【正文】 married to one of her daughters. And in the later days, she is incapable fatigue and enumerates kinds of advantages that her family will get if Jane and Mr. Bingley get married, such as wealth, status ranking, and could also throw her other daughters in the way to other rich men. All her thoughts for fetching her daughter wealthy and high status husband e just out of the considering of practicality, but not out of her daughters’ feelings. Under the moary view of marriage, Mrs. Ben totally treats her daughters’ marriage as product trades and her daughters are the modities. 英語 畢業(yè)論文 iii In Pride and Prejudice, Austen shows that because of women’s low status, they are desirable to change their status. So marriage bees a straight and quick way to change their situation. Though they know that such kind of marriage is equal to a trade and for themselves, they are only products in the marriage market or an attachment to a man or even a marriage’s slave, they do not care much. C. Other Aspects Connecting with Women’s Status The women in Austen’s age, lived in a patriarchal society, a world in which women were strictly limited, but men held all the advantages. And under such a society, women forfeited their personal personalities and own integrities. They could not entail their fathers’ estate, which was a quite iniquitous affair to the daughters in the Bens. Although they felt angry about it, “I do not think it is the hardest thing in the world that your estate should be entailed away from your own children and I am sure if I had been you, I should have tried long ago to do something or other about it” Mrs. Ben cried to her husband. But the fact is that they could do nothing to change unchangeable social rule. Young women of today have a variety of options open to them regarding their future. They can go to college。 they can have their careers and bee professional women and live on their own。 they can earn their status through hard work and their advantages. However, women in the end 18th and early 19th century English society had no these free choices. Their formal education and job were limited, and the society could not wele of a woman entering a profession, and their knowledge seemed no use to the society. If a woman was unmarried, no matter she was mature or not, she was not allowed to live alone and must live with her family, at least live with a suitable chaperone until her marriage or her spinsterhood to death. In Austen’s age, women’s actions were strictly limited and they could not enjoy their personal freedom Ⅱ Reasons for the Women’s Low Status at That Time A. Traditional Feudal Notions Observing the novel Pride and Prejudice from another aspect, we know that the theme of the novel does not only deal with love and marriage, but also includes the relationship of women, society, and women’s status. Jane Austen has shown the social fabric of society during her time and makes a ment on the status of women during that time. In Austen’s time, society treated women unfairly and women really enjoyed low status To know clearly what Jane Austen writes Pride and Prejudice for, we should firstly have a clear mind of the social background and know, under the traditional feudal notion how the society treated the women in the 18th and 19th century country society in Britain In the novel, Austen presents the gender injustices in the 19th century English society, and how the important role that money played in determining a woman’s daily life, marriage and destiny. Economically dependent, women were robbed of property and inheritance rights and possessed no independent source of ine. The entailment of the Longbourn estate is an extreme hardship on the Ben family, and is quite obviously unjust. No right to entail their father’s estate leaves the Ben daughters in a poor financial situation which both requires them to be married and makes it more difficult to marry well. Having no social status, and in order to improve their social status, women have to give up their personal dignity and ego at the expense of their love and marriage, and they are willing to get married just for financial security and enhancement of social status. Under these values of money and social status, women they can’t enjoy a happy marriage and their freedom. And they are deprived of the right to receive education and take part in 英語 畢業(yè)論文 ivsocial activities. Because there are no needs for higher education for them, and even if there is necessity to receive a higher education, it is just for selfenhancement or for pleasing their husbands. At that time, society offered few opportunities to women to choose for their lives and to decide the destiny. Just as the opening sentence of the novel says “it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” which tells the reader that men were always in the dominant status in a marriage and the heritance of property. Thus men enjoy the right to choose their wives according to their will. Through Pride and Prejudice, Austen portrays the monly held views on the characters’ marriage. Society, at that time, put a significant value on property and social status, and women in such a society, with their privileges tightly limited, had no chance to develop their personalities and their characters were fettered by the society. There were no centrally anized systems of state—supported schools, and some local grammar schools did exist but did not admit girls. So women’s education became impossible, and they didn’t have careers, but society required little for their use of knowledge and gave little chance for them to use knowledge. They were denied the possibility of improving their status or gaining