Host–Guest Relationships in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Abstract

In this chapter on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Maya Higashi Wakana analyzes the requirements of “warm” intimacy by mobilizing the concept of the host–guest relationship. In addition to the phenomena of people visiting one another is the subtler host–guest relationship, such as that between an initiator of a communication and the addressee. This host–guest perspective of interaction in the front- and backstages of everyday life is so taken-for-granted that situations and characters in realist fiction are frequently assessed without fully considering the influence the host–guest structure has on readers’ and characters’ perceptions and judgments. The chapter’s goal is to determine the face-related conditions that must exist before “warm” romantic alliances, such as those between Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, and Jane Bennet and Charles Bingley, can emerge.