Friday--August 26th
Resume and Poster
Tuesday--September 6th
Completion of Summer Reading Packet for OTHELLO, including annotations (Bring book to class beginning 9/6)
Friday--September 9th
All blog postings
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Up to Date on Second Requests to Blog
I only found 4 emails for blog membership this evening. I have sent another email to each of those four. Please send me an email at drspruell@gmail.com should you want to earn the blog grade.
See you in the A.M.
Dr. Spruell
See you in the A.M.
Dr. Spruell
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Where in the world are my fellow bloggers?
By this point of the summer you should have finished reading both Othello and Pride and Prejudice.
You should have read the entire blog.
You should be well underway in responding to the six discussion questions for each work. (You will find them in the blog.)
You should have completed the work on the summer reading handout. Remember, if you lost or didn't receive a handout, they are available on the WNHS front desk and on EdLine.
As seniors in AP/Dual Enrollment English, you will be expected to assume the work ethic of a college student.
You should have read the entire blog.
You should be well underway in responding to the six discussion questions for each work. (You will find them in the blog.)
You should have completed the work on the summer reading handout. Remember, if you lost or didn't receive a handout, they are available on the WNHS front desk and on EdLine.
As seniors in AP/Dual Enrollment English, you will be expected to assume the work ethic of a college student.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
WELCOME CLASS OF 2012!
I don't know about you, but I am looking forward to a wonderful year of reading, discussing, and writing about literature. This blog will serve as a place for us to rendezvous when we can't meet face-to-face, giving us an opportunity to engage and extend some thoughtful discussions. Additionally, meaningful posts will help your grade :) In order to participate you will need to send me an email that includes your name and the desire to join the group. It is that simple!
College, Anyone?
So, it is the last summer of your high school career. Where should you be in your pursuit of the rest of your life?
Hopefully, you have narrowed down the college choices to about three schools. One should be a safety net school. For most of you this will be FSCJ. A second selection should be a school that should accept you. For most of you this will be UNF or JU. The third school should be your desired school. This will run the gamut from UF to FSU to UCF to Georgia Tech to SCAD to UGA. If you haven't prepared at least a mental list, go on the the studentedge.com website from your summer packet and "visit" your schools. Comment on your process and help your classmates understand what you have learned and why this is important. Dream schools will require an early application. We will deal with this when we meet in August. This year will fly by. DO NOT allow yourself to fall behind :)
Hopefully, you have narrowed down the college choices to about three schools. One should be a safety net school. For most of you this will be FSCJ. A second selection should be a school that should accept you. For most of you this will be UNF or JU. The third school should be your desired school. This will run the gamut from UF to FSU to UCF to Georgia Tech to SCAD to UGA. If you haven't prepared at least a mental list, go on the the studentedge.com website from your summer packet and "visit" your schools. Comment on your process and help your classmates understand what you have learned and why this is important. Dream schools will require an early application. We will deal with this when we meet in August. This year will fly by. DO NOT allow yourself to fall behind :)
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: JANE AUSTEN
Jane Austen, the daughter of an English clergyman, was born in 1775 at her father’s Hampshire Vicarage in South Central England. Austen had six brothers and one sister. Austen and her sister, Cassandra, were inseparable. After several attempts to find an appropriate boarding school, they were schooled at home. Their father taught his own children and several who boarded with the family. This education was by extensive reading of the classics. Both sisters were pretty and popular, and they enjoyed most of the social amenities portrayed in Austen’s novels.
By the time she was in her mid-twenties, Jane’s brothers, two of whom later became admirals, had careers and families of their own. After the father’s death in 1805, the family lived temporarily in Southhampton before finally settling in Chawton.
A lively and affectionate family circle and a network of friends provided a stimulated context for her writing. It was the world of landed gentry and the country clergy that she used in her novels.
In the six novels published between 1811 and 1817, Austen revealed the possibilities of domestic literature. Her concentration on personality and character and the tensions between her heroines and their society make her works more closely related to the modern world than to the traditions of the eighteenth century. This modernity, together with the wit, realism, and timelessness of her prose style, helps to explain her continuing appeal to twentieth century reason.
Northanger Abbey, a satire on the romances, was sold for ten pounds in 1803, but as it was not published, was bought back by members of the family. It did not appear in print until after Austen’s death.
Although her friends knew of her authorship, she received little recognition in her lifetime. She was quite aware of her special excellences and limitations, and often compared her style to that of a miniaturist painter. She ridiculed the silly, the affected, and the stupid, ranging in her satire from early, light portraiture to later, more scornful exposures.
Austen published several minor works and five major novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and posthumously, a collection of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey (1818). Other minor works included Juenilia, the novel, Lady Susan, and the fragments: The Watsons and Sandition. Her name never appeared on her title pages, therefore, she received little recognition until after her death in 1817.
Her comedies of manners depict the self-contained world of provincial ladies and gentlemen, and most of her works revolved around the delicate business of providing proper husbands and wives for marriageable offspring of the middle class. She is best remembered for her lively interplays of character, her meticulous care to style and plot, a sense of comic irony, and her moral firmness. The overall substance of this novel concerns a small section of society locked into a timeless present in which little will change. The people involved are fixed, and the routines and social rituals are predetermined. Money is a problem when it is short.
Successful courtships lead to satisfactory marriages. For the first two volumes of the book, Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet are pre-judging and re-judging. It is a drama of insight that acts by revision and sees things as they really are and not what was presumed.
There is a whole vocabulary connected with the processes of decision, conviction, and opinion. People’s varied and unstable judgments are exposed and analyzed. Opinions are constantly changing as characters’ behaviors appear in a different light. The need to be aware of the difference between appearance and reality is made clear throughout the novel.
Austen writes about what she knows. Therefore, great areas of human experience are never mentioned. The male characters are not finely drawn. In contrast, the female characters are strong and stand out as intelligent and complex individuals. Extreme passions are avoided. This is demonstrated when Elizabeth accepts Darcy’s second proposal. She says, “My sentiments have undergone such a material change as to make me receive with gratitude and pleasure your present assurances.” There seem to be many important topics which Austen avoided.
Her greatest talents were her subtle insight into character and her precise dialogue. Each character’s speech is appropriate. Collins is pompous, Mr. Bennet is cynical and sarcastic, Elizabeth is forthright and honest, Lydia is frothy and giddy, and Darcy is sensitive and sure of himself.
Although Romanticism was at its peak during Austen’s life, she rejected this movement. She adhered more closely to the neo-classic style, and to its discipline, devoid of passion. Her style emphasizes plots that turn like gears on the intricacies of character interaction. Her work is often satiric but underlined with moral purport. She seemed to observe human conduct with an amused and good-humored consciousness.
She once compared her writing style to that of a painter whose subjects are miniatures. This is particularly true of her immaculate attention to detail. She was a perfectionist, and re-wrote most of her novels at least twice.
Jane Austen died at the height of her creative potential at the age of 42. Researchers have suggested the cause to be either Addison’s disease or tuberculosis. She spent the last weeks of her life in Winchester, Hampshire in South England and is buried in the cathedral there.
She gradually developed a following in England in the late 1800's, but became even more popular in America. Today, she is regarded as one of the great masters of the English novel.
By the time she was in her mid-twenties, Jane’s brothers, two of whom later became admirals, had careers and families of their own. After the father’s death in 1805, the family lived temporarily in Southhampton before finally settling in Chawton.
A lively and affectionate family circle and a network of friends provided a stimulated context for her writing. It was the world of landed gentry and the country clergy that she used in her novels.
In the six novels published between 1811 and 1817, Austen revealed the possibilities of domestic literature. Her concentration on personality and character and the tensions between her heroines and their society make her works more closely related to the modern world than to the traditions of the eighteenth century. This modernity, together with the wit, realism, and timelessness of her prose style, helps to explain her continuing appeal to twentieth century reason.
Northanger Abbey, a satire on the romances, was sold for ten pounds in 1803, but as it was not published, was bought back by members of the family. It did not appear in print until after Austen’s death.
Although her friends knew of her authorship, she received little recognition in her lifetime. She was quite aware of her special excellences and limitations, and often compared her style to that of a miniaturist painter. She ridiculed the silly, the affected, and the stupid, ranging in her satire from early, light portraiture to later, more scornful exposures.
Austen published several minor works and five major novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and posthumously, a collection of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey (1818). Other minor works included Juenilia, the novel, Lady Susan, and the fragments: The Watsons and Sandition. Her name never appeared on her title pages, therefore, she received little recognition until after her death in 1817.
Her comedies of manners depict the self-contained world of provincial ladies and gentlemen, and most of her works revolved around the delicate business of providing proper husbands and wives for marriageable offspring of the middle class. She is best remembered for her lively interplays of character, her meticulous care to style and plot, a sense of comic irony, and her moral firmness. The overall substance of this novel concerns a small section of society locked into a timeless present in which little will change. The people involved are fixed, and the routines and social rituals are predetermined. Money is a problem when it is short.
Successful courtships lead to satisfactory marriages. For the first two volumes of the book, Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet are pre-judging and re-judging. It is a drama of insight that acts by revision and sees things as they really are and not what was presumed.
There is a whole vocabulary connected with the processes of decision, conviction, and opinion. People’s varied and unstable judgments are exposed and analyzed. Opinions are constantly changing as characters’ behaviors appear in a different light. The need to be aware of the difference between appearance and reality is made clear throughout the novel.
Austen writes about what she knows. Therefore, great areas of human experience are never mentioned. The male characters are not finely drawn. In contrast, the female characters are strong and stand out as intelligent and complex individuals. Extreme passions are avoided. This is demonstrated when Elizabeth accepts Darcy’s second proposal. She says, “My sentiments have undergone such a material change as to make me receive with gratitude and pleasure your present assurances.” There seem to be many important topics which Austen avoided.
Her greatest talents were her subtle insight into character and her precise dialogue. Each character’s speech is appropriate. Collins is pompous, Mr. Bennet is cynical and sarcastic, Elizabeth is forthright and honest, Lydia is frothy and giddy, and Darcy is sensitive and sure of himself.
Although Romanticism was at its peak during Austen’s life, she rejected this movement. She adhered more closely to the neo-classic style, and to its discipline, devoid of passion. Her style emphasizes plots that turn like gears on the intricacies of character interaction. Her work is often satiric but underlined with moral purport. She seemed to observe human conduct with an amused and good-humored consciousness.
She once compared her writing style to that of a painter whose subjects are miniatures. This is particularly true of her immaculate attention to detail. She was a perfectionist, and re-wrote most of her novels at least twice.
Jane Austen died at the height of her creative potential at the age of 42. Researchers have suggested the cause to be either Addison’s disease or tuberculosis. She spent the last weeks of her life in Winchester, Hampshire in South England and is buried in the cathedral there.
She gradually developed a following in England in the late 1800's, but became even more popular in America. Today, she is regarded as one of the great masters of the English novel.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE INTRODUCTION
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice had a long and varied life before it finally saw publication on January 28, 1813. Austen began the book, originally titled First Impressions, in 1796. Her father submitted it to a London publisher the following year, but the manuscript was rejected. Austen continued to work on the book, and scholars report that the story remained a favorite with the close circle of friends, relations, and acquaintances she took into her confidence. She probably continued working on First Impressions after her family relocated to Bath in 1801 and did not stop revising and rewriting until after the deaths of both her father and a close friend in 1805. After this point Austen seems to have given up writing for almost five years. She had resumed work on the book by 1811, scholars report, and the final product appeared anonymously in London bookstalls early in 1813.
The critical history of Pride and Prejudice was just as varied as the evolution of the novel itself. At the time the novel was published in the early nineteenth century, most respected critical opinion was strongly biased against novels and novelists. Although only three contemporary reviews of Pride and Prejudice are known to exist, they are all remarkably complimentary. Anonymous articles in the British Critic and the Critical Review praised the author's characterization and her portrayal of domestic life. Additional early commentary exists in the diaries and letters of such prominent contemporary readers as Mary Russell Mitford and Henry Crabb Robinson, both of whom admired the work's characters, realism, and freedom from the trappings of Gothic fiction. After this period, however, criticism of Pride and Prejudice, and of Austen's works as a whole, largely disappeared. With the exception of two posthumous appreciations of Austen's work as a whole by Sir Walter Scott and Archbishop Richard Whateley, very little Austen criticism appeared until 1870.
In 1870, James Edward Austen-Leigh, son of Jane Austen's brother James, published A Memoir of Jane Austen by Her Nephew. This biography was the first major study of Austen as a person and as an artist, and it marked the beginning of a new era in Austen criticism. Although most critics no longer accept its conclusion that Austen was an "amateur genius" whose works were largely unconscious productions of her fertile imagination, it nonetheless performed a valuable service by bringing Austen and her works back into critical attention, Modem critical opinion of Austen began with the publication in 1939 of Mary Lascelles's Jane Austen and Her Art, which escaped from the Victorian portrait of Austen put forth by Austen-Leigh.
The critical history of Pride and Prejudice was just as varied as the evolution of the novel itself. At the time the novel was published in the early nineteenth century, most respected critical opinion was strongly biased against novels and novelists. Although only three contemporary reviews of Pride and Prejudice are known to exist, they are all remarkably complimentary. Anonymous articles in the British Critic and the Critical Review praised the author's characterization and her portrayal of domestic life. Additional early commentary exists in the diaries and letters of such prominent contemporary readers as Mary Russell Mitford and Henry Crabb Robinson, both of whom admired the work's characters, realism, and freedom from the trappings of Gothic fiction. After this period, however, criticism of Pride and Prejudice, and of Austen's works as a whole, largely disappeared. With the exception of two posthumous appreciations of Austen's work as a whole by Sir Walter Scott and Archbishop Richard Whateley, very little Austen criticism appeared until 1870.
In 1870, James Edward Austen-Leigh, son of Jane Austen's brother James, published A Memoir of Jane Austen by Her Nephew. This biography was the first major study of Austen as a person and as an artist, and it marked the beginning of a new era in Austen criticism. Although most critics no longer accept its conclusion that Austen was an "amateur genius" whose works were largely unconscious productions of her fertile imagination, it nonetheless performed a valuable service by bringing Austen and her works back into critical attention, Modem critical opinion of Austen began with the publication in 1939 of Mary Lascelles's Jane Austen and Her Art, which escaped from the Victorian portrait of Austen put forth by Austen-Leigh.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: CHARACTERS
Catherine Bennet
Catherine "Kitty" Bennet is virtually a nonentity in the Bennet family. Although she is the fourth sister, younger than Mary but older than Lydia, Austen reveals that she is "weak-spirited, irritable, and completely under Lydia's guidance . . . ignorant, idle, and vain." However, the end of the novel is a bit encouraging for Kitty. Jane and Elizabeth make sure that she visits both of them frequently, and they introduce her to more intelligent and entreating society. Austen notes that this change in environment has an excellent effect on Kitty.
Elizabeth Bennet
"Elizabeth 'Eliza' or 'Lizzie' Bennet," writes Elizabeth Jenkins in her critical biography Jane Austen: A Biography, "has perhaps received more admiration than any other heroine in English literature." Elizabeth is the soul of Pride and Prejudice, who reveals in her own person the very title qualities that she spots so easily in her sisters and their suitors. Elizabeth has her father, Mr. Bennet's, quick wit and ironic sense of humor. Unlike her older sister Jane, she resists accepting all people uncritically. She is quick to recognize most people's principal characteristics—for instance, she recognizes the stupidities of many members of her family and quickly characterizes Lady Catherine de Bourgh as a control addict and her sister's suitor Charles Bingley as a simple and good-hearted young man. But she is also, concludes Jenkins, "completely human. Glorious as she is, and beloved of her creator, she is kept thoroughly in her place. She was captivated by [George] Wickham, in which she showed herself no whit superior to the rest of female Meryton." When Elizabeth begins to accept her own impressions uncritically, she makes her worst mistakes.
Because Elizabeth is so keen an observer of other people, she recognizes her mother's silliness and vows not to be caught in the same trap as her father. This refusal, however, is itself a trap. By trusting entirely to her own observations (pride) and her own initial assessments of people (prejudice), Elizabeth threatens her future happiness with Fitzwilliam Darcy. "Above all," concludes Jenkins, "there is her prejudice against Darcy, and though their first encounter was markedly unfortunate, she built on it every dislike it could be made to bear; her eager condemnation of him and her no less eager remorse when she found that she had been mistaken, are equally lovable."
Jane Bennet
Jane Bennet is Elizabeth's older sister, the most beautiful and amiable of the Bennet sisters. Her father considers her too willing to please and believes that she lacks the character to deal with life's difficulties. He tells Jane, "You are . . . so complying, that nothing will ever be resolved on; so easy, that every servant will cheat you; and so generous, that you will always exceed your income." Jane eventually marries the equally amiable Charles Bingley.
Lydia Bennet
Lydia is the youngest of the Bennet daughters and perhaps the silliest. Austen describes her as "a stout, well-grown girl of fifteen, with a fine complexion and good-humoured countenance; a favorite with her mother, whose affection had brought her into public at an early age." Rather than spend any of her day receiving any sort of education, Lydia instead devotes all of her energies to collecting gossip about their neighbors, freely spending money about the town, and flirting with young men. Although all the Bennet girls are initially attracted to George Wickham, it is the headstrong Lydia who elopes with him and who is eventually married to him. Lydia's impudent actions put her sisters' marriage prospects in jeopardy, but she shows no signs of remorse; unlike Elizabeth and Darcy, she does not learn from her mistakes.
Mary Bennet
Mary Bennet is the third Bennet daughter, younger than Elizabeth and Jane and older than Catherine and Lydia. Rather than prancing around town flirting with young men, Mary considers herself an intellectual and would rather enjoy the company of a book. But Austen reveals that she overestimates her own talents and intelligence, saying that Mary "had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached."
Mr. Bennet
Austen describes Mr. Bennet, the father of the five Bennet girls (Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Catherine, and Lydia), as "so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic, humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three and twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character." He is mildly well-off. Austen reports that he has an income of two thousand pounds sterling a year, enough for his family to live comfortably—but socially he ranks toward the bottom of the scale of the landed gentry. This is one of the reasons that people like Fitzwilliam Darcy and Lady Catherine de Bourgh regard the family with some disdain.
Mr. Bennet is one of the primary means by which the author expresses her ironic wit. He shares this quality with Elizabeth, his favorite daughter. However, unlike Elizabeth's, Mr. Bennet's wit is usually expressed in sarcastic asides directed at his wife. Unlike his daughter, Mr. Bennet does not question or examine his own life, and his situation never improves. In addition, he allows his younger daughters to behave as carelessly and improperly as his wife. His inattention to his own family results in his daughter Lydia eloping with the despicable George Wickham.
Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are not well matched. Her silliness does not mix well with his sarcastic wit. Mr. Bennet recognizes this, and it is one of the reasons he instills in his daughter Elizabeth the importance of matching temperaments with her husband.
Mrs. Bennet
Mrs. Bennet, Austen reports, is "a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news." Mrs. Bennet is primarily concerned with the outer aspects of her society: the importance of marrying well in society without regard to the suitability of the personalities in the match. Neither does Mrs. Bennet have any regard for respecting proper manners and behavior. She is continually embarrassing Elizabeth and Jane with her inappropriate comments and schemes to marry off her daughters. Additionally, Elizabeth finds her mother's influence on the younger Bennet daughters particularly disturbing. Mrs. Bennet allows the younger girls to devote all their time searching for eligible young bachelors, neglecting any form of education. It is perhaps because of Mrs. Bennet's attitudes that her youngest daughter, Lydia, elopes with the despicable George Wickham.
Caroline Bingley
Caroline Bingley is the sister of Charles Bingley. She and her sister are very proud of her family's wealth—conveniently forgetting, Austen notes, "that their brother's fortune and their own had been acquired by trade." They are willing to go to great lengths to prevent his marriage into the poorer Bennet family. It is Caroline who reveals to Jane Bennet her plans to have Charles marry Fitzwilliam Darcy's sister Georgiana.
Charles Bingley
Charles Bingley is a friend of Fitzwilliam Darcy and the new occupant of the Netherfield estate, which neighbors the Bennet's home, Longbourn. It is through Bingley that Elizabeth first meets Darcy and is unimpressed by Darcy's manners. Bingley, whom Austen describes as "good-looking and gentlemanlike; he had a pleasant countenance and easy, unaffected manners," is very attracted to Jane Bennet. This affection distresses his sisters, including Caroline Bingley, and Darcy himself. They all believe that the Bennet family is too far down the social ladder to deserve such attention from him. Ironically, Charles himself has received his fortune by his family's interest in trade, considerably less respectable than Darcy's wealth inherited by birthright. Charles' sisters and Darcy deliberately give Elizabeth Bennet the impression that Bingley is to marry Darcy's sister, Georgiana, after he leaves for London. Eventually, however, Bingley returns to Netherfield and marries Jane.
Mr. William Collins
Mr. William Collins is Mr. Bennet's nephew and a clergyman. Because Mr. Bennet has no sons, Collins is in line to inherit Mr. Bennet's estate. Austen describes him as "not a sensible man, and the deficiency of nature had been but little assisted by education or society." Mr. Bennet enjoys Collins's visit to his home because he appreciates Collins's naive stupidity, but Elizabeth resents his attentions and rejects his marriage proposal. She is very distressed when her friend Charlotte Lucas decides to marry Mr. Collins out of interest in his estate rather than his personality.
Fitzwilliam Darcy
Fitzwilliam Darcy, like Elizabeth Bennet, combines in his character the prime characteristics of Pride and Prejudice: his aristocratic demeanor (pride) and his belief in the natural superiority of the wealthy landed gentry (prejudice). Darcy sometimes unconsciously assumes that a lack of money or social status are characteristics that disqualify people from marrying or loving each other. Elizabeth quickly discovers this aspect of his character, and it is her flat rejection of his first proposal of marriage that sparks his eventual change of heart. He recognizes the essential arrogance of his upbringing and repents of it; he tells Elizabeth, "By you I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased." In return for the privilege of become Elizabeth's husband, he is willing to put up with her three silly sisters, her equally silly mother, and even the scoundrel George Wickham as a brother-in-law.
Some critics maintain that this change of heart was nothing more than the uncovering of Darcy's innate characteristics. "Darcy's essential character is independent of circumstances," states Elizabeth Jenkins in her critical biography Jane Austen: A Biography. "He had the awkwardness and stiffness of a man who mixes little with society and only on his own terms, but it was also the awkwardness and stiffness that is found with Darcy's physical type, immediately recognizable among the reserved and inarticulate English of today." This analysis suggests that Darcy's character is more like that of his sister, Georgiana Darcy, a painfully shy girl. Georgiana Darcy's shyness and awkwardness and Fitzwilliam Darcy's arrogance and harshness come from the same roots. It is, however, Darcy's ability to examine his own life and recognize his flaws and his courage in approaching Elizabeth Bennet again, after she had already rejected him once, that leads to their eventual marriage and life together.
Georgiana Darcy
Georgiana Darcy is Fitzwilliam Darcy's younger sister. She is extremely shy and uncomfortable in company. Austen describes her as "tall . . . and, though little more than sixteen, her figure was formed, and her appearance womanly and graceful. She was less handsome than her brother, but there was sense and good humour in her face, and her manners were perfectly unassuming and gentle." Elizabeth Bennet expects that she will dislike Georgiana just as much as she initially dislikes her brother, but she turns out to be favorably impressed. Her impressions of Georgiana are among the first intimations Elizabeth has that her conclusions about Darcy may be wrong.
Miss Anne de Bourgh
Anne de Bourgh is the only daughter of Lady Catherine de Bourgh and the late Sir Lewis de Bourgh. Her mother plans to marry the sickly Anne to her cousin, Fitzwilliam Darcy.
Lady Catherine de Bourgh
Lady Catherine de Bourgh is Fitzwilliam Darcy's aunt. A proud, unforgiving woman, she is a control addict who likes to tell everyone what to do. She is scheming to have her nephew marry her own daughter, Anne de Bourgh, whom Austen describes as "sickly and cross." Elizabeth quickly realizes that Lady Catherine is a petty tyrant, but she seizes upon this revelation as an excuse to conclude that Fitzwilliam Darcy is himself equally flawed. Lady Catherine makes a final attempt to create a breach between Darcy and Elizabeth in the final chapters of the book, but her attempt backfires and only serves to help bring them together.
Colonel Fitzwilliam
Colonel Fitzwilliam is Darcy's cousin. He is the younger son of an earl and, although "not handsome," explains Austen, "in person and address [he was] most truly the gentleman." He develops a fondness for Elizabeth Bennet, but realistically admits that as a younger son he must marry for wealth, not love.
Mr. Edward Gardiner
Mr. Gardiner is Mrs. Bennet's brother, whom Austen describes as "a sensible, gentlemanlike man, greatly superior to his sister as well by nature as education." He and his wife take Elizabeth Bennet on a tour of Derbyshire, including a side trip to Darcy's estate at Pemberley. He also tries to help Mr. Bennet locate Wickham and Lydia after they elope. Mr. Gardner and his wife are among the few relatives Elizabeth can be assured will not embarrass her.
Mrs. M. Gardiner
Mrs. Gardiner, Edward Gardiner's wife and Elizabeth Bennet's aunt, is according to Austen "an amiable, intelligent, elegant woman, and a great favourite with all her Longbourn nieces." She accompanies Elizabeth on a tour of Fitzwilliam Darcy's estate at Pemberley.
Mr. Hurst
Mr. Hurst is the husband of Mr. Charles Bingley's sister Louisa. He is lazy, says Austen, an "indolent man who lived only to eat, drink, and play at cards, who when he found [Elizabeth to] prefer a plain dish to a ragout, had nothing to say to her."
Mrs. Louisa Hurst
Louisa Hurst is the wife of Mr. Hurst and the sister of Mr .Charles Bingley and Caroline Bingley. She plots with her sister to remove their brother's affection from Jane Bennet and transfer it to someone more suitable.
Charlotte Lucas
Charlotte Lucas is Elizabeth Bennet's best friend. She distresses Elizabeth by deciding to marry William Collins, Mr. Bennet's nephew, out of interest in his estate. Up until this point Elizabeth had respected Charlotte's sensibility, but her decision to marry Mr. Collins lost her much of Elizabeth's respect.
Lady Lucas
Lady Lucas is the wife of Sir William Lucas and mother of Elizabeth Bennet's friend Charlotte Lucas. Austen describes her as "a very good kind of woman, not too clever to be a valuable neighbor to Mrs. Bennet."
Sir William Lucas
A close neighbor of the Bennets, he earned most of his income through trade. His daughter, Charlotte, marries Mr. Collins, Mr. Bennet's heir.
Mr. Philips
Mrs. Bennet's brother-in-law, Mr. Philips is an attorney. He hosts the party at which Wickham tells Elizabeth about Darcy's withholding a promised legacy. Already having a negative first impression of Darcy, Elizabeth unquestioningly accepts Wickham's story as evidence that Darcy is a miserable person. When she discovers that it is actually Wickham who wronged Darcy, Elizabeth feels terrible for allowing her pride to interfere with an objective judgement of Darcy.
Mrs. Philips
Mrs. Bennet's sister, Mrs. Philips, is described by Austen as a silly, vulgar woman.
George Wickham
Lieutenant George Wickham is an unscrupulous man who schemes to win money by marrying a wealthy heiress. He is physically quite attractive; Austen says of him that "he had all the best part of beauty, a fine countenance, a good figure, and a very pleasing address." His father was once the steward of Darcy's estates, and Wickham plays on the relationship by trying to elope with Georgiana Darcy, Fitzwilliam Darcy's sister. Darcy gave Wickham a cash payment after Wickham turned down a comfortable church position the late Mr. Darcy provided for him. After Wickham elopes with Lydia Bennet, Darcy tracks him down, bribes him into marrying Lydia, and buys him an officer's rank in the army. Wickham is presented in the novel as a man totally without principle.
Catherine "Kitty" Bennet is virtually a nonentity in the Bennet family. Although she is the fourth sister, younger than Mary but older than Lydia, Austen reveals that she is "weak-spirited, irritable, and completely under Lydia's guidance . . . ignorant, idle, and vain." However, the end of the novel is a bit encouraging for Kitty. Jane and Elizabeth make sure that she visits both of them frequently, and they introduce her to more intelligent and entreating society. Austen notes that this change in environment has an excellent effect on Kitty.
Elizabeth Bennet
"Elizabeth 'Eliza' or 'Lizzie' Bennet," writes Elizabeth Jenkins in her critical biography Jane Austen: A Biography, "has perhaps received more admiration than any other heroine in English literature." Elizabeth is the soul of Pride and Prejudice, who reveals in her own person the very title qualities that she spots so easily in her sisters and their suitors. Elizabeth has her father, Mr. Bennet's, quick wit and ironic sense of humor. Unlike her older sister Jane, she resists accepting all people uncritically. She is quick to recognize most people's principal characteristics—for instance, she recognizes the stupidities of many members of her family and quickly characterizes Lady Catherine de Bourgh as a control addict and her sister's suitor Charles Bingley as a simple and good-hearted young man. But she is also, concludes Jenkins, "completely human. Glorious as she is, and beloved of her creator, she is kept thoroughly in her place. She was captivated by [George] Wickham, in which she showed herself no whit superior to the rest of female Meryton." When Elizabeth begins to accept her own impressions uncritically, she makes her worst mistakes.
Because Elizabeth is so keen an observer of other people, she recognizes her mother's silliness and vows not to be caught in the same trap as her father. This refusal, however, is itself a trap. By trusting entirely to her own observations (pride) and her own initial assessments of people (prejudice), Elizabeth threatens her future happiness with Fitzwilliam Darcy. "Above all," concludes Jenkins, "there is her prejudice against Darcy, and though their first encounter was markedly unfortunate, she built on it every dislike it could be made to bear; her eager condemnation of him and her no less eager remorse when she found that she had been mistaken, are equally lovable."
Jane Bennet
Jane Bennet is Elizabeth's older sister, the most beautiful and amiable of the Bennet sisters. Her father considers her too willing to please and believes that she lacks the character to deal with life's difficulties. He tells Jane, "You are . . . so complying, that nothing will ever be resolved on; so easy, that every servant will cheat you; and so generous, that you will always exceed your income." Jane eventually marries the equally amiable Charles Bingley.
Lydia Bennet
Lydia is the youngest of the Bennet daughters and perhaps the silliest. Austen describes her as "a stout, well-grown girl of fifteen, with a fine complexion and good-humoured countenance; a favorite with her mother, whose affection had brought her into public at an early age." Rather than spend any of her day receiving any sort of education, Lydia instead devotes all of her energies to collecting gossip about their neighbors, freely spending money about the town, and flirting with young men. Although all the Bennet girls are initially attracted to George Wickham, it is the headstrong Lydia who elopes with him and who is eventually married to him. Lydia's impudent actions put her sisters' marriage prospects in jeopardy, but she shows no signs of remorse; unlike Elizabeth and Darcy, she does not learn from her mistakes.
Mary Bennet
Mary Bennet is the third Bennet daughter, younger than Elizabeth and Jane and older than Catherine and Lydia. Rather than prancing around town flirting with young men, Mary considers herself an intellectual and would rather enjoy the company of a book. But Austen reveals that she overestimates her own talents and intelligence, saying that Mary "had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached."
Mr. Bennet
Austen describes Mr. Bennet, the father of the five Bennet girls (Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Catherine, and Lydia), as "so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic, humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three and twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character." He is mildly well-off. Austen reports that he has an income of two thousand pounds sterling a year, enough for his family to live comfortably—but socially he ranks toward the bottom of the scale of the landed gentry. This is one of the reasons that people like Fitzwilliam Darcy and Lady Catherine de Bourgh regard the family with some disdain.
Mr. Bennet is one of the primary means by which the author expresses her ironic wit. He shares this quality with Elizabeth, his favorite daughter. However, unlike Elizabeth's, Mr. Bennet's wit is usually expressed in sarcastic asides directed at his wife. Unlike his daughter, Mr. Bennet does not question or examine his own life, and his situation never improves. In addition, he allows his younger daughters to behave as carelessly and improperly as his wife. His inattention to his own family results in his daughter Lydia eloping with the despicable George Wickham.
Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are not well matched. Her silliness does not mix well with his sarcastic wit. Mr. Bennet recognizes this, and it is one of the reasons he instills in his daughter Elizabeth the importance of matching temperaments with her husband.
Mrs. Bennet
Mrs. Bennet, Austen reports, is "a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news." Mrs. Bennet is primarily concerned with the outer aspects of her society: the importance of marrying well in society without regard to the suitability of the personalities in the match. Neither does Mrs. Bennet have any regard for respecting proper manners and behavior. She is continually embarrassing Elizabeth and Jane with her inappropriate comments and schemes to marry off her daughters. Additionally, Elizabeth finds her mother's influence on the younger Bennet daughters particularly disturbing. Mrs. Bennet allows the younger girls to devote all their time searching for eligible young bachelors, neglecting any form of education. It is perhaps because of Mrs. Bennet's attitudes that her youngest daughter, Lydia, elopes with the despicable George Wickham.
Caroline Bingley
Caroline Bingley is the sister of Charles Bingley. She and her sister are very proud of her family's wealth—conveniently forgetting, Austen notes, "that their brother's fortune and their own had been acquired by trade." They are willing to go to great lengths to prevent his marriage into the poorer Bennet family. It is Caroline who reveals to Jane Bennet her plans to have Charles marry Fitzwilliam Darcy's sister Georgiana.
Charles Bingley
Charles Bingley is a friend of Fitzwilliam Darcy and the new occupant of the Netherfield estate, which neighbors the Bennet's home, Longbourn. It is through Bingley that Elizabeth first meets Darcy and is unimpressed by Darcy's manners. Bingley, whom Austen describes as "good-looking and gentlemanlike; he had a pleasant countenance and easy, unaffected manners," is very attracted to Jane Bennet. This affection distresses his sisters, including Caroline Bingley, and Darcy himself. They all believe that the Bennet family is too far down the social ladder to deserve such attention from him. Ironically, Charles himself has received his fortune by his family's interest in trade, considerably less respectable than Darcy's wealth inherited by birthright. Charles' sisters and Darcy deliberately give Elizabeth Bennet the impression that Bingley is to marry Darcy's sister, Georgiana, after he leaves for London. Eventually, however, Bingley returns to Netherfield and marries Jane.
Mr. William Collins
Mr. William Collins is Mr. Bennet's nephew and a clergyman. Because Mr. Bennet has no sons, Collins is in line to inherit Mr. Bennet's estate. Austen describes him as "not a sensible man, and the deficiency of nature had been but little assisted by education or society." Mr. Bennet enjoys Collins's visit to his home because he appreciates Collins's naive stupidity, but Elizabeth resents his attentions and rejects his marriage proposal. She is very distressed when her friend Charlotte Lucas decides to marry Mr. Collins out of interest in his estate rather than his personality.
Fitzwilliam Darcy
Fitzwilliam Darcy, like Elizabeth Bennet, combines in his character the prime characteristics of Pride and Prejudice: his aristocratic demeanor (pride) and his belief in the natural superiority of the wealthy landed gentry (prejudice). Darcy sometimes unconsciously assumes that a lack of money or social status are characteristics that disqualify people from marrying or loving each other. Elizabeth quickly discovers this aspect of his character, and it is her flat rejection of his first proposal of marriage that sparks his eventual change of heart. He recognizes the essential arrogance of his upbringing and repents of it; he tells Elizabeth, "By you I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased." In return for the privilege of become Elizabeth's husband, he is willing to put up with her three silly sisters, her equally silly mother, and even the scoundrel George Wickham as a brother-in-law.
Some critics maintain that this change of heart was nothing more than the uncovering of Darcy's innate characteristics. "Darcy's essential character is independent of circumstances," states Elizabeth Jenkins in her critical biography Jane Austen: A Biography. "He had the awkwardness and stiffness of a man who mixes little with society and only on his own terms, but it was also the awkwardness and stiffness that is found with Darcy's physical type, immediately recognizable among the reserved and inarticulate English of today." This analysis suggests that Darcy's character is more like that of his sister, Georgiana Darcy, a painfully shy girl. Georgiana Darcy's shyness and awkwardness and Fitzwilliam Darcy's arrogance and harshness come from the same roots. It is, however, Darcy's ability to examine his own life and recognize his flaws and his courage in approaching Elizabeth Bennet again, after she had already rejected him once, that leads to their eventual marriage and life together.
Georgiana Darcy
Georgiana Darcy is Fitzwilliam Darcy's younger sister. She is extremely shy and uncomfortable in company. Austen describes her as "tall . . . and, though little more than sixteen, her figure was formed, and her appearance womanly and graceful. She was less handsome than her brother, but there was sense and good humour in her face, and her manners were perfectly unassuming and gentle." Elizabeth Bennet expects that she will dislike Georgiana just as much as she initially dislikes her brother, but she turns out to be favorably impressed. Her impressions of Georgiana are among the first intimations Elizabeth has that her conclusions about Darcy may be wrong.
Miss Anne de Bourgh
Anne de Bourgh is the only daughter of Lady Catherine de Bourgh and the late Sir Lewis de Bourgh. Her mother plans to marry the sickly Anne to her cousin, Fitzwilliam Darcy.
Lady Catherine de Bourgh
Lady Catherine de Bourgh is Fitzwilliam Darcy's aunt. A proud, unforgiving woman, she is a control addict who likes to tell everyone what to do. She is scheming to have her nephew marry her own daughter, Anne de Bourgh, whom Austen describes as "sickly and cross." Elizabeth quickly realizes that Lady Catherine is a petty tyrant, but she seizes upon this revelation as an excuse to conclude that Fitzwilliam Darcy is himself equally flawed. Lady Catherine makes a final attempt to create a breach between Darcy and Elizabeth in the final chapters of the book, but her attempt backfires and only serves to help bring them together.
Colonel Fitzwilliam
Colonel Fitzwilliam is Darcy's cousin. He is the younger son of an earl and, although "not handsome," explains Austen, "in person and address [he was] most truly the gentleman." He develops a fondness for Elizabeth Bennet, but realistically admits that as a younger son he must marry for wealth, not love.
Mr. Edward Gardiner
Mr. Gardiner is Mrs. Bennet's brother, whom Austen describes as "a sensible, gentlemanlike man, greatly superior to his sister as well by nature as education." He and his wife take Elizabeth Bennet on a tour of Derbyshire, including a side trip to Darcy's estate at Pemberley. He also tries to help Mr. Bennet locate Wickham and Lydia after they elope. Mr. Gardner and his wife are among the few relatives Elizabeth can be assured will not embarrass her.
Mrs. M. Gardiner
Mrs. Gardiner, Edward Gardiner's wife and Elizabeth Bennet's aunt, is according to Austen "an amiable, intelligent, elegant woman, and a great favourite with all her Longbourn nieces." She accompanies Elizabeth on a tour of Fitzwilliam Darcy's estate at Pemberley.
Mr. Hurst
Mr. Hurst is the husband of Mr. Charles Bingley's sister Louisa. He is lazy, says Austen, an "indolent man who lived only to eat, drink, and play at cards, who when he found [Elizabeth to] prefer a plain dish to a ragout, had nothing to say to her."
Mrs. Louisa Hurst
Louisa Hurst is the wife of Mr. Hurst and the sister of Mr .Charles Bingley and Caroline Bingley. She plots with her sister to remove their brother's affection from Jane Bennet and transfer it to someone more suitable.
Charlotte Lucas
Charlotte Lucas is Elizabeth Bennet's best friend. She distresses Elizabeth by deciding to marry William Collins, Mr. Bennet's nephew, out of interest in his estate. Up until this point Elizabeth had respected Charlotte's sensibility, but her decision to marry Mr. Collins lost her much of Elizabeth's respect.
Lady Lucas
Lady Lucas is the wife of Sir William Lucas and mother of Elizabeth Bennet's friend Charlotte Lucas. Austen describes her as "a very good kind of woman, not too clever to be a valuable neighbor to Mrs. Bennet."
Sir William Lucas
A close neighbor of the Bennets, he earned most of his income through trade. His daughter, Charlotte, marries Mr. Collins, Mr. Bennet's heir.
Mr. Philips
Mrs. Bennet's brother-in-law, Mr. Philips is an attorney. He hosts the party at which Wickham tells Elizabeth about Darcy's withholding a promised legacy. Already having a negative first impression of Darcy, Elizabeth unquestioningly accepts Wickham's story as evidence that Darcy is a miserable person. When she discovers that it is actually Wickham who wronged Darcy, Elizabeth feels terrible for allowing her pride to interfere with an objective judgement of Darcy.
Mrs. Philips
Mrs. Bennet's sister, Mrs. Philips, is described by Austen as a silly, vulgar woman.
George Wickham
Lieutenant George Wickham is an unscrupulous man who schemes to win money by marrying a wealthy heiress. He is physically quite attractive; Austen says of him that "he had all the best part of beauty, a fine countenance, a good figure, and a very pleasing address." His father was once the steward of Darcy's estates, and Wickham plays on the relationship by trying to elope with Georgiana Darcy, Fitzwilliam Darcy's sister. Darcy gave Wickham a cash payment after Wickham turned down a comfortable church position the late Mr. Darcy provided for him. After Wickham elopes with Lydia Bennet, Darcy tracks him down, bribes him into marrying Lydia, and buys him an officer's rank in the army. Wickham is presented in the novel as a man totally without principle.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: THEMES
PRIDE
The two major themes of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice are summed up in the title. The first aspect can be traced in the actions and statements of all of the work's major and many of its minor characters. Pride is the character flaw that causes Elizabeth Bennet to dislike Fitzwilliam Darcy upon their first meeting. She perceives in him a cold aloofness that she attributes to his own inflated opinion of himself. Yet Elizabeth herself also suffers from the same flaw; her pride in her own ability to analyze character is such that she refuses to reevaluate Darcy in the face of evidence in his favor.
In some characters, Austen depicts pride overtly. Lady Charlotte de Bourgh is motivated by pride in her family's status to try to break up a potential match between Elizabeth and Darcy. Mrs. Louisa Hurst and Caroline Bingley try to achieve the same effect with the relationship between their brother Charles Bingley and Jane Bennet. In each case, however, Austen depicts the pride of these minor characters as ridiculous: "Austen treats pride," writes Robert B. Heilman in "E pluribus unum: Parts and Whole in Pride and Prejudice" "as if it were wholly unproblematic, a failing no less clear-cut than prejudice."
In the case of Elizabeth and Darcy, however, Austen treats pride less directly. On his first appearance in the novel, Darcy appears "above his company and above being pleased," reports Heilman, the "proudest, most disagreeable man in the world." The people who record these observations, the critic continues, "believe that they are seeing a sense of superiority, snobbishness, excessive self-approval." However, they do not take into consideration that some of the other behavior that Darcy exhibits, such as "reserve, an apparent unresponsiveness to overtures, a holding back from conventional intercourse, pleasantries, and small talk," may actually stem from a quiet personality. So what appears to be pride may be simple shyness or awkwardness. When Elizabeth and others consider Darcy full of pride, they are also condemning him, says Heilman, for not obeying the rules of the "neighborhood social ways." For Darcy and Elizabeth, at least, pride can be more than a simple negative quality.
In fact, pride serves several different functions in the novel. In addition to the misplaced pride of the minor characters, there are characters who negleet to honor their pride when they should protect it. Elizabeth's friend Charlotte Lucas decides to marry William Collins, the heir to Mr. Bennet's estate, out of a simple desire to make his estate her own. Elizabeth strongly objects to such a union; it offends her sense of pride for someone to enter into a loveless marriage for purely material purposes. The George Wickham-Lydia Bennet elopement is another example of an arrangement where pride should have been taken into consideration and was not. In this way, Heilman states, Austen defines pride as "the acceptance of responsibility. This indispensably fills out a story that has devoted a good deal of time to the view of pride as an easy and blind self-esteem." Gradually, even Darcy and Elizabeth herself come to a realization of the necessity not to reject pride, but to control it.
PREJUDICE AND TOLERANCE
The subject of prejudice is linked to pride in the title of Pride and Prejudice. It is also more directly linked to Elizabeth Bennet's character. From the beginning, states Marvin Mudrick in "Irony as Discrimination: Pride and Prejudice," "Elizabeth sets herself up as an ironic spectator, able and prepared to judge and classify, already making the first large division of the world into two sorts of people: the simple ones, those who give themselves away out of shallowness (as Bingley fears) or perhaps openness (as Elizabeth implies) or an excess of affection (as Mr. Collins will demonstrate); and the intricate ones, those who cannot be judged and classified so easily, who are 'the most amusing' to the ironic spectator because they offer the most formidable challenge to his powers of detection and analysis." EIizabeth is prepared to divide the entire world into one of these two categories—an extreme example of prejudice in the "pre-judging" sense of the term. It is most evident in her judgment of Darcy, so sure is she of her powers of observation that she refuses to reevaluate Darcy even when the weight of evidence begins to turn in favor of him.
It is not until Darcy overcomes his own prejudice against those of lower social station—by treating Elizabeth and the Gardiners graciously and considerately at Netherfield—that Elizabeth's opinion of him begins to change. "Not only do Elizabeth and Darcy . . . have the most serious problem of surmounting barriers of misconception and adverse feeling," Heilman declares, "but they are the most sensitive—both in susceptibility to injured feelings and in capacity for getting to the center of things—to matters of prejudice and pride." The ending "is a remarkable tracing of Elizabeth's coming around to a completely changed point of view," the critic concludes. "To Jane she acknowledges that she has cultivated her 'prejudices' and has been 'weak and vain and nonsensical.'" With this realization, Elizabeth begins the process of change that will eventually bring herself and Darcy together.
CHANGE AND TRANSFORMATION
The major characters of the novel suffer from a combination of the two title characteristics of Pride and Prejudice. What separates Elizabeth and Darcy from the silly minor characters, such as Wickham, Lydia, Mr. Collins, and Lady Catherine, and even from the good minor characters such as Mr. Bennet, Jane, and Charles Bingley, is their ability and willingness to learn and grow, to overcome their initial shortcomings. They mature and come to a better understanding of each other by the novel's end through a slow and painful growth process.
Darcy begins his process of transformation with Elizabeth's rejection of his suit. He makes his proposal to her clumsily, stressing his own wealth and position (and minimizing hers) and stating that he has tried to suppress his feelings because of the low position of her family. When Elizabeth indignantly rejects his hand,accusing him of arrogance and selfishness, Darcy begins a process of reevaluation of his behavior. When he next appears in the story—at the beginning of Volume 3—he is much friendlier and more attentive to Elizabeth. She begins to feel an attraction to him that is not fully realized until the Wickham-Lydia elopement is fully resolved. Darcy completes his transformation by swallowing his pride and proposing to Elizabeth again, in spite of the fact that her acceptance will make the silly Bennet girls his sisters-in-law and the detestable Wickham his brother-in-law.
Elizabeth's process of transformation begins later and takes longer. She realizes her own prejudices toward Darcy in Chapter 12 of Volume 2, when he gives her the letter in which he reveals the truth about Wickham and his role in the breakup of the Bingley-Jane relationship. She does not complete the change, however, until the end of Volume 3, when Lady Catherine de Bourgh demands assurances from her that she will not accept a proposal from him. Elizabeth refuses, and by doing so gives Darcy his first hint that his feelings for her are at last reciprocated. "By a slow revision of preconceptions," concludes Heilman, "Elizabeth and Darcy 'earn' the better insight and rapport that insight makes possible."
WEALTH AND CLASS
Wealth and class are correlated, but at the time of the novel's action, that correlation is beginning to break down. For centuries, England's economy depended on agriculture, and by and large wealth belonged to those who owned large country estates. With the industrial revolution, however, wealth has begun to concentrate in the cities, and members of the middle class can become rich through "trade." This new social mobility has forced the gentry into a defensive posture, and they are more sensitive to questions of class than ever. Mr. Collins warns Lizzy, for instance, that Lady Catherine "likes to have the distinction of rank preserved."
One of the Bennet girls' uncles is an attorney, and the other - Mr. Gardiner - is "in trade" in London; as Darcy points out, the girls' "low connections . . . must very materially lessen their chance of marrying men of any consideration in the world." When it appears, however, that Mr. Gardiner has bribed Wickham to marry Lydia, Mr. Bennet wonders how he will ever repay him. The tradesman Mr. Gardiner, that is, seems to have more liquid capital than the landed gentleman Mr. Bennet. "Men of consideration" would thus object, not to Mr. Gardiner's lack of money, nor to his manners, which are impeccable, but to his station in life - that he was not born to wealth and works for a living.
Bingley's father also made his fortune in trade. The size of that fortune, however, and the fact that Bingley inherited it instead of earning it himself, seem to cleanse it of its unpalatable associations. Nonetheless, Bingley's sisters are anxious that he should buy a large country estate, which will legitimize his wealth.
Austen clearly intends to undermine these class distinctions. The oldest Bennet girls do indeed marry men of consideration, and outside the two central couples, the Gardiners are the most admirable characters in the book - certainly more admirable than the titled Lady Catherine. Still, Austen cannot resist drawing her hero, Mr. Darcy, from the upper classes. Her social attitudes may be progressive, but they are not revolutionary.
MARRIAGE
Pride and Prejudice's famous first sentence declares the centrality of marriage to the storyline. In the course of the book - which spans a little less than a year - four marriages in fact take place: three of the Bennet girls' and Charlotte Lucas's. More are plotted: Lady Catherine schemes that Darcy should marry her daughter; Miss Bingley schemes to marry Darcy, and to get her brother married to Darcy's sister; Mr. Collins actually proposes to Lizzy; and Wickham fixes his attentions on Darcy's sister, Lizzy, and the fleetingly glimpsed Miss King before finally being persuaded to marry Lydia.In England in the late 18th and early 19th century, marriage among the wealthy was viewed as a kind of financial merger. When Darcy and Ann De Bourgh were infants, their mothers had already decided they would marry - and not, obviously, on the basis of personal affinity and sexual attraction. A little farther down the social ladder, Mrs. Bennet is furious when Lizzy refuses Mr. Collins's proposal: the thought of pawning her daughter off on a buffoon is negligible beside the prospect of keeping Mr. Bennet's estate - which Collins will inherit - in the family.
Austen is obviously unsympathetic to this view of marriage. Charlotte's decision to marry Mr. Collins damages her friendship with Lizzy, who repeatedly characterizes her motives as "mercenary," and when Lizzy visits the newlyweds at the Hunsford parsonage, she quickly deduces that Charlotte has arranged household affairs such that she spends as little time with her husband as possible.
But neither is Austen a romantic. Lydia loves Wickham wholeheartedly, but their marriage is a disaster. Mr. Bennet, too, married because he was "captivated by youth and beauty," but his wife's foolishness "had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her." The book's two successful marriages - Lizzy's and Jane's - follow long delays, reversals of opinion, and several tests of both character and commitment.
Toward the end of the book, moreover, Jane asks Lizzy how long she has loved Darcy. When Lizzy replies, "I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley," we suspect she is only half-joking. Austen seems to suggest that, while economic motives for marriage should not be decisive, neither should they be despised.
THE RIGHTS, STATUS, AND EDUCATION OF WOMEN
In Pride and Prejudice, the stakes of the marriage plots are high because Mr. Bennet's estate has been "entailed away from the female line" - a common legal provision of the period whereby only men may inherit property. If the Bennet girls do not marry well, they will be almost penniless when their father dies. The fact that the heir of the estate, Mr. Bennet's nephew Mr. Collins, is a buffoon who already has a comfortable living of his own, might suggest that Austen considers entailment unfair.
Critics have pointed out, however, that only two characters in the book - Mrs. Bennet and Lady Catherine - actually object to the entail, and that they are scarcely less ridiculous than Collins. It seems unlikely that Austen would make them the mouthpieces for her own opinions.
If Austen is equivocal about women's political equality, however, she insists on their intellectual equality. At the time of the novel, the education of gentlewomen was intended to equip them to be good wives, and it emphasized decorative arts and household management. Bingley mockingly describes the conventional "accomplishments" of women as "painting tables" and "netting purses"; his sister Caroline rejoins that a truly "accomplished" woman must also have "a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages."
By these standards, Lizzy is undistinguished: she has neither been to a women's boarding school nor had a governess; her musical performance is "pleasing, but by no means capital"; and she astonishes Lady Catherine with the admission that she cannot draw. Nonetheless, when she asks Darcy what attracted him to her, he responds, "the liveliness of your mind, I think."
When Lizzy rejects Collins's marriage proposal, he simply cannot believe she is serious, ascribing her refusal to the "wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females." In reply, she says, "Do not consider me now as an elegant female . . . but as a rational creature." Most critics agree that the phrase "rational creature" intentionally employs terminology Mary Wollstonecraft introduced in her seminal feminist tract A Vindication of the Rights of Women. The exchange would then explicitly reject the conventional view of women as nothing more than contestants in the marriage lottery, armed only with studied coquettishness and the ability to "knit purses."
PERSONAL AUTONOMY
A related but distinct theme is that of personal autonomy. In many ways, Lizzy is a champion of individualism. When Caroline Bingley derides her decision to walk three miles to Netherfield as showing "an abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country town indifference to decorum," we cannot, given the source, be expected to agree. Similarly, during the climactic final confrontation in which Lady Catherine attempts to dissuade Lizzy from marrying Darcy by appealing to "the claims of duty, honor, and gratitude," Lizzy replies, "I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness." And while Lizzy's witticisms sometimes seem to test the bounds of propriety - as when she teases Bingley for the transparency of his character - it is her "liveliness of mind" that first attracts her fabulously eligible husband.
But just as Austen urges compromise on the questions of class, marriage, and women's rights, so does she point up the limits of personal autonomy. By withdrawing into his private world of contemplation and ironic distance, for example, Mr. Bennet has neglected his duties as parent and estate manager, leading to both Lydia's near-catastrophic unruliness and his daughters' vulnerability to the entail. Lydia, for that matter, is a monster of autonomy, whose unrestrained pursuit of personal satisfaction ruins her own future and nearly ruins her sisters'. Lizzy's dispositional similarity to her father, and the attraction to Wickham that she shares with Lydia, suggest that she could fall into the errors of both. It is precisely her determination to rely on - as she says to Lady Catherine - "her own opinion" that initially blinds her to Darcy's virtues. Critics have suggested that, according to the moral scheme of the novel, her subsequent recognition of the limits of her autonomy is what finally earns her the right to a happy ending.
IRONY AND SATIRE
Irony and satire are techniques that not only Austen but her characters - particularly Lizzy and her father - employ throughout the book. Lizzy, we are told, has "a lively, playful disposition, which delights in anything ridiculous," and Mr. Bennet later says to her, "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?" Mr. Bennet invites Collins to visit purely in the hope of finding him absurd, and Lizzy subtly taunts Lady Catherine by flouting her expectation of deference.
The technical definition of "irony" is "the expression of meaning using language of a different or opposite tendency," as when Lizzy, refusing to dance with Darcy, tells Sir William that "Mr. Darcy is all politeness," or when, at the end of the book, Mr. Bennet says, "I admire all my three sons-in-law," but "Wickham perhaps is my favorite." Irony can be seen, however, as acknowledging a multiplicity of perspectives simultaneously; its prominence in a novel so concerned with the difference between real and perceived value is thus no accident. Before Wickham's true character had been exposed, for example, Lizzy told her aunt, in all seriousness, that "my father . . . is partial to Mr. Wickham." Mr. Bennet's later declaration of a favorite son-in-law is a joke, but it also illustrates the reorientation of the book's value system through the resolution of the marriage plot.
The two major themes of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice are summed up in the title. The first aspect can be traced in the actions and statements of all of the work's major and many of its minor characters. Pride is the character flaw that causes Elizabeth Bennet to dislike Fitzwilliam Darcy upon their first meeting. She perceives in him a cold aloofness that she attributes to his own inflated opinion of himself. Yet Elizabeth herself also suffers from the same flaw; her pride in her own ability to analyze character is such that she refuses to reevaluate Darcy in the face of evidence in his favor.
In some characters, Austen depicts pride overtly. Lady Charlotte de Bourgh is motivated by pride in her family's status to try to break up a potential match between Elizabeth and Darcy. Mrs. Louisa Hurst and Caroline Bingley try to achieve the same effect with the relationship between their brother Charles Bingley and Jane Bennet. In each case, however, Austen depicts the pride of these minor characters as ridiculous: "Austen treats pride," writes Robert B. Heilman in "E pluribus unum: Parts and Whole in Pride and Prejudice" "as if it were wholly unproblematic, a failing no less clear-cut than prejudice."
In the case of Elizabeth and Darcy, however, Austen treats pride less directly. On his first appearance in the novel, Darcy appears "above his company and above being pleased," reports Heilman, the "proudest, most disagreeable man in the world." The people who record these observations, the critic continues, "believe that they are seeing a sense of superiority, snobbishness, excessive self-approval." However, they do not take into consideration that some of the other behavior that Darcy exhibits, such as "reserve, an apparent unresponsiveness to overtures, a holding back from conventional intercourse, pleasantries, and small talk," may actually stem from a quiet personality. So what appears to be pride may be simple shyness or awkwardness. When Elizabeth and others consider Darcy full of pride, they are also condemning him, says Heilman, for not obeying the rules of the "neighborhood social ways." For Darcy and Elizabeth, at least, pride can be more than a simple negative quality.
In fact, pride serves several different functions in the novel. In addition to the misplaced pride of the minor characters, there are characters who negleet to honor their pride when they should protect it. Elizabeth's friend Charlotte Lucas decides to marry William Collins, the heir to Mr. Bennet's estate, out of a simple desire to make his estate her own. Elizabeth strongly objects to such a union; it offends her sense of pride for someone to enter into a loveless marriage for purely material purposes. The George Wickham-Lydia Bennet elopement is another example of an arrangement where pride should have been taken into consideration and was not. In this way, Heilman states, Austen defines pride as "the acceptance of responsibility. This indispensably fills out a story that has devoted a good deal of time to the view of pride as an easy and blind self-esteem." Gradually, even Darcy and Elizabeth herself come to a realization of the necessity not to reject pride, but to control it.
PREJUDICE AND TOLERANCE
The subject of prejudice is linked to pride in the title of Pride and Prejudice. It is also more directly linked to Elizabeth Bennet's character. From the beginning, states Marvin Mudrick in "Irony as Discrimination: Pride and Prejudice," "Elizabeth sets herself up as an ironic spectator, able and prepared to judge and classify, already making the first large division of the world into two sorts of people: the simple ones, those who give themselves away out of shallowness (as Bingley fears) or perhaps openness (as Elizabeth implies) or an excess of affection (as Mr. Collins will demonstrate); and the intricate ones, those who cannot be judged and classified so easily, who are 'the most amusing' to the ironic spectator because they offer the most formidable challenge to his powers of detection and analysis." EIizabeth is prepared to divide the entire world into one of these two categories—an extreme example of prejudice in the "pre-judging" sense of the term. It is most evident in her judgment of Darcy, so sure is she of her powers of observation that she refuses to reevaluate Darcy even when the weight of evidence begins to turn in favor of him.
It is not until Darcy overcomes his own prejudice against those of lower social station—by treating Elizabeth and the Gardiners graciously and considerately at Netherfield—that Elizabeth's opinion of him begins to change. "Not only do Elizabeth and Darcy . . . have the most serious problem of surmounting barriers of misconception and adverse feeling," Heilman declares, "but they are the most sensitive—both in susceptibility to injured feelings and in capacity for getting to the center of things—to matters of prejudice and pride." The ending "is a remarkable tracing of Elizabeth's coming around to a completely changed point of view," the critic concludes. "To Jane she acknowledges that she has cultivated her 'prejudices' and has been 'weak and vain and nonsensical.'" With this realization, Elizabeth begins the process of change that will eventually bring herself and Darcy together.
CHANGE AND TRANSFORMATION
The major characters of the novel suffer from a combination of the two title characteristics of Pride and Prejudice. What separates Elizabeth and Darcy from the silly minor characters, such as Wickham, Lydia, Mr. Collins, and Lady Catherine, and even from the good minor characters such as Mr. Bennet, Jane, and Charles Bingley, is their ability and willingness to learn and grow, to overcome their initial shortcomings. They mature and come to a better understanding of each other by the novel's end through a slow and painful growth process.
Darcy begins his process of transformation with Elizabeth's rejection of his suit. He makes his proposal to her clumsily, stressing his own wealth and position (and minimizing hers) and stating that he has tried to suppress his feelings because of the low position of her family. When Elizabeth indignantly rejects his hand,accusing him of arrogance and selfishness, Darcy begins a process of reevaluation of his behavior. When he next appears in the story—at the beginning of Volume 3—he is much friendlier and more attentive to Elizabeth. She begins to feel an attraction to him that is not fully realized until the Wickham-Lydia elopement is fully resolved. Darcy completes his transformation by swallowing his pride and proposing to Elizabeth again, in spite of the fact that her acceptance will make the silly Bennet girls his sisters-in-law and the detestable Wickham his brother-in-law.
Elizabeth's process of transformation begins later and takes longer. She realizes her own prejudices toward Darcy in Chapter 12 of Volume 2, when he gives her the letter in which he reveals the truth about Wickham and his role in the breakup of the Bingley-Jane relationship. She does not complete the change, however, until the end of Volume 3, when Lady Catherine de Bourgh demands assurances from her that she will not accept a proposal from him. Elizabeth refuses, and by doing so gives Darcy his first hint that his feelings for her are at last reciprocated. "By a slow revision of preconceptions," concludes Heilman, "Elizabeth and Darcy 'earn' the better insight and rapport that insight makes possible."
WEALTH AND CLASS
Wealth and class are correlated, but at the time of the novel's action, that correlation is beginning to break down. For centuries, England's economy depended on agriculture, and by and large wealth belonged to those who owned large country estates. With the industrial revolution, however, wealth has begun to concentrate in the cities, and members of the middle class can become rich through "trade." This new social mobility has forced the gentry into a defensive posture, and they are more sensitive to questions of class than ever. Mr. Collins warns Lizzy, for instance, that Lady Catherine "likes to have the distinction of rank preserved."
One of the Bennet girls' uncles is an attorney, and the other - Mr. Gardiner - is "in trade" in London; as Darcy points out, the girls' "low connections . . . must very materially lessen their chance of marrying men of any consideration in the world." When it appears, however, that Mr. Gardiner has bribed Wickham to marry Lydia, Mr. Bennet wonders how he will ever repay him. The tradesman Mr. Gardiner, that is, seems to have more liquid capital than the landed gentleman Mr. Bennet. "Men of consideration" would thus object, not to Mr. Gardiner's lack of money, nor to his manners, which are impeccable, but to his station in life - that he was not born to wealth and works for a living.
Bingley's father also made his fortune in trade. The size of that fortune, however, and the fact that Bingley inherited it instead of earning it himself, seem to cleanse it of its unpalatable associations. Nonetheless, Bingley's sisters are anxious that he should buy a large country estate, which will legitimize his wealth.
Austen clearly intends to undermine these class distinctions. The oldest Bennet girls do indeed marry men of consideration, and outside the two central couples, the Gardiners are the most admirable characters in the book - certainly more admirable than the titled Lady Catherine. Still, Austen cannot resist drawing her hero, Mr. Darcy, from the upper classes. Her social attitudes may be progressive, but they are not revolutionary.
MARRIAGE
Pride and Prejudice's famous first sentence declares the centrality of marriage to the storyline. In the course of the book - which spans a little less than a year - four marriages in fact take place: three of the Bennet girls' and Charlotte Lucas's. More are plotted: Lady Catherine schemes that Darcy should marry her daughter; Miss Bingley schemes to marry Darcy, and to get her brother married to Darcy's sister; Mr. Collins actually proposes to Lizzy; and Wickham fixes his attentions on Darcy's sister, Lizzy, and the fleetingly glimpsed Miss King before finally being persuaded to marry Lydia.In England in the late 18th and early 19th century, marriage among the wealthy was viewed as a kind of financial merger. When Darcy and Ann De Bourgh were infants, their mothers had already decided they would marry - and not, obviously, on the basis of personal affinity and sexual attraction. A little farther down the social ladder, Mrs. Bennet is furious when Lizzy refuses Mr. Collins's proposal: the thought of pawning her daughter off on a buffoon is negligible beside the prospect of keeping Mr. Bennet's estate - which Collins will inherit - in the family.
Austen is obviously unsympathetic to this view of marriage. Charlotte's decision to marry Mr. Collins damages her friendship with Lizzy, who repeatedly characterizes her motives as "mercenary," and when Lizzy visits the newlyweds at the Hunsford parsonage, she quickly deduces that Charlotte has arranged household affairs such that she spends as little time with her husband as possible.
But neither is Austen a romantic. Lydia loves Wickham wholeheartedly, but their marriage is a disaster. Mr. Bennet, too, married because he was "captivated by youth and beauty," but his wife's foolishness "had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her." The book's two successful marriages - Lizzy's and Jane's - follow long delays, reversals of opinion, and several tests of both character and commitment.
Toward the end of the book, moreover, Jane asks Lizzy how long she has loved Darcy. When Lizzy replies, "I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley," we suspect she is only half-joking. Austen seems to suggest that, while economic motives for marriage should not be decisive, neither should they be despised.
THE RIGHTS, STATUS, AND EDUCATION OF WOMEN
In Pride and Prejudice, the stakes of the marriage plots are high because Mr. Bennet's estate has been "entailed away from the female line" - a common legal provision of the period whereby only men may inherit property. If the Bennet girls do not marry well, they will be almost penniless when their father dies. The fact that the heir of the estate, Mr. Bennet's nephew Mr. Collins, is a buffoon who already has a comfortable living of his own, might suggest that Austen considers entailment unfair.
Critics have pointed out, however, that only two characters in the book - Mrs. Bennet and Lady Catherine - actually object to the entail, and that they are scarcely less ridiculous than Collins. It seems unlikely that Austen would make them the mouthpieces for her own opinions.
If Austen is equivocal about women's political equality, however, she insists on their intellectual equality. At the time of the novel, the education of gentlewomen was intended to equip them to be good wives, and it emphasized decorative arts and household management. Bingley mockingly describes the conventional "accomplishments" of women as "painting tables" and "netting purses"; his sister Caroline rejoins that a truly "accomplished" woman must also have "a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages."
By these standards, Lizzy is undistinguished: she has neither been to a women's boarding school nor had a governess; her musical performance is "pleasing, but by no means capital"; and she astonishes Lady Catherine with the admission that she cannot draw. Nonetheless, when she asks Darcy what attracted him to her, he responds, "the liveliness of your mind, I think."
When Lizzy rejects Collins's marriage proposal, he simply cannot believe she is serious, ascribing her refusal to the "wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females." In reply, she says, "Do not consider me now as an elegant female . . . but as a rational creature." Most critics agree that the phrase "rational creature" intentionally employs terminology Mary Wollstonecraft introduced in her seminal feminist tract A Vindication of the Rights of Women. The exchange would then explicitly reject the conventional view of women as nothing more than contestants in the marriage lottery, armed only with studied coquettishness and the ability to "knit purses."
PERSONAL AUTONOMY
A related but distinct theme is that of personal autonomy. In many ways, Lizzy is a champion of individualism. When Caroline Bingley derides her decision to walk three miles to Netherfield as showing "an abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country town indifference to decorum," we cannot, given the source, be expected to agree. Similarly, during the climactic final confrontation in which Lady Catherine attempts to dissuade Lizzy from marrying Darcy by appealing to "the claims of duty, honor, and gratitude," Lizzy replies, "I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness." And while Lizzy's witticisms sometimes seem to test the bounds of propriety - as when she teases Bingley for the transparency of his character - it is her "liveliness of mind" that first attracts her fabulously eligible husband.
But just as Austen urges compromise on the questions of class, marriage, and women's rights, so does she point up the limits of personal autonomy. By withdrawing into his private world of contemplation and ironic distance, for example, Mr. Bennet has neglected his duties as parent and estate manager, leading to both Lydia's near-catastrophic unruliness and his daughters' vulnerability to the entail. Lydia, for that matter, is a monster of autonomy, whose unrestrained pursuit of personal satisfaction ruins her own future and nearly ruins her sisters'. Lizzy's dispositional similarity to her father, and the attraction to Wickham that she shares with Lydia, suggest that she could fall into the errors of both. It is precisely her determination to rely on - as she says to Lady Catherine - "her own opinion" that initially blinds her to Darcy's virtues. Critics have suggested that, according to the moral scheme of the novel, her subsequent recognition of the limits of her autonomy is what finally earns her the right to a happy ending.
IRONY AND SATIRE
Irony and satire are techniques that not only Austen but her characters - particularly Lizzy and her father - employ throughout the book. Lizzy, we are told, has "a lively, playful disposition, which delights in anything ridiculous," and Mr. Bennet later says to her, "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?" Mr. Bennet invites Collins to visit purely in the hope of finding him absurd, and Lizzy subtly taunts Lady Catherine by flouting her expectation of deference.
The technical definition of "irony" is "the expression of meaning using language of a different or opposite tendency," as when Lizzy, refusing to dance with Darcy, tells Sir William that "Mr. Darcy is all politeness," or when, at the end of the book, Mr. Bennet says, "I admire all my three sons-in-law," but "Wickham perhaps is my favorite." Irony can be seen, however, as acknowledging a multiplicity of perspectives simultaneously; its prominence in a novel so concerned with the difference between real and perceived value is thus no accident. Before Wickham's true character had been exposed, for example, Lizzy told her aunt, in all seriousness, that "my father . . . is partial to Mr. Wickham." Mr. Bennet's later declaration of a favorite son-in-law is a joke, but it also illustrates the reorientation of the book's value system through the resolution of the marriage plot.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: STYLE
ROMANTICISM
The novel Pride and Prejudice was written during the middle of the Romantic period in western literature, but it is itself rather uncharacteristic of other fictional works of the period. Unlike the great Romantic novels and poems of the period, which usually praised youthful passions, Austen's work minimizes them. Compared to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's classic sturm und drang novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), in which the young hero is unsuccessful at love and, unable to make his inner visions conform to the reality of the outer world, finally commits suicide, Austen's works are models of restraint. Instead of the wild forces of nature, Austen concentrates on family life in small English towns. Instead of rampant emotionalism, Austen emphasizes a balance between reason and emotion. Instead of suicide and unrequited love, Austen offers elopement and marriage. Although the author does consider some of the same themes as her Romantic contemporaries—the importance of the individual, for instance—Austen's society is altogether more controlled and settled than the world presented in Romantic fiction.
IRONY
Irony, or the contrast between the expected and the actual, is the chief literary device Austen uses to comment on the small, enclosed world of the English gentry in Pride and Prejudice. Her irony takes different forms for different characters. Perhaps the most ironic character in the entire book is Mr. Bennet, father of the five Bennet sisters. Mr. Bennet is married to a silly woman he cannot respect, who centers her life on marrying her daughters off to wealthy, well-bred men. He expresses his discontent in the marriage by criticizing his wife's stream of comments. Many of these are sarcastic and hurtful, and contribute to the misunderstandings between the couple that leave them incapable of dealing with the disastrous elopement of their youngest daughter Lydia with the detestable George Wickham. Mr. Bennet's conscious use of irony is for him a game—it serves no useful purpose.
For the author, in the persona of Mr. Bennet's daughter Elizabeth, however, irony is both a toy and a defensive weapon in the war against stupidity. The author uses Elizabeth to skewer self-important characters such as Mr. Collins and Mrs. Bennet. Yet Elizabeth is also blind to her own character faults, and her very blindness is another example of Austen's use of irony. In her misunderstandings with Darcy, she (who is blind to her own pride in her ability to read character) accuses him of excessive pride, while he (who is prejudiced against people with less money than he has) accuses her of prejudice. The on-again, off-again love between Jane Bennet and Charles Bingley is also an example of Austen's use of irony to underline messages about love and marriage. "Jane and Bingley provide us, then, with one of the book's primary ironies," writes Marvin Mudrick in "Irony as Discrimination: Pride and Prejudice," "that love is simple, straightforward, and immediate only for very simple people." "In Pride and Prejudice," concludes Mudrick, "Jane Austen's irony has developed into an instrument of discrimination between the people who are simple reproductions of the social type and the people with individuality and will, between the unaware and the aware."
Other examples of Austen's use of irony abound in the novel. "Many pages of Pride and Prejudice can be read as sheer poetry of wit, as [Alexander] Pope without couplets," writes Reuben A. Brower in "Light and Bright and Sparkling: Irony and Fiction in Pride and Prejudice." "The triumph of the novel—whatever its limitations may be—lies in combining such poetry of wit," the critic concludes, "with the dramatic structure of fiction."
The novel Pride and Prejudice was written during the middle of the Romantic period in western literature, but it is itself rather uncharacteristic of other fictional works of the period. Unlike the great Romantic novels and poems of the period, which usually praised youthful passions, Austen's work minimizes them. Compared to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's classic sturm und drang novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), in which the young hero is unsuccessful at love and, unable to make his inner visions conform to the reality of the outer world, finally commits suicide, Austen's works are models of restraint. Instead of the wild forces of nature, Austen concentrates on family life in small English towns. Instead of rampant emotionalism, Austen emphasizes a balance between reason and emotion. Instead of suicide and unrequited love, Austen offers elopement and marriage. Although the author does consider some of the same themes as her Romantic contemporaries—the importance of the individual, for instance—Austen's society is altogether more controlled and settled than the world presented in Romantic fiction.
IRONY
Irony, or the contrast between the expected and the actual, is the chief literary device Austen uses to comment on the small, enclosed world of the English gentry in Pride and Prejudice. Her irony takes different forms for different characters. Perhaps the most ironic character in the entire book is Mr. Bennet, father of the five Bennet sisters. Mr. Bennet is married to a silly woman he cannot respect, who centers her life on marrying her daughters off to wealthy, well-bred men. He expresses his discontent in the marriage by criticizing his wife's stream of comments. Many of these are sarcastic and hurtful, and contribute to the misunderstandings between the couple that leave them incapable of dealing with the disastrous elopement of their youngest daughter Lydia with the detestable George Wickham. Mr. Bennet's conscious use of irony is for him a game—it serves no useful purpose.
For the author, in the persona of Mr. Bennet's daughter Elizabeth, however, irony is both a toy and a defensive weapon in the war against stupidity. The author uses Elizabeth to skewer self-important characters such as Mr. Collins and Mrs. Bennet. Yet Elizabeth is also blind to her own character faults, and her very blindness is another example of Austen's use of irony. In her misunderstandings with Darcy, she (who is blind to her own pride in her ability to read character) accuses him of excessive pride, while he (who is prejudiced against people with less money than he has) accuses her of prejudice. The on-again, off-again love between Jane Bennet and Charles Bingley is also an example of Austen's use of irony to underline messages about love and marriage. "Jane and Bingley provide us, then, with one of the book's primary ironies," writes Marvin Mudrick in "Irony as Discrimination: Pride and Prejudice," "that love is simple, straightforward, and immediate only for very simple people." "In Pride and Prejudice," concludes Mudrick, "Jane Austen's irony has developed into an instrument of discrimination between the people who are simple reproductions of the social type and the people with individuality and will, between the unaware and the aware."
Other examples of Austen's use of irony abound in the novel. "Many pages of Pride and Prejudice can be read as sheer poetry of wit, as [Alexander] Pope without couplets," writes Reuben A. Brower in "Light and Bright and Sparkling: Irony and Fiction in Pride and Prejudice." "The triumph of the novel—whatever its limitations may be—lies in combining such poetry of wit," the critic concludes, "with the dramatic structure of fiction."
Monday, June 28, 2010
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: HISTORICAL CONTEXT
JANE AUSTEN'S ENGLAND
Jane Austen's major novels, including Pride and Prejudice, were all composed within a short period of about twenty years. Those twenty years (1795-1815) also mark a period in history when England was at the height of its power. England stood as the bulwark against French revolutionary extremism and against Napoleonic imperialism. The dates Austen was writing almost exactly coincide with the great English military victories over Napoleon and the French: the Battle of the Nile, in which Admiral Nelson crippled the French Mediterranean fleet, and the battle of Waterloo, in which Lord Wellington and his German allies defeated Napoleon decisively and sent him into exile. However, so secure in their righteousness were the English middle and upper classes—the "landed gentry" featured in Austen's works—that these historical events impact Pride and Prejudice very little.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NAPOLEONIC WARS
The period from 1789 to 1799 marks the time of the French Revolution, while the period from 1799 to 1815 marks the ascendancy of Napoleon— periods of almost constant social change and upheaval. In England, the same periods were times of conservative reaction, in which society changed very little. The British government, led by Prime Minister William Pitt, maintained a strict control over any ideas or opinions that seemed to support the revolution in France. Pitt's government suspended the right of habeas corpus, giving themselves the power to imprison people for an indefinite time without trial. It also passed laws against public criticism of government policies, and suppressed working-class trade unions. At the same time, the Industrial Revolution permanently changed the British economy. It provided the money Pitt's government needed to oppose Napoleon. At the same time, it also created a large wealthy class and an even larger middle class. These are the people that Jane Austen depicts in Pride and Prejudice, the "landed gentry" who have earned their property, not by inheriting it from their aristocratic ancestors, but by purchasing it with their new wealth. They have few of the manners and graces of the aristocracy and, like the Collinses in Pride and Prejudice, are primarily concerned with their own futures in their own little worlds.
Unlike other Romantic-era writers, such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge Austen's works are very little impacted by the French Revolution and revolutionary rhetoric. Members of Austen's own family served in the war against Bonaparte and the French; two of her brothers became admirals in the Royal Navy. The only hint of war and military behavior in Pride and Prejudice, however, lies in the continued presence of the British soldiers in Meryton, near the Bennet estate at Longbourn. The soldiers include George Wickham, who later elopes with Lydia Bennet, disgracing the family. In the world of Pride and Prejudice, the soldiers are present only to give the younger Bennet daughters men in uniforms to chase after. Their world is limited to their own home, those of their friends and neighbors, a few major resort towns, and, far off, the city of London. There is no hint of the revolutionary affairs going on just across the English Channel in France.
ENGLISH REGENCY SOCIETY
On the other hand, contemporary English society is a preoccupation of Pride and Prejudice. At the time the novel was published, King George III had been struck down by the periodic madness (now suspected to be caused by the metabolic disease porphyria) that plagued his final years. The powers he was no longer capable of using were placed in the hands of his son the Prince Regent, later George IV. The Prince Regent was widely known as a man of dissolute morals, and his example was followed by many of society's leading figures. Young men regularly went to universities not to learn, but to see and be seen, to drink, gamble, race horses, and spend money. Perhaps the greatest example of this type in Pride and Prejudice is the unprincipled George Wickham, who seduces sixteen-year-old Lydia Bennet. Lydia for her part also participates willingly in Regency culture; her thoughts are not for her family's disgrace, but about the handsomeness of her husband and the jealousy of her sisters.
Most "respectable" middle- and upper-class figures, such as Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, strongly disapproved of the immorality of Regency culture. But they did participate in the fashions of the time, influenced by French styles (even though France was at war with England). During the period of the Directory and the Consulate in France (from 1794-1804), styles were influenced by the costumes of the Roman Republic. The elaborate hairstyles and dresses that had characterized the French aristocracy before the Revolution were discarded for simpler costumes. Women, including Elizabeth Bennet, would have worn a simple dress that resembled a modern nightgown. Loose and flowing, it was secured by a ribbon tied just below the breasts. Darcy for his part would have worn a civilian costume of tight breeches, a ruffled shirt with a carefully folded neckcloth, and a high-collared jacket. Even though these costumes were in part a reaction to the excesses of early eighteenth-century dress, they became themselves quite elaborate as the century progressed, sparked by the Prince Regent himself and his friend, the impeccable dresser Beau Brummel. Brummel's mystique, known as "dandyism," expressed in clothing the same idleness and effortless command of a situation that characterizes many of Austen's heroes and heroines.
Jane Austen's major novels, including Pride and Prejudice, were all composed within a short period of about twenty years. Those twenty years (1795-1815) also mark a period in history when England was at the height of its power. England stood as the bulwark against French revolutionary extremism and against Napoleonic imperialism. The dates Austen was writing almost exactly coincide with the great English military victories over Napoleon and the French: the Battle of the Nile, in which Admiral Nelson crippled the French Mediterranean fleet, and the battle of Waterloo, in which Lord Wellington and his German allies defeated Napoleon decisively and sent him into exile. However, so secure in their righteousness were the English middle and upper classes—the "landed gentry" featured in Austen's works—that these historical events impact Pride and Prejudice very little.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NAPOLEONIC WARS
The period from 1789 to 1799 marks the time of the French Revolution, while the period from 1799 to 1815 marks the ascendancy of Napoleon— periods of almost constant social change and upheaval. In England, the same periods were times of conservative reaction, in which society changed very little. The British government, led by Prime Minister William Pitt, maintained a strict control over any ideas or opinions that seemed to support the revolution in France. Pitt's government suspended the right of habeas corpus, giving themselves the power to imprison people for an indefinite time without trial. It also passed laws against public criticism of government policies, and suppressed working-class trade unions. At the same time, the Industrial Revolution permanently changed the British economy. It provided the money Pitt's government needed to oppose Napoleon. At the same time, it also created a large wealthy class and an even larger middle class. These are the people that Jane Austen depicts in Pride and Prejudice, the "landed gentry" who have earned their property, not by inheriting it from their aristocratic ancestors, but by purchasing it with their new wealth. They have few of the manners and graces of the aristocracy and, like the Collinses in Pride and Prejudice, are primarily concerned with their own futures in their own little worlds.
Unlike other Romantic-era writers, such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge Austen's works are very little impacted by the French Revolution and revolutionary rhetoric. Members of Austen's own family served in the war against Bonaparte and the French; two of her brothers became admirals in the Royal Navy. The only hint of war and military behavior in Pride and Prejudice, however, lies in the continued presence of the British soldiers in Meryton, near the Bennet estate at Longbourn. The soldiers include George Wickham, who later elopes with Lydia Bennet, disgracing the family. In the world of Pride and Prejudice, the soldiers are present only to give the younger Bennet daughters men in uniforms to chase after. Their world is limited to their own home, those of their friends and neighbors, a few major resort towns, and, far off, the city of London. There is no hint of the revolutionary affairs going on just across the English Channel in France.
ENGLISH REGENCY SOCIETY
On the other hand, contemporary English society is a preoccupation of Pride and Prejudice. At the time the novel was published, King George III had been struck down by the periodic madness (now suspected to be caused by the metabolic disease porphyria) that plagued his final years. The powers he was no longer capable of using were placed in the hands of his son the Prince Regent, later George IV. The Prince Regent was widely known as a man of dissolute morals, and his example was followed by many of society's leading figures. Young men regularly went to universities not to learn, but to see and be seen, to drink, gamble, race horses, and spend money. Perhaps the greatest example of this type in Pride and Prejudice is the unprincipled George Wickham, who seduces sixteen-year-old Lydia Bennet. Lydia for her part also participates willingly in Regency culture; her thoughts are not for her family's disgrace, but about the handsomeness of her husband and the jealousy of her sisters.
Most "respectable" middle- and upper-class figures, such as Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, strongly disapproved of the immorality of Regency culture. But they did participate in the fashions of the time, influenced by French styles (even though France was at war with England). During the period of the Directory and the Consulate in France (from 1794-1804), styles were influenced by the costumes of the Roman Republic. The elaborate hairstyles and dresses that had characterized the French aristocracy before the Revolution were discarded for simpler costumes. Women, including Elizabeth Bennet, would have worn a simple dress that resembled a modern nightgown. Loose and flowing, it was secured by a ribbon tied just below the breasts. Darcy for his part would have worn a civilian costume of tight breeches, a ruffled shirt with a carefully folded neckcloth, and a high-collared jacket. Even though these costumes were in part a reaction to the excesses of early eighteenth-century dress, they became themselves quite elaborate as the century progressed, sparked by the Prince Regent himself and his friend, the impeccable dresser Beau Brummel. Brummel's mystique, known as "dandyism," expressed in clothing the same idleness and effortless command of a situation that characterizes many of Austen's heroes and heroines.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: CRITICAL OVERVIEW
In the early nineteenth century, when Jane Austen published her first two novels Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, writes B. C. Southam in his introduction to Jane Austen The Critical Heritage, "fiction reviewing had no . . . dignity, and in the light of prevailing standards the two novels were remarkably well-received. The reviewers were in no doubt about the superiority of these works. Although their notices are extremely limited in scope they remark on points which any modern critic would want to make." These points, in the case of Pride and Prejudice, include the spirited characterizations of Elizabeth Bennet and her family, Fitzwilliam Darcy, and the other major personalities of the novel. Those people that criticized the novel, however, complained that the author of the book (who was unknown at the time—Austen published her works anonymously and her authorship did not become widely known until after her death) depicted socially and morally unrefined people, that the book was simply entertaining without being uplifting, and that the realism of her book threatened their concept of literature as an idealized higher reality.
Most of the known contemporary opinions of Pride and Prejudice come from private journals and diaries, where important figures of the time recorded their opinions of the book as they were reading it. In January of 1813, the month of the publication of Austen's novel, however, two reviews were published anonymously in the British Critic and the Critical Review. Both reviewers praised the novel's readability, but most of the reviews are dedicated to appreciations of Austen's characterization. Pride and Prejudice "is very far superior to almost all the publications of the kind which have lately come before us," wrote the British Critic reviewer. "It has a very unexceptionable tendency, the story is well told, the characters remarkably well drawn and supported, and written with great spirit as well as vigour." "It is unnecessary to add," the reviewer concluded, "that we have perused these volumes with much satisfaction and amusement, and entertain very little doubt that their successful circulation will induce the author to similar exertions." The Critical Review contributor began his appreciation with the words, "Instead of the whole interest of the tale hanging upon one or two characters, as is generally the case in novels, the fair author of the present introduces us, at once, to a whole family, every individual of which excites the interest, and very agreeably divides the attention of the reader." "Nor is there one character which appears flat," the contributor concluded, "or obtrudes itself upon the notice of the reader with troublesome impertinence. There is not one person in the drama with whom we could readily dispense,— they have all their proper places; and fill their several stations, with great credit to themselves, and much satisfaction to the reader."
Those contemporaries of Austen who criticized Pride and Prejudice did so, says Southam, out of a feeling that the novel offended their sense of the tightness of the world. "While few readers could deny that they enjoyed reading the novels— for the vitality of the characters, the wit, the accuracy and realism of her picture of society—praise comes grudgingly, fenced round with qualifications," he states. Commentators, including Lady Darcy and Miss Mitford, complained that the characters, particularly the Bennets, are unrefined and socially mannerless. "These notions of decorum persisted throughout the nineteenth century, and created a particular unease in the reader," Southam concludes, "the sense on one hand that he was undoubtedly enjoying Jane Austen, but equally a sense that he must temper his admiration, recalling that novels so very worldly and realistic could never be great art."
Because of this common reaction to her fiction, criticism of Austen's works, including Pride and Prejudice, as a whole was delayed until after her death. "In 1819," writes Laura Dabundo in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, "Henry Crabb Robinson wrote the first of several diary entries in praise of her novels." Another contemporary reviewer, the novelist Sir Walter Scott recognized Austen's greatness, but his remarks also help to perpetuate the notion that her range was limited." It was the publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen, by Her Nephew in 1870 that sparked a revival of Austen criticism. However, its depiction of Austen as a "spinster aunt" whose works were written primarily for her own amusement created a distorted picture of the author. "Later in the century," Dabundo explains, "George Henry Lewes argued for the unqualified excellence of her writing, comparing her accomplishment to that of Shakespeare, but nonetheless he saw her fiction as cool and unfevered." It was not until after the publication of Mary Lascelles's Jane Austen and Her Art in 1939 that twentieth century critics began to overturn the Victonan concept of Austen as an amateur artist uncommitted to creating great literature.
Austen criticism has exploded since 1939. Scholars turn to Pride and Prejudice for its portraits of late eighteenth-century society, for the technical expertise of its composition, and for its capacity to find and maintain interest in the everyday lives of small-town English society. "Increasingly, in studies like those of Dorothy Van Ghent, Reuben Brower, Marvin Mudnck, and Howard Babb," declares Donald J. Gray in his preface to Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Reviews and Essays in Criticism, "[twentieth-century critics] study the development of characters and themes, the structure of episodes and sentences, even her very choice of words, in order to explain how novels about three or four families in a country village are also novels about the important business of making a fruitful life in a society and of a character which do not always encourage the best of even the few possibilities they permit." Austen's novels, Dabundo concludes, "deal with passionate but realistic people whose world was changing and being challenged, people who conducted their lives in the context of their immediate friends and family and a national culture that nourished and sustained them."
Most of the known contemporary opinions of Pride and Prejudice come from private journals and diaries, where important figures of the time recorded their opinions of the book as they were reading it. In January of 1813, the month of the publication of Austen's novel, however, two reviews were published anonymously in the British Critic and the Critical Review. Both reviewers praised the novel's readability, but most of the reviews are dedicated to appreciations of Austen's characterization. Pride and Prejudice "is very far superior to almost all the publications of the kind which have lately come before us," wrote the British Critic reviewer. "It has a very unexceptionable tendency, the story is well told, the characters remarkably well drawn and supported, and written with great spirit as well as vigour." "It is unnecessary to add," the reviewer concluded, "that we have perused these volumes with much satisfaction and amusement, and entertain very little doubt that their successful circulation will induce the author to similar exertions." The Critical Review contributor began his appreciation with the words, "Instead of the whole interest of the tale hanging upon one or two characters, as is generally the case in novels, the fair author of the present introduces us, at once, to a whole family, every individual of which excites the interest, and very agreeably divides the attention of the reader." "Nor is there one character which appears flat," the contributor concluded, "or obtrudes itself upon the notice of the reader with troublesome impertinence. There is not one person in the drama with whom we could readily dispense,— they have all their proper places; and fill their several stations, with great credit to themselves, and much satisfaction to the reader."
Those contemporaries of Austen who criticized Pride and Prejudice did so, says Southam, out of a feeling that the novel offended their sense of the tightness of the world. "While few readers could deny that they enjoyed reading the novels— for the vitality of the characters, the wit, the accuracy and realism of her picture of society—praise comes grudgingly, fenced round with qualifications," he states. Commentators, including Lady Darcy and Miss Mitford, complained that the characters, particularly the Bennets, are unrefined and socially mannerless. "These notions of decorum persisted throughout the nineteenth century, and created a particular unease in the reader," Southam concludes, "the sense on one hand that he was undoubtedly enjoying Jane Austen, but equally a sense that he must temper his admiration, recalling that novels so very worldly and realistic could never be great art."
Because of this common reaction to her fiction, criticism of Austen's works, including Pride and Prejudice, as a whole was delayed until after her death. "In 1819," writes Laura Dabundo in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, "Henry Crabb Robinson wrote the first of several diary entries in praise of her novels." Another contemporary reviewer, the novelist Sir Walter Scott recognized Austen's greatness, but his remarks also help to perpetuate the notion that her range was limited." It was the publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen, by Her Nephew in 1870 that sparked a revival of Austen criticism. However, its depiction of Austen as a "spinster aunt" whose works were written primarily for her own amusement created a distorted picture of the author. "Later in the century," Dabundo explains, "George Henry Lewes argued for the unqualified excellence of her writing, comparing her accomplishment to that of Shakespeare, but nonetheless he saw her fiction as cool and unfevered." It was not until after the publication of Mary Lascelles's Jane Austen and Her Art in 1939 that twentieth century critics began to overturn the Victonan concept of Austen as an amateur artist uncommitted to creating great literature.
Austen criticism has exploded since 1939. Scholars turn to Pride and Prejudice for its portraits of late eighteenth-century society, for the technical expertise of its composition, and for its capacity to find and maintain interest in the everyday lives of small-town English society. "Increasingly, in studies like those of Dorothy Van Ghent, Reuben Brower, Marvin Mudnck, and Howard Babb," declares Donald J. Gray in his preface to Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Reviews and Essays in Criticism, "[twentieth-century critics] study the development of characters and themes, the structure of episodes and sentences, even her very choice of words, in order to explain how novels about three or four families in a country village are also novels about the important business of making a fruitful life in a society and of a character which do not always encourage the best of even the few possibilities they permit." Austen's novels, Dabundo concludes, "deal with passionate but realistic people whose world was changing and being challenged, people who conducted their lives in the context of their immediate friends and family and a national culture that nourished and sustained them."
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: CHARACTER ANALYSIS
Caroline Bingley
The younger of Bingley's two sisters, Miss Bingley is rich, attractive, elegant, snobbish, and conniving. She is determined to marry Darcy, flattering him constantly -- though in vain -- and disparaging Lizzy at every opportunity. She treats Jane like a dear friend while secretly undermining her relationship with Bingley, who she hopes will marry Darcy's little sister.
Charles Bingley
Bingley is half as rich as Darcy, meaning very rich indeed, and he has just begun renting a manor house near the Bennets'. He is outgoing, affable, good-looking, charming, and so open and artless that everyone can tell almost immediately that he is in love with Jane. But he is also somewhat flighty -- boasting to Mrs. Bennet that "whatever I do is done in a hurry" -- and thus susceptible to the persuasions of Darcy and his sisters, who oppose his marrying into the Bennet family.
Elizabeth Bennet
The second of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet's five daughters, who has inherited her mother's beauty and her father's intelligence. At 20, Lizzy has perfect manners, but she is as witty and independent-minded as the period's strict social code will allow. She finds her mother's vulgarity humiliating, but reproaching her for it, even in private, would be a breach of decorum. On the other hand, she publicly teases Mr. Darcy for his lack of chivalry, and her willingness to assert her own opinions shocks Lady Catherine, who is used to the deference and even the awe of those around her.
As attractive as they are to modern readers, however, Lizzy's independence and willfulness are the chief obstacles in the book's romantic plot, for they lead her to the prejudice of the title. The night she meets Mr. Darcy, he shows obvious contempt for her family, friends and neighbors, and she accidentally overhears him making some belittling remarks about her. That is enough to convince her to dislike him on principle. Though Wickham later misrepresents Darcy's character to her, she is too eager to believe him, and too willing to ignore the inconsistencies in his story, because of her determination to think badly of Darcy.
Otherwise, however, she is a model of late-18th-century upper-class feminine virtue: like her father, she reads a great deal; she both plays the piano and sings well; she is clever of speech; and she is a devoted and affectionate friend and sister. When Jane falls ill during her visit to Netherfield, Lizzy hikes three miles across country to take care of her -- climbing over fences and muddying her petticoats -- rather than recall any of her father's horses from their vital farm work. Bingley's sisters deride such unladylike exertion, but it speaks volumes about Lizzy's sensibility, self-reliance, and compassion.
Fitzwilliam Darcy
Mr. Darcy supplies the pride of the title, and he has good reason for it: he is not only tall, handsome, and clever, but filthy rich. At 28, he is the sole owner of the Pemberley estate in Derbyshire, which generates an annual revenue of 10,000 pounds, making him one of England's 400 richest people.
Darcy is well bred -- he attends to all the formalities that civility demands of him -- but he does not go out of his way to make others feel comfortable. He has no patience for frivolousness: he would rather sit silent than engage in vacuous small talk, and he doesn't like to dance, which is counted a serious fault in an eligible bachelor. Because of his natural dignity and contempt for vulgarity, his reticence makes him appear haughty -- though that appearance is heightened by his arrogant conviction that, in accompanying his friend Bingley to Hertfordshire, he has slipped several rungs down the social ladder. None of the locals likes him.
But after Lizzy refuses his (first) offer of marriage, he proves himself, in an attempt to "obtain [her] forgiveness" and "lessen [her] ill opinion," capable of great charm and generosity. He even ignores the difference in rank between himself and Lizzy's uncle and aunt Gardiner, who are not landowners. We also discover that the housekeeper at his estate has "never had a cross word from him" in 24 years, that he is "affable to the poor," and that he indulges and dotes on his younger sister -- though she still remains a little bit afraid of him.
George Wickham
Mr. Wickham was Darcy's boyhood companion and the son of his father's steward, a former lawyer and an honorable man who ran the Darcy estate until his death. Wickham is polite, devastatingly handsome, charming, well-spoken -- and utterly worthless. Darcy's father had bequeathed Wickham a parsonage, which would have provided him a good, comfortable living, but Wickham renounced it in exchange for three thousand pounds in cash, which he quickly squandered. When Darcy refused to give him any more money, Wickham seduced his 15-year-old sister and attempted to elope with her. He leaves huge debts wherever he goes, and tries to insinuate himself with every rich woman he meets.
Jane Bennett
Jane is the Bennet's oldest daughter, well bred, gentle, and even prettier than Lizzy -- though not as quick witted. Indeed, she is so mild mannered that her ardor for Bingley looks to Darcy like complete indifference. She finds it distressing to think badly of anyone and is consequently the only resident of Hertfordshire to find any virtue in Darcy. She cannot even motivate herself to censure Wickham, until she learns of his gambling debts. Jane and Lizzy are each other's most intimate confidantes.
Lady Catherine De Bourgh
Darcy's aunt and Mr. Collins's benefactor: arrogant and vain of her rank, yet ungracious and unusually direct in her manner of speech. She does very little herself but takes pleasure in instructing all those around her in the conduct of their own affairs. Despite her incivility, however, she requires constant company to stave off boredom.
Mr. Bennet
Mr. Bennet is a gentleman, meaning he lives off the rent and the farm revenue generated by his estate. He married his wife for her beauty and youthful exuberance, neither of which compensated very long for her inanity. He thus spends most of his time alone in his library, reading. While he commands deference as head of the household, his conversation is usually limited to mild but witty ridicule of his wife, neighbors, and younger daughters, whom he makes little effort to keep in line. Indeed, he makes little effort at anything. He is, however, devoted to Lizzy, in whose intelligence and satirical bent he sees the reflection of his own.
William Collins
Since Mr. Bennet has no sons, his 25-year-old nephew Mr. Collins is, to everyone's chagrin, the heir of his estate. He is also, in Lizzy's words, "a conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man." Mr. Collins owes his current position as a parson to the patronage of Darcy's aunt, Lady Catherine De Bourgh. He is awed by her nobility and talks about her, and the magnificence of her estate, almost constantly, adding shameless pandering to his habitual faults of long-windedness and pomposity.
Other CharactersMary Bennet: The third and plainest of the Bennet girls, Mary spends all her time playing the piano and reading moralistic literature that gives her an endless supply of sanctimonious aphorisms.
Catherine (Kitty) Bennet: The fourth of the Bennet girls, Kitty tags after Lydia and complains when she doesn't get as much attention.
Lydia Bennet: The youngest of the Bennet girls, Lydia is a somewhat less attractive version of her mother at 16: loud, exuberant, thoughtless, vulgar, and boy crazy.
Edward Gardiner: Mrs. Bennet's brother, an honest, honorable, friendly man who lives in London. He is wealthy, but since he made his money in trade, the landed gentry look down on him.
Mrs. Gardiner: Mrs. Bennet's sister-in-law, whose good sense, good manners, and perceptiveness make her a favorite with Lizzy and Jane.
Sir William Lucas: The Bennets' neighbor in Hertfordshire, Sir William is so outgoing that he sometimes oversteps the bounds of decorum, and so solicitous that he sometimes intrudes on other people's personal affairs. But no one doubts his good heart.
Lady Lucas: Lady Lucas is, aside from Mrs. Phillips, Mrs. Bennet's most regular gossip partner. The two women also have a friendly rivalry: Lady Lucas's estate is less grand than the Bennets', but her husband is a knight; her daughter is less pretty, but she manages to get married first.
Charlotte Lucas: Kind, plain, and practical, Charlotte is Lizzy's best friend -- until she shows the bad judgment of marrying Mr. Collins. At 27, however, Charlotte has few alternatives that will guarantee her as much security.
Marie Lucas: Charlotte's younger sister. Marie's sole purpose in the story is to be so overwhelmed by Lady Catherine's grandeur that she can hardly speak.
Georgiana Darcy: Mr. Darcy's sister, 12 years his junior, who worships her older brother and, because she finds his example so intimidating, is shy and diffident in public. Nonetheless, she is pretty, bright, kind, and accomplished.
Colonel Fitzwilliam: Darcy's cousin, who is much more affable and outgoing, but much less dashing.
Miss De Bourgh: Lady Catherine's daughter, a sickly, pale, emaciated little thing who hardly speaks but nonetheless finds ways to be inconsiderate. Her mother intends her to be Darcy's wife.
Louisa Hurst: The eldest of Bingley's two sisters, Mrs. Hurst serves only to second her sister's opinions and abet her connivances.
Mr. Hurst: Bingley's brother-in-law, who lives only to hunt, eat, drink, play cards and, when none of those options is available, to sleep.
Aunt Phillips: Mrs. Bennet's sister, who is, if anything, even ruder and more embarrassing.
Uncle Phillips: Mrs. Bennet's brother-in-law, who inherited her father's law practice in Meryton, a town just a mile or so from the Bennet estate.
Colonel Forster: The head of the militia unit in which Wickham enlists, which is initially quartered in Meryton.
Mrs. Forster: The colonel's wife, who, easygoing and exuberant herself, takes a liking to Lydia, thereby precipitating her disastrous elopement with Wickham.
The younger of Bingley's two sisters, Miss Bingley is rich, attractive, elegant, snobbish, and conniving. She is determined to marry Darcy, flattering him constantly -- though in vain -- and disparaging Lizzy at every opportunity. She treats Jane like a dear friend while secretly undermining her relationship with Bingley, who she hopes will marry Darcy's little sister.
Charles Bingley
Bingley is half as rich as Darcy, meaning very rich indeed, and he has just begun renting a manor house near the Bennets'. He is outgoing, affable, good-looking, charming, and so open and artless that everyone can tell almost immediately that he is in love with Jane. But he is also somewhat flighty -- boasting to Mrs. Bennet that "whatever I do is done in a hurry" -- and thus susceptible to the persuasions of Darcy and his sisters, who oppose his marrying into the Bennet family.
Elizabeth Bennet
The second of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet's five daughters, who has inherited her mother's beauty and her father's intelligence. At 20, Lizzy has perfect manners, but she is as witty and independent-minded as the period's strict social code will allow. She finds her mother's vulgarity humiliating, but reproaching her for it, even in private, would be a breach of decorum. On the other hand, she publicly teases Mr. Darcy for his lack of chivalry, and her willingness to assert her own opinions shocks Lady Catherine, who is used to the deference and even the awe of those around her.
As attractive as they are to modern readers, however, Lizzy's independence and willfulness are the chief obstacles in the book's romantic plot, for they lead her to the prejudice of the title. The night she meets Mr. Darcy, he shows obvious contempt for her family, friends and neighbors, and she accidentally overhears him making some belittling remarks about her. That is enough to convince her to dislike him on principle. Though Wickham later misrepresents Darcy's character to her, she is too eager to believe him, and too willing to ignore the inconsistencies in his story, because of her determination to think badly of Darcy.
Otherwise, however, she is a model of late-18th-century upper-class feminine virtue: like her father, she reads a great deal; she both plays the piano and sings well; she is clever of speech; and she is a devoted and affectionate friend and sister. When Jane falls ill during her visit to Netherfield, Lizzy hikes three miles across country to take care of her -- climbing over fences and muddying her petticoats -- rather than recall any of her father's horses from their vital farm work. Bingley's sisters deride such unladylike exertion, but it speaks volumes about Lizzy's sensibility, self-reliance, and compassion.
Fitzwilliam Darcy
Mr. Darcy supplies the pride of the title, and he has good reason for it: he is not only tall, handsome, and clever, but filthy rich. At 28, he is the sole owner of the Pemberley estate in Derbyshire, which generates an annual revenue of 10,000 pounds, making him one of England's 400 richest people.
Darcy is well bred -- he attends to all the formalities that civility demands of him -- but he does not go out of his way to make others feel comfortable. He has no patience for frivolousness: he would rather sit silent than engage in vacuous small talk, and he doesn't like to dance, which is counted a serious fault in an eligible bachelor. Because of his natural dignity and contempt for vulgarity, his reticence makes him appear haughty -- though that appearance is heightened by his arrogant conviction that, in accompanying his friend Bingley to Hertfordshire, he has slipped several rungs down the social ladder. None of the locals likes him.
But after Lizzy refuses his (first) offer of marriage, he proves himself, in an attempt to "obtain [her] forgiveness" and "lessen [her] ill opinion," capable of great charm and generosity. He even ignores the difference in rank between himself and Lizzy's uncle and aunt Gardiner, who are not landowners. We also discover that the housekeeper at his estate has "never had a cross word from him" in 24 years, that he is "affable to the poor," and that he indulges and dotes on his younger sister -- though she still remains a little bit afraid of him.
George Wickham
Mr. Wickham was Darcy's boyhood companion and the son of his father's steward, a former lawyer and an honorable man who ran the Darcy estate until his death. Wickham is polite, devastatingly handsome, charming, well-spoken -- and utterly worthless. Darcy's father had bequeathed Wickham a parsonage, which would have provided him a good, comfortable living, but Wickham renounced it in exchange for three thousand pounds in cash, which he quickly squandered. When Darcy refused to give him any more money, Wickham seduced his 15-year-old sister and attempted to elope with her. He leaves huge debts wherever he goes, and tries to insinuate himself with every rich woman he meets.
Jane Bennett
Jane is the Bennet's oldest daughter, well bred, gentle, and even prettier than Lizzy -- though not as quick witted. Indeed, she is so mild mannered that her ardor for Bingley looks to Darcy like complete indifference. She finds it distressing to think badly of anyone and is consequently the only resident of Hertfordshire to find any virtue in Darcy. She cannot even motivate herself to censure Wickham, until she learns of his gambling debts. Jane and Lizzy are each other's most intimate confidantes.
Lady Catherine De Bourgh
Darcy's aunt and Mr. Collins's benefactor: arrogant and vain of her rank, yet ungracious and unusually direct in her manner of speech. She does very little herself but takes pleasure in instructing all those around her in the conduct of their own affairs. Despite her incivility, however, she requires constant company to stave off boredom.
Mr. Bennet
Mr. Bennet is a gentleman, meaning he lives off the rent and the farm revenue generated by his estate. He married his wife for her beauty and youthful exuberance, neither of which compensated very long for her inanity. He thus spends most of his time alone in his library, reading. While he commands deference as head of the household, his conversation is usually limited to mild but witty ridicule of his wife, neighbors, and younger daughters, whom he makes little effort to keep in line. Indeed, he makes little effort at anything. He is, however, devoted to Lizzy, in whose intelligence and satirical bent he sees the reflection of his own.
William Collins
Since Mr. Bennet has no sons, his 25-year-old nephew Mr. Collins is, to everyone's chagrin, the heir of his estate. He is also, in Lizzy's words, "a conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man." Mr. Collins owes his current position as a parson to the patronage of Darcy's aunt, Lady Catherine De Bourgh. He is awed by her nobility and talks about her, and the magnificence of her estate, almost constantly, adding shameless pandering to his habitual faults of long-windedness and pomposity.
Other CharactersMary Bennet: The third and plainest of the Bennet girls, Mary spends all her time playing the piano and reading moralistic literature that gives her an endless supply of sanctimonious aphorisms.
Catherine (Kitty) Bennet: The fourth of the Bennet girls, Kitty tags after Lydia and complains when she doesn't get as much attention.
Lydia Bennet: The youngest of the Bennet girls, Lydia is a somewhat less attractive version of her mother at 16: loud, exuberant, thoughtless, vulgar, and boy crazy.
Edward Gardiner: Mrs. Bennet's brother, an honest, honorable, friendly man who lives in London. He is wealthy, but since he made his money in trade, the landed gentry look down on him.
Mrs. Gardiner: Mrs. Bennet's sister-in-law, whose good sense, good manners, and perceptiveness make her a favorite with Lizzy and Jane.
Sir William Lucas: The Bennets' neighbor in Hertfordshire, Sir William is so outgoing that he sometimes oversteps the bounds of decorum, and so solicitous that he sometimes intrudes on other people's personal affairs. But no one doubts his good heart.
Lady Lucas: Lady Lucas is, aside from Mrs. Phillips, Mrs. Bennet's most regular gossip partner. The two women also have a friendly rivalry: Lady Lucas's estate is less grand than the Bennets', but her husband is a knight; her daughter is less pretty, but she manages to get married first.
Charlotte Lucas: Kind, plain, and practical, Charlotte is Lizzy's best friend -- until she shows the bad judgment of marrying Mr. Collins. At 27, however, Charlotte has few alternatives that will guarantee her as much security.
Marie Lucas: Charlotte's younger sister. Marie's sole purpose in the story is to be so overwhelmed by Lady Catherine's grandeur that she can hardly speak.
Georgiana Darcy: Mr. Darcy's sister, 12 years his junior, who worships her older brother and, because she finds his example so intimidating, is shy and diffident in public. Nonetheless, she is pretty, bright, kind, and accomplished.
Colonel Fitzwilliam: Darcy's cousin, who is much more affable and outgoing, but much less dashing.
Miss De Bourgh: Lady Catherine's daughter, a sickly, pale, emaciated little thing who hardly speaks but nonetheless finds ways to be inconsiderate. Her mother intends her to be Darcy's wife.
Louisa Hurst: The eldest of Bingley's two sisters, Mrs. Hurst serves only to second her sister's opinions and abet her connivances.
Mr. Hurst: Bingley's brother-in-law, who lives only to hunt, eat, drink, play cards and, when none of those options is available, to sleep.
Aunt Phillips: Mrs. Bennet's sister, who is, if anything, even ruder and more embarrassing.
Uncle Phillips: Mrs. Bennet's brother-in-law, who inherited her father's law practice in Meryton, a town just a mile or so from the Bennet estate.
Colonel Forster: The head of the militia unit in which Wickham enlists, which is initially quartered in Meryton.
Mrs. Forster: The colonel's wife, who, easygoing and exuberant herself, takes a liking to Lydia, thereby precipitating her disastrous elopement with Wickham.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: SOCIAL HISTORY
In the following excerpt, Julia Prewitt Brown discusses how Austen offers a powerful commentary on the changes in society, gender attitudes, and class structure in early nineteenth century England.
As for the historical content of the [Austen] novels, students may not see it because they think of social history as "history with the politics left out," as G. M. Trevelyan once described it, rather than what it is: the essential foundation that gives shape to everything else. For the cultural historian Raymond Williams, for example, Austen's novels provide an accurate record of that moment in English history in which high bourgeois society most evidently interlocked with an agrarian capitalism. "An openly acquisitive society," writes Williams [in The Country and the City, 1975], "which is concerned also with the transmission of wealth, is trying to judge itself at once by an inherited code and by the morality of improvement." What is at stake here is not personal relations but personal conduct "a testing and discovery of the standards which govern human behaviour in certain real situations." Those situations arise from the unsettled world Austen portrays, with its continual changes of fortune and social mobility that were affecting the landed families of her time. Thus, although Darcy is a landowner established for "many generations," his friend Bingley has no estate and has inherited £100,000 from his father, who made money in trade; and although Mr. Bennet has an estate, he has married the daughter of an attorney who has a brother in trade, and his estate will not pass to his own children, and so on.
Readers may glimpse the "openly acquisitive society" in the heroine's first sight of Pemberley, Darcy's beautiful estate. Deeply impressed, even awe-struck, by its elegance and grandeur, Elizabeth cannot but admit to herself that "to be mistress of Pemberley might be something." Later Elizabeth satirizes her own response when her sister asks her to explain when she first fell in love with Darcy: "It has been coming on so gradually," Elizabeth replies, "that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." Elizabeth's wit distances her from herself, from the woman with the conventional response to Pemberley, just as the narrator's irony distances the reader from conventional responses. But before entering into a discussion of Austen's narrative irony, we may as well ask the conventional question, In what sense would being mistress of Pemberley "be something"?
In Austen's day England was still to a large extent an "aristocracy," or hierarchy based on property and patronage in which people took their places in a pyramidlike structure extending down from a minority of the rich and powerful at the top to ever wider and larger layers of lesser wealth to the great mass of the poor and powerless at the bottom. Together, the aristocracy and gentry owned more than two-thirds of all the land in England. In this largely agrarian society, government was conceived of as the authority of the locality, the government of parish, county, and town, whose officials were members of the gentry appointed by the Crown. In the course of the century, this system of local government was replaced by a modern bureaucracy of trained and elected administrators, but at the time Austen was writing, the gentry were the real governors of the countryside. Not until the commercial and political revolutions, accumulating full force in the eighteenth century, disrupted the solidarity of families founded on landed wealth did these ancient families, and the women who belonged to them, lose much of the power they had so long exercised. Only then did the state pass to the control of parliaments composed of men and elected by men.
Lady Catherine de Bourgh and her nephew Darcy are members of one such ancient family, and they are highly conscious of the power they possess. Both control the lives and incomes of scores of people on their estates, many of whom had no voting power until the Reform Bill of 1832. Even after that, until the secret ballot was passed in 1872, landlords could have a decisive effect on votes, since they were taken orally. Traditionally, the steward of an estate such as Darcy's would round up the tenants who could vote, take them to the polling place, and remain there while they called out their preference. A man such as Darcy, were he to run for a seat in the House of Commons, could then be sure of this built-in constituency of tenants. Wickham's chronic resentment, Austen implies, is a function of his having grown up as the son of the elder Darcy's steward, daily observing so many more advantages accrue to Darcy than to himself.
Although women in the gentry had less authority than men, a matter I take up later, some had considerable power. The tradition of primogeniture established that, under the law, property was passed to the eldest son; and English matrimonial law stipulated that, through marriage, the husband became the owner of all his wife's property. But there were ways in which the gentry could and did protect its women. Mr. Bennet cannot alter the entail requiring that his estate go to the nearest male relation, but he can settle money on his daughters that, if proper legal measures are taken, will remain their own after marriage. Because Lady Catherine's estate is not entailed from the female line, she enjoys most of the advantages of her nephew. She is patroness of the living of Mr. Collins, for example, and he is only one of many people who are dependent on her and therefore must pay court to her. Elizabeth is right when she recognizes that to join Darcy's family and become mistress of Pemberley would indeed "be something. " Family and marriage occupied a far more public and central position in the social government and economic arrangements of English society than they would later. In the novels of Austen, marriage is then accurately seen as an institution that both determines and is determined by history.
[Social historian Lawrence] Stone's theory of social history suggests that only in a highly individualist society does happiness arise as an ideal: those who see themselves as living for themselves become interested in happiness. But if they view themselves as living for something beyond the self—say, the community—happiness loses its central place in human concern. That Austen reveals in almost every novel how difficult it is to negotiate a compromise between the drive for happiness and the necessity of a life of service all communities require of its citizens (most commonly in their role as parents) is not surprising. The question of happiness lies at the heart of the English tradition of liberal rationalism, particularly as it expressed itself in the works of Austen's contemporary Jeremy Bentham and later in the formulations of John Stuart Mill. One of Mill's major efforts was to reconcile a Benthamite faith in making happiness the supreme goal of human life with his communitarian belief in service, probably acquired through the classical education he received from his father (as Austen did from hers). In order to do so, Mill eventually insists on the existence of a private domain, set apart and separate from the demands of law and custom. This abstraction, the private domain, which we have difficulty imagining as an abstraction so much do we take Mill's ideas for granted, is the basis of the argument of On Liberty (1859). So little did Mill himself take it for granted, however, that a large section of On Liberty is devoted to establishing and defining its existence. Another example is that, until the secret ballot was passed, parliamentarians expressed their astonishment over the proposal on the grounds that no honorable person would have any reason to cast a vote in secret; the private domain was imagined only with difficulty.
These same ambiguities concerning the private self and its relation to custom and community make themselves felt in Pride and Prejudice. Austen tempers her affirmation of individual happiness as an ideal by means of a deep aesthetic vigilance over its possible excesses. The hero of the novel, for example, is as different in substance and temperament from the heroine as could be; he embodies the traditional self, one whose identity is based on a sense of his own position in the social hierarchy rather than on an evaluation of his inner worth. This is what Darcy means when he says to Elizabeth, after they have been united, that he was a good man in theory but not in practice. He accepted his own merit as given; until Elizabeth forces him to, he has no impulse to look critically inward. A traditional self with a strong sense of duty (as distinct from conscience), Darcy has before him a traditional— that is to say, arranged—marriage when the novel opens. Of course, contact with Elizabeth changes Darcy, but that Elizabeth ends by marrying so traditional a personality is perhaps the largest check on the modern drive for happiness (most intelligently represented by Elizabeth) in the novel.
Not all the self-seekers in the novel are as intelligent and virtuous as Elizabeth, however, which brings us to another way Austen tempers her affirmation of the pursuit of happiness. The novel continually juxtaposes to Elizabeth and Darcy's marriage the completely selfish marriage, such as the unions between Lydia and Wickham and between Charlotte and Mr Collins, who live only for themselves and their own advancement. In contrast, Darcy and Elizabeth are envisioned at the conclusion of the novel as surrogate parents, moral guardians, and educators to Georgiana and Kitty, and as host and hostess at their ancient estate to members of the rising class of merchants, the Gardiners. The novel ends, then, on a note of affirmation of the power of marriage as an agent of constructive social change.
Feminist critics who have condemned Austen for not opening up any new vistas for the female spirit, for merely reaffirming the traditional option of marriage, may as well say to a starving person, "Man cannot live by bread alone." Like all her sisters, Elizabeth has only humiliating dependence on relations before her if she does not marry. No professions to speak of are open to her, and laws on every side are designed to restrict her independence. Within the privilege of the gentry class, wives had far less control over their lives than husbands did, and daughters had virtually none. Charlotte Lucas marries Mr. Collins because she does not wish to remain a daughter all her life; that marriage to Mr. Collins is seen as liberating by comparison with "spinsterhood" tells us all we need to know of the depth of Austen's irony on the subject of women.
What is remarkable about Austen's perspective on this subject is that she does not lapse into sentimental wish fulfillment but renders the crass, survivalist posture required of women with unfailing honesty and irony. The "honesty" and "irony" are interchangeable because of the fundamental contradiction in the gentry woman's situation: that she enjoyed tremendous privileges and relative comfort as a member of that class but that her ability to act independently within it was severely restricted. Elizabeth's refusal to marry Mr. Collins, for example, is not ponderously portrayed as an act of courage; it would take little courage to refuse so ridiculous a person as Mr. Collins. But given the situation of women and her own particular economic circumstances, to refuse him without giving way even for a moment to anxiety concerning the future shows an exceptional spirit. Elizabeth's sangfroid is again apparent when she refuses the far more imposing Darcy; she cannot be frightened by circumstance or intimidated by power. Popular women novelists writing at the same time as Austen often show heroines engaged in far more obvious acts of heroism and have been praised over Austen by feminists for portraying more adventurous women; in one such novel the heroine travels down the Amazon River. But Austen did not have to show Elizabeth traveling down the mighty river; she walks three miles in the mud to visit an ailing sister, and the society around her (including the hero) behaves as if she had. That Elizabeth remains unfazed by their exaggerated response to this most commonplace act—Darcy's admiration no more turns her head than Miss Bingley's visible contempt ruffles her—is not the least of her virtues. It is in Austen's ironic critique of her society, with its vulgar idolatry of the "lady" combined with its brute legal and economic restriction of her independence, together with her passionate endorsement of women who live within it and still manage to retain their self-possession (dignity is too lofty a word) that her feminism lies.
That Elizabeth Bennet is so easy to like makes Pride and Prejudice the less ironic novel. But Elizabeth's marriage to Darcy, as we have seen, is not without contradiction and irony. After they are united, Elizabeth "remembered that [Darcy] had yet to learn to be laught at." Perhaps a juxtaposition of the two novels suggests more than anything else that no discussion of the social-historical context in which the heroines move can proceed without consideration of Austen's irony. The moral discrimination that forms the basis of that irony is so insistent, writes Raymond Williams, "that it can be taken as an independent value . . . which is in the end separable from its social basis." After making this profound observation, Williams goes on to attach that value to the democratic social agenda "she provided the emphasis which had only to be taken outside the park walls, into a different social experience, to become not a moral but a social criticism," such as one finds in the Victorian moralists. But we will leave it to the historical ideologists to determine the political direction Austen's emphasis would take later. Whatever one concludes, one cannot help but feel that Austen wrote more for later generations than for her own. This perception is apparent not only in her steady refusal to court the public attention she could so easily have gained but in the way the novels seem to feel themselves forward into time, articulating our own historical distance from her world by means of their irony. Historians have long been in the habit of claiming, as A. J. P. Taylor has written, that, among novelists, history began with Walter Scott, the historical novelist and contemporary of Jane Austen. But if history is a form of self-consciousness, perhaps history began with Jane Austen as well.
As for the historical content of the [Austen] novels, students may not see it because they think of social history as "history with the politics left out," as G. M. Trevelyan once described it, rather than what it is: the essential foundation that gives shape to everything else. For the cultural historian Raymond Williams, for example, Austen's novels provide an accurate record of that moment in English history in which high bourgeois society most evidently interlocked with an agrarian capitalism. "An openly acquisitive society," writes Williams [in The Country and the City, 1975], "which is concerned also with the transmission of wealth, is trying to judge itself at once by an inherited code and by the morality of improvement." What is at stake here is not personal relations but personal conduct "a testing and discovery of the standards which govern human behaviour in certain real situations." Those situations arise from the unsettled world Austen portrays, with its continual changes of fortune and social mobility that were affecting the landed families of her time. Thus, although Darcy is a landowner established for "many generations," his friend Bingley has no estate and has inherited £100,000 from his father, who made money in trade; and although Mr. Bennet has an estate, he has married the daughter of an attorney who has a brother in trade, and his estate will not pass to his own children, and so on.
Readers may glimpse the "openly acquisitive society" in the heroine's first sight of Pemberley, Darcy's beautiful estate. Deeply impressed, even awe-struck, by its elegance and grandeur, Elizabeth cannot but admit to herself that "to be mistress of Pemberley might be something." Later Elizabeth satirizes her own response when her sister asks her to explain when she first fell in love with Darcy: "It has been coming on so gradually," Elizabeth replies, "that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." Elizabeth's wit distances her from herself, from the woman with the conventional response to Pemberley, just as the narrator's irony distances the reader from conventional responses. But before entering into a discussion of Austen's narrative irony, we may as well ask the conventional question, In what sense would being mistress of Pemberley "be something"?
In Austen's day England was still to a large extent an "aristocracy," or hierarchy based on property and patronage in which people took their places in a pyramidlike structure extending down from a minority of the rich and powerful at the top to ever wider and larger layers of lesser wealth to the great mass of the poor and powerless at the bottom. Together, the aristocracy and gentry owned more than two-thirds of all the land in England. In this largely agrarian society, government was conceived of as the authority of the locality, the government of parish, county, and town, whose officials were members of the gentry appointed by the Crown. In the course of the century, this system of local government was replaced by a modern bureaucracy of trained and elected administrators, but at the time Austen was writing, the gentry were the real governors of the countryside. Not until the commercial and political revolutions, accumulating full force in the eighteenth century, disrupted the solidarity of families founded on landed wealth did these ancient families, and the women who belonged to them, lose much of the power they had so long exercised. Only then did the state pass to the control of parliaments composed of men and elected by men.
Lady Catherine de Bourgh and her nephew Darcy are members of one such ancient family, and they are highly conscious of the power they possess. Both control the lives and incomes of scores of people on their estates, many of whom had no voting power until the Reform Bill of 1832. Even after that, until the secret ballot was passed in 1872, landlords could have a decisive effect on votes, since they were taken orally. Traditionally, the steward of an estate such as Darcy's would round up the tenants who could vote, take them to the polling place, and remain there while they called out their preference. A man such as Darcy, were he to run for a seat in the House of Commons, could then be sure of this built-in constituency of tenants. Wickham's chronic resentment, Austen implies, is a function of his having grown up as the son of the elder Darcy's steward, daily observing so many more advantages accrue to Darcy than to himself.
Although women in the gentry had less authority than men, a matter I take up later, some had considerable power. The tradition of primogeniture established that, under the law, property was passed to the eldest son; and English matrimonial law stipulated that, through marriage, the husband became the owner of all his wife's property. But there were ways in which the gentry could and did protect its women. Mr. Bennet cannot alter the entail requiring that his estate go to the nearest male relation, but he can settle money on his daughters that, if proper legal measures are taken, will remain their own after marriage. Because Lady Catherine's estate is not entailed from the female line, she enjoys most of the advantages of her nephew. She is patroness of the living of Mr. Collins, for example, and he is only one of many people who are dependent on her and therefore must pay court to her. Elizabeth is right when she recognizes that to join Darcy's family and become mistress of Pemberley would indeed "be something. " Family and marriage occupied a far more public and central position in the social government and economic arrangements of English society than they would later. In the novels of Austen, marriage is then accurately seen as an institution that both determines and is determined by history.
[Social historian Lawrence] Stone's theory of social history suggests that only in a highly individualist society does happiness arise as an ideal: those who see themselves as living for themselves become interested in happiness. But if they view themselves as living for something beyond the self—say, the community—happiness loses its central place in human concern. That Austen reveals in almost every novel how difficult it is to negotiate a compromise between the drive for happiness and the necessity of a life of service all communities require of its citizens (most commonly in their role as parents) is not surprising. The question of happiness lies at the heart of the English tradition of liberal rationalism, particularly as it expressed itself in the works of Austen's contemporary Jeremy Bentham and later in the formulations of John Stuart Mill. One of Mill's major efforts was to reconcile a Benthamite faith in making happiness the supreme goal of human life with his communitarian belief in service, probably acquired through the classical education he received from his father (as Austen did from hers). In order to do so, Mill eventually insists on the existence of a private domain, set apart and separate from the demands of law and custom. This abstraction, the private domain, which we have difficulty imagining as an abstraction so much do we take Mill's ideas for granted, is the basis of the argument of On Liberty (1859). So little did Mill himself take it for granted, however, that a large section of On Liberty is devoted to establishing and defining its existence. Another example is that, until the secret ballot was passed, parliamentarians expressed their astonishment over the proposal on the grounds that no honorable person would have any reason to cast a vote in secret; the private domain was imagined only with difficulty.
These same ambiguities concerning the private self and its relation to custom and community make themselves felt in Pride and Prejudice. Austen tempers her affirmation of individual happiness as an ideal by means of a deep aesthetic vigilance over its possible excesses. The hero of the novel, for example, is as different in substance and temperament from the heroine as could be; he embodies the traditional self, one whose identity is based on a sense of his own position in the social hierarchy rather than on an evaluation of his inner worth. This is what Darcy means when he says to Elizabeth, after they have been united, that he was a good man in theory but not in practice. He accepted his own merit as given; until Elizabeth forces him to, he has no impulse to look critically inward. A traditional self with a strong sense of duty (as distinct from conscience), Darcy has before him a traditional— that is to say, arranged—marriage when the novel opens. Of course, contact with Elizabeth changes Darcy, but that Elizabeth ends by marrying so traditional a personality is perhaps the largest check on the modern drive for happiness (most intelligently represented by Elizabeth) in the novel.
Not all the self-seekers in the novel are as intelligent and virtuous as Elizabeth, however, which brings us to another way Austen tempers her affirmation of the pursuit of happiness. The novel continually juxtaposes to Elizabeth and Darcy's marriage the completely selfish marriage, such as the unions between Lydia and Wickham and between Charlotte and Mr Collins, who live only for themselves and their own advancement. In contrast, Darcy and Elizabeth are envisioned at the conclusion of the novel as surrogate parents, moral guardians, and educators to Georgiana and Kitty, and as host and hostess at their ancient estate to members of the rising class of merchants, the Gardiners. The novel ends, then, on a note of affirmation of the power of marriage as an agent of constructive social change.
Feminist critics who have condemned Austen for not opening up any new vistas for the female spirit, for merely reaffirming the traditional option of marriage, may as well say to a starving person, "Man cannot live by bread alone." Like all her sisters, Elizabeth has only humiliating dependence on relations before her if she does not marry. No professions to speak of are open to her, and laws on every side are designed to restrict her independence. Within the privilege of the gentry class, wives had far less control over their lives than husbands did, and daughters had virtually none. Charlotte Lucas marries Mr. Collins because she does not wish to remain a daughter all her life; that marriage to Mr. Collins is seen as liberating by comparison with "spinsterhood" tells us all we need to know of the depth of Austen's irony on the subject of women.
What is remarkable about Austen's perspective on this subject is that she does not lapse into sentimental wish fulfillment but renders the crass, survivalist posture required of women with unfailing honesty and irony. The "honesty" and "irony" are interchangeable because of the fundamental contradiction in the gentry woman's situation: that she enjoyed tremendous privileges and relative comfort as a member of that class but that her ability to act independently within it was severely restricted. Elizabeth's refusal to marry Mr. Collins, for example, is not ponderously portrayed as an act of courage; it would take little courage to refuse so ridiculous a person as Mr. Collins. But given the situation of women and her own particular economic circumstances, to refuse him without giving way even for a moment to anxiety concerning the future shows an exceptional spirit. Elizabeth's sangfroid is again apparent when she refuses the far more imposing Darcy; she cannot be frightened by circumstance or intimidated by power. Popular women novelists writing at the same time as Austen often show heroines engaged in far more obvious acts of heroism and have been praised over Austen by feminists for portraying more adventurous women; in one such novel the heroine travels down the Amazon River. But Austen did not have to show Elizabeth traveling down the mighty river; she walks three miles in the mud to visit an ailing sister, and the society around her (including the hero) behaves as if she had. That Elizabeth remains unfazed by their exaggerated response to this most commonplace act—Darcy's admiration no more turns her head than Miss Bingley's visible contempt ruffles her—is not the least of her virtues. It is in Austen's ironic critique of her society, with its vulgar idolatry of the "lady" combined with its brute legal and economic restriction of her independence, together with her passionate endorsement of women who live within it and still manage to retain their self-possession (dignity is too lofty a word) that her feminism lies.
That Elizabeth Bennet is so easy to like makes Pride and Prejudice the less ironic novel. But Elizabeth's marriage to Darcy, as we have seen, is not without contradiction and irony. After they are united, Elizabeth "remembered that [Darcy] had yet to learn to be laught at." Perhaps a juxtaposition of the two novels suggests more than anything else that no discussion of the social-historical context in which the heroines move can proceed without consideration of Austen's irony. The moral discrimination that forms the basis of that irony is so insistent, writes Raymond Williams, "that it can be taken as an independent value . . . which is in the end separable from its social basis." After making this profound observation, Williams goes on to attach that value to the democratic social agenda "she provided the emphasis which had only to be taken outside the park walls, into a different social experience, to become not a moral but a social criticism," such as one finds in the Victorian moralists. But we will leave it to the historical ideologists to determine the political direction Austen's emphasis would take later. Whatever one concludes, one cannot help but feel that Austen wrote more for later generations than for her own. This perception is apparent not only in her steady refusal to court the public attention she could so easily have gained but in the way the novels seem to feel themselves forward into time, articulating our own historical distance from her world by means of their irony. Historians have long been in the habit of claiming, as A. J. P. Taylor has written, that, among novelists, history began with Walter Scott, the historical novelist and contemporary of Jane Austen. But if history is a form of self-consciousness, perhaps history began with Jane Austen as well.
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