Tumblr crosspost (22 February 2020)
Sep. 24th, 2021 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
In response to this post, whetstonefires said that it's possible we don't hear about any change in Darcy's feelings about Mr Bennet because Elizabeth is no longer concerned about Darcy holding Mr Bennet against her.
I replied:
Hmm, I’m not sure about the first part. In the letter, Darcy specifies that Mr Bennet is one of the people whose behaviour contributed to his sense of the Bennets’ unsuitability. So he was holding Mr Bennet against her to some extent, at least in more or less the same sense that he was holding Mrs Bennet against her—and Elizabeth is quite anxious about Darcy’s and Mrs Bennet’s reactions to each other in the final stage of the novel.
Either way, Elizabeth is neither the narrator nor the only viewpoint character of P&P. There’s a distinction (sometimes a very sharp distinction) between what she thinks about and what is important for the narrative as a whole.
It’s possible that Darcy’s feelings about Mr Bennet are simply not terribly important to the narrative (though it was sufficiently worth mentioning to come up in the letter and then again in his preference for dealing with Mr Gardiner). But it’s also possible that there is no reason for his feelings to have changed beyond a certain baseline of human respect, and his distaste is just … not something to really emphasize at that point in the story.
I replied:
Hmm, I’m not sure about the first part. In the letter, Darcy specifies that Mr Bennet is one of the people whose behaviour contributed to his sense of the Bennets’ unsuitability. So he was holding Mr Bennet against her to some extent, at least in more or less the same sense that he was holding Mrs Bennet against her—and Elizabeth is quite anxious about Darcy’s and Mrs Bennet’s reactions to each other in the final stage of the novel.
Either way, Elizabeth is neither the narrator nor the only viewpoint character of P&P. There’s a distinction (sometimes a very sharp distinction) between what she thinks about and what is important for the narrative as a whole.
It’s possible that Darcy’s feelings about Mr Bennet are simply not terribly important to the narrative (though it was sufficiently worth mentioning to come up in the letter and then again in his preference for dealing with Mr Gardiner). But it’s also possible that there is no reason for his feelings to have changed beyond a certain baseline of human respect, and his distaste is just … not something to really emphasize at that point in the story.