ROYALTY:
(king, queen, immediate family)
NOBILITY:
(great lords and ladies, landowners with titles above the baronetcy)
LANDED GENTRY:
(land owners of lesser titles, country gentlemen)
WORKING CLASSES:
(doctors, lawyers, merchants, etc. --people with professions)
LOWEST CLASSES:
(criminals, vagrants, gypsies, and those who for whatever reason cannot support
themselves and have no one else to support them either)
CLASSES SOMEWHAT EXEMPT:
(military, clergy, governesses)
It's a long complicated history to this state of affairs, but it briefly goes something like this: in the 10th century, when England began its long unification process, it was made of a number of smaller kingdoms. Over time, as one king would conquer another, these smaller kingdoms unified into larger ones, and in exchange for loyalty from the defeated former king, the victor would grant him high status and property to manage, thus ensuring both the king's security as king and the defeated's pacification with wealth. This system was supported by the church, which reinforced this structure with the idea that those who were born into positions of power were morally superior to those in lower classes--or, in other words, they were in their class by divine appointment from God himself. Many thanks to Henry VIII for ensuring this ripe-for-corruption ideology remained when he instated the Church of England (apparently God doesn't remove you from you from your divine, powerful destiny when you remove him from his--very convenient for Henry and the other sovereigns to be as impeachable as God).
The point is, by Austen's day, a "gentler" version of that system remained. While this awful setup was meant to be a way for everyone to be taken care of (your divine appointment to your station meant you were beneficent enough to care for those beneath you), you can see how it must have been used for extortion and domination (see every Dickens novel in existence). But in its ideal, men and women were meant to do what they could for everyone they could. During the Regency era, this ideal is especially strong in the class of the landed gentry, which might be the equivalent of a rather large middle class, and "gentry" is where we get the words "gentleman" and "gentlewoman." To be a gentle(wo)man of the Regency era was to be a person of property, comfortable fortune, good family, and moral ideals. The word was just beginning to be mixed with the currently understood meaning, which is a person of manners and kindness.
Of course, there is human nature. A nobleman may not be noble, and a gentleman not gentle, whatever they were supposed to be. Enter Jane Austen. One could study this structure through Austen's novels ad nauseam.
This explains why Elizabeth Bennet's famous reproach of Mr. Darcy ("Had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner...") would have been so startling to him--she'd declared him a gentleman by politics only, stating he was unworthy of the title by character only. She may as well have said he was divinely unfit for his station. Darcy wants to not just be worthy of Elizabeth's hand but of his own place. Not understanding this system also gives rise to one of the biggest fallacies modern readers have of Pride and Prejudice, which is the idea that Elizabeth Bennet was somehow "marrying up." Elizabeth and Darcy may have been at different end of the wealth spectrum, but they were both solid members of the landed gentry class--they were societal equals, even if his fortune was greater than hers. Readers who relish the idea that Elizabeth "won" the game of catching the highest-ranked husband (or that her rich husband was some kind of reward) unwittingly lump themselves into the very same group of scheming socialites that Austen was satirizing in the novel (Lady Catherine, Mr. Collins, Caroline Bingley, the entire Lucas family, and many of the Bennet's acquaintance). That Darcy learns to break free from this ideology is one of the things to his credit: he is not a benevolent lord so magnanimous as to bestow his hand on a poor country girl; he extends it out of love to his equal. That Elizabeth learns to see people for who they are rather than for how they present themselves to her is her arc; and when she finally accepts Darcy, she does so not because it's her superior is bestowing a favor on her. She's got to learn her place as his equal every bit as much as he does. The novel explores the implications of these faults in the class system, and by marrying the two reformed members of society, Austen is saying that any successful social world requires a marriage of humility and understanding. This is a big deal, people. They are not two figures singularly representing pride and prejudice--they simply demonstrate how the two principles are never without each other.
(I kid, of course. It's ok to not like Jane.)
So let's look at this business a bit closer, shall we? How do people end up in their place? It's almost entirely a matter of birth. If you were lucky enough to be the firstborn son to nobility or the gentry, your situation was pretty bright. You'd simply inherit your wealth and/or property. But what of subsequent sons? If your family was well connected, you'd find a good place in one of the lower classes in some kind of profession--likely as a clergyman or military officer, which allowed one to purchase a good living and earn the general respect of all the classes. So, while both these professions technically belong to the working class, because of their unique place of respect among society, many members mingled with the gentry. If you were a younger son from a lower class with little money, you had few life choices. You see how this is a reinforcing system whereby the wealthy remain wealthy and the poor remain poor.
And what if you were a girl?
I have read and heard criticism of Austen's heroine's motivations being all about marriage and status. While some feminists love her for writing a group of intelligent and active female characters, others seem frustrated by the fact that marriage is the big goal for all of them. It's so backward, they exclaim. I'm convinced this is once again just a misunderstanding of the system. Marriage in Austen's day was not simply a matter of falling in love, or even of falling in love with the right person. If your place in society was determined by you socio-political status, marriage was the closest thing to casting a vote that a Regency-era woman could have hoped for. There were very, very few professions available to women, and literally only two of those professions were respectable: to be a governess (which was only somewhat respected, as no one chose it unless they had no other life choices; you were always a little bit pitied, even if you were respectable) or to be the lady of a household. Being an English housewife in Austen's day was quite a different matter than it is today. Being a woman of an estate, however small, was a full-time job. Such a woman was responsible for domestic servants, some finances, the management of household resources and the education of her children, and a minutiae of other responsibilities that kept a large household running efficiently. This was a specific set of skills. A woman who did not grow up in this system would have had a steep learning curve. Being a governess allowed a woman from a lower class to mingle and mix with the higher classes, learning their ways, and mingling with men who were better off than they were.
If a respectable woman didn't marry, spinsterhood was the least of her problems. She was the Regency equivalent of a person on welfare (with all of its accompanying stigmas), and she was literally at the mercy of the generosity of the men in her life. Her brothers would have to provide for her. Universities wouldn't have admitted women, so any meaningful profession was out of the question. We've had the luxury since Austen's day to consider freedom, independence, and autonomy to mean the same thing, but they were very different to an English woman from this time. A poor, unmarried woman was none of these things. Austen's heroines didn't marry because they were simpering romantics who wanted to be taken care of; they sought marriage because it was the closest thing they had to enfranchisement and autonomy. Their choices viewed in this light were forward rather than backward. As Austen knew all too well herself, the solitary lifestyle of a poor, unmarried woman had next to no freedom or independence. It pains me to think that she must have endured this kind of existence--and yet, if she had married (and especially if she had married happily), she may not have had the advantageous position as an outsider. If she herself had not discovered so personally how faulty the system was, would her writing have been as powerful? Would she have understood the plight so completely? Would she even have seen the system as broken?
Don't get me wrong. I don't think Austen saw marriage as the ideal situation for female political status; her stories are full of unhappily married people who have no chance of escaping each other. Because marriage was the only respectable choice for a woman (even Emma Woodhouse, whatever her opinions were of herself), this left the door wide open for people to prey on one another in a mercenary or violent manner. And as she herself must have thought, it would be so much more stable if a woman could simply earn her own living. An oldest son from a sinking estate might marry a very rich girl simply so that the family name might not sink from its rank. Wealthy men like Darcy were fawned over by girls whose parents were afraid of what might happen to them if they didn't marry well. A poor girl might be manipulated and overpowered into an unhappy situation with a wealthy man who only wanted to dominate her. As Austen famously wrote, "Marriage is indeed a maneuvering business." Each child hopes to please the parents by marrying well and pleasing themselves, and each parent hopes the child will happen to fall in love with someone of fortune. Austen's wisest characters are invariably those who simply wish for happiness independent from this system.
So, why the marriage plot? Because marriage-as-status was a topic ripe with conflict. That her heroines were always granted a happy marriage (though not always one of wealth) was proof of how bleak autonomy was for women at the time. That she wrote about it so much is a testament to the fact that it was problematic, not answerable.
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A remarkable analysis.
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