Pride and Prejudice

1. Pride and Prejudice Style

2. Chief Examiner’s Report 2007 Knowledge of texts • Knowledge of the text ensures that candidates are confident in their ability to interpret and respond to examination questions. It is evident that many candidates have only cursory knowledge, perhaps gained from revision notes or check sheets, the internet, or film adaptations. • Questions are set on the understanding that candidates have a detailed and thorough knowledge of the text(s) they choose to write about. In 90724, it is assumed that candidates have detailed knowledge of specific language terms and can read and understand with discrimination. Critical response • The title of each standard contains the words “respond critically”. Candidates are expected to engage critically with aspect(s) of crafting and writing • Candidates need to be engaged with the text and have developed the skills and confidence to propose a point of view

3. style • There are very few descriptive passages • Very few concrete nouns, obviously there are a few objects such as carriages, a muddy petticoat, hats, pictures, a parasol. Austen is not interested in visualising the world she describes, except in special cases such as Pemberley • Large proportion of abstract nouns such as astonishment, pride, sense, judgement, hope • Mostly literal rather than figurative diction.

4. Narrative Techniques • Third person narrator (narration) who is omniscient and anonymous • Sometimes the narrator is the silent observer of events, relating them without comment. At other times we are told quite clearly what to think about a character or an incident. • Female narrator? • In her summaries the narrator is judgemental or authoritorial • Elizabeth is the centre of consciousness by which all values are judged in the novel, she appears in every scene, and this is true of no other character • Free indirect discourse helps to display Austen’s determination to display the psychological processes of her protagonist • Satire • meticulous details of life • delicate analysis of characters • lively dialogues • humorous ironies • combine romantic comedy with social satire and psychological insight

5. Free indirect discourse • Free indirect discourse or speech is a style of third-person narration which combines some of the characteristics of third-person report with first-person direct speech. (It is also referred to as free indirect discourse, free indirect style) • What distinguishes free indirect speech from normal indirect speech is the lack of an introductory expression such as "He said" or "he thought". It is as if the subordinate clause carrying the content of the indirect speech is taken out of the main clause which contains it, becoming the main clause itself. Using free indirect speech may convey the character's words more directly than in normal indirect, as she can use devices such as interjections and exclamation marks, that cannot be normally used within a subordinate clause. • Examples • Direct speech: • He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. "And just what pleasure have I found, since I came into this world?" he asked. • Indirect speech: • He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. He asked himself what pleasure he had found since he came into the world. • Free indirect speech: • He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure had he found, since he came into this world? • (From Wikipedia)

6. Narrative method plays a central role in this process of reformative reading. The omniscient narrator represents a model consciousness, a figure for the "author," implicitly on the same level as the reader, representing the world of the novel from a superior position, whereas the protagonist is clearly fallible and limited, whether sympathetically or ironically treated by the narrator. As a character in the text, the narrator implicitly arranges all other characters in a hierarchical order over a grid whose coordinates are knowledge and moral judgment. Structurally the narrator represents a level of understanding toward which the protagonist is headed, somewhere beyond the end of the novel. The reader's interest in this progress is underpinned by Austen's use of free indirect discourse, or reported inward thought and feeling. Other novelists who use this device, such as Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and Maria Edgeworth, treat several or many characters this way; Austen focuses almost exclusively on her protagonist, thereby giving a centrality and importance to a character that most other characters regard as unimportant. This device is one of Austen's favourites, used in Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion. But Austen also uses free indirect discourse to encourage the reader to sympathize with the protagonist, to accept her interpretations and judgments of the world around her. In this way the reader is often tricked into going along with the protagonist's errors until brought up short by the narrator's irony or revelation of the "truth."This device creates an irony of reading by which the reader identifies with both narrator and protagonist. In experiencing this irony at certain moments of narratorial revelation the reader vicariously experiences the gap between the protagonist's imperfection and fallibility and the narrator's superior understanding. All human understanding, except the godlike narrator's, is conditional and relative.The narrator's irony reminds us of this mortal fallibility. This reading would be serious matter indeed were it not for the fact that it is presented in what is "only a novel." In political terms, the point does implicitly counter "English Jacobin" ideas of the "perfectibility of man." Gary Kelly (you have this on page 10 of your handout and the full essay is on the wiki)

7. irony • Austen loves to make ironic statements about her characters. In describing Charlotte Lucas’ fear of Mr Collins leaving for London ‘but here, she did justice to the fire and independence of his character, for it led him to escape out of Longbourn House the next morning with admirable slyless, and hasten to Lucas Lodge to throw himself at her feet • Austen’s use of irony it can be argued helps to establishes intimacy with her reader – we too get that she’s joking

8. Satire (from universal teacher) • The principal form of humour in the novel is satire - lampooning by means of caricature or exaggeration customs and attitudes that the author disapproves, or characters who embody these hated attitudes. • Her favourite target seems to be the small-mindedness of the sex, the typical preoccupation with fashion, comfort and domestic security. Men are also ridiculed, but more for their individual failings. • Austen is not a critic of marriage as such but is deeply critical of the general female obsession with the institution. This is the novel's starting point, the ironical statement that a wealthy, single man must need a wife: this reflects the proprietorial attitude of those women who want to acquire a man and who know his needs better than he does. Great wealth and an elegant manner are a man's most important qualities; profundity and wisdom are unfashionable.

9. Universal teacher- satire • Though Austen attempts, in this novel, to depict honestly fashionable society and its etiquette, she is not uncritical of this world. Her criticism is, however, always very subtle and often more implicit, than explicit. She does not, as an author, tend to pass judgement on social institutions or manners, but may depict them in a humorous and unflattering light. In describing a character she may be critical, but, again, the fullest ridicule is occasioned not by this, but by what the characters do and say. • It would be wrong to characterise Austen as a highly comic writer: much of what she has to say is serious and without ironical intent and 'the novel's principal characters are not especially amusing. Elizabeth can be mischievous and finds others entertaining; we laugh a little with her but never at her as the reader is always too close to Elizabeth's experience and perspective. Elizabeth finds Darcy amusing, in his supposed pride, for a very brief duration but soon regards him seriously, first with animosity, then, in due course, sympathy leading to affection.

10. Irony - continued • Occasionally Elizabeth indulges in malicious irony. When describing Lady Catherine ‘I like her appearance’ ‘she looks sickly and cross – Yes she will do very well for him’ • But here we too agree with her

11. Letters (also see wiki for essay on the letter*) • Some 40 letters, contents either reported or reproduced • Remember the literary tradition of the epistolary novels e.g. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) or Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778) • First Impressions originally constructed like this. • Pride and Prejudice letters are part of the text’s verisimilitude. They feel authentic. • Letter writing is serious business for characters like Darcy, Jane, Mr and Mrs Gardiner. Alternatively, Lydia’s effusions are skimpy and trivial or shamelessly venal as in her asking for money in the final chapter. • Letters reveal character. Mr Collin’s is revealed as a buffoon from his first letter, Mr Bennet is a lazy letter writer • Consider the importance of Darcy’s letter of explanation to Elizabeth • *“The letter was a form of writing that stood ambiguously between the private and the public (designed to be read aloud)…In a culture of print, the presence of the letters in the novel could convey a sense of ‘personal voice’ and a handwritten text. In its very looseness, lack of structure and anecdotal content, the letter could represent a means of breaking out of the constraint that Austen’s heroines so often feel forced to submit to in the social environments they enter into.