Pride, Prejudice and Honor Killings

The first book I read on my new Kindle was Pride and Prejudice. I hadn't read it before but I'm happy to report that Miss Austen did a pretty good job of capturing at least the spirit of the Keira Knightley movie - except for the latter's cheesy American ending. The book got me thinking, though, about the problem of "honor" killings.

From a Darwinian point of view the honor killing seems profoundly unnatural - killing one of your own offspring just at the point of reaching her reproductive capacity seems very anti-fitness. I recall recently reading somewhere that a spate of honor killings in India was a new phenomena, related mainly to the disintegrating power of the traditional family organization. Family control of daughters is apparently a key instrument of social power.

There weren't any honor killings in P&P, to be sure, but flighty Lydia's running off with the rascally Wickham was a similar type of social earthquake. For her to be living with him, unmarried, would have brought the whole family into such disrepute that the other daughters would have no hope of marriage, and the family apparently faced social ostracism. Why so?

Some might attribute it to the absurd prejudices of a less enlightened age, but I am pretty sure that there really was some fundamental social glue involved. One element of that social glue was the need to maintain women in an inferior and disadvantaged position in society. I suspect that there is a more important element as well. Remember that most of the characters were members of a more or less purely parasitic social class, neither delving or spinning. It significantly lowered the status of the Bennets that some of their relations were "in trade" and others practiced the law.

One ingredient necessary to keep such a class in control of the nation was that their numbers could not be permitted to expand too much. Thus various regulations such as primogeniture and entail restricted inheritance, and it was necessary to thin the pool of eligible females.

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