The Marriage Plot in Jane Austen

抄録

All of Jane Austen’s novels end in marriage, and their ending is usually regarded to be happily concluded. Readers expect the heroine and the hero to live together satisfactorily afterwards, even though the married couples around them are not always successful in setting such an example. What is the difference between the protagonist couple and the others, or what makes us consider they are different? Austen constructed a new stream of romantic comedy following the narrative convention of the marriage plot. The purpose of this paper is to find out how the great novelist utilised the convention to develop and establish her original notion about matrimony in her works, especially in Pride and Prejudice. Firstly, I will speculate why Austen rejected marriage proposals and stayed single in her real life, even though she wrote romantic marriage plot novels. Secondly, I try to summarise how the marriage plot developed and was established as a narrative convention in the history of English literature, mostly relying on Lisa O’Connell’s analysis, who studies its development from the perspective of political interest. Then finally, I will see how Jane Austen utilised this convention to construct her original paradigm in Pride and Prejudice.