What Is Elizabeth's Prejudice

Elizabeth’s prejudice, on the opposite side of Mr. Darcy, is developed throughout the novel and verbalized in her rejection of his offer of marriage; it is what keeps her at first from realizing the truth of Mr. Darcy’s character, affections, or inner struggle, and it is only the removal of this reason-impervious prejudice which allows her to unite with and humbly accept him at the end of the book. A prejudice is a decided opinion against a person or group that is without solid foundation or reason. Elizabeth’s opinion of Mr. Darcy, up to the very moment she has realized the contents of his letter, exactly fits that definition. She is at first set against him based on his one comment about her appearance and his refusal to ask her to dance
Darcy’s pride, and an exposition of all of her personal grievances and assumptions about his person could not be more clear. In the moment of her heated diatribe, she is incapable and unwilling to consider any alternate possibilities about Mr. Darcy, though that all begins to change upon her receiving the letter the next morning which totally destroys her prejudice. Although she begins to read “with a strong prejudice against everything he might say” (Austen, 198), the more she considers the possibility of its truthfulness, the more shame she begins to feel about potentially having erred in such a fundamental way in her judgement of Mr. Darcy. In the same article by Thomas W. Stanford III, he writes that the letter “causes the humiliated Elizabeth to not only reconsider her… convictions about Darcy and Wickham, but also to develop in her own self understanding” (Stanford, 5). She exclaims out loud the folly of her previous blindness, saying “I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned” (Austen,
This point alone demonstrates the necessity of carefully examining each phrase uttered by Mary, as everything she says is not an exact reflection of the ideas intended. The argument that Elizabeth “vicariously experiences the pride of a Darcy” (Fox, 4) is also incorrect, as her manner moves more towards humility and a desire to recompense for her scathing refusal, rather than a particular pride in her own merits. Overall, it is discovered by Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy that “both qualities, pride and prejudice, result in a severe limitation of human vision and are essentially selfish” (Zimmerman, 4). Because of Elizabeth’s prejudice, she declined to see Mr. Darcy in any favorable way, even going so far as to ignore the advice of family and friends who saw the wider scope of the situation; in spite of her obstinance, and because of her willingness to change after she has been directly confronted with reality in the form of Mr. Darcy’s letter of explanation, she readily accepts him upon his second