Money and Jane Austen. How "Pride and Prejudice" Generates an Access to Contemplating Marriage Socioeconomically

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Würzburg (Neuphilologisches Institut), course: The Female Romantics, language: English, abstract: “There is a tendency to think of the settings of Austen’s novels as if they resemble Downton Abbey a hundred years earlier”. With this quote, Davidson introduces the broad topic of the paper: inheritance, money, love, society – and what goes along with it. Whether it is Downton Abbey or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the “financial status and the operations of inheritance play a fundamental role”, which is “never speaking openly, but always present”. But, to intervene right at the beginning of this funny looking idea of a paper about English literature, one could state the question of money and Jane Austen – How Pride and Prejudice generates an access to contemplating marriage socioeconomically as absolutely vital, as “economic interpretations of literature often reveal the power base of the society on which the novel is built as well as the author’s own view about the appropriateness of that power base”. In other words, and to define the very problem of the novel: “Mr. Bennet [...] is unable to use his property to provide for his family after his death since one of the stipulations included in most legal entailments was that, if there were no son to inherit the property, it would descend to the eldest nephew or male cousin in the next generation of the family”, which leads Büttner to summarize the entire novel and say that it is basically all about sex and money. The paper, hence, should analyse this problem in form of a vivisection of social restraints, in which possession seems to control love and in order to investigate about Austen’s ability to discriminate against social habits and practices of her time. This is, to legitimize the choice of the text, exactly the point, why one should have a close look at Jane Austen. She is not just a very famous female writer in English literature, but one of the most knowns for criticising society and structures. The specific topic however, is derived from the heart of analyses, contemplating the details of characters, plots, settings, and so on, while rather few scholars seem to concentrate on the meaning a novel can convey for understanding the time and circumstances it comes from. Most of them focus on the author and want to compare the author’s real life with the novel. This is, in kind, not of big use, because one simply can answer the question if the novel was written according to the author’s life.