Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice – English – UGC NET – Notes

Introduction

• Jane Austen’s novels do not represent stormy passions and high tragedy of emotional life. She was primarily concerned with the comedy of domestic life. But with her very mental makeup she was incapable of writing a tragedy or romance. Jane Austen was absolutely incapable of writing adventurous tales dealing with romantic reveries and death scenes.
• Austen chose a limited background for her novels. Her novels are recognized as ‘domestic’ or ‘the tea-table’ novels and the reader seeking anything like high romance in her works would be disappointed. There is hardly any feeling for external nature in her stories and there is little passion in her pictures of life. Whatever language of emotion is used, is forced and conventional. The kind of life that she has depicted is the one which she had put in the mouth of Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. ‘For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbours and to laugh at them in our turn?’

Her Realism

• Jane Austen was a supreme realist. Her stories are all drawn from the life that she knew. Emma tells us of a delightful girl who is as she was in the years when Napoleon was emperor. The ordinary commonplace incidents and the day-to-day experience formed the warp and woof of her novels. Sir Walter Scott wrote in his diary that the talent of Jane Austen as a realist was the ‘most wonderful’ he had ever met with. ‘That young lady had a talent for describing involvements, feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I have ever met with.’
• Jane Austen described the English country scene with skill and fidelity. She gives a vivid and glowing picture of the social manners and customs of the eighteenth century. She created numerous realistic characters. Jane Austen is nearer to life than any of the earlier novelists. Speaking of Jane Austen’s age, the critic G.E. Milton wrote: ‘Jane Austen was the first to draw exactly what she saw around her in a humdrum country life, and to discard all incidents, all adventures, all grotesque types, for perfect simplicity.’

Plot Construction

• Austen’s great skill lies in plot-construction. Her skillfully constructed plots are really the highest objects of artistic perfection. Her novels have an exactness of structure and symmetry of form. All the incidents that are introduced have their particular meanings.
• Jane Austen’s plots are not simple but compound. They do not compromise barely the story of the hero and the heroine. In Pride and Prejudice for instance, there are several pairs of lovers and their stories form the component parts of the plot. In the novels of Jane Austen the parts are so skillfully fused together as to form one compact whole.
• In the plots of Jane Austen action is more or less eliminated. Action in her novels consists in little visits, morning calls, weddings, shopping expeditions, or the quizzing of new arrivals. These small actions and incidents go to make up the plots of Jane Austen’s novels. Her novels are not novels of action, but of conversation. The place of action is taken up by conversation and scene after scene is built up by the power of conversations. In Pride and Prejudice, for instance, dialogues form the bulk of the novel.
• Referring to the great skill of Jane Austen’s plot-construction, W.L. Cross remarks in The Development of the English Novel: ‘No novelist since Fielding has been master of structure, Fielding constructed the novel after the analogy of the ancient drama. Pride and Prejudice has not only the humour of Shakespearean comedy, but also its technique.

Characterization

• Jane Austen is a great creator of characters. She has created a picture-gallery filled with so many delightful characters. Her characters are not types but individuals. She portrays human characters with great precision and exactness. Her male characters are almost perfect. She creates living characters both male and female, and draws them in their private aspects.
• Jane Austen has an unerring eye for the surface of personality and records accurately the manners, charms and tricks of speech of her characters. Nothing escapes her notice. In this respect she can be compared with her great successor Dickens, who is unique in drawing surface peculiarities. Dickens does not go below the surface while Jane Austen does. She penetrates to the psychological organism underlying speech and manner, and presents the external relation to the internal. In Pride and Prejudice the scene wherein Darcy proposes to Elizabeth at Hunsford Personage is a fine psychological study. Darcy if outwardly composed and taciturn, is driven within by a conflict between his love for Elizabeth and hatred for her stupid relations which prevent him from marrying her.
• Sir Walter Raleigh wrote of Jane Austin, ‘She has a great sympathy for all her characters and their follies and foibles do not annoy her. Jane Austen is never angry with her characters. In Pride and Prejudice Mr. Collins and Lady de Bourgh are figures of fun, monstrous puppets of silliness and snobbery, to be elaborated and laughed at.’

As a Satirist and Moralist

• Jane Austen is a satirist as well as moralist. Satire is an element in which Jane Austen lives but there is no trace of the savage indignation in her writings. Her attitude as a satirist is best expressed in the words of Elizabeth when she says: “I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.’ It is evident that her satire was sympathetic.
• Walter Allen, literary critic and novelist rightly points out, Jane Austen was a moralist-an eighteenth-century moralist. In some respects, she was the last and finest flower of that century at its quintessential.”

Dramatic Nature of Her Art

• Jane Austen developed the dramatic method both in the presentation of her plots and characters. Instead of describing and analysing the characters, she makes them reveal themselves in their action and dialogues. The plot is also carried forward through a succession of short scenes in dialogues.
• Though keeping the right to comment, she relies more on dialogue and that is her main forte. The plot of Pride and Prejudice is dramatic. Baker points out that both the theme and the plot-structure of Pride and Prejudice are remarkably dramatic. He divides the novel into five acts of high comedy.

Her Humour

• Jane Austen’s attitude towards life, presented in her novels, is that of a humorist, ‘I dearly love a laugh’, says Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, and this statement equally applies to the novelist. She laughs at follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies.
• Folly is the chief source of laughter in the novels of Jane Austen and she creates comic characters who provoke nothing but laughter. Her comic characters are Mrs. Bennet, Sir Walter Eliot, Mrs. Norris, Mr. Collins and Mr. Woodhouse. She laughs at each one of them because of their foolishness and foolish actions. Irony is a conspicuous aspect of Jane Austen’s humour. There is enough of verbal irony in her novels.

Style

• Jane Austen rendered a great service to the English novel by developing a flexible, smooth-flowing prose style. She is sometimes a shade artificial. But at her best her prose moves nimbly and easily and enables her narrative to proceed onward without any obstruction. “It does not rise to very great heights, being almost monotonous in its pedestrian sameness except when relieved by an occasional epigram or well-turned aphorism. It achieves its greatest triumphs in dialogue. It is not a prose of enthusiasm or exaltation. But it is wonderfully suited to dry satiric unfolding of the hopes and disappointments of the human heart.’
• W.L. Cross aptly remarks, ‘The style of Jane Austen cannot be separated from herself or her method. It is the natural easy flowing garment of her mind, delighting inconsistencies and infinite detail. It is so peculiarly her own that one cannot trace in it with any degree of certainty of the course of her reading.’
• Jane Austen is undoubtedly the greatest woman novelist as Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist. Faithful observation, personal detachment, and fine sense of ironic comedy are among Jane Austen’s chief characteristics as a writer.
• Austen’s novels mark a big step forward in the development of English novel. Her range is limited but her touch is firm and true. Her stories may not be exciting and thrilling, but the picture of life that she presents has all the charm of vivid narration. Dialogues form a prominent feature of the narrative of Jane Austen. Her stories are dramatic in nature. Her characters are taken mostly from the aristocracy and upper middle class of the English village and its vicinity. She created numerous realistic characters.
• She presents remarkable psychological studies of men and women, avoiding passion and prejudice. Her novels have a distinct moral purpose. She is the greatest English novelist because of her craftsmanship, purity and simplicity of her style and themes.