Acting Your Age: Marriage and Adulthood in Pride and Prejudice

Near the turn of the nineteenth century, at a time when societal expectations regarding marriage decisions straddled a nuanced line between the newly important ideal of romantic love and the established influence of parents and other financially supportive authorities, Jane Austen wrote and published her famous bildungsroman Pride and Prejudice. This novel, one of literary history’s most enduring love stories, shows several young women’s transition to adulthood through marriage, but with varying approbation. Jane Bennet’s marriage to Charles Bingley and Elizabeth Bennet’s marriage to Fitzwilliam Darcy are the happy ending at the novel’s denouement, but they are contrasted with the union of Lydia Bennet with George Wickham. All four young women transition from being children living at home to adults managing their own household, but the varying levels of happiness of each couple send a heavy-handed message about whether they went about this in a proper or an improper way. In the language of the bildungsroman genre, Jane and Elizabeth develop themselves successfully, while Lydia fails to do so. This paper examines the development of these characters, with particular attention to Elizabeth and Lydia, in light of existing literature on the bildungsroman genre and the historical context of marriage at the time Jane Austen wrote her seminal work.

Hi, my name is Elise Mertz, and this video is on the research I did in HNRS 361 this semester on marriage and coming of age in Pride and Prejudice. So, I actually got first interested in this topic last fall when I was doing a class on the history of emotions, and I learned about how in the 1700s and 1800s there was a shift. From prior to that point, romantic love was not a very popular reason to get married. Marriage was seen more as something that you should do because of the logical choice for a family alliance or for financial reasons, and then love might grow out of that marriage. But starting in the 1700s there was a transition to where romantic love became more important as an actual reason to get married, and so during this time period, in the 1700s, especially the later end, and in the 1800s, there’s a lot of ongoing conversation in the legal history and in the social history of what people thought about marriage for these different reasons, whether or not they believed that marriage should be for romantic love or not. There were laws that tried to limit elopement, when people would run away to get married without parental permission, so especially in England there were laws against that, and then this dual situation arose where Scotland had more relaxed laws and so couples could just cross the border and get married without parental permission in border towns like Gretna Green. So, there’s this really interesting set of social structures that are creating this tension between marriage for romantic love, and marriage for a more logical purpose, usually with parental approval. And Jane Austen is writing in this time period and she’s engaging very directly with this question because of course her books are all about marriage.

And her books are also, they can be considered to be in the bildungsroman genre which is about coming of age. A way a lot of scholars pitch this coming-of-age process is how to reconcile your individual wants with the needs of societal stability, so in terms of this history of marriage, that could be phrased as how to reconcile marrying someone that you love, but who also is not an unwise choice who’s going to create financial or social instability for you.

She has several characters that end up married at the end of Pride and Prejudice, and they show very much whether or not they came of age in a good way or a bad way, and how those processes for them led them to emphasize individuality or social stability or reconcile the two. So, for example, the two main characters, Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, they do marry for romantic love, but the people that they marry also do provide a great deal of financial stability for them. So, they sort of have this reconciling of these two things. They get their individuality, and they get their social stability. And it’s for this reason that they’re able to both be happy about the marriage on their own terms, but also convince their parents of the merits of the marriages.

And then on the other hand, you have characters like Charlotte Lucas who marries purely for financial stability, and she does not end up very happy at the end of the novel. Elizabeth and Jane are a lot happier than her with their marital choices, so this sort of shows that in Jane Austen’s opinion, you know, you couldn’t just focus on that aspect of the social structures. You had to also focus at least a little bit on your own individual happiness.

And then at the extreme other end of the spectrum is Lydia Bennet, who actually runs away with George Wickham. He promises her that they will get married at Gretna Green. She thinks that they’re in love and so she’s all on board with this plan but then he actually just intends to take advantage of her and live with her unmarried, which would completely ruin your reputation. So, Lydia represents focusing way too much on your individual happiness and not enough on the social stability at the time. So, we really see in Pride and Prejudice how this bildungsroman lens and this historical context of marriage can combine to show whether or not a character has developed themselves or come of age in the proper way, and how their marriage very directly reflects this proper or improper development.

I really enjoyed doing this research. I think it was very rewarding, and I hope to continue it more in the future, maybe looking in more detail at other novels and considering how they might play into this question as well. Thank you very much, feel free to put any questions or comments below.