anghraine | Tumblr crosspost (8 June 2020)

“I do, I do like him,” she replied, with tears in her eyes; “I love him. Indeed he has no improper pride. He is perfectly amiable. You do not know what he really is; then pray do not pain me by speaking of him in such terms.”

“Lizzy,” said her father, “I have given him my consent. He is the kind of man, indeed, to whom I should never dare refuse anything which he condescended to ask. I now give it to you, if you are resolved on having him. But let me advise you to think better of it. I know your disposition, Lizzy. I know that you could be neither happy nor respectable unless you truly esteemed your husband—unless you looked up to him as a superior. Your lively talents would place you in the greatest danger in an unequal marriage.”

There’s a lot going on in many P&P (and Austen) passages, but this one is always just … wait, wait, what? Like:

Elizabeth explicitly says she loves Darcy and gets upset at hearing him wrongly criticized (<3)
Mr Bennet is, apparently, too intimidated by Darcy to personally refuse his consent, but
He wants Elizabeth to retract her acceptance, because
He thinks Elizabeth needs to look up to her husband as her superior (!!!!) to be happy and “respectable” (suggesting she might make very questionable choices in marriage otherwise), and
He follows this up with his fear for her in an unequal marriage, implying that Elizabeth’s marriage will be unequal if she isn’t married to a man superior to her (I’d like “what is equality” for 100, Alex)

#mr bennet is very dodgy in a lot of ways but this is the one where i'm just ... uh. what the fuck. #honestly don't know if it's creepier if mr bennet somehow(???) ends up thinking darcy is elizabeth's superior #or that it's enough for elizabeth to ~look up to him~ even if it's not true #anyway #while i don't have a lot of patience for the defenses of mrs bennet #mr bennet can fuck right off #and i /definitely/ don't think we're meant to agree with him