While many of Jane Austen's novels subtly and comically criticize a woman's dependence upon marriage as a means of social standing and economic security, she nevertheless ends her novels with the heroine(s) getting married. Thus, it sometimes appears that she is yet complacent with her Tory society.
Another common criticism of Jane Austen is her acceptance of the class structure in her society; like the Bennet family of her novel Pride and Prejudice, she lived on the fringes of upper-class British society. But in this mentioned novel, Austen satirizes the patriarchal society in which she lived. For example, Austen sets her plot around the Bennet girls' urgency to find husbands because if their father were to die, the estate would go to their cousin, the superficial and irritating clergyman, Mr. Collins. But, when Mr. Collins proposes marriage to his cousin, Elizabeth Bennet, she refuses him despite her mother's pleas to be practical. Then, Collins turns around and marries her friend Charlotte, instead, proving his superficiality and hopes of inheriting the estate. Later, however, sisters of Elizabeth marry and she marries Mr. Darcy, a very wealthy gentleman. And, through the character of Mr. Darcy, Austen satirizes the supercilious wealthy gentleman even though she does have her heroine Elizabeth finally succumb to his better qualities and marry him.
Still, at the end of her novel, Jane Austen dramatizes this pragmatic desire of Elizabeth to find a husband that yet conflicts with her idealism and romanticism, implying that it may not be possible
to reconcile her independence and naturalness with Mr. Darcy's conservatism and conventionalty.
While critics complain that Austen has "Tory sympathies" and complacency with her society, Arthur Kettle dismisses Austen's complacency pointing to her affect upon subsequent authors:
....after Jane Austen, the great novels of the nineteenth century are all, in their different ways, novels of revolt. The task of the novelist was yhe same as it has always been--to achieve realism (with whatever innovations of form and structure their needs must discover) the truth about life as it faced them. But to do this, to cut through the sholw complex structure of inhumanity and false feeling that ate into the consciousness world; it was necessary to become a rebel...The great novelists were rebels and the measure of their greatness is found in the last analysis to correspond with the degree and the consistency of their rebellion. It was not always a conscious intellectualized rebellion...very seldom was it based on anything like a sociological analysis. It was, rather, a rebellion of the spirit, of the total consciousness, and it was only indirectly reflected in the lives the writers led.
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