Literary Theory: Weekly Response 6

"The guiding presumption of this volume is that love between women is a topic of serious and abiding human significance -- bound up in as yet unfathomed ways with our deepest beliefs nature and culture, sexuality and desire, femininity and masculinity, women and men."

- Introduction and Excerpts from The Literature of Lesbianism, edited by Castle, page 1

"A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half-deserved."

- Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 8, Jane Austen

How does Jane Austen portray the relationship between men and women?

In Pride and Prejudice, Austen blatantly displays the relationship between men and women as one of vast inequality, which is not out of character for the time period the novel was written in. In Austen's story, women are seen as beings that were created for the purpose of being the ideal person to dote upon a man. Mrs. Bingley goes on a tangent about what the perfect woman should be and what she should do for the man she is involved with. Women, in this aspect, are not seen as the partner of a man, or the other half of a man, as many love stories would convey a relationship. Instead, they are cast as the servant of a man -- they are simply there to please.