AN ECONOMY OF HER OWN: A MARXIST FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Abstract

The present study analyzes Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from a Marxist Feminist perspective to analyze the position, role, and image of the woman in the 18th-century male-dominated society. Within the Marxist Feminist theoretical framework, the study aims to explore how Jane Austen represented the image of women viz-a-viz man with a special focus on their economic conditions. More than any other female novelist of her time, Jane Austen created six admirable novels and today her fair reputation chiefly rests upon these six remarkable novels she produced during her short creative life. Although she primarily wrote about the social milieu of her time and the precarious position of women in that society which was, in the first place, a male-dominated class society that accorded women only a marginal role and status, her treatment of the gender politics and the subtle ideological maneuverings that determined the structure of the society, as well as the thoughts of the people, make her novels grand success with the readers and the critics alike.

Pride and Prejudice is one such significant novel by Jane Austen that has been immensely popular amongst Austen’s lovers throughout the ages for its splendid depiction of the 18th-century society with its sharp class stratification which categorized the people into different groups according to the social rank they possessed and thus the economic position of a person became the principal foundation of his respect, privilege, influence, and power in the society. The study inspired by the depiction of the socially-conditioned roles and images of the bevy of the female characters in Pride and Prejudice intends to realize and explain the subtle operations of the deeply classed society to demonstrate how and why women were not allowed to develop an economy of their own and realize their true potential.