A marriage is supposed to mean living happily ever after; two people come together to confirm their eternal bond of love. But what happens when no love is found in this union, only economic practicality instead? In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the society is riddled with societal norms of social class and connections that place strict limitations on who a person should marry. Marriage is looked at as a business transaction rather than a union of love. Austen starts off the novel criticizing the problem of a marriage for purely economic purposes because it results in a loss of a person’s identity; men are transformed into merely a face on a dollar bill that pretty women crave after, leading to a lack of an essential connection of love in a marriage.
Austen chooses to introduce the misconstrued notion that marriage is a necessity at the forefront of the novel in order to underscore the absurdity behind the reasoning that every man and woman must get married to secure his or
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The “truth” of a man’s supposed desire referenced beforehand is so entrenched in a woman’s mind that a rich single man is automatically considered to be “the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters” (3). The dehumanization of a rich man into property further illustrates the superseding of human qualities in light of wealth. Just as a person would survey an acre of land, a woman looks over a rich man with the same intention of acquiring him at any cost necessary. Mrs. Bennet further dehumanizes Mr. Bingley into a mere object, “a fine thing for [her] girls!”(3). Mr. Bingley vaguely portrayed as a “thing” presents him as anything from an antique to collect or a rare fish to catch; it does not matter how it is defined because all that matters in Mrs. Bennet’s mind is that one of her daughters can take its