Jane Austen's Portrayal of Marriage

Jane Austen is a well known and loved author. Some of her novels of romantic fiction have been turned into films and they have aroused intense emotional attachments among the readers and viewers. Her books have become the basis for the true love romance story since their appearance on the literary scene. Today, Jane Austen is as popular as ever and revered as much as any literary figure in history because of her realism and biting social commentary. Austen’s plots highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security, and moral issues. Marriage was crucial because it was the only accessible form of self-definition for girls on society. Some critics suggest that her novels are based on her own life, that the character of the protagonist is herself. She wrote some her novels in Bath a place in London were she lived. This can be proved in her novels Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.

Her two heroines lived in Bath some time and it marks a change in their lives. In Northanger Abbey she uses her brother’s name to name a character who is actually the brother of her protagonist in the book, Catherine Morland. Something very peculiar about her stories is that she focuses in the importance of marriage and how her protagonist always end the books with a happy marriage with their beloved man; even though she never got married. However, Jane Austen uses matrimony as more than a plot device. In fact, she had her own purpose and mission in her description of marriage.

In Northanger Abbey, when Henry dances with Catherine at the Pump-Room, his comparison of dancing to marriage reveals Henry’s intentions. Henry can see the dance as a symbol of something more than what it is physically “It is an engagement...

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...re than earned the happiness she finds in a good husband and financial security. Anne Elliot marries Capitan Wentworth as a well deserved triumph.

Austen showed her fiction view of ideal marriage throughout both stories. While Austen’s ideas that women should be equal to men in marriage may have been revolutionary, she was still very much rooted in the old ideas of class and knowing one’s place in the fiction of her novels. The perfect marriage Austen presents through these comparisons should be founded on equality and shared responsibility, but still must be between parents of an equal rank in society and be undertaken with blessings of both spouses’ families. Only that way could be a happily ever after.

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Persuasion. Ed. George Stade. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003. Print.

- Northanger Abbey. New York: The Modern Library, 1995. Print.