Feminist literary criticism often has problems with Austen’s novels, drawn to them by strong female characters with working minds and sometimes vehement spirits but who nevertheless surrender to a patriarchal sexual ideology in a marriage in which, as Mr Bennet winningly puts it, a woman looks up to a husband as her superior (p. 335).15 Elizabeth may rankle at the social and economic subordination of women that requires her to suffer in silence while a pompous fool like Mr Collins claims he is far better qualified ‘to decide on what is right than a young lady like [herself]’ (p. 88); she may daily chafe under the necessity of far more limiting constraints than the ‘self-denial and dependence’ of which Colonel Fitzwilliam, as the younger son of an Earl, complains; and she may regularly overstep the bounds of decorum in what Deborah Kaplan describes as her ‘verbal liberties’,16 criticizing men’s behaviour and characters and in general voicing stronger opinions than Lady Catherine, for one, thinks seemly in a young woman. But one boundary that Elizabeth does not overstep is the prohibition against acting on or even expressing desire. Her reaction to Lydia’s elopement, even given the standards of propriety to which her society subscribes, seems curiously naive when she questions ‘how little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue’ (p. 276).
But there is certainly not the slightest suggestion that passion, even unconsciously, endangers Elizabeth’s virtue. Until Darcy’s first proposal, her eyes may flash and her conversation sparkle with unin-hibited bravado because she has no one to please but herself; after that proposal, however, she can no longer perform as if he were a
‘stranger’.
‘It Was Happy She Took a Good Course’ 167
‘We neither of us perform to strangers’ is Darcy’s cryptic defence of his social awkwardness when Elizabeth rebukes him for his lack of gallantry in refusing to dance with any but his own party at the ball at Meryton. She attacks him from the safety of the piano and an attentive companion in Colonel Fitzwilliam, refusing to be intimidated by his solemn approach, and refusing also to be honoured by his presence.
He pleads ineptitude – he is ‘ill qualified to recommend himself to strangers’ – and she accuses him of not caring enough to take the trouble, which he, with a clumsiness that confirms his professed difficulty in catching the tone of a conversation, attempts to turn into a shared compliment to the private self that neither reveals in public: in his wooden reserve as in her playful archness, ‘we neither of us perform to strangers’ (p. 156). Whatever Elizabeth makes of this mysti-fying pronouncement – she is spared the effort of any response by Lady Catherine’s interruption – she is clearly on notice, and on the next occasion when he speaks with her (when he finds her alone at the Collins’s) her bantering tone is noticeably absent. In fact, it never returns until after his proposal has been renewed.
Nothing that Elizabeth subsequently does can be accused of the design that Darcy early on professes to find so contemptible: ‘there is meanness in all the arts which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation’, he had pontificated for the benefit of Caroline Bingley; ‘Whatever bears affinity to cunning is despicable’
(p. 34). For Elizabeth, there is no throwing herself in his path as Charlotte had done with Mr Collins, ‘instantly set[ting] out to meet him accidentally in the lane’ when she sees him coming towards the house (p. 110). After Darcy’s first proposal, she deliberately takes her walks on paths she knows him not to frequent; she stays out walking, and reading his letter, so long that she misses the gentlemen’s farewell visit; and the visit to Pemberley, which sets the relationship back on track, is triply secured against the faintest of suspicions that it might have been undertaken even in the vague hope of seeing him again. The holiday with her aunt is organized long before Elizabeth has any idea of Darcy’s interest in her; it is originally intended to take in the Lake district and only foreshortened and redirected to Derbyshire well after Elizabeth’s acceptance of the invitation; and Pemberley is visited only after multiple reassurances that the master is absent: all of this to protect her from the unkind aspersion that Elizabeth dreads after Darcy’s untimely return finds her in his grounds: ‘It might seem as if she had purposely thrown herself in his way again!’ (p. 222).
168 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre The relationship is barely rekindled when Lydia’s disgrace promptly drives all possibility of a rapprochement from Elizabeth’s mind, and it is only then that she begins to think seriously about an attachment that she can comprehend no likelihood of eventuating. In Northanger Abbey Austen mocks Richardson’s insistence that ‘no young lady can be justified in falling in love before the gentleman’s love is declared’;17
if this is the case, the narrator observes, ‘it must be very improper that a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the gentleman is first known to have dreamt of her’ (p. 27) – a comment that seizes on the central absurdity of the feminine code that imposes regulations on the unconscious.18 Nevertheless, in Pride and Prejudice considerable ingenuity is required, first to contrive a courtship in which there is no possibility of the young lady falling in love before the gentleman’s love is declared, and then to devise a means of her love blossoming without her being seen to initiate the renewal of an address that is so clearly to her material advantage – and that she fancies she still has the power to bring on (p. 234). In this respect, it is important that Elizabeth, after the disgrace of Lydia’s elopement, is ‘convinced that she could have been happy with him … [only] when it was no longer likely they should meet’, when ‘no such happy marriage could now teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was’ (pp. 275–6).19
Elizabeth dares to dream, and to entertain visions of an imaginary future, only when she is safe from the possibility of doing anything to realize them.
When Lady Catherine later arrives on her doorstep and demands Elizabeth scotch rumours of her engagement to Darcy, Elizabeth stands upon her own dignity, even though she believes it will terminally alienate the family whose dignity Darcy so much values. And then when Darcy himself arrives on the scene, accompanying Bingley in his renewal of his addresses to Jane, we are again reassured that Elizabeth is so far from offering encouragement to Darcy’s suit that he might have despaired had not Lady Catherine’s intervention provided the unintended reassurance that Elizabeth was not ‘absolutely, irrevocably’
decided against him. But in case there is any doubt about Elizabeth’s innocence, he spells it out when she questions his silence and apparent indifference when accompanying Bingley to her home:
What made you so shy of me, when you first called, and
afterwards dined there? Why, especially, when you called, did you look as if you did not care about me?’
‘Because you were grave and silent, and gave me no
encouragement.’
‘It Was Happy She Took a Good Course’ 169
‘But I was embarrassed.’
‘And so was I.’
‘You might have talked to me more when you came to dinner.’
‘A man who had felt less, might.’ (pp. 338–9, our emphasis) Even Elizabeth’s forwardness in finally speaking first, to thank him for rescuing Lydia from disgrace, is handsomely exonerated, even though Elizabeth fears it had a ‘great effect’ – ‘ Too much, I am afraid’ – in prompting him to speak.20 It is only by accident that she breaks the silence on the first occasion they had been alone together since his return from London, where Lady Catherine’s ‘unjustifiable endeavours to separate’ them had unwittingly removed all his doubts and made him ‘determined at once to know every thing’ (p. 339).
There is such a methodical efficiency in the pains taken to establish Elizabeth’s innocence of design that it raises the question of why she needs to be protected so assiduously. Mary Waldron reminds us just how unconventional a heroine Elizabeth is: she is ‘far from silent, frequently pert (at least by contempora
ry fictional standards), openly challenging to accepted authority, and contemptuous of current decorums’.21 With Wickham in particular she oversteps the bounds of strict propriety, making her preference so marked that she is ashamed to discover, after his attentions had been temporarily diverted to Miss King and her £10000, that he expects ‘her vanity would be gratified and her preference secured at any time by their renewal’ (p. 207). It is the kind of reproof that, in conversation with Charlotte Lucas, she can congratulate Jane on avoiding, for Jane’s feelings for Bingley are so impercepti-ble that she is in no danger of exposing herself to ‘the suspicions of the impertinent’ (p. 17). Waldron comments that ‘Jane is a Dr Gregory girl with this difference – though she can appear to have no thoughts of marrying Bingley, she cannot be expected to prevent herself from feeling, a distinction which the conduct-books rarely make.’22 But it is a distinction that Elizabeth is not prepared to make, either, and at the same time as she champions purely pragmatic reasons for a woman keeping her feelings to herself, she also defends Jane from the assumption that she knows her own heart. Jane, she insists, is not concealing her feelings: ‘she is not acting by design. As yet, she cannot even be certain of the degree of her own regard, nor of its reasonableness’
(p. 18). And it is from this design that Elizabeth also needs to be protected once her heart also is at risk. With Wickham, her behaviour may be bordering on the unseemly, but her heart is not in it – so that, as she can promise her aunt, ‘when I am in company with him, I will not be wishing’ (p. 129). With Darcy, however, from the moment she
170 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre discerns her feelings, she becomes vulnerable to ‘wishing’, and all her actions, intentionally or not, become subject to imputations of design.
‘Women’s rights … to express desire and sensibility as well as independence’ may have been, as Janet Todd argues, ‘a more openly discussed problem’ than many modern critics, keen to defend Austen from charges of social or political conservatism, will allow,23 but the right to express desire (like the right to free speech or to bear arms) is quite a different matter from the advisability of exercising that right in a specific social environment. Deborah Kaplan emphasizes the
‘divided loyalties’ of Austen’s ‘cultural duality’, and her preparedness, in seeking publication, to accommodate the patriarchal values of gentry culture on which her own social status of ‘genteel femininity’
depended.24 But the problem with such an argument, based as it is on
‘historically specific and local influences’,25 is the persistence of narrative conventions across a broad range of social and political climates.
Rather than simply understanding these conventions as ways of accommodating ‘historically specific and local influences’, it can also be useful to understand the way in which historically specific and local influences accommodate conventions that even today still continue to exert themselves.
The other, less interesting mode of attachment
In The Female Quixote, Arabella asks some highly pertinent questions of her father when he chooses a husband for her. For a start, what has this man done to deserve either her father’s esteem or her own favour?
‘By what Services has he deserved the Distinction with which you honour him?’ she asks her father, and, more to the point: ‘Has he merited my Esteem, by his Sufferings, Fidelity, and Respect; or, by any great and generous Action, given me a Testimony of his Love, which should oblige me to reward him with my Affection?’ ( FQ, pp. 41–2).
These are good questions: what does merit a woman’s love? how does a man prove himself worthy of it?
Arabella locates the foundations of a woman’s love in gratitude and esteem: in esteem for the personal attributes of the lover, and in gratitude for his disinterested service.26 Likewise, in Pride and Prejudice, the narrator explains the reversal of Elizabeth’s feelings for Darcy in similar terms – and explicitly discounts the reasonableness or naturalness of first-sight love:
If gratitude and esteem are good foundations of affection, Elizabeth’s change of sentiment will be neither improbable nor
‘It Was Happy She Took a Good Course’ 171
faulty. But if otherwise, if the regard springing from such sources is unreasonable or unnatural, in comparison of what is so often described as arising on a first interview with its object, and even before two words have been exchanged, nothing can be said in her defence, except that she had given somewhat of a trial to the latter method, in her partiality for Wickham, and that its ill-success might perhaps authorise her to seek the other less interesting mode of attachment. (p. 246)
Gratitude and esteem are, Fielding tells the reader in Tom Jones, the
‘proper motives to love’,27 even for a hot-blooded and high-spirited young man such as Tom. For a young woman such as Elizabeth,
‘proper motives’ would seem to be even more imperative, though the propriety of gratitude and esteem as foundations of affection has more pragmatic origins than is perhaps widely understood, for it is not simply a more ‘rational’ love that Austen is advocating but also a more prudent love.
Esteem as a motive for love hardly needs justification, though, in particular cases – such as Pamela’s love for Mr B – it can sometimes seem unaccountable. Interestingly, though, when Mr Bennet warns his daughter against marrying a man she cannot esteem, it is her public respectability as much as her personal happiness for which he fears. He speaks from his own experience – ‘let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life’ (p. 335) – but he also recognizes that Elizabeth’s ‘lively talents’ place her in a more particular danger: she could be neither happy nor, significantly, ‘respectable’, and ‘could scarcely escape discredit and misery’ (p. 35). Mr Bennet’s own respectability is somewhat dented as a result of his marriage to a woman he cannot respect, though it is his choice to take his pleasure where he can find it and shrug off the rest of his responsibilities. The daily reality for Elizabeth, however, is the conversation she has with Mr Collins the evening of the Netherfield Ball, where custom dictates that she defer to the opinions of a man who insists he knows better than a woman what is right. Mr Bennet clearly fears her ‘lively talents’ would not be equal to the kind of compromises Charlotte Lucas is prepared to make for the sake of a comfortable home, and Elizabeth’s sharp tongue could do a lot of damage, both to her husband’s dignity and to her own reputation.
As Judith Lowder Newton observes of the ‘unbounded licence’ of Mrs Selwyn’s tongue in Burney’s Evelina, ‘whatever its value in a novelist, a turn for satire was hardly a virtue in a bride’.28
Elizabeth has reason enough to esteem Darcy for his ‘Sufferings, Fidelity, and Respect’, and she has even more reason to feel grateful for
172 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre his ‘great and generous Action, given … [her as] a testimony of his Love’ and which prompts her to break their uncomfortable silence. But even prior to his handsome generosity in rescuing Lydia, Elizabeth’s gratitude is excited by his unassuming willingness to change in order to please her:
above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within her of good will which could not be overlooked. It was gratitude. –
Gratitude, not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough, to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection. … without any indelicate display of regard, or any peculiarity of manner, where their two selves only were concerned, [he] was soliciting the good opinion of her friends, and bent on making her known to his sister. Such a change in a man of so much pride, excited not only astonishment but gratitude – for to love, ardent love, it must be attributed. (p. 234)
Robert Polhemus locates the role of gratitude in the growth of affection in the ‘aphrodisiac effect of feeling beloved’: ‘How fundamentally wise and nice people are, after all, w
ho fall in love with us!’29 But before gratitude can come into play, of course, the other party must already have fallen in love, and Polhemus suggests that what he describes as Austen’s uncharacteristically ‘lumbering prose’ (in the description of gratitude and esteem as the foundations of affection quoted earlier) can be attributed to her ‘unconscious resentment’ of the tendency, implicit in a love founded on gratitude and esteem, to ‘separate and genderize sexual desire … and love’.30 (Sexual desire, for example, is
‘natural and acceptable in men, but unseemly for women, who are its proper objects’.31) He identifies Fielding as the chief literary predecessor with whom Austen is engaging in her reluctant endorsement of gratitude and esteem, though this conception of love was far more common than Polhemus acknowledges. Austen, for example, had certainly read, and enjoyed, The Female Quixote,32 where Arabella’s expectations of gratitude and esteem are taken to such uncompromising lengths. It was also very much part of the no-nonsense approach of conduct-books, John Gregory’s account of the process of attachment the other extreme to Arabella’s inflated notions of what a man needs to do to merit love:
Some agreeable qualities recommend a gentleman to your common good liking and friendship. In the course of his acquaintance, he
‘It Was Happy She Took a Good Course’ 173
contracts an attachment to you. When you perceive it, it excites your gratitude; this gratitude rises into a preference, and this preference perhaps at last advances to some degree of attachment, especially if it meets with crosses and difficulties; for these, and a state of suspense, are very great incitements to attachment, and are the food of love in both sexes.33
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