Pride And Prejudice And Wuthering Heights: A Comparative Analysis

From reading both Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, it is clear that the young characters have to make choices and decisions about their futures. Using Pride and Prejudice as my core text and Wuthering Heights as my secondary text I will demonstrate how looking at these young characters making choices and decisions about their futures is significant, if we want to assess these novels critically. Taking the social class, feminism and theme of marriage, I will use suitable sources of information such as ‘Setting and Character in Pride and Prejudice’ by Charles J.McCann along with others to back up my point of how I believe it is unfair for characters to have to make decisions at such a young age. In Pride and Prejudice, it is the Bennet family who has the decision to make regarding marriage. It is their social class and gender that drives to them to the final decision. The Bennets have five girls who need to be married off to a wealthy family in order for them to have a good life. This is not very fair, as they are not marrying for love, it is just for wealth. The children are also very young to be making such decisions. In Wuthering Heights, Mr. Earnshaw’s daughter Catherine is looking for marriage. She is given the choice between the higher-class family the Linton’s and lower …show more content…
I believe the social class of each family to be important when critically assessing the novels as it shows how the decisions of these characters is influenced by the way they are brought up or the social class to which they belong. In Pride and Prejudice, the characters are placed into a setting or house to which their social class matches. For example, Netherfield, Rosings and Pemberley all represent a family. As Charles J.McCann says “(T)hus, while Netherfield is to Bingley as Rosings is to Lady Catherine, the unknown quantity that is Pemberley creates a certain mystery about Darcy.”