Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
NOTE: Shout-out to Ms. Kube, who used Mr. Collins’s proposal in a lesson contrasting two dramatically different literary proposals. I don’t remember much of tenth grade, but I remember that. I remember it so well that I started to wonder mid-read if Mr. Collins was the source of the egomaniacal first proposal. I wish I could remember where the second one was from.
Spoilers? Really? After 211 years and a buttload of memes? You’ve had your bloody chance. Increasingly feral Kindle notes are available here.
Yeah, I’m gonna have to side with Mr. Darcy on this one. Lizzy’s family straight up sucks. (Lizzy herself is a delight, and I am mostly fond of Jane. But if the horrid mother hadn’t gotten to me within the first few chapters, Lydia’s escapade with the dreadful Mr. Wickham would’ve been enough to put me off the entire family. I now fully understand the vicious urge to exile any lady who stans Mr. Wickham. Yet it also makes an infuriating sort of sense that Wickham is Mr. Bennet’s favorite son-in-law, god this family is horrible. Having now finished the book, I am astonished that Mr. Darcy was able to put aside his Bennet-induced revulsion long enough to realize that Lizzy’s eyes were handsome enough to tempt him. I would not have.)
In regard to the breadth of literature and analysis that already exists: there is nothing I can possibly add to what a multitude of others have already said over the last two centuries, and I obviously just got here anyway and haven’t read anything else by Jane Austen, aside from Northanger Abbey, which according to goodreads was read in 2010. But I am a mouthy piece of baggage, not unlike our easily prejudiced heroine, and even if I arrived late to the party I still want to record my thoughts for my own reference. I’m not even ashamed that I finally picked up Austen after buying Pride and Premeditation (Tirzah Price). I have a contentious relationship with the Western classics, as can be seen in my earlier battles with Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) and Little Women (Louisa May Alcott), and had no reason to think Austen would go any differently, though I’m glad she did. I now want to reread Northanger Abbey, and I have also been told I should try Persuasion, so we’ll see how this goes.
Anyway. The current iteration of the Bennet family was spawned by Mr. Bennet, by nature unfashionably contrary and sarcastic, silly enough to marry a handsome woman without looking too deeply at her actual personality and now resigned to spending the autumn of his life trolling her in every way possible. Mrs. Bennet – equally silly and ill-mannered, but in different ways – gave birth to five daughters over the course of their marriage, and the whole family lives in Longbourn House in the village of Longbourn, Hertfordshire. In the absence of a son, Longbourn is entailed to William Collins, a distant cousin with an unattractive habit of running at the mouth. The entailment gives a whiff of Downton Abbey, only Mr. Collins would’ve been much improved if he’d gone down with the Titanic. The situation has given Mrs. Bennet an acute case of nerves (which she would probably have developed anyway), and she is obsessed with the idea that Mr. Collins will turn her and her daughters out of Longbourn upon her husband’s death, which in turn has triggered an unhealthy obsession with arranging the marriages of said daughters, somewhat against their wills. Again, I don’t know how much of this is due to the entailment and how much would naturally have come to her as a result of both her nature and her society. We’ll never know now.
Whatever the case, Mrs. Bennet’s schemes seem to come to fruition when her eldest, Jane, catches the eye of wealthy bachelor Charles Bingley, who recently moved into the nearby estate of Netherfield Park. She is even more ecstatic when Mr. Collins (whom she had previously despised) proposes to the second-eldest, Elizabeth (“Lizzy”) as a gesture of familial goodwill. Unfortunately, Mr. Collins has less game than a corpse, and Lizzy turns him down flat. Despite her mother’s fury, he then marries Charlotte Lucas, Lizzy’s best friend, while Lizzy herself goes on to antagonize Fitzwilliam Darcy, an even wealthier bachelor than Bingley. Her opinion of Mr. Darcy is not helped by his awkward, unmannerly aloofness, nor by her developing relationship with George Wickham, godson of Darcy’s late father, who claims the current Mr. Darcy condemned him to a life of poverty by denying him his share of the inheritance. What with Lizzy’s prejudices against Darcy and Darcy’s open dislike of Lizzy’s family, the two of them have more than enough animosity to keep them busy for about a year, though they seem to keep running into each other under the most unlikely of circumstances. Moreover, Darcy gradually becomes infatuated with Lizzy and begins to behave more civilly around her, which confuses her greatly; however, their relationship is jealously monitored by Darcy’s insane overbearing aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who firmly expects that Darcy will marry her own sickly daughter and will hear no opinions to the contrary.
Despite her own growing attraction to Darcy, Lizzy angrily turns down his eventual proposal shortly after learning that he manipulated Bingley into dropping his courtship of Jane; she also confronts him with Wickham’s accusations, but is forced to recant this particular grievance after he writes her a letter explaining that Wickham is in fact an ungrateful gold-digger. Upon realizing that Darcy is telling the truth, Lizzy rejects Wickham’s advances. Undaunted, Wickham seduces Lydia, the youngest wild-child Bennet daughter, in the hopes of securing her (paltry) fortune for himself. Though he has no intention of marrying her despite the lavish promises that convinced her to elope with him in the first place, he is ruthlessly hunted by Darcy, who pays off his gaming debts and forces him to marry Lydia. Everyone thus manages to save face, though Lydia’s unwilling groom ends up miserable as well as destitute and I hope they bury him in a pauper’s grave. Meanwhile, Darcy encourages Bingley to resume his courtship of Jane, then proposes to Lizzy a second time and is eagerly accepted. Mrs. Bennet immediately forgets her earlier loathing of Darcy in view of his annual income of 10,000 pounds; the family celebrates, and the disgruntled Lady de Bourgh is forced to accept that Darcy will never marry her daughter. Wickham and Lydia have, of course, learned absolutely nothing, but Elizabeth regularly sends them money to cover their various extravagances, and they somehow manage to scrape by.
As mentioned above, this book made me go absolutely feral. I already knew the skeleton of the plot from years of imbibing unhinged Pride and Prejudice memes, so most of my attention was focused on Austen herself, a blisteringly hilarious woman who apparently took zero prisoners. Her first thought on Catherine and Lydia, the two youngest Bennets: “their minds were more vacant than their sisters’.” (This seems rather unfair to Jane and Lizzy. Mary deserves it.) I knew of course that Austen was supposed to be funny, but I was unprepared for the level of cheerful savagery that greeted me throughout the narrative. The impeccably polite roasts – both from the characters and the author – are the best part of the book. I will never not laugh at this particular observation:
“He [Darcy] was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity…Bingley was sure of being liked wherever he appeared, Darcy was continually giving offence.”
And, of course, I love love LOVE Lizzy, a sharp-witted, endlessly entertaining heroine. Her primary exercise in the beginning of the book comes from leaping to conclusions, but she is young and she grows tremendously as new information is revealed to her. She is never a doormat, but she also remains a kind, generous daughter, wife, niece-in-law, sister, friend. I love her relationships with Jane and Georgiana Darcy. I was irritated by her offense at Charlotte Lucas’s decision to marry Mr. Collins – if anything, I would’ve thought she’d be grateful that her mother could no longer force her to accept Collins’s proposal – but, well, that’s part of the prejudice she has to overcome, and does overcome. I am grateful that she is shaped by more than just her idiot mother and father: despite her unsatisfactory home life, she has a close relationship with the Gardiners, an aunt and uncle who take more of a parental role than her own parents. Mrs. Gardiner did irritate me enormously during the visit to Pemberley, first when she kept harping on Wickham’s imaginary virtues and then when she still tried to find a way to excuse him even after learning what she learned; but, on the whole, I am glad that Lizzy has her.
I am less satisfied with Jane, who is distressingly malleable and will fight to the literal death to excuse unmannerly people in a manner that invites an unflattering comparison to Melanie Wilkes. Where Melanie was unfailingly loyal to people who didn’t deserve even an iota of loyalty (ahem, Scarlett), however, Jane insists on absolute objectivity, to a degree that makes me want to kick her. It’s one thing to try to see both sides of a story. It’s another to enforce a level of neutrality that consistently avoids finding fault with people who are so toxic you can almost see a little cloud of smoke following them around. This is something I sincerely hope she will outgrow. That being said, she does eventually express some very gentle displeasure with Caroline, Bingley’s asshole sister, which is a positive sign. It doesn’t go as far as hoping Caroline will trip in front of a carriage, but growth is growth, and both Lizzy and I are proud of her. And yet this willful blindness is still important, because it conveys a prejudice of a different dimension than Lizzy’s: that is, Jane is automatically prejudiced in favor of absolutely everyone, even people like Caroline and Wickham, because she genuinely does not believe that anyone can be inherently bad. It is a real triumph to watch as Lizzy finds the balance between her own excessively negative prejudices and Jane’s excessively positive ones.
One note, which honestly says more about me than it does about the book: I would have let Lydia and Wickham starve. I am actually personally offended by the existence of Lydia, a spoiled brat who sails through life with everything she wants (except money) and without consequences or even so much as a hint of contrition. She doesn’t seem to realize that she almost destroyed her whole family’s reputation, in a time when reputation is all; the thought never crosses her vacant, vacant mind. I suppose one could argue that her marriage is a consequence in itself – her husband ends up hating her, and they never have enough money – but Lizzy always bails her out, so the lesson never sticks the landing. Is there one child like that in every Regency-era family? I certainly hope not. Lydia is already more than I can take. She is so similar in spirit and deed to the Lydia in Alias Grace that I almost wonder if Atwood’s Lydia was inspired by Austen’s. They certainly seem to share a taste for men in uniform, though Atwood’s Lydia ends up married to a wealthy reverend. (Another terrible Lydia: Lydia Thomson, though her character has no relation to either of the Lydias mentioned above. I guess the moral of the story is to run like hell if you meet somebody named Lydia.)
I suppose it doesn’t matter, because in the end I still gave the book five stars, I would still read it again, and I am still thinking about watching the 2005 movie, though one of my cousins called it a travesty. Looking over the changes the film made (as outlined on Wikipedia), I have a feeling I’m going to agree, especially if they cut down on Lizzy’s journey to self-awareness, as the article seems to suggest. Still, it could be a good time. I am currently going through a bit of a Regency phase and I swear I am going to watch Bridgerton any day now, and I mostly just want the balls and the pretty dresses and the proper English vibe of it all. Based on all the screenshots I saw while I was fact-checking myself on the Jane Austen wiki, I would expect nothing less.
