Fifty miles of good road!
May. 3rd, 2024 11:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineMy actual, serious opinion on why Darcy thinks living 50 miles from your family is relatively close while Elizabeth thinks it's far:
Darcy is so profoundly out-of-touch due to wealth, property, influence, his families' status, etc that he truly does not comprehend the complications and expenses of travel for normal people even among the landowning classes. Like, there's all this ink spilled on his status as a gentleman/landowning commoner and what really differentiates a gentleman like Mr Bennet from one like Darcy if anything, and what that would mean in their social context, blah blah. But in pragmatic terms, Darcy's lifestyle and his interests as a landowner have far more in common with the nobility to which he is connected than the typical lifestyles of the gentry.
Darcy talking about 50 miles of good road being nothing in terms of inconvenience and blithely ignoring the costs of either owning or hiring horses, the complications of maintaining a horse if you do own it, the complications around hiring or owning the vehicle drawn by the horse(s), how much more you'd need to pay in services if you don't own the vehicle/horses, what using that vehicle for travel would entail for the workings of the estate or your trade if your family does own it, the cost of stopping along the way, what's lost by the duration of the journey, etc etc. These are things that even fairly well-off landowners like the Bennets would have to deal with in terms of the convenience of travel on "good road" (and also clues us into the prosperity of the Gardiners). These concerns do not even occur to Darcy as problems to consider. This doesn't represent a malicious, personal callousness so much as the genuine obliviousness that arises from extreme socioeconomic inequality. These kinds of problems simply melt away in Darcy's life (read: there are people who make them melt away) and as a result, he truly does not comprehend the impact of prosaic difficulties on the feasibility of something like travel for people like the Lucases or Bennets. The only calculation of convenience that seems to be happening in his head is the effect of distance and road quality on the timing of the journey.
(I think his confusion at people who have family libraries but aren't buying books at this super important literary moment reflects this as well. Books were still quite expensive at the time. He does not appear to grasp that "always buying books" like he does is literally not an option for most people, even in the gentry. He's right about the important literary moment, but "buying things costs money" is a concept that seems not to even enter his calculus.)
My much less serious opinion on why Darcy thinks living 50 miles from your family is "a very easy distance" while Elizabeth thinks it's far:
His landowning family members don't have to think about these problems any more than he does, and if I were Lady Catherine de Bourgh's nephew, I would also consider living 50 mi away from my relatives pretty damn close.
Darcy is so profoundly out-of-touch due to wealth, property, influence, his families' status, etc that he truly does not comprehend the complications and expenses of travel for normal people even among the landowning classes. Like, there's all this ink spilled on his status as a gentleman/landowning commoner and what really differentiates a gentleman like Mr Bennet from one like Darcy if anything, and what that would mean in their social context, blah blah. But in pragmatic terms, Darcy's lifestyle and his interests as a landowner have far more in common with the nobility to which he is connected than the typical lifestyles of the gentry.
Darcy talking about 50 miles of good road being nothing in terms of inconvenience and blithely ignoring the costs of either owning or hiring horses, the complications of maintaining a horse if you do own it, the complications around hiring or owning the vehicle drawn by the horse(s), how much more you'd need to pay in services if you don't own the vehicle/horses, what using that vehicle for travel would entail for the workings of the estate or your trade if your family does own it, the cost of stopping along the way, what's lost by the duration of the journey, etc etc. These are things that even fairly well-off landowners like the Bennets would have to deal with in terms of the convenience of travel on "good road" (and also clues us into the prosperity of the Gardiners). These concerns do not even occur to Darcy as problems to consider. This doesn't represent a malicious, personal callousness so much as the genuine obliviousness that arises from extreme socioeconomic inequality. These kinds of problems simply melt away in Darcy's life (read: there are people who make them melt away) and as a result, he truly does not comprehend the impact of prosaic difficulties on the feasibility of something like travel for people like the Lucases or Bennets. The only calculation of convenience that seems to be happening in his head is the effect of distance and road quality on the timing of the journey.
(I think his confusion at people who have family libraries but aren't buying books at this super important literary moment reflects this as well. Books were still quite expensive at the time. He does not appear to grasp that "always buying books" like he does is literally not an option for most people, even in the gentry. He's right about the important literary moment, but "buying things costs money" is a concept that seems not to even enter his calculus.)
My much less serious opinion on why Darcy thinks living 50 miles from your family is "a very easy distance" while Elizabeth thinks it's far:
His landowning family members don't have to think about these problems any more than he does, and if I were Lady Catherine de Bourgh's nephew, I would also consider living 50 mi away from my relatives pretty damn close.
no subject
on 2024-05-05 08:16 am (UTC)The other thing is, he thinks she's flirting with him! He thinks she knows he's trying to court her! Given that, the subtext of the conversation is also that he's expecting her to have his resources in the future, and he's expecting her to be at least thinking in that direction.
no subject
on 2024-05-13 06:38 pm (UTC)Right! He's certainly very aware of the considerable difference between his general consequence and standing vs Sir William's and Charlotte's, but has no sense of what that means in any material sense.
The other thing is, he thinks she's flirting with him! He thinks she knows he's trying to court her! Given that, the subtext of the conversation is also that he's expecting her to have his resources in the future, and he's expecting her to be at least thinking in that direction.
Hmm, yes, though I'm not sure how pertinent that is to the initial point about Charlotte specifically; I think he's just awkwardly trying to make polite conversation at first. Even Darcy does not think Elizabeth could be considered near her family at Pemberley. But Elizabeth's admission that there's a level of prosperity at which distance doesn't really matter, but that this doesn't apply to Charlotte's situation, is easy for him to read as a hint that this isn't a concern for Elizabeth with regard to their "relationship." And because that's in the back of his mind already, it seems natural to turn the conversation towards his assumption that Elizabeth has not spent all her life at Longbourn (which is actually true) and would be more comfortable with life at a further distance from her family than Charlotte, especially when she explicitly mentions wealth making a difference in this calculus. The subtext for him is that their marriage will take Elizabeth far away, but that's fine, actually.