Pride and Prejudice (5 page)

Elizabeth and Darcy’s ‘family party’ at Pemberley represents the nation: as in Burke’s focus on the ‘little platoon’, the intimate, domestic group is both the image and the source of national order and responsibility. In the final chapter of
Pride and Prejudice
, the membership of the Pemberley family is carefully defined. It includes Jane and Bingley, of course, and Georgiana Darcy; Mr Bennet is a regular visitor, and Caroline Bingley, Lady Catherine de Bourgh (eventually), and even Lydia, are occasionally entertained; only Mrs Bennet, Mary and Wickham remain remote. But ‘with the Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate terms’, since it was they who, ‘by bringing [Elizabeth] into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them’ (III, xix). At its most intimate level, then, this ideal community effects an alliance between the traditional ruling élite and a new order: between Darcy, a member of the landowning aristocracy, and the Gardiners, important figures in
Pride and Prejudice
, and representative of that growing commercial and professional class whose ‘excursive flights of ambition’ Wollstonecraft so admired. The alliance is mediated and secured by Elizabeth. In terms of status, she is herself the daughter of a marriage between much lesser, financially insecure, landowning gentry and commerce; more importantly, in terms of moral and cultural values, her feminine individualism penetrates Darcy’s self-satisfied and exclusive definition of what it is to be ‘well bred’. Class identity has become as much a function of mental and moral qualities as it is of visible wealth or an ancient name. When the Gardiners are first introduced, for example, Mr Gardiner is described as ‘a sensible,
gentlemanlike
man’, and the narrative voice clearly takes sides against ‘the Netherfield ladies’ who ‘would have had difficulty in believing that a man who lived by trade, and within view of his own warehouses, could have been so well bred and agreeable’ (II, ii, my emphasis).

Austen’s relationship with a traditional élite is not, then, as has sometimes been thought, simply that of straightforward apologist. Her own social status was precarious, both as a
woman, and as the daughter of a family partly dependent on the patronage of wealthier relations. Her novels are alert to the complexities and insecurities of that social position, and preoccupied with questions of respectability and responsibility; they describe the rapidly changing constituency of rural England at a moment when estates were being bought, rented or created by those who had made their money in trade (as has Bingley’s family) and when, at the same time, a new metropolitan professional middle class to which people such as the Gardiners belonged was gaining cultural ascendancy. Her heroines are the agents of both change and consolidation. Operating in the private, domestic sphere, they are much closer to the new professional values of self-reliance, rationalism and integrity than to what Austen depicts as the mercenary superficiality of the
rentier
class. Through Elizabeth, through Fanny, the dependent outsider who becomes the moral centre of
Mansfield Park
, even through the more socially secure Emma who has to learn about the proper exercise of responsibility, Austen prescribes reform, adjustment, and thus renewal, for a dangerously unselfconscious and therefore vulnerable ruling class. In that wonderful scene towards the end of the novel, for example, in which Elizabeth has to defend her right to happiness against interference from Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Lady Catherine is an easy target. She is a sharply realized embodiment of a stock comic figure: the caricature of an old order, powerless in the face of youth and desire and incapable of change. Her appeal to ‘“the claims of duty, honour, and gratitude”’ (III, xiv) stands little chance against Elizabeth’s rationality, wit and unswerving belief in autonomous choice:

‘Supposing [Darcy] to be attached to me, would
my
refusing to accept his hand, make him wish to bestow it on his cousin? Allow me to say, Lady Catherine, that the arguments with which you have supported this extraordinary application, have been as frivolous as the application was ill judged.’ (III, xiv)

‘Frivolous’ is a key word here. It puts Lady Catherine’s rehearsal of Burkean notions of honour on a par with the ostentatious
display of Rosings, and aligns her inflexible version of tradition with the superficial snobbery of a Caroline Bingley. In daring to judge Lady Catherine’s argument ‘frivolous’, Elizabeth enacts an alternative value system identified with mental qualities of seriousness, ‘depth’ and commitment rather than superficial display.

Elizabeth’s Wollstonecraftian ‘liveliness’ of mind, her habit of ironic laughter and self-awareness (however imperfect), can thus be identified in quite precise cultural terms. Selfconscious, rational, sceptical: Elizabeth is an Enlightenment figure skilfully integrated, through the mechanisms of romantic comedy, into the traditional Burkean hierarchy which Enlightenment values sought to dismantle. Elizabeth’s victory over Lady Catherine is inevitable rather than revolutionary: traditional values in that form are no longer the target, as they were when Wollstonecraft attacked Burke. Darcy, on the other hand, is much less easy to overcome. He can appreciate, match and accommodate the potentially revolutionary qualities which differentiate Elizabeth from the likes of Caroline Bingley – because they rouse his desire. At the end of the novel, Elizabeth and Darcy indulge in the familiar lovers’ pleasure of confirming love by narrating its origin. Elizabeth, characteristically, speaks for Darcy:

‘The fact is, that you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking and looking, and thinking for
your
approbation alone. I roused, and interested you, because I was so unlike
them
. Had you not been really amiable you would have hated me for it; but in spite of the pains you took to disguise yourself, your feelings were always noble and just…really, all things considered, I begin to think it perfectly reasonable.’ (III, xviii)

The tone is playful, flirtatious, ironic. It libidinizes the serious moral and political vocabulary of nobility, amiability, justice, reason and, in doing so, forges unobtrusive connections between private and public histories. Elizabeth’s loving retrospect rewrites Darcy’s insupportable snobbery as mere ‘disguise’;
aristocratic culture is discovered to be essentially ‘amiable’ after all.

In the previous chapter, Elizabeth tells Jane the story of how her own love developed: ‘“It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley”’ (III, xvii). From the moment the novel was published, criticism of Richardson’s
Pamela
turned on the possibility that Pamela’s ‘virtue’ was no more than mercenary self-interest masquerading as moral rectitude. Similar questions have been asked of Elizabeth’s motivation in
Pride and Prejudice
– usually reaching the comfortable conclusion that she is blamelessly free of any ignoble interest in Darcy’s wealth. But the novel is less complacent than some of its critics have been: Elizabeth’s ironic narrative of falling in love is properly selfconscious about the impossibility of easily distinguishing between disinterested motives and the attraction of material advantages. A conflation of morality, aesthetic pleasure and social power is at the very heart of the female-centred fiction of upward social mobility: middle- or lower-class heroines (and their readers) are seduced precisely by the prospect of ‘reforming’, and therefore participating in, the attractive power of the upper-class male. In
Pride and Prejudice
, the seduction is intellectual and aesthetic rather than physical, but that just makes it all the more effective. When Elizabeth sees Pemberley, what impresses her is the extent of Darcy’s influence:

As a brother, a landlord, a master, she considered how many people’s happiness were in his guardianship! – How much of pleasure or pain it was in his power to bestow! – How much of good or evil must be done by him!…she thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever raised before; she remembered its warmth, and softened its impropriety of expression. (III, i)

Elizabeth’s rational judgement is modified by the prospect of effective power; she is seduced out of her class-based indignation by the thought that, through marriage, she might have shared
this position of influence over others’ happiness. And the romance plot immediately rewards her with Darcy himself, ‘strikingly altered’ in his manner towards her (III, i). At the personal level, confrontation gives way to the compromise which will make romantic fulfilment possible. At the public level, by implication, class antagonism settles for a mutually beneficial consensus.

The effectiveness of that consensus is demonstrated when Darcy, working in close partnership with Mr Gardiner, saves Lydia from the worst social consequences of her liaison with Wickham. As Mrs Gardiner tells Elizabeth, Darcy’s ‘mistaken pride’ at first made him think it ‘beneath him’ to share his knowledge of Wickham’s character and behaviour (III, x). By entering into a more open form of government and giving others access to that knowledge, Darcy is instrumental in returning Lydia – and Wickham – to a kind of respectability. Wickham, a vestigial example of the old rake figure, is effectively disempowered as the new alliance, between Darcy’s wealth and influence and Mr Gardiner’s professional expertise, acts to guarantee public morality and order.

By the end of the novel, then, Darcy has been converted into a figure of comic reconciliation. Lady Catherine, representing the older generation of aristocracy, would have thwarted the romantic fulfilment on which comedy depends. Darcy, the new aristocratic man, uses his power and knowledge to re-establish social harmony, a harmony symbolized – as at the end of Shakespearian comedy – by multiple marriages: Lydia’s to Wickham, Jane’s to Bingley, and most important, of course, his own to Elizabeth. In doing so, he recalls another of Samuel Richardson’s heroes: not the dangerously predatory Mr B., but the protagonist of Richardson’s last work,
Sir Charles Grandison
(1753–4), a novel Austen greatly admired. Sir Charles is a model of new masculine sensibility who spends a lot of money and moral effort persuading other characters into marriage, to the unqualified admiration of all around him. But Austen, the inheritor also of a tradition of women’s writing, significantly modifies her Richardsonian original. Sir Charles acts out
of disinterested and rather tediously unassailable masculine virtue. Darcy acts out of love for Elizabeth. ‘Her heart did whisper, that he had done it for her’, and her instincts are triumphantly confirmed when Darcy confesses that his main motivation in saving Lydia was ‘“the wish of giving happiness to you”’ (III, x; III, xvi). Romantic love makes individual happiness both the motivation and the goal of moral and social change. As a result of Elizabeth’s influence, and in the hope of pleasing her, Darcy rethinks his pride, opens himself up to new social alliances and acts to ensure Lydia’s respectability. His reward, when Elizabeth accepts his second proposal, is ‘happiness…such as he had probably never felt before’ (III, xvi).

So the power to motivate and reward change, both personal and social, lies with the woman. As in the standard popular romance, as in Richardson’s
Pamela
, the hero is ultimately shown to be loving and therefore lovable; through desire for the heroine, he is transformed from an aggressive and potentially threatening figure into an ally and a husband. Elizabeth’s Wollstonecraftian ‘independence of mind’ makes her desirable to Darcy and brings laughter, ‘ease and liveliness’ to Pemberley. This plot formula seems to give women, and the values they represent, a lot of power and responsibility. But it is power of a carefully circumscribed kind. The social order has been modified, not radically altered. Austen’s post-revolutionary achievement in
Pride and Prejudice
is to put Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary femininity at the service of the Burkean ‘family party’ by writing what is still one of the most perfect, most pleasurable and most subtle – and therefore, perhaps, most dangerously persuasive – of romantic love stories.

Burke, Edmund,
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790), edited by Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1996)

Jane Austen’s Letters
, 3rd edition, collected and edited by Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)

More, Hannah,
Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education
(1799), Vols. VII and VIII of
The Works of Hannah More
, 18 vols. (London, 1818)

Richardson, Samuel,
Pamela
:
or, Virtue Rewarded
(1740), edited by Peter Sabor with an Introduction by Margaret A. Doody (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1997)

Southam, B. C. (ed.),
Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968)

Steiner, George,
After Babel
:
Aspects of Language and Translation
(London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975)

Wollstonecraft, Mary,
Maria
(1798) in Mary Wollstonecraft,
Mary and Maria
; Mary Shelley,
Matilda
, edited by Janet Todd (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1996)

——,
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792), edited by Miriam Brody (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1996)

1.
Letters
, p. 203.

2.
Ibid., p. 201.

3.
Southam, p. 46.

4.
Steiner, p. 9.

5.
Letters
, p. 275.

6.
Burke, pp. 170, 315, 135.

7.
Wollstonecraft,
Vindication
, p. 152.

8.
Ibid., pp. 150–51.

9.
Ibid., p. 151.

10.
Ibid., p. 81.

11.
Letters
, p. 202.