An Archetypal Study Of Female Self-growth In Pride And Prejudice

The present thesis seeks to interpret the self-growth of Elizabeth in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice in the light of the archetype of animal groom tales.The animal groom archetype is about "a girl who marries or goes to live with what she thinks is a beast or animal who is really an enchanted prince" (Garry and El-Shamy 94). In such tales, the heroine ultimately discovers the true nobility of her animal groom and falls in love with him after a long time of misunderstanding; meanwhile, the animal groom shifts back to the "Prince-Charming" because of the girl’s true love. A distinctive feature of this archetype lies in the heroine’s self-growth through overcoming her Electra complex by transferring her immature attachment towards her father into a mature love to her husband.Pride and Prejudice falls into the shadow of this archetype, a fact that has often been neglected in spite of the many studies on the novel as a Bildungsroman. Reading against this archetype, it is easy to see that the novel touches the audience by appealing to the age-old and profound female collective unconsciousness of metamorphosis from girlhood to womanhood, which better interprets the novel than the more popular "Cinderella" archetype.However, there are differences between the metamorphosis of Elizabeth and that in the animal groom tales, chiefly in the fact that the wedding serves as a new beginning of Elizabeth’s self-growth instead of its end, that the female may continue growing in their married life, which is a challenge to the patriarchal tradition that marriage is the ultimate task of women. It thus suggests the dawning of a new age.