评价网 > 科教论文 > 文学毕业论文 > 英美文学论文 > 正文

On the Women’s Status Seen in Pride and Prejudice美文学

2013-05-05 01:04

Abstract
With the development of the society, women are playing more and more important roles in various aspects of the modern society, and their statuses are also enhanced. However, traditional ideologies are deeply rooted; women are still treated unfairly, and they have to fight against traditional prejudice and self-cultivation to their status’s enhancement.
Key Words
Women’s status; pride and prejudice; feudal ideology；Pride and Prejudice
 
摘　要
随着社会与进步，妇女在社会各个领域中起着越来越重要的作用，妇女在很多方面的地位也得到提高。但是，封建观念根深蒂固，妇女仍然受到来自各个领域的不公平待遇，所以妇女要敢于与封建偏见做斗争，要积极通过改变自我来提高自身的地位。
关键词
妇女地位；傲慢与偏见；封建观念；《傲慢与偏见》

Introduction
Today, people are more and more caring about women’s status. Women are not a separated individual, but deeply tie to the society, and they play very important roles in every aspects of the modern society. So women’s status not only connects to women themselves, but also the society’s development. Therefore, both women and the government should try their efforts to enhance women’s status and advance the equal right of men and women.
As everyone knows, Pride and Prejudice，a well-known novel written by Jane Austen, marriage is central topic of the novel. According to the appearance of the novel, as for Austen’s characters, marriage does not mean the act of ungoverned passion but a complex engagement between the marrying couple and society. In the novel, Austen portrays the women’s low status and the reasons of women’s low status. But women in the novel didn’t try to strive for their right, they thought little of their low status, and had little self-awareness, just negotiated to the society.
As for our Chinese women, they have been experiencing over 3000 years’ traditional ideology. And even in the modern society, they also suffer kinds of discriminations from the society and men. They are usually thought of humbler than men, and always be excluded out of the society.

（科教作文网http://zw.nseAc.com）

 
 
 Ⅰ.A General Summary of the Women’s Status in Pride and Prejudice
A. A Brief Introduction to the Story  
    Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen’s great masterpiece, a sharp and witty comedy of manners played out in early 19th century English society. , a world in which men held virtually all the power and women were required to negotiate mine-fields of social status, respectability, property, and marriage.
Marriage is one of the themes in the novel. Austen concentrates on women’s fate most. Through her characters’ process of courtship and marriage, Austen shows social backgrounds behind their marriage and what low status women have suffered. In Pride and Prejudice, for a woman, generally the only way to her is to get married besides being spinsterhood or governess. To marry a rich and high status man, is a path for the young women to gaining financial security and social status. The novel portrays life in the middle class rural society of the day, and tells the initial misunderstanding and later mutual enlightenment between Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy. They gradually dispel their prejudice and constitute a happy marriage. Here Austen shows the power of love and happiness to overcome class boundaries and prejudice, thereby implying that women should strive for their own love and happiness, but not to according the social will.
However, behind the happy marriage of Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy, Austen mainly wants to show that property, social status still play the most important roles in a marriage, from which women suffered a lot. No right of inheritance, such is particularly the case of the Bennets, a family of five daughters whose father’s estate is entailed to a distant relative, for upon Mr. Bennet’s death they will loose home, land, and income, everything else. After knowing Elizabeth’s refusal to Mr. Collins, Mrs. Bennet threats her daughter that “if you go on refusing every marriage, you will never get a husband, and I am sure I do not know who is to maintain you when your father died.” So it is illustrated that property and social status are more important than marriage. （科教范文网 lw.nseaC.Com编辑发布）
 
Thus, under the effect of the unreasonable social value, doesn’t Charlotte Lucas,
who is up to playing in a high-staked matrimonial game forfeit her own personal
integrity?
B. Women’s Status Shown in the Novel
Either in the past or today, society puts a significant value on marriage. In modern society, marriage means the birth of a new family, which is filled with love, understanding, happiness and harmonious atmosphere. Moreover, marriage is not a trade and the two persons in a marriage should not get married for the personal benefit or just for convenience. But in which, marriage is an odd phenomenon and it is just an approach, which people could reach their aims and provides them convenience. Austen describes Charlotte’s marriage as a symbol, through which Austen shows the readers what low status women hold. 

In the novel, marriage is an everlasting and hot topic for all the people, especially for women and their families. Although marriage is an odd phenomenon in the end 18th and early 19th century middle class’s country life in Britain, it is very common. Women never considered the marriage itself, but to what extent that they would be benefited from a marriage. Mrs. Bennet, for example never concerns about the moral and teaches her daughters the view of moral. “The business of her life was to get her daughters married” and she thinks that could fetch her daughters wealthy and high status husbands; she has achieved something great in her life and her family will be benefited much. Thus, when Mr. Bingley, a wealthy bachelor with large fortune, four or five thousand a year, becomes their neighborhood, Mrs. Bennet begins to contemplate his getting married to one of her daughters. And in the later days, she is incapable fatigue and enumerates kinds of advantages that her family will get if Jane and Mr. Bingley get married, such as wealth, status ranking, and could also throw her other daughters in the way to other rich men. All her thoughts for fetching her daughter wealthy and high status husband come just out of the considering of practicality, but not out of her daughters’ feelings. Under the monetary view of marriage, Mrs. Bennet totally treats her daughters’ marriage as product trades and her daughters are the commodities.

（科教范文网http://fw.ΝsΕΑc.com编辑）

 
In Pride and Prejudice, Austen shows that because of women’s low status, they are desirable to change their status. So marriage becomes a straight and quick way to change their situation. Though they know that such kind of marriage is equal to a trade and for themselves, they are only products in the marriage market or an attachment to a man or even a marriage’s slave, they do not care much.

C. Other Aspects Connecting with Women’s Status
The women in Austen’s age, lived in a patriarchal society, a world in which women were strictly limited, but men held all the advantages. And under such a society, women forfeited their personal personalities and own integrities. They could not entail their fathers’ estate, which was a quite iniquitous affair to the daughters in the Bennets. Although they felt angry about it, “I do not think it is the hardest thing in the world that your estate should be entailed away from your own children and I am sure if I had been you, I should have tried long ago to do something or other about it” Mrs. Bennet cried to her husband. But the fact is that they could do nothing to change unchangeable social rule.
Young women of today have a variety of options open to them regarding their future. They can go to college; they can have their careers and become professional women and live on their own; they can earn their status through hard work and their advantages. However, women in the end 18th and early 19th century English society had no these free choices. Their formal education and job were limited, and the society could not welcome of a woman entering a profession, and their knowledge seemed no use to the society. If a woman was unmarried, no matter she was mature or not, she was not allowed to live alone and must live with her family, at least live with a suitable chaperone until her marriage or her spinsterhood to death. In Austen’s age, women’s actions were strictly limited and they could not enjoy their personal freedom
Ⅱ Reasons for the Women’s Low Status at That Time

（科教作文网http://zw.NSEaC.com编辑发布）

A. Traditional Feudal Notions
Observing the novel Pride and Prejudice from another aspect, we know that the theme of the novel does not only deal with love and marriage, but also includes the relationship of women, society, and women’s status. Jane Austen has shown the social fabric of society during her time and makes a comment on the status of women during that time. In Austen’s time, society treated women unfairly and women really enjoyed low status
To know clearly what Jane Austen writes Pride and Prejudice for, we should firstly have a clear mind of the social background and know, under the traditional feudal notion how the society treated the women in the 18th and 19th century country society in Britain
 In the novel, Austen presents the gender injustices in the 19th century English society, and how the important role that money played in determining a woman’s daily life, marriage and destiny. Economically dependent, women were robbed of property and inheritance rights and possessed no independent source of income. The entailment of the Longbourn estate is an extreme hardship on the Bennet family, and is quite obviously unjust. No right to entail their father’s estate leaves the Bennet daughters in a poor financial situation which both requires them to be married and makes it more difficult to marry well. Having no social status, and in order to improve their social status, women have to give up their personal dignity and ego at the expense of their love and marriage, and they are willing to get married just for financial security and enhancement of social status. Under these values of money and social status, women they can’t enjoy a happy marriage and their freedom. And they are deprived of the right to receive education and take part in social activities. Because there are no needs for higher education for them, and even if there is necessity to receive a higher education, it is just for self-enhancement or for pleasing 

their husbands.
    At that time, society offered few opportunities to women to choose for their lives and to decide the destiny. Just as the opening sentence of the novel says “it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” which tells the reader that men were always in the dominant

status in a marriage and the heritance of property. Thus men enjoy the right to choose their wives according to their will.
Through Pride and Prejudice, Austen portrays the commonly held views on the characters’ marriage. Society, at that time, put a significant value on property and social status, and women in such a society, with their privileges tightly limited, had no chance to develop their personalities and their characters were fettered by the society. There were no centrally organized systems of state—supported schools, and some local grammar schools did exist but did not admit girls. So women’s education became impossible, and they didn’t have careers, but society required little for their use of knowledge and gave little chance for them to use knowledge. They were denied the possibility of improving their status or gaining their financial security through hard work or personal achievements. They were mostly estimated by others through their property and social status.
Therefore, in Pride and Prejudice, marriage is one of the most ideal ways, in which women could gain reputation, wealth and raise their social status. Just as the character Charlotte Lucas in the novel, without thinking highly either of men or matrimony, her life goal is marriage. When proposing and being rejected by Elizabeth, Mr. Collins quickly transfers his attention towards Charlotte Lucas, and he could not possibly be in love with Charlotte, for only three days before he had proposed Elizabeth. Yet Charlotte knows the fact that the man she will marry has no attachment to her, just for the will of marrying, but she pays no attention to it. She marries Mr. Collins for the purpose other than love, so she doesn’t care about whether there is love in their marriage. Just as Charlotte says to her fiend “I am not romantic, you know. I never was. I ask only a comfortable home; and considering Mr. Collins’s character, connections, and situations in life…” she accepts Mr. Collins’s proposal. Austen
portrays that Charlotte’s marriage to Collins is a monetary trade. Charlotte marries Collins primarily because he will be able to provide her enough livelihoods and will be able to make her life quite easy by considering estate. So she thinks that the tolerable Collins’s proposing to her is an extremely good fortune for her since he earns his money through inheritance and is in the command of the wealthy lady Catherine. In other words, Charlotte marries Collins not because of love but because of her desire for financial security and raising her social status. Facing the practicality, she would have sacrificed every better feeling to worldly advantages. After their marriage, Charlotte has to endure her intolerable husband. （转载自科教范文网http://fw.nseac.com）
 
Another obvious aspect, examining from Pride and Prejudice is the Prejudice on the right of women’s inheritance. Society doesn’t admit that women can entail from their fathers. Although the Bennet family has no son, none of the five Bennet daughters are allowed to entail their father’s estate, after their father’s death. And all his estate will have to be turned over to one of their male relatives Mr. Collins, and after the death of Mr.  Bennet, the five Bennet daughters would lose all that they have been owned. Just as Mr. Bennet says to her wife and his daughter “about a month ago I received this letter …It is from my cousin, Mr. Collins, who, when I am dead, may turn you all out of this house as soon as he pleases.”. Certainly, the mention of the inheritance offered women in the situation of plight.
B. Women’s Surrender to Social Prejudice
In the novel, Austen criticizes the unreasonable social structure, also the innocence of women. In terms of marriage, they thought they had no high social status and had no large property, so they thought that marriage was an acceptable path to his high status or their economic safety according to the view of the society. They never thought that they could earn their life and their marriage, which belonged to themselves but not to the social value. They just considered if they could completely integrate into the society and accepted the twisted monetary view and marriage view, and played the roles that the society needed, they could gain their happiness and easy life. Thus, they dressed themselves and were willing to transform themselves into commodities, appearing in kinds of balls, in order to attract men. 
Although women were forced under the social prejudice, they tried no struggle. They were willing to believe that marriage was a form of trade and in the marriage market they could be given happiness. Facing social prejudice, they also had the consciousness of being humble, thinking that the male was the superiority, and women had to surrender to the society, was seemed to more easily to them. In the novel, Austen demonstrates that women should strive for their own life and marriage, without considering the influence of the wrapping view of society, be self—confident and get rid of the illiberal mind, not ruin any chance to realize the value, dignity, personality of theirs. Elizabeth is the best example, although she sometimes shows her pride, she is an admirable, wit, brilliant, and self—confident woman, who conquers many difficulties and at last she gains the true love with Darcy. As for Charlotte, she also could have tried to find somebody she really loves and gets married, like her friend Elizabeth, but she makes no attempt to find a husband whom she really loves and esteems, only giving in to the necessity of acquiring financial security and status ranking through marriage.

（转载自http://www.ＮＳＥＡＣ.com中国科教评价网）

Ⅲ Enlightenment from Women’s Status in Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice portrays life of the middle class in rural society in the end of 18th century and early 19th century Britain. And the novel strongly reflects the point that the property plays an important role in determining what a woman’s destiny will be. In the novel, Jane Austen shows that women in that society really enjoyed a low status and merely they had no way to decide their destinies, if they were poor or had little money. In Austen’s times, the whole society’s vale was property or money, women who have very little money, only enjoyed low status and can not choose their marriages according to their will. In contract, things were usually different to men. Darcy and Bingley are rich men and they have large property, therefore, they have the privilege to choose their wives according to their will. However, for Charlotte, she is not good-looking and hasn’t large property, so she is willing to marry Mr. Collins though he is a stupid man, and obtains a marriage just for convenience and property in the marriage market. Additionally, Austen also presents women’s low status in other aspects, such as, in education, career, politics, economy, social status, culture, inheritance right, and so on.