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Marriage And Marriage In Jane Austen's Sense And Sensibility

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In her work Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen is closely looking at the injustice done to women, and she is especially rejecting the idea of Marriage for money rather than love. Austen also did not agree that women should depend on men for economic-financial protection, thus as not to look kindly on patriarchy and the merging of interests of the upper class and middle class. Convenience marriage was common. Women were deprived of the freedom to earn or inherit money. So marriage for them was a safety net which will save them from a life of poverty and despair; thus, women felt that the only way to achieve social fulfilment was to compete on the marriage market, where Men were the buyers; women were the sellers. Society encouraged young women "to exercise gamesmanship instead of honesty, to control rather than …show more content…

Jane Austen Marriage is a paramount concern. Marriage is not only a personal question but rather it affects the whole social group, because marriage is just not a matter of love or companionship, but much more than that. It is a political, social and economic alliance between two people, and their families. One of the chief characteristics of Sense and Sensibility is the lack of a father figure, at that time the father’s used to take decisions on the future marriage of their daughters. In the absence of the father, mothers had some authority to do so. Mothers played an important role in the upbringing and education of children. The Dashwood sisters are a fine example to illustrate the plight of upper-class women in England. Jane Austen has criticised and parodied the romantic concept of an ideal love and passion through Marianne. In the novel, Marianne rejects Colonel Brandon’s love because she feels attracted towards

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Finding a partner for marriage during the Regency era was through courtships, and courtship were more based on the money and same social classes. Do not considered as marrying below themselves. When Lady Catherine heard about her nephew Darcy fall in love with Elizabeth which she was in the lower social class as him, she told Elizabeth, “My daughter and my nephew are formed for each other. They are descended on the maternal side, from the same noble line;”. Lady Catherine’s metaphor demonstrated that she thinks Elizabeth is too poor to marry Mr Darcy.

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1156 Words | 5 Pages

In Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, and Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens, two proposals, despite their few effective lines, end up being horrendously uneffective. In the first, William Collins proposes to Elizabeth Bennett, and in the latter, Bradley Headstone-his last name, which he will need after he dies from the painful embarrassment of his rejection- proposes to Lizzie Hexam. What makes a marriage proposal successful is a display of commitment, intimacy, and passion- though not too much or too little of any one factor! A lack of one or more of these factors, which both proposals are guilty of, will lead the proposer down the path of one of the main struggles of wooing: rejection. Both men do make one or two seemingly effective statements.

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“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance,” Charlotte says to Elizabeth in the novel, Pride and Prejudice, written by Jane Austen. Charlotte Lucas is an intelligent, twenty-seven-year-old, single lady of Netherfield Park that is desperate to marry to get out of her parents’ house. Thus, she ends up marrying the ridiculous Mr. Collins and being one of the many that ended up married by the end of the novel. Samina Ashfaq and Naisr Jamal Khattak from the University of Peshawar both write and analyze about how each one of the relationships show a different extent of satisfaction in Love, Infatuation, and Compromise in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

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2404 Words | 10 Pages

Like many societies and cultures around the world, a fantasy is created in which greed and vanity strip away love and admiration from the strong marital grips we are accustomed to. Jane Austen beautifully illustrates a world where this vain fantasy becomes each woman’s reality. Love simply dissolves into oblivion while greed and arrogance fill its empty, forgotten space. This toxic, distorted image of marriage storms through 1800s England corrupting relationships and mocking the foundations of marriage; however, Austen implements an opposing force that has the ability to trounce this destructive change in the once traditional, loving society.

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742 Words | 3 Pages

‘Emma’ is a tale of marriages; it opens with the marriage of Miss Taylor and Mr. Weston and ends with more weddings (Johnston, 1997). Readers who misread Austen may interpret her discussion regarding marriage as an endorsement, but such is not the case; Austen uses these marriages to convey that it was a woman’s sole purpose (Johnston, 1997; Moffat, 1991). However, fiercely independent Emma defies social expectations of a woman in the 19th century. Emma is the personification of Austen’s advocacy of women’s rights and equality of the sexes (Moffat, 1991). Emma is a strong female, possessing the luxury of independence.

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1828 Words | 8 Pages

In the same time, these literary works have differences, for the most part because the latter underlines the evolution in Jane’s writing style and ideas determined by satirical images of the high-class, and appoints a novel, typical for the mature stage of her career, while Pride and Prejudice is a model of her beginning as a writer. The first novel shapes the middle-class society (the Bennet family, their relatives, and neighbors), in an accurate way, especially because the author belonged to it; she spend her entire life in this social circle, and her continually encounters with its members provided her, those well painted details. Thus, Austen is perfectly aware of the desires and aspirations of the women and men in this class. Those people were craving to overcome their social status, they were in constant search of means which could endow them, and so they were capable of many things to achieve their purposes. Therefore, the main characters of this novel, the Bennet family, who were having five unmarried daughters, were struggling to assure their future, by marrying them in the upper-class: A single man of large fortune; four of five thousand a year.

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Readers of Jane Austen can easily find out what marriage means and how its important social status is to women of Austen's time. In Pride and prejudice Jane Austen used the characters to tell her deep feeling of love and friendship with its ups and downs. For instance you have Darcy and Elizabeth who are the two heroines of this novel. Elizabeth's love is very important. At the beginning, Elizabeth refused to accept Darcy's pursue.

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1020 Words | 5 Pages

‘The immediate Austen family was warm and affectionate. George Austen was fond of his wife and children.’ George Austen was a scholar and encouraged the children in reading and learning. The first year of her life Jane spent in the family of Elizabeth Littlewood, who nursed her.

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While each character displays the feud between sense and sensibility, two characters, in particular, are followed throughout the entire novel and are evaluated in their most vulnerable moments. Moments of the book, both cheerful and despondent, give a passageway to the personalities of Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne. As the duo is followed in their love struck journey we see blatant symbol. Elinor and Marianne superbly emulate the two-parted title of Sense and Sensibility respectively. (Tulloch,

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1180 Words | 5 Pages

However, they still consider themselves above others in the social ladder. Therefore, Catherine Earnshaw -the daughter in the family- cannot marry the man she loves since he is an adopted orphan. He would not be able to provide for her and she wants to live a life in luxury and comfort. She instead chooses to marry a man in her own class. Sense & Sensibility was written by Jane Austen in the early 19th century.

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2801 Words | 12 Pages

Jane Austen lived in a period at the turn from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century, which was a period of mixed thoughts, which conflicted all the times. Among all the conflicts, the most important one was the disparity in social status between men and women. Not only men’s status was in the center of the society but also common people thought it was right that men were much more important than women were. In those days girls were neither allowed nor expected to study much because they did not have to work for a living. They were supposed to stay at home and look beautiful in order to get suitable husbands.

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1042 Words | 5 Pages

The idea of life without having a financial support is a matter of great consternation, especially for 2 women. Thus, as illustrated in Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma, many people are taken in low esteem and in high esteem just on the basis of financial condition and women are suffered badly in this era. In these three popular novels, the heroines of Austen are facing the harsh realities of the deprived society. Elinor and Marianne Dashwood were deprived of their manor by their uncle after their father’s death and then they are left with little money.

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2036 Words | 9 Pages

Did you ever see her? A smart, stilish girl they say, but not handsome. I remember her aunt very well…she married a very wealthy man” (Austen 184). Willoughby despite loving Marianne marries Miss Gray for her money because of his financial state. Instead of love, money becomes a determiner for the choice of marriage, making it a commodity rather than a

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1552 Words | 7 Pages

They were not entitled to become educated or employed and instead had to spend all of their time training to become the ideal domestic wife, through sewing or playing the piano to prove their worth. With this disadvantage, financial stability was the top and most important quality when finding a man to marry since they could not attain that independently. The women in Pride and Prejudice were competitive to win the best man they could find, which created the plot for this novel. Writer Daryl Jones described them as, “feisty, intelligent heroine in financially straitened circumstances [that] overcome the opposition of a backward-looking tradition and authority, as well as the preconceptions about class and money to which her own sceptical intelligence has initially predisposed her, to win the hand of a man who is effectively the richest man in England.” (Jones pg. 93).

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1277 Words | 6 Pages

The women in Sense and Sensibility were more interested in obtaining a husband due to financial difficulties than that of a good education. Gender stereotypes are seen throughout this novel, as educational success was only deemed important for the more superior men. Social orders reflect the differences in social class and gender. We see Austen use the economic position of women to show the powerlessness they had which underlies the pressure of marriage and the vulnerability

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