First Impression on Pride and Prejudice
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Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was originally entitled First Impressions, and both these titles embody the themes of the novel. Austen's narrative describes how the prejudices and first impressionsespecially those dealing with pride, love, marriage, and the status of women during the nineteenth centuryof the main characters change throughout the novel, focusing on those of Elizabeth Bennet.
Jane Austen could have possibly written Pride and Prejudice with the purpose of positioning us, as the readers, to share her attitudes on the importance of marriage. She had extremely radical views for her time, and believed that marriage should not occur on the grounds of superficial feelings, pressures to marry, or wealth and social status. During her time period, these were all the reasons people did marry, and Austen believed one should only marry for love. Austen uses characters as literary devices to show the readers the juxtaposition between relationships which have resulted in married for love and relationships which have resulted in marriage for other reasons. By influencing the reader to believe marriage should only be for love, one begins to realize it is this, and only this, which can enable the characters of the novel to be happy.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife" (Austen, 1). The first sentence of Pride and Prejudice highlights the importance of marriage within the world of the novel. This singleyet boldsentence suggests that the sole purpose for marriage was to increase the characters' social and financial ranking...