Pride and Prejudice

1. Pride and Prejudice Note: this is not mine, but I’m happy to use it, thanks google ppt search

2. Jane Austen • Born December 16, 1775 • 7th of 8 children, 6 boys and 2 girls • father was a country clergyman, rector of Steventon • went to boarding school with sister Cassandra and returned at age 9 • in 1801 moved with family to Bath • in 1809 moved to Chawton and resumed writing • died on July 18, 1817

3. 18th century England • Importance of the small community • the great house • landed gentlemen • network of personal contacts • system of manners • formal social rituals

4. Contemporary events of Austen • Napoleonic Wars • Slave trade • rise of industrialism and “moneyed middle class”

5. 18th century England English society in the late 18th century was largely made up of a series of rural communities governed in paternalistic fashion from the great house by a member of the gentry or aristocracy who owed his authority and prestige to the ownership of land

6. Each community included cross section of ranks and was independent of all others.Links were created by meetings between the land owners during county activities. Starting with the vertical relationships that stretched from the highest to the lowest in the village and preceding to the horizontal relationships of the gentry a network of face to face contacts was created which embraced all of society

7. Edmund Burke, philosopher Manners are more important than laws. Upon them, in great measure the laws depend. The laws touch us here and there. . . Manners are what vex and soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase,barbarize or refine us. . . They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them or they totally destroy them

8. Role of the Family The family unit acts as a regulative force within a society that might otherwise become unstable. Connected with the marriage is the entire ritual of courtship and marriage

9. 18th century means to maintain conventional society The family imposes the rituals as a means of retaining control over the girl or man until the marriage, and then the cycle begins again

10. Responsibility of Individual Equation between the polite behavior of the individual and the moral health of the nation is necessary for an understanding of Austen’s novels

11. Preservation of gentry or aristocrats based on land ownership Austen believed that the fate of the landed classes depended on their ability to preserve the system of manners which buttressed their authority.

12. Purpose of Manners The fact that it is largely through manners that Austen works out the questions of morality and social power

13. Wealth is not a standard for gentility Any episode which trumpets wealth traduces the standard of propriety that Jane Austen’s society imposed specifically to ward off the uncouth encroachments of the approaching industrialized age

14. Austen’s major theme The fate of society depends upon the ability of the landed gentry to live up to their ideal of concern for others and the willingness of other groups to accept this concern

15. 18th century view of the purpose of literature Literature was a means to instruct by example so that individuals might emulate the good. Rarely are characters completely good or evil

16. Much of Austen’s fiction is in direct response to the excesses of popular literature of her day-- sentimentalism, melodrama and the gothic novel

17. Rejection of contemporary literature Austen felt that her contemporary authors demanded emotional responses far in excess of what their fiction required and that they distorted human behavior to fit literary conventions

18. Austen’s aim Rather than demanding tears of horror from her readers she elicited laughter; rather than drawing sentimental characters seriously she tried to purge all nonsense through wit, and rather than make her readers suffer through a series of false events, she tried to entertain them through a set of realistic conventions

19. Influences on Austen • Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison 1753 • Fanny Burney’s Cecilia or Memoirs of an Heiress 1782 • Weaknesses List location or contact for competitive analysis (or other related documents) here FOR MORE INFO...

20. Didactic purpose Austen intentionally uses 18th century literary devices to an 18th century end, moral and emotional didacticism

21. Comedy of Manners Comedy of manners derives from Restoration comedy: It deals with the relations and intrigues of gentlemen and ladies living in a polished and sophisticated society, evokes laughter mainly at the violations of social convention and decorum and relies for its effect in great part on the wit and sparkle of dialogue

22. Comedy of manners The comedy of manners is a literary convention which depends very much on highly developed and codified social convention, not simply for its material (the manners of a period) but for its significance its ability to embody in comic confrontations important differences between characters and distinct evaluations of them (morals)

23. Melodrama gothic novel irony comedy of manners juxtaposition paternalism status quo Noblesse oblige bourgeoisie dowry entailment primogeniture gentry juvenilia parody Some terminology

24. effete didactic foil denouement didactic temporal incongruity subtle Noveau riche Industrial revolution eclaircissment anti-hero pedant imagery Terms (cont)

25. Other works by Austen • Emma • Persuasion • Sense and Sensibility • Mansfield Park • Northanger Abbey

26. Northanger Abbey Northanger Abbey is a parody on gothic literature. Austen wants to expose her readers to everything absurd in a convention or genre and then make those conventions work

27. Sense and Sensibility a parody of sentimental literature popular during Austen’s time. In Sense and Sensibility Austen exposed what is false and absurd in the sentimental novel’s convention of distress by the device of substituting life for literature, and natural for “heroic” responses. The difference is the responses between “the anxieties of common life as opposed to the “alarms of romance.”

28. Emma In Emma, society is plagued by adherence to conservatism. It is in danger of atrophy that can result from rejecting necessary changes. The leading families do little formal entertaining and balls are no longer held. As a result relationships cease to develop, manners and morals o untested and become static and there are insufficient opportunities for courtship and the necessary change which hit produces in the form of marriage

29. Persuasion Austen no longer seems able to keep faith in established order of things and in Persuasion she creates a world in which old certainties have finally crumbled

30. Mansfield Park Austen dramatizes that the social order of England is changing. Effete aristocracy and materialistic middle class threaten society. The threat comes from loosening bonds of traditionalism. Austen expresses a loss of confidence in the English landed society in her creation of this novel

31. Austen’s view of society’s future In the novels of Jane Austen, an historian can trace the coming of the industrial age of the 19th century and what that revolution, with the rise of the middle class and the demise of the a landed, demi-aristocracy meant. Austen identified the encroaching standard of wealth as an indication of aristocracy and deplored the shift of values which were to come.

32. Austen’s vision of value conflict In the course of the 19th century the conflict to values which Jane Austen describes turned to a struggle for power. As the old order weakened and began to lose its authority so those engaged in trade and industry made increasing demands that attention be paid to their values

33. Bourgeoisie values They [the bourgeoisie or middle class] wanted England to be shaped in such a way as to foster free enterprise and social mobility; they wanted a society in which work and acquisition of money were sources of prestige

34. Great Reform Bill of 1832 17 years after Austen’s death, the Great Reform Bill marked the first major step toward institutionalizing of middle class values and bringing on the Victorian Period

35. Major concerns • Emphasis on breeding--stress upon the mind and the senses, upon attitudes toward life, not upon birth or fortune • her heroines return society to a more moderate course as a reaction to 18th century sentimentalism • wit and irony provide stability because they regulate conduct(Bergeson) • concept of the gentleman defined the age

36. Major concerns (cont) • Personal gentility becomes the last barrier to social anarchy • marriage is a rite of passage into adulthood for women • gentility, civility and breeding are the keys to Austen’s world • cosmic order in courship and marriage

37. Pride and Prejudice

38. Themes • courtship and marriage • Darcy and Elizabeth • Lydia and Wickham • Bingley and Jane • Charlotte and Mr. Collins • Unexpected delays or issues

39. Characterization “… Heywood has been called a prose Shakespeare. Really, Miss Austen much more really deserves the title. Within her range her characterization is truly Shakespearea, but she has scarcely a spark of poetry. . .” Richard Simpson

40. Instead of telling us what her characters are and what they feels she presents the people and they reveal themselves. In this she has not been surpassed by Shakespeare himself. If ever living beings can be said to have moved across the page of fiction as they lived, speaking as they spoke, and feeling as they felt they do so in Pride an dPejudice, Emma, and Mansfield Park

41. Sir Walter Scott comment which revived interest in Austen She has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of oridnary life, which to me the most wonderful I ever met with... .The equisite touch which rendeers ordinary commonplace htings and characters interesting from the truth of description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early

42. Wit • Highlight any procedural differences from regular projects of this type • Discuss requirements, benefits, and issues of using new procedures FOR MORE INFO... “Jane Austen as Ironist and Moralist” George Henry Lewes

43. Dialogue • Review high-level schedule milestones here FOR MORE INFO... “The Narrative Art of Jane Austen” Mary Lascelles

44. Austen’s irony Irony is implicit in Elizabeth Bennett herself: as a complex person she can judge others, but as a middle class heroine with bourgeois tendencies, she can herself be pleasantly fallible

45. Universal judgement Darcy is appropriate for what she [Elizabeth] wants within the range of what she can have. In the same way, Charlotte Lucas has measured what her range of choice is and has decided that the best she can hope for is a Mr.. Collins

47. Critics’ Response • Subject matter • Austen’s subject matter--courtship and marriage and common issues-- are too slight for her artistry • Dialogue • plot revolves around what the characters say and not what they do • Detachment • Austen is too far removed from what her characters feel

48. Achievement of Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice climaxes first stage in Austen’s artistic development. That development is based upon her highly sophisticated awareness of the reader’s possible responses to fiction and upon her desire to exploit, through increasingly sophisticated techniques, the possibility for manipulating, controlling and educating these responses

49. Characters of Pride and Prejudice

50. Intelligent lively and animated opinionated and staunch demonstrates an acceptable revolt against conventions of society Called “the most delightful a creature that ever appeared in print sets the action in the novel personifies the prejudice in the title of the novel Elizabeth Bennett