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“Irony is central to the meaning and effects of Pride and Prejudice"
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“Irony is central to the meaning and effects of Pride and Prejudice.” Howfar and in what ways do you find this to be the case?
Jane Austen initially worried that Pride and Prejudice was a work ‘rather too light, and bright,
and aprakling’ to justify its moral themes- yet it is for its dazzling ironic wit that the novel is
prized today. The multi-faceted device of irony is deftly manipulated by Austen: first the
mischievous narrator, who finds ‘great enjoyment in occasionally professing opinions which, in
fact are not [her] own,’ then the ‘explorer of incongruities’ (Mudrick) exposing the absurdities of
character, and finally the moralist, revealing complex principles and themes.
The most immediately apparent form of irony in Pride and Prejudice is its verbal irony, which is
used by both the narrator and a few characters to highlight the absurdities of other characters to
comic effect, ‘for what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our
turn?’ Nowhere is this more enjoyable than in the double act of the Bennet marriage, in which
Mr Bennet amuses himself with ironic statements whose true meanings are intended to elude
the ‘mean understanding’ of his wife: ‘if your daughter… should die, it is a comfort to know it
was all in pursuit of Mr Bingley, and under your orders.’ Typically Mrs Bennet’s reply to this
barbed criticism is oblivious to its irony - ‘Oh! I’m not afraid of her dying’ - revealing her own
idiocy and perverse priorities. The Bennet marriage offers many such comic exchanges, such
as the opening dialogue in which Mrs Bennet’s increasingly impatient enquiries are met with her
husband’s muted responses ‘Mr Bennet replied that he had not’ and ‘Mr Bennet made no
answer’, until he finally resigns himself to hearing her, which the narrator wryly states ‘was
invitation enough’. This perfect opposition of understatement and hyperbole highlights the
effusion of Mrs Bennet's character and clearly sides the narrator with Mr Bennet, as Austen
values moderation and reason above sentimentality and excess. However, Mr Bennet does not
go without narrative criticism, for the lack of communication inherent in his marriage that is
revealed by passages such as these has an irony of its own: in the very first chapter of a novel
based on marriage we see a dysfunctional marriage in which the ;continual breach of conjugal
obligation and decorum, which, in exposing his wife to contempt of her own children, was so
highly reprehensible’.
Another proponent of verbal irony is our heroine, who has evidently inherited it from, yet yields it
less cruelly than, her father. She, who is much like Austen herself ‘delights in anything
ridiculous’, makes gentle fun of Darcy through mild sarcasm: ‘I am perfectly convinced…that Mr
Darcy has no defect. He owns it himself without disguise.’ Her subtle mockery of flawed
characters, such as the sententious and hypercritical Mr Collins, is often in conjunction with that
of the narrator or Mr Bennet, and so the comic irony is augmented by the enjoyment of a private
joke in which the reader is included: ‘his cousin was absurd as he had hoped… and except in
the occasional glance at Elizabeth, required no partner in his pleasure.’ For Austen, to
demonstrate wit, or at least to grasp its subtleties, is a mark of intelligence and perception, and
those who fall prey to it are undermined:exposed as deficient in understanding. This is
exemplified in an exchange in which Miss Bingley accuses Elizabeth of being ‘one of those
ladies who seeks to recommend themselves to the opposite sex, by undervaluing their own’, yet
it is ironically at that very moment doing so herself, for the remark was ‘chiefly addressed’ to
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