Among the more famous critiques[i] of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is that offered by her fellow nineteenth century writer Charlotte Bronte who described the novel as a disappointment, “a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but […] no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck”.
One might be tempted to retort – upon reading Charlotte’s own magnus opus Jane Eyre and (especially) that of her sister, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights – that emotional regulation is no bad thing. Yet it is admittedly true that Austen does not attempt to plumb the depths or scale the heights of the desperate emotions of a Heathcliff or a Cathrine Earnshaw.[ii]
Pride and Prejudice’s reputation as a restrained, if not parochial, treatment of the lives of the rural gentry seems only further confirmed by its apparent lack of interest in any larger questions of politics or philosophy.
If Austen had wanted to include such ‘big’ ideas, she certainly need not have looked far for inspiration. The novel’s first draft, then titled First Impressions, was completed in the 1790s shortly after the revolutionary terror had violently executed thousands of the French nobility. The manuscript was revised in 1810 – 12 as Napoleon Bonaparte consolidated much of Europe under the French Empire and launched his ill-judged invasion of Russia. When the novel was finally published in 1813, the War of the Sixth Coalition was drawing to a close (although the final defeat of Napoleon would have to wait until 1815).
Austen is not much interested in these epoch shaking events[iii]. Aside from a visit from a local militia, there is little in the novel’s plot to betray its historical setting. Correspondingly, many have dismissed the work as a pretty and charming love story but with little to interest critics of serious ideas.[iv]
Such critics, I believe in any case, could not be much further from the truth. Indeed, if every philosopher were to be matched with a novelist, then Austen’s match must be Aristotle. And if ever a novel embodied Aristotle’s famous ‘golden mean’[v] it is that of Pride and Prejudice.
The novel is brilliantly structured with a series of opposing pairs each of which represents an extreme or deficiency which our protagonists must avoid. Take, for instance, the novel’s central concern, the basis for a good marriage. On the one hand we encounter the extreme ‘logic’ of a Charlotte Lucas who views happiness in marriage as “entirely a matter of chance” though the “only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and … their pleasantest preservative from want”. Charlotte seeks a match with nothing other than social respectability and fortune in mind. She is rewarded with exactly such a match in the person of Mr Collins, a man incapable of inspiring any higher feelings in a woman.
Opposing Charlotte Lucus, is the character of Lydia Bennet. Thoughtless, vain, and over-indulged, Lydia cares for nothing outside of immediate gratification. Her elopement and eventual marriage to Mr Wickham inspire a match indifferent to prudence or virtue. The feelings that inspire the match soon “sink to indifference” while the extravagance and little fortune of its two principals yield an unstable lifestyle perpetually indebted to their wealthier relations. If Charlotte represents an extreme of prudential sense, then Lydia must represent its extreme deficiency.
Elizabeth Bennet herself must navigate between these two extremes. Her two early proposals (first from Mr Collins and secondly from Mr Darcy[vi]) offer her matches of social status and stable fortune but without her being able to respect, admire, and ultimately love her partner. Elizabeth’s decision to reject these proposals requires courage, for after all, as Mr Collins helpfully points out to her, “in spite of your manifold attractions, it is by no means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made”.
Yet Austen is no friend of a love imprudent to all material considerations. If Elizabeth must navigate past social respectability and fortune without feeling on one side, her growing attraction to Mr Wickham[vii] presents the opposite temptation of a match imprudent as to fortune. A caution against this match is given by the estimable Mrs Gardner reminding Elizabeth that marriage is not only a matter for one’s feelings or, in her own words “you have sense, and we all expect you to use it.”
Austen’s philosophy of moderation extends beyond questions of matrimony to her treatment of broader social arrangements and institutions. Her style is characterised by a gentle satire that mocks the excesses and inconsistencies of her society but lacks a contemptuous or revolutionary edge. This at least characterises Austen’s treatment of a category such as social class which, in her revolutionary age, certainly attracted a much fiercer and more fatal critique than that offered in the pages or Pride and Prejudice.
Austen is no stranger to the absurdities of those who would equate social class with personal or moral worth. Mr Collins, who is able to detail the number and expense of the windows of Rosings Park, is one such absurdity as is the presumptuous Lady Catherine de Bough whose manners are “dictatorial and insolent”.
Moreover, the characters of Mr and Mrs Gardner who are of lower social standing but are simultaneously relatives for whom Elizabeth might have “no need to blush”, stand as a rebuttal for any easy equation of class and moral worth.
Yet does not through her satirical critique suggest that class distinctions in themselves absurd. When Elizabeth is accused by Lady Catherine as seeking to “quit the sphere in which [she] has been brought up” she responds not with a tirade against false distinctions but with an affirmation of Lady Catherine’s broader point (though rejecting her application) with the words “He [Darcy] is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter; so far we are equal.”
The dictatorial presumption and rigid convention of Lady Catherine who, we are informed, likes “distinction of rank preserved” might be understood as failings peculiar to the gentry. Yet the mirror of Lady Catherine is Elizabeth’s own aunt, Mrs Phillips whose vulgarity is her class’s own peculiar failing.
Class, is of course, an important category in Austen’s novels, but Austen’s satire consistently works to remind her readers not to treat it with too much seriousness. Indeed, excessive class consciousness falls into that same fault of immoderation against which her novels so strongly advise.
Austen is always less concerned with revolutionising society than with being sensibly alive to its excesses and peculiarities. The advice of her novels, it seems to be, to reject radical solutions or social overhaul not because society is perfect as it is, but because there is opportunity enough to play one’s cards with skill enough to live happy and moral (though not utopic) lives. And while this approach ought not to preclude any form of social advocacy, in a time as intemperate and immoderate as our own, it has its own (considerable) value.
[i] The most famous critique originates from Mark Twain who wrote that, “Everytime I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig [Austen] up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
[ii] Meanwhile, when compared to a character like Mr Rochester, Mr Darcy might be said to embody the very spirit of joviality and conviviality.
[iii] How might the pride of Mr Darcy (who refused to dance with a woman not known to him at the Meriton Ball) compare with that of Napoleon who once declared “Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools”? Or how might the prejudice of Elizabeth Bennet compare with those who dispensed revolutionary justice via the blade of a guillotine?
[iv] Indeed Austen offered (somewhat satirically) this very criticism of her own work writing; “The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story; an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte, or anything that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style.”
[v] The golden mean or golden middle way is the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency. For instance, courage is the golden middle between recklessness and cowardice.
[vi] This is Darcy’s first (and rejected) proposal. The novel concludes with his second, and this time successful, offer.
[vii] This is (of course) prior to any suggestion of a connection between Lydia and Mr Wickham.
