This study will examine Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice and its relationship to the Romantic movement. The Romantic movement focused in subject and form on a loosening of the restrictions of the earlier Classical and neo-Classical movements. The Romantic movement involved a more free and subjective description and expression of personal passion and feelings which were not present in idealistic Classical literature. Austen's novel can hardly be called blatant in its largely genteel treatment of passion between the sexes, but it is nevertheless a step toward such openness in comparison to Classical works. More importantly for the focus of this study, Austen treats romantic love and its ideal end in marital bliss with an irony which is perhaps absent from much other Romantic literature. Austen focuses on the subjects of love, passion, feelings and marriage which are more typical of Romantic than Classical literature. However, she does so with an amused irony which elevates the novel above what might otherwise be seen as a shallow work about shallow characters with shallow concerns. After all, the book is essentially about five sisters trying to find men to marry. The book could be fairly accused of portraying a romantically insulated world isolated from the larger and more profound social and political issues which dominated Classical literature.
Austen's book reflects the typical Romantic concerns with the individual rather than with larger sociopolitical issues which subsume the individual. Specifically, aside from her preoccupation with romance, illusory romance, and the ideal goal of marital bliss, Austen seeks to examine with the tool of irony the issues of self-awareness and self-delusion. For example, one of the major elements of the two primary characters of the novel
--Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy--is their misperception about others, especially each other. Elizabeth at first considers Darcy an impossible candi...