by Jane Austen
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.
As they drive through the grounds Elizabeth admires the unobtrusive good taste in evidence – ‘neither formal nor falsely adorned’ – and ‘at that moment she felt that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!’ Then they are led through the house where again the elegance and genuine taste – ‘neither gaudy nor uselessly fine’ – awakens her admiration, and she again reverts to what she regards as her lost opportunity. ‘“And of this place,” thought she, “I might have been mistress!”’ Showing them round the house is Mrs Reynolds, a sort of cicerone who may be guilty of ‘family prejudice’ but whose testimony concerning the youthful qualities of Darcy and Wickham has authority for Elizabeth. She is a voice from within the house and thus acquainted with Darcy from his origins, and is not, as Elizabeth necessarily is, a purely social acquaintance. She shows them some miniatures, including one of Darcy (‘“the best landlord, and the best master”’) and invites Elizabeth to go and look at a larger portrait of Darcy upstairs in the picture-gallery. Elizabeth walks among the portraits
in quest of the only face whose features would be known to her. At last it arrested her – and she beheld 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. She stood several minutes before the picture, in earnest contemplation…There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth’s mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original than she had ever felt in the height of their acquaintance…Every idea that had been brought forward by the housekeeper was favourable to his character, and as she stood before the canvas on which he was represented, she fixed his eyes upon herself, 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.
One can almost detect the unformulated thought – ‘and of this man I might have been the wife’.
It is a thought which explicitly occurs to her in due course.
Standing in the middle of the house, contemplating the qualities in the face in the portrait (qualities imparted and corroborated to some extent by the housekeeper), Elizabeth completes the act of recognition which started with the reading of Darcy’s letter. Notice the fact that the truest portrait is the large one in the more private part of the house upstairs; downstairs Darcy is only visible in ‘miniature’. We can imagine that the further a man goes from the house in which he is truly known, the more liable he is both to mis-representation and non-recognition. Standing before the large and true image of the real Darcy, Elizabeth has in effect completed her journey. When she next meets the original, outside in the grounds, she is no longer in any doubt as to his true worth. The rest of the book is, indeed, for the most part concerned with externalities – the mere melodrama of Wickham’s elopement with Lydia which gives Darcy a chance to reveal his qualities in action. But all this is only delay, not advance, in terms of the novel. For the most important action is complete when Elizabeth has finished the contemplation of the portrait. In answer to Jane’s question concerning when Elizabeth first realized she was in love with Darcy, Elizabeth replies: ‘I believe it must date from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.’ This is not wholly a joke, nor should it be taken to indicate that at heart Elizabeth is just another materialist in what is shown to be a distinctly materialistic society. In this case the grounds, the house, the portrait, all bespeak the real man – they represent a visible extension of his inner qualities, his true style. And if Pemberley represents an ordering of natural, social, and domestic space which is everything that the Bennet household is not, who shall blame Elizabeth for recognizing that she would be more truly at home there. However, it is true that such a remark could only be made in the context of a society which shared certain basic agreements about the importance and significance of objects, domiciles, and possessions. One can well imagine Charlotte Brontë’s response to a remark of this kind. But these are matters to which we shall return.
Having mentioned the central importance of Darcy’s letter which contains an ‘account of my actions and their motives’ for Elizabeth to peruse and re-peruse in private, we might at this point consider the overall importance of letters in this novel. So much of the main information in the novel is conveyed by letter – whether it be Mr Collins’s vapid but acquisitive pomposity, or Miss Bingley’s competitive coldness, or Mr Gardiner’s account of Darcy’s role in securing the marriage of Lydia and Wickham – that there has been some speculation that the novel was initially conceived in epistolary form. Thus Brian Southam:
In Sense and Sensibility, twenty-one letters are mentioned, quoted, or given verbatim, and in Pride and Prejudice no fewer than forty-four, including references to a ‘regular and frequent’ correspondence between Elizabeth and Charlotte Lucas, and the further regular communications of Elizabeth and Jane with Mrs Gardiner, a very credible system of letters to carry much of the story in epistolary form. If this reconstruction is feasible it supports my theory that, like Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice was originally a novel-in-letters.
On the other hand critics have been drawn to note the brilliance of much of the dialogue and have suggested that the novel has close affinities with the drama. In an excellent essay entitled ‘Light and Bright and Sparkling’3 Reuben Brower writes: ‘In analysing the ironies and the assumptions, we shall see how intensely dramatic the dialogue is, dramatic in the sense of defining characters through the way they speak and are spoken about’, and he proceeds to show just how much, and how subtly, is revealed in various passages of dialogue. Walton Litz in his book on Jane Austen4 says that the tripartite structure of the novel is similar to the structure of a three-act play, and adds that in many of the passages ‘we are reminded of the novel’s affinities with the best in eighteenth-century drama’. But he also notes that the early part of the novel is more dramatic than the latter.
Howard S. Babb has shown how Jane Austen plays on the word ‘performance’ in the early dialogues, bringing all the implications of the word together in the great scene at Rosings, where Elizabeth’s actual performance at the piano becomes the centre of a dramatic confrontation. But after the scene at Rosings, when Darcy’s letter begins Elizabeth’s movement toward self-recognition, the term ‘performance’ quietly disappears from the novel. The first half of Pride and Prejudice has indeed been a dramatic performance, but in the second half a mixture of narrative, summary, and scene carries the plot towards the conclusion.
As he rightly says, this reveals that Jane Austen felt able to take advantage both of scenic representation and authorial omniscience using third-person narrative, but I think there is another interesting aspect of the combination of the dramatic and the epistolary – particularly bearing in mind that as Mr Babb has noted, the word ‘performance’ fades after Elizabeth receives Darcy’s letter.
In essence a letter is written and read in retirement from the social scene; this is certainly true of Darcy’s major epistolary clarification. The letter enables him to formulate things and convey information in a way which would not be possible on a social occasion where public modes of utterance necessarily restrict the more private ones. A letter is also a transforming of action into words which may then be reflected on in a way which is impossible while one is actually involved in the action. ‘Introspection is retrospection’ said Sartre, and so is letter-writing, even if the letter seems to be written in the midst of some anxious situation. By combining the dramatic and the epistolary modes, Jane Austen has deftly set before us a basic truth – that we are both performing selves and reflective selves. It is in social performance that Elizabeth reveals all her vitality, vivacity, and wit, as well as her actual physical magnetism; it is in private reflection (‘reflection must be reserved for solitary hours’) that she matures in judgement, reconsiders first impressions, and is able to make substantial changes to her mental reality-picture. How suitable, then, that after giving us some of the most brilliant ‘performances’ in English fiction, Jane Austen should allow her novel to move away from performance towards reflection after Darcy’s letter. She thus subtly offers an analogue of how – in her view – the individual should develop. For if the human being is to be fully human, then to the energy of performance must be added the wisdom of reflection.
The idea of the self as a performer has taken hold of much recent thought, and most people recognize that society is effectively held together by a series of tacitly acknowledged rituals in which we all play a number of different parts.5 Jane Austen certainly believed in the value of the social rituals of her time – be they only balls, dinners, evening entertainments – and would have seen them, at their best, as ceremonies and celebrations of the values of the community. What she was also clearly aware of was how the failings of some of the performers – insensitivity, malice, arrogance, foolishness, and so on – could spoil the ritual, and transform a ceremony to be enjoyed into a nightmare to be endured, as Elizabeth has so often to endure her mother’s agonizing ceremonial violations. But although we are all role players for much of the time we spend with other people, there will obviously be a difference between those people who are unaware of the fact – who disappear into their roles, as it were – and those who are at all times quite aware that the particular role they are performing in any one particular situation is not to be identified as their whole self, that they have facets and dimensions of character which cannot always be revealed on every occasion. The former type of person may sometimes appear to be something of an automaton, incapable of reflection and detachment, while the latter type may often wish to make a gesture of disengagement from the roles he is called on to play, to indicate that he has not become mindlessly imprisoned in those roles. Such gestures are expressive of what Erving Goffman calls ‘role distance’.
Considering the characters in Jane Austen’s novel in this light, we can see that Mr Bennet has become comp
letely cynical about the social roles he is called on to play. He extracts a somewhat bitter pleasure from making gestures of disengagement from these roles, to compensate for the familial miseries brought about by his having married a sexually attractive but unintelligent woman (another example of the dangers of unreflective action based on first impressions – Lydia is her father’s daughter as well as her mother’s).6 He effectively abdicates from the one role it is most incumbent on him to perform, i.e. the role of father. (Jane Austen seems quite interested in the effects on a family of ineffectual, absent, or ailing fathers – it usually indicates a dangerous lapse of central authority.) He has taken refuge in mockery just as he takes refuge in his library – both are gestures of disengagement from the necessary rituals of family and society. Mrs Bennet, incapable of reflection, loses herself in her performance. Unfortunately she has a very limited view of the requirements of that performance; lacking any introspective tendencies she is incapable of appreciating the feelings of others and is only aware of material objects – hats, dresses, uniforms – and marriage, not as a meeting of true minds but as a disposing of redundant daughters. On another level Lady Catherine de Bourgh has none of what Jane Austen elsewhere approvingly calls ‘the Dignity of Rank’ but only the mindlessness of rank. She thinks her position entitles her to dictate to other people and impose her ‘schemes’ on them (a recurrent word in the book). She has never thought out, or thought round, the full implications of her performance. Being incapable of reflection she makes people suffer. At the other extreme Mary Bennet sees herself as a sage reflector before she has had any experience; when reflection portentously precedes performance in this way it is shown to be comical and useless. Darcy of course has thought about all the implications of his role in society, at least by the end of the book. His hauteur makes him go in for a certain amount of ‘role distance’, as at the first ball when he slights Elizabeth to show his contemptuous detachment from the social ritual of the moment; but, unlike Wickham, he is not cynical about role-playing, and by the end his performing self is shown to be in harmony with his reflecting self.
