Comment on the structure of Plot in
Pride and Prejudice.
In Pride and Prejudice, Jane
Austen creates a picture of the small, cocooned world of the middle class
gentry -- with their commonplace joys and their commonplace sorrows. The
central concern of this "comedy of manners" is Mrs. Bennet’s dogged
efforts to find suitable husbands for her eldest daughters. Of course, Mrs.
Bennet’sjudgements cannot be trusted, for she is a nagging wife, an ineffectual
mother, and a social misfit throughout the novel. Her repeated and continued
foolishness is one of the things that holds the plot together into a unified
whole.
The plot’s focus on
marriage is seen from the very beginning of the story. The arrival of Mr.
Bingley, ‘a single man of large fortune’ at near-by Netherfield immediately
fires the imagination of Mrs. Bennet. An acquaintance is struck and what
follows is a series of parties, balls, and teas, which are very essential to
the plot; it is at these social gatherings that the four main characters
-Bingley and Jane and Darcy and Elizabeth - are brought together. They also
serve to illustrate the culture, manners, fashions, pretensions, and snobberies
of the English gentry at the time.
