by Jane Austen
Jane Bennet is incapable of role distance, but she has such a generous and high-minded conception of the roles she has to perform – daughter, sister, lover, wife – that she strikes us at all times as being both sensitive and sincere. Much the same could be said of Bingley, whose rather spineless plasticity in the hands of Darcy’s more decisive will indicate nevertheless that his basic good nature extends to a willingness to perform roles which are thrust upon him – obviously a potential source of vulnerability. Elizabeth is of course special. She can indeed perform all the roles that her familial and social situations require of her; moreover she performs many of them with an esprit or an irony which reveal, as it were, a potential overspill of personality, as if there is more of her than can ever be expressed in any one role. She is also capable of role distance, not in her father’s spirit of cynicism but in her own spirit of determined independence. She will put truth to self above truth to role. Thus in two of the scenes which give us the most pleasure to read we see her refusing to take on the roles which people in socially superior positions attempt to impose on her. To Darcy’s first lordly proposal she refuses to respond in the role of passive grateful female, as he obviously expects she will; while in the face of Lady Catherine’s imperious insistence that she promise not to marry Darcy she refuses to act the compliant social inferior to which role Lady Catherine is relegating her. The assertion of the free-choosing self and its resistance to the would-be tyranny of roles imposed on it from socially superior powers is a spectacle which delights us now quite as much as it can have done Jane Austen’s contemporaries.
All that has been said makes it clear that there are at least two different kinds of characters in the book – those who are fully defined by their roles, even lost in them, and those who can see round their roles and do not lose awareness of what they are doing. D. W. Harding uses the terms character and caricature to point to this difference, and, commenting that ‘in painting it must be rather rare for caricature and full portraiture to be brought together in one group’, he goes on to show what Jane Austen achieves by her carefully handled interaction of character and caricature, and what she is implying about a society in which such interactions are possible. (Examples are the meetings between Elizabeth and Mr Collins, and Elizabeth and Lady Catherine.7) There is an important conversation in which Elizabeth announces that she comprehends Bingley’s character completely. He replies that it is pitiful to be so transparent. ‘That is as it happens. It does not necessarily follow that a deep, intricate character is more or less estimable than such a one as yours.’ Bingley replies that he did not know she was a ‘studier of character’.
‘It must be an amusing study.’
‘Yes, but intricate characters are the most amusing. They have at least that advantage.’
‘The country,’ said Darcy, ‘can in general supply but few subjects for such a study. In a country neighbourhood you move in a very confined and unvarying society.’
‘But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them forever.’
Elizabeth’s last remark is not wholly borne out by the book, for the Collinses and the Mrs Bennets and Lady Catherines of this world do not change. But ‘intricate’ characters are capable of change, as both she and Darcy change. Marvin Mudrick has examined this separation of Jane Austen’s characters into the simple and the intricate, and shown how central it is to Pride and Prejudice, and there is no point in recapitulating his admirable observations here. Very generally we can say that obviously it is always likely to be in some ways oppressive for an intricate person to find himself or herself forced to live among simple people. Elizabeth has a dimension of complexity, a questing awareness, a mental range and depth which almost make her an isolated figure trapped in a constricting web of a small number of simple people. Darcy is posited as intricate to make her a match, but in truth he appears more to be honourable and reserved. He is not Benedick to Elizabeth’s Beatrice. He is however capable of appreciating the intricacy of Elizabeth so that in effect he can rescue her from the incipient claustrophobia of her life among simple people, and offer her more social and psychological space to move around in. (The good simple people, Jane and Bingley, join them in Derbyshire – the rest are left behind.)
This matter of social space is an important one, but another word may be said about what we may refer to as mental space or range, and its effect on language. We can recognize at least two very different ways in which people use language in this book. Some people employ it unreflectively as an almost automatic extension of their other behaviour; they are unable to speak, as they are unable to think, outside their particular social situation. (Consider, for example, the extremely limited range of Mrs Bennet’s conversation, its obsessive repetitions, its predictable progressions.) Others, by contrast, are capable of using language reflectively and not just as an almost conditioned response to a social situation. Such people seem to have more freedom of manoeuvre within language, more conceptual space to move around in, and as a result they can say unpredictable things that surprise both us and the other characters in the book, and they seem capable of arriving at independent and thought-out conclusions of their own. Obviously such people are capable of thinking outside their particular social context – thus Elizabeth’s mind and conversation are not limited to what she has seen and heard within her own family.8 It is not surprising that a person who has achieved a certain amount of mental independence will wish to exercise as much free personal control over his or her own life as is possible. He, or she, will not readily submit to the situations and alliances which society seems to be urging them into – hence Elizabeth’s incredulity when Charlotte unhesitatingly accepts the role of Mr Collins’s wife, to Elizabeth an inconceivable capitulation to the solicitations of social convenience. By contrast she will strive for a maximum of personal control (in defiance of real economic and family pressures), as is consistent with her having the quickest and furthest-ranging mind, and the most richly developed linguistic capacities.
Because the same space is occupied by people using language both reflectively and unreflectively, the claustrophobia for someone highly sensitive to speech can become very great, as witness the agonies of embarrassment which Elizabeth goes through while her mother rattles unreflectively on. This can obviously lead to a desire to escape, and although Jane Austen does not seem to envisage how someone might renounce society altogether, she does show the relief with which an intricate person seeks out some solitude away from the miseries which can be caused by the constant company of more limited minds. Thus in the fragment The Watsons which Jane Austen wrote some time between First Impressions and Pride and Prejudice, the isolated, because more complex, consciousness of the heroine, Emma, is glad to seek out the refuge of her father’s quiet sick-room away from the family downstairs.
In his chamber, Emma was at peace from the dreadful mortifications of unequal Society, & family Discord – from the immediate endurance of Hard-hearted prosperity, low-minded Conceit, & wrong-headed folly, engrafted on an ontoward Disposition. She still suffered from them in the Contemplation of their existence; in memory & in prospect, but for the moment, she ceased to be tortured by their effects.
(cf. Elizabeth ‘sick of this folly, took refuge in her own room, that she might think with freedom’.) Elizabeth is fortunate to make a more permanent escape through marriage to Darcy; ‘she looked forward with delight to the time when they should be removed from society so little pleasing to either, to all the comfort and elegance of their family party at Pemberley’. Pemberley is an all but impossible dream of a space – both social and psychic – large enough to permit a maximum of reflecting speech and personal control.
There is another aspect to the problems which can be posed by lack of social space. In a clearly stratified class society, such as Jane Austen depicts, there are invisible restrictions, boundaries and chasms, which the properly deferential person will not dare to traverse. There are quite a number of ma
licious remarks about people in trade made by some of the members of the landed aristocracy; one of the things Darcy has to do is to learn to appreciate the merits of people like the Gardiners. The absurd and cringing servility of Mr Collins is an extreme example of the kind of mind, or rather mindlessness, which such a society can exact as a condition of belonging. It is a point, indeed, whether Elizabeth can be contained within such a society. One of the trials which Darcy has to pass is to confront the fact that he will become related not only to Mrs Bennet, but also to Wickham, if he marries Elizabeth. Elizabeth is sure that there is ‘a gulf impassable between them’ after the marriage of Lydia and Wickham. ‘From such a connection she could not wonder that he should shrink.’ Lady Catherine insists to her that ‘connection with you must disgrace him in the eyes of everybody’. In this society, as in any highly structured society, it is a matter of some moment just who may be ‘connected’ to whom. Darcy has already dissuaded Bingley from a defiling connection with the Bennets, and the connection – from an external point of view – had indeed become more disgraceful by the end. The question is, can Darcy cross the social space which, in the eyes of society (and in his own up to a certain stage), exists between himself and Elizabeth?
There is a curious little scene between Elizabeth and Darcy shortly before he proposes to her for the first time. They are discussing, of all apparently trivial things, whether it could be said that Charlotte Lucas is living near to her family, or far from them, now that she has moved fifty miles and become Mrs Collins. Darcy says it is near, Elizabeth that it is far; it is possible that he is wondering whether he will be able to move Elizabeth a sufficient distance away from the rest of her socially undesirable family. Elizabeth makes the politic remark: ‘The far and the near must be relative, and depend on varying circumstances.’ At this point Darcy ‘drew his chair a little towards her’ then a little later in the conversation he ‘experienced some change of feeling; he drew back his chair, took a newspaper from the table’, and coldly changes the drift of the conversation. In that small advance and retreat of his chair, Darcy is miming out, albeit unconsciously, his uncertainty as to whether he can bring himself to cross the great social space which, as he sees it (he is still proud), separates Elizabeth from himself. They live in a society which all but dictates certain ‘connections’ and works strongly to prevent others. Part of the drama is in seeing whether two people can resist the connections which society seems to be prescribing for them (as Lady Catherine has the ‘rational scheme’ of marrying her daughter to Darcy,9 and Mrs Bennet wishes to thrust Elizabeth at Mr Collins), and make a new connection of their own, one which is not made in response to society’s controlling power but freely made according to the dictates of their judgement, their reason, and their emotions. One of the gratifications of the book is that Elizabeth and Darcy seem to demonstrate that it is still possible for individuals to make new connections in defiance of society. That there is perhaps a fairy-tale touch to their total felicity at the conclusion in the dream world of Pemberley should not discourage us from recognizing the importance of holding on to this possibility as one which is essential to a healthy society. That is to say, a society in which the individual can experience freedom as well as commitment.
At this point it is perhaps worth considering in a little more detail just what kind of society Jane Austen does portray in this novel. It is a society which stresses social control over individual ecstasy, formality over informality, sartorial neatness over bodily abandon, and alert consciousness over the more Romantic states of revery and trance. The schemes and structures of the group – family, community, society – tend to coerce and even predetermine the volition and aspirations of the self. No novelist could have valued consciousness more than Jane Austen, and some of the dialogue between Elizabeth (in particular) and Darcy requires a very high degree of alertness of consciousness. Indeed, this is just the point, that in this society linguistic experience is stressed almost to the exclusion of bodily experience. True, the men hunt, the women go for walks, and the sexes may come together at a ball. But all the important transactions (and most of the unimportant or vexatious ones) take place through language. When Darcy makes his second, and now welcome, proposal we read of Elizabeth – ‘though she could not look, she could listen, and he told of feelings which…made his affection every moment more valuable’. At this crucial moment ‘love’ has been transformed into a completely linguistic experience. This is quite appropriate in a society setting a high value on consciousness.
Intimate physical contacts and experiences, while not denied, are minimized. Hands may meet, though it is more likely to be the eyes which come together across a distinct social space. Faces may be turned towards, or away from, other faces, and Elizabeth is prone to a good deal of blushing (allowing that the body has its own language, it is perhaps not entirely irrelevant to note that Norman O. Brown, following Freud, suggests that blushing is a sort of mild erection of the head). In general we are more likely to be shown dresses than bodies, public greetings than private embraces. It is interesting to compare, for instance, Jane Austen’s description of an important ball with Tolstoy’s. In Jane Austen the dancing (which from her letters we know she thoroughly enjoyed) is almost exclusively an occasion for conversation; indeed it is a social ritual which permits something approaching private conversation in public, and there are some important exchanges between Darcy and Elizabeth while dancing. There is movement, there is grouping; there are longueurs and excitements. (In The Watsons, interestingly, Jane Austen describes what it is like for a young girl to enter a ball – the sweeping of dresses on the floor, the cold and empty room in which conversation is stiffly started, the noise of approaching carriages, and so on – a rather unusual excursion into private sensations which is not, however, taken very far.) What we do not get is the physicality of a ball. The following passage from Anna Karenina is, for instance, inconceivable in Jane Austen. Kitty is watching Anna and Vronsky at the moment when they are falling in love with each other:
She saw that they felt as if they were alone in the crowded ballroom. And she was struck by the bewildered look of submission on Vronsky’s face, usually so firm and self-possessed – an expression like that of an intelligent dog conscious of having done wrong.
If Anna smiled, he smiled in reply. If she grew thoughtful, he looked serious. Some supernatural force drew Kitty’s eyes to Anna’s face. She was charming in her simple black gown, her rounded arms were charming with their bracelets, charming the firm neck with the string of pearls, charming the unruly curls, charming the graceful, easy movements of her little hands and feet, charming the lovely, animated face: but in that charm there was something terrible and cruel.
Kitty is ‘sure that the blow had fallen’. At this decisive moment when the blow falls which will determine the rest of their lives, there is no language. It is Anna’s body which is speaking to Vronsky, and speaking a language which Kitty can also read. Rational consciousness is drowned in an intensity of purely physical, sensory awareness and response. We have moved a long way from the sparkling dialogue maintained by Elizabeth with her partners, and are indeed approaching something like a state of trance, each dancer almost drugged just by the presence and proximity of the other. This is not intended as any indictment of Jane Austen’s novel, for who would wish it other than it is. It is pointing to something characteristic of the society she wrote out of and in turn portrays – namely, the minimizing of a whole range of physical experiences which can often change lives more forcibly than rational reflection.
As we have mentioned, Jane Austen is particularly suspicious of the immediacy of sexual attraction. It is worth asking, then, what is ‘love’ as it emerges from the book. And we should notice first that if Jane Austen’s society minimizes the bodily dimension, so it does the possibility of a transcendental one. Her concern is with conduct, almost never with religious experience.10 Her society is secular and materialistic, and the terms need not be pejorative. It was a so
ciety which valued objects and the actual edifices which made up its structure; it was quite capable of sustaining a fairly nominal or unexamined piety towards the Unknown, but at its best it concentrated on how man and woman may best live in harmony with each other. (What may happen in such a society when it is not at its best Jane Austen unsparingly reveals.) All of this obviously influenced the notion of ‘love’ and its relationship to marriage. Mrs Gardiner complains to Elizabeth that ‘that expression of “violently in love” is so hackneyed, so doubtful, so indefinite, that it gives me very little idea’, and Elizabeth duly rephrases her reading of Bingley’s attitude towards Jane as a ‘promising inclination’. Early in the book Charlotte and Elizabeth discuss the conscious strategies that a woman must deploy to secure the attachment of a man, and Charlotte of course demonstrates the complete triumph of conscious calculation over spontaneous emotion by her decision to marry Mr Collins. She admits that she is ‘not romantic’ and asks only for ‘a comfortable home’. Of course Mr Collins’s company is ‘irksome’ but, in her eyes, the state of marriage, as a ‘preservative from want’, is much more important than the actual man who makes up the marriage. As Elizabeth realizes when she sees them married, Charlotte will survive by having recourse to selective inattention, deriving satisfaction from the house and screening out as far as possible the man who provided it. Elizabeth’s spontaneous reaction when told of their coming marriage is – ‘impossible’, but her remark is not only indecorous, it is excessive. In such a society, the need for an ‘establishment’ is a very real one, and in putting prudence before passion, Charlotte is only doing what the economic realities of her society – as Jane Austen makes abundantly clear – all but force her to do.
