Pride and Prejudice
The Reactionary Principles of Jane Austen
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen’s masterpiece begins with one of the killer opening lines of world literature. The novel goes on the discuss the realities of male and female desirability, and the dynamics of marriage. Below I will offer remarks concerning the various characters of the novel, and how they exemplify different archetypes of femininity and masculinity. As I do this, I will attempt to illustrate why Jane Austen is such a tough pill to swallow for some.
The lover of men
Reading an Austen novel in the current era, perhaps the most immediately striking element is the way how the author really, deeply loves men. Loves, admires, respects, looks up to men. Sees them as essential to not only her life, but to the whole world. This, coupled with her unashamedly patriarchal attitudes (more on those later), makes her a difficult author for feminists.
Back when I was a student, I remember remarking how feminist teachers and professors had a peculiarly hard time with her. On the one hand, she is quite possibly the greatest, most skilled, and probably the most widely beloved female author in the English canon. There’s no way getting around her. Normally a feminist would love nothing better than than to adore Austen, a great female artist with a justified place of prominence in the culture. But... she’s the wrong kind of woman.
To some degree this is a problem with almost all female authors from the pre-feminist era. Their wrong-think is a constant threat. But Austen’s case is special. She isn’t just a child of her times, but her patriarchal, reactionary, sexist, ‘misogynistic’, teleological, Aristotelian ideas are systematic, and inform the whole tenor, message, and structure of her stories. It’s not just an attitude here or a choice of words there. Austen’s whole worldview is horrifying to behold to any real feminist. I’ve seen them cope with her in two ways: avoid contact with her and try to give her a low profile (indeed a difficult task with an author of her stature), or sink deep into cognitive dissonance and self-inflicted gas-lighting (less devoted feminists read her in secret, as a guilty pleasure, attempting to somehow fence her off in their minds).
What is it exactly that makes Austen so toxic? I’ll use Pride and Prejudice to illustrate the matter. The main character, Elizabeth Bennet, is an intelligent young woman with self-confidence, a lively personality, and she knows how to stand up to herself, even to get quite prickly with her words. So far so good, thinks the feminist. The trouble is that not only do her highest priorities (as is the case with all women in the novel) circle around marriage and finding a good husband, but that she vehemently attacks any and all ideas of ‘female emancipation’ or ‘equality of the sexes’.
Her sister Lydia is a case in point. Lydia is basically an early representative of the type of woman which is now by far the most prevalent in our society. She’s the free spirit, the spontaneous, liberated girl who makes her own choices and enjoys life to the full, by sacrificing her Virtue and Reputation. She’s also an extreme solipsist, whose whole world revolves around herself, utterly unable to admit or even perceive her own moral failings, whose weight outside observers consider great. Needless to say, Elizabeth is abhorred by her behavior and is ashamed of her sister. Lydia’s elopement constitutes the ‘dark night of the soul’ in the novel, and is generally judged along the following lines, offered to the girl’s father, Mr. Bennet, by his autistic relative, Mr Collins:
“The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison of this. And it is the more to be lamented, because there is reason to suppose that his licentiousness of behavior in your daughter has proceeded from a faulty degree of indulgence.”
The words are inconsiderate, as is typical of the inconsiderate Mr. Collins. But he is painfully correct in pointing out the ‘faulty degree of indulgence’. Elizabeth too agrees with Mr. Collins’ analysis, and confronts her father. She accuses him for not having been patriarchal enough! The happy ending the novel reaches is in large part because Mr. Bennet realizes he needs to lord over his women (both wife and daughters) more strictly. For a long time he has been giving their feminine silliness too much leeway, which results in the women causing grave harm to themselves and the whole family.
Another key constituent to the happy ending is the presence of Mr. Darcy, the most noble of Austen’s noblemen. He represents the deeply competent and wise, yet taciturn and cold-seeming male type, whose primary vice is that of Pride. Elizabeth draws too hasty conclusions from Darcy’s behavior, thus representing the Prejudice part of the equation, and creating the primary source of tension in the story. Not only can prejudice, or over-reliance on her own judgment, make her blind to a fundamentally good man in front of her, it can make a fundamentally bad man appear good. This is illustrated with Elizabeth’s infatuation with Mr. Wickham, behind whose amiable and handsome surface lies an immoral scoundrel lacking any principles.
While Elizabeth represents a cautionary tale of female prejudice or overconfidence, Mr. Darcy is an illustration of the damage male pride can cause to its bearer. But ultimately the story also helps the reader realize that 1) pride doesn’t need to wholly mar the person’s character – Darcy is genuinely admirable despite his pride and aloofness. And 2) with sufficient effort, the overweening pride can be checked and defeated. In the novel, the effort required to overcome pride is motivated by love. Amor vincit omnia … etiam superbia.
This holds true in Elizabeth’s case as well. In the end, she has sufficient humility to realize her flawed judgment. Humility is depicted as something essential, particularly for the more ‘spunky’ type of girl represented by Elizabeth. To her good fortune she has a good baseline, being a classic daddy’s girl who respects her father deeply, and looks up to him as an authority. Indeed, the words of council offered by Mr. Bennet to Elizabeth are worth quoting here, to the grave terror of feminists.
“Lizzy, I know that you could be neither happy nor respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband; unless you looked up to him as a superior.”
The assessor of women
Elizabeth and Lydia have three other sisters, the most important of whom is Jane. She is essentially an ideal woman, with a “superexcellent disposition”, as Elizabeth puts it. She is kind to an almost angelic degree, always considerate, always believing good of her neighbor to the bitter end and even beyond it. She is also clearly the most beautiful of all the sisters, and this point is not handled as some irrelevant superficiality, like it would be in all modern fiction (or currently it would be more likely that the whole set-up would be inverted and gaslit through body-positivity). Not so with Austen.
Indeed, another reactionary aspect of Austen’s writing is the appreciation, honesty and realism with which she treats female beauty. Beauty is depicted as something crucially important in a woman, comparable even to the ‘superexcellent disposition’. As if to illustrate this very point, the girls have a neighbor called Charlotte Lucas. She also has a highly agreeable personality, but her looks are plain. This becomes a deciding factor. She is simply not attractive to men, and has to settle for a purely ‘sensible’ marriage with a full-on gamma male, Mr. Collins. The infinitely more fulfilling option of marrying not only a much wealthier, but in all ways more amiable and well adjusted man, Mr. Bingly, only becomes available to Jane because she is so beautiful. Austen has no qualms with this, and sees nothing wrong with it. Beauty is one of the great things in life, and it is only right that it should be deeply appreciated and greatly rewarded.
If Jane is the paragon of womanhood, her mother is an example of perhaps the most insufferable archetype of her sex. Not only is she vain, superficial and selfish, she is also fundamentally stupid. Here Austen balances her appreciation of genuine love and affection by reminding the reader not to be blinded by it. It is explained Mr. Bennet married his wife based solely on her looks, disregarding or ignoring the deep flaws in her character. This has resulted in a very unfulfilling marriage, where he spends his time sarcastically laughing at his stupid wife who by now has even lost most of her looks. Fortunately the two elder daughters she gave him are not only pretty, but bright and agreeable, and constitute a great consolation in his life. But as if to illustrate the long tail of a man’s choices, his youngest daughter, the aforementioned Lydia, is in most aspects like her mother reincarnated – just as stupid, just as selfish, just as superficial, though probably less beautiful than Mrs. Bennet in her prime.
No matter the quality of their personalities or the goodness of their looks, all the women agree on one thing: marriage. All their priorities are centered around it. In the novel, a girl of 23 is considered approaching the verge of spinsterhood. At that age people may begin to ask what is wrong with her, if nobody has taken her by then? On the other hand, the novel clearly shows that hasty or badly considered choices here can be truly damning. Marriage is presented in its full stature as the most important decision any of us, men or women, will probably ever make in our lives. Not only is it so for practical or negative reasons, but also for positive reasons, as a good marriage is confidently depicted as the pinnacle of earthly happiness.
“I am certainly the most fortunate creature that ever existed!” cried Jane. “Oh! Lizzy, why am I thus singled from my family, and blessed above them all! If I could but see you as happy! If there were but such another man for you.”
What makes all this so very damning from a feminist viewpoint, is that Austen depicts this reality as right, good and proper. Indeed, the deep sense of the inherent and immovable rightness, goodness and propriety (or their inverse) in all things, choices, people, and behavior, is something that oozes from every page of Austen. It is here where she is at her most Aristotelian and most didactic.
Austen doesn’t simply describe lives noncommittally, like a video camera set to record the life of a particular family. She gives everything an unquestionable, unshakable moral order. The way she does it leaves no room for argument or subversion. Things are to remain as they stand. Not only is she truthful, she is morally serious to the very bone. I believe that this, dear reader, is why Jane Austen is so problematic to the feminist movement, and to the modern mind.
