Pride and Prejudice - Social Class in Society

Gender and class expectations in the Regency and Victorian time span were founded round a repaired social structure. This is the world depicted inside Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice, in writing in 1813. Gender expectations controlled and constrained the lives of the people abiding by them, most especially the women of the Regency time span, who lived in the shaded of men and were disempowered. Men were anticipated to be financially viable through entails of their occupation or through inherited family wealth. The repaired social structure that Austen depicts has a restricted social mobility, with the top classes and aristocracy exceedingly reluctant in allowing the middle classes to marry into their families therefore dispersing their wealth. (Austen 35)

A characteristic hierarchal system lived, with prominent distinctions between the classes, and each class governed by a distinct set of standards and expectations that were firmly adhered to. The middling and top classes were controlled by the expectations put upon traits, social communication, perform and courtship, represented honestly and intelligently by Austen as her life was furthermore governed by these expectations. Austen's aim on this repaired social structure aids the book reader in understanding the messages being presented on class and gender expectations and their result on limiting and restricting the actions of the people who lived during the time.

During Austen's life, only her direct family knew of her authorship of these novels. At one issue, she composed behind a doorway that creaked when tourists approached; this warning permitted her to conceal manuscripts before any individual could enter. Though publishing anonymously prevented her from acquiring an authorial reputation, it furthermore endowed her to preserve her privacy at a time when English society associated a female's entry into the public sphere with a reprehensible decrease of femininity. (Grusky 45)

Additionally, Austen may have searched anonymity because of the more general atmosphere of repression pervading her era. As the Napoleonic Wars (1800-1815) threatened the security of monarchies all through Europe, government censorship of publications proliferated.

The social milieu of Austen's Regency England was especially stratified, and class divisions were fixed in family connections and wealth. In her work, Austen is often critical of the assumptions and prejudices of upper-class England. She distinguishes between interior deserve (goodness of person) and external deserve (rank and possessions). Though she often satirizes snobs, she furthermore pokes joy at the poor breeding and misbehavior of those smaller on the social scale. Nevertheless, Austen was in numerous modes a realist, and the England she depicts is one in which social mobility is restricted and class-consciousness is strong. (Croix 94)

Socially regimented ideas of appropriate behavior for each gender factored into Austen's work as well. While social advancement for young men lay in the infantry, place of adoration, or regulation, the head procedure of self-improvement for women was the acquisition of wealth. Women could only complete this aim through successful marriage, which interprets the ubiquity of matrimony as an aim and theme of conversation in Austen's ...