by Jane Austen
Even when pride and prejudice impair judgment, Elizabeth and Darcy remain principled, perceptive, and admirably strong-minded. As Darcy puts it, in a critique of his friend Mr. Bingley’s complaisance, “To yield without conviction is no compliment to [one’s] understanding” (p. 50), while Elizabeth declares of herself that “There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me” (p. 173). This strength of personality—she calls it her “impertinence” and he “the liveliness of your mind” (p. 367)—draws an initially unimpressed Darcy to Elizabeth. Further, when evidence presents itself, Elizabeth is able to turn her keen powers of perception inward. Through Darcy’s letter to her, she quickly recognizes her errors, which ability sets her apart from someone like her own undiscerning mother. Although the scene of humiliation and painful self-recognition—“Till this moment, I never knew myself” (p. 205)—that follows Elizabeth’s reading of the letter is more the stuff of Greek tragedy than of the novel of manners, its presence in the narrative demonstrates that Elizabeth has the capacity for introspection.
Pride and prejudice seem an almost indispensable set of character traits, or qualities worth cultivating, when we detect the effects of their virtual absence from the personalities of Jane and Mr. Bingley, both of whose easy manners and thorough failures to discriminate put a nearly permanent end to their relationship. Early in the novel, Elizabeth finds Jane too self-effacing, too good-natured, and not critical enough: “You are a great deal too apt, you know, to like people in general. You never see a fault in any body. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in my life” (p. 16). This assessment may say as much about Elizabeth’s own forcefulness of personality as it does about Jane’s easygoing manners, but Elizabeth has a point. In this instance, Elizabeth is teasing, but she also means what she says, especially when it becomes apparent that Jane wrongly considers the Bingley sisters as agreeable as she does their brother. It is this particular fault that nearly undoes Jane’s romance with Bingley, for the Bingley sisters, her professed friends, have snubbed her long before she realizes it; once she does, her mild manners prevent her from asserting her own interests with their brother. Bingley, too, shows a “want of resolution” (p. 136) to protect his own affairs of the heart. When Darcy misconstrues Jane’s quiet amiability as lack of sufficient interest in Bingley, he easily manipulates his friend into leaving Netherfield and Jane’s presence.
One could argue that the presence of professional and commercial men and women in the novel should militate against the easy acceptance not only of pride and prejudice but of other characteristics of the gentry. Even though members of professional and commercial society appear in the novel, however, they aspire to the lifestyle of the gentry and adopt its values and habits. We do not find Austen’s characters embracing those qualities that were well established as virtues and self-consciously adopted among middle-class reformers in her day—efficiency, frugality, punctuality, self-reliance, and the work ethic—and that she herself may have prized. In fact, when we look at the world of the novel, we see hardly any work being done or business being transacted. Certainly, when a team of horses is unavailable to be harnessed to the carriage that might convey Jane Bennet to Netherfield, we become vaguely aware that Mr. Bennet is a gentleman farmer who oversees a working farm. But Austen chooses not to introduce us to farmhands at work, as novelists of social realism would do a generation after hers. We are also very much aware of the presence of soldiers who presumably engage in training exercises if not in actual warfare, but we see them only as dancers at the ball and as romantic distractions for idle young ladies. We become acquainted with the man of commerce Mr. Gardiner only when he is on a holiday tour, and we never actually behold Mr. Collins ministering to his parishioners. In fact, Mr. Collins’s identity as a clergyman is construed solely in terms of the house and property the living brings him. Nor do we hear of commerce in action, except for the occasional ironic reference, as when Lydia Bennet, living out the absurd logic of England’s relatively new consumer culture, buys a hat she knows is ugly simply for the sake of spending money.
What Austen foregrounds throughout the novel is a culture of leisure. In an age when the values of the gentry and aristocracy still prevailed, leisure was understood not only as a respite from labor, as it would have been for those who had to work for a living, but as a way of life that had its own virtues and failings. As in the worlds of classical Greece and Rome so admired by the eighteenth-century society into which Austen was born, a life of leisure at one’s country seat—construed as “retirement” from the daily concerns of commerce and petty political and financial intrigue in London—was considered essential for any gentleman who would take on the responsibilities of disinterested participation in politics and the administration of empire. Especially in the early eighteenth-century of Austen’s grandparents, known in poetry as the Augustan Age for its neoclassical values, those who depended on income from sources other than land—that is, commercial or professional interests—would have seemed compromised in their ability to rise above the concern for personal gain to serve the public good. The country gentry, however, whose values were articulated by Lord Bolingbroke and Augustan poets such as Alexander Pope, regarded themselves as being at leisure for virtuous study and reflection, and as having the power to rise above the corruption, favoritism, and factional-ism that dominated London politics.
In Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy provides the model for the virtuous country gentleman, even though he keeps a house and has acquaintances in London. While we never see Mr. Darcy in his role as keeper of the public interest, or managing his estate, we feel assured that he is the kind of man who inhabits his country estate responsibly. When Darcy negotiates the Lydia-Wickham elopement crisis with authority and competence, we sense that he manages all his life’s affairs with similar capability. That he husbands his estate well becomes clear when the touring party of Elizabeth Bennet and the Gardiners arrives at Pemberley to find grounds that, in accordance with the standards for eighteenth-century British taste in landscape design, seem natural and unpretentious. Such simple elegance was understood to reflect the values and temperament of the owner, as Pope had made clear in his poem on house and grounds aesthetics, the “Epistle to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington,” in which he argued against frivolous and impractical estates but applauded the taste in design and architecture of men of sense. It is also quickly apparent that Darcy is a good estate manager because he commands the allegiance and respect of his servants, as Elizabeth and the Gardiners soon learn during their interview with the housekeeper. When, in response to her sister Jane’s question concerning when she first started to love Darcy, Elizabeth quips that “I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley” (p. 361), she is being ironic, but there is a part of her that surely must have been swayed by seeing property that is not only magnificent but graceful. If, in Darcy’s presence, she cannot see past what she takes to be his inexcusable pride, she must recognize during her visit to his well-ordered estate that he is a man of principles and generosity.
While country retirement may have been essential to the life of the worthy gentleman, Austen also offers us a glimpse of the corrupt side of leisure and its symptoms of moral dissolution—luxury and indolence. Despite his good nature, Sir William Lucas demonstrates the affectation of the newly titled in part by abandoning his commercial interests, the success of which had resulted in his public prominence and his knighthood. He is raising a young heir who promises to become as debauched as his father’s fortune will allow, dreaming, as he does already at this tender age, of keeping foxhounds and drinking a daily bottle of wine, should he ever find himself as wealthy as Mr. Darcy. Austen turns her gentle wit on the pretensions of parvenu gentry, but she frowns somewhat more severely upon the shortcomings of the aristocratic matron. Although well established in her rank, L
ady Catherine is too easily flattered by Mr. Collins, and her behavior makes it clear that she lacks the genuine good breeding and strength of character of her nephew, Mr. Darcy. Unlike the understated elegance of Darcy’s Pemberley, Lady Catherine’s solemn residence is designed to inspire a discomfiting sense of awe among her visitors. That one of the drawing rooms boasts a “chimney-piece [that] alone had cost eight hundred pounds” (p. 76) serves both to exemplify the ostentation of Rosings Park and to make Mr. Collins’s behavior seem all the more preposterous, for it is he who basks in the reflected glory of his patron’s estate by savoring its every sumptuous detail, including this one.
If leisured society can be extravagant, it can also be lazy. For example, Mr. Bingley’s brother-in-law, Mr. Hurst, “a man of more fashion than fortune” (p. 18), seems entirely incapable of any exertion except eating and playing cards, a fact that Austen humorously establishes as evidence of his perfect lethargy. At Netherfield, when Elizabeth Bennet chooses reading over a game of loo, he is nonplussed. Lacking any interior life himself, Mr. Hurst cannot imagine how one could take pleasure in an activity that is solitary and that might require reflection. Austen’s character sketch reaches its ironic limit when, upon finding the rest of his party unwilling to play cards, Mr. Hurst “had, therefore, nothing to do, but to stretch himself on one of the sofas and go to sleep” (p. 54). In fact, the sorts of leisure activities characters engage in—card playing, dancing, singing, piano playing, walking, conversation, letter writing, reading—may be taken in particular instances to indicate their moral fiber and social inclinations. Generally speaking, the exemplary character is one whose leisure activities imply a willingness to balance private reflection against community-minded sociability. At fault are such characters as Mr. Hurst, whose leisure suggests he lacks a capacity for autonomous thought or action, but also Mary, whose excessive attention to books and piano playing marks an untoward self-absorption.
In contrast, Elizabeth and Darcy are both introspective and fully socialized, even if Darcy refuses to be pleasant to those whom he considers his social inferiors. Both are adept conversationalists, and their verbal sallies display their intelligence, wit, and powers of perception. Elizabeth is also a competent pianist—good enough to entertain company but not so exceptional as to take herself seriously as an artist. Both Elizabeth and Darcy enjoy reading, which should predispose Austen’s audience to like them. But Elizabeth is quick to disown any pretension to being an intellectual, which is the flaw of her sister Mary. By contrast, the unsympathetic Caroline Bingley seems incapable of focusing on a book, and she pretends to enjoy reading only when she believes it will help to impress Mr. Darcy. Mr. Bingley, for whom we feel a measure of affection, does not read either, and we may take this fact as a sign that he lacks the depth of his friend Darcy. Or course, Bingley must be worthy of the heroine’s kind sister and cannot, therefore, be laughable or insipid, like Mr. Hurst; rather, Bingley lacks substance in an amiable, happy-go-lucky way. The characters’ discussion of inclinations toward reading also leads the Netherfield set to render opinions on libraries. Mr. Darcy sees it as an obligation to augment his family’s library collection “in such days as these” (p. 39), an allusion, presumably, to the cultural decay of Britain wrought by the rise of a philistine commercial society that forsakes the liberal arts in favor of market culture. Caroline Bingley, by contrast, sees family libraries as so much grand furniture. No doubt finding the book cover more valuable than the book, she esteems Mr. Darcy’s library for its enhancement of the prestige of the household.
Walking is the other leisure activity that clearly distinguishes Elizabeth Bennet from Caroline Bingley, whose idea of exercise is to gossip as she takes a turn about the drawing room or the shrubbery, and whose exertion is entirely motivated by her romantic interest in Mr. Darcy. Elizabeth enjoys solitary rambles that allow her time for reflection, so it is no hardship when she takes a brisk three-mile walk through fields and over puddles to visit her sister Jane at Netherfield during the latter’s illness. Elizabeth’s fortitude in walking, a consequence of her concern for her sister’s health, has the unintended effect of invigorating the torpid company at Netherfield, if only because her activity seems so brazen to them. Her animation captivates Mr. Darcy and rankles Caroline Bingley, who takes Elizabeth’s brief adventure “to show an abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country-town indifference to decorum” (p. 37). Still, Elizabeth is no romantic heroine of the sort who would be fashioned by Charlotte Brontë several decades later. The sphere of action in Austen’s novel of manners is circumscribed enough so that it would be shocking indeed were Elizabeth, like Brontë’s Jane Eyre, to wander despondently about the English countryside, exhausted and starving. Elizabeth’s own burst of romantic enthusiasm—“What are men to rocks and mountains?” (p. 154)—subsides quickly enough.
If Austen’s attention to the culture of leisure serves to call into question the values of the landed elite even as it reinforces them, the marriage plot complicates the outlook of the novel further still. With respect to social class, the hero and heroine are worlds apart—or so they appear in Darcy’s estimation. At Netherfield, Darcy finds that Elizabeth has “attracted him more than he liked” (p. 60), and he thus resolves to regulate his feelings toward her. Elizabeth’s station in life and the “total want of propriety” (p. 196) among her family members make the match ill-advised, if not untenable, as Darcy callously points out in proposing marriage to her against his better judgment. He is astounded not only that Elizabeth rejects him—in that respect he is no better than Mr. Collins, whose earlier proposal is made with equal confidence in her acceptance—but that his explanation of his initial reluctance has caused offense. That Darcy fails to consider that Elizabeth might actually be offended by a proposal that opens with the suitor’s expression of his disdain for her inferior social connections and his efforts to overcome his love for her suggests that the insuperable gulf he perceives between them seems to him perfectly natural. For her part, Elizabeth knows full well the subtle distinctions that define rank in her society, and it is more his tactlessness than his pointing out an obvious fact of social hierarchy that infuriates her.
It is also the case that Elizabeth has a healthy sense of her own entitlement. As she proudly remarks to Lady Catherine, Mr. Darcy “is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter; so far we are equal” (p. 331). At Rosings, when Sir William Lucas and his daughter Maria are daunted by the prospect of their encounter with the redoubtable Lady Catherine, we find that Elizabeth, by contrast, “had heard nothing of Lady Catherine that spoke her awful from any extraordinary talents or miraculous virtue, and the mere stateliness of money and rank she thought she could witness without trepidation” (p. 161). In the society of this novel, talent and manners—that is, truly good breeding, rather than affectation—ultimately trump birth and social connections. Even Mr. Darcy endorses this view, as Elizabeth observes. Indeed, when the lovers finally reconcile their differences, Elizabeth teases Darcy that her “impertinence” appeals to him because he is “sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention” (p. 367). Darcy’s ennui, however, should be taken not as a tacit authorization of a new democratic outlook but rather of a meritocratic one. That is, the values of the gentry and the aristocracy are reinforced even as their membership becomes infused with the blood of the professional classes, which would seem to undermine the restrictive claims upon which the upper classes predicate their existence. The possibility that Mr. Darcy might marry his frail cousin, Miss Anne de Bourgh, in order to consolidate their estates is presented as an outmoded aristocratic notion, not to be taken seriously by the new generation.
What makes the lovers’ attitudes possible is that the real consequences of social rank are diminished by the conventions of romantic comedy. A typical feature of the comic novel is that powerful social distinctions upheld in everyday life tend to be suspended in an effort to further the plot. Within the safe space of the novel, such comic upheavals create e
xciting possibilities for minor social transgressions; at the same time, in the novel’s conclusion, the existing order becomes reaffirmed. In this case, the reaffirmation happens as Elizabeth becomes absorbed into Darcy’s world. It is standard comic fare that the potentially formidable member of the ruling class who might prevent the budding romance— here, Lady Catherine—turns out to be a relatively powerless busybody who depends on weak-minded followers to reinforce her sense of her own importance. Lady Catherine, in fact, resembles the stock type of aging woman tenaciously clinging to her diminished power, a familiar character found in Restoration comic drama, as well as in the mid-eighteenth-century novels of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson.
Whatever its social and comic implications, the marriage plot is the chief concern throughout the novel, and there is a sense of urgency about forging the right unions that motivates the action of the entire book. The ironic opening gambit—“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”—rehearses the epigrammatic wisdom of a gossip-driven community comprising women like Mrs. Bennet, who is herself eager to enhance the prestige of her family by marrying her daughters well. Prestige and social connection, however, are not the only motivating forces in this neighborhood or within the Bennet household. In the idealistic world of the romantic comedy, Mrs. Bennet’s ambition to see her daughters nicely settled appears a simple matter of crude one-upmanship with Lady Lucas. Thus, when Mr. Bennet teases his wife rather unkindly over her preoccupation with finding eligible suitors, the reader is amused. We forget, though, that Mr. Bennet’s own first question about the newly arrived Mr. Bingley concerns his marital status, which suggests either that Mr. Bennet is baiting his wife or that his apparent indifference on the matter is feigned. Mr. Bennet, of course, should be concerned about the marriage question. As the narrator informs us later, he regrets having spent all his disposable income, instead of reserving a portion of it to protect his daughters’ financial future. It hardly excuses him that he had assumed he would have a son whose coming-of-age would nullify the “entail”—that is, the legal document that places restrictions on who may inherit his estate. (In the absence of male heirs, women could typically inherit an estate but not if an entail existed barring them from doing so.) As endearing a character as Mr. Bennet is, he has not behaved responsibly as a father, a fact that becomes all the more apparent when Lydia, who has had very little in the way of sensible parental guidance, elopes with Wickham, thereby, as Lady Catherine observes, jeopardizing the marriage prospects of her four sisters in a world that still cares about the taint of family reputation: “Not Lydia only, but all were concerned in it” (p. 272).