Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations focus on the themes of money and social class. In both novels, money plays a significant role in shaping and directing human motivations and actions. A direct connection can be drawn between the two protagonists Pip and Elizabeth Bennet. Pip is lower on the social ladder than Elizabeth, but both characters climb a metaphorical ladder to find happiness in society. Elizabeth rebels against her options to escalate into the social world through marriage, and Pip embraces his possibilities of reaching the level where a marriage with Estella would be feasible. The characters start out in different directions and both deviate from their established paths as the novels progress. Elizabeth eventually embraces a life with her social superior, Mr. Darcy, while Pip accepts a life without Estella and high society realizing what is truly important in life: love and connections, not wealth and money. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Another connection can be made between Mrs. Bennet and Miss Havisham. Although the techniques used to create Miss Havisham and Mrs. Bennet differ, the two characters share several traits. Mrs. Bennet is clearly not an exemplary female role model. Because of his position in the wealthy class, he worries about money, marriage and all the other factors that contribute to climbing the social ladder. Her ideas are made even more difficult and frenetic by the notions of feminine propriety that Elizabeth so unseemly upholds. Mrs. Bennet is very distressed and confused that a simple social phenomenon like marriage can become so complicated by love, politics, and more. In Mrs. Bennet, Austen draws the most obvious caricature of the traditional values ​​of the world of Pride and Prejudice. Miss Havisham is the unfortunate victim of a male-dominated society. The main connection between these two women is that neither is remotely interested when it comes to their daughter's search for love. Mrs. Bennet only wants her daughters to marry a man of "good fortune" and Miss Havisham has effectively blinded Estella from the light that metaphorically represents love in Great Expectations. The moral theme of Great Expectations is quite simple: affection, loyalty and conscience. they are more important than social progress, wealth and class. At heart, Pip is an idealist; whenever he can conceive of something that is better than what he already has, he immediately desires to obtain the improvement. When he sees Satis House, he wishes he were a rich gentleman; when he thinks of his moral defects, he wishes to be good; when he realizes that he cannot read, he wishes to learn to do so. Pip's desire for self-improvement is the main source of the novel's title: because he believes in the possibility of advancement in life, he has “great expectations” about his future. However, Pip's progress soon becomes focused on one thing, accumulating money to win Estella's hand in marriage. When Pip first meets Estella as a boy, she tells him that he has light hands. Pip, from that meeting onwards, believes that the key to Estella's heart is money and wealth. His desire to marry Estella and join the upper classes stems from the same idealistic desire as his desire to learn to read and his fear of being punished for bad behavior: once he understands ideas such as poverty, ignorance and immorality, Pip does not want moredo it. being poor, ignorant or immoral. Pip makes the mistake of associating these things with lack of money; therefore, throughout the entire novel he is motivated to accumulate money to become a gentleman. A true gentleman, however, has nothing to do with wealth and everything to do with a good and sincere heart. Pip creates the idea in his head that Miss Havisham is his secret benefactor and that she is turning Pip into a gentleman to marry Estella. When Pip later discovers that Magwitch, the convict from his past, is actually responsible for his rise in society, his ideas about high society are shattered. When Pip becomes a gentleman, he immediately begins to act as he thinks a gentleman should. act, which leads him to treat Joe and Biddy in a snobbish and cold manner. Similarly, when Elizabeth Bennet thinks of marrying Darcy, she imagines bringing her relatives through his huge estate and then quickly reminds herself that her relatives would not come to visit him because we are beneath Darcy in society. “And of this place,” she thought, “I could have been the mistress!” Now I could get to know these rooms in a familiar way! Instead of regarding them as strangers, I could rejoice in them as if they were mine and welcome my uncles as visitors. - But no,' - recovering himself, - "it could never have happened: I would have lost my uncle and my aunt: I should not have allowed myself to invite them." This was a fortunate memory: it saved her from something like regret” ( Austen, p. 161). A similar situation occurs when Joe comes to visit Pip and the meeting is awkward because Joe feels inferior to Pip and Pip wants nothing to do with the poor and modest lifestyle that is attached to Joe. Joe says: “Pip, dear old friend, life is many parts welded together, as it were, and one man is a blacksmith, another is a white blacksmith, another is a goldsmith, and another is a coppersmith. Divisions between these must occur and must be addressed as they come” (Dickens, p. 310). Joe says these words to Pip as farewell in chapter 27, after their awkward meeting in London. Pip, now a gentleman, was uncomfortably embarrassed by both Joe's banality and his opulent lifestyle, and the unassuming Joe felt like a fish out of water in Pip's sumptuous apartment. With this quote, Joe tells Pip that he does not blame him for the awkwardness of their meeting, but instead attributes it to the natural divisions of life. The blacksmith invents a metalworking metaphor to describe these natural divisions: some men are blacksmiths, like Joe, and some men are goldsmiths, like Pip. In these simple terms, Joe comes to a wise and resigned attitude towards the changes in Pip's social class that have separated them, and shows his fundamental goodness and loyalty by blaming the division not on Pip but on the unalterable nature of the human condition. .In Pride and Prejudice, the first time Darcy proposes to Elizabeth, money and social rank overshadow all his words. Elizabeth is disappointed because he spends more time in his proposal emphasizing Elizabeth's lower status than actually asking her to marry him. “In vain I struggled...He spoke well, but there were feelings beyond those of the heart to detail, and he was no more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of pride. His sense of her inferiority – of her being a degradation – of the family obstacles which judgment had always opposed to inclination, was warmly addressed” (Austen, p. 98). This scene is about how Darcy is not motivated by money but by a sincere love and admiration for Elizabeth. That's why their romance will eventually blossom. However, at the time of this proposal, to Elizabeth they wereyou give incorrect information about Darcy's character and she doesn't excuse her disregard for her feelings when talking about her social class. Class lines are strictly drawn in both Great Expectations and Pride and Liberty. Prejudice. Although the middle-class Bennets may socialize with the upper-class Bingleys and Darcys, they are clearly their social inferiors and are treated as such. Austen satirizes this type of class consciousness, particularly in the character of Mr. Collins, who spends most of his time doting on his upper-class patron, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. While Collins offers an extreme example, he's not the only one to argue it. His view of the importance of class is shared by, among others, Mr. Darcy, who believes in the dignity of his lineage; Miss Bingley, who dislikes anyone who is not as socially accepted as her; and Wickham, who will do everything he can to get enough money to rise to a higher position. Mr. Collins's views are simply the most extreme and obvious. The satire directed at Mr. Collins is therefore even more subtly directed at the entire social hierarchy and the conception of all who are part of it in its correctness, in complete disregard of other more worthy virtues. Through the Darcy-Elizabeth and Bingley-Jane marriages, Austen shows the ability of love and happiness to overcome class boundaries and prejudices, thus implying that such prejudices are empty. Similarly, Dickens shows that a person's rank on the social ladder does not truly define them as a morally good or bad person. Dickens creates characters ranging from the most miserable criminals, such as Magwitch, to the poor swamp farmers, such as Joe and Biddy, to the middle class, such as Pumblechook, to the very rich, such as Miss Havisham. The theme of social class is central to the plot of the novel and to the ultimate moral theme of the book: Pip's awareness that wealth and class are less important than affection, loyalty and inner worth. Pip reaches this realization when he finally understands that, despite the esteem in which he holds Estella, his social status is in no way connected to his real character. Drummle, for example, is an upper-class idiot with no regard for others, while Magwitch, a persecuted convict, has deep inner worth. Not long after meeting Miss Havisham and Estella, Pip's desire for advancement largely overshadows his basic goodness. After receiving his mysterious fortune, his idealistic desires appear to have been vindicated and he indulges in a life of gentlemanly idleness. But the discovery that the wretched Magwitch, and not the wealthy Miss Havisham, is his secret benefactor shatters Pip's oversimplified sense of his world's hierarchy. The fact that he comes to admire Magwitch as he loses Estella to the brutal nobleman Drummle ultimately forces him to realize that social standing is not the most important quality one possesses and that his gentlemanly behavior has led him to hurt people who take care of him. about him more. It is ironic that at the end of Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations the two main characters do exactly the opposite of what they set out to do at the beginning of each novel. Elizabeth marries the man she claimed to loathe, and Pip gives up his ambition to be a gentleman and marries Estella because he finds a deeper meaning in life. Elizabeth overcomes her prejudices. Pip's blind journey is shattered when he discovers the truth about his benefactor and the horrible people who rule the upper-class society he once so desperately wanted to be a part of. From the first meeting.