Pride and Prejudice (4 page)

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 novels
¹⁸
– 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 Sensibility
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).