Pride and Prejudice (56 page)

As they drive through the grounds Elizabeth admires the unobtrusive good taste in evidence – ‘neither formal nor falsely adorned’ – and ‘at that moment she felt that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!’ Then they are led through the house where again the elegance and genuine taste – ‘neither gaudy nor uselessly fine’ – awakens her admiration, and she again reverts to what she regards as her lost opportunity. ‘“And of this place,” thought she, “I might have been mistress!”’ Showing them round the house is Mrs Reynolds, a sort of cicerone who may be guilty of ‘family prejudice’ but whose testimony concerning the youthful qualities of Darcy and Wickham has authority for Elizabeth. She is a voice from
within
the house and thus acquainted with Darcy from his origins, and is not, as Elizabeth necessarily is, a purely social acquaintance. She shows them some miniatures, including one of Darcy (‘“the best landlord, and the best master”’) and invites Elizabeth to go and look at a larger portrait of Darcy upstairs in the picture-gallery. Elizabeth walks among the portraits

in quest of the only face whose features would be known to her. At last it arrested her – and she beheld a striking resemblance of Mr Darcy, with such a smile over the face as she remembered to have sometimes seen when he looked at her. She stood several minutes before the picture, in earnest contemplation…There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth’s mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original than she had ever felt in the height of their acquaintance…Every idea that had been brought forward by the housekeeper was favourable to his character, and as she stood before the canvas on which he was represented, she fixed his eyes upon herself, she thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever
raised before; she remembered its warmth, and softened its impropriety of expression.

One can almost detect the unformulated thought – ‘and of this man I might have been the wife’. It is a thought which explicitly occurs to her in due course.

Standing in the middle of the house, contemplating the qualities in the face in the portrait (qualities imparted and corroborated to some extent by the housekeeper), Elizabeth completes the act of recognition which started with the reading of Darcy’s letter. Notice the fact that the truest portrait is the large one in the more private part of the house upstairs; downstairs Darcy is only visible in ‘miniature’. We can imagine that the further a man goes from the house in which he is truly known, the more liable he is both to mis-representation and non-recognition. Standing before the large and true image of the real Darcy, Elizabeth has in effect completed her journey. When she next meets the original, outside in the grounds, she is no longer in any doubt as to his true worth. The rest of the book is, indeed, for the most part concerned with externalities – the mere melodrama of Wickham’s elopement with Lydia which gives Darcy a chance to reveal his qualities in action. But all this is only delay, not advance, in terms of the novel. For the most important action is complete when Elizabeth has finished the contemplation of the portrait. In answer to Jane’s question concerning when Elizabeth first realized she was in love with Darcy, Elizabeth replies: ‘I believe it must date from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.’ This is not wholly a joke, nor should it be taken to indicate that at heart Elizabeth is just another materialist in what is shown to be a distinctly materialistic society. In this case the grounds, the house, the portrait, all bespeak the real man – they represent a visible extension of his inner qualities, his true style. And if Pemberley represents an ordering of natural, social, and domestic space which is everything that the Bennet household is not, who shall blame Elizabeth for recognizing that she would be more truly at home there. However, it is true that such a remark could only be made in the context of a society which shared certain basic agreements
about the importance and significance of objects, domiciles, and possessions. One can well imagine Charlotte Brontë’s response to a remark of this kind. But these are matters to which we shall return.

Having mentioned the central importance of Darcy’s letter which contains an ‘account of my actions and their motives’ for Elizabeth to peruse and re-peruse in private, we might at this point consider the overall importance of letters in this novel. So much of the main information in the novel is conveyed by letter – whether it be Mr Collins’s vapid but acquisitive pomposity, or Miss Bingley’s competitive coldness, or Mr Gardiner’s account of Darcy’s role in securing the marriage of Lydia and Wickham – that there has been some speculation that the novel was initially conceived in epistolary form. Thus Brian Southam:

In
Sense and Sensibility
, twenty-one letters are mentioned, quoted, or given verbatim, and in
Pride and Prejudice
no fewer than forty-four, including references to a ‘regular and frequent’ correspondence between Elizabeth and Charlotte Lucas, and the further regular communications of Elizabeth and Jane with Mrs Gardiner, a very credible system of letters to carry much of the story in epistolary form. If this reconstruction is feasible it supports my theory that, like
Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice
was originally a novel-in-letters.

On the other hand critics have been drawn to note the brilliance of much of the dialogue and have suggested that the novel has close affinities with the drama. In an excellent essay entitled ‘Light and Bright and Sparkling’
³
Reuben Brower writes: ‘In analysing the ironies and the assumptions, we shall see how intensely dramatic the dialogue is, dramatic in the sense of defining characters through the way they speak and are spoken about’, and he proceeds to show just how much, and how subtly, is revealed in various passages of dialogue. Walton Litz in his book on Jane Austen
⁴
says that the tripartite structure of the novel is similar to the structure of a three-act play, and adds that in many of the passages ‘we are reminded of the novel’s affinities with the best in eighteenth-century drama’. But he also
notes that the early part of the novel is more dramatic than the latter.

Howard S. Babb has shown how Jane Austen plays on the word ‘performance’ in the early dialogues, bringing all the implications of the word together in the great scene at Rosings, where Elizabeth’s actual performance at the piano becomes the centre of a dramatic confrontation. But after the scene at Rosings, when Darcy’s letter begins Elizabeth’s movement toward self-recognition, the term ‘performance’ quietly disappears from the novel. The first half of
Pride and Prejudice
has indeed been a dramatic performance, but in the second half a mixture of narrative, summary, and scene carries the plot towards the conclusion.

As he rightly says, this reveals that Jane Austen felt able to take advantage both of scenic representation and authorial omniscience using third-person narrative, but I think there is another interesting aspect of the combination of the dramatic and the epistolary – particularly bearing in mind that as Mr Babb has noted, the word ‘performance’ fades after Elizabeth receives Darcy’s letter.

In essence a letter is written and read in retirement from the social scene; this is certainly true of Darcy’s major epistolary clarification. The letter enables him to formulate things and convey information in a way which would not be possible on a social occasion where public modes of utterance necessarily restrict the more private ones. A letter is also a transforming of action into words which may then be reflected on in a way which is impossible while one is actually involved in the action. ‘Introspection is retrospection’ said Sartre, and so is letter-writing, even if the letter seems to be written in the midst of some anxious situation. By combining the dramatic and the epistolary modes, Jane Austen has deftly set before us a basic truth – that we are both performing selves and reflective selves. It is in social performance that Elizabeth reveals all her vitality, vivacity, and wit, as well as her actual physical magnetism; it is in private reflection (‘reflection must be reserved for solitary hours’) that she matures in judgement, reconsiders first
impressions, and is able to make substantial changes to her mental reality-picture. How suitable, then, that after giving us some of the most brilliant ‘performances’ in English fiction, Jane Austen should allow her novel to move away from performance towards reflection after Darcy’s letter. She thus subtly offers an analogue of how – in her view – the individual should develop. For if the human being is to be fully human, then to the energy of performance must be added the wisdom of reflection.

The idea of the self as a performer has taken hold of much recent thought, and most people recognize that society is effectively held together by a series of tacitly acknowledged rituals in which we all play a number of different parts.
⁵
Jane Austen certainly believed in the value of the social rituals of her time – be they only balls, dinners, evening entertainments – and would have seen them, at their best, as ceremonies and celebrations of the values of the community. What she was also clearly aware of was how the failings of some of the performers – insensitivity, malice, arrogance, foolishness, and so on – could spoil the ritual, and transform a ceremony to be enjoyed into a nightmare to be endured, as Elizabeth has so often to endure her mother’s agonizing ceremonial violations. But although we are all role players for much of the time we spend with other people, there will obviously be a difference between those people who are unaware of the fact – who disappear into their roles, as it were – and those who are at all times quite aware that the particular role they are performing in any one particular situation is not to be identified as their whole self, that they have facets and dimensions of character which cannot always be revealed on every occasion. The former type of person may sometimes appear to be something of an automaton, incapable of reflection and detachment, while the latter type may often wish to make a gesture of disengagement from the roles he is called on to play, to indicate that he has not become mindlessly imprisoned in those roles. Such gestures are expressive of what Erving Goffman calls ‘role distance’.

Considering the characters in Jane Austen’s novel in this light, we can see that Mr Bennet has become completely cynical about the social roles he is called on to play. He extracts a somewhat
bitter pleasure from making gestures of disengagement from these roles, to compensate for the familial miseries brought about by his having married a sexually attractive but unintelligent woman (another example of the dangers of unreflective action based on first impressions – Lydia is her father’s daughter as well as her mother’s).
⁶
He effectively abdicates from the one role it is most incumbent on him to perform, i.e. the role of father. (Jane Austen seems quite interested in the effects on a family of ineffectual, absent, or ailing fathers – it usually indicates a dangerous lapse of central authority.) He has taken refuge in mockery just as he takes refuge in his library – both are gestures of disengagement from the necessary rituals of family and society. Mrs Bennet, incapable of reflection, loses herself in her performance. Unfortunately she has a very limited view of the requirements of that performance; lacking any introspective tendencies she is incapable of appreciating the feelings of others and is
only
aware of material objects – hats, dresses, uniforms – and marriage, not as a meeting of true minds but as a disposing of redundant daughters. On another level Lady Catherine de Bourgh has none of what Jane Austen elsewhere approvingly calls ‘the Dignity of Rank’ but only the mindlessness of rank. She thinks her position entitles her to dictate to other people and impose her ‘schemes’ on them (a recurrent word in the book). She has never thought out, or thought round, the full implications of her performance. Being incapable of reflection she makes people suffer. At the other extreme Mary Bennet sees herself as a sage reflector before she has had any experience; when reflection portentously precedes performance in this way it is shown to be comical and useless. Darcy of course
has
thought about all the implications of his role in society, at least by the end of the book. His hauteur makes him go in for a certain amount of ‘role distance’, as at the first ball when he slights Elizabeth to show his contemptuous detachment from the social ritual of the moment; but, unlike Wickham, he is not cynical about role-playing, and by the end his performing self is shown to be in harmony with his reflecting self.

Jane Bennet is incapable of role distance, but she has such a generous and high-minded conception of the roles she has to
perform – daughter, sister, lover, wife – that she strikes us at all times as being both sensitive and sincere. Much the same could be said of Bingley, whose rather spineless plasticity in the hands of Darcy’s more decisive will indicate nevertheless that his basic good nature extends to a willingness to perform roles which are thrust upon him – obviously a potential source of vulnerability. Elizabeth is of course special. She can indeed perform all the roles that her familial and social situations require of her; moreover she performs many of them with an
esprit
or an irony which reveal, as it were, a potential overspill of personality, as if there is more of her than can ever be expressed in any one role. She is also capable of role distance, not in her father’s spirit of cynicism but in her own spirit of determined independence. She will put truth to self above truth to role. Thus in two of the scenes which give us the most pleasure to read we see her refusing to take on the roles which people in socially superior positions attempt to impose on her. To Darcy’s first lordly proposal she refuses to respond in the role of passive grateful female, as he obviously expects she will; while in the face of Lady Catherine’s imperious insistence that she promise not to marry Darcy she refuses to act the compliant social inferior to which role Lady Catherine is relegating her. The assertion of the free-choosing self and its resistance to the would-be tyranny of roles imposed on it from socially superior powers is a spectacle which delights us now quite as much as it can have done Jane Austen’s contemporaries.