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.
Monday, June 28, 2010
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.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: THE NEW ROMANCE
Students, like many critics, question the point of the last volume (the final 19 chapters) of Pride and Prejudice because they already know who will "get" whom. Many feminist scholars portray Austen's happy unions as either sexist, sellouts, or parodies. But critics' declared dissatisfaction with marriage as a narrative resolution is never reconciled with unexamined prejudices against single women. A number of critics themselves reiterate the tired news that Austen was a "spinster," a term that Austen's books never once invoke and that hardly defends singleness as a liberating option. The twin assumptions that neither single nor married women can be powerful, useful, or happy leads to a deadlier myth, the curiously perverse axiom that suicide is woman's only "life-affirming" choice. In fact, the art—particularly Kate Chopin's The Awakening—and the authors—Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath—in vogue during the last few decades have often been seen as glorifying death as the only way out for women in an inexorably unjust culture. By implication, simply surviving, let alone coping, becomes synonymous with compromising. The last third of Pride and Prejudice, however, imagines an alternative: far from smothering under a shroud of "the marriage plot," Elizabeth Bennet works out a new institution of love based on a new conception of self.
After the crisis of Elizabeth's initial embarrassment at Mr. Darcy' s unexpected arrival at Pemberley, including her "amazement at the alteration in his manner," Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle the Gardiners "were again surprised, and Elizabeth's astonishment was quite equal to what it had been at first, by the sight of Mr. Darcy approaching them." Elizabeth's second surprise is that "he really intended to meet them." The encounter here between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy encapsulates the recurring action of this final volume; Elizabeth continually assumes that Mr. Darcy will "strike into some other path," but whenever the "turning" that obscures him fades away, he always turns up, "and at no great distance"—in fact, "immediately before" her. Every time that "her thoughts were all fixed on that one spot . . . whichever it might be, where Mr. Darcy then was," she finds that he is on an errand expressly to see or to help her.
In the woods of Pemberley, Elizabeth is far from imagining that Mr. Darcy is on such a quest. In fact, she begins an alternating pattern of distancing herself from him—fancying that her friendly praise "might be mischievously construed"—yet nevertheless bewildering herself with his mystery: "Why is he so altered?. . . It cannot be for me, it cannot be for my sake." Always the stunning answer is that her "reproofs at Hunsford [did] work such a change as this," because "it is [not] impossible that he should still love" her. Mr. Darcy himself later explains why he does not "avoid her as his greatest enemy," by distinguishing between hatred and anger: he could never hate her, and even his anger "soon began to take a proper direction"—at himself. Through an affecting contrast, Austen honors this man's exceptionally receptive resilience. Elizabeth's response to the events at Hunsford had been an inability to "feel the slightest inclination ever to see him again"; Mr. Darcy, however, not only wishes to continue as Elizabeth's friend but hopes that his sister, Georgiana, may come to know her as well.
The trope of Elizabeth's shock will be picked up when she is home at Longbourn, looking out the window to see Mr. Darcy riding up to the house with Mr. Bingley. The narrator explains, "Her astonishment at his coming was almost equal to what she had known on first witnessing his altered behaviour in Derbyshire." Elizabeth's surprise is great because she has felt that the disgrace of Lydia's elopement would destroy Mr. Darcy's affection. But we also learn that although Mr. Darcy continues to astound, the shock is lessening and is now only "almost equal" to what she had felt before. The stupefaction Elizabeth experiences here, like that created by Mr. Darcy's behavior at Pemberley, reflects the conventional belief that men cannot be loyal and deeply attached lovers. Mr. Darcy's arrival at Longbourn enlarges Elizabeth's expectations of men's capacity to love. One measure is that when he returns yet again, after Lady Catherine de Bourgh has stormed through Longbourn vowing to separate her from Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth now only "half expect[s]" him not to come.
Back in Lambton, Elizabeth had begun to rely on Mr. Darcy's affection, or on her own "power, which her fancy told her she still possessed, of bringing on the renewal of his addresses." But that confidence is shattered by the news of Lydia Bennet's elopement. For readers swept by a growing excitement at Elizabeth's discovery of Fitzwilliam Darcy's "impossible" power "still [to] love me," the turning point at the lodgings is a careful frustration of our hopes, a transformation of exhilaration to anguish. Elizabeth mistakenly, and conventionally, reads Mr. Darcy's "earnest meditation" about how to find Mr. Wickham as a sign that "her power was sinking." The inadequacy of Elizabeth's equation of love with "power" is suggested by a sudden shift in tone. From the pathos of "she could neither wonder nor condemn," the narrator unexpectedly swells into sentimental cliches: "but the belief of his self-conquest brought nothing consolatory to her bosom, afforded no palliation of her distress." "Of course not," respond students, who readily see that women's self-sacrifice is silly. Elizabeth realizes only "now, when all love must be vain," that she "could have loved him"; yet she, at least as much as Mr. Darcy, must let go of such traditional, and false, visions of sexual relations.
At issue are assumptions about the selfishness and instability of men's love. When Elizabeth discovers that Mr Darcy had been at Lydia's wedding, "conjectures as to the meaning of it, rapid and wild, hurried into her brain," but they "seemed most improbable." However, what she considers her most farfetched fancies will be "proved beyond their greatest extent to be true." Elizabeth's inability to conceive that Mr. Darcy could cherish a concern for her as "ardent" as hers for Jane culminates when we learn that while her new respect for Mr. Darcy is fervent, it still does not do him justice. "Elizabeth was now most heartily sorry" that she had not concealed the elopement from "all those who were not immediately on the spot." By designating Mr. Darcy as just another bystander, Elizabeth would, in her yearning for secrecy, negate her unreflecting confidence—her disclosure of how fully she has accepted his revelations about Mr. Wickham—and deprive herself of Mr. Darcy's delicately underspoken comfort. But Elizabeth's regrets are hilariously inappropriate because the joyful truth is that Lydia's problems never would have been solved had Elizabeth not confided in Mr Darcy. Only he knew how to find Mr. Wickham.
Elizabeth's doubts about the possibility of allegiance from Fitzwilliam Darcy are hardly a private matter. Neither Austen's culture nor our own has traditionally demanded much of men as lovers. William Collins's spleen when Elizabeth refuses him reflects the customary churlishness of the disappointed suitor. Mr Darcy's own first movement toward Elizabeth embodies the sexist view that he is a good catch who has only to choose and be accepted, that no matter how he has insulted any woman, she will be happy either to dance with or marry him whenever he can force himself to ask. The novel does not support such conventional views. Most students have been raised on the interwoven notions of women's craving for men and men's indifference to women, a trope misnamed "the battle of the sexes" and a heritage that Pride and Prejudice explicitly invokes in its opening torture scenes in which Mr. Bennet baits Mrs. Bennet. Readers continue to adore Mr. Bennet's bitter humor on a first reading and only later learn to reevaluate that continual breach of conjugal obligation and decorum which . . . was so highly reprehensible." Pride and Prejudice offers a vision of love in which women and men may care about each other with a passionate tenderness at least equal to that felt by strongly united sisters: the other person' s well-being is simply and immediately crucial. Mr. Darcy's concern for Elizabeth is so great, so sublimely disinterested, that, whether or not she loves him, he wants to make her happy and never claim the credit.
At stake is how we recognize romance. What are the signs in others that we respond to as allure, and what are the alterations in ourselves that we identify as passion?
What Pride and Prejudice offers to Elizabeth Bennet through Fitzwilliam Darcy is a sexuality that casts away usual power relations with their traditional alternatives of confrontation and capitulation, when men sweep women off their feet but both sides nurse an underlying narcissism as their truly dominant passion. The traditional proposal Mr Darcy made at Hunsford betrays a masturbatory fixation with his own desires and sacrifices, however, his avowal of love in the lanes near Longbourn portrays a generous focus on Elizabeth Bennet, foretelling a relation of listening reciprocity. Mr Darcy's reform is convincing because it is based on a goodness and generosity that Elizabeth had never credited him with, and it is moving because it is unimaginable according to cultural ideas of men's capacity and feelings. The sexual politics of the relation between Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy locates erotic pleasure in kindnesses that any person can show another. To women Austen offers a vision in which nothing about men's honest devotion is too good to be true—a prophecy that women need not settle for less. In a final volume made up almost exclusively of characters' astonishment at how others' actions surpass or betray their expectations, the delicately crocheted chain of Elizabeth's surprises carefully builds excitement over reunions that we are asked to celebrate because they change our ideas about what love, even marriage, can mean.
Yet as Elizabeth discovers Mr. Darcy's affection, she must explore her own—in a process that protects the integrity and disinterestedness of her attachment. "She respected, she esteemed, she was grateful to him, she felt a real interest in his welfare." Her effort to "make [her feelings] out," as she "lay awake two whole hours" is a comic reversal of an earlier moment when, with "something like regret," she had toyed with envy about the position as "mistress of Pemberley." Now, as Elizabeth investigates her new tenderness for Mr. Darcy, we can delight in how she stretches out the process of committing herself. Respect, esteem, gratitude, and an interest in his welfare all add up to love. Such feelings are the origin of love based on knowledge, and, Pride and Prejudice shows, nothing else is love.
But Elizabeth's discerning standards for heterosexual affection display a revolution of self as well as of eros. Even at the height of her suspense about Mr Darcy, Elizabeth asserts the worth of her own life, gloriously declaring to herself, "If he is satisfied with only regretting me, when he might have obtained my affections and hand, I shall soon cease to regret him at all." Such faith that if need be she can outlive her affection for Fitzwilliam Darcy is based on the new idea that he will be unworthy if he cannot continue to love. The value for her own future, separate from her connection to a man, and her resolve to judge his rather than her own worth by his performance intensify our suspense over the test: Can Mr. Darcy justify her affection? The fulfillment of that quest comes in a love scene that readers have long depreciated as an anticlimax.
Pride and Prejudice is a pivotal moment in our feminist heritage, an achievement whose power has in many senses been lost, as we have so often lost women's history and work. This novel offers an iconoclastic representation of women and men. Austen is a creative political thinker in her own right, but her politics must be located through attention to the relationships among her characters, between those characters and their narrator, and between narrator and reader, before we try to place her in extratextual heritages or contexts. Rather than look for politics by turning away from the text to events outside the novel, we need at last to accept that the book's explicit concerns are themselves political. Pride and Prejudice does more than teach us about the debates of Austen's day; it can guide us among the many urgent issues of identity and gender with which we continue to struggle. In an age when we have learned to see the battle of the sexes as one aspect of the abuse that women have been taught to label as "love," the answer is not to throw out romance altogether. Pride and Prejudice's moving prophecy is that we may also make Elizabeth Bennet's demand that Fitzwilliam Darcy become worthy of her love.
After the crisis of Elizabeth's initial embarrassment at Mr. Darcy' s unexpected arrival at Pemberley, including her "amazement at the alteration in his manner," Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle the Gardiners "were again surprised, and Elizabeth's astonishment was quite equal to what it had been at first, by the sight of Mr. Darcy approaching them." Elizabeth's second surprise is that "he really intended to meet them." The encounter here between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy encapsulates the recurring action of this final volume; Elizabeth continually assumes that Mr. Darcy will "strike into some other path," but whenever the "turning" that obscures him fades away, he always turns up, "and at no great distance"—in fact, "immediately before" her. Every time that "her thoughts were all fixed on that one spot . . . whichever it might be, where Mr. Darcy then was," she finds that he is on an errand expressly to see or to help her.
In the woods of Pemberley, Elizabeth is far from imagining that Mr. Darcy is on such a quest. In fact, she begins an alternating pattern of distancing herself from him—fancying that her friendly praise "might be mischievously construed"—yet nevertheless bewildering herself with his mystery: "Why is he so altered?. . . It cannot be for me, it cannot be for my sake." Always the stunning answer is that her "reproofs at Hunsford [did] work such a change as this," because "it is [not] impossible that he should still love" her. Mr. Darcy himself later explains why he does not "avoid her as his greatest enemy," by distinguishing between hatred and anger: he could never hate her, and even his anger "soon began to take a proper direction"—at himself. Through an affecting contrast, Austen honors this man's exceptionally receptive resilience. Elizabeth's response to the events at Hunsford had been an inability to "feel the slightest inclination ever to see him again"; Mr. Darcy, however, not only wishes to continue as Elizabeth's friend but hopes that his sister, Georgiana, may come to know her as well.
The trope of Elizabeth's shock will be picked up when she is home at Longbourn, looking out the window to see Mr. Darcy riding up to the house with Mr. Bingley. The narrator explains, "Her astonishment at his coming was almost equal to what she had known on first witnessing his altered behaviour in Derbyshire." Elizabeth's surprise is great because she has felt that the disgrace of Lydia's elopement would destroy Mr. Darcy's affection. But we also learn that although Mr. Darcy continues to astound, the shock is lessening and is now only "almost equal" to what she had felt before. The stupefaction Elizabeth experiences here, like that created by Mr. Darcy's behavior at Pemberley, reflects the conventional belief that men cannot be loyal and deeply attached lovers. Mr. Darcy's arrival at Longbourn enlarges Elizabeth's expectations of men's capacity to love. One measure is that when he returns yet again, after Lady Catherine de Bourgh has stormed through Longbourn vowing to separate her from Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth now only "half expect[s]" him not to come.
Back in Lambton, Elizabeth had begun to rely on Mr. Darcy's affection, or on her own "power, which her fancy told her she still possessed, of bringing on the renewal of his addresses." But that confidence is shattered by the news of Lydia Bennet's elopement. For readers swept by a growing excitement at Elizabeth's discovery of Fitzwilliam Darcy's "impossible" power "still [to] love me," the turning point at the lodgings is a careful frustration of our hopes, a transformation of exhilaration to anguish. Elizabeth mistakenly, and conventionally, reads Mr. Darcy's "earnest meditation" about how to find Mr. Wickham as a sign that "her power was sinking." The inadequacy of Elizabeth's equation of love with "power" is suggested by a sudden shift in tone. From the pathos of "she could neither wonder nor condemn," the narrator unexpectedly swells into sentimental cliches: "but the belief of his self-conquest brought nothing consolatory to her bosom, afforded no palliation of her distress." "Of course not," respond students, who readily see that women's self-sacrifice is silly. Elizabeth realizes only "now, when all love must be vain," that she "could have loved him"; yet she, at least as much as Mr. Darcy, must let go of such traditional, and false, visions of sexual relations.
At issue are assumptions about the selfishness and instability of men's love. When Elizabeth discovers that Mr Darcy had been at Lydia's wedding, "conjectures as to the meaning of it, rapid and wild, hurried into her brain," but they "seemed most improbable." However, what she considers her most farfetched fancies will be "proved beyond their greatest extent to be true." Elizabeth's inability to conceive that Mr. Darcy could cherish a concern for her as "ardent" as hers for Jane culminates when we learn that while her new respect for Mr. Darcy is fervent, it still does not do him justice. "Elizabeth was now most heartily sorry" that she had not concealed the elopement from "all those who were not immediately on the spot." By designating Mr. Darcy as just another bystander, Elizabeth would, in her yearning for secrecy, negate her unreflecting confidence—her disclosure of how fully she has accepted his revelations about Mr. Wickham—and deprive herself of Mr. Darcy's delicately underspoken comfort. But Elizabeth's regrets are hilariously inappropriate because the joyful truth is that Lydia's problems never would have been solved had Elizabeth not confided in Mr Darcy. Only he knew how to find Mr. Wickham.
Elizabeth's doubts about the possibility of allegiance from Fitzwilliam Darcy are hardly a private matter. Neither Austen's culture nor our own has traditionally demanded much of men as lovers. William Collins's spleen when Elizabeth refuses him reflects the customary churlishness of the disappointed suitor. Mr Darcy's own first movement toward Elizabeth embodies the sexist view that he is a good catch who has only to choose and be accepted, that no matter how he has insulted any woman, she will be happy either to dance with or marry him whenever he can force himself to ask. The novel does not support such conventional views. Most students have been raised on the interwoven notions of women's craving for men and men's indifference to women, a trope misnamed "the battle of the sexes" and a heritage that Pride and Prejudice explicitly invokes in its opening torture scenes in which Mr. Bennet baits Mrs. Bennet. Readers continue to adore Mr. Bennet's bitter humor on a first reading and only later learn to reevaluate that continual breach of conjugal obligation and decorum which . . . was so highly reprehensible." Pride and Prejudice offers a vision of love in which women and men may care about each other with a passionate tenderness at least equal to that felt by strongly united sisters: the other person' s well-being is simply and immediately crucial. Mr. Darcy's concern for Elizabeth is so great, so sublimely disinterested, that, whether or not she loves him, he wants to make her happy and never claim the credit.
At stake is how we recognize romance. What are the signs in others that we respond to as allure, and what are the alterations in ourselves that we identify as passion?
What Pride and Prejudice offers to Elizabeth Bennet through Fitzwilliam Darcy is a sexuality that casts away usual power relations with their traditional alternatives of confrontation and capitulation, when men sweep women off their feet but both sides nurse an underlying narcissism as their truly dominant passion. The traditional proposal Mr Darcy made at Hunsford betrays a masturbatory fixation with his own desires and sacrifices, however, his avowal of love in the lanes near Longbourn portrays a generous focus on Elizabeth Bennet, foretelling a relation of listening reciprocity. Mr Darcy's reform is convincing because it is based on a goodness and generosity that Elizabeth had never credited him with, and it is moving because it is unimaginable according to cultural ideas of men's capacity and feelings. The sexual politics of the relation between Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy locates erotic pleasure in kindnesses that any person can show another. To women Austen offers a vision in which nothing about men's honest devotion is too good to be true—a prophecy that women need not settle for less. In a final volume made up almost exclusively of characters' astonishment at how others' actions surpass or betray their expectations, the delicately crocheted chain of Elizabeth's surprises carefully builds excitement over reunions that we are asked to celebrate because they change our ideas about what love, even marriage, can mean.
Yet as Elizabeth discovers Mr. Darcy's affection, she must explore her own—in a process that protects the integrity and disinterestedness of her attachment. "She respected, she esteemed, she was grateful to him, she felt a real interest in his welfare." Her effort to "make [her feelings] out," as she "lay awake two whole hours" is a comic reversal of an earlier moment when, with "something like regret," she had toyed with envy about the position as "mistress of Pemberley." Now, as Elizabeth investigates her new tenderness for Mr. Darcy, we can delight in how she stretches out the process of committing herself. Respect, esteem, gratitude, and an interest in his welfare all add up to love. Such feelings are the origin of love based on knowledge, and, Pride and Prejudice shows, nothing else is love.
But Elizabeth's discerning standards for heterosexual affection display a revolution of self as well as of eros. Even at the height of her suspense about Mr Darcy, Elizabeth asserts the worth of her own life, gloriously declaring to herself, "If he is satisfied with only regretting me, when he might have obtained my affections and hand, I shall soon cease to regret him at all." Such faith that if need be she can outlive her affection for Fitzwilliam Darcy is based on the new idea that he will be unworthy if he cannot continue to love. The value for her own future, separate from her connection to a man, and her resolve to judge his rather than her own worth by his performance intensify our suspense over the test: Can Mr. Darcy justify her affection? The fulfillment of that quest comes in a love scene that readers have long depreciated as an anticlimax.
Pride and Prejudice is a pivotal moment in our feminist heritage, an achievement whose power has in many senses been lost, as we have so often lost women's history and work. This novel offers an iconoclastic representation of women and men. Austen is a creative political thinker in her own right, but her politics must be located through attention to the relationships among her characters, between those characters and their narrator, and between narrator and reader, before we try to place her in extratextual heritages or contexts. Rather than look for politics by turning away from the text to events outside the novel, we need at last to accept that the book's explicit concerns are themselves political. Pride and Prejudice does more than teach us about the debates of Austen's day; it can guide us among the many urgent issues of identity and gender with which we continue to struggle. In an age when we have learned to see the battle of the sexes as one aspect of the abuse that women have been taught to label as "love," the answer is not to throw out romance altogether. Pride and Prejudice's moving prophecy is that we may also make Elizabeth Bennet's demand that Fitzwilliam Darcy become worthy of her love.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Pride and Prejudice published in 1813, is Jane Austen's second, and probably best known novel, though it was originally published anonymously. Austen began Pride and Prejudice in 1796 under the title First Impressions. Her family found the novel entertaining and continued to reread it for at least two years. By 1799, she'd begun working on Eleanor and Marianne, which was later published as Sense and Sensibility in 1811. She again began revision work on First Impressions, though she was forced to retitle it as the name had already been used by another novelist. Pride and Prejudice finds its popular appeal in its control of language, wit, clever dialogue, and charming representations of human foible portrayed in characters such as Mr. Collins, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and Mrs. Bennet. It is a far more mature and better written novel than Sense and Sensibility.
Known as a novel of manners, it, like Emma (1816), another popular Austen novel often used in the classroom, portrays the life of gentility in a small, rural society. Austen dramatizes the delicate and precarious nature of a society based on an ecology of manners. In such a society, the well-being of everyone hinges on people maintaining their proper places and behaving according to a strict code of manners. For the Bennet girls, their chances of marriage fall precipitously with every show of impropriety.
From the beginning, it is important to understand the very real danger that faces the Bennet girls if they do not marry. Upon Mr. Bennet's death, the girls' cousin, Mr. Collins, will inherit Longbourn. That means that the family will have no source of support and no place to live. A marriage of one of the girls to a wealthy man would provide a solution, but there is another problem, even for Jane and Elizabeth who do not suffer from ill-bred, vulgar behavior as their sisters do. Each girl possesses a negligible dowry to entice a prospective husband. Any man who chooses to marry a poor girl must do so for love or to acquire a good wife. Clearly Kitty, Mary, and Lydia will not make good wives. They have not been brought up to behave properly. Indeed, with the example of the loud, tactless Mrs. Bennet, it is a wonder that Elizabeth and Jane have managed to grow up so well.
Mrs. Bennet cannot be the only one blamed for the poor behavior of her daughters. Mr. Bennet keeps himself aloof from his wife's quirks, using them only as fodder for his dry wit. When Mrs. Bennet sends Jane on horseback to Netherfield, plotting that Jane should catch cold, Mr. Bennet, though making disparaging comments, does not attempt to stop her. He is as ineffective a parent as she is, taking no responsibility for the improprieties of the girls, until Lydia's elopement. At this point he realizes he has been derelict as a parent and attempts to change. This is part of Austen's goal to teach the necessity of proper behavior, of taking responsibility for one's actions. Thus is it important that both Darcy and Elizabeth admit to their Pride and Prejudice and the mistakes that they have made. In doing so, they seek to learn from their mistakes, but also they recognize the danger of such rash opinionated behavior, such as that of Darcy's childhood friend, Wickham. Mr. Wickham was nearly the ruin of both of them and their families.
However, in spite of Wickham's and Lydia's complete break with propriety, and the danger that she places the rest of her family in, she neither learns from her mistakes, nor suffers particularly from them. In a world where so much depends on people fulfilling their positions, behaving properly, punishment is a luxury that society cannot afford. For if Lydia were punished, perhaps ostracized, the rest of the family, and through them friends and the rest of the community, would suffer. The taint of scandal and gossip serve to make women ineligible to marry. In this small community, no one could afford to associate with the Bennets. At the same time, maintaining that sort of ostracism would cause schism and the ecology of the community would be forever crippled, if not destroyed completely. Therefore, Lydia must be forgiven and her improprieties overlooked. This is only possible because she has returned to the fold, once again conforming within the bounds of acceptable behavior. Once she and Wickham have married, they have sufficiently rectified their situation and no longer pose a danger to the society.
Austen does remain cautious about marriage without some sort of attachment, or marriage between people of comparable characters. Charlotte marries Mr. Collins, suffering for the rest of her life with an obsequious fool and under the thumb of Lady de Bourgh. In exchange for security, she has given up her individuality and freedom. And while Austen does suggest that individuality must be contained within the codes and mores of society, it should not be repressed all together. Individualism has the power to add zest and charm to life, as long as it does not subvert the community. This sort of conforming individualism is best exemplified in Elizabeth. She is a unique character, abiding by the social demands of the community, yet at the same time her sharp wit and humor make her the only woman that engages Darcy's mind and heart.
Feminists have criticized Austen's portrayal of women in Pride and Prejudice as being too passive. None of the women ever take active control of their lives. They instead must wait until men act. Jane must wait for Bingley, and when he leaves Netherfield, she cannot contact him or ask for any explanation. Similarly, when Lydia disappears with Wickham, none of the Bennet women—who incidentally will be more fundamentally affected by the events than anyone else—are allowed to do anything to retrieve Lydia. Instead they must wait at home for news. This enforced passivity reinforces the traditional view of women as helpless and delicate. Men must take care of women since they are incapable of managing for themselves. However, it should be noted that Austen gives most of the dialogue to the women throughout the novel.
Another thing that many readers notice about Austen's novels, is that in spite of the fact that she writes during the political turmoil of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the growing Industrial Revolution, and the escalating political and social upheaval in England, except for the officers stationed in Meryton, there is no evidence of any of this strife in her novels. Austen herself notes that she knows little of the world at large and instead chooses to write about what she does know. However, it is clear that she does not know how to write male characters well. As mentioned above, much of the dialog in the novel is given to women. Some critics have suggested that Austen herself was not familiar enough with men to write believable male characters. When Elizabeth accepts Darcy's proposal, Austen only vaguely suggests his reaction: "he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do."
Austen's writings had great influence on a number of writers throughout the century. Glimpses of Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Collins can be found in Dickens Elizabeth's sharp wit can be found in Thackeray, Eden, and Trollope. Her exploration of manners and the constrictions of women were taken up by later women writers such as George Eliot, Sarah Grand, and Elizabeth Gaskell. She helped to legitimize the novel as an art form. At the same time, she set an example for other women writers, showing them that even without the expansive education given to men, women could still make valuable contributions.
Known as a novel of manners, it, like Emma (1816), another popular Austen novel often used in the classroom, portrays the life of gentility in a small, rural society. Austen dramatizes the delicate and precarious nature of a society based on an ecology of manners. In such a society, the well-being of everyone hinges on people maintaining their proper places and behaving according to a strict code of manners. For the Bennet girls, their chances of marriage fall precipitously with every show of impropriety.
From the beginning, it is important to understand the very real danger that faces the Bennet girls if they do not marry. Upon Mr. Bennet's death, the girls' cousin, Mr. Collins, will inherit Longbourn. That means that the family will have no source of support and no place to live. A marriage of one of the girls to a wealthy man would provide a solution, but there is another problem, even for Jane and Elizabeth who do not suffer from ill-bred, vulgar behavior as their sisters do. Each girl possesses a negligible dowry to entice a prospective husband. Any man who chooses to marry a poor girl must do so for love or to acquire a good wife. Clearly Kitty, Mary, and Lydia will not make good wives. They have not been brought up to behave properly. Indeed, with the example of the loud, tactless Mrs. Bennet, it is a wonder that Elizabeth and Jane have managed to grow up so well.
Mrs. Bennet cannot be the only one blamed for the poor behavior of her daughters. Mr. Bennet keeps himself aloof from his wife's quirks, using them only as fodder for his dry wit. When Mrs. Bennet sends Jane on horseback to Netherfield, plotting that Jane should catch cold, Mr. Bennet, though making disparaging comments, does not attempt to stop her. He is as ineffective a parent as she is, taking no responsibility for the improprieties of the girls, until Lydia's elopement. At this point he realizes he has been derelict as a parent and attempts to change. This is part of Austen's goal to teach the necessity of proper behavior, of taking responsibility for one's actions. Thus is it important that both Darcy and Elizabeth admit to their Pride and Prejudice and the mistakes that they have made. In doing so, they seek to learn from their mistakes, but also they recognize the danger of such rash opinionated behavior, such as that of Darcy's childhood friend, Wickham. Mr. Wickham was nearly the ruin of both of them and their families.
However, in spite of Wickham's and Lydia's complete break with propriety, and the danger that she places the rest of her family in, she neither learns from her mistakes, nor suffers particularly from them. In a world where so much depends on people fulfilling their positions, behaving properly, punishment is a luxury that society cannot afford. For if Lydia were punished, perhaps ostracized, the rest of the family, and through them friends and the rest of the community, would suffer. The taint of scandal and gossip serve to make women ineligible to marry. In this small community, no one could afford to associate with the Bennets. At the same time, maintaining that sort of ostracism would cause schism and the ecology of the community would be forever crippled, if not destroyed completely. Therefore, Lydia must be forgiven and her improprieties overlooked. This is only possible because she has returned to the fold, once again conforming within the bounds of acceptable behavior. Once she and Wickham have married, they have sufficiently rectified their situation and no longer pose a danger to the society.
Austen does remain cautious about marriage without some sort of attachment, or marriage between people of comparable characters. Charlotte marries Mr. Collins, suffering for the rest of her life with an obsequious fool and under the thumb of Lady de Bourgh. In exchange for security, she has given up her individuality and freedom. And while Austen does suggest that individuality must be contained within the codes and mores of society, it should not be repressed all together. Individualism has the power to add zest and charm to life, as long as it does not subvert the community. This sort of conforming individualism is best exemplified in Elizabeth. She is a unique character, abiding by the social demands of the community, yet at the same time her sharp wit and humor make her the only woman that engages Darcy's mind and heart.
Feminists have criticized Austen's portrayal of women in Pride and Prejudice as being too passive. None of the women ever take active control of their lives. They instead must wait until men act. Jane must wait for Bingley, and when he leaves Netherfield, she cannot contact him or ask for any explanation. Similarly, when Lydia disappears with Wickham, none of the Bennet women—who incidentally will be more fundamentally affected by the events than anyone else—are allowed to do anything to retrieve Lydia. Instead they must wait at home for news. This enforced passivity reinforces the traditional view of women as helpless and delicate. Men must take care of women since they are incapable of managing for themselves. However, it should be noted that Austen gives most of the dialogue to the women throughout the novel.
Another thing that many readers notice about Austen's novels, is that in spite of the fact that she writes during the political turmoil of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the growing Industrial Revolution, and the escalating political and social upheaval in England, except for the officers stationed in Meryton, there is no evidence of any of this strife in her novels. Austen herself notes that she knows little of the world at large and instead chooses to write about what she does know. However, it is clear that she does not know how to write male characters well. As mentioned above, much of the dialog in the novel is given to women. Some critics have suggested that Austen herself was not familiar enough with men to write believable male characters. When Elizabeth accepts Darcy's proposal, Austen only vaguely suggests his reaction: "he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do."
Austen's writings had great influence on a number of writers throughout the century. Glimpses of Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Collins can be found in Dickens Elizabeth's sharp wit can be found in Thackeray, Eden, and Trollope. Her exploration of manners and the constrictions of women were taken up by later women writers such as George Eliot, Sarah Grand, and Elizabeth Gaskell. She helped to legitimize the novel as an art form. At the same time, she set an example for other women writers, showing them that even without the expansive education given to men, women could still make valuable contributions.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: HUMOR
Pride and Prejudice is an extremely funny novel, but most students miss the humor because of difficulty with the language. Close examination of Austen’s ironic and scathing treatment of specific characters and scenes in the novel not only helps to clarify the novel’s major themes, but also makes Pride and Prejudice an enjoyable experience.
The novel is sarcastic from its opening line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” (1). This is obviously not true—as any major movie star or rock singer can attest. Austen is ironically stating that when a young, rich, single man is in the neighborhood, people are always trying to set him up with a girl, whether or not he wants to be. This is because, as Austen notes, once he moves into a neighborhood, he becomes the "rightful property” of the girls of the area. This idea of targeting available young men for marriage is the central topic of the novel, as every family in Hertfordshire is attempting to hitch up Mr. Bingley to their daughters. This line also shows the desperation of the families in attempting to attain wealth and connections at all costs.
The first declared victim of this targeting mentality, Mrs. Bennet, is one of the funniest (and the stupidest) characters in Pride and Prejudice. In Chapter 1, Mrs. Bennet is completely oblivious to Mr. Bennet’s sarcasm because she is incapable of understanding anything remotely intelligent, and she is completely fixated on the idea of Mr. Bingley, the latest rich and available young man to move into the neighborhood. Mr. Bennett teases Mrs. Bennet by telling her that there is no need for him to introduce himself to Bingley, which there really is, as the societal rules of the time dictated that the father of a family must first introduce themselves to a new neighbor (especially a male) before the rest of the family was permitted to visit. The teasing comes to a head when Mrs. Bennet exclaims that Mr. Bennet has no regard for her delicate nerves, to which he replies: “You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least” (2). In reality, Mr. Bennet has no respect for his wife’s feelings at all because she is so ridiculous. Austen clarifies this shortly hereafter, when she describes the Bennets as a couple:
Mr. Bennet was 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. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was 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 (3).
In other words, Mr. Bennet is a smart aleck and Mrs. Bennet is a whiny hypochondriac whose only goals in life are getting her daughters married and gossip. This is indicative of both characters throughout the novel: anything that comes out of Mr. Bennet’s mouth is sarcastic and/or insulting, and whatever Mrs. Bennet says is idiotic and loud. This mismatch of tempers and abilities highlights one of the novel’s most significant themes, the concept of a good match as a unity of similar characters and temperaments as opposed to marriage for the sake of attraction.
Unfortunately, the Bennet marriage also exemplifies another warning from Austen—the ramifications of a bad match on children. The Bennets’ inability to understand each other and get along results in Mr. Bennet’s neglect of his three youngest daughters: Mary, Kitty, and Lydia. He leaves them to his wife to raise because after his patience has worn out after Jane and Elizabeth, and this neglect is what makes these three girls so “silly.” Lydia is an airheaded flirt whose selfishness nearly ruins everything for all of her sisters, and Kitty is a nervous wreck who is far too easily influenced by Lydia’s lead. However, the oldest of the three silly girls, Mary, is another source of amusement in the novel. Mary is sarcastically introduced in the novel by her father, who facetiously appeals to the “wisdom” that she has gathered from great amounts of reading: “’What say you, Mary? For you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books, and make extracts’” (4). Despite reflecting deeply and reading always, Mary has no ability to apply the knowledge she has gathered, and is just as much of an idiot as her mother is. Austen demonstrates this immediately with Mary’s lack of a response to her father’s taunt: “Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.” This is Mary’s problem throughout the novel, as she says a great many things, but absolutely none of them are sensible. Another example of this occurs after Elizabeth finishes playing the piano at the second gathering of the novel, where she is quickly succeeded by Mary, who devours any chance at attention even though she cannot sing. Austen then describes Mary more thoroughly:
Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application [perseverance], it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached. Elizabeth, easy and unaffected, had been listened to with much more pleasure, though not playing half so well (17).
Mary’s vanity and know-it-all attitude make her intolerable to everyone around her, but it is the result of the neglect of her father, who could have taught her proper manners and could have helped in her education, as he had done with Jane and Elizabeth. Elizabeth notes this failing in her father later on in the novel, reminding us that the consequence of a bad match is often miserable and neglected children.
Another of Austen’s humor targets is Mr. Collins. With the possible exception of Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Collins is the biggest buffoon of Pride and Prejudice. His letter of introduction in the novel makes his silliness obvious:
[F]or having received ordination at Easter, I have been so fortunate as to be distinguished by the patronage of the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh...whose bounty and beneficence has preferred me to the valuable rectory of this parish, where it shall be my earnest endeavour to demean myself with grateful respect towards her Ladyship, and be very ready to perform those rites and ceremonies which are instituted by the Church of England (47).
Mr. Collins sees his primary job as Lady Catherine’s doormat (which is a good thing, since she is determined to treat him and every other character in the novel that way), and will also force himself to baptize, marry, and bury the members of his parish whenever time permits. Both Elizabeth and Mr. Bennet immediately recognize that he may not necessarily be “sensible,” and their assessment is justified when Mr. Collins arrives shortly thereafter. He constantly praises everything, down to the most minute piece of furniture. He also apologizes profusely for the smallest thing, a habit appreciated by no one except Mary and Mrs. Bennet. His constant remarks of admiration for Lady Catherine, whose condescension and sheer rudeness equal the money she possesses, irritate virtually everyone around him.
One of the best examples of the failings of Mr. Collins and of humor in the novel in general is Mr. Collins’ proposal to Elizabeth. When Mr. Collins asks Mrs. Bennet for a private word with Elizabeth, Elizabeth tries to avoid being alone with him by first saying that no one needs to leave, and then tries to leave the room herself, but is stayed by her mother’s order. Then Mr. Collins begins his declarations of love for Elizabeth: “’Almost as soon as I entered the house I singled you out as the companion of my future life’” (80). This statement is false, since he initially shows interest in Jane and only makes up his mind for Elizabeth when Mrs. Bennet tells him that Jane is practically engaged to Bingley. He then proceeds to list his reasons for marrying, all of which basically boil down to the fact that Lady Catherine told him he should, which is hardly romantic. He also goes so far as to say that the best thing about marrying him is that Elizabeth will get to be near Lady Catherine herself, which, in Mr. Collins’ mind, is the ultimate reason to marry anyone. Elizabeth is, not surprisingly, not enticed by this proposal, and refuses Mr. Collins. This hilarious and awkward scenario, a primer on what not to do when one proposes, is also a reminder to Austen’s audience that the only reason to marry anyone is for true love—love that is based on understanding and equality of mind and character, not love of status or beauty. Unfortunately, Mr. Collins is so dense that he does not believe Elizabeth, and therefore persists several more times before he finally gives up his suit and proposes to Charlotte Lucas, who he does not even know. This point is exemplified later through the Collins’ marriage, as Charlotte is completely miserable and must encourage her husband to be away from her as much as possible.
There are many other examples of humor in this novel. From Darcy and Elizabeth’s verbal war to the nonsensical behavior of the sillier characters in the novel, Austen’s use of irony, both verbal and situational, makes her examination of the rules of courtship and society a joy to read, and her style also emphasizes her major points. Pride and Prejudice is the perfect example of humor’s ability to teach important lessons about life.
The novel is sarcastic from its opening line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” (1). This is obviously not true—as any major movie star or rock singer can attest. Austen is ironically stating that when a young, rich, single man is in the neighborhood, people are always trying to set him up with a girl, whether or not he wants to be. This is because, as Austen notes, once he moves into a neighborhood, he becomes the "rightful property” of the girls of the area. This idea of targeting available young men for marriage is the central topic of the novel, as every family in Hertfordshire is attempting to hitch up Mr. Bingley to their daughters. This line also shows the desperation of the families in attempting to attain wealth and connections at all costs.
The first declared victim of this targeting mentality, Mrs. Bennet, is one of the funniest (and the stupidest) characters in Pride and Prejudice. In Chapter 1, Mrs. Bennet is completely oblivious to Mr. Bennet’s sarcasm because she is incapable of understanding anything remotely intelligent, and she is completely fixated on the idea of Mr. Bingley, the latest rich and available young man to move into the neighborhood. Mr. Bennett teases Mrs. Bennet by telling her that there is no need for him to introduce himself to Bingley, which there really is, as the societal rules of the time dictated that the father of a family must first introduce themselves to a new neighbor (especially a male) before the rest of the family was permitted to visit. The teasing comes to a head when Mrs. Bennet exclaims that Mr. Bennet has no regard for her delicate nerves, to which he replies: “You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least” (2). In reality, Mr. Bennet has no respect for his wife’s feelings at all because she is so ridiculous. Austen clarifies this shortly hereafter, when she describes the Bennets as a couple:
Mr. Bennet was 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. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was 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 (3).
In other words, Mr. Bennet is a smart aleck and Mrs. Bennet is a whiny hypochondriac whose only goals in life are getting her daughters married and gossip. This is indicative of both characters throughout the novel: anything that comes out of Mr. Bennet’s mouth is sarcastic and/or insulting, and whatever Mrs. Bennet says is idiotic and loud. This mismatch of tempers and abilities highlights one of the novel’s most significant themes, the concept of a good match as a unity of similar characters and temperaments as opposed to marriage for the sake of attraction.
Unfortunately, the Bennet marriage also exemplifies another warning from Austen—the ramifications of a bad match on children. The Bennets’ inability to understand each other and get along results in Mr. Bennet’s neglect of his three youngest daughters: Mary, Kitty, and Lydia. He leaves them to his wife to raise because after his patience has worn out after Jane and Elizabeth, and this neglect is what makes these three girls so “silly.” Lydia is an airheaded flirt whose selfishness nearly ruins everything for all of her sisters, and Kitty is a nervous wreck who is far too easily influenced by Lydia’s lead. However, the oldest of the three silly girls, Mary, is another source of amusement in the novel. Mary is sarcastically introduced in the novel by her father, who facetiously appeals to the “wisdom” that she has gathered from great amounts of reading: “’What say you, Mary? For you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books, and make extracts’” (4). Despite reflecting deeply and reading always, Mary has no ability to apply the knowledge she has gathered, and is just as much of an idiot as her mother is. Austen demonstrates this immediately with Mary’s lack of a response to her father’s taunt: “Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.” This is Mary’s problem throughout the novel, as she says a great many things, but absolutely none of them are sensible. Another example of this occurs after Elizabeth finishes playing the piano at the second gathering of the novel, where she is quickly succeeded by Mary, who devours any chance at attention even though she cannot sing. Austen then describes Mary more thoroughly:
Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application [perseverance], it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached. Elizabeth, easy and unaffected, had been listened to with much more pleasure, though not playing half so well (17).
Mary’s vanity and know-it-all attitude make her intolerable to everyone around her, but it is the result of the neglect of her father, who could have taught her proper manners and could have helped in her education, as he had done with Jane and Elizabeth. Elizabeth notes this failing in her father later on in the novel, reminding us that the consequence of a bad match is often miserable and neglected children.
Another of Austen’s humor targets is Mr. Collins. With the possible exception of Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Collins is the biggest buffoon of Pride and Prejudice. His letter of introduction in the novel makes his silliness obvious:
[F]or having received ordination at Easter, I have been so fortunate as to be distinguished by the patronage of the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh...whose bounty and beneficence has preferred me to the valuable rectory of this parish, where it shall be my earnest endeavour to demean myself with grateful respect towards her Ladyship, and be very ready to perform those rites and ceremonies which are instituted by the Church of England (47).
Mr. Collins sees his primary job as Lady Catherine’s doormat (which is a good thing, since she is determined to treat him and every other character in the novel that way), and will also force himself to baptize, marry, and bury the members of his parish whenever time permits. Both Elizabeth and Mr. Bennet immediately recognize that he may not necessarily be “sensible,” and their assessment is justified when Mr. Collins arrives shortly thereafter. He constantly praises everything, down to the most minute piece of furniture. He also apologizes profusely for the smallest thing, a habit appreciated by no one except Mary and Mrs. Bennet. His constant remarks of admiration for Lady Catherine, whose condescension and sheer rudeness equal the money she possesses, irritate virtually everyone around him.
One of the best examples of the failings of Mr. Collins and of humor in the novel in general is Mr. Collins’ proposal to Elizabeth. When Mr. Collins asks Mrs. Bennet for a private word with Elizabeth, Elizabeth tries to avoid being alone with him by first saying that no one needs to leave, and then tries to leave the room herself, but is stayed by her mother’s order. Then Mr. Collins begins his declarations of love for Elizabeth: “’Almost as soon as I entered the house I singled you out as the companion of my future life’” (80). This statement is false, since he initially shows interest in Jane and only makes up his mind for Elizabeth when Mrs. Bennet tells him that Jane is practically engaged to Bingley. He then proceeds to list his reasons for marrying, all of which basically boil down to the fact that Lady Catherine told him he should, which is hardly romantic. He also goes so far as to say that the best thing about marrying him is that Elizabeth will get to be near Lady Catherine herself, which, in Mr. Collins’ mind, is the ultimate reason to marry anyone. Elizabeth is, not surprisingly, not enticed by this proposal, and refuses Mr. Collins. This hilarious and awkward scenario, a primer on what not to do when one proposes, is also a reminder to Austen’s audience that the only reason to marry anyone is for true love—love that is based on understanding and equality of mind and character, not love of status or beauty. Unfortunately, Mr. Collins is so dense that he does not believe Elizabeth, and therefore persists several more times before he finally gives up his suit and proposes to Charlotte Lucas, who he does not even know. This point is exemplified later through the Collins’ marriage, as Charlotte is completely miserable and must encourage her husband to be away from her as much as possible.
There are many other examples of humor in this novel. From Darcy and Elizabeth’s verbal war to the nonsensical behavior of the sillier characters in the novel, Austen’s use of irony, both verbal and situational, makes her examination of the rules of courtship and society a joy to read, and her style also emphasizes her major points. Pride and Prejudice is the perfect example of humor’s ability to teach important lessons about life.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: GOOD MATCHES
The primary concern of Pride and Prejudice is to determine how a young girl of some intelligence and beauty but not much money can enter into a good marriage in Regency England—a time and place in which a good marriage was determined almost entirely by the opportunity for money, status, and “connections” (networking) between families and businesses. Austen criticizes this concept of marriage as financial and social advancement, and instead contends that a good marriage consists of two people who are of similar mind and talents.
In order to understand what is at stake for all of the girls in the novel, it must first be understood that there were very few options available to the daughters of a gentleman such as Elizabeth Bennett and her sisters. Professions for “respectable” women at the time were scarce—the only viable career choice would be as a governess for young children. Since those jobs were few and far between, the most realistic (and sometimes only) option for young women of Austen’s time was marriage. This, of course, made the availability of brides to men plentiful, increasing the anxiety of parents of young girls who did not have enough money, status, or beauty to attract rich young men. Austen addresses the desperation felt by parents who needed to marry off their daughters at the very beginning of the novel: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” (1). This spot of humor highlights the major dilemma of not only the Bennett sisters but thousands of girls in Austen’s time—the desperation of parents to marry their daughters off to the first unmarried man with money that comes along.
Austen presents several attitudes toward the problem of attaining a marriage with underwhelming money, status, and/or looks. The first character to marry in the novel is Charlotte Lucas, who demonstrates her opinion on the concept of a good match in her discussion with Elizabeth regarding Jane and Bingley:
“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other, or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation, and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life” (16).
Charlotte is advocating not knowing anything about a spouse before getting married because she believes that the less you know, the better. This philosophy, which Elizabeth immediately dismisses as “not sound,” is what leads Charlotte to agree to marry Mr. Collins, a buffoon who will be a constant source of embarrassment and distress to Charlotte. Many characters in the novel, as well as Regency society itself, would consider Mr. Collins a tremendous match for the plain, nearly-spinster Charlotte, who has been previously unsuccessful in attracting a husband. After all, Mr. Collins is a respectable man whose position as a minister for the well-respected Lady Catherine de Bourgh is the envy of many. He will have money and standing throughout his life, and will eventually even inherit Longbourn. It is no wonder, then, that Mrs. Bennett is angry with Elizabeth for turning down an offer of marriage from such an eligible man. However, Austen soon vindicates her heroine because only a few months later, Charlotte is miserable in her marriage despite her social and marital status. Austen demonstrates Charlotte’s mistake in failing to get to know her prospective husband before the point of no return.
Marriage that is based on looks and physical attraction does not work any better than marrying for status. The Bennets, we are told, marry because they were both good looking:
[Elizabeth’s] father, captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humor which youth and beauty generally give, had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her (176).
Mr. and Mrs. Bennett wed because they are physically attracted to each other, but, like Charlotte and Mr. Collins, learn nothing of their prospective spouse’s personality. As a result, they soon find they have nothing in common and by the beginning of the action of this novel cannot even stand to be in the same room for long periods of time. This lack of understanding and tolerance has a devastating effect on the Bennett daughters, as Mr. Bennett’s intolerance of his wife leads him to leave his youngest three daughters alone, which is why they become so silly. Elizabeth acknowledges this after noting Lydia and Kitty’s vulgar behavior with the militia:
But she had never felt so strongly as now the disadvantages which must attend the children of so unsuitable a marriage, nor ever been so fully aware of the evils arising from so ill-judged a direction of talents, talents which rightly used might at least have preserved the respectability of his daughters, even if incapable of enlarging the mind of his wife (177).Mr. Bennett’s loathing of his wife is no excuse for his parental neglect, and he is responsible for not guiding Mary, Kitty, and Lydia properly. Lydia and Wickham are no better off—they foolishly run off to London without knowing much of anything of each other because they too are attracted to each other. Lydia is a carbon copy of her mother, and Wickham, who is far more cunning, soon tires of her. Had they bothered to acquaint themselves with each other, they might have avoided the Bennets’ fate.
Jane Austen’s concept of a good match is more than looks and status—it is a match of character and intelligence. Darcy and Elizabeth are proof of this. Both characters demonstrate their intelligence and wit throughout the novel, often through their verbal sparring with each other. Both suffer from their own pride, as well as the prejudice created by each other’s actions. However, Elizabeth’s prejudice against Darcy’s comments and actions in the beginning of the novel is much more severe than Darcy’s, which explains why he falls in love with Elizabeth long before she has any interest in him. While Elizabeth’s personality appeals to him, Darcy is convinced that he is superior to Elizabeth because he has the same expectations of a match that those of his society maintain. This sense of superiority is a tremendous offense to Elizabeth in Chapter 34, and she has little trouble rejecting Darcy because he is so rude. Elizabeth, however, is not innocent either, and believes herself to be superior to Darcy because she thinks she is not as rude as he is. The reality of the situation, however, is that Elizabeth is just as dissatisfied with people as Darcy is:
“The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and everyday confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense” (101-102).At this point in the novel, Darcy is attracted to Elizabeth beyond reason, but as this would send him down the same road as the Bennets or the Wickhams, it is insufficient to woo Elizabeth, and thus the proposal cannot be accepted until Darcy learns that Elizabeth is an equal.
Fortunately for both of them, Darcy and Elizabeth come to realize that they are indeed equals. Darcy meets the Gardiners, who demonstrate that Elizabeth’s relations can not only act in a civilized manner, but can actually be a delight to speak to. Elizabeth sees the regard of Darcy’s servants for their master, and witnesses the behavior of the reformed Darcy at Pemberley. Both use their intelligence to see past their own pride and the prejudices that have been formed, and are ready by the end of the novel to be together. However, one last issue remains—the impact of society’s prejudices on Elizabeth and Darcy. When Lydia runs away with Wickham, society’s values at the time would dictate that Darcy end his pursuit of Elizabeth because any connection with a family whose daughter would thoughtlessly run away with a man without getting married would poison that person’s status in society permanently. Darcy sees past this, solves the problem by bribing Wickham (which is a great source of pain considering Wickham’s insidious attempt at elopement with Georgiana). Elizabeth must deal with the venom of Lady Catherine, who makes her prejudices against Elizabeth and her family plain in the rudest possible way. Austen rewards the efforts of Elizabeth and Darcy to see past their own limitations and the limitations imposed by the society around them with domestic felicity, as it is clear at the end of the novel that they are indeed a good match.
In order to understand what is at stake for all of the girls in the novel, it must first be understood that there were very few options available to the daughters of a gentleman such as Elizabeth Bennett and her sisters. Professions for “respectable” women at the time were scarce—the only viable career choice would be as a governess for young children. Since those jobs were few and far between, the most realistic (and sometimes only) option for young women of Austen’s time was marriage. This, of course, made the availability of brides to men plentiful, increasing the anxiety of parents of young girls who did not have enough money, status, or beauty to attract rich young men. Austen addresses the desperation felt by parents who needed to marry off their daughters at the very beginning of the novel: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” (1). This spot of humor highlights the major dilemma of not only the Bennett sisters but thousands of girls in Austen’s time—the desperation of parents to marry their daughters off to the first unmarried man with money that comes along.
Austen presents several attitudes toward the problem of attaining a marriage with underwhelming money, status, and/or looks. The first character to marry in the novel is Charlotte Lucas, who demonstrates her opinion on the concept of a good match in her discussion with Elizabeth regarding Jane and Bingley:
“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other, or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation, and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life” (16).
Charlotte is advocating not knowing anything about a spouse before getting married because she believes that the less you know, the better. This philosophy, which Elizabeth immediately dismisses as “not sound,” is what leads Charlotte to agree to marry Mr. Collins, a buffoon who will be a constant source of embarrassment and distress to Charlotte. Many characters in the novel, as well as Regency society itself, would consider Mr. Collins a tremendous match for the plain, nearly-spinster Charlotte, who has been previously unsuccessful in attracting a husband. After all, Mr. Collins is a respectable man whose position as a minister for the well-respected Lady Catherine de Bourgh is the envy of many. He will have money and standing throughout his life, and will eventually even inherit Longbourn. It is no wonder, then, that Mrs. Bennett is angry with Elizabeth for turning down an offer of marriage from such an eligible man. However, Austen soon vindicates her heroine because only a few months later, Charlotte is miserable in her marriage despite her social and marital status. Austen demonstrates Charlotte’s mistake in failing to get to know her prospective husband before the point of no return.
Marriage that is based on looks and physical attraction does not work any better than marrying for status. The Bennets, we are told, marry because they were both good looking:
[Elizabeth’s] father, captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humor which youth and beauty generally give, had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her (176).
Mr. and Mrs. Bennett wed because they are physically attracted to each other, but, like Charlotte and Mr. Collins, learn nothing of their prospective spouse’s personality. As a result, they soon find they have nothing in common and by the beginning of the action of this novel cannot even stand to be in the same room for long periods of time. This lack of understanding and tolerance has a devastating effect on the Bennett daughters, as Mr. Bennett’s intolerance of his wife leads him to leave his youngest three daughters alone, which is why they become so silly. Elizabeth acknowledges this after noting Lydia and Kitty’s vulgar behavior with the militia:
But she had never felt so strongly as now the disadvantages which must attend the children of so unsuitable a marriage, nor ever been so fully aware of the evils arising from so ill-judged a direction of talents, talents which rightly used might at least have preserved the respectability of his daughters, even if incapable of enlarging the mind of his wife (177).Mr. Bennett’s loathing of his wife is no excuse for his parental neglect, and he is responsible for not guiding Mary, Kitty, and Lydia properly. Lydia and Wickham are no better off—they foolishly run off to London without knowing much of anything of each other because they too are attracted to each other. Lydia is a carbon copy of her mother, and Wickham, who is far more cunning, soon tires of her. Had they bothered to acquaint themselves with each other, they might have avoided the Bennets’ fate.
Jane Austen’s concept of a good match is more than looks and status—it is a match of character and intelligence. Darcy and Elizabeth are proof of this. Both characters demonstrate their intelligence and wit throughout the novel, often through their verbal sparring with each other. Both suffer from their own pride, as well as the prejudice created by each other’s actions. However, Elizabeth’s prejudice against Darcy’s comments and actions in the beginning of the novel is much more severe than Darcy’s, which explains why he falls in love with Elizabeth long before she has any interest in him. While Elizabeth’s personality appeals to him, Darcy is convinced that he is superior to Elizabeth because he has the same expectations of a match that those of his society maintain. This sense of superiority is a tremendous offense to Elizabeth in Chapter 34, and she has little trouble rejecting Darcy because he is so rude. Elizabeth, however, is not innocent either, and believes herself to be superior to Darcy because she thinks she is not as rude as he is. The reality of the situation, however, is that Elizabeth is just as dissatisfied with people as Darcy is:
“The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and everyday confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense” (101-102).At this point in the novel, Darcy is attracted to Elizabeth beyond reason, but as this would send him down the same road as the Bennets or the Wickhams, it is insufficient to woo Elizabeth, and thus the proposal cannot be accepted until Darcy learns that Elizabeth is an equal.
Fortunately for both of them, Darcy and Elizabeth come to realize that they are indeed equals. Darcy meets the Gardiners, who demonstrate that Elizabeth’s relations can not only act in a civilized manner, but can actually be a delight to speak to. Elizabeth sees the regard of Darcy’s servants for their master, and witnesses the behavior of the reformed Darcy at Pemberley. Both use their intelligence to see past their own pride and the prejudices that have been formed, and are ready by the end of the novel to be together. However, one last issue remains—the impact of society’s prejudices on Elizabeth and Darcy. When Lydia runs away with Wickham, society’s values at the time would dictate that Darcy end his pursuit of Elizabeth because any connection with a family whose daughter would thoughtlessly run away with a man without getting married would poison that person’s status in society permanently. Darcy sees past this, solves the problem by bribing Wickham (which is a great source of pain considering Wickham’s insidious attempt at elopement with Georgiana). Elizabeth must deal with the venom of Lady Catherine, who makes her prejudices against Elizabeth and her family plain in the rudest possible way. Austen rewards the efforts of Elizabeth and Darcy to see past their own limitations and the limitations imposed by the society around them with domestic felicity, as it is clear at the end of the novel that they are indeed a good match.
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