Thus, from the outset the family microcosm allows implicit debate – about the role of different character ‘types’ in the family and society - but it also provides a forum for explicit debate through rapid interchanges, in the intimacy of a context in which the characters can enjoy some degree of freedom of expression. Austen employs this technique to almost theatrical effect in the very first scene. There is a formality about the opening statement that is reminiscent of a prologue: “it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”. This is followed by a chapter that is composed almost entirely of dialogue, quick-fire question and answers as well as detailed discussion, in which the “universal truth” of the first line is deconstructed. Austen therefore inaugurates a fundamental theme of the entire novel – the quest for a husband – but at the same time reveals the scope of different prejudices, exploiting the highly varying ‘perceptions’ to create comedy and conflict.
The family microcosm, with its competing character ‘types’ and conversational tensions, can be seen to stand for a the wider society in which the family live. This creates a kind of Chinese box structural effect to reading the text as the different worlds interconnect and reflect each other on different levels: “the distances of the drawing room, moreover, are the mirror of the social distances outside” (Duckworth, Pride and Prejudice: The Reconstitution of Society). Just as we encounter the different familial roles within the context of the Bennet household, similarly subtle distinctions exist in terms of class roles within the wider society. Once again, unspoken boundaries emerge within the ‘respectable’ social sphere that Austen represents: such as the gulf that is hinted at between the Bennets and their less wealthy, lower middle class relatives the Gardiners (inhabitants of the rather crudely named “Cheapside”); or in the subtle but important distinction between the accepted aristocratic heritage of Darcy, and the far more accommodating ‘nouveau-riche’ class that the Bingleys belong to. Moreover, the Bingleys may seem to symbolise a wider trend in English society of an emerging manufacturing class who aspire to a traditional aristocratic lifestyle, buying into estates such as Netherfield Park, to assert their newly acquired status. In this way Austen depicts a subtle shift in roles (on a personal level within the family or on a more general level in society), revealing a degree of social mobility within clearly drawn social boundaries.
As in the family microcosm, much of the action and dramatic tension in the interaction of the Meryton community is created through the failure of characters to fulfil their roles or respect unspoken codes of social conduct. Austen creates a sense of conscious performance in social rituals, such as the balls, where conversation, as well as behaviour, may be seen to be governed by convention. Yet, she points to the potentially disruptive effect when these roles are disregarded, even for a moment. Through our insight into her consciousness, the readers gain (and perhaps share) a sense of Elizabeth’s crippling humiliation at her mother’s crudely materialistic assessment of Darcy’s merits – as Mrs Bennet constantly refers to his “ten thousand a year” – a fact widely, acknowledged privately but which has a jarring effect when brought into the highly polite public sphere. Significantly, this failure of the more comic ‘caricature’ characters to respect the subtleties of social codes is mirrored in the upper class context, as Darcy suffers a similar sense of shame at his Aunt’s “poor breeding” when she suggests that Elizabeth may practise on the piano in the rooms at the back of the house: “she will be in nobody’s way, you know, in that part of the house”. This reveals both Darcy and Elizabeth’s hyper-sensitivity and close ‘reading’ of the unspoken social subtext of Lady Catherine’s apparently generous invitation, as they both react to the patronising implications of the comment – that Elizabeth’s presence will be unnoticed in the servant’s quarters of the great house. A similar mirroring across the classes and anxiety about the crossing of “bounds of decorum” is illustrated in the objection to the blatant use of non-verbal, sexual signals by both Lydia and Miss Bingley. Both women avoid the constraints of conversation yet convey a clear message to the objects of their attention – Mr Darcy and almost all of the soldiers stationed at Meryton (in Lydia’s case) – by parading contentiously around the ball room, or drawing room at Netherfield Park. Moreover, even Mr Darcy allows himself to slip momentarily from the role as ‘gentleman’, as he fails to participate in the ritual politeness of the dance at Meryton, instead allowing his private thoughts to be publicly heard: “she is not handsome enough to tempt me.” Austen therefore asserts the need for a division between the public and the private: there is a strong sense of the unspoken yet clearly defined ‘role’ of each individual within the family and the wider community but also the need to maintain a sense of public ‘performance’.
This focus upon social roles and strong consciousness of clear boundaries has led many to read a highly social conservative politics into Austen’s work. In Jane Austen: The War of Ideas , Marilyn Butler reads a more specific contemporary political commentary in Pride and Prejudice, viewing the novel as a kind of anti-Jacobin “parable” in which the initial free-spirited and symbolically “revolutionary” spirit of Elizabeth is ultimately “tamed” and compromised by her union with upper class Darcy. However, it seems that any reference to the background of political turmoil in France upon which Austen was writing is another level that remains very much ‘unspoken’ or implicit in the text. Austen herself complained, in a letter to her sister Cassandra, that Pride and Prejudice was “rather too light and bright and sparkling” and could be much improved by the inclusion of “history of Buonaparté”. For Butler, this quotation serves more as a symbol of Austen’s playful relation to, rather than a genuine denial of, any specific contemporary political comment. Yet, even those allusions to the Napoleonic wars that are present, seem very much related to the peripheries of the text. The soldiers stationed at Meryton are portrayed as far more important for the pleasant social and romantic opportunities that they provide, rather than as a frightening symbol of a threat of French invasion. Moreover, the single explicit reference to the war-time context – in the final, summarising comment that in spite of “the restoration peace” Wickham and Lydia continue to flit about the country – serves only to highlight how the characters within the novel are governed by a time frame that is utterly detached from contemporary politics. It is perhaps not surprising that a clear response to the Napoleonic background cannot be read into the text, given the fact that Austen wrote and revised Pride and Prejudice over the course of a seventeen year period. In fact, the ambiguous nature of contemporary political references in Pride and Prejudice may, in themselves, be seen as a reflection of the contemporary social climate when the book was written. Armstrong summarises this anxiety: “the novel was written in a period when government repression was fierce, and the definition of sedition extraordinarily narrow.” It seems therefore more appropriate to consider the turmoil as providing a background or subtext for the social and political anxieties about change, which perhaps provoked a desire to adhere even more closely to the safe boundaries of tradition and the ideals of the past.
However, the so-called “revolutionary” or independent spirit of Elizabeth seems fundamental to the text on a wider political level. To return to the title quotation, we can identify a strong sense of Elizabeth as being a part of a spirited debate – there are socially equalising implications to Lady Catherine’s idea of “returning” a comment to Elizabeth, rather than imposing a judgement upon her as a social and financial inferior, as we might have expected. Elizabeth certainly illustrates, in this scene and the novel as a whole, a strong resistance to social and sexual subordination. She challenges established notions of gender through her unwillingness to accept the ‘role’ of the stereotypical passive female, that is exemplified by her sisters Jane and Mary, or even her closest friend, Charlotte Lucas. It seems significant that Elizabeth consciously distinguishes herself from Jane through the quality of laughter – “she only smiles, I laugh” - perhaps symbolising her ability to subversively mock and view her social surroundings with an often ironic perspective, even as she participates within its rituals. In some ways, it seems that Elizabeth invites a reading as a feminist heroine. Clark points out: “the most authentically powerful figure in the novel is an unmarried, middle class woman without a fortune” while the male characters appear “bungling and absurd” by comparison (Women, Power and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778-1860). While this may be a rather extreme and one-dimensional reading of Elizabeth’s “power”, many critics have commented upon the overwhelming sense of her “liveliness”. This is evident both on a physical level, manifested in her walks through the fields (such as in her insistence that she will walk to Netherfield which results in the muddy petticoat that is so scandalous to the sterile and inactive Miss Bingley), but also in Elizabeth’s lively intellect. Within the microcosm of both the family and the Meryton community, Elizabeth stands out as an individual in her willingness to challenge her “superiors” (indeed, Austen seems to expose this label as a form of ridiculous prejudice in itself). It seems that Lady Catherine’s patronising comment: “you give your opinion very decidedly for so young a person” is applicable in a wide variety of different contexts – whether addressing her father (patriarchal authority), Mr Collins (in theory at least, a clerical and familial authority) or Mr Darcy (a social authority); in each case she seems to speak with the authority of one who “knows exactly what to think”.
Yet, unlike the equally lively (though shallow) Lydia, Elizabeth never forgets the limitations of her position (a contrast that we may see played out in the juxtaposition of the fantastical, romantic sensibility of Marianne Dashwood and the material practicality of her sister, the heroine, Elinor, in Sense and Sensibility). For all of her female independence, Elizabeth still looks up to Darcy as a kind of guardian figure – it is only when she appreciates him in his roles as a “master”, “brother” and “landowner” that she realises his potential as a husband. Moreover, Lydia’s catastrophic breaking of the unspoken social rules, in her elopement with Wickham, renders Elizabeth completely powerless and in a position of utter dependency upon Darcy. This reveals the vulnerability of Elizabeth’s power; it seems that Elizabeth can only retain her freedom within a very limited social ‘space’ and allotted role - she both challenges but also accepts the necessity of the rigid social boundaries that govern her life.
There is a similarly double-edged treatment of the issue of marriage in Pride and Prejudice. On one level, Austen reveals a brutally realistic detachment between the personal and the political, or more specifically, economic, in marriage. This is manifested in the debate surrounding Charlotte Lucas’ decision to marry the admittedly “irksome” Mr Collins in order to secure a comfortable home and lifestyle for herself. As she puts it in starkly rational terms: the marriage is a “preservative from want”. For Elizabeth, this utter separation of the material from the emotional is, she decides, “impossible”, though Austen marks her out very much as an individual in her assertion of independence. There is a sense in which the action of the plot also stands for a wider, autobiographical significance as the Mr Collins plot-line parallels a choice that Austen herself had to make about whether to accept a proposal from a rich man who she did not love. It seems that the conventional, romanticised notion of marriage therefore comes under threat in parts of Pride and Prejudice, as Austen dramatises the daily torment of ill-matched marriages (in Mr and Mrs Bennet and later between Lydia and Wickham) but also in the decidedly financial motivation from which even Elizabeth is not wholly immune. Austen seems to exploit this anxiety and ambiguity surrounding marriage, even in the final ‘fairytale’ marriage between Darcy and Elizabeth, as she half-jokingly admits to Jane that her love for Darcy dates from her “first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley”.
Yet, on another level, this same institution of marriage is held up as a glittering ideal that preoccupies almost all of the characters in the novel. This seems once again a mark of Austen’s social conservatism. Marriage can be associated with a sense of preservation – a way of maintaining family lines and ensuring that major aristocratic estates are maintained intact over the generations. This sense of the continuity provided by marriage is manifested in the literal and symbolic “estate”, a motif that Duckworth argues recurs throughout Austen’s work. In The Improvement of the Estate (1997) he comments upon this mutli-layered significance of the estate: “throughout Jane Austen’s fiction estates function not only as the settings of action but also as indexes to the character and social responsibility of the owners”. It certainly seems that from the outset of Pride and Prejudice, men as potential husbands are equated with the imagery of property: “a man on his first entering the neighbourhood…is considered the rightful property of someone or other of their daughters”. The irony seems to be here, that it is in fact the women who, once married, become the property of their husbands, as their role is fundamentally to ensure the preservation of the male family line, property and inheritance. Underlying tensions therefore emerge between the independent spirit of the heroine Elizabeth and the resolution which emphasises unity; they also emerge in Austen’s representation of the social and economic realities of marital decisions, even as the characters ceaselessly pursue marriage as an ultimate ideal.
For Charlotte Bronte, this sense of the rigidity and the limitation of the ideals portrayed in Austen’s writing are manifested in the landscape itself. She complained in a letter to G.H. Lewes in 1848 that she saw nothing in Austen’s writing but “a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck”, concluding: “I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in one of their elegant but confined houses.” On one level, it seems that Bronte is criticising the aesthetic style favoured by Austen, which contrasted strongly with Bronte’s own taste and romantic sensibility - an aesthetic that privileged material elegance and a highly contrived view of the natural that is at the centre of the culture that Austen depicts in Pride and Prejudice. (It is perhaps significant [to Elizabeth’s rite of passage] that she is denied a trip to the lakes at the last moment – a setting which we may associate with more wild and ‘romantic’ notions of nature and self, depicted in literature of the period by Wordsworth, for example – in favour of the refined country estates of Derbyshire). On another level, there seem to be a sense in which Bronte see the ideological rooted in the physical in Austen’s novels, a sense that the idealisation of the great parks – such as Netherfield, Rosings and particularly Pemberley – symbolises and idealises a sense of the aristocratic tradition, refinement, hierarchy and very clear cut literal and social boundaries in the landscape and wider society. Bronte therefore encourages a re-examination of the detail of the descriptions in Pride and Prejudice, implying a link between the literal and political landscapes in Austen’s novels.
This sense of the ideological rooted in the physical is perhaps most evident in the detailed descriptions of Pemberley. On a level of narrative, the setting of Pemberley serves as a catalyst for change within the novel. Both Elizabeth and her relatives (and, Austen it seems) appear to invest in the notion that the estate reflects the character of its owner. As Duckworth observes, this is a view in which Austen corresponded closely with some key eighteenth century thinkers: “a Shaftesburian recognition that excellent aesthetic taste denotes an excellence of moral character”. The aesthetically pleasing and highly tasteful Pemberley therefore serves as a turning point in Elizabeth’s perception of Darcy. Significantly, it seems that it is only when she re-‘views’ Darcy in a reconstructed form – in the portrait in the house and the gardens outside – that Elizabeth is able to fully appreciate Darcy in person. Many critics comment upon the “movement” in Elizabeth’s initial viewing of the grounds of Pemberley: “as they passed into the other rooms, these objects were taking different positions”. This moving perspective allows Austen to represent the possibility of many different perceptions of the grounds (a theme throughout, such as in the earlier example the sisters’ differing perceptions of Mr Collins’ letter) but, at the same time highlights the fact that the idealised landscape of Pemberley and all that it symbolises begins to look attractive, from any angle, to Elizabeth. When confronted with the literal reality, the natural spectacle clearly triggers a wider re-appraisal of Darcy’s offer: “of all this I might have been mistress!”
Moreover, Pemberley also functions as a fantasy space within the novel; the ample grounds provide a ‘space’ for a reconciliation between Elizabeth and Darcy. The massive grounds seem to symbolise a social sphere large enough to incorporate both the lower middle class Gardiners and the aristocratic Darcy. As Tanner writes, this sense of an ideal ‘space’ can work on many different levels beyond the literal: Pemberley is “an impossible dream of a space – both social and psychic – large enough to permit a maximum of reflecting speech and personal control.” Although the grounds may be seen to reflect the highly ordered and traditional nature of Darcy’s outlook on life (which Bronte equates with Austen herself), upon closer examination, the descriptions of Pemberley also incorporate an element of the picturesque. Unlike the deeply traditional Rosings, which emerges as a highly fitting metaphor for Lady’s Catherine’s rigid formality and concern with entrenched spatial and social boundaries, the grounds of Pemberley include a winding river and the irregular openings among the wooded high ground that “gave the eye power to wander”, as well as more traditional trimmed lawns and pathways. This sense of aesthetic balance is reflected in the double negative of the description of Pemberley: “neither formal nor falsely adorned”. The sentence structure itself seems to capture a sense of equilibrium, particularly as it is repeated, in Elizabeth’s approving sense that the grounds are: “neither gaudy nor uselessly fine”. Even on an aesthetic level therefore, the grounds seem to reconcile Darcy’s tradition with an element of Elizabeth’s natural “tanned” and “almost wild” appearance (a description insultingly attached to Elizabeth by Miss Bingley) or more ‘natural’ individuality. (Armstrong points to a possible link between femininity and the picturesque in the novel: “the feminine is a profoundly disruptive category in this novel, as it is for [Uvedale] Price’s picturesque”). Significantly, Pemberley therefore provides the setting for one of the most highly symbolic acts of the book – Elizabeth’s crossing of the bridge to meet Darcy at the other side. This provides a fitting metaphor for Austen’s politics in the entire novel; she points to the possibility for a lucky and deserving individual (the bridge is only wide enough for one to cross) to cross the literal and metaphorical boundary and ‘bridge’ the gap of seemingly “impassable gulf” into a higher social class and a different social, economic and political landscape. Yet even in creating this individualised and symbolic fairy tale ending, Austen reminds us of the chasms that exist between the different social groups in society as a whole; both Elizabeth and the reader remain highly conscious of the divisive nature of the boundaries that are built into the social structure in which the heroine must live.
The union of Elizabeth and Darcy in the idealised landscape of Pemberley therefore allows Austen to bring the action to a highly “aesthetic solution” or conclusion as well as achieving a kind of narrative resolution (C. Johnson, Pride and Prejudice and the Pursuit of Happiness). At first glance, Pride and Prejudice may have a satisfying “fairy tale quality” but below this “light and bright and sparkling” surface, fundamental and complex political questions concerning marriage, gender and social mobility are raised. As Armstrong writes: “the text asks demanding and radical questions – perhaps the more radical because they are indirect”. Yet at the same time, there is also a striking resonance in Tanner’s view that “eighteenth century thought was fundamentally loyal to the respect for limits, definition and clear ideas”, which is also encapsulated within Pride and Prejudice. It seems to me that, contrary to Butler’s reading of Pride and Prejudice as a pointed commentary on the contemporary political situation, Austen’s stance is more one of general optimistic conservatism. Pride and Prejudice is notable for its absence of references to the French revolution, as Austen constantly points to the potential for happiness within existing, traditional social structures, if only people would fulfil their social roles properly. There may be a tension between the spirited, challenging individuality of Elizabeth within the text and the fixed resolution at the end, but the ideal of marriage, like the refined landscape of Pemberley, always remains within view.
