Marriage, Courtship and Aristotle's Spouidaia in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Abstract

For Aristotle, seriousness is one of the loftiest qualities a human can acquire, requiring a level of refined practical judgment that rules an individual in private and public life. While Aristotle’s Politics is not known for its praise for the role of women’s rationality in society, he argues in this text that women can develop the sort of judgment to be serious, and that through this quality they play an important role in the regime, particularly through the experience of married life, for “it can be argued that even within her restricted domestic sphere the woman demonstrates considerably more virtue than Aristotle's official doctrine allows” . If romantic love is an important part of the human experience, and marriage is one manifestation of romantic love, understanding the ways that the human personality develops within the experiences of courtship and marriage is an important task. Moreover, understanding the ways that social structures can promote, or impede, the fostering of romantic love, is necessary to consider, especially if we take Aristotle’s insight into the importance of marriage to regimes seriously.