Mr. Bennet Character Analysis

Jane Austen was just twenty-one years old when she wrote Pride and Prejudice, widely considered her tour de force. Austen was born in England in the 18th century during the romantic time period. The romantics strongly believed in imagination over reason, the opposite of the neoclassicists, who believe in reason over emotion. Even though she was born in the romantic period, Austen was a neoclassicist and Pride and Prejudice was written based on the neoclassicist views. After the publishing of Pride and Prejudice, and many other novels, Jane Austen started to become a well-known author. Not just because of her popular novels but also because it was rare for women to do anything besides working around the house in that time period, let alone write a novel. While Pride and Prejudice takes place in England, some of the smaller cities where action occurs are Netherfield, Longbourn, and London. Austen uses epistles, deux ex machina, and burlesque and foil characters to create a novel of manners and a novel of marriages. Since this novel was published in the 19th century, the reason to get married was much different than today’s world. Men were the only ones that could hold property rights, and as I stated above, women mainly stayed around the house. Therefore, there were many instances in which women would marry men for so that they could have property and have money to spend. One strong believer of women marrying men for money and property was Mrs. Bennet. She and her husband, Mr. Bennet, were blessed with the luck of having 5 daughters and Mrs. Bennet believed that it was her job to get them all married, whether they wanted to or not. Mr. Bennet, however, was not a strong believer of this method. Mr. Bennet’s role in the novel, while not central, was to add comic relief and sarcasm to the stress put on by Mrs. Bennet to get her daughters married. While he wanted to get his daughters married, like Mrs. Bennet, he also cared about his daughter’s happiness and, primarily,

Cited: Austen, Jane, and Vivien Jones. Pride and Prejudice. London: Penguin, 2003. Mudrick, Marvin. "Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery." Princeton UP, 1952. 94-126. Shmoop Editorial Team. "Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice." www.shmoop.com/prideandprejudice/mr-bennet.html. University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 01 Nov 2010.