Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

by Marea Mitchell

  Class and gender hierarchies may be used in the same way, to measure the exchange value of love against transactions within the political and sexual economy, but the tensions they provoke are necessarily resolved differently when they cannot be simply wished away.

  The more goodly and the more lovely

  In Sidney’s Arcadia, Pyrocles and Musidorus, like Bingley and Darcy, are the strangers in town, and they are contrasted to the extent that the masculine ideal permits. Pyrocles has fair auburn hair and ‘a pure complexion’, and is of ‘cheerful favour’, with a ‘look gentle and bashful’. Musidorus’s hair is black and curled, and he has the advantage in height; his face ‘was composed to a kind of manlike beauty …

  and the features of it such as they carried both delight and majesty’,

  ‘his countenance severe, and promising a mind much given to thinking.’ For the purposes of distinguishing their characteristic excellence, we are told that ‘though both had both, if there were any odds, Musidorus was the more goodly and Pyrocles the more lovely’ ( NA, p. 809).

  As distinctions go, much the same could serve for Bingley and Darcy.

  Bingley is ‘good looking and gentlemanlike’, with ‘a pleasant countenance, and easy, unaffected manners’,4 which render him, if not

  ‘lovely’, at least perfectly amiable. Darcy, in contrast, is ‘a fine, tall person’ with ‘handsome features’ and ‘noble mien’ (p. 7), but his countenance is forbidding and disagreeable, his stern reserve impenetrable,

  160 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre and his mind can be assumed much given to thinking since he seems reluctant to distract it by social chat. That he is the more goodly of the two, as measured by honourable exertion, he is eventually given opportunity to demonstrate, though, as with Musidorus (but for very different reasons), his true nobility is disguised by appearances.

  The distinguishing features of Pyrocles and Musidorus establish the appropriateness of their choice of sister,5 Pyrocles drawn to the gentler and sweeter of the two, though, as with the brothers, ‘both had both’, the distinction between the sisters’ virtues only a matter of degree: there is ‘more sweetness in Philoclea but more majesty in Pamela’, though only if ‘such perfections may receive the word of more’ ( NA, p. 76). Philoclea is bashful and generous, Pamela ‘of high thoughts’, confident of her own worth but devoid of pride.

  Maurice Evans suggests that Sidney conceived of Pamela and Philoclea ‘in terms of sense and sensibility, an Elizabethan Eleanor and Marianne Dashwood’,6 but the parallels with Elizabeth and Jane are just as striking.7 Elizabeth has Pamela’s courage and self-possession, as well as her ‘constant temper’ (though Elizabeth’s is an emotional resilience bred of natural cheerfulness and low expectations); Jane has Philoclea’s timidity and generous candour, though with a more placid exterior sheltering her easily bruised sensibility. For both sets of sisters, moreover, parents prove disastrous encumbrances, threatening the happiness of their children in pursuit of their own selfish ends. Both fathers neglect their responsibilities, Basilius looking after himself rather than his nation’s or his daughters’ interests by retiring in seclusion, and Mr Bennet retiring to his library rather than supervising his household. And both mothers threaten to ruin their daughters’

  chances of happiness, Gynecia by pursuing her passion for her daughter’s lover, and Mrs Bennet by unashamedly pursuing husbands for her daughters. Both sets of daughters also turn to each other for friendship and solace – though, however seriously or mischievously modern critics might speculate on the intimacy of women’s friendships in Austen’s works, none of Austen’s women are quite so intimate as Philoclea and Pamela, who retire to bed to comfort each other, where they impoverished their clothes to enrich their bed which for that night might well scorn the shrine of Venus: and there, cherishing one another with dear though chaste embracements, with sweet though cold kisses, it might seem that love was come to play him there without a dart, or that, weary of his own fires, he was there to refresh himself between their sweet breathing lips. ( NA, p. 245)

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  The intimacy of the sisters reminds us also that the narrative structure supports continuity as well as opposition. Like many a fictional heroine before and after her, Elizabeth, with her fluent tongue and acerbic wit, participates in what Judith Lowder Newton has called the

  ‘fantasy of the power of intelligence, wit, and critical attitudes’,8

  though without cutting her ties with the chaste, silent, and obedient model of womanhood embodied in her sister. Elizabeth’s attachment to Jane, her admiration for her unassuming, sweet-tempered goodness, and even her fond exasperation with her desire to think well of every-one, all vouch for Elizabeth’s own good-nature, as does Philoclea’s gentleness and innocence for Pamela’s, despite the formidable reserve enjoined on Pamela by her station. But in the absence of something of importance to do, it is more or less incumbent upon a heroine to shine through language – if not in company, at least, like Frances Burney’s Evelina, in the semi-privacy of personal correspondence.9 On the page, a heroine’s greatest assets are words, and if she loses them, and loses control over the way her own experience and that of others is represented, she is in serious danger of paling into insignificance.10 Both Pamela and Elizabeth are already hard-pressed to preserve their dignity, Pamela in the face of the guardianship of the ‘loutish clown’ Dametas, and Elizabeth in the face of her mother’s shameless husband-hunting on behalf of her daughters, and, for both, words become a measure of the control they are still able to exert over circumstances in which they are daily mortified. For Elizabeth especially it is a gallant performance, for her dignity is entirely a matter of strength of character, but when decorum forces her to surrender the floor to her mother, she is reduced to a ‘painful confusion’ for which ‘years of happiness’ could not make amends (p. 299).

  Matters of fortune

  Everything in the world can look like everything else if the terms of comparison are ingeniously enough employed, and the similarities in the skeletons of these two works are interesting chiefly as they draw attention to the values that inform the structural oppositions they support. Musidorus and Pyrocles are social equals and, for all their occasional follies, so nearly approaching the perfection of manhood that distinguishing their virtues in terms of degree seems hardly to establish their individuality – though it helps, for the purposes of identification, that one of them spends the greater part of his time in a dress. There are some differences in temperament – Pyrocles the more

  162 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre hot-headed and impetuous of the two, a distinction he also shares with Bingley, who admits to Mrs Bennet that ‘whatever I do is done in a hurry’ (p. 36) – but Pyrocles and Musidorus represent the same core values (as might be expected of princely cousins who have been raised together). Bingley and Darcy, however, are different enough in terms of social position, personality, and force of character that Mary Waldron can describe Darcy’s choice of friend as ‘peculiar’.11 Both are prosperous and genteel, and despite Bingley’s wealth deriving from trade, comfortably at home in fashionable society, but their tempera-ments and tastes seem so unlike that even when Elizabeth is disposed to think well of Darcy she still attributes his closeness to the Bingleys to his desire to cultivate a husband for his sister. (When she is less charitably inclined, Darcy’s friendship with Bingley is attributed to the power he must enjoy exercising over such a malleable young man.) They are an incongruous pairing, not only socially and temperamen-tally but also psychologically, as Elizabeth’s analytical endeavours suggest, Darcy’s ‘deep, intricate’ character much harder to make out than Bingley’s, which is implicitly the opposite of deep and intricate though tactfully the negative is never spelled out. ‘It does not necessarily follow’, Elizabeth tells Bingley, ‘that a deep, intricate character is more or less estimable than such a one as yours’ (p. 36).

>   It does not necessarily follow, either, that the difference in status between Darcy and Bingley makes one more estimable than the other, though the care that has to be taken to protect Elizabeth from being tainted, not only by her mother’s mercenary ambitions, but also by her own appreciation of what it would mean to be mistress of Pemberley, implicitly reinforces the value attached to Darcy’s superior wealth and social position. Bingley is a good catch but decidedly second-class, a point with which Mr Bennet rather shabbily taxes Elizabeth after Darcy has sought his consent to their marriage: Darcy ‘is rich, to be sure,’ so Elizabeth can expect ‘more fine clothes and fine carriages than Jane’ (p.

  334). It is a low thrust, but needs to be said, because the distinctions of rank function not simply as a register of the historically specific class-consciousness of early nineteenth-century society but also as a narrative device that structures a hierarchy of gendered values. In Arcadia, the distinctions of rank are not even real, but they can cheapen Pamela as surely as they can Elizabeth, even though the heroines occupy different positions in the hierarchy. Elizabeth must show herself as capable of resisting the suit of a man whose station is so far above hers as Pamela in Arcadia must show herself capable of resisting Musidorus’s suit while he remains so far beneath her, disguised as the shepherd,

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  Dorus. Pamela will not demean herself, or risk being disparaged as an easy catch, by an improvident match, and when Musidorus asks, through his pretended address to Mopsa, whether it is his mind or his estate that makes him unworthy, Pamela replies that estate is all a woman has to go on: ‘since the judgement of the world stands upon matter of fortune, and … the sex of womankind of all other is most bound to have regardful eye to men’s judgements, it is not for us to play the philosophers in seeking out your hidden virtues, since that which in a wise prince would be counted wisdom, in us will be taken for a light grounded affection’ ( NA, p. 226). Elizabeth’s scruples need to work in the opposite direction. Darcy’s high ‘estate’ – material as well as social – is equally capable of cheapening Elizabeth’s affection while his virtues remain hidden (and with her father she is reduced to pleading, ‘you do not know what he really is’ [p. 335]), for his ‘estate’ is all the world will judge by as she acknowledges facetiously to Jane in dating her love from her ‘first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley’ p. 332).

  ‘I will not be wishing’

  There is an oddly surreal moment during Elizabeth’s inspection of Pemberley that encapsulates the perspectival shift that has to take place before Elizabeth can love the man above her. As she walks through the portrait gallery, she is arrested by ‘a striking resemblance of Mr Darcy, with such a smile over the face, as she remembered to have sometimes seen, when he looked at her’ (p. 220). She returns to the portrait before she leaves the gallery, to reassess, not simply the virtues, but also the consequence of a man in whose guardianship, ‘as a brother, a landlord, a master,’ lay the happiness of so many people (p. 220). And then, in her mind, she steps into his line of sight: ‘she stood before the canvas, on which he was represented, and fixed his eyes upon herself’ (p. 220, our emphasis).

  Darcy’s eyes have been following Elizabeth for half the novel, and she has been wondering why ‘so great a man’ (p. 44) has been looking at her. Now she looks at herself with his eyes and feels his reflected value. She does not see herself as he sees her – that would be too patriarchal by half – but she does bask in the warmth of his (nicely ambiguous) ‘regard’, and comes as close as she ever will to actively seeking his attention.12 The responsibilities of ‘guardianship’ that she now identifies in the portrait that takes its place in the patricians’ gallery are an element of the distinction of rank that she has been inclined to

  164 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre ignore – and that her own society ignores in pronouncing Bingley ‘just what a young man ought to be’ (p. 11), stretching the standards that define the masculine ideal to accommodate a gentleman who, kind-hearted and affable though he may be, contributes nothing to his community other than as a prospective husband.13 Elizabeth is now ready to regret the scorn with which she dismissed his regard, but fixing his eyes upon herself in the privacy of the portrait gallery is the extent of her endeavours to catch his eye. Her predicament is similar to Melidora’s in Markham’s English Arcadia after she realizes her affections have been misplaced : how does she indicate to a scorned suitor that his attentions might now be welcome? Melidora’s tiger hunt initiative was hardly foolproof, but in Pride and Prejudice the initiatives are all Darcy’s. There are few narratives that work as hard as Pride and Prejudice to exclude the possibility that the heroine has knowingly done anything to engage the hero’s interest or to encourage his suit, regardless of the fact that few heroines do more to provoke it, or take

  ‘greater liberties, with a pair of fine eyes’ ( P2, IV. 403).

  In Pamela 2, it is the errant Miss Stapylton whose eyes are far too busy for her own good. She has ‘extraordinary notions of a first-sight love; and gives herself greater liberties, with a pair of fine eyes, (in hopes to make sudden conquests in pursuance of that notion,) than is pretty in her sex and age; which makes those who know her not, conclude her bold and forward’ ( P2, IV. 403). The ‘pair of fine eyes’

  that first attracts Darcy ( P&P, p. 23) is not in the business of making a sudden conquest, but neither are the eyes discreetly lowered before a gentleman whose esteem Elizabeth might value, and the arch looks that signify her refusal to be intimidated, together with her animated conversation, keep the eyes raised and sparkling, even when they are not directed at the man who finds her face ‘rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes’ (p. 19). To

  ‘those who know her not’, or know her chiefly as the sister of the irre-pressibly bumptious Lydia or the daughter of the impudently garrulous Mrs Bennet, she may appear ‘bold and forward’ – or, as Caroline Bingley proclaims, exhibiting ‘that little something, bordering on conceit and impertinence’ (p. 45) – but she is unequivocally not on the hunt, at least as far as Darcy is concerned.

  A very simple and well-tried strategy initially protects Elizabeth from suspicion of covert plotting while still allowing her a degree of self-realizing agency: as with Pamela and Arabella, Elizabeth is distracted from the real business of the novel by other, more pressing concerns, so that she is not aware of the love plot in which she is implicated. A

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  first-sight hate might be putting it too strongly, but by the time Darcy overcomes his scruples enough to make his first, ungracious proposal, Elizabeth is beside herself with anger and contempt, though cool-headed enough to congratulate herself (and to remind the reader) that she had inspired ‘ unconsciously so strong an affection’ (p. 172, our emphasis). Darcy later admits to believing Elizabeth ‘to be wishing, expecting [his] addresses’ (p. 328), and Elizabeth is again called on to defend her character: ‘My manners must have been in fault, but not intentionally I assure you’ (p. 328).

  Generations of women readers have also found it gratifying that Elizabeth has inspired Darcy’s affection unconsciously, for it has happened without the man absorbing the best part of the woman’s attention, without her adapting her behaviour in any way to suit his tastes.

  Elizabeth herself is not above taking the effort to please a man – and on the evening of Bingley’s ball she dresses for Wickham ‘with more than usual care’ (p. 79) – but she can also wryly observe the way in which the attention of Bingley’s sisters is wholly engaged by men. After dinner, in the hour that passed before the men appeared, they are devoted to Jane and prove perfectly capable of entertaining themselves: ‘Their powers of conversation were considerable. They could describe an entertainment with accuracy, relate an anecdote with humour, and laugh at their acquaintance with spirit.’ But the moment the men appear their attention is immediately usurped:
‘Jane was no longer the first object.

  Miss Bingley’s eyes were instantly turned towards Darcy, and she had something to say to him before he had advanced many steps’ (p. 47).

  Elizabeth later challenges Darcy to attribute his admiration of her to the novelty of her impertinence: ‘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’

  (p. 338). Darcy wisely deflects the challenge by identifying other things to admire, singling out her goodness to Jane when she was ill. (We would not want Elizabeth’s aversion to attention-seeking behaviour to become yet another attention-seeking device.) But Pride and Prejudice at least holds open the possibility that Elizabeth can beguile just by being herself.

  There is in Pride and Prejudice, then, a subtle shift in the strategic importance of doing nothing to encourage a man’s attentions: it is not just propriety or even dignity that is at stake, but also a personal identity independent of the relational self that, for a woman, is usually realized in marriage. Darcy’s singling out for admiration Elizabeth’s concern for Jane when she was ill, which prompted her to undertake

  166 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre the three-mile walk across dirty fields, and to arrive at Netherfield Park with a face glowing with exercise, is, in this respect, a nicely ambiguous identification of the nature of Elizabeth’s unselfconscious powers of attraction. In what has become known in some circles as the ‘erec-tion scene’ (thanks to rumours that Andrew Davies’s script for the recent BBC production of Pride and Prejudice called for Darcy to be ‘particularly pleased’ to see Elizabeth when she arrives ‘all flushed and muddy’14), Elizabeth’s concern for her sister and her lack of concern for dirty stockings and blowsy hair are perhaps overshadowed – though Elizabeth is not to know it – by Darcy’s appreciation, possibly among other things, of fine eyes ‘brightened by the exercise’ (p. 31), but Elizabeth’s mind is on other things, and here as elsewhere men are not the defining point of her life.