Pride and Prejudice (55 page)

However, it is important to note that her
éclaircissement
first comes through language as well – in the form of Darcy’s letter. The passages describing her changing reaction to that letter are among the most important in the book. In effect she is having to choose between two opposed and mutually exclusive versions – Wickham’s and Darcy’s. ‘On both sides it was only assertion.’ She had at first been taken in by Wickham’s plausible physical manner, but she gradually comes to put more trust in Darcy’s authoritative writing manner – she is discriminating between styles at this point. (Note that she immediately judges that Mr Collins is not a sensible man from the pompous style of his letter-writing – in this case, first impressions are validated.) She realizes that ‘the affair…was capable of a turn which must make him (Darcy) entirely blameless throughout the whole’.
The affair was capable of a turn
– there in essence is the whole problem which forever confronts the interpreting human consciousness which can turn things now this way now that way as it plays, seriously or sportively, with the varying versions of reality which it is capable of proliferating: one concrete world – many partial mental pictures of it. But if it is the problem of consciousness, it can also be its salvation, for it enables a person to change his version or interpretation of things. Just how tenacious a man can be of a fixed version, and how disastrous that tenacity can be when it is a wrong version, is indeed the very subject of
King Lear
. Elizabeth thinks for a time that her wrong version has cost her a perfect mate and a great house, crucial things for a young lady in that society.

She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her…It was an union that must have been to the advantage of both…But no such happy
marriage could now teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was.

But of course she does not have to undergo Lear’s tribulations. By an intelligent and just reading of Darcy’s letter she not only changes her mind about him; she comes to a moment of intense realization about herself. ‘How differently did everything now appear in which he was concerned!…She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd. “How despicably have I acted!” she cried; “I, who have prided myself on my discernment!…Till this moment I never knew myself.”’ This may seem somewhat excessive – it is part of Darcy’s improvement that he comes to acknowledge the justness of much of what she has said about his behaviour and manner. The important thing is that in perceiving her own pride and prejudice – notice she uses both words of herself – Elizabeth can now begin to be free of them. There can be few more important moments in the evolution of a human consciousness than such an act of recognition. There is much in our literature as well as our experience to suggest that the person who never comes to the point of saying ‘I never knew myself’ will indeed remain forever cut off from any self-knowledge – what possible effect there is on his vision and conduct need not here be spelt out. If we don’t know ourselves, we don’t know our world.

It is not surprising that after wandering alone for two hours ‘giving way to every variety of thought – re-considering events, determining probabilities’, as Elizabeth does after receiving Darcy’s letter, she experiences ‘fatigue’. For she has indeed been through an ordeal and engaged in a critical effort of rearranging her mental furniture. As F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: ‘I was impelled to think. God, was it difficult! The moving about of great secret trunks.’ That there are internal expenditures of energy quite as exhausting as any bout of external action is a truth which Jane Austen, with her restricted position in a fairly immobile society, was peculiarly able to appreciate. Elizabeth’s particular ordeal is indeed a very ancient one, for she has been
confronting for the first time the problematical discrepancies between appearances and reality, and the unsuspected limits of cognition. It is a theme as old as
Oedipus Rex
, and even if all that is involved is recognizing a rake and a gentleman respectively for what they really are, in Elizabeth’s society, no less than in ancient Greece, such acts of recognition are decisive in the procuring of happiness or misery.

The constant need to be alert to the difference between appearance and reality is made clear from the start. Compared with Bingley and Darcy, Mr Hurst ‘merely looked the gentleman’. Since Mr Hurst alternates between playing cards and sleeping, he is hardly a problematical character. Wickham of course is more so. ‘His appearance was greatly in his favour’ and he has a ‘very pleasing address’. He is ‘beyond’ all the officers of his regiment ‘in person, countenance, air, and walk’. Elizabeth does not have it ‘in her nature to question the veracity of a young man of such amiable appearance as Wickham’. He ‘must always be her model of the amiable and the pleasing’. It is only after reading Darcy’s letter that she has to start changing that model. As the above-quoted words make clear (none of them have pronounced ethical connotations), Elizabeth has hitherto responded to Wickham’s manner, or that part of the self which is visible on social occasions. After the letter she thinks back.

As to his real character had information been in her power, she had never felt a wish of inquiring. His countenance, voice, and manner had established him at once in the possession of every virtue. She tried to recollect some instance of goodness, some distinguished trait of integrity or benevolence…but she could remember no more substantial good than the general approbation of the neighbourhood.

She has now started to think about ‘substance’ as being distinct from ‘appearance’ and from this point on Darcy’s character will continue to rise in her estimation as Wickham’s falls, until she can complain to Jane ‘There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of these two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it.’ Poor
Jane, so reluctant to believe in the existence of human duplicity and evil scheming, would like to believe in the goodness of both men, but Elizabeth with her more rigorous mind points out that there is ‘but such a quantity of merit between them; just enough to make one good sort of man; and of late it has been shifting about pretty much. For my part, I am inclined to believe it all Mr Darcy’s.’ Even here, as we can see, Elizabeth’s sense of humour has not deserted her; and it enables her to disconcert Wickham with a nice irony. On her return from Rosings Wickham asks if Darcy’s ‘ordinary style’ has improved, adding, ‘For I dare not hope that he is improved in essentials.’ Elizabeth, by now convinced of the essential goodness of Darcy can thus reply meaningfully. ‘Oh, no!…In essentials, I believe, he is very much what he ever was.’ Wickham makes a rather agitated retreat, adding with weak insolence ‘I must rejoice that he is wise enough to assume even the
appearance
of what is right.’ The italics are Jane Austen’s and the word occurs again later in the chapter, again italicized, as if to stress that Elizabeth is now fully awakened to the possible disparities between appearance and substance.

Just what constitutes a person’s ‘real character’ is one of the concerns of the book: the phrase occurs more than once, usually with the added idea that it is something that can be ‘exposed’ (and thus, by the same token, concealed). In particular, Darcy in his letter writes that whatever Elizabeth may feel about Wickham it ‘shall not prevent me from unfolding his real character’, just as later in the letter he narrates Wickham’s attempt to seduce Georgiana, ‘a circumstance…which no obligation less than the present should induce me to unfold to any human being’. Cordelia’s last words before being banished are:

Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides
Who covers faults, at last shame them derides.

‘Unfolding’ a hidden reality is of course replacing mere appearance with substance. The fact that reality can get folded up and hidden away – because we are so built that we are forced to work from first impressions which can be cynically manipulated
– means that it is very important to be careful about what we regard as convincing evidence. It is the mistake of both Lear and Othello that they ask for the wrong kind of evidence, thus making themselves vulnerable to those who are willing to fabricate a set of false appearances. But in Shakespearean tragedy, as also in
Pride and Prejudice
, the ‘real character’ of both the good and the bad – of Cordelia and Iago, of Darcy and Wickham – is ‘unfolded’. The cost and process of the unfolding are of course very different in each case. But the perennial theme is common to both.

At this point we may ask if Elizabeth has any more than calligraphic evidence for her new belief as to the relative merits of Darcy and Wickham. Obviously something more is required to give ‘substance’ to what could be mere ‘assertion’. There is of course the magnanimous part he plays in the crisis precipitated by the elopement of Lydia and Wickham, but Elizabeth’s improved vision has already by then ‘learned to detect’ the boring affectation in Wickham’s manner, and appreciate the solid merit of Darcy. The education of her vision, if we may call it so, starts with Darcy’s letter but it is not complete until she has penetrated his house and confronted his portrait. This occurs on her visit to Derbyshire when the Gardiners persuade her to join them in looking round Pemberley, Darcy’s fine house and its beautiful grounds. This physical penetration of the interior of Pemberley, which is both an analogue and an aid for her perceptual penetration of the interior quality of its owner, occurs at the beginning of Book Three, and after the proposal-letter episode I regard it as the most important scene in the book and wish to consider it in some detail.

The word ‘picture’ occurs frequently in the novel, often in the sense of people ‘picturing’ something – a ball, a married couple, a desired situation – to themselves. One important example of this is the following. ‘Had Elizabeth’s opinion been all drawn from her own family, she could not have formed a very pleasing picture of conjugal felicity or domestic comfort.’ These pictures, then, are mental images, either derived from impressions or conjured up by imagination. (It is of course a particular quality of Elizabeth’s that she is able to think outside the reality picture
offered to her by her own family.) There are also more literal references to pictures – as when Miss Bingley suggests to Darcy, by way of a spiteful joke, that he should hang portraits of some of Elizabeth’s socially inferior (to Darcy) relatives at Pemberley, adding ‘As for your Elizabeth’s picture, you must not attempt to have it taken, for what painter could do justice to those beautiful eyes?’ The relation between actual portraits and mental pictures is suggested when Darcy is dancing with Elizabeth. She has teased him with a witty description of their common characteristics. ‘“This is not a very striking resemblance of your own character, I am sure,” said he. “How near it may be to
mine
, I cannot pretend to say.
You
think it a faithful portrait undoubtedly.”’ Later in the same dance he says ‘I could wish, Miss Bennet, that you were not to sketch my character at the present moment, as there is reason to fear that the performance would reflect no credit on either.’ Her answer is: ‘But if I do not take your likeness now, I may never have another opportunity.’ This is more than mere banter because, since we cannot literally internalize another person, it is at all times extremely important what particular picture or portrait of that person we carry with us. The portrait metaphor allows one to suggest that the picture should be done with some care in order that the gallery of the mind should not be hung with a series of unjust unlikenesses.

We know that Jane Austen herself went to art galleries when she could. Thus in a letter to Cassandra in 1811:

Mary & I, after disposing of her Father & Mother, went to the Liverpool Museum, & the British Gallery, & I had some amusement at each, tho’ my preference for Men & Women, always inclines me to attend more to the company than the sight.

And in 1813 it is clear that when she went to a portrait gallery she had her own fictional portraits in mind. Again the letter is to Cassandra:

Henry and I went to the Exhibition in Spring Gardens. It is not thought a good collection, but I was very well pleased – particularly
(pray tell Fanny) with a small portrait of Mrs Bingley, excessively like her. I went in hopes of finding one of her Sister, but there was no Mrs Darcy; – perhaps however, I may find her in the Great Exhibition which we shall go to, if we have time; – I have no chance of her in the collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Paintings which is now shewing in Pall Mall, & which we are also to visit. – Mrs Bingley’s is exactly herself, size, shaped face, features & sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her. I dare say Mrs D. will be in Yellow.

Later in the letter she adds

We have been both to the Exhibition & Sir J. Reynolds’, – and I am disappointed, for there was nothing like Mrs D. at either. I can only imagine that Mr D. prizes any Picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye. – I can imagine he wd have that sort of feeling – that mixture of Love, Pride & Delicacy. – Setting aside this disappointment, I had great amusement among the Pictures…

It is worth noting that she does not expect to find a recognizable portrait of Elizabeth in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s collection. For Reynolds, the artist, including the portraitist, ‘acquires a just idea of beautiful forms; he corrects nature by her self, her imperfect state by her more perfect’. In his
Discourses
Reynolds laid typical neo-classical stress on ‘central forms’, and generalized figures which are not ‘the representation of an individual, but of a class’. This neo-classic approach tended to minimize the individuating qualities of a person or thing in favour of more generic attributes or in deference to classical models.
²
But for Jane Austen, the novelist and admirer of Richardson, it was precisely the individuating qualities, which sharply differentiated even the sisters in the same family, which held most interest. Elizabeth is not a type; indeed she has that kind of independent energy which is most calculated to disturb a typological attitude to people. She wants recognizing for what she is and not what she might represent (Mr Collins’s regard for her as for Charlotte, is, she knows, wholly ‘imaginary’ – he sees
her only as a suitable wife-figure, and is dismissed according to his deserts). She is fortunate in attracting the discerning eye of Darcy – he is always staring at her, as if trying to read her fully, or capture the most complete likeness for his memory – for he alone of the men in the book is equipped to do justice to all her real qualities. It is thus only right that she should be brought to a full recognition of his real qualities. And this finally happens at Pemberley.