The first
challenge you face when writing about Pride and Prejudice is to get through your first
sentence without saying, "It is a truth universally acknowledged . . ." With
that accomplished (with that out of the way), you can move on to more testing questions.
For example: Why does the reader yearn with such helpless fervor for the marriage of
Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy? Why does the reader gloat and flinch with almost equal
concern over the ups and downs of Jane Bennet and Mr. Bingley? Jane and Elizabeth's
mother, Mrs. Bennet (stupid, prattling, vulgar, greedy), is one of the greatest comic
nightmares in all literature, yet we are scarcely less restrained than she in our fretful
ambition for her daughters.
Jane Austen makes Mrs. Bennets of us all. How? And, even more
mysteriously, this tizzy of zealous suspense actually survives repeated readings.
Finishing the book for perhaps the fifth or sixth time, the present writer felt all the
old gratitude and relief: an undiminished catharsis. These days, true, I wouldn't have
minded a rather more detailed conclusion--say, a twenty-page sex scene featuring the two
principals, with Mr. Darcy, furthermore, aquitting himself uncommonly well. (Such a scene
would take place, of course, not in a country inn or a louche lodging house in town but
amid all the comfort and elegance of Pemberley, with its parklands and its vistas and its
ten grand a year.) Jane Austen, with her divine comedies of love, has always effortlessly
renewed herself for each generation of readers (and critics, too: moralists, Marxists,
myth-panners, deconstructors--all are kept happy). One may wonder what she has to say to
the current crop of twenty-year-olds, for whom "love" is not quite what it was.
Today love faces new struggles: against literalism, futurelessness, practicality,
wised-updom, and nationwide condom campaigns. But maybe the old opposition, of passion and
prudence, never really changes; it just sways on its axis.
Let us begin by pinpointing the moment at which love blooms--for Mr.
Darcy, and for every male reader on earth. It blooms on page 33 of my edition (the Oxford
Illustrated Jane Austen, 1923). We have had the Meryton assembly, the straitlaced
dansant, at which the local community thrills to the entrance of the eligible gents and
their entourage; and we have protectively endured Mr. Darcy's audible humiliation of our
heroine: "She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me. . . ." Soon
afterward Jane Bennet--meek, sweet, uncomplicated--is invited to dine with the fashionable
newcomers. "Can I have the carriage?" she asks her mother. "No, my dear,
you had better go on horseback, because it seems likely to rain; and then you must stay
all night." Jane rides, it rains, she falls ill--and cannot be moved. Elizabeth's
anxiety is one we can easily share: experienced in the ways of nineteenth-century fiction,
we know that these frail beauties can fall apart more or less overnight. So, the next
morning, impelled by sibling love, Elizabeth strides off through the November mud to
Netherfield, that fortress of fashion, privilege, and disdain. She arrives unannounced,
and scandalously unaccompanied, "with weary ancles, dirty stockings, and a face
glowing with the warmth of exercise."
By now the male reader's heart is secure (indeed, he is down on one
knee). But Darcy's palpitations are just beginning. As for female susceptibilities--as for
falling in love with him--Mr. Darcy, I think, ravishes the entire gender on his very first
appearance: "Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine tall person,
handsome features, noble mein; and the report which was in general circulation within five
minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year." That, plus this--
"'You have a house in town, I conclude?' Mr. Darcy bowed."--will about do it.
Auden, among many others, was shocked by Jane Austen's celebration
of "the amorous effects of brass": that is, of money, and old money, too (for in
Jane Austen's world you cannot make money). Money is vital substance in her world; the
moment you enter it, you feel the candid horror of moneylessness, as intense as the tacit
horror of spinsterhood. Funnily enough, our hopes for Elizabeth and Darcy are egalitarian,
and not avaricious, in tendency. We want love to bring about the redistribution of wealth.
To inspire such a man to disinterested desire, non-profit making desire--this is the
romantic hinge. Elizabeth Bennet is Jane Austen with added spirit, with subversive
passion, and, above all, with looks. Although writers' lives are no more than optional
extras in the consideraton of their work, the dull fact of Jane Austen's spinsterhood--her
plainness, her childlessness, her virgin death--invests her comedies with disappointment,
and with a sense of thwarted homing. It also confirms one's sense of the diminishing
physicality of her later heroines: inconspicuous, undetectable Fanny Price; the regal Emma
(with her avuncular Mr. Knightley); the poignant staidness of Anne Elliot.
Incredibly, Jane Austen was about the same age as Elizabeth when she
began Pride and Prejudice ("I am not one and twenty"), and Elizabeth remains her
only convincingly sexual heroine. Even her father, indolent Mr. Bennet, is sufficiently
aware of her passionate nature to deliver an exceptional warning: "discredit and
misery" would await her, she "could be neither happy nor respectable," in a
loveless marriage. His marriage is loveless, and so is everybody else's; and they have all
settled for it. But he knows that Elizabeth would never settle for anything less than
love. How do we get a sense of this society, this universe, with its inhibition, its
formality, its echelonized emotions? It comes to us most clearly, perhaps, in its
language. Mr. Darcy's first name is Fitzwilliam, which is a nice name--but Elizabeth will
never use it. She will call him "Mr. Darcy" or, occasionally, "My dear Mr.
Darcy." You call your mother "Madam" and your dad "Sir." When the
dance floor is "crouded," young ladies may get a "headach." You may
"teaze" a gentleman, should you "chuse," and should he consent to be
"laught" at. If it be the sixth of October, then "Michaelmas" will
have been celebrated "yesterday se'nnight." "La," what
"extacies" we were in! Everyone is much "incumbered" by
"secresy" and the need to watch their "expences." A rich man must
marry a rich girl, to avoid "degradation" or even "pollution." But a
poor man much marry a rich girl too, in order to achieve a "tolerable
independence."
So who is to marry all the poor girls--the poor girls, how will they
find "an husband"? How will they swerve between passion and prudence, between
sensibility and sense, between love and money? Two extreme cases are explored in Pride and
Prejudice. Or, rather, they are unexplored, unexamined; they define the limitations of
Jane Austen's candor and, perhaps, the limitations of her art. First is the marriage that
is all sense, all money (and not very much money either): the marriage of Mr. Collins and
Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth's neighbor and her closest friend. Mr. Collins is, of course, a
world-class grotesque; he has a slimy vigilance that Mr. Podsnap migh have envied.
"Can he be a sensible man, sir?" Elizabeth asks her father, having acquainted
herself with Mr. Collins's introductory letter. Mr. Bennet responds with typically droll
and fateful laxity: "No, my dear: I think not, I have great hopes of finding him
quite the reverse. There is a mixture of servility and self-importance in his letter,
which promises well; I am impatient to see him." Mr. Collins comes to stay. Because
of the famous entail in Mr. Bennet's estate, the girls will be bypassed, and cousin
Collins is next in line to inherit. He therefore feels obliged to marry one of the many
Bennet daughters. His gaze first alights on Jane, then (one day later) on Elizabeth, to
whom (eight days later) he unsuccessfully proposes before fixing on Charlotte Lucas (one
day later). He proposes to her one day later. And she accepts him. Jane Austen expends
little energy on physical description. Her characters are "handsome" or
"pleasing" or "not at all handsome." The feature-by-feature inventory
she leaves to the hags and harpies (this is Miss Bingley on Elizabeth: "Her face is
too thin. . . . Her nose wants character. . . . Her teeth are tolerable, but not out of
the common way"). She deals in auras, in presences; her creations fill a certain
space with a certain personal style, and they are shaped by their idiolects. Of the
Reverend William Collins we are told only this: "He was a tall, heavy looking young
man of five and twenty." But his immense physical dreariness is nonetheless fully
summoned. (The twenty-page sex scene is in this case not sorely missed. "I crave your
indulgence, my dear Mrs. Collins, if, at this early juncture . . .") Anyway,
Charlotte repairs to what Collins calls his humble abode. And that's her life gone. Jane
Austen interprets the matter with a kind of worldly savagery: Charlotte accepts Collins
"from the pure and disinterested desire of an establishment"; marriage is
"the only honourable provision" for women so placed, and "must be their
pleasantest preservative from want." Elizabeth is not so hard-barked about it, but
her "astonishment" at her closest friend's expediency soon modulates into the
quiet conviction "that no real confidence could ever subsist between them
again." And by the time she pays a visit to the newlyweds, she has decided that
"all the comfort of intimacy was over."
Isolation, then, is part of the price Charlotte pays, and expects to
pay. Elizabeth feels she can discuss her best friend's situation with Mr. Darcy, whom at
this stage she thoroughly dislikes ("[Mr. Collins's] friends may well rejoice in his
having met with one of the very few sensible women who would have accepted him"); but
she doesn't feel she can discuss her best friend's situation with her best friend. Why
not? Well, people didn't, then. There is no reason why it should occur to Elizabeth to
question this miserable silence. But perhaps it ought to have occurred to Jane Austen.
Elizabeth is quick to find rueful humor in the business, and Jane Austen is even quicker
to find non-rueful humor in it (we hear Charlotte's mother inquiring "after the
welfare and poultry of her esdest daughter"). The marriage is pitiful and creepy; but
it is routinely pitiful and creepy. It is everyday.
The other escape from the love-money, passion-prudence axis is the
escape undertaken by Elizabeth's sister Lydia: all love, or at least all passion, or at
any rate no prudence (and certainly no money). Little Lydia elopes with the feckless
Lieutenant Wickham. Now, in Jane Austen's universe, elopement is a tractable delinquency,
provided the absconders marry very soon, preferably before nightfall. Should she neglect
the wedlock end of it, however, the woman will face an isolation far more thoroughgoing
than Charlotte Lucas's: "irremediable infamy," ostracism, demi-mondainedom.
Lydia languishes for two whole weeks with Wickham before the affair if patched and pelfed
together (largely by Mr. Darcy, it transpires); thus Lydia's virtue is precariously and,
as it were, retroactively preserved. Wickham consents to make an honest woman of her,
after heavy bribes.
So what are we meant to feel about Lydia? Slimeball Mr. Collins
writes to Mr. Bennet, at an early stage in the scandal, "The death of your daughter
would have been a blessing in comparison of this." In a later letter, having
"rejoiced" that the "sad business has been no well husted up," Collins
adds, "I must not . . . refrain from declaring my amazement, at hearing that you
received the young couple into your house as soon as they were married. . . . You ought
certainly to forgive them as a Christian, but never to admit them in your sight or allow
their names to be mentioned in your hearing." "That," says Mr. Bennet,
"is his notion of Christian forgiveness!"
But what is Jane Austen's notion of it? We may well believe that as
a Christian she forgives Lydia. But we will want to know whether as an artist she forgives
Lydia. Installed in "all the comfort and elegance" of Pemberley, Elizabeth sends
the Wickhams odd bits of spare cash, and "occasionally" receives her sister
there. Lydia, so to speak, is wheeled off onto a siding, lost to serious consideration,
and lost to her sister. And this despite the following mitigations (which gallantry, as
well as conscience, obliges one to list): that Lydia's fall was precisely and vividly
foretold by Elizabeth; that its likelihood was blamed on parental and familial laxity;
that Elizabeth was at one point entirely gulled by Wickham's charms and lies; and that
Lydia, during the course of the novel, only just turns sixteen. Calling on her privilege
as the local omniscient, Jane Austen consigns Lydia's marriage to the communal grave
("His affection for her soon sunk into indifference; her's lasted a little
longer"), underlining her exclusion from the circumambient happy ending. Lydia, so
beautifully evoked (brawny, selfish, clumsy, wholly transparent: after the ball at
Netherfield "even Lydia was too much fatigued to utter more than the occasional
exclamation of 'Lord, how tired I am!' accompanied by a violent yawn"), is now
summarily written out.And here, I think, the reader begins to feel that artists should
know better than that; we expect them to know better than that. We expect artists to stand
as critics not just of their particular milieu but of their society, and of their age.
They shouldn't lose sight of their creations at exactly the same point that
"respectability"--or stock response--loses sight of them.
For all its little smugnesses and blind spots, despite something
airless and narrow, Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's most sociable book--and,
strangely, her most socially idealistic. The impulse is in fact strongly present. And
because this is a romantic comedy, the impulse expresses itself through the unlikely
personage of Fitzwilliam Darcy. Darcy doesn't account for the novel's eternal humor and
elan, but he does account for its recurrent and remorseless power to move. Elizabeth's
prejudice is easily dealt with: all she needs is the facts before her. Yet the melting of
Darcy's pride demands radical change, the difference between his first declaration
("In vain have I struggled") and his second ("You are too generous to
trifle with me"). The patching-up of the Lydia business involves Darcy in some
expense, but it also forces him to descend into the chaos of unrestrained dreads and
desires--an area where Jane Austen fears to linger, even in her imagination. The final
paragraph gives us the extraordinary spectacle of Darcy opening his arms, and his house,
to Elizabeth's aunt and uncle, who make what money they have through trade. Darcy, Jane
Austen writes, "really loved them." This is the wildest romantic extravagance in
the entire corpus: a man like Mr. Darcy, chastened, deepened, and finally democratized by
the force of love.
