Pride and Prejudice Read online

  An early habitual restraint is peculiarly important to the future character and happiness of women. A judicious unrelaxing but steady and gentle curb on their tempers and passions can alone ensure their peace and establish their principles…

  Girls should be led to distrust their own judgment; they should learn not to murmur at expostulation; they should be accustomed to expect and to endure opposition…It is of the last importance to their happiness, even in this life, that they should early acquire a submissive temper and a forbearing spirit.17

  Pride and Prejudice could well be read as a critical exploration of More’s contention that women’s happiness is dependent on restraint and submission. I have already suggested that happiness is a central preoccupation in the novel; and the key terms from contemporary debates about women play constantly through Austen’s careful discriminations between the degrees and kinds of happiness expected not just by Elizabeth but by a whole range of female characters. Reason, feeling, passion, propriety, decorum, modesty, delicacy, elegance, independence: as in the work of polemicists like Wollstonecraft and More, this embattled vocabulary is under scrutiny throughout Pride and Prejudice. How, then, might we place Elizabeth Bennet and the novel’s other female characters against the versions of womanhood which it evokes?

  Elizabeth is clearly much closer to Wollstonecraft’s rational femininity and ‘independence of mind’ than to More’s ideal of a ‘submissive temper’ and ‘forbearing spirit’. She demonstrates precisely that independence, after all, in rejecting Mr Collins – along with his stereotyped definition of her as a creature of ‘modesty’ and ‘economy’. At the end of their interview, as Mr Collins continues to insist that her refusal is due merely to conventional coquetry, Elizabeth makes a desperate plea to be taken seriously as a woman of integrity: ‘“Do not consider me now as an elegant female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart”’ (I, xix, my emphasis). The opposition between a false form of femininity and a strongly felt rational autonomy, like the phrase ‘rational creature’ itself, is straight out of Wollstonecraft.

  Similarly, when Elizabeth dashes across the countryside to Netherfield to be with Jane in her illness, we admire her for her concerned spontaneity, and for her unconcern about ‘blemishing the delicacy of [her] sex’. Other characters are less impressed by such unladylike exertion, and the whole event – crucial in so many ways to the development of the novel – dramatizes an important debate about what is and is not ‘proper’ behaviour. Mary Bennet, for example, who talks like a conduct book rather than a human being, primly intones the maxim that ‘“every impulse of feeling should be guided by reason”’ (I, vii); while Caroline Bingley rationalizes her jealousy by appealing to a more worldly, metropolitan view of propriety: ‘“It [i.e. walking several miles alone and getting ‘above her ancles in dirt’] seems to me to shew an abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country town indifference to decorum”’ (I, viii). Elizabeth’s liveliness, her ‘active sensibility’ – to take a phrase from one of Wollstonecraft’s novels18 – secures our sympathy even more firmly through juxtaposition with such self-interested versions of conduct-book standards.

  But, though the characterization of Elizabeth suggests a tendency towards Wollstonecraft’s position rather than More’s, it would be unwise to identify Austen too neatly with Wollstonecraft’s gender radicalism. Austen’s (and her characters’) use of politicized terms is always strategic, contingent on particular circumstances, subject to adjustment in the wider context of their usage in the novel as a whole. In Elizabeth’s contrast between herself as a ‘rational creature’ and the image of the ‘elegant female’, for example, ‘elegant female’ is Mr Collins’s phrase, not her own. It suggests his conceited, but also class-based, ignorance of what real ‘elegance’ might be, rather than a fixed definition. A few chapters later, the authorial voice approvingly describes Mrs Gardiner – who is certainly rational – as ‘elegant’ (II, ii). (And, later still, we are told that Pemberley, representative of its owner, has ‘more real elegance’ than Rosings (III, i).) The two categories are not actually incompatible in Austen’s post-revolutionary scheme of things: the more conventionally feminine, and upper-class, attribute of elegance can coexist with the more contentious claim to rationality.

  The most important consequence of Elizabeth’s walk to Netherfield is its effect on Darcy. As Caroline Bingley recognizes only too well, Elizabeth’s ‘indifference to decorum’, her ‘impatient activity’, make her all the more attractive. When Elizabeth arrives, Darcy too is doubtful about the prudence of her solitary walk, but he is equally struck by ‘the brilliancy which exercise had given to her complexion’ (I, vii). Elizabeth’s stay at Netherfield gives Darcy plenty of opportunity to experience her intellectual as well as her physical attractions, and the visit is punctuated by their sexually charged sparring and by authorially directed glimpses into Darcy’s growing subjection: ‘Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by [Elizabeth]’; ‘He began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention’; ‘She attracted him more than he liked’ (I, x; xi; xii). Darcy’s ‘divided’ responses point up a conflict in which a spontaneous female individuality wins out over feminine propriety and social status. And it does so because it’s a source of sexual power. Where Wollstonecraft urged women to seek other objects, Austen returns the new femininity to the more familiar pleasures of romantic fiction. Those privileged moments of access to Darcy’s private feelings play strategically on romance expectations: reading from Elizabeth’s point of view, we take pleasure in her power, fully confident that Darcy’s pride will have to fall before the charms of a woman with ‘independence of mind’.

  For the romance to be fulfilled, that independence of mind also has to be adjusted, however: Elizabeth’s prejudice has to fall with Darcy’s pride. Like a good reader of More’s Strictures, it would seem, Elizabeth has to learn to ‘distrust [her] own judgment’, to recognize the error of her first impressions. After reading Darcy’s letter, Elizabeth fiercely castigates herself for wilfully misjudging both Darcy and Wickham:

  ‘Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly. – Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.’ (II, xiii)

  And later, when she has to convince her father that Darcy is the man who will make her happy, Elizabeth earnestly wishes ‘that her former opinions had been more reasonable, her expressions more moderate’ (III, xvii, my emphasis). Elizabeth comes close here to a More-like regret at the lack of ‘a steady and gentle curb on [her] tempers and passions’, and the language of painful self-knowledge recalls those anti-revolutionary novels of female education, which dramatize the disciplinary advice of conduct literature. Had she been the heroine in a standard anti-revolutionary novel, Elizabeth’s misjudgement of men would have been based on a foolish romantic attachment, and might well have caused her downfall. But in Pride and Prejudice it is Lydia, not the heroine, who enacts the conventional melodrama of mistaken and self-indulgent passion. If Elizabeth is in love, it is with her individuality, not the wrong man. She prides herself on being above the usual female obsession with men and marriage (just as, when the trip to the Lake District is planned, she distinguishes herself from ‘the generality of travellers’ (II, iv)). The shock of remorse includes the recognition that she has been as ‘wretchedly blind’ as the generality of heroines, and the punishment for courting ‘prepossession and ignorance’ is to fall in love, like them. In fact, Elizabeth is made to suffer what she at one point describes to Charlotte as ‘“the greatest misfortune of all! – To find a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate!”’ (I, xviii).

  The wit of Austen’s romantic plot makes it very difficult to read Pride and Prejudice (Sense and Sensi
bility or Mansfield Park may be another matter) as a novel advocating punitive control – or even the resigned compromise that More articulates:

  this world is not a stage for the display of superficial or even of shining talents, but for the sober exercise of fortitude, temperance, meekness, diligence, and self-denial;…life is not a splendid romance…[but] a true history, many pages of which will be dull, obscure, and uninteresting.19

  Such circumscribed expectations describe the attitude and experience of Charlotte Lucas, rather than Elizabeth Bennet, for whom life does turn out to be ‘a splendid romance’. For Charlotte, marriage is women’s ‘pleasantest preservative from want’, but it is ‘uncertain of giving happiness’ (I, xxii). Elizabeth, in contrast, strongly believes in marriage as a test of personal moral integrity and in individual happiness as a legitimate goal, and that idealism is one of her most attractive traits. She is shocked when Charlotte sacrifices ‘every better feeling to worldly advantage’ (I, xxii); and, against the advice of her milder and more conventionally passive sister Jane, she condemns the ‘want of proper resolution’ which almost leads Bingley to ‘sacrifice his own happiness’ (and Jane’s) to the whim of others (II, i). Elizabeth’s ‘prepossession and ignorance’ may need some corrective redirection, but her idealism and readiness to judge responsibly remain intact. And when she acknowledges Darcy as her true object of desire, the plot tells us, that idealism finds its proper fulfilment. Elizabeth’s lively individuality – her ‘shining talent’, to use More’s terminology – is provided with an appropriate ‘stage’ when she marries Darcy and becomes mistress of the ‘comfort and elegance of their family party at Pemberley’ (III, xviii).

  Unlike More, then, Pride and Prejudice makes a very clear connection between a (slightly chastened) ‘independence of mind’ and women’s individual happiness. Unlike Wollstonecraft, however, it finds women’s ‘independence of mind’, their opportunities for rational self-improvement, entirely compatible with marrying ‘advantageously’. From their very different political standpoints, both More and Wollstonecraft condemned romance fiction for diverting women’s energies from more appropriate objects: for More, romantic fantasies deflect women from their duty as the moral centre of the nation; for Wollstonecraft, they reduce women to ‘abject wooers and fond slaves’. A preoccupation with novels, she argues, tends to ‘make women the creatures of sensation’; it ‘relaxes the other powers of the mind’.20 Begun in the 1790s but completed in the later, post-revolutionary, period, Austen’s novel has assimilated both positions and moved on. It dares to close the gap between ‘splendid romance’ and ‘true history’. Unlike More, for whom happiness was a state of necessary constraint, or Wollstonecraft, for whom it was deferred until some revolutionary future, Austen’s romantic comedy makes fulfilment seem both legitimate and attainable in the present. Rather than condemning the pleasures of fantasy, Pride and Prejudice directs those energies to a carefully redefined fantasy object: through the ideal of ‘rational happiness’, it persuades women of their active role in a revitalized version of Burke’s ‘little platoon’.

  So far, in exploring Pride and Prejudice as a post-revolutionary romance, I have focused on gender: on Elizabeth as an early-nineteenth-century equivalent of the ‘post-feminist’ heroine. I want now to consider the wider social meaning, the class allegiance and the literary precedents implicit in the alliance between Elizabeth’s new femininity and Darcy’s ancient family. In spite of her independence of mind, Elizabeth’s marriage is in some ways strikingly conventional – so much so that it thrills Mrs Bennet much more than the marriages of either Lydia or Jane: ‘“Jane’s is nothing to it – nothing at all”’ (III, xvii). Like a good daughter, Elizabeth marries above her, and secures upward social mobility, as well as financial advantage, for herself and her family.

  Marriage to Darcy represents a particularly impressive example of this standard female route to social improvement. Indeed, Elizabeth could be said to repeat the spectacular success of Pamela, the serving-girl who marries the master of the house in Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, published in 1740. Pamela withstands physical assaults, abduction and attempted rape from Mr B. for so long and with such moral firmness that he eventually reforms, falls in love with her and makes her his wife and mistress of his estates. Pamela was a huge popular success. Industries sprang up to produce the print, the stage show, the ballad and the teaset of the novel. And, as that level of popularity testifies, the figure of Pamela herself became a kind of cultural myth: the virtuous woman who reforms the rake came to embody the impact of middle-class values on a corrupt ruling class and the possibility of wider social access to wealth and power.

  In spite of the sixty or so years and obvious differences between them, Pamela and Pride and Prejudice are recognizably part of the same woman-centred, middle-class fictional tradition. Unlike Mr B., Darcy is not a rake: the housekeeper at Pemberley very explicitly describes him as ‘Not like the wild young men now-a-days, who think of nothing but themselves’ (III, i). But though Elizabeth may not be in danger of direct physical assault, Darcy’s insulting dismissal of her family and his interference in Jane’s happiness are only more subtle modes of violation. Echoing Pamela, who cannot ‘look upon [Mr B.] as a gentleman’, and doesn’t think she could take him as a husband because of his sexual ‘rudeness’,21 Elizabeth refuses Darcy’s first proposal with a cutting critique of his manners – indeed, of his very identity: ‘“You are mistaken, Mr Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner”’ (II, xi). As we learn later, these are the words that subsequently ‘torture’ Darcy (III, xvi) and produce the new man who greets Elizabeth and the Gardiners at Pemberley. Like Richardson’s Mr B. who, like all ‘people of fortune’, had been ‘unaccustomed to controul’,22 Darcy confesses to having been ‘spoilt’ by parents who ‘almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing’ (III, xvi). As in Pamela, desire opens up that faulty class education to the possibility of correction; the shock of resistance and criticism from the lower-class woman excites upper-class masculinity into change: ‘“You [Elizabeth] taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled”’ (III, xvi). Elizabeth’s lesson in Pride and Prejudice is to learn that she loves the man whose social pride prejudiced her against him; Darcy’s is to adjust that ‘mistaken pride’ (III, x) and welcome into his intimate ‘family party’ Elizabeth’s ‘low connections’, the relations from Cheapside who he once thought must ‘very materially lessen [her] chance of marrying [a man] of any consideration in the world’ (I, viii).

  Elizabeth and Darcy’s ‘family party’ at Pemberley represents the nation: as in Burke’s focus on the ‘little platoon’, the intimate, domestic group is both the image and the source of national order and responsibility. In the final chapter of Pride and Prejudice, the membership of the Pemberley family is carefully defined. It includes Jane and Bingley, of course, and Georgiana Darcy; Mr Bennet is a regular visitor, and Caroline Bingley, Lady Catherine de Bourgh (eventually), and even Lydia, are occasionally entertained; only Mrs Bennet, Mary and Wickham remain remote. But ‘with the Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate terms’, since it was they who, ‘by bringing [Elizabeth] into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them’ (III, xix). At its most intimate level, then, this ideal community effects an alliance between the traditional ruling élite and a new order: between Darcy, a member of the landowning aristocracy, and the Gardiners, important figures in Pride and Prejudice, and representative of that growing commercial and professional class whose ‘excursive flights of ambition’ Wollstonecraft so admired. The alliance is mediated and secured by Elizabeth. In terms of status, she is herself the daughter of a marriage between much lesser, financially insecure, landowning gentry and commerce; more importantly, in terms of moral and cultural values, her femini
ne individualism penetrates Darcy’s self-satisfied and exclusive definition of what it is to be ‘well bred’. Class identity has become as much a function of mental and moral qualities as it is of visible wealth or an ancient name. When the Gardiners are first introduced, for example, Mr Gardiner is described as ‘a sensible, gentlemanlike man’, and the narrative voice clearly takes sides against ‘the Netherfield ladies’ who ‘would have had difficulty in believing that a man who lived by trade, and within view of his own warehouses, could have been so well bred and agreeable’ (II, ii, my emphasis).

  Austen’s relationship with a traditional élite is not, then, as has sometimes been thought, simply that of straightforward apologist. Her own social status was precarious, both as a woman, and as the daughter of a family partly dependent on the patronage of wealthier relations. Her novels are alert to the complexities and insecurities of that social position, and preoccupied with questions of respectability and responsibility; they describe the rapidly changing constituency of rural England at a moment when estates were being bought, rented or created by those who had made their money in trade (as has Bingley’s family) and when, at the same time, a new metropolitan professional middle class to which people such as the Gardiners belonged was gaining cultural ascendancy. Her heroines are the agents of both change and consolidation. Operating in the private, domestic sphere, they are much closer to the new professional values of self-reliance, rationalism and integrity than to what Austen depicts as the mercenary superficiality of the rentier class. Through Elizabeth, through Fanny, the dependent outsider who becomes the moral centre of Mansfield Park, even through the more socially secure Emma who has to learn about the proper exercise of responsibility, Austen prescribes reform, adjustment, and thus renewal, for a dangerously unselfconscious and therefore vulnerable ruling class. In that wonderful scene towards the end of the novel, for example, in which Elizabeth has to defend her right to happiness against interference from Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Lady Catherine is an easy target. She is a sharply realized embodiment of a stock comic figure: the caricature of an old order, powerless in the face of youth and desire and incapable of change. Her appeal to ‘“the claims of duty, honour, and gratitude”’ (III, xiv) stands little chance against Elizabeth’s rationality, wit and unswerving belief in autonomous choice: