intro paragraph

In 1813 England, courtship and marriage were almost entirely determined by gender and class. This was so because property could only follow male lineage and everybody wanted to ‘marry up’; this institution was called entailment. Austen uses Collins’ speeches of entailment in order to satirize the dominance of rich men in relationships due to entailment, a practice Austen thought of as unfair. Austen also utilizes Wickham’s attempts to make money off of entailment as an attack on the power that men had over relationships and money, regardless of their deservedness. The wild words of Mrs. Bennet, juxtaposed by those of more realistic characters, show the reader how ridiculous Austen thought entailment, with all of its inequalities, was. Through discussions of entailment, Austen uses her ever-present satire to show the unfair weight that class and gender had in determining courtship and marriage.