Jane Austen For Beginners

by Robert Dryden

  As for Elinor, news arrives about a marriage between “Mr. Ferrars” and Lucy Steele, but Austen has provided us with a twist in the plot: Lucy Steele has married Mr. Robert Ferrars, not Edward! Edward pays a visit to Barton and informs the Miss Dashwoods that his brother (not he) has married Lucy Steele. Elinor’s sense, patience, and goodness have finally paid off. Edward explains that he had fallen out of love with Lucy a long time ago, but was simply honoring his previous vow. At the time of his proposal, he had so little knowledge of and experience with women, and he made a “foolish” decision. This fact is born out in that a growing love for Lucy never manifested, and that once Robert became wealthy with the family inheritance, it was Lucy who broke off the engagement to Edward. Clearly Lucy cares more about money than she let on. And now, Edward is free! He proposes to Elinor, and you guessed it—she accepts.

  • • •

  In most of her novels, Austen has a way of financially rewarding characters whose marital longings are driven by true love rather than money. Sense and Sensibility is no exception. Characters like Willoughby and Lucy may get the money they desire and be able to live lavish lifestyles, but directly or indirectly, Austen intimates that they will not be happy. Characters like Edward and Elinor, and Brandon and Marianne, who seek true love and don’t wish to compromise or settle for less, end up with all the money they need for happiness. There has never been a major Austen character who makes sacrifices for true love and winds up destitute. In the cases here, Robert and Lucy are represented as greedy characters who behave badly. Their marriage is a puzzle to everyone and likely to themselves as well. In contrast, Edward and Elinor’s marriage looks extremely good. So much so that Mrs. Ferrars (who had threatened to disown Edward) eventually decides to re-accept Edward as her recognized son, and she gives her blessing to their marriage. She also gives Edward £10,000 (approximately $830,000), which will surely help out the couple who had planned to subsist on Edward’s clergy living (via Brandon) of £250 per year. Since they valued love above money, Austen rewarded them with a considerable sum. Marianne, who cared so much for Willoughby and so little about what he was worth, falls in love with Brandon and they are eventually married. And in Brandon’s care, the Dashwoods will be very well off financially.

  Although her novel has plenty of elements that position it as a contribution to Romantic literature, Sense and Sensibility is more accurately a parody or satire of the conventional Romantic plot and characters of her day. The Romantic characteristic of sensibility ultimately proves to be self-destructive. Granted Willoughby makes a good Romantic villain or anti-hero, but Edward and Brandon leave quite a bit to be desired as Romantic heroes.

  Romantic literature aside, Austen’s novel reveals a great deal about upper-class Regency England and about human nature. The characters in this society are trying to negotiate a strict patriarchy and an obsession with money and status. Austen has some of them give in to temptation, but she balances the greedy and destructive behavior by introducing other characters who are self-sacrificing and who have clear judgment, honorable behavior, and the desire for true love. The attentive Austen reader will recognize many parallels between the world Austen represents to us in her novel and the one in which we live today. Indeed, so many of the challenges faced by Austen’s characters have contemporary resonance—and will always have resonance.

  Austen’s novel has much to say about the resiliency of women. Mrs. Dashwood, Elinor, and Marianne endure trial after tribulation yet they are able to grow and evolve under pressure with grace and fortitude. Austen begins her novel by pulling the carpet out from under the feet of the Dashwood women, stranding them nearly helpless in a dog-eat-dog patriarchal society that is nearly insensitive to their circumstances. What follows from there is like a survival manual. Negotiating one disappointment after another, these women persevere. Austen might agree that unwavering persistence is the key to their survival and their eventual rise to security and happiness. Austen’s representation of a stranded single mother and her three daughters determined to make their way is nothing short of a feminist motif that is radical for its day.

  Also of crucial importance to the Dashwood women is their unwavering view of and faith in Colonel Brandon and Edward Ferrars. These men have endured a great deal of hardship in their own lives. Like the women who they eventually marry for love, they too have remained constant and persistent in their desires to do the right thing. By contrast, Willoughby and John Dashwood are weak characters. They know they are behaving badly, but they are unable to alter their destinies because they are influenced by greed. Edward and Brandon, however, are good men in this materialistic, patriarchal society, male counterparts to the honorable Dashwood women. Steadfast good behavior is of the highest value in Jane Austen’s world. Thus, Austen rewards these men with women who will be lovers, best friends, and true companions for life in a modern-day sense.

  Chapter 3

  Pride and Prejudice

  Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen’s most popular novel. Her initial draft was called First Impressions, and she wrote it during the years 1796 and 1797 when she and her family still resided at Steventon. With the help of her father, she tried to publish it late in 1797, but her work was rejected. She substantially revised the story in 1811 and 1812 when she was living with her sister Cassandra and their mother in the town of Chawton in Hampshire. In 1813 she published the novel successfully in three volumes under its revised title. One of the reasons for the book’s blockbuster success during the past twenty years is that it has been represented successfully in several film versions. The BBC production starring Colin Firth (1995) is the most well-respected interpretation, as it attempts to cover nearly all of the novel. Although not as well regarded by the more purist Jane Austen fans, the Hollywood production starring Keira Knightly (2005) has contributed mightily to the novel’s popularity.

  Pride and Prejudice contains themes related to early nineteenth-century social-class issues, economics, and evolving gender identities. Austen introduces us to a combination of landed and middle-class characters who are living in the midst of a changing economy and a changing social order. Great Britain’s emerging status as a colonizing empire has created various economic opportunities for members of the middle class. We see rich middle-class characters, who are now eligible to mingle with and even marry members of the gentry. Fifty years earlier, this would not have been possible. Thus, Austen presents us with the gentry of old England (if you will) and emerging middle-class identities that are connected to a new Great Britain. Furthermore, we see a juxtaposition of gentry characters—wealthy and powerful members of the landed gentry and lower-level members, who have much more modest landed estates.

  Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy is a bachelor and landed gentleman who has a great fortune of old money and a regal country estate called Pemberley in Derbyshire. His good friend Charles Bingley is a middle-class character whose family is worth a fortune, but they are without a landed estate. In breeding, Darcy represents old England and Bingley represents the new Great Britain. Darcy is a blue-blood landed gentleman, and Bingley differs in that he is a member of the nouveau riche. He is beneath Darcy in social standing, but he is a representative of the changing British economy, where wealth is now competing with land for status. Likely Bingley has made his fortune abroad in colonial endeavors (although the specific source of his income is not revealed). Like Darcy, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and their daughters are of landed status, but their estate, called Longbourn, is humble and their monetary income minimal. In the social hierarchy, they are overshadowed by Darcy’s estate and fortune of old money, and by Bingley’s fortune of new money.

  Gender issues are explicitly apparent from the first page as Mr. and Mrs. Bennet have five daughters, each either at or approaching an eligible age for marriage. And as a result of having no sons to inherit the property, a significant portion of the plot revolves around the fate of the Bennet estate. Daughters could not inherit landed property at this time in British history.
The Bennets’ social status in the gentry allows them to mingle in high social circles, but they are far from what you would call well-monied. This is an important detail as Mr. Bennet is unable to make his daughters more attractive to prospective suitors via extravagant dowries. And since the Bennets have no sons, there is an urgency to find the daughters acceptable partners as soon as possible. As Austen states about Mrs. Bennet, “The business of her life was to get her daughters married.” Two gender issues are extremely important. Firstly, women were eligible on the marriage market for a relatively brief period of time in their lives, from age fifteen until their mid twenties. When a woman reached her late twenties, she was destined for spinsterhood. She would be entirely dependent for her livelihood on parents, brothers, and/or married sisters. There were some employment opportunities for women as teachers or governesses, but options were scarce and hardly desirable. Secondly, outside of visits to London or Bath, opportunities to meet men were minimal for women in these small, provincial communities. A woman could easily fail to meet an eligible bachelor during her courting years, so if she received a proposal of marriage, she was expected to take it no matter what. Love in marriage was not a reasonable expectation for English women during this period in history.

  In Austen’s world, however, we see women who (like Austen herself) might turn down a proposal of marriage if she was not in love. In Pride and Prejudice one of Austen’s female characters is willing to risk the tragic consequences if she does not possess loving feelings for her prospective mate. For the time, this was exceedingly radical. We also see male characters who value love in addition to intelligence and freedom of thought in their women—again, a way of thinking that was not commonly accepted in Austen’s day.

  Finally, the terms pride and prejudice can be interpreted as the trappings of tradition and the patriarchal order in old English society. There is little movement or change in the identities of most of the characters who populate Austen’s story. The characters are connected with traditional expectations and ways of thinking about society, marriage, and money. They don’t question stereotypical notions of pride and prejudice that are so ingrained and prominent in society. Fitzwilliam Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, and to a lesser extent Charles Bingley and Jane Bennet all struggle to negotiate the terrain of social pride and prejudice; they evolve and change. Love is what brings them together, and pride and prejudice is what breaks them apart. The work they do in order to overcome social obstacles paves the way for more progressive thinking about marriage, gender roles, and expectations. For this reason at least, Jane Austen is a pioneer for her representations of gender roles and marriage. She is precursor to the modern-day feminist.

  • • •

  As the curtain opens on Pride and Prejudice, we meet members of the Bennet family who are central characters in Austen’s novel. Mr. Bennet, the patriarch of the family at Longbourn Estate, is bookish and quiet, but he is also honorable, ethical, and extremely wise. His wife compensates for his quietness, as she is like a whirlwind of gossip and idle chatter. The two eldest daughters are Elizabeth (Lizzy), and Jane, followed by Mary, Kitty, and Lydia. With a young woman’s urgency to get married in mind, the plot begins as news reaches Longbourn that the rich, eligible bachelor by the name of Charles Bingley has just rented the nearby estate of Netherfield. Remember that Bingley has a fortune, but he is not landed. His wealth, now an acceptable determinant of social value in the new economy of Great Britain, makes him an extremely desirable prize to any of the Bennet daughters. His arrival in the neighborhood creates a massive stir. The call goes out immediately from Mrs. Bennet and all the Bennet girls for Mr. Bennet to pay a visit to Bingley and begin to establish ties. In fact, Mr. Bennet already has. Going one better, he has arranged for his daughters to attend a ball where Bingley and his entourage (Darcy included) will be in attendance. Bingley is described as “good looking and gentlemanlike [with] a pleasant countenance, and easy, unaffected manners,” and Darcy is a “fine, tall person [with] handsome features, [and a] noble mien.” We notice that Darcy’s description contains an allusion to his nobility (“noble mien”), but the most important detail to observe in the contrasting descriptions is that even though the men are from different social classes, they can bond as equals in friendship because of Bingley’s monetary fortune. The upwardly mobile middle class can now compete with the gentry for social positioning.

  When the evening of the ball arrives, we see more evidence of just how important social-class issues are in this society. Bingley is the biggest hit at the ball. He is friendly and open, and he seems to take an instant liking to Jane Bennet. Even though he is a man of fortune, he treats everyone at the ball equally with kindness and openness. Darcy, on the other hand, is perceived as cold, aloof, and distant. He is believed to be snobbish and would not dance with any of the young women. Elizabeth is particularly disgusted with Darcy and views him as an elitist. From her perspective, Darcy is embarrassed and annoyed to be in the company of such inferior people, who populate the small and provincial town. Elizabeth perceives that to Darcy, the ball, the townspeople, and the town of Meryton are all socially beneath him.

  The distance that Darcy keeps between himself and the members of the ball at Meryton is undoubtedly connected with social-class prejudice. It is not Elizabeth’s imagination that Darcy is aloof. But in addition to his snobbery, Austen is fashioning Darcy as a Romantic-hero type, who begins his journey in the narrative as an outsider. The Romantic hero, who was invented as a literary trope or archetype by the likes of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley during the time that Austen is writing, has a dark, mysterious side that he wrestles with. This keeps him on the margins of society until he is able to negotiate his dilemma. In Darcy’s case, you might say that he has conflicting feelings about the pride and prejudice in his society, and at the same time he struggles with his conflicting feelings for Elizabeth Bennet.

  In the early interaction between Elizabeth and Darcy we also see the emergence of Austen’s progressive representation of women. Elizabeth understands that as a nobleman, Darcy has his “Pride,” and that explains his aloofness in a crowd that he might find to be socially beneath him; however, as Elizabeth states, “I could forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.” Elizabeth is a great example of an early fictional female feminist. Her feelings and her dignity are counted—she insists on it. She doesn’t play the role of the meek, passive, or subservient female. She has opinions, and she expresses them boldly.

  Initially Jane and Bingley are not trapped by the social friction experienced between Elizabeth and Darcy. Since they hit it off at the ball, an arrangement is made whereby Jane should pay a visit to Netherfield to spend time with Charles, his sister Caroline, and his friends. This is all part of Mrs. Bennet’s plot to speed up the marital process. Jane, however, becomes ill during her visit, and Elizabeth makes the trek to Netherfield to nurse her sister back to good health. In doing so, Austen continues to develop Elizabeth’s character as a liberal female—a tomboy, who walks the three miles to Netherfield. Doing so in the wake of a rainstorm, Elizabeth arrives muddy and receives negative attention for her unladylike appearance. She disregards the protocol, conventions, and manners that are expected of a woman in polite society. Her behavior is nothing out of the ordinary to us in the twenty-first century, but two hundred years ago it would have been scandalous.

  Not only is Elizabeth’s behavior radical for the time period, but so is Darcy’s reaction it. During her time at Netherfield, she is still disgusted with Darcy, but she matches wits with him during the many conversations that take place between the two, so much so that the narrator finally reveals that “Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by [Elizabeth].” The implication is that Darcy becomes enamored with Elizabeth because she challenges him with her intelligence. She is able to match wits with him, and he is not put off or threatened. He may not know it yet, but Darcy is an enlightened man because he is attracted to a free-thinking woman.

  When Jan
e is finally nursed back to good health and the party (now including Mrs. Bennet) returns to Longbourn, they are greeted with the news that their cousin, Mr. Collins, will soon be making a visit. This part of the plot involves that British property law the entail (also seen in Sense and Sensibility, as we noted, and in Austen’s final finished novel, Persuasion). The law dictates that landed property cannot be sold and must be retained by the family. Since ownership of land is a means to power and wealth, this medieval law intends that landed estates remain intact. However, emphasizing the degree to which this society is dominated by the patriarch, women were unable to inherit property. Since Mr. Bennet is the only male in his immediate family, none of the females are able to inherit the estate once he has died. When his death occurs, ownership of his property will go to the next closest male relative, in this case the cousin Mr. Collins, a clergyman. He is not close to the family and certainly not well liked, but by law, upon Mr. Bennet’s death, Collins will have immediate ownership and could put Mrs. Bennet and her five daughters out on the street.

  Mr. Collins is one of Austen’s great comical characters. The beginning Austen reader might not expect to laugh out loud when learning about a society of manners, courtship, and proper behavior, but be prepared to enjoy Austen’s satire and sarcasm. In the case of Collins, Austen invents him as pompous, awkward, and not easy on the eyes. He is so full of himself, and so clueless in his own ability to assess his personal flaws, that he becomes sad, pathetic, but at the same time riotously funny. We could not laugh at his expense if it were not for his own inflated ego. His patroness is Lady Catherine de Bourgh, a high-ranking member of the gentry, who is a relative of Darcy’s. Collins drops her name every chance he gets.