Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (35 page)

unquestionably my sister’s fortune, which is thirty thousand pounds;

but I cannot help supposing that the hope of revenging himself on

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me, was a strong inducement. His revenge would have been complete

indeed.” (221–22)

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Darcy’s version of Georgiana’s story is Lydia’s, reframed in narratively

comprehensible terms. Fifteen-year-old girl goes to a watering place

under dubious chaperonage, where she is pursued by a designing

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rake, whose motives comprehend both avarice and sexual revenge,

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and who, with the help of an accomplice, persuades her to temporar-

ily abandon her allegiances and values—a lapse for which she pays

by remaining nearly silent throughout the remainder of the novel.

In contrast to Lydia’s story, Darcy’s rendition gives cogent reasons

and ample evidence to account for Georgiana’s temporary folly: she

is more than ten years younger than her brother/guardian; she has

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an “affectionate heart” that retains “strong impressions” and that is,

neatly, the instrument of her reclamation, when she is “unable to sup-

port the idea of grieving and offending a brother whom she almost

looked up to as a father.” Wickham is much more the conventional

villain in this narrative, the Lovelace who, “undoubtedly by design,”

engineered the entire plot, with the help of at least one accomplice (in

contrast, in his elopement with Lydia, he is fleeing old acquaintances

rather than seeking co-conspirators; his friend Denny will attest to

nothing more than a conviction that he never intended to marry, and

Mrs. Younge, rather than acting as procuress, merely hides the lov-

ers after their flight). Darcy’s recitation contains all the elements of

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conventional narrative: motive, suspense, crisis, even exposition and

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explanation of apparent gaps: “undoubtedly by design,” “in whose

character we were most unhappily deceived.”

Darcy, and through him Elizabeth, attempt to impose this narra-

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tive on Lydia’s story. The letters, as pieces of evidence, give a com-

prehensive picture of the events, but as narrative they are garbled,

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incomplete, in conflict with one another—an incoherent polyglot

rather than a sustained story. In contrast, Darcy and Elizabeth con-

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struct Lydia’s story as a kind of poor man’s version of Georgiana’s:

Wickham’s motive is no longer 30,000 pounds and revenge on an

ancient enemy but ignominious avoidance of debt and easy sex. But

he is still the unscrupulous villain who preys on an innocent young

girl. Lydia’s folly is compounded by the conspicuous absence of a

controlling male, but she is no less a victim, no less, in Elizabeth’s

despairing assessment, “ lost”: “ She has no money, no connections,

nothing that can tempt him to—she is lost for ever” (287). Elizabeth

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has abandoned her picture of Lydia as a prostitute in the making and

replaced it with one in which she and Darcy, as substitutes for Lydia’s

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inadequate father, assume responsibility for her fall:

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“When I consider,” she added, in a yet more agitated voice, “that
I

might have prevented it!—
I
who knew what he was . . . Had his char-

acter been known, this could not have happened. But it is all, all too

late now!” (287)

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The temptation that becomes the focus now is Wickham’s, not Lydia’s;

his is the character that needed more attention paid to it. As with the

story of Georgiana’s near-ruin, emphasis here is on information that,

if known, might have prevented the calamity, and that, now known,

makes it narratively comprehensible. This is no longer the story of

the inevitable fate of a determined flirt, in which gaps in information

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signal, largely, lack of interest rather than mystery or hidden motive.

It has become the story of a wolf in the fold, of an unscrupulous

charmer, in whose character the citizens of Meryton and Brighton,

synecdochically concentrated in the Longbourn family, were “most

unhappily deceived.” In this way, both Darcy and Elizabeth exercise

the same logical negotiations Austen displayed in her letter to Martha

Lloyd, in their efforts to reclaim Lydia’s story, if not Lydia herself:

Without knowing what else to do about it, they resolve to think that

she would have been respectable if the men in her life had behaved

tolerably by her at first.

The mass of depositions that make up the bulk of the commission

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report, like the set of letters that contain the information on Lydia’s

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elopement, are inconclusive, full of conjecture and contradiction—

incoherent in their very comprehensiveness. The rumors and gos-

sip that constitute another part of public discourse about the royal

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marriage—of Caroline’s friendship with the notorious Lady Oxford,

for instance—are equally inconclusive in their very interestedness, as

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Austen’s rhetoric demonstrates. Does the friendship itself corrupt?

Is it proof of a corruption already existing? Austen’s slippery termi-

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nology entertains both possibilities. Either the friendship, like the

unhappy marriage itself, is “ bad” for Caroline, or it is a manifesta-

tion, the mark and result of a badness whose source is still to be

determined.51 In this way Austen’s epistolary response to Caroline’s

letter recapitulates the trajectory of her novel: first, like Mr. Bennet,

she effectively throws up her hands: “I do not know what to do about

it.”52 Then she recasts the story as a narrative of patriarchal responsi-

bility gone bad. It now becomes a coherent, if incomplete, tale, with a

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known and familiar cause and a series of foreseeable effects. The novel

endorses and replicates this change of both heart and focus, in its rev-

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olution in presenting not only Lydia’s narrative but also Mr. Bennet’s

culpability.

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In her despairing speech to Darcy, Elizabeth suggests the fictive

and ideological meaning behind Lydia’s elopement. The elision in

her accounting of her sister’s unfortunate position is psychologi-

cally telling: Lydia has “no money, no connections, nothing that can

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tempt [Wickham] to—.” To what? Propriety does not prevent her

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from completing either that sentence or the thought it springs from.

Unlike the ellipses in the commission report, which hide a number

of unmentionable possibilities, Elizabeth trails off when she’s about

to speculate on the one possible respectable outcome to the story—

marriage—replacing it instead with the melodramatic statement,

“she is lost for ever,” echoed a few lines later in “it is all, all too

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late now!” Both statements turn out to be incorrect, and their inac-

curacy—and narrative unreliability—is underscored when they are

endorsed by the prosy Mary Bennet, “ ‘Unhappy as the event must be

for Lydia, we may draw from it this useful lesson; that loss of virtue

in a female is irretrievable—that one false step involves her in endless

ruin’. . . . Elizabeth lifted up her eyes in amazement, but was too much

oppressed to make any reply” (298).

Elizabeth’s self-editing reveals not her foolishness but the erotic

content of her conversation with Darcy, the extent to which the sexu-

ality in both Georgiana’s and Lydia’s stories has been transferred to

the one authorized romance of the three. Elizabeth trails off before

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introducing the subject of marriage because the subject has been rein-

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troduced into her consciousness and her fantasies—and she hopes in

Darcy’s as well—by the visit to Pemberley. Both her increased mod-

esty and her increased desire make it an impossible word to voice. At

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the same time, her use of “tempt,” precisely because it is followed

by no specific temptation, reinserts the language of desire into the

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conversation, reminding Darcy that his original desire for Elizabeth

most often manifested itself as a temptation—a “danger” (88, 93)—

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against which he “ struggled” (210) but was ultimately unable to

resist. Elizabeth thus positions herself as tempting—the only woman

of the three who is legitimately erotically desirable per se—just at the

moment when the conversation hovers over the point of transition

between desire and its legitimate culmination in marriage.

Darcy’s relating of the Georgiana/Wickham story marks the first

step in this renegotiation of the novel’s sexual content. In his let-

ter to Elizabeth, he begins his explanation with an acknowledgment

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of Wickham’s erotic hold over her imagination, “Here again I shall

give you pain—to what degree you only can tell. But whatever may

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be the sentiments which Mr. Wickham has created, a suspicion of

their nature shall not prevent me from unfolding his real character. It

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adds even another motive” (220). In the narrative that follows Darcy

begins by recasting Wickham, who hitherto has been simply an attrac-

tive, “agreeable” (110) young man, as the dashing and unscrupulous

rake who seduces young girls. In the course of this transaction, he

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also makes Wickham over into the usurping brother, the Edmund to

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Darcy’s Edgar (old Mr. Darcy died, significantly, just when both men

reached their majority), who must be excised from the family and

replaced by the equally agreeable Colonel Fitzwilliam.53 The simili-

tude, and consequently the rivalry, between Darcy and Wickham is

underscored by Georgiana’s transfer of innocent trust from the one to

the other, a transfer that also inserts a suggestion of incestuous desire

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into the story. Darcy then converts similitude into appropriation, first

by demonstrating, in his assurances to Elizabeth about Wickham’s

motives, that he has access to his rival’s thoughts, and then by effec-

tively replacing him as brother/lover. At the same time he establishes

his position as head of the household, manager of the estate, and

putative father.

The story of feminine bad behavior disrupts existing narrative expec-

tations that are fundamentally class based. Its recasting, in Austen’s

letter and the plot of her novel, as a story of “natural” weakness insuf-

ficiently corrected is crucial to the project of bourgeois achievement

and consolidation, appropriation, and assimilation of aristocratic pre-

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rogative, in which both the novel and the culture are engaged. The

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use of the two seduction stories—the overlaying of the sentiment of

one onto the incoherent farce of the other, as well as the arrogation

of the erotic potential in both to serve the legitimate romance—illus-

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trates that transaction whereby the energies of what is illicit are trans-