Emma, chapters 1-3

Jane Austen’s fourth novel, Emma, is arguably as beloved as her second, Pride and Prejudice; in fact Austenites will often define themselves by which one they prefer, even a bit contentiously, which is sort of like taking sides over which champagne you like better, brut or demi-sec. For my part, I don’t care, just top off my glass, please.

In each of Austen’s novels we find her trying to achieve something new, and in Emma it’s to do with her heroine. Having just given us (to disastrous effect, I think) a protagonist so passive and repressed as to render her utterly inert, she swings to the opposite extreme here. Emma Woodhouse is everything Mansifeld Park’s Fanny Price is not: rich, beautiful, spoiled, self-confident. She has character flaws you could steer an oil tanker through, but her rank makes her virtually unassailable; as a result of which she’s a charming, beguiling, utterly relentless terror. The novel is about her metamorphosis into a human being. I’m reminded of the story of Greta Garbo at a screening of Beauty and the Beast, reacting to the hero’s climactic transformation into a prince by exclaiming, “Give me back my beast!” Readers of Emma may feel similarly when our pushy, tart-tongued heroine is finally brought down a peg or seven, and learns to play nice. But it’s only a small vexation, because the solution is obvious: just go back to page one read the whole damn thing over again.

Emma begins with the entrancing plangency of a folk tale by the brothers Grimm, as Austen lays out the particulars of our heroine’s biography: mistress of a large house from an early age, after the death of her mother and the marriage of her elder sister—both of whose places in her life have been filled by a governess, one Miss Taylor, whose “mildness of…temper had hardly allowed her to impose any restraint,” so that Emma has grown up “doing just what she liked; highly esteeming Miss Taylor’s judgment, but directed chiefly by her own.” Austen doesn’t mince words:

The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much of her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.

But now things have changed, because Miss Taylor has become Mrs. Weston and left the Woodhouse establishment for one of her own. Emma consoles herself for the loss of her friend to “a man of unexceptionable character, easy fortune, suitable age and pleasant manners” by remembering that she’s the one who pretty much threw them in each other’s path in the first place, and blocked any avenue of escape until they looked around and noticed each other and thought, “Hubba hubba.” So she takes credit for the match; “but it was a black morning’s work for her”, because it’s now left her alone at home with her voraciously infirm father, and no one to follow her around all day and listen to her prattle and watch her kick up her heels and just generally reinforce her belief that God created Emma Woodhouse on Day One and then the rest of the cosmos on Two through Seven.

Austen’s narrative tone here is gentler, kindlier; but I think this is a deliberate dodge, an attempt at ironic dissonance. For instance, she says of Emma’s father that “having been a valetudinarian all his life, without activity of mind or body, he was a much older man in ways than in years; and though every where beloved for the friendliness of his heart and his amiable temper, his talents could not have recommended him at any time.” This has fooled many people into imagining Mr. Woodhouse to be an adorable old darling with a shawl over his knees and a twinkle in his eyes; but as the novel progresses it becomes ever clearer that he’s the sheerest horror. He represents a kind of tremulous nihilism, a nervous entropy; he’s like a bubbling tar pit, trying to entrap everyone in the vicinity and fossilize them before they can grow, change, breathe. He’s terribly funny, of course, but he’s a genuine danger; if he and Fanny Price ever came within a dozen yards of each other, their combined frigidity would snuff out the sun. When he sighs over how much he’ll miss “Poor Miss Taylor,” Emma reminds him that the Westons only live a half-mile off.

“…We shall be always meeting! We must begin; we must go and pay our wedding-visit very soon.”

“My dear, how am I to get so far? Randalls is such a distance. I could not walk half so far.”

“No, papa; nobody thought of your walking. We must go in the carriage, to be sure.”

“The carriage! But James will not like to put the horses to for such a little way;—and where are the poor horses to be while we are paying our visit?”

“They are to be put into Mr. Weston’s stable, papa. You know we have settled all that already. We talked it all over with Mr. Weston last night…”

You can bet she’ll have to “settle all that” about six hundred times more before anybody gets anywhere near a carriage. You get the sense that Mr. Woodhouse is a temporal anomaly; he can slow time, stop it, and on good days even set it creeping in reverse.

He and Emma live in a great house called Hartfield, whose palatial grounds abut a small village, Highbury, in which the most of the novel’s other characters live in the kind of rustic cheerfulness that makes them no match at all for Emma. She’s basically a queen on a chessboard where the only other players left are pawns. And as we’ll see, that’s pretty much how she treats them.

But she does long for someone who isn’t abject or overawed in her presence—someone with whom she can have an actual conversation. And here he comes now, dropping by to relieve the tedium in which Mr. Woodhouse has been so happily marinating: Mr Knightley, “a sensible man about seven or eight and thirty,” a longtime friend of the family and, since Emma’s sister’s marriage to his own brother, a member of the extended family himself.

Emma is delighted to see him, though Mr. Woodhouse is concerned that he’s come at so late an hour; “I am afraid you must have had a shocking walk” — as though a stroll through the chill night air were the equivalent of being beset by gypsies. Mr. Knightley assures him of having been assaulted by nothing more discomposing than beautiful moonlight.

“But you must have found it very damp and dirty. I wish you may not catch cold.”

“Dirty, sir! Look at my shoes. Not a speck on them.”

“Well! That is quite surprising, for we have had a vast deal of rain here. It rained dreadfully hard for half an hour, while we were at breakfast. I wanted them to put off the wedding.”

With just a little more youth and vigor, Mr. Woodhouse would be the kind of character you find in gothic horror fiction, burying children in the basement to save them from the cruel world. As if to reinforce this, he now hangs his head, for talk has turned—inevitably—to the day’s festivities. “Ah! Poor Miss Taylor! ’tis a sad business,” he says, lamenting that the lady in question has got away from him before he could have her walled up in the linen pantry. Mr. Knightley tries to make him see that the change is a happy one for the bride, it being “better to have only one to please than two.”

“Especially when one of those two is a fanciful, troublesome creature!” said Emma playfully. “That is what…you would certainly say if my father were not by.”

“I believe it is very true, my dear, indeed,” said Mr. Woodhouse with a sigh. “I am afraid I am sometimes very fanciful and troublesome.”

“My dearest papa! You do not think I could mean you…I meant only myself. Mr. Knightley loves to find fault with me, you know—in a joke—it is all a joke. We always say what we like to each other.”

After three novels, we know instantly what Austen is setting up here. In the oeuvre of this supposedly proto-romantic writer, lovers are marked as predestined for each other not by deranging fits of attraction, or attacks of galloping passion, but by spiky, brittle, stinging bouts of conversation—in fact, by mockery and sarcasm. Emma and Knightley’s snarky verbal jousting is just Austen’s version of a full-throttle Puccini duet, with trills and crescendos and a chorus of sixty on the bridge.

And if you need any further proof, this early in the novel, that the romance quotient going forward will be hovering at just about zero, here’s Emma’s retelling (to Knightley, who wasn’t there) of the of the nuptial ceremony itself, in all its giddy, flowery, transcendent sentimentality:

“Well,” said Emma…“you want to hear about the wedding; and I shall be happy to tell you, for we all behaved charmingly. Every body was punctual, every body in their best looks: not a tear, and hardly a long face to be seen. Oh, no; we all felt that we were going to be only half a mile apart, and were sure of meeting every day.”

For Austen, who usually dashes out descriptions of weddings in a single line, with all the ardor of a Post-It note reminder to buy mouthwash, the fragment above really is an outpouring of detail.

Emma then adds that, much as she’ll miss her governess, she takes pride in the marriage being of her own devising. “I made the match, you know,” she brags, “four years ago; and to have it take place…when so many people said Mr. Weston would never marry again, may comfort me for any thing.” At which her father begs her never, ever to do any such thing again, “for whatever you say always comes to pass. Pray do not make any more matches.”

“I promise to make none for myself, papa; but I must, indeed, for other people. It is the greatest amusement in the world!”

And there it is, right there: the rest of the novel all laid out for us. Because we can see what Mr. Knightley sees: that despite Emma’s long (very long) account of her campaign to land Miss Taylor and Mr. Weston at the altar together, the resultant wedding can scarcely be claimed as her “success.”

“Success supposes endeavour. Your time has been properly and delicately spent, if you have been endeavouring for the last four years to bring about this marriage. A worthy employment for a young lady’s mind! but if, which I rather imagine, your making the match, as you call it, means only…your saying to yourself one idle day, ‘I think it would be a very good thing for Miss Taylor if Mr. Weston were to marry her,’ and saying it again to yourself every now and then afterwards,—why do you talk of success? where is your merit? What are you proud of? You made a lucky guess; and that is all that can be said.”

Emma shoots back that “a lucky guess is never merely luck. There is always some talent in it,” which Knightley waves away with, “A straight-forward, open-hearted man, like Weston, and a rational unaffected woman, like Miss Taylor, may be safely left to manage their own concerns. You are more likely to have done harm to yourself, than good to them, by interference”…

…and yes, I confess, I could happily sit and listen to them snipe at each other like this until my spine permanently curved. As I noted earlier (in my discussion of Lizzy and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice), Austen’s acerbic, sarcastic, unwitting lovers belong to a tradition that goes back at least to Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick, and on through Tracy and Hepburn, right up to…well, choose your sitcom, basically. But nobody has ever done it better than our gal J.A. and her baaaad attitude.

Emma then brazenly flouts Knightley’s judgment of her by announcing that she’s already settled on the new clergyman, Mr. Elton, as the next beneficiary of her matchmaking skills. He’s been at Highbury a full year and it’s high time he was saddled with a wife, and besides, when he was officiating at the wedding earlier that day, “he looked so much as if he would like to have the same kind of office done for him! I think very well of Mr. Elton, and this is the only way I have of doing him a service.”

So right away, we know Mr. Elton is in trubbah. And so does Knightley, who says, “Invite him to dinner, Emma, and help him to the best of the fish and the chicken, but leave him to choose his own wife. Depend upon it, a man of six or seven and twenty can take care of himself.” But this bit of wisdom doesn’t quite reflect as handsomely on Knightley as it might, because if he were really wise he’d realize that saying it aloud will have precisely the opposite effect of the one intended. Unless he wants Emma to go rushing out into the larger world, grabbing people by their collars and making a first-class idiot of herself. Which, now that I think of it…hmm.

The succeeding chapter switches gears in order to give us the back-story of the bridegroom. Here’s where Austen’s juvenile years, penning three- and four-page epics in which people meet, love, and die amidst all manner of tumult and tragedy, show their bounty; because the story of Mr. Weston functions almost as a little novella all on its own.

The youngest of three brothers, he eschewed their “homely pursuits” in order to enter the militia; then, as Captain Weston, he met a certain Miss Churchill “of a great Yorkshire family,” and the two fell in love. Miss Churchill’s brother and his wife, “full of pride and importance, which the connection would offend,” opposed the match; but Miss Churchill defied them and married him anyway, and her relations threw her off. Alas, the resulting union was not a happy one.

[Miss Churchill] had resolution enough to pursue her own will in spite of her brother, but not enough to refrain from unreasonable regrets at that brother’s unreasoning anger, nor from missing the luxuries of her former home. They lived beyond their income, but still it was nothing in comparison to Enscombe; she did not cease to love her husband; but she wanted at once to be the wife of Captain Weston, and Miss Churchill of Enscombe.

If we must have modern writers undertaking Jane Austen sequels and “prequels,” you’d think one of them would at least be enterprising enough to tackle this intriguing creature, instead of yet more intensive scrutiny into the navel of Fitzwilliam Darcy.

Anyway, the former Miss Churchill bears a son and dies, leaving Captain Western a whole lot poorer and burdened with a baby. But the brother and sister-in-law step in to relieve him; having had their tempers softened by their sister’s illness, and “having no children of their own, nor any other young creature of equal kindred to care for, [they] offered to take the whole charge of little Frank soon after her decease.”

Suddenly liberated from all responsibility, Captain Weston left the militia, went into trade, prospered, moved to Highbury, and “the next eighteen or twenty years of his life passed cheerfully away”, apparently so very cheerfully that we can’t be sure which it was, eighteen or twenty, but what’s a couple of lost years between friends?  Little Frank, in the meantime, so ingratiated himself in his uncle and aunt’s affections that they bestowed their name on him as well. He has grown up “a very fine young man,” as Mr. Weston is able to report to all his neighbors, for he sees his son every year in London, and they’re on very good terms. In a small provincial town with a limited pool of inhabitants and a higher-than-average ratio of middle-aged biddies, this kind of material proves tinder for a whole firestorm of gossip.

Mr. Frank Churchill was one of the boasts of Highbury, and a lively curiosity to see him prevailed, though the compliment was so little returned that he had never been there in his life. His coming to visit his father had been often talked of but never achieved.

Now, upon his father’s marriage, it was very generally proposed, as a most proper attention, that the visit should take place.

Then, as if to swell the excitement to full-on nuclear proportions, we find out that Frank Churchill has written to his new mother to congratulate her on the marriage.

For a few days every morning visit in Highbury included some mention of the handsome letter Mrs. Weston had received. “I suppose you have heard of the handsome letter Mr. Frank Churchill had written to Mrs. Weston? I understood it was a very handsome letter, indeed. Mr. Woodhouse told me of it. Mr. Woodhouse saw the letter, and he says he never saw such a handsome letter in his life.”

Aside from being a wonderfully funny evocation of the head-banging monotony of what passes for interest in village life, it’s also our first indication that in fact Mr. Woodhouse is really one of the novel’s cast of clucking old hens; but after the first twinge of surprise, it does seem entirely right.

The handsome letter provides Mr. Woodhouse a distraction from his continuing distress over the loss of Miss Taylor to the rapacious world in which people insist on actually doing things. We hear of occasions on which he and Emma “left her at Randalls in the centre of every domestic comfort, or saw her go away in the evening attended by her pleasant husband to a carriage of her own”—and each time Mr. Woodhouse heaves a sigh and says, “Ah, poor Miss Taylor! She would be very glad to stay.” But soon enough the novelty of the wedding subsides, and Mr. Woodhouse enjoys some welcome relief.

The compliments of his neighbors were over; he was no longer teased by being wished joy of so sorrowful an event; and the wedding-cake, which had been a great distress to him, was all ate up.

That’s right—in addition to being a control-freak and a gossip, Mr. Woodhouse is also a crank. “His own stomach could bear nothing rich, and he could never believe other people to be different from himself.” Austen riffs on this for a while, turning the wedding cake into the prop for a whole comic monologue, but while we’re laughing we’re wondering what new ghastly trait Mr. Woodhouse will exhibit next. Maybe he’s parsimonious, or flatulent, or beats the household dogs with a crop.

We have a chance to see him now in a new setting, as the scene shifts to an evening party at Hartfield—this being a regular occurrence at the great house, because “Mr. Woodhouse was fond of society in his own way. He liked very much to have his friends come and see him,” for which reason “there was scarcely an evening in the week in which Emma could not make up a card-table for him.”

Alas, not all is pleasure for the paterfamilias on these occasions.

He loved to have the cloth laid, because it had been the fashion of his youth; but his conviction of suppers being very unwholesome made him rather sorry to see anything put on it; and while his hospitality would have welcomed his visiters to every thing, his care for their health made him grieve that they would eat.

Not that anyone can really tuck in anyway, with Mr. Woodhouse hovering over them and parceling out crumbs as though they might be radioactive:

“Mrs. Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs. An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. Serle understands boiling an egg better than any body. I would not recommend an egg boiled by any body else,—but you not need be afraid, they are very small, you see,—one of our small eggs will not hurt you. Miss Bates, let Emma help you to a little bit of tart—a very little bit…Mrs. Goddard, what say you to half a glass of wine? A small half glass, put into a tumbler of water? I do not think it could disagree with you.”

I like to picture him attempting this kind of thing at one of my Italian family’s free-for-alls. Interpose yourself between a guest and the pasta platter there, and you risk having your arm devoured along with the pappardelle.

The Miss Bates to whom Mr. Woodhouse addresses himself here is one of several new characters we meet in this chapter, and the only one who can match him for sheer comic brio. She is the single daughter of an ancient mother—“the widow of a former vicar of Highbury…a very old lady, almost past every thing but tea and quadrille”—and the two live alone very humbly (or, since most of Highbury lives humbly, I should maybe say very very humbly).

Miss Bates stood in the very worst predicament in the world for having much of the public favor; and she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her, into outward respect. She had never boasted either beauty or cleverness. Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle of life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible. And yet she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good-will.

But beyond this, she is a talker; perhaps the most voluble and indefatigable of any talker Jane Austen ever invented. She doesn’t say much in this first chapter of our acquaintance with her—or rather, Austen doesn’t report much of what she says, because you can bet both your ass and your assets she’s off in the margins somewhere firing away like a gatling gun—but we’ll become exhaustively familiar with her epic chattering before too long.

The other new characters—who join Mrs. and Miss Bates, the Westons, and Mr. Knightley as the dinner guests this evening—include Mr. Elton, the young cleric Emma has chosen to play Cupid for (“a young man living alone without liking it,” for whom “the privilege of exchanging any vacant evening of his own blank solitude for the elegancies and society of Mr. Woodhouse’s drawing-room and the smiles of his lovely daughter” is just the ticket, thanks).

Then there’s Mrs. Goddard, the mistress of a school; she’s one of Austen’s blander creations, but provides the opportunity for one of her more spirited snarks:

Mrs. Goddard was the mistress of a school,—not a seminary, or an establishment, or any thing which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality, upon new principles and new systems,—and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity,—but a real, honest, old fashioned boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way, and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.

And finally we have Harriet Smith, a pretty young girl who happens to be one of those aforementioned non-prodigies. She is “the natural daughter of somebody. Somebody had placed her, several years back, at Mrs. Goddard’s school, and somebody had lately raised her from the condition of scholar to that of parlour boarder. This was all that was generally known of her history.” Miss Smith has fallen into easy intimacy with some tenants of Mr. Knightley, named Martin, but Emma, impressed by Harriet’s looks and demeanor, thinks she deserves better, and needs only a little notice and encouragement to rise higher. Which is of course just the thing Emma loves better than a hound loves a hambone.

She would notice her; she would improve her; she would detach her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into good society; she would form her opinions and her manners. It would be an interesting and certainly a very kind undertaking; highly becoming to her own situation in life, her leisure, and powers.

At this point you may actually find yourself thinking a little bit ahead; and if the train of your thought is along the lines of, “Aha! Emma wants to marry off Mr. Elton, and she wants to improve Miss Smith’s situation. Two birds, one stone, maybe?”—well, then, give yourself a big gold star and as many goddamned boiled eggs as you want, you great big genius, you.

And come on back here next time to see how it all starts going horribly awry.

~

For the remainder of my analysis of Emma, see Bitch In a Bonnet Volume 2, which you can purchase from Amazon and other fine sites.

Mansfield Park, chapters 1-3

Is there anyone who doesn’t have a problem with Mansfield Park?...Having just given the world one of its most irresistible literary characters, Jane Austen faced the same dilemma as a bowler returning to the lanes for the first time after scoring ten straight strikes: How the hell do you follow up a perfect game?  Most probable answer: You choke.

Though of course we’re taking literature, not tenpins, so the reality is likely to be more complicated.  My own take is that Austen was feeling a little guilty after Pride and Prejudice; in creating Elizabeth Bennet, she’d shamelessly pulled out all the stops, loading her character with every imaginable attraction, from sparkling impertinence to righteous recklessness.  There’s nuance in Lizzy, but it’s all brightly lit; everything about her is incandescent.  Here is a character pitched to reach the cheap seats, and successfully so; nearly 200 years later, we’re still hanging on her every word, our jaws parted in readiness for adoring laughter.

So perhaps Austen thought, this time I won’t make it so easy for myself.  This time I’ll try to construct a heroine with more shade—someone whose charm will be of the hidden variety, as opposed to the wagging-her-tail-and-doing-tricks kind.  Possibly she even thought of this as artistic atonement; and if so, she took it too far, like those 14th Century saints who scourged themselves with whips and licked the open wounds of lepers, because what she came up with was Fanny Price, a creature famously described by the great Kingsley Amis as “a monster of complacency and pride…under a cloak of cringing self-abasement”.  I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it is more than a little maddening that everything Fanny gains (and over the course of the novel she gains a lot) is obtained by withholding, withdrawal, refusal.  She embodies negation.  Her default setting is OFF.

Mansfield Park begins with the usual dollop of Austenian backstory, here concerning three sisters, all beauties, the eldest of whom marries a baronet (“All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match, and her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim to it”), the second of whom marries respectably (a clergyman), and the youngest of whom marries, “in the common phrase, to disoblige her family, and by fixing on a Lieutenant of Marines, without education, fortune, or connections, did it very thoroughly.”

This latter match results in a breach between the sisters.  The eldest, Lady Bertram, being “easy and indolent,” would be content with “merely giving up her sister, and thinking no more of the matter;” but the middle sister, Mrs. Norris, has, we’re told, “a spirit of activity,” and can’t rest till she’s written a thundering “J’accuse!” to the newly minted Mrs. Price, essentially condemning her to hellfire and brimstone and…well, even more hellfire.  To which Mrs. Price replies, essentially, You are not the bosses of me so you can both go suck the same egg.  With which epithet Mrs. Norris scampers to Lady Bertram, forcing Lady Bertram to raise her ire, which is the only actual exertion she’ll undertake during the entirety of the novel.

I love that Austen introduces Mrs. Norris as possessing “a spirit of activity,” which is apparently Regency code for “highly developed sociopathic egocentrism,” or in other words, extreme douchebaggery.  Mrs. Norris is a compendium of the worst traits of every Austen villain up till now: she comprises Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s bullying, Mr. Collins’s shameless sycophancy, Mrs. Bennet’s delusions of humility, and Fanny Dashwood’s martyr complex.  And to these she adds a fault all her own: triumphal miserliness.  By rights she should be a kind of Frankenstein monster, a mangle of elements that don’t mesh at all, but in fact she works beautifully, all these ghastly attributes integrating like cogs in an infernal machine, interlocking with each other and keeping them in perpetual motion.

One of the most delightful things about her, is the way she always has her eye on the main chance.  As we’ve seen, she was the one who basically orchestrated the breach with Mrs. Price (because, what did she think that lady was going to do, faced with all her scorn and derision?  Write back with, “Yes, you’re right, I’m so sorry”?), which gave her several years’ bragging rights at being the one who exposed the true depths of her sister’s perverseness and ingratitude.  But eventually Mrs. Price writes to mend the breach, having in the ensuing decade been humbled by a career of serial pregnancy, on top of “an husband disabled for active service, but not the less equal to company and good liquor”.  The newly contrite sister asks whether there isn’t something her grander relatives can do to promote the fortunes of one or two of her approximately eighty-six children.  And Mrs. Norris, sensing that righteous indignation, enjoyable as it is, has about exhausted itself in her repertoire, hits upon the scheme of responding instead with forgiveness and largesse—and thus convinces Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram that it would be an excellent idea to take one of Mrs. Price’s daughters off her hands.

Sir Thomas is initially wary of the idea, thinking “of his own four children—of cousins in love, &c.”, but Mrs. Norris, fixed now on setting herself up as an icon of magnanimity, talks him through that particular worry. 

“You are thinking of your sons—but do not you know that of all things upon earth that is the least likely to happen; brought up, as they would be, always together like brothers and sisters?  It is morally impossible.  I never knew an instance of it.  It is, in fact, the only sure way of providing against the connection.”

She carries the day, and puts the seal on her sanctity by assuring him that “I will write to my poor sister to-morrow, and make the proposal; and, as soon as matters are settled, I will engage to get the child to Mansfield; you shall have no trouble about it.  My own trouble, you know, I never regard.”

Since this plan has been from the start hers and hers alone, Mrs. Norris might be supposed to be the one who will take responsibility for the mail-order niece; after all, she has no children of her own, so a helpmeet of this kind would be just the thing.  But oh, no.

…Mrs. Norris had not the least intention of being at any expense whatever in her maintenance.  As far as walking, talking and contriving reached, she was thoroughly benevolent, and nobody knew better how to dictate liberality to others; but her love of money was equal to her love of directing, and she knew quite as well how to save her own as to spend that of her friends…though perhaps she might so little know herself, as to walk home to the Parsonage after this conversation, in the happy belief of being the most liberal-minded sister and aunt in the world.

And so it’s settled that the child will reside in the magnificence of Mansfield Park with Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram and their brood; though Sir Thomas observes that they must strive “to preserve in the minds of my daughters the consciousness of what they are, without making them think too lowly of their cousin”.  Mmmmm-hm.  That’ll happen.  No one in the narrative has yet twigged to the fact that they’ve set up the perfect conditions for a classic Wicked Stepsisters scenario.  Wicked Stepmother, too, except for Lady Bertram’s invincible inertia; you might as well ask for a Wicked Sofa, or Wicked Daybed. 

But never mind, Aunt Norris is happy to play the role instead.  “I only wish I could more useful,” she says obligingly; “but you see I do all in my power.”  What we see, actually, is that she desires—demands—the thanks of a grateful nation, and she wants it just for showing up.  This is the kind of woman who, on a good day, can inflict on you a lifetime of indebtedness for allowing you to serve her a cup of decaf. 

Yeah, it’s pretty easy to tell who my favorite character is, going into this baby.

Young Fanny Price now enters the novel, being met at Northampton by her aunt Norris, “who thus regaled in the credit of being foremost to welcome her, and in the importance of leading her in to the others, and recommending her to their kindness.”  Because, see, otherwise they might have just tied her to a post out by the burn pit.

Fanny at this point is ten years old and not much to look at, though certainly possessed of “nothing to disgust her relations.”  Austen is fond of this gambit: introducing her heroines by laying a stress on how unremarkable they are, though this is usually followed by the gradual amplification of their attractions by wit, courage, or integrity.  Not so with Fanny, who will remain a small, cringing, flinching thing for pretty much the full span of the story.  Even after she gets over her initial terror of Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram and her awe at her cousins, she still seems to scurry along the baseboards like a mouse.

She spends a good part of these early chapters curled up in secluded dark corners crying, which I suppose is meant to move us to pity, except excuse me, most of us modern readers are paying about 80 percent of our take-home pay on apartments the size of Lincoln town cars, so it’s tough to feel sorry for a kid who’s landed herself in a pad large enough to have an abundance of dark secluded corners. 

Eventually, the law of averages being what it is, someone eventually trips over her while she’s in the throes of one of these sob fests.  Fortunately it’s her cousin Edmund, the kindly second son.  The elder brother, Tom, is inclined to poke Fanny with the toe of his shoe and taunt her, as though trying to turn her into a fear-biter; while the Bertram girls can’t get over how thick-headed she is for not possessing such basic knowledge as “the Roman emperors as low as Severus” (these days it would be the Zodiac signs of the Jonas Brothers).  So yes, it’s lucky indeed that Edmund is the one to find her in distress on the attic stairs, and not one of the other children or, God forbid, the adults (though of course the only way Lady Bertram would come near the attic stairs is if someone lit dynamite beneath her chaise longue). 

Edmund is kind to Fanny, and draws her out of her sorrow by asking her about the family she left behind, who he’s sharp enough to realize she must miss; and by this means he discovers her special affection for her brother William, whose absence she feels most keenly.  When Edmund observes that surely William will write to her, Fanny agrees, but alas he’s instructed her to write first to him.

“And when shall you do it?”  She hung her head and answered, hesitatingly, “she did not know; she had not any paper.”

At this point you are forgiven if you put down the book, chuff in exasperation, and exclaim, “Sweet creeping jebus, kid, grow a goddamn pair.”

Edmund takes her into the breakfast-room where he not only supplies her with paper but rules her lines for her, “with all the good will that her brother could himself have felt, and probably with somewhat more exactness.”  Those of us who have read Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice now realize exactly where this is headed, and are free to settle back and wait for Mrs. Norris to push her way back into the plot.

It doesn’t take long.  Aunt Norris is taking her duties as Wicked Stepaunt seriously, and we find her encouraging the worst character traits of the Wicked Stepsisters, answering their reports of Fanny’s stupidity with the assurance that, “though you know (owing to me) your papa and mama are so good as to bring her up with you, it is not at all necessary that she should be as accomplished as you are;—on the contrary, it is much  more desirable that there should be a difference.”  In other words, let Fanny’s dullness and dumpiness make you look all the more hawt by comparison.  Which is just the kind of advice these girls eat up with a spoon.  The author then notes:

…it is not very wonderful that with all their promising talents and early information, they should be entirely deficient in the less common acquirements of self-knowledge, generosity, and humility.  In every thing but disposition, they were admirably taught.

In Austenspeak, this is some serious slammin’. 

Meanwhile, Edmund takes on Fanny’s education, and of course she’s a willing pupil—she reacts to every kindness like a dog that’s spent its whole life being beaten.  He “recommended the books which charmed her leisure hours, he encouraged her taste, and corrected her judgment; he made reading useful by talking to her of what she read, and heightened its attraction by judicious praise.”  Maybe it’s too harsh to say that he’s building his own personal Stepford Wife, but dang, isn’t he?...If there were one recorded instance of Fanny exhibiting independent thinking—daring to disagree with him on some matter, and thereby proving that what he’d made of her mind was more than just a reflection of his own, I’d be contented.  But what we get instead is what we’ll be getting for the foreseeable future: grateful Fanny…unworthy Fanny…grateful, unworthy, grateful, unworthy. 

I have to wonder what Austen was thinking here—what, exactly, she made of her new heroine.  The Austen I know and love—the keenly intelligent, fiercely independent, poison-tongued mock-maker—would have had Fanny Price for breakfast.  I’m certain, in fact, that she must have met many such girls at dances and balls, and at the sight of these dutiful, humble little dormice she must have sharpened her metaphorical knives, and had a simply wonderful evening carving them into ribbons.  Yet here, she’s giving us this quivering blancmange as our presumed point of reference.  Jane, honey…you got some issues you wanna tell us about?

Anyway, we come to our next plot point.  Mrs. Norris’s husband expires (dying just as he lived: offstage), which leaves his living vacant.  Edmund, who’s meant for the clergy, was intended to have it, but his older brother Tom has run up so many gaming debts that Sir Thomas has to sell the living to another candidate to make up for it, leaving Edmund without any prospects.  Sir Thomas, deeply feeling the injustice to Edmund, rips Tom a new one over this, but alas, his son’s the kind of charming rogue who has a built-in bounce-back feature.

Tom listened with some shame and some sorrow; but escaping as quickly as possible, could soon with cheerful selfishness reflect, 1st, that he had not been half so much in debt as some of his friends; 2dly, that his father had made a most tiresome piece of work of it; and 3dly, that the future incumbent, whoever he might be, would, in all probability, die very soon.

When the living eventually goes to one Dr. Grant, his being “a hearty man of forty-five” seems at first to negate Tom’s third point; but no—“he was a short-neck’d, apoplectic sort of fellow, and, plied well with good things, would soon pop off.”

Hard not to like Tom, though I know we’re not supposed to.

Another repercussion of Mr. Norris’s demise, is the general expectation that Fanny will now leave Mansfield Park to live with his widow.  Her chief objection to taking Fanny in the first place had been Mr. Norris’s poor health, which couldn’t stand the activity and noise of a young girl in the house (because you know, Fanny is such a hellion), but now that Mr. Norris is beyond the reach of teenage torment, the way is clear for Fanny finally to join her aunt in her new household.  Fanny spends several pages panicking over the idea, to the point that even Edmund can’t comfort her; but she might’ve spared herself.  Because Aunt Norris again reveals herself to be a strategist of almost Napoleonic wiliness:

…Mrs. Norris had not the smallest intention of taking her.  It had never occurred to her, on the present occasion, but as a thing to be carefully avoided.  To prevent its being expected, she had fixed on the smallest habitation which could rank as genteel among the buildings of Mansfield parish; the White house being only just large enough to receive herself and her servants, and allow a spare room for a friend, of which she made a very particular point;—the spare-rooms at the parsonage had never been wanted, but the absolute necessity of a spare-room for a friend was now never forgotten.

Outmaneuvered, the Bertrams resign themselves to keeping Fanny, despite the waning of their fortunes—which, we learn, isn’t due only to Tom’s recklessness, but also to troubles in Sir Thomas’s estates in Antigua, from whence most of his income derives.  His wife has one last go at her sister, commenting that anyone would think Mrs. Norris would be glad of some young company and household help, which provokes an absolutely hilarious outpouring of self-styled victimhood, in which Mrs. Norris—whose will and energy might be sufficient to shift the entire foundation of London by thirty degrees if she thought it might earn her a few pence—paints herself as too broken in spirits and in health to look after a robust teen.  She concludes in high style:

“Dear Lady Bertram! what am I fit for but solitude?  Now and then I shall hope to have a friend in my little cottage (I shall always have a bed for a friend); but the most part of my future days will be spent in utter seclusion.  If I can but make both ends meet, that’s all I ask for.”

Mrs. Norris has scored a victory over her relations, but she doesn’t have long to enjoy it; because when Dr. Grant moves into the parsonage, it soon becomes evident that his wife is a very liberal housekeeper.  She “gave her cook as high wages as they did at Mansfield Park, and was scarcely ever seen in her offices.  Mrs. Norris could not speak with any temper of such grievances, nor of the quantity of butter and eggs that were regularly consumed in the house.”  She complains bitterly about this prodigal behavior to her sister, but Lady Bertram has her own reasons to resent Mrs. Grant:

She could not enter into the wrongs of an economist, but she felt all the injuries of beauty in Mrs. Grant’s being so well settled in life without being handsome, and expressed her astonishment on that point as often, though not so diffusely, as Mrs. Norris discussed the other.

For a brief, exhilarating moment we get a feeling we’re being set up for a venerable English comedy of manners—a tug-of-war for supremacy between three indomitable ladies.  Sort of like Mapp and Lucia with special guest-star Lady Bracknell.  Then we remember we’ve still got Fanny hanging onto the narrative, like a wad of gum to the sole of a shoe, and there goes that.

Then, unexpectedly, a sliver of genuine darkness descends.

Sir Thomas found it expedient to go to Antigua himself, for the better arrangement of his affairs, and he took his eldest son with him in the hope of detaching him from some bad connections at home.  They left England with the probability of being nearly a twelvemonth absent. 

There’s a narrative reason for taking Sir Thomas offstage at this point.  His daughters have grown about as horrible as they can, given the restraint his presence imposes on them; with him gone—and with no compensating authority in their somnambulant mother, and with an aunt who so far from checking their arrogance, actively encourages it—they can now become really worthy foils to Fanny Pureheart.  Austen is just taking Aunt Norris’s principle and reversing it: for Fanny to look even more angelic, all that’s required is for her cousins to go completely Moll Flanders.

And, given that Sir Thomas has to go, it seems only natural that he be dispatched in a manner consistent with gentlemen of his time and place.  Many among the aristocracy of 18th century England grew rich from trade in sugar, coffee and tobacco plantations in the West Indies; Austen would surely have known that.  It must have seemed to her the most natural thing in the world, that Sir Thomas Bertram would have such an interest, and be called on to manage it.

But what’s less clear is the extent to which Austen understood how such operations were run.  She may have known, and in fact almost certainly did know, of the slave trade that supplied the labor for such places; but did she know—could she even have conceived—of the appalling brutality of the conditions forced on those human beings kept there in servitude against their will?...Austen, like most of polite Regency society, is silent on the issue; slavery was, to a great extent, the elephant in the room for her contemporaries in what was then the emerging imperial power in western Christendom.  I’d like to think that Austen—the chaste daughter of a provincial nobody—had never encountered anything that would allow her to grasp even the minutest horror of the inhumanity suffered by the people “owned” by Sir Thomas Bertram’s real-world corollaries. 

But we can grasp it.  We know full well what the lives of these people were like; and their endless wretchedness, the shrieking injustice of their condition, reverberates down the centuries.  We can’t not know it; there’s no excuse for ignorance of it—the hideous details are only a point-click away.  When Sir Thomas Bertram departs England for Antigua to address the problems plaguing his enterprise there, we modern readers are immediately assailed by appalling images: of slave uprisings, violent reprisals, corporal punishments.  From this moment on, it’s impossible for us to feel any warmth or sympathy for Sir Thomas; he’s become deeply, criminally suspect in our eyes.  Worse, it’s now become difficult—almost impossible—to think of Mansfield Park itself with any of the romantic longing we allow ourselves when we contemplate, say, Pemberley; because we know that the great house sits on a foundation of human blood and bone.  This, as much as Fanny Price’s insipidity, is the reason so many of us just can’t warm to Mansfield Park.

However…I will try.  My aim in this blog is to document the development of Jane Austen’s prowess as a social satirist on the level of Swift and Voltaire.  To that end, I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt; I’ll presume (as indeed I do anyway) that she writes in ignorance of the horrific excesses of the slave economy that allowed landed gentry like Sir Thomas Bertram to flourish; I’ll presume that for her, persistent troubles in Antigua are merely a convenience for her narrative.  And I’ll keep my focus where I think she would’ve wanted it: on the frictions, frissons, and fireworks that occur between her cast of characters.

And when Sir Thomas does eventually reenter the narrative, I will attempt to take him at face value as well.  This current post is to be my only foray into the economic underpinnings of Mansfield Park; in any case, they’ve been written about much more piercingly elsewhere.  But while I may be setting them aside for this particular endeavor…let me just assert that, in general, they shouldn’t be set aside at all.  We owe those who suffered at least that much.

~

For the remainder of my analysis of Mansfield Park, see the collected Bitch In a Bonnet, which you can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or other fine sites, or dowload as an ebook for Kindle or Nook.

Pride and Prejudice, chapters 1-5

Jane Austen’s second published novel is one of the best known and best loved in the English language, so much so that it’s almost impossible to see it clearly any longer; it’s become a set of fixed images and responses in our collective mind. Perhaps only Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” has undergone so thorough a metamorphosis from literary work to cultural bulwark, bogged down by the accumulated accretions of generations who know it only second- or third-hand—or who know it only by reputation, a kind of ripple effect across the surface of western civilization; familiarity by osmosis. Whenever it’s mentioned we no longer even hear the dissonance in the title; it's just a series of syllables, a consumerist trigger—not Pride and Prejudice, but Pridenprejudice. It is, in these post-literate days, less a novel than a brand. And like all powerhouse brands, it’s proved capable of spawning sub-brands, the most powerful (and in my opinion the most insidious) being that which currently boasts legions of frenzied, maenad-like devotees who’d as soon rip Austen’s moldering carcass to shreds than grant her even a posthumous claim on her own creation. I speak, of course, of the great, the dreaded, invoke-it-at-your-peril, Darcy.

What’s been lost in all this, alas, is the original novel, which, when it’s read at all these days, is undertaken by people who already "know" it, who are convinced they’ve always known it, that they knew it in utero; they don’t just read it, they read it with intent. We all strive to find what we need in stories; we furnish what we can, in between the lines, to make the text more amenable to us—to reflect us better. But with the possible exception of the New Testament, no other seminal text has been so greedily trawled for evidence of the reader’s own transcendent superiority. Pride and Prejudice is the kind of book certain people make a point of visibly carrying with them in public, exhibiting it like a designer label. Or a weapon.

Astonishing, then, to read it afresh. Make a conscious effort to clear away the layers of received opinion, the yellowing varnish of endlessly parroted consensus, and you find a lean, feisty, spiky little novel, limber and fleet-footed and occasionally even vicious. A bantamweight boxer of a novel. Readers don’t fall for Pride and Prejudice; they’re knocked down. And while they’re on the mat they see twittering birds around their heads, like in cartoons. No wonder so many people are deranged about it. They’ve had their brainpans jostled. Their vision’s still screwy, they talk too loud, and under stress they’ve been known to wet themselves.

This most famous of Austen’s works begins with one of the most famous first lines in literary history: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” What nobody ever seems to get, here, is that she’s being ironic—she’s starting as she means to go on. The “truth” that is “universally acknowledged” is actually neither; it’s the kind of ludicrous attempt to co-opt the conventional wisdom we hear all the time in the modern world (“Everybody knows trees cause air pollution”). Austen even exposes the irony in the next paragraph, when she allows that even the single man in question might not be aware of the “truth” about him.

From there she gets right down to business. We’re thrown into the hearth and home of the Bennet family, a gentleman and his wife and their five grown daughters. Anyone expecting a Dickensian scene of domestic felicity is in for a rude shock. The Bennet home is if anything a kind of capital-B Bedlam, with Mrs. Bennet as the chief lunatic and her husband the sadistic warden who keeps poking her with a stick through the grate.

Both the senior Bennets are, in fact, major comic creations of Austen’s. Mrs. Bennet is all impulse, pure emotion; the delay between her having a feeling, and speaking it, cannot be measured by any instrument known to man. It’s like her synapses are actually in her tongue. She rages, she rants, she pouts, she preens, she exults—sometimes all in the space of a single sentence. Her husband, whose regard for her is clearly long gone, likes to amuse himself by orchestrating this cacophony of feeling—directing it first this way, then that, like a pinball player knocking about a little silver ball. His chief method of doing this is by affecting not to understand a word of what she says to him, even the plainest and most obvious statement of fact. This happens repeatedly in the first chapter, with such frequency you’d think any idiot would sit up and say, “Hey, wait a minute—are you busting my chops, here?” But Mrs. Bennet is not just any idiot. She’s world championship material; a Wonder Woman of imbecility.

And Mr. Bennet is an utterly ruthless tormenter. It’s fairly clear that he’s revenging himself on his wife for getting old and silly; but Austen skillfully implies an element of self-loathing as well. He can’t forgive his wife for losing her youth and beauty; but he can’t forgive himself for not having seen that’s all she ever had going for her.

The chief prod to Mrs. Bennet’s hysteria is that she has five unmarried daughters and a limited income. This is why she’s in such a state of high excitement when the novel opens; she’s just heard news of a gentleman—the aforementioned “single man in possession of a good fortune”—moving into the neighborhood. “What a fine thing for our girls!” she trills to her husband, who of course pretends not to understand her.

“How so? how can it affect them?”

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” replied his wife, “how can you be so tiresome! You must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them!”

“Is that his design in settling here?”

This is exactly the kind of response that causes Mrs. Bennet to sputter bits of foam; but she manages all the same to make her point, which is that Mr. Bennet had better introduce himself to this newcomer, Mr. Bingley, immediately, so that he can then become acquainted with the rest of the family. But Mr. Bennet sees no point in that; if his marrying one of the girls is all that matters, why not just send over all five for him to choose from, like a pack of hunting dogs?

It’s here that Mr. Bennet first expresses some degree of partiality for one of his brood, when he adds that he may have to put in a good word for “my little Lizzy.” All his daughters, he declares, are silly and ignorant, but “Lizzy has something more of quickness than her sisters.” Elizabeth Bennet’s “quickness” is at the very heart of the novel, and of the character’s extraordinary appeal to generations of readers, and I sometimes wonder whether a certain type of female devotee—lethally smart, socially inept, unappreciated by her family and disdained by her peers—might not latch on so needily to Lizzy Bennet as a personal avatar if the first words regarding her super-specialness didn’t come from her father. My own observation of the “Lizzies” and their ilk is that, whoa baby, major Daddy issues.

As for the other Bennet sisters: Lydia, the youngest, is the most like her mother—all wild, unchecked feeling—and is for that reason her mother’s favorite, which she both knows and uses to her advantage. Mary is bookish but very far from wise; she’s always trying to come forth with some wise maxim or aphorism, but it invariably ends up sounding like bad advertising copy. Kitty coughs, and…well, basically Kitty coughs. And then there’s Jane, who’s possessed of no flaw of any kind: she has beauty, grace, charm, humility, and sweetness of temper. By page 19 you’re more than ready to push her in front of a train.

In the end Mr. Bennet does visit Mr. Bingley; Austen doesn’t say why, but it’s pretty clear he’d be only too happy to have one less mouth to feed. If he really can foist one of his daughters onto this new arrival, all the better. But of course he doesn’t tell anyone that he’s paid the call; instead he waits for his wife to snarl about how tired she is of hearing Mr. Bingley’s name since they’re never to know him; then he produces the news of his acquaintance as though it were something he’d agreed to all along, leaving Mrs. Bennet to do one of those whiplash reversals that over time have basically shredded her grey matter to confetti. If someone treated his dog the way Mr. Bennet treats his wife, PETA would have the guy shot.

And yet, we laugh. Of course we do. It’s funny. It’s also funny when Mrs. Bennet says, “If I can but see one of my daughters happily settled at (Mr. Bingley’s) Netherfield…and all the others equally well married, I shall have nothing to wish for.” We hoot because this is exactly the kind of mindless babble you get from women like her. She doesn’t even hear herself. She might as well have added, “and if I can but fly like a bird and live forever” into the mix.

Next thing you know there’s a ball, and in Austen that always spells trouble. She likes lining up all her characters so that they sweep around the room in perfect harmony, while in the ether above them all bloody hell’s breaking loose. In this case the hell is principally provoked by one of Mr. Bingley’s guests, a regal young man who enters the hall like Admiral Perry stepping foot on the island of Japan. This is Mr. Darcy.

The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.

Even worse, by Austen’s yardstick, is that he refuses to dance—unless it’s with one of Bingley’s two sisters, whose noses are as determinedly tilted skyward as his; they’re like three sea lions balancing invisible hoops. And when Bingley—who of course is having just a swell time, never better, love these peeps and hey how about that Jane Bennet number, woof—corners his friend and pleads with him to dance, Darcy flatly refuses:

“At such an assembly as this, it would be insupportable. Your sisters are engaged, and there is not another woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment to me to stand up with.”

Bingley bravely urges him on, pointing out that Elizabeth Bennet is both very pretty and at present without a partner. Darcy looks over to where Lizzy is seated, and either not knowing or not caring that she can easily overhear him, declares:

“She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.”

So here’s my message of good will to all those aggrieved single women, smoldering with affronted self-esteem, who go angrily about their lives carrying tote bags that read AN ELIZABETH IN A DARCY-LESS WORLD: Ladies, I can help you! I know for a fact that there are very, very many men who would be only too happy to step reluctantly into your life, offend all your friends en masse, and then insult you in particular. You just say the word, I’ll have a whole rugby team of Darcys at your doorstep.

But then, I’m willing to bet these women meet such men all the time. And I’m guessing that they, like Lizzy, don’t recognize a potential Great Romantic Hero in any of them; or maybe they do, and that’s the point. They don’t want a potential romantic hero; they want one who’s already fully fitted out and ready to drive off the showroom floor. God forbid they should have to do any of the body work themselves. Or that, like Lizzy, they’d have to recognize some of their own failings into the bargain. What, are you fuggin’ kidding me…?

Good luck with that, chiquitas. ‘S’all I’m sayin’. Cheers, stay in touch.

Anyway, Lizzy is sufficiently self-confident to laugh off the incident, in fact to report it merrily to her friends and family, which only increases the general loathing of Darcy. Lizzy doesn’t mind being the figure of fun; it doesn’t leave a scratch on her. She’s invincibly well-adjusted. She knows it, too; when Jane, the next day, is all bewilderment at Mr. Bingley having paid her the compliment of asking her to dance a second time, Lizzy rolls her eyes and says, “Compliments always take you by surprise, and me never.”

We’re then introduced to another family in the neighborhood, the Lucases. Austen’s brief introductory sketch of their paterfamilias is a small comic gem all on its own, and a wonderfully coherent psychological profile as well; by the time you finish it, you’d be able to pick him out of a crowd. It’s worth quoting in full, because it shows how Austen’s comic genius can manifest itself even in the swiftest, most fleeting strokes:

Sir William Lucas had been formerly in trade in Meryton, where he had made a tolerable fortune and risen to the honour of knighthood by an address to the King, during his mayoralty. The distinction had perhaps been felt too strongly. It had given him a disgust to his business and to his residence in a small market town; and quitting them both, he had removed with his family to a house about a mile from Meryton, denominated from that period Lucas Lodge, where he could think with pleasure of his own importance, and unshackled by business, occupy himself solely in being civil to all the world. For though elated by his rank, it did not render him supercilious; on the contrary, he was all attention to everybody. By nature inoffensive, friendly and obliging, his presentation at St. James’s had made him courteous.

Sir William has a daughter, Charlotte, who’s Lizzy’s best friend. She is, we are told, “a sensible, intelligent young woman, about twenty-seven.” We already know she’s no looker, because a few pages earlier, during a scene in which Mrs. Bennet recounts for her husband the goings-on at the ball so exhaustively that the poor man is nearly driven to taking refuge under his desk, she says the following, of Mr. Bingley’s dance partners:

“First of all, he asked Miss Lucas. I was so vexed to see him stand up with her; but, however, he did not admire her at all; nobody can, you know.”

Charlotte thus has all the necessary criteria for seeing the world as it is: she’s smart, she’s old, and she’s unloved. And true to her nature, she speaks truth to Lizzy throughout the novel, though Lizzy—her supposed best friend—hears her without listening. She says something now, as the novel’s principle womenfolk gather to talk over the ball—making this one of the chapters male readers may have some trouble with (except, say, the kind of male who giddily consents to be in the studio audience for The View). As the ladies rise to new heights of indignation over Mr. Darcy’s insufferable pride, Charlotte interrupts them:

“His pride,” said Miss Lucas, “does not offend me so much as pride often does, because there is an excuse for it. One cannot wonder that so very fine a young man, with family, fortune, everything in his favour, should think highly of himself. If I may so express it, he has a right to be proud.”

Such wise words alarm Mary, who’s supposed to be the sage in the room. Accordingly she leaps into an extemporaneous discourse on pride that proves to be another comic high point. It’s a small masterpiece of flat-footed, tone-deaf banality:

“Pride…is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed, that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”

At this point, she’s in serious danger of Lydia beaning her with a candlestick. Fortunately for her safety, a young Lucas lad chooses this moment to burst in and declare that if he were as rich as Mr. Darcy he’d drink a bottle of wine every day, prompting Mrs. Bennet to say that if she were to see him she’d take the bottle away from him, unleashing a repeated chorus of “No you shouldn’t”/”Yes I should” which, Austen tells us, “ended only with the visit.”

For the record?...If I were to meet Mrs. Bennet, a bottle of wine a day is about the first thing I’d recommend to her.

~

For the remainder of my analysis of Pride and Prejudice, see the collected Bitch In a Bonnet, which you can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other fine sites, or download as an ebook for Kindle or Nook.