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Power of Love in Othello and Pride and Prejudice

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Compare and contrast how Shakespeare and Austen present the power of love in Othello and Pride and Prejudice.

In order for love to be true it must come from both sides equally. Its power will not be strong enough to overcome all obstacles if its foundation is not pure. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen paints a portrait of the power of love as merely unbreakable whereas Shakespeare arguably portrays it as weak and vulnerable.

Both Shakespeare and Austen use dialogue as a tool for the construction of their characters. Although Austen relies on narration as well as speech, Shakespeare relies completely on speech as Othello is a play. Arguably, before ‘the moor’ arrives in the play, he is described as an ‘old black rum’ by the ‘malicious’ …show more content…

With most characters in Austen’s novel, they often tend to give a different impression of themselves from the one they intended; a type of irony present in Austen’s novel. An illustration of this is Mrs Bennett, who adopts a sentence structure which is long and rambling, portraying her as a woman of ‘mean understanding, little information and uncertain temper’ (pg 7). The use of the triple syntactical structure by the narrator is forcing this painted portrait of Mrs Bennett’s character on the reader, and therefore right from chapter one this is how we think of her till the very end of the book. The phrase ‘little information’ could also reflect on her moral status in the novel. Due to her ‘little information’, Mrs Bennett usually talks about inappropriate or unnecessary subject matters. For example, during chapter 9, Mrs Bennett’s states she ‘dine with four and twenty families’ (pg 43). This choice of subject matter is firstly unnecessary and inappropriate constructing her as narrow minded. Additionally, not being able to speak appropriately is punished by receiving a lower moral status in the novel than those who are able to such as the Gardiners. Could

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