The Problems with Marriage: the Contrasting Relationships in Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is about a small country town in England, where life is all about having money, getting married, and having more money. In this novel, Austen focuses in on one particular family, the Bennets, who consist of five daughters and one over-obsessive mother who is looking to marry off each of her daughters before her husband passes away, for they do not have a son to inherit their estate and therefore her daughters will be left without a home, money, or respect in society. The story has ups, downs, and surprises around every corner for each of the relationships that are formed, broken, then formed again between the daughters and other men, until finally four sharply contrasting marriages emerge to show how real marriages are to be built. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen effectively shows her theme that happy strong marriages take time to build by contrasting Darcy and Elizabeth 's relationship with the marriage relationships of, Mr. Wickham and Lydia, Mr. Collins and Charlotte, and Mr. Bingley and Jane. Darcy and Elizabeth are made up to be an example of the perfect couple. They are the ones who discover that a relationship will not last without love, and manage to balance love with the need of money and social power. Although, in the beginning, Darcy seems to be a very ". . .disagreeable man . . ." (Austen 14), he begins opening himself up to the Bennet family, near the end. The journalist, Martin Amis points out that Darcy ends up dealing with the issues surrounding Lydia and Wickham 's relationship and ends up freely inviting Elizabeth 's aunt and uncle to come live with them at Pemberley (4). This marriage is also a force that will lead to the end of the division between the two classes; an article in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism notes that by marrying each other they "forged a contract between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie"("Austen: Pride" 35). While Darcy and Elizabeth do end up living happily ever

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