On the Women’s Status Seen in Pride and Prejudice [3]
论文作者:佚名论文属性:短文 essay登出时间:2009-04-04编辑:黄丽樱点击率:18103
论文字数:5830论文编号:org200904040809503408语种:中文 Chinese地区:中国价格:免费论文
关键词:Women’s statuspride and prejudicefeudal妇女地位傲慢与偏见封建观念《傲慢与偏见》
ghters in the Bennets. Although they felt angry about it, “I do not think it is the hardest thing in the world that your estate should be entailed away from your own children and I am sure if I had been you, I should have tried long ago to do something or other about it” Mrs. Bennet cried to her husband. But the fact is that they could do nothing to change unchangeable social rule.
Young women of today have a variety of options open to them regarding their future. They can go to college; they can have their careers and become professional women and live on their own; they can earn their status through hard work and their advantages. However, women in the end 18th and early 19th century English society had no these free choices. Their formal education and job were limited, and the society could not welcome of a woman entering a profession, and their knowledge seemed no use to the society. If a woman was unmarried, no matter she was mature or not, she was not allowed to live alone and must live with her family, at least live with a suitable chaperone until her marriage or her spinsterhood to death. In Austen’s age, women’s actions were strictly limited and they could not enjoy their personal freedom
Ⅱ Reasons for the Women’s Low Status at That Time
A. Traditional Feudal Notions
Observing the novel Pride and Prejudice from another aspect, we know that the theme of the novel does not only deal with love and marriage, but also includes the relationship of women, society, and women’s status. Jane Austen has shown the social fabric of society during her time and makes a comment on the status of women during that time. In Austen’s time, society treated women unfairly and women really enjoyed low status
To know clearly what Jane Austen writes Pride and Prejudice for, we should firstly have a clear mind of the social background and know, under the traditional feudal notion how the society treated the women in the 18th and 19th century country society in Britain
In the novel, Austen presents the gender injustices in the 19th century English society, and how the important role that money played in determining a woman’s daily life, marriage and destiny. Economically dependent, women were robbed of property and inheritance rights and possessed no independent source of income. The entailment of the Longbourn estate is an extreme hardship on the Bennet family, and is quite obviously unjust. No right to entail their father’s estate leaves the Bennet daughters in a poor financial situation which both requires them to be married and makes it more difficult to marry well. Having no social status, and in order to improve their social status, women have to give up their personal dignity and ego at the expense of their love and marriage, and they are willing to get married just for financial security and enhancement of social status. Under these values of money and social status, women they can’t enjoy a happy marriage and their freedom. And they are deprived of the right to receive education and take part in social activities. Because there are no needs for higher education for them, and even if there is necessity to receive a higher education, it is just for self-enhancement or for pleasing
their husbands.
At that time, society offered few opportunities to women to choose for their lives and to decide the destiny. Just as the opening sentence of the novel says “it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good
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