Pride & Prejudice
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If we investigate the themes, characters and setting of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in an effort to find faults of logic, we must first recognize that the entire work is a fault of logic because Austen’s world is a microcosm of one level of society, a level wherein everything and everyone turns out kindly, whether they be heroes or villains, rich or poor, or proud or prejudice. This is because unlike conventional romantic novels, like Wuthering Heights, there is no deeply passionate love displayed in this novel, no horrific consequences of being left without an annual inheritance, and even the alleged villains of the piece, like Wickham, are sprinkled with enough of the milk of human kindness as to almost make them preferable over some of the non-villains in the work. Psychologically, this type of mixed-trait character portrayal is realistic of reality because human development occurs as a continual process, one filled with both flaws and successes of character behavior. Richard Simpson (289) explicates this point further in his essay, The Critical Faculty of Jane Austen:Wickham, the modified villain of Pride and Prejudice, has so much charm about him that his sensible and epicurean father-in-law is almost disposed to like him better than his other and more honorable sons. Miss Austen has a most Platonic inclination to explain any knavishness into folly. Wickedness in her characters is neither unmixed with goodness, nor is
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d that no loss of life was to follow. Hence she could consider the struggles of the mariners with an amused an ironical complacency, and observe minutely all of the hairbreadth escapes of their harmless peril. Accordingly, her view of the life she described was that of a humorist, but of a very kindly one.” Oliphant is using understatement in this last line perhaps even more than of which she herself is aware.
Another way in which Austen is illogical is in the way she creates a social world that seems to be affected by no, or permit any entrance of, any ray of light from any other social milieu. There are no political or social issues that affect the characters, merely their interaction with one another within their own reserved and elite social circle. Everything in this world is painted over with the brush of amused kindness, and, as Austen often suggests in her characterizations in the novel, the individual does not exist without social interaction, then it must also be equally true that this social circle does exist independently of any other interaction. Austen has already suggested with characters like Wickham, that there are no truly wicked people in this social circle. However, she also seems to suggest that the l
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Approximate Word count = 1736
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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