I find it hard to settle on what Austen is up to in PP. On the one hand, Charlotte's decision puts one end of the marriage spectrum in stark perspective; and it's not a pretty sight. One could argue that Charlotte's story serves as a contrast to Elizabeth's, who is willing to compromise nothing in relation to Mr. Darcy. On the other hand, Austen reveals that one of Elizabeth's passing thoughts is that "It would be something to be mistress of Pemberley." And it is in consequence of her visit to Pemberley that her mood toward Mr. Darcy seems to shift.
Austen winds up writing a lot of novels about people who want to have their cake and eat it too. An eternal theme of bourgeois entitlement. The plots always revolve around marriage - but the successful marriage in Austen always comes to stand for a QED about how the gentry actually deserve to have their money AND their happiness because they have scrupules and actual values that they strive to live up to. They get their goodies because they are virtuous. This would be very tiresome were it not for the fact that Austen also includes characters like Charlotte Lucas who, depending on the way you read things, either serve to make the main characters look better or worse.
The way I read Austen, there seems to be real anger about the fact that women must marry in order to have decent lives and real rage about their enforced dependency. Austen never married and did actually make a living as a writer. In addition, I find it hard to imagine that a writer who writes a cinderella story (Mansfield Park) about a heroine named "Fanny Price" is not sticking tongue in cheek ... hard to say how much of this is conscious.
Joanna
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