Pride and Prejudice (59 page)

As it can be seen we are in the proximity of a major problem here, namely that of the relationship and adjustment between individual energy and social forms. If one were to make a single binary reduction about literature one could say that there are works which stress the existence of, and need for, boundaries; and works which concentrate on everything within the individual – from the sexual to the imaginative and the religious – which conspires to negate or transcend boundaries. Looking back at the terms of Charlotte Brontë’s criticisms of
Pride and Prejudice
quoted at the start of this introduction we notice a preponderant vocabulary of boundaries – ‘accurate’, ‘carefully fenced, highly cultivated gardens’, ‘neat borders’, ‘elegant but confined houses’. Her own impulse is towards the ‘open country’ and the boundless ‘air’ as the whole progress of her aptly named Jane Eyre reveals.
¹¹
In the eighteenth century however, the stress was on the need for, or inevitability of, boundaries. Thus Locke in the first chapter of his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
:

I suspected we began at the wrong end, and in vain sought for satisfaction in a quiet and sure possession of truths that most concerned us, while we let loose our thoughts into the vast ocean of Being; as if all that boundless extent were the natural and undoubted possession of our understandings, wherein there was nothing exempt from its decisions, or that escaped its comprehension…Whereas, were the capacities of our understandings well considered, the extent of our knowledge once discovered, and the horizon found which sets the bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things – between what is and what is not comprehensible by us – men would perhaps with less scruple acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of the one, and employ their thoughts and discourse with more advantage and satisfaction in the other.

And thus Hume:

Nothing, at first view, may seem more unbounded than the thought of man, which not only escapes all human power and authority, but is not even restrained within the limits of nature and reality…And
while the body is confined to one planet, along which it creeps with pain and difficulty; the thought can in an instant transport us into the most distant regions of the universe; or even beyond the universe, into the unbounded chaos, where nature is supposed to lie in total confusion…But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.

By turning the negative words in these passages into positive ones, and vice versa, one could begin to establish a basic vocabulary to describe the very different kind of epistemology posited by the whole movement we know as Romantic. ‘The vast ocean of Being’, ‘the most distant regions of the universe’, even ‘the unbounded chaos, where nature is supposed to lie in total confusion’ – these were the very realms the Romantic imagination set out to explore; for it
did
claim for itself ‘unbounded liberty’ and refused to accept the notion that man and his mind are ‘really confined within very narrow limits’. Locke invites us, in the interests of sanity, to recognize and accept the ‘horizon’ which ‘sets the bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things’. Blake took the word ‘horizon’, transformed it into ‘Urizen’ and made that figure the evil symbol of all that restricted and restrained man. He thus stood the Enlightenment on its head, and if it was at the cost of his sanity, then, like other Romantics, he preferred to enjoy the visionary intensities of his ‘madness’ rather than subscribe to the accepted notions of mental health. Other Romantics too have preferred to cross that horizon and boundary and explore ‘the dark parts of things’ and often they have found this sphere to be full of dazzling illuminations.

This is not the place to embark on a summary of the Romantic movement. The point is that Jane Austen was brought up on eighteenth-century thought and was fundamentally loyal to the respect for limits, definition, and clear ideas which it inculcated. Yet among writers who published work the same year as
Pride
and Prejudice
were Byron, Coleridge, Scott, and Shelley; the
lyrical Ballads
were already over a decade old, and Keats would publish four years later. Jane Austen was writing at a time when a major shift of sensibility was taking place, as indeed major social changes were taking place or were imminent, and to some extent she was certainly aware of this. She had depicted at least one incipient Romantic in the figure of Marianne Dashwood in
Sense and Sensibility
, and her treatment is a rather ambiguous mixture of sympathy and satire. In the figure of Elizabeth Bennet she shows us energy attempting to find a valid mode of existence within society. One more quotation from Blake will enable me to conclude the point I am trying to make. In the
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
, Blake writes: ‘Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is eternal Delight.’ As I have said, I think that Jane Austen’s suspicion of energy increased in her later work. But in
Pride and Prejudice
she shows us energy and reason coming together, not so much as a reconciliation of opposites, but as a marriage of complementaries. She makes it seem as if it is possible for playfulness and regulation – energy and boundaries – to be united in fruitful harmony, without the one being sacrificed to the other. Since to stress one at the expense of the other can either way mean loss, both to the self and to society, the picture of achieved congruence between them offered in
Pride and Prejudice
is of unfading relevance. It is perhaps no wonder that it has also proved capable of giving eternal delight.

(1972)

1.
For further discussion of the influence of
Sir Charles Grandison
on Jane Austen, who was of course steeped in Richardson’s work which she admired so much, see Frank Bradbrook’s helpful book
Jane Austen and her Predecessors
.

2.
It is interesting to speculate which painters Jane Austen might have been looking at in London in 1813, apart from Reynolds. The possibilities could include Gainsborough and George Romney, though more recent portraits would have been done by Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1825), Sir Henry Raeburn (1756–1823), John Hoppner (1758–
1810), and Johan Zoffany (1723–1810). Lawrence regarded himself as a loyal adherent of Reynolds’s
Discourses
, though he did once say that Reynolds ‘was of a cold Temperament, a philosopher from absence of the Passions’. There is still a somewhat generalized sweetness and purity in some of Lawrence’s portraits of fashionable ladies, though it is not perhaps the true neo-classic generality. Hoppner was also popular as a painter of beautiful women and, probably more in competitive envy than genuine outrage, once made the strange declaration that ‘the ladies of Lawrence show a gaudy dissoluteness of taste, and sometimes trespass on moral, as well as professional chastity.’ Perhaps Raeburn – ‘the Scottish Velasquez’ – achieves somewhat more individuality in his portraits than Lawrence. Sir Walter Armstrong in 1901 wrote of his work: ‘His pictures are always well focused. Our eye is invariably led at once to the most worthy centre, where the sitter’s personality sits enthroned among the accidents of his condition…’ Lawrence’s beauties may have been too fashionable for Jane Austen to have found Mrs Bingley among them. Hoppner and Raeburn seem to have taken in a wider range of ladies, from a class point of view, and it is not inconceivable that in front of one of their portraits Jane Austen found a faithful image of her own created character.

3.
See
Jane Austen: Twentieth Century Views
, edited by Ian Watt.

4.
Jane Austen: A Study of her Artistic Development
.

5.
The work of the sociologist Erving Goffman is relevant here. See in particular his book
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
, the first chapter of which is, indeed, headed ‘Performances’.

6.
It is Lydia’s precipitous elopement, in addition to the more remote but not dissimilar marriage of her father, that provokes Jane Austen into her most direct attack on first impressions. She is justifying Elizabeth’s change of mind about Darcy.

‘If gratitude and esteem are good foundations of affection, Elizabeth’s change of sentiment will be neither improbable nor faulty. But if otherwise – if the regard springing from such sources is unreasonable or unnatural, in comparison of what is so often described as arising on a first interview with its object, and even before two words have been exchanged – nothing can be said in her defense except that she had given somewhat of a trial of the latter method in her partiality for Wickham, and that its ill success might, perhaps authorize her to seek the other less interesting mode of attachment.’

It is fairly clear here that Jane Austen is showing her particular suspicion of the pre-verbal immediacy of sexual attraction. In this area in particular, she obviously thought that to act on first impressions could only be disastrous. For some interesting observations on Jane
Austen’s suspicions of sex, see Marvin Mudrick’s
Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery
.

7.
See ‘Character and Caricature in Jane Austen’ in
Critical Essays on Jane Austen
, edited by B. C. Southam.

8.
cf. Basil Bernstein’s work in socio-linguistics in which he differentiates between a restricted speech code and an elaborated speech code, the former determined by a person’s particular position in the social structure, while the latter is not thus restricted.

9.
‘It was the favourite wish of
his
mother, as well as of hers. While in their cradles, we planned the union: and now, at the moment when the wishes of both sisters would be accomplished in their marriage, to be prevented by a young woman of inferior birth, of no importance in the world, and wholly unallied to the family!’

The spectacle of Elizabeth holding out against the wishes, plans, schemes of society – positional control – is one which helps to sustain our belief in the possibility of some degree of individual autonomy. (It is a tolerably savage comment on this society’s power to enforce connections based on respectability, that it is felt to be a blessing by the Bennets when it is announced that Wickham is to marry Lydia after the elopement. ‘And they
must
marry! Yet he is such a man!…How strange this is! And for
this
we are to be thankful.’ Elizabeth’s characteristically penetrating sense of the ironies in her society sees at once the strangeness of a marriage which is at once undesirable, in view of the character of the bridegroom, and absolutely essential, in view of society’s rigid rules. Public propriety entirely pre-empts private felicity. The fact of the connection has become more important than the individuals who will compose it.)

10.
Gilbert Ryle points out in his interesting essay, ‘Jane Austen and the Moralists’, in which he argues that Shaftesbury’s ideas influenced Jane Austen’s ethics/aesthetics, that while she often uses the word ‘Mind’ she almost never uses the word ‘soul’.

11.
It is worth noting the names of the various places which Jane Eyre goes to and leaves; they form a suggestive progression – Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, Moorhouse, Marshend, Ferndean, and in her flight towards Rochester she finally finds herself in a trackless forest. From an initially very repressive house, in which she shows her rebellion by losing consciousness and passing out as though her ‘head’ had been too tightly ‘gated’, she makes her way to the uncharted spaces of nature – from behind ‘gates’ to beyond social boundaries. However, is it not an unambiguous progression, and in fact Jane Eyre finally recognizes the need for boundaries – only they will be ones of her own drawing and dictating. But this is another story.

See also Note on the Text,
p. xl
.

p. 8, l. 27: “
When is your next ball to be, Lizzy?
”: the first and subsequent editions give this speech to Kitty, but as Chapman notes,
¹
it clearly belongs to Mr Bennet. In the first edition, it begins a new line which should also have been indented.

p. 9, l. 34:
“my dear Mr
.
Bennet?
” 1st ed.:
“my dear Mr
.
Bennet!
” A common printer’s error. The emended text follows Chapman.

p. 45, l. 29:
daughter
1st ed.:
daughters
follows the third edition and Chapman. Both Kitty and Lydia are present.

p. 65, l. 28:
up stairs
.” 1st ed.:
up stairs
. Though inverted commas are sometimes used for indirect speech, there is no indication here of where they should open, so it seems more likely to be a printer’s error. Not corrected in Chapman.

p. 88, l. 11:
Bingley’s
1st ed.:
Bingleys
’ follows the second and third editions and Chapman.

p. 126, l. 10:
proceeds
1st ed.:
proceeded
follows Chapman.

p. 143, l. 34:
Lucy
1st ed.:
Lucas
.

p. 162, l. 31:
impertinence?
1st ed.:
impertinence
. follows Chapman.

p. 210, ll. 14–16: “
A great many
…
have to tell!
”: printed as one speech in first edition. Emendation follows the third edition and Chapman. It is clearly Maria, not Elizabeth, who is concerned with the number of dinners.

p. 226, l. 34:
her
1st ed.:
his
corrected in second and subsequent editions.

p. 229, l. 31:
my carrying
1st ed.:
by carrying
follows Chapman. ‘By carrying’ seems more likely, because more elegantly concise, than ‘by my carrying’, which Chapman suggests as the probably correct reading, though he does not himself adopt it.
²