Mrs Bennet’s vulgarity displays itself fully in ch 18, vol 1, when the Bennets and Mr Collins attend Netherfield Ball. Mrs Bennet tactlessly blunders on at the dinner table about the ‘advantages of the match’ between Jane and Mr Bingley, which is premature, and has not occurred yet. Indeed we can tell that Elizabeth anticipated her mother’s ‘loud and felicitous self-gratulation’, as she considered it ‘a most unlucky perverseness’ to be seated near Mrs Bennet at the table. We are exposed to the final unpleasant element of Mrs Bennet’s character in ch 7, vol 3, where Mrs Bennet, when hearing that the eloping and disgraceful Lydia will marry the scoundrel Wickham, reacts in a most absurd and superficial manner. Far from ‘being humbled by any remembrance of (Lydia’s) misconduct’, Mrs Bennet, ‘all in a flutter’, hysterically proclaims the marriage ‘delightful indeed’, and goes on to announce her daughter ‘well married’ in her shameful union with Wickham. Thus, the character of Mrs Bennet is finally laid bare to the reader as frivolous, shallow, and lacking completely of any moral sensitivity.
However, although on first impressions it seems that Austen is highly vindictive and critical of Mrs Bennet, on taking a closer look at her situation, another impression of Mrs Bennet is formed. Although her constant quest to marry of her daughters well often seems tiresome and overdone, Mrs Bennet is merely acting like a good and responsible parent should. Although her methods seem questionable, she is ultimately doing what is best for her daughters, and trying to secure them a comfortable lifestyle and a good financial position. On closer inspection, Austen is using a gentle, Horation shade of satire to mock Mrs Bennet’s situation rather than her purpose. I feel that Austen is actually strongly criticizing the frenetic marriage market of Regency society, and the fact that, for women, marriage was absolutely necessary in order to ensure themselves financial security for the rest of their lives.
I also feel that Austen is strongly criticizing the huge inequality between the sexes in Regency society. Through Mrs Bennet, she shows that the conditions of economic life in that period favoured men and restricted women. The entailed fortune that so obviously benefits Mr Collins and restricts Mrs Bennet is merely the epitome of an economic privilege granted of men and an economic restriction imposed on women. Men such as Wickham and Collins, no matter how hapless and undeserving, must be provided for and given every opportunity to earn their way. Women in contrast are prepared for nothing but display. Their goal is not to accomplish, but to ‘be accomplished’, or as Miss Bingley puts it, to be ‘esteemed accomplished. Indeed the first two sentences of the novel make subtle and ironic point of this disparity. Here we see that men do not need to marry. They may ‘want’ or desire wives, but unlike women who need to marry to secure financial security, men can remain bachelors for the rest of their lives and still live in great comfort. We do indeed know from her letters to her sister Cassandra, that Jane Austen, who remained an unmarried maid until she died, was not in a good financial situation. Her family situation moreover, imposed upon her a heightened awareness of the economic contradictions between genteel men and women, for Austen had five brothers who had what she did not: access to work that paid, access to inheritance and privilege, and access to the status that belonged to being both prosperous and male. Through Mrs Bennet, Austen criticises the inequality between men and women in the Regency period. She uses the marriage market of that time as a paradigm of the power men had over women, and the economic restrictions imposed on women by male-dominant society.
Another, equally comical character through whom Austen exposes aspects of her society is Mr Collins, who we first hear off in ch 13, vol 1, in a letter which is Mr Bennet reads amusedly at the breakfast table. We can immediately guess his character from his letter, which is masterpiece of pompous condescension, pedantically worded, giving us a complacent, snobbish and conceited image of him. It announces his arrival at Longbourne, and anticipates the role he is to play in the plot. Thus, we already form an opinion of Mr. Collins character before we are even formally introduced to him. Upon hearing that Mr Bennet’s estate, should he die, would be entailed to Mr Collins, a man who ‘nobody cared anything about’, Mrs Bennet gets hysterical and angry, proclaiming Collins an ‘odious man’ and a ‘false friend’. Such is the fickleness her character, that hearing the complements paid to her by Collins through the letter ‘did away much of her ill will’.
Upon his arrival inside the house Mr Collins begins to commend each and every item of furniture within it. Mrs Bennet would, on any other occasion, have been delighted at this, but she knows that when Mr Collins entails the estate, all that he admires will be his own. Thus we see the hollow, false edge of Collins’s character. Austen then goes on to describe Jane and Elizabeth as ‘not the only objects of Mr Collins desire’. Here we clearly see that Mr Collins sees the girls as objects, and his views of them are purely materialistic. Mr Collins continues to insinuate the Bennet household throughout the evening, and he is again brutally summed up by Austen in ch 15, vol 1, where he is described as an insensible man with a ‘deficiency of nature’, full of ‘pride, obsequiousness, and self-importance’. Austen’s general use of oxy-morons here such as self-importance and humility, emphasize Collins’s pretension, and show the reader he is two faced. His primary aim at Longbourne was to marry one of the Bennet daughters, thus making the entailment of Mr Bennet’s estate to himself more bearable on the Bennets. He feels he can choose any of the daughters, and they would not dare refuse him. Upon hearing that Jane was no longer available, he quickly ‘changed to Elizabeth, whilst Mrs Bennet was stirring the fire’. Here Austen is vindictively attacking Mr Collins’s lack of passion, using vivid imagery and harsh satire. We further see his insincerity in his proposal to Elizabeth, where he falsely claims that he had ‘singled her out as his companion for future life the moment he had entered the house’. We know this is a lie, as he had first intended to marry Jane.
Austen now adopts an epistolary mode of writing to reveal the progressing facets of Mr Collins throughout the rest of the novel. We clearly see his sycophantic and superficial nature when Elizabeth visits him and his new wife. However, Austen criticises him most viciously in his second letter to the Bennets, where he condones Mr Bennet on Lydia’s elopement. He tells Mr Bennet that ‘the death of his daughter would have been a blessing in comparison’ to her elopement. Although he is a man of religion, he still advises Mr Bennet to ‘close the doors’ on his daughter. Collins is wonderfully caricatured through his letters, which perfectly display his unfortunate pride and condescension.
Through Mr Collins, Austen vindictively attacks the clergy of Regency society, criticising their mercenary, and unholy, unchristian qualities. We are also extremely disturbed to hear that, if Wickham had failed in the militia, he would ‘have gone into the church’. The fact that this womaniser and drunkard should even consider becoming a clergyman is absolutely outrageous. I feel that, unlike with Mrs Bennet, Austen is strongly and nastily criticizing Mr Collins and the clergy of her time, using biting Juvenalean satire to convey her message to the reader.
It is indeed ‘a truth universally acknowledged’ that the ebullience and confident assurance of its comedy, combined with its fairy tale gratifications, has made Pride and Prejudice the best known, and possibly the best liked, of all the Jane Austen novels. Initially called ‘First Impressions’, Pride and Prejudice brilliantly describes the fusion between upper class and bourgeoisie society. In it Austen flaunts beautifully her rare and uncanny ability to mock her characters exaggerated faults, and in doing so, criticize many aspects of the ostentatious and repressive world in which she lived.
