One Jane Austen’s View of Marriage in Pride and Prejudice.doc

One Jane Austen’s View of Marriage in Pride and Prejudice Abstract: Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen’s representative work. It expressed the view of love and marriage in a mildly humorous way. Through the discussion of the different marriages, she perfectly reflected the relation between money and marriage at her time and gave the people in her works vivid characters. Austen thinks that marriage merely for property, money and status is absolutely wrong, but marriage without economic factors is silly. In a word, she is against the marriage for money. She regards love between two people as the basis of an ideal marriage, which breaks the traditional marriage concept and influences people’s idea of marriage nowadays. Key Words: Pride and Prejudice; views of marriage; love; Jane Austen I、Introduction Jane Austen (1775-1817) is often viewed as the greatest of the English women realistic novelists in the nineteenth century. The Pride and Prejudice is one of her famous books and it is the representative of realistic literature. In portrays, with special sensitive characteristic of female writers, the life and ideas of middle class who live in countryside. This novel makes an analysis of human nature and then stick up readers to think over social relations. This novel takes young people’s marriage as the thread and it covers the inheritance of fortune, women’s social status, ethics and custom. Being the masterpiece of Jane Austen, it comes to the extensive favor of literary lovers and experts at the same time. This paper makes an analysis of four marriages in Pride and Prejudice and discusses the deep outlook for their love and marriage in the light of social background at the time. Pride and Prejudice is a story about Mrs. Bennet’s daughters who are at marriageable age. The whole story is about marriage. Through four couples’ attitude to love and marriage and the reaction of the other people, we can get a clear picture of the customs of the upper middle class then, s