Pride and Prejudice, as the name implies, is about the lives of a family where pride and prejudice controls the outcome of everyone’s thoughts, actions, and relationships. Through the work of Austen there is a focus on the main character, Eliza, and her family issues and relationship with a seemingly prideful man, which all reflects to how society is today. One of the major issues that cause such a huge issue amount society today is the possession of money and the different social classes that are thus created. Because of the different social classes, there is an abundance of pride and prejudice among the rich and the poor. All this is seen in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Austen shows how pride and prejudice affects the relationship between the different social classes.
One of the major relationships between the different social classes is the relationship between Darcy and Elizabeth. When these two first met at a ball, Darcy was seen as an ignorant prideful man. This was due to his refusal to dance, saying that Elizabeth is “not handsome enough to tempt me. (Austen 8)” With this, Darcy insults Elizabeth and thus a hatred for him is developed in her. However, later on Darcy actually realizes that he loves her and tries to flirt with her plenty of times. But Elizabeth is prejudice against him and is too proud to try to get to know him and change her thoughts about him. Also all she listened to was the bad that people spoke about him. For example, when she first met Wickham, he told her how Darcy had pretty much betrayed him because of his pride (66-70). Throughout the book, the pride and prejudice of Elizabeth towards Darcy caused strife between them yet in a way, strengthened their relationship as time passed, she begin to learn the truth about him.
Another relationship that shows the effects of pride and prejudice on the relationship between different social classes is Miss Bingley and the Bennets. When she is first introduced, she seemed to be very nice to Jane, however, to Elizabeth, she was rather rude. Later on it is revealed that she ridicules the Bennet family due to the fact that they aren’t as wealthy as her family and Darcy. She reveals her true prideful nature when Elizabeth came to visit her sick sister Jane and was walking in the rain. She was commenting on her appearance when she came. She also went on saying that because Jane had such unusual parents and had “low connections,” there wasn’t much chance that she would be married to someone rich (29-30). Another thing that Miss Bingley does is mocking Darcy and Elizabeth and the love-hate relationship they have. She tries to steal away Darcy’s attention from Elizabeth because she thinks that she is better due to her wealth, yet it all backfires because Darcy just pays more attention to Elizabeth thus causing Miss Bingley to be more prejudice against Elizabeth. She thinks that just because she has wealth, she is allowed to speak freely about others and looks down on the Bennets although her brother and a family friend love two of the girls in that family.
With the different relationships between two different social classes, Austen is able to reveal to us that pride and prejudice play a huge role in how we treat, see, and react to each other. She also shows that it is not just the rich that show more pride and prejudice than the poorer people. Rather, both of them show pride and prejudice in their lives. Overall, man is born with pride and throughout life would be prejudice to something at some point of time. Depending on the situation, it could cause a lot of damage or cause very little. But either way, different social classes show pride and prejudice and are overall sinful in nature
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