All Things Pride and Prejudice

Surely Elizabeth comes as the exception to some norms of behavior. A stile-jumper by conviction as well as instinct, she not only flouts convention, she holds it up for deliberate mockery. But does she exhibit the same
relationship to her community’s patterns of thought? She makes terrible blunders of judgment, yet don’t these also proceed from her energy, freedom, and brilliance—her desire either to laugh at everyone, as she would have it, or “willfully to misunderstand them”, as Darcy believes? If anyone is unlikely to have her opinions dictated to her, one would think, it is Elizabeth Bennet. Yet this is precisely what happens, and in the most important of all instances. There is no more crucial judgment in the novel than the one she makes about Darcy at the very start of their acquaintance. Pride, she decides: inexcusable, insufferable pride. The word becomes the tonic note of the book, and the whole course of the heroes’ relationship can be charted through the reorchestrations its meaning undergoes.
 Some  three hundred pages later, Elizabeth finds herself telling her father that Darcy “has no improper pride”, and the novel is ready to come to rest on its final, glorious harmony. But how does Elizabeth come to make that pivotal judgment in the first place? Quite simply, it is handed to her by her community. The movement
of the word “pride” through the narrative and into Elizabeth’s voice and mind follows the course I just traced: from community to family to individual. It begins as one of the judgments made by the collective consciousness
at the first assembly, the very first negative judgment rendered against Darcy: “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”. By the end of the evening, the opinion has hardened: “His character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world.” Mrs. Bennet, we are given to understand, participates in the formation of this opinion, but her feelings are couched in words such as “dislike” and “resentment,” with no characterological judgment made. By the next morning, however, she has ceded both authority and articulation to the voice of her community: “ ‘every body says that he is ate up with pride’ ” . She is talking here (chapter 5) to her daughters and the Miss Lucases, and the word proceeds to circulate within this inlet of the communal lake. Charlotte accepts the characterization, dissenting only as to its moral valence: “ ‘His pride,’ said Miss Lucas, ‘does not offend me so much as pride often does, because there is an excuse for it . . . he has a right to be proud.’ ” Now and only now is the word taken up by Elizabeth: “ ‘That is very true . . . and I could easily forgive his pride if he had not mortified mine.’ ” Playing on Charlotte’s emphasis of the personal pronoun, she reverses the moral direction of her friend’s analysis with typical irony, but assimilates the
characterological assessment without a thought. Mary affirms the consensus in her own way (“ ‘Pride . . . is a very common failing, I believe’ ”), but her remarks serve mainly as a device to end the conversation, and the point of the episode seems precisely to have been the introduction of the word “pride” into Elizabeth’s head. Had Austen simply wished to show her making the judgment herself, either at the moment of Darcy’s snub or afterwards, she could have done so with a great deal less effort.
Even the feeling of “mortification” connected with the snub — at least as important to Elizabeth’s subsequent behavior as is the judg-ment itself — is urged on her by her community. Elizabeth was certainly not
pleased with Darcy’s behavior at first, but neither was she much affected by it: “Elizabeth remained with no cordial feelings towards him. She told the story however with great spirit among her friends; for she had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in any thing ridiculous” . There is a wide space between thinking something “ridiculous” and being “mortified” by it, and if Elizabeth had been mortified at the time, as she certainly is later, she would hardly have “told the story with great spirit among her friends.” Indeed, when she and Jane discuss the ball that same night, Darcy isn’t so much as mentioned, not even when the snobbery of Bingley’s sisters is explicitly canvassed. As Mrs. Bennet perceives (“I beg you not to put it into Lizzy’s head to be vexed by his ill treatment” ), Elizabeth’s resentment arises in the course of that next morning’s conversation, when she finds that her friends take the incident as a more serious affront than she was at first inclined to do. In short, while Elizabeth herself sends the story of  Darcy’s snub out into the community, she gets her opinion and
feeling about it handed back to her.
Elizabeth’s second important judgment in the early stages of the novel, her delighted approval of George Wickham, is no less an act of unconscious mental conformity. Here the conformity is not to an opinion, but to the very way the community makes and maintains its opinions, that is, to the logical pattern I analyzed above. Another syllogistic mousetrap snaps shut, and it stays shut for twenty chapters. Elizabeth’s response to Wickham is encapsulated in a silent thought that occurs during their long conversation about Darcy’s perfidy and pride. The subject has already rendered her indistinguishable from her mother (“ ‘He is not at all liked in Hertfordshire. Every body is disgusted with his pride’ ” ), and at one point she exclaims: “To treat in such a manner, the godson, the friend, the favourite of his father!” — She could have added, “A young man too, like you, whose very countenance may vouch for your being amiable.”
In other words:
All men of good countenance are amiable.
Wickham is a man of good countenance.
Wickham is amiable.
Not only is the logic the same, so is its grounding in desire. Elizabeth, like her community, won’t let the facts stand in the way of what she wants to believe. This is, of course, a well-attested observation in the critical literature; the modification I am making concerns the origin of Elizabeth’s “prejudice.” It may well be that most everyone in the world thinks this way—excessively syllogistic, insufficiently self-critical, blinded by desire—but had Austen wished to make that point, she would have done so. The point she does make is much more specific; Elizabeth is presented not as a typical person, but as a typical member of her community. She assents to and helps propagate collective judgments; she takes her opinions for universal truths; witty as she is, she risks the same mental gridlock as those around her.
Darcy, the product of a different community, displays different shortcomings. His errors are ones of behavior, not of thought. But Elizabeth, in one of her least admirable moments, blurts out what could be the motto of all
the “good people of Meryton”: “ ‘I beg your pardon;—one knows exactly what to think’ ”.
The intellectual fault that Elizabeth shares with her community can be understood at its most basic level as an inability to deal with contradiction.
Much of Mrs. Bennet’s foolishness, and the humor of that foolishness, consists of an inability to see the contradictions in her own thinking: “ ‘Well, Lizzy . . . what is your opinion of this sad business of Jane’s? For my part, I am determined never to speak of it again to anybody. I told my sister Philips so the other day’ ”. Mr. Bennet’s moral indolence is made possible through the equivocations of irony: “ ‘I admire all three of my sons-in-law highly . . . Wickham, perhaps, is my favorite, but I think I shall like your husband quite as well as Jane’s’ ”. The tension between his disgust for Wickham and the recognition that he is responsible for Wickham’s presence in his family is resolved by the use of a single word, “admire,” to name both itself and its opposite. But the leading exemplar of the desire to evade contradiction is Elizabeth herself. The most telling examples occur in dialogues with Jane and Charlotte, her two intimates. In one, Jane tries to suggest that Darcy may not be as bad as Elizabeth has concluded. In another, Charlotte simply wants her to understand that she, Charlotte, believes that “happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance” and that “it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life”. In neither case does Elizabeth alter her opinion even slightly, and in both she closes the exchange with an arrogantly self-affirming gesture. The first we have already seen: “one knows exactly what to think.” The other is deaf even to the possibility of contradiction: “You make me laugh Charlotte; but it is not sound. You know it is not sound, and that you would never act in this way yourself.” It is no wonder that she spends so much of the novel being surprised.
Finally, even for Elizabeth, cognitive inertia becomes behavioral and emotional stasis. On the fundamental question that confronts her she is, for all her rapid motion, as jammed stuck as her mother ever is. Replying to
Charlotte’s suggestion that a young woman should secure a man first and then worry about falling in love, she says: “Your plan is a good one . . . where nothing is in question but the desire of being well married; and if I were determined to get a rich husband, or any husband, I dare say I should adopt it”. “Or any husband”: like Richardson’s Clarissa, Elizabeth has forsworn marriage. But though the gesture may have been conventional by this point, Austen does not use it casually. Essentially reflexive, it carries for that very reason a tone of utter finality. And although one may see it as nothing more than a prop that allows Elizabeth to maintain her self-esteem until the right man comes along, that observation points to the essential problem: the right man comes along, yet Elizabeth remains stuck in her old pattern. A complacent consciousness is at war with unsettled feelings, but complacency is winning. The process of breaking this pattern constitutes the burden of the
plot: the positive outcome is a foregone conclusion only in retrospect. At this point, certain of what she knows and of what she wants, Elizabeth has stopped questioning herself. She knows exactly what to think, and she knows exactly how to act. She is, like her community, “well-fixed.”