Study Questions for Pride and Prejudice
I hope you'll do two things while reading P&P:
- enjoy Austen's unparalleled prose (so precise, so expressive in every aspect, from its rich vocabulary to its impeccably calculated punctuation! --just imagine what grades you'd get if you could write like this...); and
- try to figure out how it fits together with the other books on the syllabus (since presumably the Core Curriculum folks weren't just kidding when they put it on). --Keep Montaigne, especially, in mind.
A good way to to approach the above is to remember to second-guess your first impressions (as the novel's original title, First Impressions, might have warned us to do). Is the novel really about what it seems to be about? Are the characters and situations to be taken at face value, or is there more going on than meets the eye? Apply this technique when answering each of the questions below.
(1) How does the (famous!) opening of the novel (the first sentence) prepare us for what follows? (Does it prepare or misprepare us, or both, and why?)
(2) Marriage, you'll notice, is about a
lot of things other than our post-Romantic notion of "true love," in this
novel. (Some would say it's still about those things, but we just don't
talk about it in the same terms these days.) Characterise the various
characters' concepts of marriage. What is revealed by them--about the
character, about the world of the novel, about you as Jane Austen's reader?
In particular,
(a) think about Charlotte Lucas's
relationship to marriage. What do we learn from and about her? What effect
does all this have on and for Elizabeth?
(b) compare Darcy's two proposals.
(c) compare the two proposals made
to Elizabeth, with particular heed to the discourses (types of language)
employed: emotive/subjective, economic, social, moral...
(3) Think about the functions of the "minor" characters: Wickham, Lady Catherine, the 3 younger Misses Bennett. What are they doing there? Why are they necessary? (In each case, what would be lacking if he/she were not in the novel?)
(4) Mr. and Mrs. Bennett: how'd you like 'em to be your parents? Which of the two is a better parent? (Keep track of textual evidence that supports your opinion.)
(5) Jane Austen is renowned for her use of irony. Verbal irony, allow me to remind you, is a form of speech in which one meaning is stated and a different, usually antithetical, meaning is intended. Austen's irony takes many forms, including over- and understatement, ironic foreshadowing, negative description ("X was not Y"), and various kinds of contradiction (between speaker and narrator, or speech and situation). Choose a narrative passage, a dialogue or a speech in which Austen uses irony and pick it apart, show how it works. What is Austen aiming at? Are you reacting the way she wants you to react?
(6) Keep close tabs on the way various forms of art--painting, music, writing--are portrayed and used in the novel. What (if anything) happens to the common 18th-c. dualities of Art vs. Nature, Reason vs. Feeling, etc?
(7) Track the role of writing--which is Austen's medium, after all. What is the power of the written word--for the writer and for the reader? Letter-writing looms large in the novel; why are the letters (and the process of writing them) important?
(8) Track, and reflect upon, the use of the word "character."
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