Pride And Prejudice Gender Analysis

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the role of gender is critical in the lives of relatively affluent Britons in the early 19th Century. While the author, Austen, was born in 1775 in England on the tail end of the Age of Enlightenment, the novel likely takes place during the start of the Regency Period, portraying a microcosm of the middle and upper class population, at that time. England’s power structure contrived through the concentration of wealth, British law and societal norms, to render women largely impotent to improve their lot. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen uses ironic and satirical elements, to criticize the very limited opportunities for women to escape from the strictures of their inordinately male-dominated society.

The …show more content…
Societal norms for such women required their central focus to be marriage, so women with higher aspirations were required to camouflage their intellectual activities. In Pride and Prejudice largely through the role of the strong-willed, and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Austen somewhat autobiographically shows the reader the severe restrictions on the female members of her social class at the time. Elizabeth Bennet’s personality traits although somewhat detrimental to her at the start of the 19th Century, would serve her well in contemporary times. During the Regency Period, however, access to capital, discriminatory laws and a code of societal norms all conspired to keep women subservient to, and dependent upon men. While many women in England currently are able to seek higher education, pursue self-sufficiency through a career, and escape from the societal norms making them subservient to, and dependent upon men, money remains now, as then, an impediment for