Marriage, Power, and Gender in Pride and Prejudice

Introduction: The Marriage Market in Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice is, on its surface, an alluring story about a spirited young woman in search of a suitable match. It is a story of an iconoclast challenging antiquated social conventions, a narrative that juxtaposes bourgeois pride against working-class prejudice, and, perhaps most importantly, a story about marriage and the many different reasons one might pursue it: love, money, improved social status, practicality, and more. In many ways, Pride and Prejudice is an instructive exposé on marriage and male-female relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Austen's seminal work explores the institution of marriage from numerous angles while offering the reader sharp and insightful aphorisms concerning the dynamic between men and women — among them, "Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing after all" (Austen 132).

One cannot discuss Pride and Prejudice — and the marriage market it depicts — without referencing one of the novel's most famous opening lines: "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). A modern reader's first reaction might well be, "My, how times have changed." But setting that aside, this opening sentence establishes a fascinating proposition about marriage, class, and gender relations. In short, it presents the rudimentary idea that a man of means desires — and seeks — a wife.

Inverting Social Expectations: Women as the True Pursuers

On its own, the notion that a wealthy man seeks a wife is not especially compelling. What makes it so is the way Austen immediately complicates the message by introducing elements of provinciality, financial expediency, and corporeal possession in the very next paragraph: "However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters" (Austen 1).

This passage is wonderfully enlightening because it inverts what a reader might expect and what traditional, superficial wisdom would suggest. The idea that "man has money; man seeks wife" is, in fact, an overly simplistic rendering of reality. In reality, it is the women — and their families — who are pursuing the rich man, regardless of whether he actually desires a wife. When Austen's statement is unpacked in this way, the modern reader might instead say, "Times haven't changed at all."

The notion that women marry for money is a universal and enduring concept, and Austen is keenly aware of it. She is equally aware of how provincial women are in their need for a moneyed man — and that this, perhaps, is the more incisive observation. It becomes a case where the predator (the man) has become the prey. Furthermore, speaking in terms of the objectification of women — which was undoubtedly the socially accepted norm circa 1813 (Caroline Bingley's desirability, for instance, was enhanced by her twenty-thousand-pound dowry) — Austen demonstrates in those first few paragraphs that it is really a matter of a woman claiming a man: "he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters" (Austen 1). In short, men are chattel to be possessed by the shrewdest and most resourceful debutante.

Elizabeth Bennet and Female Power

Elizabeth Bennet is the personification of this ideal. She is intelligent, headstrong, and attractive — though not, by Austen's own account, as conventionally beautiful as her elder sister Jane. While on the surface, and for much of the novel, it is the men who appear to pursue Elizabeth, she holds the ultimate power to determine her own fate and choose whom she marries. Like a Venus flytrap, she waits for the right man, allows him to pursue her, and then exercises her own will. Elizabeth ends up with exactly the man she wants — Mr. Darcy. In this respect, Pride and Prejudice is fundamentally a story about the power and influence women hold over men.

It should be noted that Austen carefully constructs her narrative to underscore this point while also honoring traditional literary conventions. To reinforce the power that women hold, she introduces ancillary characters and situations that represent more conventional paradigms — most notably through Elizabeth's sisters, friends, and their respective suitors. These secondary figures provide contrast and levity while deepening the novel's central argument about gender and marriage.

Conclusion: Austen's Insights on Marriage and Gender

Our heroine gets to have her cake and eat it too. Elizabeth winds up with Mr. Darcy, who is both wealthy and the man she falls in love with. This is, after all, a woman's narrative about courtship and marriage, and Austen elected to reward her readers with a kind of Shakespearean symmetry: multiple marriages, and characters who are — more or less — happy or at least content by the novel's end.