Jane Austen Pride And Prejudice Social Class Analysis

The Importance of Social Class with Pride and Prejudice
In Pride and Prejudice, Austen reveals the values of the characters and the society in which they live at the scene of the Netherfield Ball. This scene connects to the theme of barriers between social classes. Social class plays as a very important role in Jane Austen's work Pride and Prejudice. She demonstrates this through the Bennets. The Bennets were not poor, but they were not wealthy and stood in a position to lose their home to a relative, Mr. Collins. Society is organized according to where one falls on the social ladder. The three major social classes in the Victorian Era are: upper, middle and lower. These classes constantly changed, and the lower classes always tried to climb the social ladder. Climbing the social ladder was not an easy thing to do. The barriers between the classes were distinctive. In Austen's work we find all three classes and …show more content…
Women in Pride and Prejudice needed to marry into rich families so their family name wouldn't be as Mrs. Bennet would say, ruined. However, some people who associated oneself with the upper-class thought it to be scandalous for one to marry into a class lower than the class he or she was currently in. Wickham was a man who was filled with manipulation and in the time period was considered very poor. He was a part of the lower class and lived off of gambling. His way of climbing up the social ladder was gambling away all of his money and once he found himself in debt, he tried to use his good looks to find a woman that was vacuous enough to marry him so he could inherit her family’s heritage. Wollstonecraft believed that we should keep marriage sacred. She believed that you could not have more chastity until the body of a woman was no longer idolized while she has no virtue or sense. Austen went about expressing her feelings of women and the social class in a more romantic