Pride / Prejudice

by Ann Herendeen

  Elizabeth put her free hand, the one not supporting Jane’s arm, to her forehead in a gesture of exasperation. “I can’t comprehend how you claim to have a happy marriage with such a topsy-turvy view of things.”

  Jane laughed. “I will never learn when you are joking and when you are serious. But if it will end this uncomfortable subject, I will say that I am delighted with the friendship between our husbands. I would never oppose any of Charles’s wishes, so long as it was not morally objectionable or led him into bad habits or company. But beyond that, he and Mr. Darcy were friends long before they married us. A truly happy marriage ought not destroy a longstanding friendship.”

  Elizabeth was briefly silenced, humbled by the depth of her sister’s love and the selfless yet confident way she acknowledged their husbands’ attachment. Jane’s faith was true, unshaken by doubts. It made Elizabeth’s practical viewpoint seem shallow by comparison. She had prided herself on her “philosophical” marriage: correcting her original prejudice with civility and impartiality; moved by gratitude, advancing to affection; finally, through reflection, achieving what she hoped was understanding. But when she said the word to Fitz, did she truly mean love, as Jane so sincerely felt for Charles? Or was it mere passion? Philia, eros, agape. Fitz had taught her the classical names for the three emotions that English muddled into the one word, love. Perhaps, she decided, what had begun as philia and progressed quickly to eros would develop over time into the agape her sister had known from the beginning. “Then you do not object to my assigning them a room?”

  “Of course not,” Jane said. “I don’t see why it must be announced, that’s all, as if you’re bestowing some great reward, like Queen Elizabeth with her favorites.”

  “That’s a splendid thought!” Elizabeth seized upon the analogy, and its change in mood, with relief. “I must make more use of my namesake. Which do you suppose Fitz is? He certainly had Leicester’s pride when we met, but now there is more of the industry and adventure of Raleigh. I would not like to see him so misguided as Essex.”

  The men stood waiting for their wives to catch up. “What is this?” Fitz asked, having listened for what followed his wife’s telling laugh. “I hope I am not to be conveyed to the Tower.”

  “Not at all,” Elizabeth said. “Although I have decided to give you and Charles your own special lodging, for when the weather is inclement. That small room at the end of the corridor on the second floor. Will that suit, do you think?”

  “Admirably,” Fitz said. “Do you hear, Charles? We are to put up in style this winter.”

  “That’s very kind,” Charles said. He gave a small, graceful bow to Elizabeth, then seeing his own wife ill at ease, adroitly changed the subject. “So, Fitz, did you attend your cousin’s wedding?”

  “Anne de Bourgh’s to George Witherspoon?” Fitz stepped in to back up his friend. “No. Tempted as we were, we were not invited.”

  “Lady Catherine can’t possibly mean to keep up her objections to your marriage forever,” Jane said.

  “No,” Elizabeth said. “I think she felt happier with a private ceremony. As few witnesses as possible.”

  “What is there to be ashamed of?” Jane asked. “It sounds like an excellent match. Charles says Mr. Witherspoon has an immense fortune.” She blushed, embarrassed at the mercenary implication. “I meant only that Lady Catherine need have no fear that her daughter was making an imprudent connection or had been taken in by a fortune hunter. I have met Mr. Witherspoon and I can say that he is of good character, and very pleasant in manner. If Miss de Bourgh—I suppose I must call her Mrs. Witherspoon now—is as great an invalid as you say, he will treat her considerately.”

  “Well, you know,” Charles said. “Lady Catherine had hoped to get Fitz as her son-in-law. Witherspoon can’t measure up to that.”

  “No one can measure up to that,” Elizabeth said. She signaled for Fitz to take her arm. The couples, formed up now husband with wife, proceeded in the direction of the house, Fitz’s head bent low to hear his wife’s urgent, whispered message.

  “Truly?” he said, placing a tender kiss on Elizabeth’s forehead. “So soon?”

  “I’m sorry, Fitz.” Elizabeth answered in the regretful tone appropriate for informing the company of an afternoon’s outing spoiled by rain. “The way we work at it, it’s unavoidable.”

  “Sorry? Why should you be sorry?”

  “What if it’s another girl?”

  Fitz laughed. “Then there’s no help for it. Since we have honored my mother with our first, we’ll have to name the second one Catherine.”

  Charles and Jane, following close behind the other couple, were not allowed to escape hearing the news, and conveyed their heartiest congratulations. “Perhaps it will be a boy this time,” Jane suggested. An intense discussion of names, in which Fitzwilliam, George, and Charles figured prominently, was cut short by an interested party.

  “All I know,” Charles said, “is that it’s much better for friends to marry sisters than to marry one’s friend to one’s sister.”

  “Excellent!” Fitz exclaimed, clapping Charles on the back as if he were the one who had just heard good news from his wife. “Marriage has been the making of you, Charles. Not merely a man, but a wit. I believe you have coined an epigram.”

  a cognizant original v5 release october 06 2010

  The Story Behind

  Pride/Prejudice

  OF JANE AUSTEN’S six published novels, Pride and Prejudice is the most popular and the most frequently adapted. It’s also the most “romantic,” with a Cinderella-like love story; a witty, spirited heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, who, unlike her two-hundred-year-old peers, is still envied and admired by twenty-first-century women; and a hero, Fitzwilliam Darcy, considered by many readers the sexiest of Austen’s leading men. What could possess a writer to try her hand at yet another version of this beloved story? Madness, hubris, cynical exploitation aside, my reason is simple: I felt there is a hidden story behind the one Austen shared with us, one she gives readers just enough clues to discover if we will.

  The central story of Pride and Prejudice follows Elizabeth and Darcy’s growth in self-knowledge, as the misunderstandings arising from her prejudice and his pride evolve into genuine love. But intertwined with this story is a parallel one, concerning the friendship between Darcy and his “gentlemanlike” friend, Charles Bingley. It too begins with an unequal relationship, here between a slightly older, far more sophisticated man, and an inexperienced “youth,” still reliant on his mentor’s guidance. Just as Darcy and Elizabeth can know true love only once he has been “humbled,” that is, when he realizes how his inflated sense of self-worth has prevented him from seeing her as his equal, so Darcy’s continued friendship with Bingley requires acceptance of him as a man, an adult, capable of making his own decisions—especially the all-important choice of wife.

  As I read and reread the novel, it seemed to me that this friendship can be interpreted as romantic, or at least sexual, and that in Darcy and Bingley Austen was showing readers what today we might call “bisexual” men. These are not “gay” men; their love exists not as an exclusive, self-contained pairing, but in the context of the society in which they lived, where marriage to a lady of good family was the objective of every gentleman of property, just as marriage to a “gentleman in possession of a good fortune” was necessary for every young lady. This is the hidden story I have brought out in Pride / Prejudice.

  The only thing drearier than reading a political novel is writing one. My motivation for writing Pride / Prejudice was the fun of telling a good story, not advancing an argument. But a “bisexual Pride and Prejudice” can’t expect to escape this sort of analysis entirely. While I may have “queered” Austen’s novel, I don’t feel I’ve “changed” it by turning her characters into something different from what they are in the original. As the title indicates, the idea derives from “slash” fiction, in which existing stories are retold with same-sex relationships between some o
r all of the main characters. (The term refers to the / symbol, which indicates which characters are to enjoy the same-sex treatment.) Like the first slash, based on the original Star Trek television show, and featuring stories about Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock (K/S), the concept works best when the source material contains a genuine homoerotic subtext.

  To those who feel that making the hidden sexuality explicit “spoils” Austen’s work, I would say that because we value sexuality differently than did people in 1800, it’s no more wrong to include it in modern retellings of her stories than it is to examine some of her other subtexts, such as the slave trade and the wealth derived from it in Mansfield Park. There’s no overt sex in Austen’s novels, not because her characters lack genitals or hormones, but more because of the different way in which this aspect of life was viewed at the time; as just another bodily function, its depiction was unnecessary. But we have come to recognize that the physical act of love has emotional and psychological components, and showing it allows for a three-dimensional portrayal of character. It’s because we don’t see sex as inherently sinful or disgusting that we can include it in adaptations of older works without regarding the new material as erotica or obscene.

  Yet surely Austen didn’t “intend” to write a “bisexual” love story. I must be misinterpreting innocent remarks and behavior in the light of my own contemporary, sex-saturated cultural background. I believe Austen created her deeply sympathetic and carefully detailed human portraits from observation, enhanced by the writer’s gift of imagination. As it’s highly unlikely that never once in her life did she meet a gay or bisexual man, it’s far more probable that she based her characterization of Darcy and Bingley at least partly on some gay or bisexual men of her acquaintance. Whether she “knew” what she was seeing is a meaningless, modern question, like looking at a black-and-white photograph and asking why everybody’s wearing gray.

  Pride / Prejudice is a way of bringing to light the alternative universe that was invisible in Austen’s time. What to us seems explosively subversive, in Austen’s time simply didn’t matter. Whether Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley spent the night in each other’s arms or alone in their separate rooms, their friendship would appear exactly the same in public, where Austen and the rest of the world would see them. But just because people couldn’t or wouldn’t see it doesn’t mean the sexual element wasn’t there, just as the fact that until recently we were unable to verify the existence of black holes and dark matter in the universe doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I call Pride / Prejudice a yin-yang, reverse-image Pride and Prejudice that fills in the blanks by illuminating what was previously obscured.

  All authors who write versions of Austen novels are faced with the hellish problem that the Divine Miss A. produced some of the most elegant prose ever to appear in English literature. If we want to tell the same story from a slightly different angle, or by supplying the yang for her yin, we have two unpalatable options: to paraphrase, or to dump vast chunks of her text into our narrative. Neither alternative is attractive to a writer. Copying is, well, copying—not creative at all. Paraphrasing is about as low as a writer can go, taking material that is perfect and turning it into at best mediocre fare. We can steal, or we can spin gold into straw. Both practices merit Truman Capote’s dismissal of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

  Rather than “type” an entire novel, I have imagined the scenes that Austen didn’t show us, what I call “writing in the gaps.” Of course, for the story to make sense, some of Austen’s crucial scenes must be included, and whenever possible I have a character do the dirty work of paraphrase, as when Elizabeth recounts to her sister Jane the conversations she has missed while recuperating from her cold. Throughout the book, I tried to mesh my own voice comfortably with the original by continuing Austen’s jaunty, epigrammatic manner, although without attempting futile imitation. Were Austen to be granted a chance to come back to life, my hope is that her fury at this mangling of her “darling child” would be directed at the content, not the style.

  The biggest “gap” in the original story takes place after the disastrous Netherfield ball, when Bingley and his household remove to London for the winter. Austen keeps her attention focused on Elizabeth and the Hertfordshire society, while telling us nothing of what the men are up to during those four or five months in town. This was the section of the story that allowed the greatest scope for my imagination, and where I indulged myself by introducing characters from my first novel, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander, along with its eponymous gentlemen’s club.

  Some readers may protest that since “sodomy” was a capital crime, Darcy, whose only vice is a very reasonable “pride,” would be unlikely to commit so immoral an act or to associate with men who do. The natural development of Darcy’s sexuality, beginning with the adolescent, exploitative relationship with George Wickham, and progressing in early adulthood to the pleasurable instruction of mistresses, seems implicit even in Austen’s chaste original. We tend to forget, in our modern age of hookups and safe sex, the difficulties facing the sexually active gentleman of two hundred years ago. There was no “dating,” no casual sex between men and women of the middle and upper classes. Female prostitution, to a much greater extent than now, filled a very real need. Same-sex activity, by contrast, while illegal and dangerous, was readily available and inexpensive—or free. A “heteroflexible” man could find willing partners in the streets and the parks, and in the clubs called molly houses (like a gay bar or bathhouse). Although a “bisexual” man could take the prudent course of action and satisfy his urges with women, a fastidious man like Darcy might sometimes prefer men of his own class—educated, discreet, perhaps even clean—to the coarser female merchandise of brothels.

  There is also the way in which people accommodate their desires on the one hand, and the rules of society, including harsh and repressive sexual laws, on the other: by a psychological disconnect. Darcy is “clever” and has been to university, where he has been exposed to the ideas of ancient Greece and Rome, with their very different understanding of love between men. If two gentlemen truly love each other, and express that love physically, then, by definition, this must be an honorable act, not a crime. The law is for the purpose of regulating the conduct of the uneducated lower orders who lack higher moral principles and are simply pursuing “unnatural” sex. That the law would apply equally to all is something Darcy admits only subconsciously.

  Darcy is the intelligent woman’s elusive ideal: the man who wants a partner on his level, and who values a woman’s mind as much as her appearance. In the segregated world of 1800, when men and women pursued separate leisure activities and received very different educations, Darcy expects to find his equal in a man. When he meets Elizabeth, because of the disparity in their social status, it takes him time to recognize in her the embodiment of that other half he has been seeking. Austen has brilliantly conveyed the more cerebral aspects of this perfect match in scenes that read like conversational sexual intercourse, and I have necessarily extended this form of lovemaking into the couple’s engagement and married life. But I also enjoyed the chance to portray Elizabeth as Darcy’s equal in appetite and energy as well as in intellect.

  Elizabeth, as Austen has created her, is, I believe, a passionate woman. The sections where Elizabeth struggles with her attraction to the charming, handsome villain, George Wickham, strike me as Austen’s guarded way of showing us the heights of a young lady’s sexual excitement over an unworthy and dangerous object. It is for this reason that I included a physical side to Elizabeth’s friendship with Charlotte Lucas. Because of the ignorance surrounding female sexuality, both women would consider their love “innocent.” With no male organ involved, there could be no “sex,” nothing improper. But they would regard all intimacy as private and would be as disinclined to speak openly of their deeper feelings, even to each other, as would two men engaged in far more forbidden same-sex acts.

  While it�
��s possible to claim a connection with modern ideas of bisexuality for the men, women’s choices were determined more by the economics of marriage and spinsterhood than by sexual orientation. For a woman to live unmarried she needed financial independence; the majority of women living on the lower rungs of the gentry, like Elizabeth and Charlotte, did not have this option. Single, they were dependent for the rest of their lives on their parents and brothers. Elizabeth, with no brothers, faces certain poverty on her father’s death. Charlotte can expect only grudging charity and resentment from her brothers in a large family with many obligations. Living together, apart from their families and any financial support, meant certain and extreme poverty even if it had been socially acceptable. Earning a living in the few available jobs, such as governess or schoolteacher, was little better than servitude. Marriage was the only possible choice if it was offered, and choosing it says nothing about a woman’s sexuality, merely her “stomach.” Thus Charlotte accepts the loathsome Mr. Collins and Elizabeth, while horrified, eventually recognizes Charlotte’s necessity, even if she can’t quite endorse it.

  Charlotte’s speech in chapter 14, in which she claims that men can have it “both ways” in marriage while women cannot, does not reflect my own beliefs. It’s my opinion that Austen intended Charlotte’s marriage as a cautionary tale against the cruelty of a society that makes it impossible for women to live unmarried. Austen is not arguing in favor of sexual freedom, only the choice to marry for genuine love or not at all. I doubt she would agree that men should have it both ways either, but I see in Darcy and Bingley a couple who will have it so, and I tried in this story to make it work. Where Elizabeth has a husband who will, indeed, be “everything” to her, I couldn’t help wanting to give Charlotte a measure of happiness beyond what her creator allowed—thus the chaste but affectionate relationship with Anne de Bourgh.