Constructing Mr. Darcy : tradition, gender, and silent spaces in Jane Austen's Pride and prejudice.

Abstract

The reality of Jane Austen's characters in Pride and Prejudice is socially constructed; their goals and actions become a typification of society's institutions and conventions. Examining Austen's pivotal characters, with a particular focus on Fitzwilliam Darcy, reveals that each is a product of a socio-cultural determinism as they reflect social institutions and represent cultural conventions. Gender categorizes social interactions in everyday life. As individuals act out gendered prescripts and expectations, they create gendered systems of dominance and power. These learned patterns of gender norms and roles are carried out in everyday life with "masculine" and "feminine" perpetuated as divergent and oppositional. Austen's Mr. Darcy is the product of the social construction of gender. Darcy's actions and self-representation reflect a historicity and ideology that is founded on gendered power relations. His is the ideology of patriarchy which guarantees the hegemonic position of men and the oppression of women. Language establishes and maintains the connection between personal identity and gender identity that produces the problem of masculine/feminine duality. In an effort to recast the prevailing masculine rhetorical structures that have defined language and society, Austen creates, in Pride and Prejudice, a model of feminine writing that deconstructs the repressive structures of thinking that invent gender inequality. Jane Austen offers us a new manner of masculinity in the "transformation" of Fitzwilliam Darcy and a feminist's recasting of relations between genders.