No Place Like Home: An analysis of the country houses in Pride and Prejudice

Resumo

The aim of this study is to analyze how the country houses in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice stand as representations of the characters. This analysis is conducted in two parts: the first, based mainly on Osman Lins’s studies of the narrative space, seeks to determine the emblematic correspondence between houses and families through the perspective of society; the second part aims at analyzing the relations between home and self according to Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of the house. This study tries to clarify some issues concerning the heroine’s relationship to the two houses she inhabits: the significance of the insubstantiality of Longbourn, and her reasons to desire being the mistress of Pemberley. This analysis concludes that the architectural elements of the country houses reveal the families’ social rank and tradition as well as the characters’ sense of identity and of belonging to their homes. The lack of concreteness of Longbourn reflects the heroine’s difficulty in identifying herself with her family and with its entailed house. At Pemberley, she finds love, protection, and her place in the world.