4.Major themes
Many critics take the title as the start when analysing the themes of Pride and Prejudice but Robert Fox cautions against reading too much into the title (which was first entitled: First Impressions), because commercial factors may have played a role in its selection. “After the success of Sense and Sensibility, nothing would have seemed more natural than to bring out another novel of the same author using again the formula of antithesis and alliteration for the title. The qualities of the title are not exclusively assigned to one or the other of the protagonists; both Elizabeth and Darcy display pride and prejudice.” The phrase “pride and prejudice” had been used over the preceding two centuries by Joseph Hall, Jeremy Taylor, Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson. Austen probably took her title from a passage in Fanny Burney’s Cecilia (1782), a popular novel she is known to have admired:
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‘The whole of this unfortunate business, said Dr Lyster, has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE. […] if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination.'(capitalisation as in the original)
A theme in much of Austen’s work is the importance of environment and upbringing in developing young people’s character and morality. Social standing and wealth are not necessarily advantages in her world and a further theme common to Austen’s work is ineffectual parents. In Pride and Prejudice, the failure of Mr and Mrs Bennet as parents is blamed for Lydia’s lack of moral judgment. Darcy has been taught to be principled and scrupulously honourable but he is also proud and overbearing. Kitty, rescued from Lydia’s bad influence and spending more time with her older sisters after they marry, is said to improve greatly in their superior society. The American novelist Anna Quindlen observed in an introduction to an edition of Austen’s novel in 1995:
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Pride and Prejudice is also about that thing that all great novels consider, the search for self. And it is the first great novel that teaches us this search is as surely undertaken in the drawing room making small talk as in the pursuit of a great white whale or the public punishment of adultery.