Marriage, Financial Security, and the Transmission of Property in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a literary classic. In it, the bookish protagonist Elizabeth Bennet fights her feelings for the wealthy and cold Mr. Darcy. Elizabeth comes from a family with dwindling wealth, limited status in their country community, and an estate in shambles without an heir; by stark comparison, Mr. Darcy represents the most upper echelons of English society, boasting wealth and status beyond the imagination of the Bennets and their neighbors. Austen’s cast of characters and carefully built romantic tension have been recycled and reimagined many times across our cultural landscape. However, the tempestuous romance is contextualized by status, property ownership, and financial security, which together remind the reader that in Austen’s late 18th-century world, marriage primarily operated as a business arrangement. The love between Elizabeth and Darcy thinly veils the true function that the institution of marriage served at the time: the transmission of property.
Against this backdrop of class tension exemplified by Elizabeth and Darcy’s different wealth and statuses, Pride and Prejudice features various “villains,” such as Mr. Wickham, Ms. Bingley, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Of all the loathsome forces separating Elizabeth and Darcy, the most frustratingly unlikeable is Elizabeth’s own mother, Mrs. Bennet. Throughout the story, Mrs. Bennet is characterized as frivolous, scheming, overdramatic, vain, crass, and simple-minded. Her singular purpose is to marry off her five children (all daughters) to men with financial means. Thus, throughout the novel, Mrs. Bennet becomes a caricature of senseless vanity and shameless rapacity that reproduce sexist and classist stereotypes. But perhaps she has been misunderstood.
Mrs. Bennet’s Nerves
“‘A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a-year. What a fine thing for our girls!’ [Says Mrs. Bennet] ‘How so? how can it affect them? [replies Mr. Bennet]” (2).
Without any sons, the decaying Bennet family estate, Longbourn, will not pass to any of the five daughters, leaving all of them without housing or an income when the aging Mr. Bennet dies. Instead, property transmission only occurs from father to son through inheritance. Women have no legal claim to property but through either their living father or a husband. Keeping this in mind, it makes sense that Mrs. Bennet becomes obsessed with marrying off her daughters to safeguard their financial security.
In her first appearance, Mrs. Bennet overdramatically begs a patronizing Mr. Bennet to make an introduction to a new bachelor in town. Mr. Bennet threatens not to do so, meaning their daughters may lose the chance to socialize with the bachelor. “‘Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion on my poor nerves’” (3). Readers laugh along with Mr. Bennet as he makes fun of her infamous “nerves.” We are clearly meant to think dismissively of Mrs. Bennet’s obsession with marrying her daughters off. In the exchange, Mr. Bennet’s coolheaded condescension seems more defensible than Mrs. Bennet’s obvious desperation to secure her daughters’ financial futures. Indeed, her desire to find wealthy partners for her daughters is portrayed as nothing more than uncouth money-grubbing, the punchline of a joke.
But Mrs. Bennet’s unfavorable portrayal distracts from a deeper villainy, an even greater threat to their daughters’ future than her obsession: Mr. Bennet’s apathy. In this opening exchange, Mr. Bennet seemingly dismisses the need to give attention to his daughter’s financial futures and thoroughly refuses to take his wife’s concern seriously. Here too, the reader is introduced to “Mrs. Bennet’s nerves,” almost an entirely different character. Mrs. Bennet’s nerves are referenced as a frustrating, yet laughable, consideration in the Bennet house. Mrs. Bennet’s nerves are therefore a stand-in for all the uncontainable and lamentable excesses of a woman’s range of emotion, critique, and opinion. It is clear that Mrs. Bennet views a new bachelor in town as a chance for at least one of her daughters, and thus also potentially the rest of them, to be saved from a future of struggle and poverty. The greater question becomes: Why doesn’t Mr. Bennet share his wife’s fervor for securing financial stability for his children?
Class as a Foil to Romance
Mrs. Bennet’s supposed corruption is most obvious in a dramatic scene when Darcy proposes to Elizabeth. At this precipice of finally securing financial stability for herself and her sisters, Elizabeth is ironically foiled by her mother’s own dedication to marry her off. Mr. Darcy surprises Elizabeth with a proposal wherein he divulges that his love for her goes against all his better judgment, namely his estimation of her family as “class-climbing” due to Mrs. Bennet’s public quest to marry her daughters off to rich men. Thus, Darcy reveals his deep-seated bias against Elizabeth’s class, which has caused him to believe that their marriage would be mostly useless to him.
As Elizabeth rebuffs Darcy’s proposal, he becomes upset. Just moments after proclaiming his love for her, he says, “Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections?—to congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?” He goes on to mention Mrs. Bennet pointedly, blaming her thinly-veiled mission to marry her daughters for wealth -- as if there were any other purpose to marriage. Here, readers are induced to follow Darcy’s lead, attributing fault to Mrs. Bennet and transforming her from a petty nuisance to an outright offender.
Yet, in explaining the irrationality of his proposal given Elizabeth’s class background, Darcy confesses the true purpose of marriage: a mutually-beneficial business arrangement that allows the transmission of property. Embedded in Darcy’s logic is the admission that without financial incentive, there is no societal reasoning for him to marry Elizabeth. The reason to recuperate Mrs. Bennet’s character is precisely because she is one of the few characters to openly recognize the institution of marriage for what it is and to advocate for her daughters’ wellbeing by playing by its rules. If her daughters can only remain housed and fed through wealthy marriages, then she will stop at nothing to marry them off. That Mrs. Bennet does this so openly and pursues this mission in a dress and with a shrill voice is all it takes to make her a threat to Elizabeth and Darcy’s attachment.
Austen’s writing is a product of the political landscape of the time, informed by the unique contours of late 18th-century patriarchy, class dynamics, and cultural capital. These social and structural forces colluded to disempower those without property, and legally excluded women from the possibility entirely. In this way, while Pride and Prejudice (and all of Austen’s writing for that matter) ostensibly revolve around romance, the stories are really providing a narrative to the anxieties of effective property transmission. Perhaps Austen’s focus on love was a convenient way to critique the institution of marriage, one of the few legal pathways for women to change their economic circumstances at the time.
Whatever Austen’s intentions, reading Pride and Prejudice through a lens towards class and gender reveals a new way to understand the character of Mrs. Bennet. This time, she reads not as a loathsome embarrassment but instead as a figure deeply interested in navigating the reality of the social landscape around her in order to care for her children's futures. Frankly, hating Mrs. Bennet is unoriginal. She is an 18th-century example of the “white trash” archetype colliding with equally dangerous stereotypes about “gold diggers” and other unacceptable women. However, Mrs. Bennet has been right all along about the need for her daughters to marry. She is their unwavering advocate deeply consumed by whether they will have a house to live in, food to eat, clothes to wear, and more. She seems to me like a financial planner, an involved parent, and a bold woman who could care less about societal norms in her quest to raise her daughters in a patriarchal world.
