Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations focus on the themes of money and class. In both novels, money plays an important role in shaping and directing human motivations and actions. A direct link can be established 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 for escalation in the social world through marriage and Pip seizes his chances of rising to the level where marriage to Estella would be feasible. The characters start off in different directions, and both deviate from their established course 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 relationships, not wealth and wealth. 'money. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not 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. Due to her situation in the leisure class, she is preoccupied with money, marriage, and all the other factors necessary to climb the social ladder. Her ideas are made all the more difficult and frenzied by the notions of feminine propriety that Elizabeth so unseemly defends. Mrs. Bennet becomes very distressed and confused by the idea that a simple social phenomenon like marriage can become so complicated by love, politics and so on. 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 the least bit interested in their daughter finding love. Mrs. Bennet just wants her daughters to marry a man of "good fortune" and Miss Havisham has actually 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. are more important than social promotion, wealth and social class. Deep down, Pip is an idealist; whenever he can conceive of something better than what he already has, he immediately desires to obtain the improvement. When he sees Satis House, he aspires to become a rich gentleman; when he thinks of his moral failings, he aspires to be good; when he realizes that he cannot read, he wants to learn. Pip's desire to improve himself is the main source of the novel's title: because he believes in the possibility of moving forward in life, he has "great expectations" for his future. However, Pip's advancement soon focuses on one thing, accumulating money in order to win Estella's hand in marriage. When Pip first meets Estella as a child, she tells him that he has well-formed hands. Since this meeting, Pip 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 like poverty, l ignorance andimmorality, Pip no longer wants to be poor, ignorant or immoral. Pip makes the mistake of associating these things with lack of money; therefore, throughout the novel he is motivated to accumulate money in order to become a gentleman. However, a true gentleman has nothing to do with wealth and everything to do with a kind and sincere heart. Pip creates the idea in his head that Miss Havisham is his secret benefactor and that she is transforming 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 of high society are shattered. When Pip becomes a gentleman, he immediately begins to act like he thinks a gentleman is supposed to. act, which leads him to treat Joe and Biddy with snobbery and coldness. Similarly, when Elizabeth Bennet thinks about marrying Darcy, she imagines taking her relatives to his huge estate, then quickly remembers that her relatives would not come to visit her because they are below Darcy in society. “And of this place,” she thought, “I could have been the mistress! I may now know these pieces! Instead of viewing them as strangers, I could have rejoiced in them as my own and welcomed my uncle and aunt as visitors. -- But no, -- remembering, -- that could never be the case: my uncle and aunt would have been lost to me: I should not have been allowed to invite them. » It was a happy memory -- it saved her. of something like regret” (Austen, p. 161). A similar situation is found when Joe comes to visit Pip and the meeting is awkward because Joe feels beneath Pip and Pip wants nothing to do with the poor and modest lifestyle that is attached to Joe. Joe said, "Pip, dear old man, life is made up of many separations welded together, as I can say, and one man is a blacksmith, and another a white man, and another a goldsmith, and another a coppersmith." . The divisions between them must arise and must be bridged as they arise” (Dickens, p. 310). Joe says these words to Pip as a farewell in chapter 27, after their awkward meeting in London. Pip, now a gentleman, was uncomfortably embarrassed by both Joe's ordinariness and his own opulent lifestyle, and the unassuming Joe felt like a fish out of water in Pip's lavish apartment. With this quote, Joe tells Pip that he does not blame him for the awkwardness of their meeting, but rather attributes it to the natural divisions of life. The blacksmith concocts a metaphor of metallurgy to describe these natural divisions: some men are blacksmiths, like Joe, and others are goldsmiths, like Pip. In these simple terms, Joe takes a wise and resigned attitude toward the changes in Pip's social class that have driven them apart, and he shows his essential 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 disheartened because in his proposal he spends more time emphasizing Elizabeth's low rank than asking her to marry him. “In vain I struggled... He spoke well, but there were feelings other than those of the heart to be detailed, and he was no more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of pride. His feeling of inferiority – that it was a degradation – of the family obstacles which judgment had always opposed to inclination, was warmly spoken of” (Austen, p. 98). This scene shows how Darcy is not motivated by money but by a sincere love and admiration for Elizabeth. This is why their romance will endthrive. However, at the time and place of this proposal, Elizabeth has been given incorrect information about Darcy's character and she will not excuse her disregard for his feelings when speaking about his social class. Class lines are strictly drawn in both Great Expectations and Pride and 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 kind 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. Although Mr. Collins offers an extreme example, he is not alone in holding such views. His conception of the importance of class is shared, among others, by Mr. Darcy, who believes in the dignity of his lineage; Miss Bingley, who dislikes anyone who is not as socially accepted as she is; and Wickham, who will do anything he can to get enough money to advance to a higher position. Mr. Collins' views are simply the most extreme and obvious. The satire directed against Mr. Collins therefore also addresses more subtly the entire social hierarchy and the conception of all those who compose it according to its rightness, with total disregard for 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, implying that these prejudices are hollow. Similarly, Dickens shows that a person's rank on the social ladder does not really define that person as a morally good or bad person. Dickens creates characters ranging from the most miserable criminals, like Magwitch, to the poor peasants of the swamp country, like Joe and Biddy, to the middle class, like Pumblechook, to the very rich, like Miss Havisham. The theme of social class is central to the novel's plot and the book's ultimate moral theme: Pip's realization that wealth and class are less important than affection, loyalty, and inner worth . Pip comes to this realization when he finally comes to understand that, despite his esteem for Estella, a person's social status has no relation to their real character. Drummle, for example, is an upper-class jerk who doesn't care about others, while Magwitch, a persecuted convict, has deep inner worth. Soon after meeting Miss Havisham and Estella, Pip's desire for advancement largely overshadows his basic goodness. After receiving his mysterious fortune, his idealistic wishes seem to have been justified and he indulges in a life of gentlemanliness and idleness. But the discovery that it is the miserable Magwitch, and not the wealthy Miss Havisham, who is his secret benefactress, shatters Pip's overly simplistic sense of the hierarchy of his world. The fact that he comes to admire Magwitch while losing Estella to the brutal nobleman Drummle ultimately forces him to realize that social position is not the most important quality one possesses and that his gentlemanly behavior l has led to hurting people who care. about him the most. It is ironic that at the end of Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations, the two main characters do the exact opposite of what they planned to do at the beginning of each novel. Elizabeth marries the man she claims to hate and Pip abandons his ambition to be a gentleman and marries Estella because he finds deeper meaning in life. Elizabeth overcomes her prejudices. Pip's blind journey is destroyed when he learns the truth about his benefactor and the.