Joe Wright’s Film Adaption of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The Romanticising of Marriage in Popular Culture

Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice was first published in 1813, exactly two hundred years ago, but it still appeals to readers and filmmakers alike. The novel portrays the Bennet family, with its five unmarried daughters, and their mother’s often desperate attempts to marry them off into financial safety, as the family estate is “entailed” to a distant male cousin. The main plot of the novel is Mr. Darcy’s and Elizabeth Bennet’s initial pride and prejudice turned into love, and the sub-plots of love and marriages that do not all fare well are numerous. In the novel Austen points out, that however uncertain of its capacity to ensure happiness, marriage was the best solution for young women without a fortune to escape poverty, as they had no other means of providing for themselves. The theme of the novel is marriage and the opening statement of Austen’s novel is its thesis, although a tongue-in-cheek one, advocating the universal idea that single rich men must be in need of a wife, and not the other way around. By addressing such gender issues, regardless of her humorous angle, Austen was certainly one of the earliest feminist writers. This idea of single men in want of marriage is true, for as contemporary studies have shown men stand to benefit much more from marrying than women. Joe Wright’s 2005 film adaptation, Pride & Prejudice, deliberately eliminates this opening sentence, and on the apparent grounds of reaching greater popularity Wright’s team modifies the novels story structure, setting and language to appeal to contemporary audiences. These intentional alterations, which leave out Austen’s irony and whit, flatten out the characters and their dialogues and create an overall “Cinderella” perspective of the main plot, to better fit the tale which the Hollywood film is meant to convey