Marriage and marriageability
in the novels of Jane Austen





Seminar
paper
for
the
module

Jane
Austen
in
summer
term
2010


















submitted
by




Alexander
Axmann











Hamburg,

September
1,
2010

Contents



page
1 Introduction 2
2 Marriage and the social backgrounds 2
3 Companionate and arranged marriage 5
4 From acquaintance to courtship to marriage 7
5 Marriageability and the good match 8
5.1 Accomplishments 9
6 Conclusion 10





































 1


 




Marriage is generally the origin of the elementary community of

which larger communities ... and ultimately the nation are
constituted and on the conjugal state of the population, its
existence, increase and diffusion, as well as manners, character,
happiness and freedom ultimately depend...
Registrar General, Introduction to the Census, 1851

1
 Introduction



Marriage played a major role not only in Jane Austen’s famous novels, but in
the lives of many young people along history. The focus in this work lies on
the relationships, courtship customs and marriages of the members of the
upper middle and the upper classes in England in the Regency period. Taking
Austen’s works as a starting point with a special regard to Pride and Prejudice,
I will outline the real existing ideas and circumstances regarding marriage
and associate them with her novels. The topics are all derived from the major
theme of the work, Marriage and marriageability and a major focus lies on the
development of companionate marriage. Austen often contrasts this scheme
to the (at her time still existing) arranged marriage, creating frictions between
the involved (upper) middle classes and the higher or aristocratic classes.

2
 Marriage
and
the
social
backgrounds


Because Jane Austen’s novels are novels of courtship with female heroines,
they hardly ever focus on men’s professions, except for short references.
Those men, who, in the end, usually get married to the novels’ heroines, like
Mr. Tilney in Northanger Abbey1 (NA) or Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice2 (PP),


























































1
Jane Austen and Marilyn Butler. Northanger Abbey (Penguin Classics. London ; New
York: Penguin Books, 2003)


 2


are sufficiently rich to afford living on the interest of their own or their
parents’ fortune, which they are going to inherit once their father dies.
Women never pursued any serious profession. This picture of the upper
middle and upper classes has its origin in economic developments around the
17th century where a “rapid increase of wealth permitted the wives of
prosperous men to withdraw from productive activity”.3 Before that, women
often participated in their husbands businesses and female individuals
working for their livings were nothing uncommon. However, with the
succeeding separation of home and workplace, “the wife … lost the informal
opportunity to learn [her husbands] skills.”(ib) Lawrence Stone states that
“wives of the middle and upper ranks of society increasingly became idle
drones … and passed their time in such occupations as novel-reading,
theatre-going, card playing and formal visits”.4 The same applied to middle
and upper class daughters and unmarried women were therefore “deprived
of any independent social and economic function”(ib:381). The prospect of
becoming a spinster or ‘old maid’, living “under the shelter of some
contracted lodging in a country town, attended by a single female servant,
and with difficulty living on the interest of two or three thousand pounds”, as
William Hayley described it in his Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Essay on
Old Maids from 1785, was not desirable for any of them. An unmarried
woman was dependent on the family and often lived in her parents’
households. Jane Austen herself lived upon the support of her brothers until
she died, earning only 100 pounds-a-year with her novel writing in the last
years, not enough to live on.5
To parents, the importance to settle their daughters was clear, and
though mutual affection became an acknowledged basis for marriage, an
arrangement of this kind without prospect of a fortune at least on one side
wasn’t practicable: “The perfect genteel alliance was both prudent and
affectionate.”(Vickery, 1998:81) In Northanger Abbey, Isabella Tilney makes the
deferral of James Morland’s inheriting 400 pounds an excuse to not marrying

























































2
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. (London: Penguin, 1994)
3
Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter : Women's Lives in Georgian England.
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 2.
4
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), 396.
5
[N.N.] “Marriage and the Alternatives: The Status of Women”
<http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/pptopic2.html#protofem3> (20.08.2010)


 3


him as well as Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland wait for 8 months until
they finally receive the financial legitimation for their marriage. The reality
looked similar; Elizabeth Kennedy advised her daughter in 1801 to take care
when it comes to partner choice: “when poverty comes at the door, love flies
out of the window.”(Vickery, 1998:40)
Female education in boarding schools or at home, which was more
common in wealthier families, was almost exclusively employed to improve
the prospects of marriage. An emphasize was laid on “fashionable education”
like “training in social graces which it was thought would enable women both
to attract husbands and to occupy their leisure hours once they were
married.”(Stone,1977:347) Different reasons lead to a “shortage of suitable
males” in the 18th century and the number of never-married women rose to
about 25% in that period (ib:380). Understandably, finding a marriageable
partner was a most important issue for a young girl. In this we can detect the
motivation why Austen’s courtship stories are mostly written from the
perspective of a heroine living under circumstances where strong evidence of
a want of suitable men is given. We have the impression in the first chapter of
Pride and Prejudice where no sign of ease is visible in Mrs. Bennet’s first
attempts to arrange a marriage for one of her five daughters. Impatiently, she
delivers recent news to her husband that „a single man of large fortune“, who
is about to move into the neighbourhood, would be a „fine thing for our
girls“(PP:5). The selection of men within her range must be a bad one and
Mrs. Bennet, „assumes the attitude of a customer in a ill-stocked market“.6
In Pride and Prejudice it says “[marriage] was the only provision for
well-educated young women of small fortune”(PP:98) and in certain
characters, the reality of the prevailing circumstances in Austen’s time can be
observed. Apart from the rather unrealistic love stories between Jane and
Bingley or Elizabeth and Darcy, Charlotte, though she thinks her suitor to be
“neither sensible nor agreeable”(98), accepts Mr. Collins proposal of marriage.
She sees it as the “pleasantest preservation from want”, “however uncertain
of giving happiness.”(99)


























































6
Katherine Sobba Green, The Courtship Novel, 1740-1820 : A Feminized Genre.
(Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 154.


 4


3
 Companionate
and
arranged
marriage


The relationships between the heroine and her spouse are always, or at least
to some greater degree, based on affection, not on familial interests. This is
self-evident when we take a look at the concept of Austen’s stories. Green
(1991) lists them in the category of courtship novels and courtship has
something to do with unfolding affection between two partners before
marriage, something that in an arranged marriage might happen after it. The
idea and problematic nature of arranged marriage can therefore only play a
minor part in the plot, though it never goes out of sight; relationships based
on affection are often contrasted with attempts of arranging those. In Pride and
Prejudice, the naturally developing romance between Elizabeth and Darcy
goes against Catherine de Burgh’s attempts to marry Darcy to another woman
and in Northanger Abbey, patriarchy appears in form of General Tinley’s
attempts to press his son into something that serves familial interests to a
greater degree than his romantic love to Catherine Morland. However,
parental marriage arrangements without the children’s consent have long
been dying out at the time Jane Austen wrote her novels and love was seen as
a vital part in order to “hold a marriage together”(Stone, 1977:271).
The concept of companionate marriage developed with the beginning
of the 18th century. It chiefly bases upon the doubt about the idea that
“affection could and would naturally develop after marriage” which
appeared in the early 17th century. The belief spread that “decision-making
power had to be transferred to the future spouses themselves” (Stone,
1977:325) in order to create successful marriages and marriageable women as
well as men gained a new freedom not only to reject a suggested match, but
to make a choice by themselves, “on the understanding that it will be made
from a family of more or less equal financial and status position, with the
parents retaining the right of veto.”(ib:271)
Arranged marriages were primarily contrived to serve familial
interests and most of the time remained confined to one social class, whereas
companionate marriages could cross “class, status or economic lines”(Green,
1991:2). Marriages with members of the upper class involved did, in most of


 5


the cases, not mingle with lower classes. Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who
belongs to the upper class and wants to bestow her fortune within her family,
makes an effort to forestall the class-crossing marriage of her nephew. She
confronts Elizabeth in chapter 56 and implores her not to accept Darcy’s
proposal of marriage. Lady Catherine, unlike members of the middle classes,
had to take care of a greater fortune and a special social status, which applied
to all members of aristocracy: The confrontation between her and Elizabeth is
not a clash of different views on companionate marriage, since both
acknowledge the importance of affection in a relationship, but Lady
Catherine’s great possessions give rise to fear of loss. Robin Jarvis writes that
“whenever and wherever parents have controlled resources vital to their
children’s future standard of living, they had been able to influence strongly
their children’s choice of spouses”.7 Therefore, as Lawrence Stone states, the
power of decision-making was yet, in Austen’s time, more likely “to be
exercised by parents” instead of children among “well-born” families (Stone,
1977:271). Additionally, Jarvis writes that decision-making power in marriage
choice was being transferred from parents to children with a pace
considerably varying not only between social classes, but also between
different families (2004:90). Her struggles and the reason why Lady Catherine
cannot forestall the marriage of her nephew with a middle-class woman are
founded in Darcy’s modernist moral, which opposes to her conservative
behaviour normally implemented by aristocracy. Being the master of his own
remarkable fortune, Darcy decides to disregard a possible loss in rank or
wealth in a marriage with Elizabeth, which renders him quite a progressive
character, advocating marriage conceptions not too different from our present
ideas. It must, however, be acknowledged that Darcy feared a loss of rank
and fortune for his friend Bingley so much, that he argued him out of the idea
of marrying Jane Bennett. Not until Elizabeth makes him realize his poor
beliefs right after his first proposal, he begins to reflect and, eventually,
revised his notions about class-consciousness.


























































7
Robin Jarvis, The Romantic Period : The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English
Literature, 1789-1830. (1st ed, Longman Literature in English Series. Harlow, England;
New York: Pearson/Longman, 2004), 90.


 6


4
 From
acquaintance
to
courtship
to
marriage


Pride and Prejudice begins with Mrs. Bennet’s begging her husband that he
would “visit him [Mr. Bingley] as soon as he comes”(p.5). In fact, the
husband had to pay a formal visit to form a new acquaintance so that he
could introduce the rest of his family afterwards. Among the upper middle
and the upper classes, common opportunities for marriageable women and
bachelors to form acquaintances were public balls. However, if they had no
relative or friend who knew the other person, they had to seek for the Master
of Ceremonies, “whose responsibility was to know the background of the
young men and women present, and then introduce them so they could
dance, as it was improper for men and women of the day to introduce
themselves.”8 In the film version of Northanger Abbey from 2007, Mr. Tilney
arranges a formal introduction at a ball even after he got to know Catherine
and Mrs. Allen by himself. The etiquette of dancing included different
standards of conduct, it was for instance “improper for a woman to dance
more than two dances with the same partner, and if two people did dance
more than two dances together, they were assumed engaged”(ib). This might
be the reason why Jane Bennet “did not expect such a compliment”(PP:13) as
Mr. Bingley’s asking her to dance a second time at the Meryton assembly and
perhaps the reason why he did not ask another time. Country-dances, which
were often performed, acted as an emblem of marriage. Dancing cards where
people could sign if they wished to dance with someone were common and as
well very strict were the rules for the dance itself. In the film adaption
mentioned above, a classic line dance is performed with men and women
standing at a couple of meters distance towards each other, every couple in
the room making the same movements. In these dancing patterns, the
structure of society as well as of marriage can be observed: people hardly
touching each other, everybody sticking to the strict rules in the same
manner.
In times where the power of partner choice was in the hands of the
children, as it more and more tended to be in the course of the 18th century,


























































8
Sandra Cause. 15.10.2008. “Formal Balls in Jane Austen and Regency England.”
<
http://victorian-fiction.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_ball_in_jane_austen>
(20.08.2010)


 7


the protagonists, if we believe the events in Austen’s novels to resemble
reality in those days, at first chose their partner on the basis of physical
attractiveness. Evidence is given in Pride and Prejudice when Mr. Darcy rejects
Elizabeth with the reason that she wouldn’t be “handsome enough to tempt
me”(p.11) and when Elizabeth reasons that Mr. Bingley “could not help
seeing that you [Jane] were about five times as pretty as every other woman
in the room.”(p.13) Men decided about whether to dance with a woman at an
assembly on what they saw, which should be nothing new to the modern
reader. After the visual came conversation, and this was one of the
accomplishments to be learned by women to whom it was of essential
importance to captivate potential future spouses. “Polite conversation” took a
major position in the curriculae of boarding schools for women, subsumed
under so-called “curious work”(Stone, 1977: 349f). While dancing, people
usually conversed. In her first dance with Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth mocks the
custom of dancing partners to have a conversation, which must necessarily be
restricted to shallow subjects such as “the size of the room, or the number of
couples”(PP:74). Nevertheless, she can’t help having a conversation because
for her “it would look odd to be entirely silent for half an hour together”(ib).

5
 Marriageability
and
the
good
match



A good match in the classic sense was when a man or a woman had the luck
of marrying a person of a much larger fortune or higher rank. This often
happens in Jane Austen’s novels; most of her heroines are too
underprivileged in fortune and status to expect a match as advantageous as
they usually are. Green mentions an example from Mansfield Park where Lady
Bertram made a match which by far exceeded the expectations raised by her
„Blazon“, a collection of attributes which account for a person’s worth on the
marriage market.(1991:72) “About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of
Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to
captivate Sir Thomas Betram, of Mansfield Park”(ib:153).
In that case, marriageability is reduced to rank and fortune, but it can contain
much more: The marriage between Elizabeth and Darcy does not base on
either; their love for each other develops on categories of character. The
valuing of individual properties of a person is also an argument pointing


 8


towards a companionate, affection-based relationship. We can find the issue
in a number of situations in Pride and Prejudice: Elizabeth refuses Darcy’s
first proposal which shows her disregard for fortune and rank, whilst the
proposal in Darcy makes obvious a very high regard for Elizabeth’s personal
attributes, her character.

5.1
Accomplishments

On numerous occasions in Pride and Prejudice there is talk of a young
woman’s accomplishments. In chapter 8, Mr. Bingley, Mr. Darcy and others
discuss their merit and Mr. Darcy, though his real beliefs may be
overshadowed by his pride9, affirms that a woman must, among other things,
possess “thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing and the modern
languages” and an “improvement of her mind by extensive reading.”(PP:33)
Women were not expected to work at these times and they who did
were at risk of losing their reputation. Jane Austen wrote in a letter from April
30, 1811 about a governess hired by her brother Edward: "By this time I
suppose she is hard at it, governing away – poor creature! I pity her, tho' they
are my neices."10 Her opinion adds to the picture of a woman who occupies
herself with numerous activities and possesses a number of exceptional, but
merely decorative skills, which was just what was expected of a woman.
Passivity and a passion for the domestic sphere where she was supposed to
manage the household and offer her husband consolation from the, to borrow
Robin Jarvis’ words, “rough-and-tumble of the working environment in
which she has no place”(2004:92) fall into the same category.
The need for accomplishments ,many of them were learned in
boarding schools or taught at home, was directly sparked off by the change of
importance among motives of marriage11. Lawrence Stone formulates in easy

























































9
Mr. Darcy’s pride, though evident in his speech at the Meryton Ball in chapter 3,
cannot doubtlessly be distinguished in chapter 8 where the party resides at
Netherfield. Assuming a slowly developing affection for Elizabeth, his retentive
behaviour could be interpreted as a resentment towards Miss Bindley’s sardonic
behaviour towards Elizabeth
10
Jane Austen and Deirdre Le Faye. Jane Austen's Letters. (3rd ed. Oxford ; New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 186.
11
In times of arranged marriages, accomplishments were less important as the
children were merely granted “a right of veto, to be exercised on the basis of [only!]
one or two formal interviews” (Stone, 1977:270) over the match nominated by their
parents.


 9


words that there was a shift “from giving priority to economic and social
considerations to giving equal or more weight to solidly based and well-tried
mutual affection.”(ib:273) The “well-tried mutual affection” doubtlessly
needed to be based upon a longer period in which man and woman could get
to know each other and “the fullest possible knowledge of the moral,
intellectual and psychological qualities of the prospective spouse”(ib:271). It
was therefore essential to attract the other person and accomplishments like
conversation skills and a good education could help with it.

6
 Conclusion


The mentioned notions and habits of marriage and courtship might sound a
little bit odd in the ears of the twenty-first-century reader. The rules were
stricter and marriage was considered more important. No one could rely on a
social security benefit in these times, the mortality rate was higher and
religion, though in England not catholic, influenced men and women. The
chapters on the development of companionate marriage probably help us
understanding that our modern conceptions about marriage were not god-
given but had to pass through years of maturation. I hope this gives rise to
some thinking about our modern ideas of love; maybe not everything is better
today and couldn’t it be possible that we think too laxly about marriage,
something which’ preparation and careful completion was one of the most
serious things in past people’s lives?


 

10

Literature


Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. London: Penguin, 1994.

Austen, Jane, and Rosalind Ballaster. Sense and Sensibility, Penguin Classics.
London ; New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
Austen, Jane, and Marilyn Butler. Northanger Abbey, Penguin Classics. London ;
New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
Austen, Jane, and Deirdre Le Faye. Jane Austen's Letters. 3rd ed. Oxford ; New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes : Men and Women of the
English Middle Class, 1780-1850, Women in Culture and Society. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Green, Katherine Sobba. The Courtship Novel, 1740-1820 : A Feminized Genre.
Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1991.
Jarvis, Robin. The Romantic Period : The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English
Literature, 1789-1830. 1st ed, Longman Literature in English Series. Harlow,
England ; New York: Pearson/Longman, 2004.
Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977.
Vickery, Amanda. The Gentleman's Daughter : Women's Lives in Georgian England.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998.


 

11