Pride and Prejudice: Breaking Free from a Byproduct of Society by Lindsay Parks

Lindsay Parks

Romantic Comedy

Professor Sinowitz

20 March, 2020

Pride and Prejudice: Breaking Free from a Byproduct of Society

Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice is set in England in the late 1700’s to early 1800’s, a time where societal pressures and norms were around every corner constantly putting pressure on the youth to live up to those expectations. Expectations such as marry well, to act like a lady or gentleman, to not bring shame upon your family. These expectations were all pointed towards one goal, the status of the family and the status of the family was a sense of pride for many. For others, it formed pride and prejudice against those not in the same class. Through relationships such as Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy and Jane and Mr. Bingley, Austen is able to show in different ways how pride and prejudice are a byproduct of society and one must break through the walls of society in order to find true love. 

Pride—a feeling or deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from one's own achievements, or more specifically in the novel’s case, pleasure in one's status and their own values. No two characters more symbolize pride other than Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth themselves. For example, Mr. Darcy states that “I have made no such pretension. I have faults enough, but they are not, I hope, of understanding …  My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them” illustrating how his pride is so great that he refuses to question his own perceptions and views on things as it is “too little yielding—certainly too little for the convenience of the world” (Austen. Ch. 11). His first impression of Elizabeth is anything but terrific, it’s dreadful actually, and his pride and prejudice based on his first impression of her blinds Mr. Darcy for a large portion of the book from his true feelings. The same can be said about Elizabeth as her initial pride and prejudice lead her to have an equally bad first impression of Mr. Darcy as “he was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world, and everybody hoped he would never come there again” (Ch. 3). From an outside perspective, the reader can see that one meeting at a ball with Mr. Darcy does not shed the full light on his character and self, as well as how a first impression of Elizabeth does not do her justice either. This leads the readers to yearn for Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth to break through these initial impressions based on their pride and prejudice. Their pride and prejudices are formed from years of being taught by society that class status matters the most and it is important to find a suitable mate as quickly as possible. Therefore, most will base their opinions on people off of the first impression and after that they are closed off to seeing someone a different way than that. However, in Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth’s case, they are constantly being thrown together by circumstance and so they are then forced to continue to have conversations and further build whatever connection they have whereas if they had never met again then that would have been it and they would have hated each other forever. Eventually, Mr. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth, yet it is still full of pride and arrogance as he clearly expects her to say yes, because in Mr. Darcy’s mind, who would not say yes to him. However, Elizabeth attacks this by saying “You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, then as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner” (Ch. 11). She attacks how he likes to live by the title of “gentlemen”, given to him by his aristocratic standing, and not by his actions. In her eyes, he has not earned being called a gentleman and instead acts anything like it. Mr. Darcy’s high view of himself is unvalidated by Elizabeth and brought into question which later leads to his revelation that “he was given good principles but left to follow them in pride and conceit.” He was taught “to think meanly of all the rest of the world; to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own” (Ch. 16) and this all changed because of Elizabeth calling him out which enabled him to overcome his class prejudice and make a clear judgement. Not without fault of her own though, Elizabeth came to this realization herself earlier on when she realized that she had “courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned” (Ch. 13) and because of this she never knew herself before. These revelations end up bringing Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth together eventually, because they are both able to break through the barrier created by their own pride and prejudices. They are able to reach their happy ending because they did not listen to society and disregarded all that society had taught them was right and instead did what they thought was right.

            Mr. Bingley and Jane’s relationship battled not their own pride and prejudices, but that of Mr. Bingley’s sister Caroline Bingley and other outsiders. Much like Mr. Darcy, she is superficial, selfish, and all too reliant on class prejudice. However, unlike Mr. Darcy, Caroline never realizes this like Mr. Darcy and instead stays her shallow self throughout the whole novel. Her treatment of Jane is sneaky as she is not outright unpleasant to her face as to save her own face in the eyes of other people, but then when Jane is gone she talks negatively about her and her family. More so about her family as Miss Bingley thinks Elizabeth is “blowsy” (Ch. 8) and that her eyes have nothing “extraordinary in them. They have a sharp, shrewish look, which ... [she] do[es] not like at all” (Ch. 45). While there is little for Miss Bingley to talk negatively about Jane, there is of her family and in that day and age, your family and status was everything. Therefore, because of her own agenda to marry Mr. Darcy herself and her selfish want for her brother to marry someone other than Jane that is higher in stature, she uses the views of society, its pride and prejudices, to try to discredit the Bennet’s and Jane in order to break Mr. Bingley and Jane up. Mr. Darcy plays into this scheme by Miss Bingley as well as at first his own prejudice leads him to believe that Jane is not good enough for Mr. Bingley. However, in Mr. Darcy’s own revelation he realizes he was wrong about Jane and Mr. Bingley as well and then helps them get back together. Jane’s own sister Elizabeth’s pride also stands in the way as she tells Jane, “you are a great deal too apt you know, to like people in general. You never see fault in anybody” (Ch. 4), encouraging her to not always look for the best in people and to not believe in second chances. If Jane was to waiver and instead never give another second chance like how Elizabeth was telling her, she would have played right into society’s hands as she would have then only believed in first impressions. Instead, Austen uses Jane as the character that parallels society and its pride and prejudices to show that society is wrong to only base their opinions and views on a whim and to not give people a real chance. If society as a whole was more like Jane, then maybe it would be a better place and more people would find their true love like Jane and Mr. Bingley, instead of marrying for convenience or station like Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. Throughout the meddling and interfering, Mr. Bingley and Jane’s feeling for one another did not waver and because they were able to overcome the outside views and what others wanted them to do, they were able to eventually have their happy ending that would have otherwise faded away.

One could argue that society's expectations can lead to a happy ending too like for instance Charlotte, got everything she ever wanted by marrying Mr. Collins. However, I argue that while society's expectations can give one what they want and happiness, they cannot give one true love and true happiness. If Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth and Mr. Bingley and Jane had accepted society’s expectations with no hesitation then none of them would have found their true love, the love that was not born out of circumstance or convenience but instead defied obstacles in order to exist. Throughout the novel, Austen argues against societal norms and pressures in order to show that if one is able to escape hierarchical society’s wormhole and break from being constrained by it, then one can find true love; that one must break free in order to find the love that is independent from these societal pride and prejudices.

Work Cited:

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. New York: Modern Library, 1995

*the online pdf of the book I used only had chapter headings and not page numbers which is why my quotes are cited by chapter and not page number