Key Quote
“"A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!"”
Mrs Bennet · Chapter 1
Focus: “fine thing for our girls”
Mrs Bennet's very first dialogue in the novel — she reduces Bingley to a financial figure and marriage to a transaction, establishing the economic anxiety that drives much of the plot.
Technique 1 — ECONOMIC QUANTIFICATION
Mrs Bennet immediately quantifies (expresses numerically) Bingley's value — 'four or five thousand a year' — reducing a human being to an annual income. The semicolon creates a deliberate appositive (renaming) structure: 'large fortune' IS 'four or five thousand a year'. She treats wealth and identity as interchangeable. The exclamatory 'What a fine thing!' expresses delight at a financial opportunity, not a romantic one.
The possessive 'our girls' reveals Mrs Bennet's view of her daughters as collective assets to be deployed in the marriage market. She does not specify which daughter — any will do, because the goal is family financial security, not individual happiness.
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RAD — STAGNATE
Mrs Bennet never changes — this opening declaration of mercenary interest is essentially the same perspective she holds at the novel's close. She is one of Austen's static characters, functioning as a satirical constant against which Elizabeth's growth can be measured. Her fixation on money is neither examined nor overcome.
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Technique 2 — AUSTEN'S IRONIC FRAMING
This line follows immediately after the novel's famous opening sentence about 'a single man in possession of a good fortune' needing a wife. Austen creates structural irony: the narrator's detached, mock-universal statement becomes Mrs Bennet's breathless personal application. The comedy arises from the gap between the narrator's ironic distance and Mrs Bennet's complete lack of self-awareness.
Mrs Bennet takes the opening sentence's satire entirely at face value — she genuinely believes a rich single man exists to marry one of her daughters. This dramatic irony positions the reader as more perceptive than the character: we see through the social convention that Mrs Bennet embodies without question.
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Context (AO3)
THE ENTAIL & ECONOMIC DESPERATION
The Bennet estate is entailed (legally restricted) to the nearest male heir, Mr Collins. When Mr Bennet dies, his wife and daughters will lose their home and income. Mrs Bennet's obsession with marriage is therefore not merely comic but rooted in genuine economic terror — without wealthy husbands, her daughters face poverty. Austen invites us to laugh at her manner while recognising the system that makes it necessary.
MARRIAGE AS MARKET
In Regency England, marriage was the primary economic institution for women. With no right to inherit equally, own property independently (before marriage), or pursue professional careers, women were financially dependent on making advantageous matches. Mrs Bennet's mercenary approach reflects a brutal social reality beneath the comedy.
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WOW — BOURDIEU'S MARRIAGE MARKET
Pierre Bourdieu describes marriage in pre-modern societies as a form of economic exchange — families trade social capital (status, connections) and economic capital (wealth) through their children's marriages. Mrs Bennet is a perfectly rational actor within Bourdieu's framework: she treats her daughters as bearers of whatever modest social capital the Bennet family possesses and seeks to convert it into economic security through marriage. Austen's satire works on two levels: Mrs Bennet is comic in her lack of subtlety, but the system she navigates is deeply serious.
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