On the one hand, it is unquestionable that First Impressions is an appropriate title for …show more content…
He is a charming man, whose good looks and interesting personality attract Elizabeth. Nevertheless, it does not take long for her first impression to alter completely. Despite her thoughts on him, Wickham is proven a dishonest opportunist, a fortune-hunting hypocrite.
On the other hand, we can justify the author’s choice to use Pride and Prejudice instead of First Impressions as a title. To start with, the former is more captivating and does not throw the reader immediately into the subject of the book. On the contrary, not only does it allow them to use their imagination for the story and the characters, but it also draws their attention to a particular idea that the author finds significant; the character development of the protagonists.
Another important reason that explains the title alteration is the fact that the idea of “pride and prejudice” is omnipresent in the novel. Both Darcy and Elizabeth are personalities with an equal amount of those traits. The former is a proud wealthy man, who comes from a noble family and has set some high standards when it comes to choosing his partner. As a result, he is thought to be narrow-minded and extremely selective and, at the same time, prejudiced against people from the lower or middle class, like Elizabeth. We should not forget that, in the beginning, he referred to her as just “tolerable” in appearance and even when he made his proposal, he kept pointing out their class …show more content…
As we can notice in the book, apart from Elizabeth and Darcy there are other characters, too, who display the above mentioned traits. For instance, Mr. Collins and his patroness Lady Catherine de Bourgh are people of a high social and economic status, who tend to look down on lower class people like the Bennets, just because of their position in society. Therefore, by changing the title of her novel, Austen wanted to criticize strongly this particular characteristic of the social