The Power Of The Meryton Ball By Jane Austen

So it’s a Meryton Assembly ball, where Austen arranges the rendezvous of her heroes and heroines. The dancing at the ball is integral to develop a type of relationship she anticipates. It’s a time of perfect pleasure for many of the girls and their families from Elizabeth’s neighborhood. Jane’s and Bingley’s chemistry in this ball, as Austen depicts, completely matches with each other. The Meryton ball works as a catalyst to advance a love between Jane and Bingley, they exchange amorous glances since it is for what she does painstaking efforts to cultivate love in her characters through dancing, the love that must be emerged from her characters’ inner most feelings for each other, and the love that must be the reason of a marriage. Bingley’s
Allison Thompson in her book, Dancing Through Time: Western Social Dance in Literature, 1400-1918: Selections, chronicles the history of dancing in Western culture from 1400 to 1918. On the Regency era dance culture, she particularly mentions Austen, stating, “The novelist Jane Austen was an enthusiastic dancer and dancing forms an important part of all of her fictional heroines’ lives” (116). Thompson has noted Austen’s love of dancing, and she expresses little surprise at the depiction of so much dancing in the backdrop of Austen’s love for it, but, surprisingly, it’s not just Austen’s love for dance behind her depiction. If we read Fullerton’s following statement in A Dance with Jane Austen, “Jane Austen fell in love with Tom Lefroy as they danced together and their romance was conducted almost entirely at balls” (10), then it can be easily implied that Austen due to her personal experience was well aware of the possibility of falling in love that used to thrive on dancing at the balls. In Pride and Prejudice, she fully exploits this possibility to take it to the further stage of a marriage. Austen’s concern with the marriage of her heroines is not hidden from her readers, and this is the demonstration of her concern, which makes us to perceive her approach towards the dancing and the ballrooms, which, in turn, are associated with the matters of matrimony of her heroines. As Austen’s own life was spent visiting the different balls from Steventon to Bath, she views this as a valuable chance, which every young man and woman must avail. There is no denying that Austen purposefully uses balls and dancing to fulfill her purpose of depicting them. In Pride and Prejudice, can we imagine Darcy and Elizabeth and Bingley and Jane courtships and subsequently their marriages without their dancing with each