Pride and Prejudice: How Jane Austen’s Classic Novel Challenges the ‘Male Gaze’

It is ironic that one of the best novels ever written has so seemingly politically incorrect an opening line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” More than a few readers will recognise this from Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen (1775-1817), and they might wryly acknowledge that though the opening line seems to epitomise “the male gaze”, the literary adventure that flows from it is firmly from the point of view of its protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet.

Most souls who enjoy English literature require no recommendation on this novel from me, yet I will still assault your good sense with it. To illustrate how its story seized my attention, I will quote Fitzwilliam Darcy, who, when asked by Elizabeth about when he fell in love, said: “I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”

The narrative arc follows the trials and tribulations of the most sensible of the Bennets’ five daughters, Elizabeth, who is unaided by the immoderate behaviour of her mother and her two youngest sisters, while she plays an emotional hide-and-seek with a seemingly haughty and taciturn Mr Darcy.

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The challenge before the Bennets is more daunting than what faces most of the English gentry: they have five daughters, all of whom have to be married off to well-off landed gentlemen for fear of falling into poverty. This fear turns the other young women of this class to engage in cut-throat competition. They thwart others’ budding love affairs (think of Mr Bingley, who has a crush on Jane Bennet, but whose sister competes for the affections of Mr Darcy).

You may wonder why I’m reading this marvellous book so late in my life (never ask a gentleman his age). Simple: no matter what bookshop I visit these days, there is nothing to read. The reason could be the spineless corporate publishing ecosystem or the hijacking of display shelves by low-IQ propagandists—or that we have so few quality writers in English, a language that India conquered long ago.

I have been urged to read Jane Austen often enough—by my former English literature-majoring spouse, by various enjoyable films, and by various other literary references.

For instance, there was a moment over two decades ago when I read Azar Nafisi’s memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003). Nafisi writes of the book club she set up after resigning from university (she refused to wear a veil after the 1979 Iranian revolution). Four sections focus on four authors, the final being Jane Austen. Most impressive were Nafisi’s students who changed the famous opening of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.” These brilliant girls in Nafisi’s club even set up a “Dear Jane Society”.

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Yet I still didn’t seriously consider taking the plunge until two years ago, with the death of the English writer Martin Amis. I am a fan of his early books, and even more so of the novels by his famous father Kingsley. I picked up Martin’s autobiography, Experience (2000).

Early on, he quotes his letter from school in Sussex, in 1967, to his dad and to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, who was his stepmother from 1965 to 1983. In it, he mentions that in preparation for the Oxford entrance hurdles, he was mastering seven greats: six men and Jane Austen. He also mentions that he recently read and loved George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), which he describes as “Jane Austen + passion + dimension”. (Incidentally, Eliot was a pseudonym for Mary Ann Evans.) Despite the back-handed compliment, I was intrigued.

Then on the first day of this year, the British novelist David Lodge passed away. I picked up his 1975 campus satire Changing Places. (Its subtitle, “A Tale of Two Campuses”, echoes Charles Dickens.) Set in the late 1960s, Morris Zapp, an English professor from a west coast American university (in a thinly veiled San Francisco), is on an exchange program to an English university (in less-thinly veiled Birmingham) where Philip Swallow of the English department has been sent to the US in Zapp’s place. It is a laugh riot.

Pertinently, however, both academics (and the author) are Jane Austen enthusiasts: Swallow has an unfinished MA thesis on Austen while the more accomplished Zapp (in America’s publish-or-perish system) is working on a comprehensive commentary on all six Austen novels so that “there would be simply nothing further to say about the novel in question” and thereby be the final word on all scholarship on Jane Austen (he has, however, only gotten halfway commenting on her first novel, Sense and Sensibility).

So, after I finished Lodge, I embarked on Pride and Prejudice.

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What I found that made this novel’s storytelling magical is Jane Austen’s language: her characters speak with polite irony, as if they know that the marriage olympics, that they are engaged in, might be a blood sport, but it has to be played with manners and etiquette (or else the purpose is defeated). Actually, then, the opening line is not “the male gaze” but the woman’s satirical view of it; and therefore, we get a rather less benign interpretation of “must be in want”.

Austen’s observations are wry and humorous, and her language is above all, highly (and enviably) empathetic, which is quite the contrast to our current age of nastiness, where cruelty of words is the point. Also, I liked that everyone writes letters; and that the novel has a happy ending.

Mr Darcy’s words, quoted above, feel very much like something you might say about life in general: you never really begin anything, you just find yourself in the middle of it. This is why it’s never too late to read Jane Austen; I myself plan to immerse myself in her posthumously published Persuasion, shortly. You should, too.

Aditya Sinha is a writer living on the outskirts of Delhi.