Pride and Prejudice By Jane Austen : A CRITICAL ANALYSIS

 

When we discuss any work of art, we profit as much by noticing what it is not about as well as what it is about. With no other artist is this negative approach as profitable as Jane Austen; this-- by the fact that any discussion of her novels seems inevitably to begin with her limitations, or the omissions of her art. Without implying her inferiority to other novelists, we may begin our discussion by summing up some of the things not found in Pride and Prejudice and her other novels. 

Through a contemporary of the great Romantics, Jane Austen is essentially a child of the 18th Century, in its Neo-classical aspects. She is witty and ironic observer of human inconsistency and ludicrousness rather than a chronicler of consuming passions. She is concerned with a world in which the problems are of good form rather than that of subsistence.

What we do not see in Austen's novel:

What are some of the things that we have not found in “Pride and Prejudice”?

 

Death, for one thing, and any of the grander, metaphysical experiences of life. She does not show us any of the great agonies of human experience, or the darker side of life. We see nothing of hunger, poverty, misery; her novels do not deal with any of the grand passions or terrible vices one finds in life; we see nothing of God, and very little of a spiritual sphere of experience. 

What we see in Austen's novel:

We see only a limited range of human society, too. Most of her people are of the kind she knew intimately—the landed gentry, the upper classes, the lower edge of the nobility, the lower clergy, the officer corps of the military. As we have noticed before her novels exclude the lower classes, not only the industrial masses of the big cities, but also the agricultural labourers who must have been numerous around Meryton and Lon bourn. We do not see the political dimensions of the situation; the people of Meryton seem oblivious to the political affairs disturbing- London and the world, and have no political interests -of a local kind. 

 We hardly see in Austen's novel:

 Jane Austen's novels are curiously devoid of any reference to nature itself. It is one of the ironies of English literary history that at a time when the English romantic writers—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly, Keats and others — were discovering external nature, Jane Austen manages to keep her characters imprisoned indoors, very much the way the eighteenth-century writers did. Hence we have very few passages of description, especially of natural setting. 

The only description of "nature", in "Pride and Prejudice" is the description of Pemberley (Chapter: 43) and it is brief and fairly generalized. The only lesson Elizabeth derives from this natural beauty is "that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!" "The proper study of mankind is man," Jane would say with Alexander Pope.

And the "man" that she observes would be a man indoors, away from nature., of a special kind. She creates characters who any strong passions, the violent emotions which one finds in the fictional creations of Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and other 19th century novelists. 

Her people are all rather reasonable social creatures, occasionally disturbed and upset, but not given to frenzies, displays of irrationality, violent psychological conflicts, or volcanic furies. This does not mean that they are wooden, unemotional puppets: see Elizabeth's reaction to Darcy's letter (Chapter: 36) or her reaction to the elopement (Chapter: 46) when she "burst into tears." Still, when these are admitted, any reader with Dostoyevskyan tastes will be disappointed by the calmness of her characters, including those in love. 

So far, we have been discussing only the elements lacking in her art, and the casual reader may well wonder how a novel may still be great if so much is missing. This is a question which the Janeites must answer periodically, for there are critics who find her works shallow, restricted, narrow. She herself admitted her limitations, saying that "3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work upon." 

Charlotte Bronte called Jane Austen's art a "Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting," and -disapproved. From the beginning Jane Austen had is defenders, however. Sir Walter Scott envied her, saying in his diary, "The big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders common things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied me." 

The intelligent reader is brought face-to-face with the recurring dilemma of novel criticism:  Fielding or Richardson? Scott or Austen? Thomas Wolfe or Hemingway? One may circumvent the dilemma by b asking and reject neither? Is it not possible to like both kinds of novel and reject neither?