Hello, I’m Antonia Carey. I’m a double major in English and Theatre Arts with a Performance concentration. I’ve never pinpointed a single favorite author, but some of my favorites are Mary Shelley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Christopher Marlowe, Sandra Cisneros,  Hemingway, and Oscar Wilde.
Pride and Prejudice seems to be responding to Fordyce’s Sermons by emphasizing the individual over a ubiquitous image of “the female.” Where Fordyce is writing to women on how to be marriageable, Austen is writing about the effect that this constant pressure to be marriageable is affecting each of the women in the Bennet household. The most obviously affected by this idea of womanhood that Fordyce presents is Mary, whom we know is reader of “moral philosophy” (70). Mary does not show any signs of excessive wit or study of “frivolous arts” that Fordyce warns against (395). Yet, in Fordyce’s eyes, she still transgresses against her sex. He writes in “On Female Virtue, Friendship, and Conversation” that “Dulness [sic] and insipidity, moroseness and rigour, are dead weights on every kind of social intercourse” (397). Mary appears to have these in spades, as she is constantly taking the moral high ground and demeaning anything that she finds to be frivolous. It’s noted that when the Bennet sisters go into Meryton, accompanied by Mr. Collins, that “every sister except Mary agreed to go” (105). Fordyce also mentions women learning the difference “between an obliging study to please,” which he finds to be a good quality among women, and “an indecent desire to put themselves forward,” which is something women should avoid displaying. Mary transgresses here as well. It is stated plainly in chapter VI that Mary who, due to not being pretty like her sisters, “worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments, was always impatient for display.” At this event, Mary does play a long concerto, but makes up for it with “Scotch and Irish airs” (62-63). Her behavior at the Netherfield ball is not quite as felicitous. She is imposing on the party, so much so that Elizabeth subtly entreats their father to stop her (132). Mary, by trying too hard to be the woman that she is expected to be, becomes one of the women that Fordyce denounces.