For love or for money? That’s the question. I recently read Pride and Prejudice for the first time, and it was a really lovely experience. It was surprisingly funny in parts, and I quickly became invested in the various scandals that were transpiring on the pages. There were a lot of interesting themes including family, social class, and gender dynamics. All of these themes existed within the scope of marriage/relationships and I found myself comparing the relationship dynamics in the story to the ones we see in modern day America.
Obviously there were significant differences with things such as transportation (horses and carriages instead of cars) and communication (letters instead of phones), but the most striking contrast to me was the way women existed within society. There was a part in the book that discussed The Bennets having to pass their house down to a distant cousin that none of them had met because he was the next male heir in the family line. Women couldn’t get anything on their own, so they either had to settle for what they had, or use other means to get what they wanted. In the story, marriage was a valuable card to play that could be used to procure wealth or climb the social ladder.
The Bennets were a middle class family with five daughters, no sons, and a mother that desperately wanted to rise to the upper class so naturally she used what she had to try to get to the next level. Mrs. Bennet’s hunger for status led to her basically trying to pimp out her daughters to the highest bidder. I do believe that she cared for her daughters and wanted the best for them, but it led her to prioritize marriage and money to an almost laughable extent. I found myself being greatly annoyed by her throughout the story. The characters that were a part of the upper class were also familiar with the power of marriage. For most of the story, they were looking for ways to maintain and expand their already large estates. They looked down on the Bennets, and tried to prevent any sort of union with the family due in part to Mrs. Bennet’s gold digging nature, and the family’s general lack of connections. We see this desperation to get married in other characters as well. Mrs. Bennet’s youngest daughter, Lydia, was the ultimate “pick me.” Throughout the story she literally had no interests outside of flirting with men and finding a husband, to the point where her father lost hope in her vapidness. She ended up running off with this guy who was basically a scammer before they were officially married, which was an extremely frowned upon thing to do at the time. It almost led to her family being completely ostracized from society, which they considered to be a fate equal to death. We also see this desperation in Charlotte, who was Elizabeth’s best friend at the beginning of the story. Charlotte gladly accepted Mr. Collins’s marriage proposal a day after he proposed to her best friend. Ignoring all the bad things that her best friend said about him and the fact that they were unlikely to make a good match. All for the sake of being married.
I recognize that not having to marry purely for financial reasons is a privilege. It wasn’t that long ago that women couldn’t even open a bank account on their own, so there was a pressing necessity for marriage that there isn’t in modern society, at least not to quite the same extent. In this novel, Elizabeth, the main character, turned down marriage multiple times and it was seen as an extremely unconventional approach by her peers. Now though, the marriage rates are lower than ever, many women are choosing solitude over a partner because they can’t find someone worthy of their affection. Unlike the world of Pride and Prejudice, in today’s world it’s not radical at all for women to remain single and childless deep into their adult lives. However, while our society has advanced since the 1800’s there are still those that view marriage, and relationships in general as transactional arrangements. There are still “pick me” women that will do or say anything to try to win the attention of a man. There are still “high value” men with “traditional values” that believe their money or general standing of being a man makes them entitled to any woman they want, as if women are just an item at the store that they’re shopping for or something. The phrase “traditional values” and “high value man” are dog whistles to misogyny the way Donald Trump’s MAGA schtick is a dog whistle to racism and bigotry. In both cases it involves people with a weirdly intense desire to revert back to times when women and people of color didn’t have rights. As I was reading, I found that I was grateful not to have to live in such an outdated and antiquated way.
In a novel filled with characters that were obsessed with marriage as a way of reaching their own materialistic ends, the main quartet of Jane, Elizabeth, Darcy, and Bingley were framed by the author as being sensible and righteous for desiring love instead of a higher social class or increased wealth. It’s a surprisingly progressive take for something written over 200 years ago, and it’s a sentiment I share. I know there are some men out there that are frustrated, longing for the days of old when they had all the power and women were basically forced to be with them. I am not one of those men. For 26 years I’ve been single, and I often think about what I’d want my future partner to be like. One thing I know for certain, is that I want an equal, someone with the same rights and freedoms that I have, that doesn’t depend on me for any materialistic reason. I want an Elizabeth and not a Charlotte or a Lydia.
Just some guy on the internet 