Wednesday, July 2, 2014

How does Austen portray regency attitudes towards men?

The portrayal of men in Pride and Prejudice is suitably complex. On the face of it, men in Regency England were completely dominant. Married women had virtually no civil rights as we would recognize them today. The wife was legally under the complete control of her husband, and whatever property she owned passed directly to him upon their marriage.
Yet Jane Austen presents a more subtle picture of the role of men in Regency England. The famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice gives us an inkling of this immediately:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. 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 as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.”

Austen is completely overturning the established understanding of gender roles. It is the husband who is the "rightful property" of his prospective wife. The marriage market of the time was one in which both men and women were considered as commodities, items of property to be bought and sold. And in relation to men, it's not enough that they be handsome, dashing, loving or kind; they must be in possession of a fortune.
It's interesting that a number of male characters in the story have a rather romantic ideal of love, going against the established norms to form attachments to socially-inferior women. The central relationship, that between Elizabeth and Darcy, is an illustration of this. In this sense, the female characters have a certain advantage over the men, being more clear-eyed and less naive about the harsh realities of the Regency marriage market.
 

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