Austen, Jane - Works

Marginalized by society she stressed the social position of woman in that time. The main characters are the young girls: there is always the relationship of heroes and heroines of the comedy of manners in the witty couple. Jane Austen follows the restoration comedy and anticipates Oscar wilder, using the language as a weapon. The protagonists are heroines: they are skilled in the use of language, cleaver, they would like to be independent. They accept to love but not to be submitted in the couple.

Those heroines are described in the passage from family to world, from adolescence to self-awareness.
Pride and Prejudice is full of dramatic irony because the characters sometimes do things they don’t know are wrong and the public knows it, and irony because she wants to make fun of the establish order. She makes fun of human behaviour. The setting is always the countryside and the characters are middle-class people. For his reason she was accused to be boring because she never changed her style and she is always focused on the same elements of society. On one side she is always common, on the other she is always new. The observation of human behaviour is so precise that it can be applied to our contemporary society and we can trace similarities in our society and also the irony is the same used in our contemporary society. Jane Austen’s characters are always modern in their approach to life. She gathered the new from common things, she has very simple plots such as social relations and ordinary themes in contrast with the other writers of her time. Austen made things new, more concerned in the interior side of the characters, more in their thoughts than in their actions.
The first statement is an incipit in medias res to say that we are in the middle of the matter. A single rich man has just come to the countryside and the main concern of families with daughters is a favourable marriage. This statement is ironic: irony on society and criticism. We share the point of view of Mrs bennet but at the same time there is irony towards her who is the symbol of society which will be criticized.
There is a link among the restoration comedy and the comedy of manners of Oscar wilder, marriage. Marriage is the main theme and around marriage we take part of manners, habits linked to the big theme of marriage. She uses dialogues as natural conversations of middle class people and gentry; you give speech naturalness.
Analysing the lines women are presented in a bad way: Mrs bennet is irrational, nervous, overexcited, impatient, vocative, she doesn’t stop to think about situations, she understands very little, she doesn’t know how to react to situations and the business of her life is to have her daughters married; Mr bennet instead is a man detached, rational.
‘all the girls are silly and ignorant’ says Mrs bennet and it is a prejudice of society towards woman.
Jane Austen starts the book following the rules but the development of the story will demonstrate exactly the opposite: she wants to demonstrate through the story that all the girls have qualities (Elisabeth will deny Darcy’s purposes).