“A lady’s imagination”: marriage and the construction of female identity in Pride and Prejudice

Abstract

In the present work, we aim to highlight the importance of marriage in Jane Austen’s novels, its implications in the social living and in the construction of female identity, with a greater focus on one of her novels, Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813. By contextualizing the period in which such novels were written, as well as the author’s period of life, we attempt to draw attention to the main reasons why marriage is the focus of Austen’s narratives; for one thing, marriage meant material and social survival to women in a patriarchal Regency society. To this end, we based this paper on theoretical-critical works by BROWSNTEIN (1997), CULLER (1999), JONES (2000), LOVELL (1978), MARSH (1998), WEINSHEIMER (1972), and WILTSHIRE (1997). Such a discussion is crucial to a deeper and significant reading of Jane Austen’s novels, since it contributes to back up a correlation between present and past, in respect to the place of women in society and their freedom of choice in the many areas of their lives, which frequently conflicts with the stereotyped roles society attributes to them. Jane Austen herself is an example of subversion to such a social imposition, since she chose her literary career over marriage, breaking with traditional social patterns of that time when such choices were considered inconceivable, or at least shameful, to women. The reading of Jane Austen’s novels allows us to see beyond the happy-ending romantic cliché, in which its own narrative configuration already constitutes, in itself, a social criticism.