Elizabeth, Family & Random Speculation

[anghraine]

[reposted from wordpress]

There is a rather fascinating comment towards the end of Pride and Prejudice, after Elizabeth’s engagement to Darcy, particularly re: the insistence on the Bennets as a warm and affectionate family.  (You know, Mr Bennet really loves his wife and only mocks his daughters because [ . . .], actually they are friendly, loving, just chaotic (–> natural).  The book shows nothing of the kind; if it did, Elizabeth would probably be a much less attractive character – and I know a few Victorian critics took serious umbrage at her detachment from them, even as it is.)

By the end of the novel, she is no longer taking offence at Darcy’s palpable discomfort around her family; rather, she attempts to protect him from them.  But that’s not the line I’m thinking of, though I find it significant and darling and an awesome reversal of gender-roles.  I’m thinking of the one which follows it – that Elizabeth’s family makes life so impossible for her that she has almost no enjoyment of her own engagement, and can only long for her escape from ’society so little pleasing to either [herself and Darcy]‘.  She feels not the slightest regret at leaving her home or her family behind, even though it entails a separation of several hundred miles from her beloved father and sister – she wants only to be gone to Pemberley.

 

We’re used to loud, boisterous families being portrayed as ‘the best’ – the Weasleys in the Harry Potter books are the absolute stereotype of this sort of thing.  The quiet and orderly ones are inevitably cold, critical, unloving.  Yet Elizabeth Bennet is a creation of the eighteenth century, a woman who prizes the outward forms of good breeding as admirable in and of themselves – perhaps excessively so.  To her, the Burrow might very well be the stuff of nightmares.  She is good enough to tell us what she longs for:  comfort and elegance.

That’s what she longs for, but has never had; it’s what Pemberley means to her – and she specifically links it with family – the comfort and elegance of their family at Pemberley – not Darcy’s (which would be strictly accurate at this point), but theirs: Elizabeth, Darcy, and Georgiana.  She doesn’t think of local society, her reception by neighbours, servants, the other relations – just the three of them.

Which is rather weirdly insular for Elizabeth, of all people.  I can’t see her thrilled by a life of splendid isolation.  Perhaps, in typical Elizabeth fashion, she’s simply not thinking about matters she can’t do anything about (as a totally irrelevant side-note, this is one of those things I find very cool about her – no Angstmuffin she!), and her feelings re: Darcy don’t overflow with rationality at this point (those who think she isn’t ‘romantically’ in love should, perhaps, take a close look at her reactions when Darcy first returns to Longbourn – I half expected her to bean the nameless young lady with the coffee-pot – and then her ecstatic letter to Mrs Gardiner).

The next thing we hear, of course, is that the married Darcys – and Miss Darcy – are living in the Austen approximation of perfect happiness at Pemberley.  Jane and Bingley are thirty miles away (the second circle of heaven?); even they can’t stand to live close to Mrs Bennet.  Lydia is occasionally at Pemberley; Wickham never is, though Darcy helps him in his career.  Both Wickhams stay so long with the Bingleys that they (Jane and Bingley) are almost ready to hint that they should leave.  (Gasp!)  Darcy and Elizabeth love the Gardiners who are always welcome.  Kitty stays with Jane and Elizabeth and is much improved.  (Later, Austen said that she married a clergyman near Pemberley.)  Mr Bennet randomly shows up.

And Elizabeth – Elizabeth! – persuades Darcy to reconcile with Lady Catherine, so she ends up dropping by Pemberley too.  Now, I always instinctively find this somewhat puzzling, because the last thing we heard, Elizabeth couldn’t care less if Darcy was alienated from his family over her.  On the other hand she does care what her own relations think, even the ones she can hardly stand to be around, so?  Well, obviously she changed her mind somewhere in there.

Fanfic fodder!

Anyway, all of this is to say that – in my opinion – we see Elizabeth as isolated from her family, as a unit, as well as her community, though she is close to the occasional individual among them.  It is not in her nature to be unhappy but Longbourn is one heck of an apt name for that place.  Austen is careful to show the Darcy/Elizabeth relationship primarily as a relationship between a man and a woman who don’t need to get along, who often don’t, who are different people with different lives, who pretty much fall in love because they each realise the other is made of awesome.  (Satisfyingly, they each realise this before the most spectacular displays of awesomeness.)  However, while Elizabeth falls in love with Darcy the man (by which I mean, ‘Darcy the supercool human being’ rather than anything to do with the fandom-patented Loins o’ Lust) I think it’s evident that she glomps onto him so fiercely for more reasons than his devotion-inducing fabulousness.

Darcy = Pemberley and Pemberley = order, comfort, elegance, serenity, influence, luxury, everything that she could (and does!) possibly desire, and all of it wrapped up nicely and presented in the form of an imperfect but happy, orderly, functional family.

Hm, this is more interpretation than theorising.  However, the theories are built upon the interpretations so it was necessary to get them all out and clear.  Anyway, accepting this interpretation of Elizabeth’s eager identification away from her  – shall we say, native habitat? – and with her prospective husband’s, it sort of led me to the theorising which is really the point of this all.

Elizabeth, pre-marriage, is very eager to adopt her husband’s world as her own.  She perceives that world as himself, his sister, his house and grounds.  She doesn’t consider that he might have other attachments beyond what she has personally seen – even that he might feel anything like what she does when facing potential opposition within her own fractured clan.  (Notice that she has no intention whatsoever of giving him up, regardless of her relations’ feelings on the subject; that, despite fandom’s tendency for superfluous drama, is never the issue.  The issue is not wanting to inflict pain on her family, particularly her father.)

Plainly, in my opinion, she undergoes a rather dramatic change of opinion during the early stages of her marriage; for whatever reason, she moves from total indifference to actively working as a – er – Fitzwilliam family facilitator.  Which is actually one of the many things that makes Pride and Prejudice so compelling – it has a sense of reality beyond its pages.  It’s as if the last chapter is only partly there to resolve loose ends – it’s also a way of saying ‘of course the story doesn’t end there; things happened afterward, like this and this and this, and people changed, like this character and that one; however, this bit of it that I was telling you about, that’s over.’

Perhaps that’s why Austen had such clear ideas of what happened later, and favourite colours, and who lived and who died.

At least I like to think so.