance of her marriage scheme into motion” (Weinsheimer 409) by “[perceiving] him [Mr. Collins] from an upper window as he walked toward the house, and instantly set out to meet him accidentally in the lane” (Austen 270). Charlotte was in her late 20’s and did not have much choice for falling in love and having the perfect happenstance meeting with her fiance as she dreamed about with Elizabeth. She did not have the time and luxury that Elizabeth had to fall in love. Charlotte had to find a man that

could support her so she would not turn out to be a spinster and outcasted from society.
Contrasting the failure of Charlotte with her quest for love, Elizabeth ends up falling in love and not having to settle to meet expectations. Weinsheimer remarks about the suddenness that Elizabeth realizes her love for Darcy, “the central marriage of Pride and Prejudice is based not alone on reason and the growing mutual understanding between Darcy and Elizabeth, but also on a thoroughly spontaneous affection-one which flowers entirely contrary to the efforts and expectations of the characters” (Weinsheimer 416). Elizabeth realizes her love for Darcy when she realizes that they are very similar in character. It is hard for Elizabeth herself to pinpoint an exact time and place when she fell in love. In her words, “It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began” (Austen 829) and which when Elizabeth asks Darcy when he fell in love with her he replies with “I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun” (Austen 829). Their pure, unadulterated love for each other contrasts the fake, loveless marriages that were going on during Jane Austen’s era. Elizabeth avoids the trouble that Charlotte faced by not caring about how the world would view her if she ended up getting married to a rich man like her mother wanted, especially with the failed marriages of one of her sisters.
Connecting back to the loss of Charlotte’s hopeless romantic version of love, in Judy Brady’s article I Want a Wife she describes all the duties a wife needs to be able to do, repeating the phrase “I want a wife” over and over again.

Brady sends the message home by getting more and more specific on what wives have to do to please their husband. Brady points out all the objectification women have to deal with when they want to marry. They essentially are turned into slaves of their husbands. Their only purpose is to provide for the children and take care of the house while the husband goes out and learns at school. Even though the article was written in 1971, it still stands true and shows how love can sometimes be ignored and have marriage only have the purpose of pleasing the husband. Charlotte wanted to have a life that would not be summarized as “a wife to go along when [the] family takes a vacation so that someone can continue to care for [the husband] and [his] children when [he] need[s] a rest and change of scene” (Brady 540). Brady is talking about how the wife has the job of being the ‘wife,’ and never gets a break from working and has to always be on call to take care of the children and her husband. Charlotte, in settling to marry Mr. Collins instead of looking for the husband that she always dreamt of, has to take the role of the slave-wife that Brady

describes.
Related to Charlotte’s loss of love is Elizabeth’s younger sister, Lydia’s failed marriage. Lydia eloped with
As opposed to both Pride and Prejudice and I Want a Wife, in Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, the women in this play lack the same societal standards and expectations, so are free to fall in love however they want with no repercussions. In the play, Shakespeare turns gender roles on their head with the heroine disguised as a man. This adds a different spin on love, Viola dressed up as Cesario falls in love with Orsino who is in love with Olivia who is in love with Cesario and then Viola’s twin brother Sebastian is in love with Olivia, who interestingly thinks that Cesario and Sebastian are the same person. All this confusion ends up getting resolved in the end, but during the play it is a big mess. Viola has a interesting place in the world of Twelfth Night as she is both a man and a woman at the same time. In her essay “Glimpsing a “Lesbian” Poetics in “Twelfth Night”” Jami Ake brings up “the dynamics by which a language of female-female desire emerges from the materials of conventional heteroerotic discourses already in circulation” (Ake 375). She brings up how the gender binary is flipped around in the play and Orsino has many feminine qualities that Viola falls in love with. Both Orsino and Viola do not mind that they do not fit into the typical gender norms and even embrace it. Orsino is a drama queen that makes a big deal about everything. Viola does not mind that he acts this way and falls deeply in love with him the moment she meets him. This is much different from Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice who took the entire book to realize her love for Darcy. Similarly though, they both do not let the expectations society imposes on them get in the way of the love. Ake also says “Viola's successful wooing of Olivia in the interview scene affords us a glimpse of a tentative “lesbian” poetics as one female character imagines and articulates the words that will seduce another” (Ake 376). Olivia’s easiness to fall in love despite telling herself that she will mourn over her dead brother shows she does not care what society will think of her as a upperclass woman falling in love with the servant of the man who is trying to win her love. No one had any worries about the repercussions that would come with falling in love with the people they did. They let their feeling rule their mind and guide them in the direction they wanted.
Society has an enormous influence on how people falling love, dictating on whether or not they feel accepted. Some people go against the flow and stand up for what they believe in and do not mind being the first of their kind to show the injustice. Others go with the flow and are afraid to break the mold, adhering closely to the rules accepted by the general public and wait for someone else to make the big move. Women themselves do not need to be the ones to fall in love and be forced to marry others, anyone who does not follow the general rules or expectations of society is forced to stay inside the lines.