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Lydia’s excesses in this scene cross both gender and class boundaries.

That Chamberlayne is a manservant is indicated by his silence and

passivity and by an implied contrast with the “lady” he is supposed to

represent; historically, his name suggests servitude and intimacy with

the family’s most private regions. Familiar behavior with a social infe-

rior links Lydia with her mother. Mrs. Bennet makes no attempt to

exclude servants from knowledge of confidential family matters such

as Lydia’s elopement (“was there a servant belonging to [the house-

hold],” Elizabeth wonders, “who did not know the whole story before

the end of the day?” [300]). Lydia’s familiarity echoes her amusement

at her sisters’ “formality and discretion” in refusing to gossip in front

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of a waiter earlier in the same chapter (236). Her narrative indiscre-

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tion (“not a soul” knew of the prank, except everyone in the house

at the time, a nearby aunt, eventually the five or six men who were

being gulled, finally her sisters and possibly the coachman) prefigures

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the account she later gives of her marriage to Wickham, which, in its

indiscriminate recitation of the events, exposes the secret of Darcy’s

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involvement. Austen in this scene demonstrates Lydia’s uncontain-

able sexuality. Instances of cross-dressing, in addition to necessitating

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a familiarity with details of feminine dress as well as with male and

female bodies, are commonly associated with extraordinary access to

the opposite sex: their chambers, their confidences, and their bod-

ies.47 Moreover, the sexual pun at the close of Lydia’s recitation sug-

gests that her pleasure is the most public aspect of this otherwise

officially private affair: “I thought I should have died. And
that
made

the men suspect something.” Her sexual pleasure is apparently a sign

all of the men are in the secret of how to interpret.

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That the game involves cross-dressing connects it to other instances

in the novel, including the one that frames this recitation, in which

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excessive concern and/or play with clothes mark Lydia’s frivolity,

heedlessness, and narcissism. In this scene, intending to treat her sis-

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ters to lunch, she has instead used up her money on an “ugly” bon-

net, which she buys for no cognizable reason except that “I thought

I might as well buy it as not,” a folly that she intends to redeem

only by more purchases of “ some prettier-coloured satin to trim it

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with fresh” (235). Her satisfaction in the transaction arises chiefly

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from the inconvenience and discomfort it causes her sisters when she

adds the bonnet to the luggage in the carriage: “How nicely we are

crammed in!’ cried Lydia. ‘I am glad I bought my bonnet, if it is only

for the fun of having another bandbox!’ ” (237).

On the morning of her wedding to Wickham she avoids hearing

“above one word in ten” of a lecture from her aunt on her folly in

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having lived with him for over two weeks before marriage, because

she is thinking, “you may suppose, of my dear Wickham. I longed to

know whether he would be married in his blue coat” (324). The close

association in Lydia’s mind and in her recitation of “dear Wickham”

and his blue coat amounts to a metonymic substitution, one prepared

for as early as her first interest in the militia, who are distinguishable

as objects of desire solely by their red coats: “It was next to impos-

sible that their cousin should come in a scarlet coat, and it was now

some weeks since they had received pleasure from the society of a man

in any other colour” (99). This is an infatuation she shares with her

mother. For Mrs. Bennet and Lydia, interest in clothes substitutes

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for interest in human beings and emerges at inappropriate and inop-

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portune moments. The mother’s attention is focused, in her distress

at Lydia’s fall and in her delight at her subsequent marriage, on the

arrangements for wedding clothes.

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Both women illustrate a narcissism consistently condemned in

Austen’s early novels, where to disregard the impact of one’s behavior

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or desires on one’s family and community is to become, in Poovey’s

term, “anarchic” (183). Lydia’s behavior, however, has a more spe-

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cifically historical referent. Her sexuality, particularly in her unrepen-

tance, links her to working-class sexual nonconformity in the latter

half of the eighteenth century, in the decades following the passage

of the 1753 Marriage Act. Her willingness to cohabit indefinitely

with Wickham, her confidence that he will eventually marry her,

signals not so much depravity or misplaced confidence as an assur-

ance that cohabitation is not antithetical to marriage. “She was sure

they should be married some time or other, and it did not much

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signify when” (327).48 As John Gillis has pointed out, because the

Hardwicke Act outlawed private weddings, it produced a distinction

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between those who considered themselves married and those who

had been “churched.” A growing number of couples, especially from

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the artisan and itinerant laboring classes, chose to ignore that distinc-

tion, cohabiting or performing private ceremonies designed to legiti-

mize offspring, and often dissolving bonds just as casually, without

apparent stigma attaching to either man or woman (Gillis 35–38).

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The collective zeal to ensure that Lydia and Wickham are married

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properly in a parish church and that Lydia remain with her aunt and

uncle until the banns have been published (despite the risk that a

pregnancy may become evident) cooperates with the need to settle

enough money on the couple to make them relatively comfortable

after the payment of their debts. The single motive is to bring them

into at least temporary conformity with the evolving standards that

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124

R o y a l R o m a n c e s

will guarantee the family’s survival in the class into which Jane’s and

especially Elizabeth’s eventual marriages move them.

Lydia’s story—shapeless, motiveless, and without a crisis (the news

of her elopement is Elizabeth’s crisis)—is manifestly not narrative; it

is not, indeed,
narrated
in any coherent way, even according to the

epistolary conventions that govern its recitation. The story is told, or is

rather made available, first through Jane’s two letters to Elizabeth, in

which any possibility of suspense, any resemblance to a typical elope-

ment narrative or Gretna Green novel,49 is deflected through their

having been delivered together instead of two or more days apart,

as they were written. A similar collapse of the elements of suspense

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occurs in the express that arrives, dramatically, at midnight and that

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is followed and contradicted a few hours later by the appearance of

Colonel Forster. There is, moreover, the hearsay testimony of Colonel

Denny, that Wickham does not intend to marry Lydia, and there is

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Lydia’s own letter, in which the confession, “I am going to Gretna

Green,” is tempered by her laughter. “You will laugh when you know

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where I am gone, and I cannot help laughing myself.” Indeed, she

“can hardly write for laughing,” and her laughter encloses her confes-

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sion in such a way as to usurp it as the key component of the letter:

“What a letter is this, to be written at such a moment,” comments

Elizabeth (300).

William Galperin has observed that “of the only Austen novels

that could have been epistolary narratives at some point,
Pride and

Prejudice
appears the more conducive by far to the epistolary mode”

(134), primarily because it “ maintains” the separation between sis-

ters that is dropped in
Sense and Sensibility
(135). He suggests that

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“ the epistolary version of
Pride and Prejudice
—to the degree that

one might be extrapolated from the final version—was likely more

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didactic in explicitly measuring the liabilities of the character who

became Elizabeth Bennet against the virtues of her forbearing sis-

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ter, Jane, whose role is diminished in the version of the novel that

has survived” (125). The inclusion of Lydia’s story, especially its epis-

tolarity, suggests the possibility of a tripartite structure, in which

Elizabeth is effectively contrasted with two foils, the overly cautious

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and self-effacing sister in unfashionable London and at home, and

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the heedless flirt at a fashionable watering place. Yet Austen seems to

have chosen not to exploit the didactic potential in the placing of the

three sisters. The letters, with the exception of Darcy’s to Elizabeth,

are haphazard in composition, delayed or confused in their delivery,

and, in consequence of both, they confound interpretation. But, to

the extent that they do confound interpretation—and here I include

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Th e N o v e l , R e g e n c y, D o m e s t i c a t i o n o f R o y a l t y 125

Darcy’s letter—they invite it. These are letters to be mulled over and

discussed rather than responded to. The letters are not dialogic in the

way that letters must be in the kind of didactic epistolary fiction to

which Galperin compares
Pride and Prejudice
.50

There is, however, a seduction story of sorts in the novel that, by

inviting a comparison to Lydia’s history, implicitly demonstrates its

disruptive potential and refusal to conform to the narrative conven-

tions that cooperate in the novel’s gentrifying project. This is the

story of Darcy’s sister Georgiana and her own aborted elopement

with Wickham. Here all the conventional elements of a seduction

narrative are contained within Darcy’s formal rendering:

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“ My sister, who is more than ten years my junior, was left to the

guardianship of my mother’s nephew, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and

myself. About a year ago, she was taken from school, and an estab-

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lishment formed for her in London; and last summer she went with

the lady who presided over it, to Ramsgate; and thither also went

Mr. Wickham, undoubtedly by design; for there proved to have been a

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prior acquaintance between him and Mrs. Younge, in whose character

we were most unhappily deceived; and by her connivance and aid, he

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so far recommended himself to Georgiana, whose affectionate heart

retained a strong impression of his kindness to her as a child, that she

was persuaded to believe herself in love, and to consent to an elope-

ment. She was then but fifteen, which must be her excuse; and after

stating her imprudence, I am happy to add, that I owed the knowledge

of it to herself. I joined them unexpectedly a day or two before the

intended elopement, and then Georgiana, unable to support the idea

of grieving and offending a brother whom she almost looked up to as

a father, acknowledged whole to me . . . Mr. Wickham’s chief object was

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