Multiple Reading Personalities

“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”

Peacock Plumes by Erik Veland

Re-reading my notes on Pride and Prejudice almost a month after they were written, I was amused to see how faithfully they reflected my experience with reading Jane Austen: a great many early remarks, both laudatory (Such sharp wit! Such ability to sum up a scene in a few well-chosen details!) and annoyed (Disjointed structure! Unnecessary intrusion of the writer’s opinion!)… Then, about a third of the way into the story, notes stop. I was so fully taken in I forgot to think about what I was reading.

Yet I did not love Elizabeth Bennet: while I thought she was a great character, I’m not sure I would like her very much as a person. The second in a family of five daughters, Elizabeth is her father’s favorite – a quick-witted girl with a judgmental/ gossipy/ cynical streak. Her older sister, Jane, seems the traditional model of female perfection: selfless, beautiful, loving and naïve. The three younger sisters appear as counterpoints to this onslaught of qualities: one of them, Mary, is typecast as the plain-looking girl who tries to compensate her lack of looks through culture, and comes out looking ridiculous; the other two, Kitty and Lydia, are two brainless girls maniacally addicted to fun. The family is rounded up with a nice-but-weak paternal figure and a mother who is the prototypical Austen airhead married woman (like Mary Musgrove in Persuasion, Mrs. Bennet is self-centered, intellectually limited and crassly manipulative).

As if such a family wasn’t enough of a liability, the Bennet girls’ marriage prospects are also limited by their lack of financial expectations, their father’s estate being entailed to their nearest male relative. Mrs Bennet, for all her shortcomings, seems more aware than anyone else of the real danger of poverty the situation places her daughters in, and is intent on marrying them as well and as fast as possible.

An opportunity seems to present itself for Jane when Mr. Bingley, a rich gentleman, rents the nearby estate of Netherfield. An attachment immediately begins between the two of them; unfortunately, Bingley’s two sisters and his friend Darcy, afraid that the match would be unfavorable, separate the two lovers by attracting Bingley to London and convincing him that Jane has no true attachment to him.

Elizabeth meanwhile has conceived a strong dislike for Darcy: not only did he disdain her at a ball, he is also believed to have wronged Mr. Wickham, a militia officer she is fond of, and she suspects his interference between Jane and Bingley. Of course she will slowly discover that he was (mostly) innocent, and he will realize his attraction to her; and when they both have overcome their ‘pride and prejudices’, they will end up together and help Bingley and Jane reunite.

The interwoven love stories at the heart of the book are illuminated by a number of secondary plots, such as the loveless marriage of Elizabeth’s friend Charlotte Lucas to a boorish clergyman, the reckless elopement of Lydia and Wickham or the depiction of the frozen life of Lady Catherine, Darcy’s aunt eaten alive by birth pride. These snippets inform the heroines’ choices and provide a counterpoint to their mostly good decisions. They point directly to Austen’s vision of the necessity to balance heart and head in matters of sentiments; Austen’s almost cruel wit keeps the whole from feeling preachy. The only character that really left me feeling uneasy was Mary, afflicted with intellectual pretensions but little true intelligence or sensitivity. In the grand tradition of Moliere’s femmes savantes, her efforts at self-improvements only seemed to make her a worse person. No political correction here, no belief that self-improvement is accessible to all but to the already gifted: as Austen puts it, there is “in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil — a natural defect which not even the best education can overcome”, a cynicism I don’t quite know what to make of.

A theme I will keep an eye on in my future Austen readings!