Pride and Prejudice
Chances are, you probably had to read Pride and Prejudice in college, and depending on your taste in literature – probably hated it. I did when I first read it. I thought the style was pompous, the characters silly moral asses, the plot predictable, and the relative importance of a woman changing her mind insignificant compared to the Napoleonic wars then raging throughout Europe. But I was a nineteen-year old kid, seduced by Nietzsche and writing Tolstoy pastiche. I wasn't mature enough to appreciate Jane Austen. I reread the novel years later, slowly and with a wider acquaintance with literature. And as surely as Elizabeth Bennett saw through her earlier prejudices and learned to love Mr. Darcy, I finally understood what Pride and Prejudice really was, and virtually haven't put it down since. As with any great novelist, Austen is taken up as a role model by many different ideologies that, one suspects, need role models instead of the authority of internally consistent logic. Much like Nietzsche, Austen has been the posthumous spokeswoman for feminism (the word did not exist until Fourier coined it, circa 1830) to Alt Right activists. (And yes, believe it or not, Nietzsche at one time was appropriated by feminists. Ain't that a hoot.) But Austen is far from a cut-and-dry political or philosophical novelist. While there are themes within her work you can interpret according to several ideologies, in my opinion you're wasting your time. F.R. Leavis said: “Why waste time reading Feliding when we have Jane Austen?”. Why waste time puzzling over whether Austen was a feminist or a Left Wing Hegelian when you have so much else, even at the syntactical level, that you can never exhaust with any here-today, gone-tomorrow political fad? Austen is one of those rare writers who straddles the worlds of both poplar fiction and academic study, and because of that there are many factions and schisms when it comes to enjoying her novels. On the one hand, there are the Janeites, who love the romance and dialogue of the novels as an end in themselves; on the other, every imaginable lit critic with an ideological axe to grind. I believe the best way to appreciate Austen is a middle way, because there is nothing inherently inferior in a novel with a good story, and yet learning how Austen uses free indirect style – which she invented – doesn't necessarily hamper enjoying Mr. Collin's hilarious pomposity. So – silly romance and Post-Lacanian Feminism aside – what is Pride and Prejudice really about? The answer might horrify you: epistemology (yikes!). Not epistemology in all it's Kantian mumbo nouemenomo but the everyday epistemology we deal with when we judge those we interact with. How accurate are our impressions of other people? Are we skilled in perceiving deceit, or merely deceiving ourselves? Can people change, and if so, how can we be sure we aren't being fooled again? Let's be honest: we judge people all the time. We make split-second judgments based mostly on appearance, and from there compartmentalize people into various stereotypes according to our own prejudices and past experience. Sometimes our judgments are right. I'm reasonably certain that someone who writes a twenty-thousand word complaint about there not being a Rey figurine in the Star Wars Monopoly Game is a petty person, who probably complains equally about a lot of petty things and is generally not the spark of any party or otherwise pleasant to be around voluntarily or otherwise. But I could be wrong; we often are. Perhaps this person has a deep seated love for Star Wars and Monopoly that surpasses my comprehension and has come to the limit in tolerating their separation. This is a petty example in itself – what does that say about me? – but misjudged calculations based on limited information is precisely the motor that generates so much fun in Pride and Prejudice, and shows us how important it is to know exactly who we are before we go about deciding who others are with dogmatic confidence. Elisabeth begins to dislike Mr. Darcy when he makes that insulting and infinitely quotable remark of not wanting to give second-hand beauties the charity of a dance at a ball. This would be the nail to the coffin of many relationships, but Elisabeth isn't such a serious person and she brushes off this insult with ease. It is not until she stays with Darcy at Longbourne that she begins to see aspects of his personality that call into question her early assessment. People say things they don't mean more often than not, especially in formal situations they aren't enjoying, and for all we know Mr. Darcy was only indulging in some locker-room talk that Elisabeth shouldn't have heard anyway because she was eavesdropping on him. Mr. Darcy is actually only shy, and lacking the confidence – despite his pride – to handle it, becomes socially awkward around strangers and expresses that awkwardness by projecting inferiority on others through his pride. Then along comes Mr. Collins and Elisabeth gets her turn to be haughty. Mr. Collins is a delightful mixture of obsequious docility and arrogance: he is practically a slave, in everything from fashion to opinion, to his patron Lady Catherine, yet he takes the status of that patron as a reflection of his own worth and, by a sly synecdoche that often puts his foot in his mouth, gives himself more value and greater airs for the simple reason that he is valuable enough to be her slave. This is one of the best examples of Austen's irony, which is the theme that moves her plots along and gives them such exciting yet unpredictable symmetry. Mr. Collin's proposal to Elisabeth is all about himself and completely devoid of any romantic feeling, yet overly secure at success because his inverted vanity is too blind to see that he's making a fool of himself. Elisabeth's judgment of Mr. Collins is correct, yet leads her to have false confidence in her estimation of both Darcy and Wickham, and as it is this false confidence that is the source of her pride, she will be shaken to her core when she discovers how her pride produces the prejudices by which she is deceived. It is not until she catches damning contradictions in Wickham's claims that she realizes that he fooled her simply because he appealed to her own dislike of Darcy to make himself more attractive, and it was this attractiveness which had really formed her opinion of him -- not any logical judgment of her own. Even though she gradually warms up to Darcy, nothing can repair the damage he does when he obstructs the marriage of Jane and Bingley, which he does however for a good reason according to his own limited information and miscalculation of character. He thinks Jane is a coquette – to put it bluntly – and doesn't want Bingley to get hurt. He is wrong of course, but by his own mutual misunderstanding of Elisabeth, he proposes to her nevertheless, and gives us one of the greatest scenes in English literature. Mr. Darcy's proposal mirrors Mr. Collin's in that it is more about himself than Elisabeth, but Mr. Darcy is open about his emotions, so much so that it's to his own detriment when he admits that he has fought against loving Elisabeth but cannot overcome himself (which is both really shitty as well as touchingly sweet). Elisabeth rejects Darcy because of what he did to Jane as well as what she believes he did to Wickham, one of which is utterly false and the other, while accurate, has mitigating circumstances because she doesn't yet understand Darcy's character. Darcy, on the other hand, loves Elisabeth because she has a feisty, independent spirit, but fails to perceive himself that his pride is too extreme, and is even undermining itself by motivating his “ungentlemanly" behavior. This insult hits Darcy hard and begins his transformation into the compassionate man his love for Elisabeth will finally bring about. Darcy clears himself in a letter that discloses his true behavior towards Wickham, as well as explains his motives for thwarting Jane, which in turn causes Elisabeth to re-evaluate her judgment not only of him but also her deepest securities about herself. It is this dialectic of what was right and what wrong about her perception of Darcy and Wickham that eventually allows Elisabeth to see Darcy as he actually was, and as Darcy himself becomes a better man, she in turn more accurately perceives that he is exactly the best man to complement her personality now that they understand each other by more fully understanding themselves. Thus Austen's irony works to reveal the underlying prejudices in both Elisabeth and Darcy by redirecting their pride towards re-evaluating themselves. Had they never misunderstood each other, they never would have had a reason to know themselves better and thus would have never developed into the perfect matches that they become. So what, today, is relevant about this silly little story about a woman who learns to change her mind? Austen dramatizes the importance, now all too often forgotten, of judging people accurately and fairly. We should be more patient with others, and learn not to extrapolate a fault into a general picture that only long intimacy will slowly erase. But we don't often have the time for intimacy, and given most people's manners, scarcely the inclination. Yet judging someone too harshly, without consideration of mitigating merits we are unaware of, has the flip side of misjudging selfish manipulators too kindly because they appeal to us, sexually or otherwise. Accurately judging a person's character is no easy task, but necessary; there are many pitfalls and setbacks, as well as disguises and dissimulations even the most cynical of us are sometimes too naïve to see. But there are few better guides into this treacherous territory of the human heart than Jane Austen, who was after all a child of the Enlightenment and had an unshakable faith in the power of reason to accomplish anything. Perhaps her faith was a bit itself naïve, but there are plenty of dark lessons to learn from these seemingly shallow novels, perhaps the chief among them being that until we have examined our own hearts with the shame that comes from mistaking another, we are just as prejudiced to ourselves as we are anyone we judge on the evidence of a moment. And then we have to live with ourselves as strangers even among the closeness of those we believe we love and perhaps never loved us back. |