Yet while Wickham has the appearance of goodness and virtue, this appearance is deceptive. His true nature begins to show itself through his attachment to Miss King for purely mercenary purposes and then through Darcy's exposition of his past.
Lydia is a reckless, flirtatious, sixteen year old girl, who was put out in society too early for her to have a real understanding of what is appropriate and just how insignificant she is. She is the favorite of Mrs. Bennet, because the two have such similar characters. Lydia is constantly obsessed with the officers in the regiment, and sees no purpose to life beyond entertainment and diversion. She lacks any sense of virtue, propriety or good-judgment, as seen in her elopement with Wickham.
The marriage between Lydia and Wickham was the result of irresponsible behaviour. Wickham did not mean to elope with Lydia, but he had to leave Brighton because he had many debts and he is naturally impulsive . He took advantage that Lydia wanted to go with him, and made her believe they had run away to elope. Wickham had no intentions of marrying Lydia as he was still in search of a wealthy wife after having failed with Darcy’s sister and Miss King. The elopement was a disgrace to the Bennet name and if they did not get married it would be worse. Wickham finally married Lydia thanks to Darcy, who bribed him and took care of all the financial arrangements.
This fixed up marriage was doomed from the start. There is no mutual understanding and little communication between the two. This marriage is barely accepted by society and there are no feeling of love involved, eventually Lydia’s passion for Wickham will fade and he will get into more debt. This marriage was over before it started.
Mrs Bennet is very like Lydia; she dreamt of marrying a gentleman and flirted with all the soldiers, just like her daughter. She has very little knowledge of how outrageous her behaviour and actions are and so continues to damage the Family’s reputation at ever public occasion.
Mrs Bennet married above herself. Mr Bennet is a relatively sensible, intelligent gentleman and Mrs Bennet is in every way his opposite, with her tactless behaviour and inferior family connections.
Mrs Bennet does not get upset when she is the object of her husband’s sarcasm and is not intelligent enough to discriminate between important and trivial information. When she is frustrated she complains about her nerves. Mrs Bennet does not understand Mr Bennet, and whilst Mrs Bennet’s aim in life is to get her daughters married to rich men, Mr Bennet is not interested in family affairs and does not seem to think much of his daughters, or girls in general. ‘They are all silly and ignorant like other girls.’ Jane Austen tells us his favourite daughter is Elizabeth. ‘I must throw a good word for my Lizzy.’
Mr Bennet is not blinded by fatherly love and can see the faults in all his daughters, though it seems that he does favour Elizabeth and Jane.
Although very likeable he is not a strong father figure and is unable to discipline his children. Together the Bennets provide no strong adult influences, and so are left with children like Lydia, whose shallowness highlights her parents’ faults.
Their marriage was based on an initial physical attraction. Mr Bennet was ‘captivated by youth and beauty’ and the appearance of good humour that goes with these. The initial physical attraction dies quickly and all Mr Bennet’s ‘views of domestic happiness were overthrown’. He lost all respect for his wife. Furthermore, Mrs Bennet has ‘low connections’ and little money. She was beneath him socially. Therefore they were not well matched in character or social background. He made the wrong choice. At the end of the novel he confidentially admits his mistake to Elizabeth.
Unlike the Bennets, the Gardiners are a sensible, lively and intelligent couple. They seem to love each other and work well together. Mr Gardiner is Mrs Bennet’s brother. He is a tradesman. The couple live in Gracechurch, a street in the City of London. Elizabeth looks up to Mrs Gardiner, not to Mrs Bennet.
Elizabeth Bennet is the second oldest of five sisters, she is lively, quick-witted, sharp-tongued, bold and intelligent. Elizabeth is good-looking, and is especially distinguished by her fine eyes. The importance of her eyes may be symbolic of her abilities of perception. She has pride in her abilities to perceive the truth of situations and of people's characters. However, her perceptive abilities fail her frequently because she is influenced by vanity and judges people rashly, in the cases of Mr Wickham and Mr Darcy for example.
Darcy and Elizabeth’s relationship does not get off to an excellent start.Darcy at first seems to be self important and proud, the impression everyone, including Elizabeth, has of him after his attending the first dance. Darcy offends Elizabeth. Bingley suggests that Darcy dances with Elizabeth, but Darcy thinks ‘she is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt’ him. Furthermore, he says he is not going to dance with women that have been ‘slighted by other men’. Elizabeth overhears this and is not left with many ‘cordial feelings towards him’. This makes Elizabeth prejudiced against Darcy.
Later on Darcy starts to feel attracted to Lizzie. He admires ‘the beautiful expression of her eyes’, her figure and above all the ‘playfulness’ of her character. The stay in Netherfield, when Jane gets sick, shows that Darcy is attracted to Elizabeth despite himself. He seems to enjoy talking to Elizabeth and is beginning to feel the danger of paying too much attention to her. Elizabeth still is prejudiced, but she seems to enjoy the challenge of talking to him. Wickham’s story that Darcy refused to keep his father’s promise after his death affects her opinion on Darcy.
Despite her mother, family situation and hostility towards him Darcy cannot erase his feelings for Elizabeth. Whenever he approaches Elizabeth in an attempt to express these feelings he ends up offending her more, for example, his first proposal, consisting of far too much reasoning and understanding of Elizabeth’s inferiority, did not go down well with her and she was more offended that the had said and thought these things than flattered that he wanted to marry her in spite of them.
Darcy Harbours a much deeper love for Elizabeth as he loves every aspect of her and always has. Elizabeth only realises she loves him from his actions at the end of the novel and her acknowledgement that she had been prejudiced against him.
Their marriage will be hard for society to accept, simply for the reason that Elizabeth is seen as inferior to Darcy. The deep mutual love they both share should be enough to overcome the problems society makes for them. The independent thinking of the two could make the marriage either exciting or exhausting and they will likely have many arguments because they are both as stubborn as each other. The two could end up with deeper respect for one and other or hating each other.
Jane is the oldest in the family. Beautiful, good-tempered, sweet, amiable, humble and selfless, Jane is universally well-liked. She refuses to judge anyone badly, always making excuses for people when Elizabeth brings their faults to her attention. Her tendency to give people the benefit of the doubt leads her to be hurt by insincere friends such as Caroline Bingley, although in the end her judgments seem to be more accurate than Elizabeth's overall and to do her much less harm. She say she always speaks her mind which suggests she may not have many thoughts in her mind as she rarely shares an opinion. She seems to be almost unreal in her innocent views about everyone and is quite shy and held back about her own feelings, it is unclear whether this is out of courtesy or stupidity.
Mr. Bingley, much like Jane, is an amiable and good-tempered person. He is not overly concerned with class differences, and Jane's poor family connections are not a serious deterrent to his attachment to her. Bingley is very modest and easily swayed by the advice of his friends, as seen in his decision not to propose to Jane as a result of Darcy's belief that Jane is not really attached to him. Also like Jane it does not appear that he is very intelligent. ( ‘My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them-by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents.’ in other words he cant make sense of any ideas he has.) His manners are excellent but this may simply be because he has no other feelings to express except those of an over the top happiness and delight in everything, this could be seen as merely childlike stupidity.
Jane and Bingley fall in love very quickly and their relationship is practically perfect in society’s views. They both respect their social obligations and refuse to visit the other improperly; however their families cause them problems.
Bingley’s sisters don’t dislike Jane, but wish for their brother to marry someone ‘better’. Mrs Bennet’s tactless meddling in her daughters relationship creates the view that Jnae only wishes to marry for money and Jane’s lack of apparent enthusiasm leads to confusion of her feelings. When torn apart from Bingley she tries to hide her heartache from her family but it was easy to see that when reunited Jane was overjoyed.
Bingley’s love for Jane remains constant; the only thing that changes is the advice of Darcy, which leads him not to propose to Jane in the beginning of the novel but to propose to her in the end.
To determine the best marriage in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ we must first decide what the term ‘best marriage’ means. If it means that the best marriage is one that will succeed on social grounds almost any marriage with the exception if Elizabeth and Darcy and Lydia and Wickham could be the ‘best’.
It could mean which marriage will last the longest, in that case it would most likely be the Bennets marriage as it has lasted so long the only way it will end is when one of them dies, but I couldn’t call it the best marriage because the two can barely stand each other.
The best marriage could be the one in which there is the most romance, love or passion, this would suggest that the mess of a marriage between Lydia and Wickham could be the best because they both have a lot of passion.
‘Pride and Prejudice’ takes place during the period of romanticism. This movement believed in abandoning restraint, embracing emotions and the celebration of natural beauty. Austen remained separate from romanticism in her work. In her characters relationships she shows that a balance of reason and love is needed to be successful. You cannot and will not do well in a marriage with only one of them.
This is shown in Lydia and Wickhams marriage. It was based purely on emotion and it is clear that it is the worst marriage in the novel and it wont last.
In contrast Miss Lucas’ and Mr Collins’ marriage is one based solely on reason and society. Austen shows that this can work, but only from a social point of view and as there are absolutely no feelings involved at all, the lives and wants of the two in the marriage will never be fulfilled.
The Bennets marriage started off like Lydia and Wickham’s, Mrs Bennet was anxious to get married and; when she found a man whom she loved, she was determined to marry. Mr Bennet had found a woman he loved and married her based on emotion. However their marriage has lasted this long when Wickham and Lydia’s is not expected to last. This is perhaps because neither of the Bennets are as reckless as Lydia and Wickham and Mr Bennet had money unlike Wickham and his many debts, or because along the course of their marriage the two began to understand their social class and accepted it. Either way the marriage has been successful this far and I doubt it will fall apart, though as previously mentioned there are many faults in the marriage, a large one being some of their children, and it is definitely not the happiest because the two Bennets rarely spend time doing anything other than arguing.
Darcy’s first proposal was based on his love for Elizabeth and it was clear he had cast his reasoning aside, if Elizabeth had accepted him this wouldn’t have worked as Darcy would still have felt resentment about her inferiority. When Elizabeth declines Darcy she is also only acting on emotion as he has just insulted her. This again shows that marriage cannot be based purely on emotions. Towards the end of the novel Darcy is finally able to accept his reasoning as well as his love for Elizabeth and she herself understands her place in society and so is able to see that what he was saying was the truth and not meant to be hurtful, and so they now have a successful relationship based on both love and reasoning.
This however is not what I have decided to be the best marriage because the two are so open about their opinions they are bound to clash on many an occasion.
I believe the best marriage to be Jane and Bingley’s. They each love each other and have similar ways of expressing it, their personalities are almost identical and they will have few if any arguments. They are each aware of where they stand in society but do not dwell on it so much that it becomes a problem. Bingley, who is portrayed as someone with very little reasoning, has, in his choice of a wife, whether knowingly or not, picked the perfect one for him, one who shares his views on everything and will be accepted in society, despite her ‘inferiority’ purely because she is so incredibly likeable.
We are told it is a happy marriage. They have a happy and uncomplicated marriage, though sometimes complicated by other people. They live in Netherfield at first but after a year they want to get away from Mrs Bennet and other relations. So Bingley buys an estate in Derbyshire near Pemberley.
The marriage will probably be the most socially successful and the two will be respected, admired and loved by all who know them.
I see the best marriage to be one containing an equal amount of love and reasoning, this is certainly it.
