Pride and Prejudice (1813)

The opening chapter of Austen’s novel, as with several of her others, establishes the story that will unfold over the hundreds of pages that follow. Aside from the opening 16 lines, and the closing paragraph, the approximately 85-line chapter is composed almost entirely of untagged dialogue, with only two reporting clauses: ‘replied his wife’ (l.30), and then later ‘replied he’. In other words, with few exceptions the characters speak directly to the reader throughout. As there is so little description (we know almost nothing about this couple with regard to their physical appearance or surroundings), the chapter is perhaps most concerned with the revelation of character: by its close the reader has a firm grasp of Mr and Mrs Bennet’s personalities and of their relationship. Austen does this not through diegesis, allowing the narrator to explain to the reader, but through mimesis, the direct speech of the characters. Which is to say, the reader is shown the characters and their dialogue, not told about them. Austen’s technique is essentially realist: like Defoe she aims to offer up a mirror to the world, but hers is a markedly different world from that of Robinson Crusoe. Pride and Prejudice features characters, language, and a spatial and temporal setting familiar to its bourgeois readers. As with most other realist novels, the time is the contemporary, the place ordinary, the people from the middle classes, the ideology secular, the language everyday, and the narrator above the characters in a ‘hierarchy of discourse’ that allows the third-person narrator to be unquestionable as well as omniscient. Most importantly, Pride and Prejudice presents itself as transparently representative of the author’s society, and of the society of its contemporary readers (for example, contrast this with Shakespearean tragedy which uses poetry, the nobility and locations usually distant in time and place).