On Jane Austen's View Of Marriage

Jane Austen is one of the greatest realistic novelists in English literature in the 19th century. During the forty-two years of her life, Austen had completed six novels and left behind three fragments. In her works, Austen vividly revealed the class relationships, social customs and social morals of her time by meticulously and humorously depicting the life of the rural gentry at that time. Austen's careful craftsmanship has enabled her novels to be popular with readers in every generation since they were first produced. During the past two hundred years, Austen's artistic charm has remained unchanged in spite of the change of readers' literary taste. Virginia Woolf once wrote that of all great writers Jane Austen "is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness".[1] In the twentieth century Jane Austen's "greatness" has never been challenged.There are neither heroic passions nor astounding adventures in Austen's novels, which maybe result from her limited life experiences. Her only concern is how a marriageable genteel-class woman could find a satisfactory husband. Austen delineates many kinds of love and marriage in her novels. As a woman novelist, Austen not. only puts forward a complete set of views of marriage in her works but also expresses her own original view toward women's marriages of her time in them.The most obvious characteristic of Austen's view of marriage is the predominant economic considerations. During Austen's time, according to the British law, entailed property was usually inherited by the nearest male heir, to marry properly, a woman usually must have a handsome dowry ready, as a result many women could not marry owing to their poor economic conditions. However, if a woman managed to get married, not only would she obtain "the pleasantest preservative from want" for her later life, but her social status would also be raised.Austen's masterpiece Pride and Prejudice fully embodies her view of marriage. In this novel four major types of marriage manifest themselves: the marriage of sensible Elizabeth and decent Darcy involves both love and money; the marriage of mediocre Charlotte and vulgar Collins includes money but not love; the marriage of pleasant Bingley and mild Jane is based on beauty, virtue and fortune; the marriage of empty-minded Lydia and dissolute Wickham brings them neither love nor money. Obviously, the heroine Elizabeth's marriage is Austen's ideal while Charlotte's marriage is the commonly desired reality of her time.Jane's marriage is as happy as Elizabeth's, but Austen prefers the latter because of Elizabeth's independent and progressive feminine consciousness. And Lydia's marriage is certainly criticized and satirized by Austen. Here Austen expresses her view of marriage clearly: it is wrong to marry for money, but it is silly to marry without it; marriage is associated with property and social status but is not determined by them; no happy marriage can be obtained without love. Austen's view of marriage lays stress on the equal importance of love and economic considerations but love plays the most important role, which is of great social significance at that time.Persuasion is Austen's last mature work. The marriage theme is further developed in this novel compared with Pride and Prejudice. In Persuasion, the aristocratic daughter Anne is a perfect and unprecedented heroine, who has endured all the pains in the course from naivety to maturity and tempered her own will and character at the same time. Anne finally gets married satisfactorily and joins the active, hard-working and prosperous pseudo-gentry rank she has learned to admire. The hero Went worth is the first self-made person in Austen's novels. They differ from Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Their relationship, which is based on mutual understanding, mutual respect, mutual trust, and mutual love finally leads to their engagement. The happy married life of Mr. and Mrs. Croft is a kind of ideal family model constructed by Austen, which also predicts the future of Anne and Wen...