Gender Inequality In Pride And Prejudice

Holmes uses Ashley to highlight moments and positions of inequality starting fairly early in her development. Johnson also works to destabilize the idea of modern gender equality, through a ‘girl’ character. Like Ashley, Candice is in a transitional age. At nineteen, she is a legal adult, but still very dependent on her parents and, to use a whitmanism, the ‘adultier adults’ around her. She alternates between the autonomy one would expect from an adult woman, and the ignorance/innocence seen in children closer to Ashley’s age. The morning that D’aron, Candice, and their other two friends (Louis and Charlie) were planning on using performative intervention to protest the Civil War reenactment, Charlie and D’aron both have second thoughts and back out. Candice and Louis choose to do the intervention anyway. About an hour after the intervention was supposed to occur, Candice “hobble[s] up to the back door…shaking, arms clawed by bush and bramble…her clothes torn… her white knuckles scraped and bruised, eyes swollen dark with fear” (117, Johnson). D’aron’s immediate thought, given the direction she had come and the fact that her clothes were torn up, was that Candice had “gotten herself raped” (119, …show more content…
By choosing to describe a girl on the brink of adolescence, Holmes enables herself to explore the ways that sexism and inequality influence puberty and ‘tweendom’, as well as suggesting that more gender inequality would also lead to a more effective treatment of female identifying abusers. Johnson’s choice to depict a girl on the brink of adulthood allows him to look at how “good sexism” is still bad, and how even the most “woke” among us is still susceptible to discriminatory and problematic thought. Both texts ultimately suggest that society at large needs to do