Exploring Connections Between Pride and Prejudice and Fay Weldons Letters to Alice

Authors Avatar by williano08 (student)

Anoushka William

The tension between the individual and society is what leads to questioning and change.

A parallel study of two texts, written in two distinct time frames, exposes the questioning and change that had occurred within society itself, as a result of tensions between the individual and society. A study of Jane Austen’s early 19th century novel, Pride and Prejudice, set in Landed Gentry of the Regency Era, and Fay Weldon’s late 20th century epistolary non-fiction text, Letters to Alice, explores the ways writers, often through their characters in fictitious literature have the capacity to catalyse change in their world by introducing new ideas. Weldon’s contextualisation and discussion of Austen’s text as a novel of superior literature, clarifies the connections between the two texts and highlights the questioning and change that has occurred within the role of women and the values of love and marriage especially. A reading of both texts emphasises the ability of the writer to use literature, and especially the letter-form, to create tension within society and change it from within.

Reading Austen and Weldon’s texts together foregrounds the differences between their distinct contexts, and in this, illuminates the reader to the social changes that have occurred over time in the lives of women, as their traditional roles have been questioned. Both Austen and Weldon, as highly successful female writers, take particular interest in women and act as social commentators as they navigate their lives. Weldon contextualises Austen’s novel and context for her readers, stating, “Women were born poor, stayed poor and lived well only by their husband’s favour.” The repetition of “poor” explicates the negative repercussions if a woman failed to marry in Austen’s time. She delineates a woman’s sole purpose to marry through the four metonyms of marriage being “The great prize, the aim…the stuff of their lives, their very existence.” With this in mind, we can return to the characterisation of an individual representative of her time period as a whole, with an empathetic mind. The detached and unemotional language of “disinterested” in that Charlotte married Mr Collins “solely out of the pure and disinterested desire of an establishment” elucidates that Charlotte married out of financial necessity more than anything else. Women in Austen’s society depended on men for financial security, and thus quickly accepted any appropriate proposal offered to them.

Join now!

This characterisation is contrasted to the characterisation of Elizabeth Bennet, who, according to Weldon, “must have upset a number of readers, changed their minds and the society they lived in” by “paying attention the subtler demands of human dignity rather than the cruder ones of established convention.” Elizabeth, unlike the more pragmatic Charlotte chooses to marry for love, rather than merely security, thus indicating Austen’s own equal valuing of the two components in marriage. The high modality of her exclamatory rejection of Mr Collins’ proposal “My feelings in every respect forbid it!” contrasts to Elizabeth’s view that Mr Darcy ...

This is a preview of the whole essay