Literary Adventure discussion
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Pride and Prejudice
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February Read - Pride & Prejudice
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For me this is a classic piece of early feminist literature. Although Jane does marry Mr.Darcy she does it for love not because it is what her family wants or what society feels a women in her 20's should do.
This book has been described by scholars as a very conservative text. Did you find it so? What sort of position do you see it taking on the class system? It has also been described as Austen's most idealistic book. What do you suppose is meant by that?
2. In 1814 Mary Russell Mitford wrote: "It is impossible not to feel in every line of Pride and Prejudice...the entire want of taste which could produce so pert, so worldly a heroine as the beloved of such a man as Darcy.... Darcy should have married Jane."
Would you have liked the book as well if Jane were its heroine?
Have you ever seen a movie version in which the woman playing Jane was, as Austen imagined her, truly more beautiful than the woman playing Elizabeth?
Who doesn't love Elizabeth Bennet?!!
3. Two central characters in Austen have her own first name.
In Emma: Jane Fairfax is a decorous, talented, beautiful woman.
In Pride and Prejudice: Jane Bennet is everything lovely.
What do you make of that?
4. Lydia and Wickham pose a danger to the Bennet family as long as they are unmarried and unchecked. But as a married couple, with little improvement in their behavior, this danger vanishes.
In Pride and Prejudice marriage serves many functions. It is a romantic union, a financial merger, and a vehicle for social regulation. Scholar and writer Mary Poovey said that Austen's goal "is to make propriety and romantic desire absolutely congruent."
Think about all the marriages in the book with respect to how well they are fulfilling those functions.
Is marriage today still an institution of social regulation?
What about it would change if gay marriage were legally recognized?
5. Austen suggests that in order to marry well a woman must be pretty, respectable, and have money. In the world of Pride and Prejudice, which of these is most important? Spare a thought for some of the unmarried women in the book—Mary and Kitty Bennet, Miss de Bourgh, Miss Georgiana Darcy, poor, disappointed Caroline Bingley. Which of them do you picture marrying some day? Which of them do you picture marrying well?