Lecture 15- Pride and Prejudice IV: Theme, Form & Style - I

[Music] [Music] hello Learners and welcome to the 14th lecture in this NP course titled the English novel interdisciplinary approaches this is our fourth discussion of the novel that we have chosen for analysis that is Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice in the previous lecture I provided a brief overview of Jane Austin's life and career I spoke about the lack of opportunity with regards to uh employment uh finance and education that characterized the lives of women and especially women writers like Jane Austin and I also spoke a little bit about how Jane Austin began to achieve the status and the success as a professional writer very late in her life and career uh specifically I described Jane Austin's publishing career as split in two parts the the first period can be called as the stevon period in which uh she wrote a lot of uh juvenalia aimed primarily for the entertainment of a family members but also began to compose uh longer works of fiction with an eye towards the the literary and the publishing Market uh it is in this stevon period that uh the the three novels it's Pride and Prejudice Sense and Sensibility Northanger Abby were were composed in the second period that is also known as the Chen period is when J Austin begins to solidify her sense of herself as a professional writer this is the period when uh novels composed earlier are sold that is to say marketed and transformed into Commodities with a very clear eye towards creating in and sustaining a community of readers who will also become a community of book buyers who will sustain the career of the novelist uh this is also the period in which Austin composed uh the novels which are seen as the the marker of of uh renewed maturity complexity and seriousness in the novelist and and these are the novels Mansfield Park Emma and persuasion uh the clear difference between these these two categories of novels is is not so much that uh the first category is written by a writer who was uh writing for her family and the second was a writer who was writing for the market that was true but more importantly the the first set of novels are marked by a somewhat mechanical adherence to established conventions that is to say protagonists in novels like brighten Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility uh seem to follow the plot or the script that was laid down for them by literary conventions uh these literary conventions essentially said that for a woman the way to prosperity and security and safety to secure uh a wealthy husband and marriage and the protagonists seem to go towards that goal seem to be moving towards that goal uh of course they they don't do it uh simply as a deterministic machine they are thinking feeling beings and as we will see Elizabeth Bennett think very critically and very honestly about what is the meaning and what is the goal and what is the purpose of marriage but nonetheless there is a sense in which uh marriage if uh secured with all of the critical sensibility all of the honest and U sincere and open-minded thinking uh has the potential to secure uh happiness lasting happiness uh for an individual that assumption is is not under question however when we come to the later novels or these novels that's Mansfield Park Emma and persuasion uh even that assumption that uh a good partner secured not with the uh empty mechanical or the mercenary goal of uh wealth or income but uh secured with a much more holistic emotional and uh intellectually thought through process of compatibility and U emotional fit between two individuals even that kind of a marriage may not hold all of the answers and may not be the the the solution or the key to happiness in fact the very question of Happiness what What happiness is how one is to be happy these these questions are expanded and it seems that there are no easy answers to these question so the the later novels uh take a much more philosophical and um much less practical approach to this question of how an individual and especially an unmarried woman a single woman without the chance of securing great wealth or without a great uh deal of personal wealth which would give her uh Security in life how is this individual to secure uh a sustainable happy and secure future for herself there are no easy answers to this question the best marriage may even fail to secure these these goals so this is the general uh intellectual and emotional difference the the difference in the terrain that these two sets of novels occupy now in today's lecture we will begin reading Pride and Prejudice and before I do that I want to get give a sense of how Jane Austin is perceived today Jane Austin is a hugely popular writer uh in some senses uh one of the most popular writers in fact uh Jane Austin is is a writer who defines uh the experience of reading English for for many people and in a country like India with its uh long history of colonial rule and with the origins of education and especially with the origins of English education with colonial rule in India Jane Austin exemplifies not only the act of reading novels but the act of reading itself and uh there are many individuals who associate reading Jane Austin with being civilized with with with learning manners with learning to write English and generally and generally with uh being modern and being everything that a good human being can be one thinks of the uh writer nirat Chri who famously boasted that he went to bed uh after reading a page of Jane Austin every night um this was not an unheard of attitude and we we know for a fact that Winston Churchill during the the height of the London Blitz uh recommended that that everyone keep a copy of Pride and Prejudice that they read this novel while the world around them was literally being burned down so there are many uh instances of people turning towards Jane Austin to find some sort of uh emotional relief and uh um also different forms of education so Jan Austin is uh hyper canonical today and uh that is both a good thing and a Bad Thing uh the forms in which Jane Austin is received today often um put the context in which Jane Austin lived and the the details of her writing into a kind of uh obscurity uh today we or whoever claims to love and admire Jane Austin actually loves and admires uh their version of Jane Austin and that is to say Jane Austin today is U handed down to us by a a great uh cultural Machinery there is a very well-oiled and um very well-funded uh cultural industry that uh markets Jane Austin as a very readable uh novelist uh what does this industry do this industry presents Jane Austin as a great chronicler of human psychology right um one can look at any number of Jane Austin adaptations that are available to stream on on the the internet or or on the TV or on any uh video library or a DVD uh lending store uh there are many adaptations of Jane Austin's novels they uh are not limited to films or TV shows there are also adaptations of Jane Austin as uh more popular forms of genre fiction such as uh literature about zombies films about zombies um and a great deal of fanfiction as well uh all of this uh emerges from the assumption that Jane Austin Chronicles human psychology with great detail she describes what human beings do how human beings behave when they are faced with difficult circumstances what are these difficult circumstances uh the women in Jane Austin's novels they are not born into money uh they face a struggle for survival that is to say if they do not secure the hand of a wealthy man in marriage they will literally be driven to poverty and in that situation they will not have any option uh to they will not have any alternative to secure a living for themselves uh other than uh doing some very uh ill-reputed and uh immorally perceived professions so this uh most of Jane Austin's protagonists face uh a struggle for sur for survival and how they behave uh in the situation when they are faced with extreme uh choices uh they they reveal something Universal about human character this is the manner in which Jane Austin's novels are adapted circulated framed and presented to us as highly attractive Commodities uh there is however something missing when we perceive Jane Austin simply as a chronicler of human psychology we missed the fact that it was not just about Universal human psychology but rather the psychology of a very limited and particular set of human beings human beings who shared the experiences that Jane Austin herself had she wrote about a small group of people with the hope that when she described their problems others even those who did not share those problems could relate to them and could learn something about their human situation there is another aspect of the the reception of Jane Austin today which deserves mention and this is um a somewhat male chauvinistic idea the the idea is that Jane Austin merely wrote about women and not not only did she write about women she only wrote about a concern that affected women alone the concern that one needs to secure a wealthy husband for oneself uh this this kind of a critique manifested self in descriptions of her novels as being too monotonous or too similar right uh more than one critic has uh said that Jane Austin's novels are all essentially the same they all describe different combinations and permutations by which a not so wealthy woman manages to secure for herself the hand of a wealthy man who also happens to be a good man right uh this is not true this is uh a highly simplistic and exaggerated statement there is a great deal of variation there's a great deal of nuance in Jane Austin's novels and in fact J Jane Austin's novels are not about the plot they're not about what happens but rather they're about how we learn about what happens right so uh these are certain uh preoccupations and and certain attitudes to words Jan Austin's fiction which which remain popular today despite the great popularity and generally positive reception that that she enjoys related to this somewhat male chauvinist and misogynist reception that J atin only writes about women and women's concerns about marriage there is an accusation that Jan Austin's world is insula that this is a world that does not reflect the political uh the geopolitical or the economic or the social uh contexts of late 18th and early 19th century Europe and one evidence cited by these these critiques of Austin's work is that this was the time when the French Revolution occurred this was the time when the ponic wars occurred this was the time when Britain was constantly at War there there were a lot of wartime shortages there were a lot of Financial material problems that people in England faced uh due to these wars which are not reflected in the novels uh this this argument again is is incorrect uh as I mentioned in my previous lecture Jane Austin was sharply aware of the influence of uh the wars how they gave employment to to men like like her own brothers and how these these wars and the employment they they provided to men had an in had an influence on the emotional and matrimonial lives of women who did not go to war right and and we will see a very Vivid illustration of that in Pride and Prejudice through the character of Wickham the biggest charge uh and this is not about Jane Austin as an individual writer but rather about the genre of romance in General is that this is a genre that that is an Escapist form of writing writing this is a a sort of Novel that's written for readers who derive a certain pleasure from escaping from the material and uh practical concerns of everyday life and instead they they wish to escape and read about the struggles of a small group of women trying to cure the marriage of of one of their own or or other women uh this charge uh describes Austin's work as as Escapist this again is is untrue it is not correct at all because through the description of women and their concerns with marriage Jane Austin's novels describe uh a great deal of what was unfolding in England but not only in England but in Europe in general so these are some attitudes with which Jane Austin is is received today and our job uh in this course while we discuss Pride and Prejudice will be to go much Beyond these attitudes and to show how these are not true and and instead these these attitudes seek to limit one's uh appreciation and enjoyment of the novels Jane Austin described in in a letter uh that her goal and and her ideal subject matter was three or four families in a Country Village and she described uh her novels as a kind of uh miniature artwork she she described her novels as being like 2 or three inches of ivory on which to work with a fine brush to practice A Min miniaturist art and uh she she also described how her novels managed to provide little effect after much labor right so this uh Vision this description of herself as U both an artist as well as a creative laborer describes how she understood the work of fiction in the time in which she lived being a woman and uh lacking opportunities for professional growth uh such as joining the Navy or inheriting businesses or being a clergyman or marrying into wealth like her brother is dead the only thing left for an intelligent uh skilled creative but uh not formally educated woman like herself was to write was to write fiction uh about the world that she could observe because she lacked formal education she would not be taken seriously if she decided to write about uh philosophy or history or literary criticism the the three things that she considered adding to Pride and Prejudice in order to make it a much more serious or seriously perceived work the only thing she could write about was the world that she had observed world and given the lack of opportunities the lack of agency and the lack of access the only world she could observe was three or four families in a Country Village however what was limiting or what seems to be insular or closed or confined in this description that is three of four families in a Country Village is offset and uh more than compensated for by the richness and the sophistication with which she describes what she observes about these three or four families that is to say she works her fine brush over those two three inches of ivory which with such uh refinement and with with such care and with such sophistication that the effect even though it is at the end of the day a description of three or four families becomes much more than a description of those three or four families it becomes a description of something resembling the universal Human Condition we will return to this description as we encounter more specific evidence from the novel but for now let us keep in mind that the that the insularity or the confinement of what can appear to be uh a limitation of Jane Austin's novels is in fact the source of their strength and the source of the great power because the the subject matter is limited from the beginning the novelist has much greater opportunity to produce to to describe that limited subject matter in such a heightened and refined and creative manner that the final effect that is to say the novel which describes these three or four families in a Country Village becomes something that many more families in fact hundreds and thousands and millions of other families and readers in many countries and many villages all over the world can read uh enjoy appreciate and relate to right so uh even though it's about three or four families in a small Country Village in England people all over the world can relate to the struggles the contradictions the the challenges and the joys faced by these three or four families and specifically the women in these three or four families now with these words let us now uh begin reading the novel and I will read from the first page of Pride and Prejudice to to help illustrate some of the ideas that we've been discussing so far this is how Pride and Prejudice begins it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife however little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families that he is considered as the rightful property of someone or other of their daughters so this is among the most famous the most cited and most well-known openings in all of literature right so it is worth spending some time trying to understand how this opening sentence illustrates both the strengths of Jane Austin as a writer as well as reflects the world from which her writing and she herself as a writer emerged right it is a truth universally acknowledged so it seems here that the novelist is pointing towards an opinion that's held by other people and what about that opinion not only do some people hold this opinion but they also believe that it is not an opinion it is in fact a truth TR that it is a fact that exists irrespective of what they think right and then what is that truth the truth or the supposed truth or the truth which is considered to be a truth is that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife now the word want here is not a verb but it is in fact a noun right and want as a noun means lack or deficiency right so this man here right possesses uh a good fortune that is he owns a lot of property from which he gets rent or he has a lot of wealth which he has invested and which yields an annual return of of a great deal of income that he has but there's something he lacks and it is almost as a consequence of having the first that he lacks the second what does he lack he lacks a wife and it is this relationship between the three things uh the man possessing Fortune the man lacking a wife and the relationship between the two uh lacking a wife possessing a fortune being a universal truth that the novelist wants to convey the novelist is not saying that this is the case the novelist is simply saying that for a lot of people this exists as an unexamined truth that they so strongly believe it to be the case that they have forgotten that it is in fact an opinion okay and how do we know this because the next sentence makes this clear however let little known the feelings or views of such a man maybe on his first entering a neighborhood this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families that he is considered as a rightful property of some or someone or other of their daughters now the second sentence describes what is uh most famously considered to be Jane Austin's strength as a writer which is irony iron is a literary device by which a writer says one thing but actually means the very opposite of what is being said let us try to understand how irony works by understanding the sentence now the man possesses a great deal of property right however when he enters a neighborhood the surrounding families they wish they they try to find a possibility or they hope that through a certain work of fate in the next a few months or weeks or in the near future something will happen so that uh he this man who himself possesses property will be seen as the property of one of their daughters right now what is this what does this mean it is not that by marrying the this wealthy man will become the property of his wife rather this use of property as a metaphor illustrates the lack of agency faced by women and in fact it is the desperation and the need to survive uh produced by this lack of property that these surrounding families in that Village begin to see this wealthy man as a potential husb husband for one of the younger unmarried women or one of their daughters in the village so it is the use of property here illustrates the very ex the very opposite of of property it is not that by marrying this wealthy man these daughters will gain the property that that he gains No in fact it is the very opposite in fact uh in 1753 the married woman's property Act was passed which ensured that women could not own property so then why is Jane Austin's narrator saying that when a wealthy man moves into a neighborhood he is perceived as the rightful property of one of the unmarried daughters in that Village it simply shows how far these these unmarried women and and their families have been driven uh to what kind of desperation they have been driven by the absolute lack of opportunity by the uh lack of any agency provided to women that they they begin to uh see these this this wealthy man with a predatory gaze right so this is uh an indication of how irony works and and how Jane Austin describes the economic inequality that that was pervasive in uh 18th and 19th centuries in England we will continue our discussion of this opening which is among the most powerful in in all of literature in the next lecture [Music] aah [Music]