Monday, March 19, 2012

Pride and Prejudice is evidently a book about penis envy, according to Susan Fraiman.

Although primarily a book about the relationship between men and women, Pride and Prejudice is also about relationships among men. In the essay The Humiliation of Elizabeth Bennet, Susan Fraiman proposes that the book's various marriages represent the age-old use of women as a form of currency between men to solidify alliances and exchange power. Specifically, the relationship between Mr. Bennet and Mr. Darcy is an example of male diplomatic maneuvering and politicking using women as the tokens of exchange.
Futhermore, the Darcy/Bennett interactions are in a sense homoerotic, as Mr. Bennet is giving an element of his own flesh to Mr. Darcy in the form of his daughter. The close bond between Mr. Bennet and Elizabeth is nearer to a father/son relationship than father/daughter, as they share a witty insight onto the world and a bookish love of learning. The symbolic extraction of Elizabeth from the intellectual world to the world of marriage is accomplished when Darcy interrupts Elizabeth's letter-reading with a proposal, a private softening of prejudices that is a prelude to the later public rejection of Elizabeth's worldview.
The fundamental conflict of the book, that of pride, prejudice, vanity, and submission, can be ultimately traced to the struggle between men and women in the male-dominated English society of the early 1800s. Women turn to vanity because they cannot afford to be proud, a state of being reserved for men of high status, and to prejudice in response to the social competitiveness instituted by men and promoted by their own interactions.
On the whole, Pride and Prejudice is a book about various kinds of joinings, both in marriage and in social standing, among both men and women. The sequence of events that leads to the union of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth results in the strengthening of connections between Darcy and Mr. Bennet, Mr. Gardiner, and others.