us. In all of Austen's novels her heroines are ultimately married. The characters in Austen's novels have something in common with her neighbors, friends and relatives. That is to say, Austen's writings are all about the people and the family matters of her time. At that time, the value of people counted on the possession of a fortune. The society was filled with the possession and the control of a fortune. Since men inherited all fortunes, women had to obey men and gained their happiness through proposals and marriages.
The main subject in Pride and Prejudice is stated in the first sentence: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man is possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." (Austen, 3) Actually, it should be said like this, totally the opposite - a single woman must be in want of a husband with a good fortune. "It was the only honorable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want." (Austen, 32)www.lunwenwang.com 论文网在线
"The underlying theme of Jane Austen's social comedy is the predicament of being a woman in a man's world - a world ruled by men and run for their advantage, in which marriage looms as the central and decisive act of the woman's life, and where the prevailing view is that `Marriage has…no natural relation to love. Marriage belongs to society; it is a social contract'. Other than marriage, no career or occupation was open to her. Her education was a grooming for polite society, providing her with fashionable “accomplishments” to catch the eye of a future husband." (Austen, 45)
Marriage of Austen's time actually was a kind of foundation stone and its function was mainly the key to the connection of fortune, the decision of relation and the right of inheritance. (Wilkes, 84) What it valued was to be matched for marriage. The point of marriage of the time was not to offer a legal form of giving birth to children and taking care of children. At that time there were not so many people who wouldn't like to get married as we do now. Of course, there was no such romantic marriage that would bear no legal obligation and would break up at any moment. As a matter of fact, marriage is a kind of ritual that everyone should go through and a part of the way to normal life. However, the different share of work between objectively caused such kind of traditional marriage male and female. In the society of the time, labor productivity was not developed. Women were discriminated against in social employment and the division and the inheritance of fortune. Women were treated as the ones who could only give birth to children and serve men. They became poor appendage of husbands in the patriarchy. No matter what kind of family they were born in, rich or poor, they had to depend on marriage to change their way of life or maintain their own relatively good situation. Marriage is their only way to survive in the cruel world.
4. Conclusion
In Pride and Prejudice, Austen fully expressed her view of marriage. From the novel, we can get a comprehensive understanding of women’s social status in pre-Victorian English country society of the 1810s. What Austen's novels exhibit is a world that is reduced consumedly; the views of them are narrow; anyway, they are quite concentrated. What she focused on was morality and customs; strict rules of behavior and criterion, hence, what her novels talk about are traditional marriages. She paid more attention to the expatiation that marriage means prescriptive connection of fortune, decision of cognation and rights of succession. At the time when women could not have the equal opportunity as men for getting work of the same value and having the same heirdom, they were the minority weak groups and the appendage of husbands in the family structure of male. Austen tried to search for rational marriages for women through rational love. Actually she emphasized that women should take the initiative in marriages, expressing view of value that was different from male writers.
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