Jane Austen: life, works, and literary significance

Marriage is arguably one of the most poignant themes at the core of Jane Austen's novels. The plots of her most famous books generally revolve around the subject of marriage and lay emphasis especially on its tremendous importance in the lives of the nineteen century women. In Jane Austen's time, marriage often took the form of a social contract between two parties, the fate of both men and women being affected to the greatest extent by the marriages they contracted. Of the two genders, the women were obviously the ones who suffered most from the consequences of a very inflexible social system, that did not allow them to be anything else than wives to men and, afterwards, mothers. As such, a good match was a young girl's highest aspiration in life and her only means of acquiring a situation in society, since a profession of any kind was almost out of the question for any woman. This patriarchal ideology is very common in Austen's novels. Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Persuasion all relate the stories of unmarried young women who are in search of a good marriage. The main characters in the three stories manage after many intricacies of the plot to find almost fairytale matches, not only because they marry rich and accomplished men, but also because they marry for love. Nevertheless, Jane Austen downplays this idealistic effect of these stories, by setting examples of many infelicitous marriages in the background and by using her keen irony to reveal the long-term, general unhappiness that these relationships produced. As a rule, it can be said that Austen divides the marriages into unhappy and happy ones, based on whether they were contracted for money or for love.

Thus, in Pride and Prejudice, the positive effect of the marriages made by the two older Bennet sisters is counteracted by the unhappy, almost disastrous marriage of Mr. And Mrs. Bennet. The two are opposite natures and clearly make each other miserable in their conjugal life. Mr. Bennet has no love and no respect for his wife, and continuously ridicules her limited mind and views. However, her own negative experience does not prevent Mrs. Bennet from adhering stubbornly to the belief that marriage can be a very profitable business, and from developing a sort of monomania with the marriage of her daughters. Mrs. Bennet's obsession with marriage as a social contract is effectively used in the novel, through many reverberations, to convey the general mood of the age. In fact, the famous first sentence of the novel ironically compresses this message: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."(Austen, 1983, p. 1) the phrase, although uttered by the impersonal voice of the author, matches so well Mrs. Bennet's life philosophy that it might actually be considered as a part of her free indirect speech. The first and the second chapter of the book especially emphasize the humorous but also very tragic marriage of Mr. And Mrs. Bennet. Sarcastically, Austen draws attention to the way in which a social arrangement was considered as crucial as a 'universal truth'. In this respect, it can be contended therefore that the fault for the infelicitous marriages, such as that between Mr. And Mrs. Bennet, belonged to the social system itself, in which property and social standing were invariably considered as the most respected attributes of a person. This, paired with the fact that the woman was entirely dependent first on her father's will and then on that of the potential suitors, created a vicious circle that was very hard to break. The two main obstacles that can thwart real love between two people, and which are derived exactly from this social game of interests, are already listed in the title: pride and prejudice are only the consequences of the rigid social stratification, in which class and money were all-important. Also, the fact that one of the sisters could bring the misfortune for all the others through an unhappy marriage arrangement (as in Lydia's case) or, on the contrary, it could raise the rank of the whole family through a felicitous one, is telling of the way in which the social system functioned as a chain reaction, a single move being able to bring about happiness or disaster.

In Emma, the main plot of the novel also revolves around the marriage issue. The tone of the novel seems however a little lighter, and the irony less scathing: Emma is a young woman, with a very good social position and almost no worries in her life, and on this account, she is not concerned at all with her own situation and does not feel that she has any reason to marry. Emma's attitude betrays precisely the extent to which marriage for a young woman was a social necessity, meant to ensure a woman's survival and to place her in her habitual and unique existential role as a wife: "I have none of the usual inducements of women to marry. Fortune I do not want; employment I do not want; consequence I do not want; I believe few married women are half as much mistress of their husband's house, as I am of Hartfield; and never, never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right in any man's eyes as I am in my father's" (Austen, 1996, p.84). However, the obsession with match making reappears, since Emma, although not concerned with her own case, becomes very concerned for her orphan friend, Harriet Smith. Harriet becomes the innocent victim of Emma's well-intended but irresponsible games. The moral of the story is clear: Emma inadvertently tries to conquer social prejudice by introducing her friend in the high ranks of society, through a convenient marriage. Her attempts are disastrous, since she almost ruins her friend's chance to be happy with the simple but honest Mr. Martin, and by urging her into unfit matches with Mr. Elton and Frank Churchill. In chapter forty-nine of the novel, the idea that for a woman marriage meant security in the age, more than romance is made clear by Mr. Knightly: "A man would always wish to give a woman a better home than the one he takes her from." (Austen, 1996, p.393). The failure of Emma's endeavors emphasizes again the rigidity of the social system that did not allow for a low-born woman to be integrated in the higher circles.