In Want of a Wife: Romance and Realism in Jane Austen's

Pride and Prejudice

Vermont Humanities Program First Wednesday Lecture

St. Johnsbury Atheneum, 3 October 2012

James A. W. Heffernan

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

So begins Pride and Prejudice, probably the best known novel written by Jane Austen. Like the first sip of a fine wine, the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice lingers on the palate with tingling sensations, subtly provoking and surprising us the more we think about it. Ostensibly the sentence is about a man and what he wants, and since the object of his want--of his desire or need--is a wife, we might see this sentence as a very simple way of initiating an old-fashioned romance, the story of a man who seeks a woman and eventually finds and marries her.

Think of what happens to Cinderella when she's whisked off to the ball by her fairy godmother. The handsome prince falls in love with her, picks up the glass slipper that she leaves behind in her rush to leave by midnight, searches the kingdom until he finds the delicate foot that will fit that slipper, and then he marries her.

But the very first sentence of Pride and Prejudice begins to tell us that this will be a very different kind of story. For one thing, the man in question need not be a prince, let alone a handsome prince; he's just got to be single and a man of good fortune: possessed of property or rich enough to buy it. The sentence tells us, in other words, that we are no longer in the world of fairy tales or what used to be called romances, stories of knights rescuing damsels in distress. We're in the world of the English novel, which is usually said to have begun with Samuel Richardson's Pamela in 1740.

The novel inherits from romance the theme of the passionate quest, but radically revises that theme in light of the socio-economic conditions under which men and woman actually met and married in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This novel, like most of the other novels published in the 70-odd years since Pamela appeared, tells a story about characters situated in realistic time and space and operating under conditions that we recognize even now, two hundred years later, as realistic. Say what you will about the ecstasy of falling in love and running away and living happily ever after, the plain fact is that unless the happy couple plan to live on the street and beg for spare change, marriage normally takes a certain amount of money.

In Jane Austen's time, a genteel young woman could not work for a living, and therefore could not expect to live comfortably unless she was lucky enough to inherit money or marry it. So the word "want" in the first sentence of Jane Austen's novel is a word charged with several meanings. If a single man in possession of a good fortune is in want of a wife, we might say that he's in the market for a wife: he wants a wife in the way he might want a house, or a horse, or a butler.

Here too we see how the old-fashioned plot of romance, which is driven by the man's passionate quest for a lady, gets reconfigured in terms of business and acquisition. This doesn't mean that desire disappears as a motive for marriage, because the man with a lot of money--after all--can survey a variety of young women to determine just which one he wants. But there remains a crucial question: will the woman that he wants / want him in return--and in what sense will she want him? Will she truly desire him, or simply need his money to live on?

Jane Austen understood this question only too well. In 1801, when her father retired as rector of the Anglican church in Steventon, Hampshire, she moved with him and her mother and sister Cassandra to the town of Bath, where they lived in rented lodgings on a tight budget. In December 1802, when she was almost 27 and therefore well on her way to spinsterhood by the standards of her day, she got a proposal from a young man named Harris Bigg-Wither, heir to a magnificent estate called Manydown Park. There was just one problem. Besides being six years younger than Jane, he was a witless, stuttering, shambling, clumsy dolt, the worst possible mate for a brilliantly witty and in her own way quite worldly young woman. So what did Jane Austen do? At first she said yes, which meant of course yes to the irresistible attractions of his magnificent estate. Then she spent a sleepless night and told him "no": not even his splendid estate could trump her indifference--her downright aversion--to him. Three years later came a second proposal from a lively young clergyman who was far more engaging than Harris Bigg-Wither, but he was too young and impulsive and lacking in fortune to tempt her. So Jane Austen stayed unmarried right up to her death at the age of 42.

But she knew very well what it felt like to be a young unmarried woman in want of a suitable husband, for that is the very "want" lurking just beneath the surface of this sentence about the wants of a single man. At the age of 20, she fell in love with a handsome young Irishman whose wit and boldness and sense of play matched her own, but since neither of the two had any money to speak of at the time, his family packed him off to London and left her nursing a broken heart.

Out of that broken heart, plus a great deal further experience of the infinitely complex relations between marriage, money, and property, came the novels of Jane Austen. Though the great opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice seems to be talking about the wants of a single man, it is written from the viewpoint of a single woman looking out for marriage prospects, a woman who very much needs a single man possessed of a good fortune, and ideally of some personal attractions as well. But how does she get such a man? By romantic convention, by the convention of stories such as that of Cinderella, the woman is the passive object of the man's passionate quest; she waits for him to find her. In Jane Austen's time, and to some extent even in our own, the woman was still expected to wait patiently for the man to find her and make his proposal. But Jane Austen knew only too well that women who did absolutely nothing but wait might end up waiting forever.

Socially forbidden to pursue any man openly, most women were compelled by economic need to become manhunters: to find men capable of supporting them--and often to settle for the best deal they could make with a man who was anything but prince charming. Operating under these radically contradictory conditions, what could a young woman do? What were her options? Did she have any reasonable chance of ensuring her financial security and of finding a compatible partner? These are the thorny questions that Jane Austen tackles in her fiction, and above all in Pride and Prejudice, which strives to tell as unsentimentally as possible just how two young women of very modest means contrive to captivate two handsome and wealthy young men.

The leading roles in this novel are therefore played by women, especially by one young woman, Elizabeth Bennet, age twenty, second of the five daughters of a gentleman who can support them and his wife modestly for as long as he lives, but who cannot even leave them a house, for by English law of the time their estate is entailed: legally predestined to go out of the Bennet family to the nearest male heir. This is why Mrs. Bennet wants so desperately to get her daughters married.

Now Mrs. Bennet strikes most readers as hopelessly stupid and overbearing--irrepressibly garrulous, vulgar, and anything but subtle in her hunt for eligible men. She's a source of acute embarrassment to her daughter Elizabeth, especially during supper at the Netherfield Ball, where Mrs. Bennet "freely" and "openly" boasts of her expectation that her eldest daughter Jane will soon be married to Mr. Bingley, the handsome and wealthy young bachelor who has recently moved into their neighborhood. Elizabeth is especially embarrassed because she fears that her mother's vulgar boasting is clearly overheard by Mr. Darcy, the still more wealthy and handsome bachelor who has already begun to interest her--though she has so far denied any interest in him.

But the irony of this whole scene becomes evident when we realize that just before Mrs. Bennet starts boasting about Jane's marriage to Bingley, Elizabeth herself has been happily thinking about it. Mrs. Bennet breaks the social rules by taking the lid off Elizabeth's thoughts--by talking audibly about the manhunt in which all the Bennet women are engaged. That's what makes her vulgar. But in her own bumbling way, Mrs. Bennet exposes the radical contradiction under which young single women live. While desperately hunting eligible men, they must pretend to be doing nothing of the kind.

Mr. Collins' visit to the Bennets accentuates this conflict between social ritual and brute economic fact--as well as the sharp difference between Mrs. Bennet and her husband. Early in the novel, Mr. Bennet tells his family that he's received a letter from Mr. Collins, a distant cousin, who has never met any of the Bennets before but has written to say that he now plans to stay with them for a couple of weeks. Holding up Mr. Collins' letter, Mr. Bennet announces that it comes from "my cousin, . . . who, when I am dead, may turn you all out of this house as soon as he pleases." Mr. Bennet's tone is typically cavalier and facetious. He's far more attractive than the deadly serious Mrs. Bennet because he has such a wonderfully light touch--the delightful ability to make a joke out of anything and everything. When I'm dead you'll all be out on the street! What a riot! What a hoot! But lurking beneath Mr. Bennet's charming joke is an almost brutal indifference to the fate of his daughters: as long as I have my three square meals a day and plenty of time to read in my library (his favorite pastime), why should I care what the hell happens to you after I'm dead?

It's Mrs. Bennet--vulgar, utterly lacking in wit and charm, utterly lacking in social graces and the light, facetious touch of Mr. Bennet--it's Mrs. Bennet who cares about those daughters. It's Mrs. Bennet who has every reason to be deadly serious in her anxiety for their future. When Mr. Bennet lies comfortably in his grave, they may end up with almost nothing to live on.

This brute economic fact--the fact that every one of the Bennet daughters must find and marry a man capable of supporting her--is one of the many things that make this novel realistic. And it's important to realize that brute economic facts constitute much of the core of this novel, because it can too easily be read as the story of genteel families living in a rural neighborhood far removed from the strains and pressures of ordinary life, from the sufferings of ordinary people, or from the high drama of great public events. Jane Austen once described her work as a little bit of ivory two inches wide: not a great canvas but a finely wrought cameo.

Think for a minute about what this novel excludes. It has virtually nothing to say about what we commonly call the business of life: the ways in which people make a living. And it has virtually nothing to say about something else that plays a central role in history--namely war. Just think about what was happening in England in 1813, when Jane Austen published Pride and Prejudice. England was at war with France, and specifically with the Napoleonic empire, which by now had overthrown most of the monarchies of Europe. Two years after this novel appeared, Napoleon was decisively defeated at the Battle of Waterloo by the English Duke of Wellington leading an alliance of European armies against him. But you'd hardly know any of this from Pride and Prejudice, for this is a wartime novel with no war in it. Jane Austen deliberately avoids the subject of war and Napoleon himself. At the age of fifteen, she wrote her own history of England. Proudly calling it the work of a "partial, prejudiced & ignorant Historian," she populated her history with women. But the history she set out to write as she grew to maturity was the story of courtship and match-making. With all its battles and struggles and triumphs and defeats, courtship and match-making was story enough for her. While her older brothers lived and moved in the world of public history and thought of novels as merely food for women, she in turn thought of public history with a fine irreverence--as food for overstuffed men. When her sister Cassandra wrote to tell her how much she liked Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen playfully pretended to regret its lack of historical ballast. "The work," she wrote, "is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story, an essay on writing, a critique of Walter Scott [renowned of course for his historical novels]--a critique of Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte, or anything that would form a contrast. . . ." In fact of course Jane Austen would never put such stuff into her novel, because she had set out to cultivate her own turf, her own home ground, the domestic life of rural England.

Consider what she does with war in this novel. Early on we learn that a militia regiment has been stationed in Meryton, a market town just a mile from the village of Longbourn, where the Bennets live, and we also learn that the two youngest Bennet girls love to go to Meryton as often as they can to meet the officers. But the officers in this novel are never shown leading men into battle. Instead they are caught up in social events. In the very last sentence of Chapter 12, we get the latest news of the regiment, as reported by the young Bennet girls: "several of the officers had dined lately with [the girls' uncle, a private had been flogged, and it had actually been hinted that Colonel Forster was going to be married." With just a passing glance at the brutality of war in the flogging of that poor private, the sentence tells us what the officers mainly do: they go to dinner parties, they meet women, and they sometimes marry them--as Colonel Forster does later on.

Significantly, the very last word of the chapter is "married," for marriage--or mating--is the central business of the novel. And if you think this makes the novel trivial or irrelevant to the real business of life, ask yourself whether or not marriage is more important than war in your own life. Ask yourself just how important it is for anyone to choose a marriage partner for the rest of his or her life.

This is a novel about the process of finding a partner, a novel about courtship, and courtship is normally the subject of romantic or sentimental fiction--stories of passion. But by the age of 38, when she published Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen had long since learned how to laugh at sentimentality and the conventional language of courtship. The pompous, witless, and utterly insensitive Mr. Collins speaks this language with a vengeance. In proposing to Elizabeth, he tells her of "the violence of [his] affection." But since he also tells her that he's making this proposal for reasons quite distinct from her personal attractions, and that he knows exactly how little she will inherit, he plainly shows that he cares nothing about her at all.

So here is the first real test of Elizabeth's character. On the one hand, she's offered a chance to marry a clergyman with a good "living," as the English say, a good job as the rector of a country church, with not only a nice rectory to live in but the certain prospect of inheriting the Bennets' estate once Mr. Bennet dies. Mr. Collins, in short, offers a lifetime of financial security, But on the other hand, he's a pompous, witless, condescending fool. Inviting himself to stay with the Bennets in order to take one of the daughters as his wife, he offers himself to Elizabeth as if he were doing her a huge favor.

As a result, she says no--decisively. And when he presses her to accept him anyway, when he goes so far as to warn her that she might never get another chance to marry anyone at all, she says something very remarkable about her refusal to marry him: "My feelings in every respect forbid it." Her feelings forbid her to accept his proposal because he has shown no feeling at all--no sensitivity to her feelings.

Collins is in fact a grotesque parody of the traditional romantic hero. In traditional romance, a knight in shining armor sets out to rescue a lady in distress. Collins is the modern equivalent of the medieval knight. He's come to rescue Elizabeth from poverty by marrying her so that along with him she can keep the house she now lives in. But Collins utterly fails in the role of lover because he cares nothing at all for Elizabeth.

Only three days after she turns him down, he proposes to her friend Charlotte Lucas--age 27, just the age at which Jane Austen herself was offered the chance to marry the dolt with the splendid estate. Collins offers no more than a comfortable home, and he falls far short of sweeping Charlotte off her feet, for she knows full well that he's a crashing bore. But unlike Elizabeth, and unlike Jane Austen too, Charlotte accepts a man she does not love. She's aging, she's never been very attractive, and though well educated, she's never been raised to support herself. As a woman of small fortune, she needs financial security, and marriage, she thinks, will be her "preservative from want." She must have a husband, and she takes what seems to be the only one available. She makes the choice that could easily have been made by Elizabeth--if only she had ignored her feelings for the sake of financial security.

Pride and Prejudice is a novel in three volumes, and since Charlotte's acceptance of Collins' proposal comes at the end of Volume I, it parodies the typical ending of the sentimental romance. In a typical romance, lovers who have been passionately seeking each other all through the story finally overcome the obstacles that have separated them--whether fiery dragons or tyrannical elders or whatever--the young lovers finally overcome those obstacles and are joined in marrage. But there is absolutely nothing romantic about the marriage of Charlotte and Collins. This marriage, in fact, may seem to confirm what Charlotte Bronte said about Jane Austen: "The passions are perfectly unknown to her."

Now it's perfectly true that Jane Austen doesn't give us anything like the kind of wild, tempestuous, rebellious passion that we find in the novels of Charlotte Bronte or her sister Emily. Elizabeth Bennet is no kin to Catherine Earnshaw of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, who starves herself to death rather than live without her beloved Heathcliff. Elizabeth Bennet is not a romantic rebel ruled by the winds of passion alone. Though flattered by the attentions of an attractive and superficially charming young officer named Wickham, she would never dream of running off with him, nor even of marrying him without careful consideration of his financial means. She understands the rules of modern society and the practical necessities of life. But if you think this means that Elizabeth has no heart at all, let's recall again just why she says no to Collins' proposal: "My feelings in every respect forbid it." Elizabeth has feelings--and principles. Much as she needs financial security, she will not marry a man that she does not love. In a world dominated by men, the young women of this novel have very little freedom, very little room in which to maneuver, but because of her feelings, Elizabeth dares to exercise one of the very few rights she has: the right to say no.

Her mother is dumbfounded by her refusal of Collins, but Elizabeth holds her ground. She will settle for nothing less than a man she loves.

Later on in the novel, her principles are tested again by a proposal far more tempting than what Collins has to offer. This proposal comes from the handsome Mr. Darcy, heir to a magnificent estate, with a splendid income besides--by far the grandest man in the whole book. But Darcy has antagonized Elizabeth from the start. At a public dance in Meryton, where she first saw him, she overheard Darcy telling his friend Bingley that Elizabeth was "not handsome enough"--not attractive enough-- for him to dance with. He thereby wounded her pride, and filled her with prejudice against his pride--whence comes the title of the novel.

By the time Darcy makes his proposal, Elizabeth has found more reasons to resent him, more props for her prejudice. For one thing, Wickham has told her that Darcy deprived him of a clerical "living" that was rightfully his. For another thing, she believes that Darcy yanked his friend Bingley right out of the Bennets' neighborhood-- simply to block the chance of an engagement between Bingley and Elizabeth's sister Jane. On top of all this, Darcy makes his proposal sound insulting to Elizabeth's ears because he insists on expressing "his sense of her inferiority"--that is, his disdain for the low social status of her family as compared with his. All this prompts Elizabeth to say "no" for the second time.

But Darcy's proposal differs sharply from Collins' proposal. He's not only much wealthier than Collins, with a grand estate of his own; he's also much more intelligent and sensitive--not at all a pompous fool. Also, unlike Collins, Darcy really does care for Elizabeth: it's precisely his feelings for her--his irrepressible love for her--that overpower his objections to her family. Just as importantly, he has already begun to show that he admires her vitality and relishes her playful wit, that he's learning how to talk to her. At one point when Elizabeth is playing the piano at a dinner party, Darcy walks up to watch her perform. When he stands over her so that he can see her full face, she lets him know that she will not be frightened by him. "My courage," she says, "always rises with every attempt to intimidate me." Instead of apologizing for scaring her, as a conventional suitor might, Darcy senses that she's sparring with him, and he jabs right back. You couldn't really think that I wanted to scare you, he says in effect, and then adds, "I have had the pleasure of your acquaintance long enough to know, that you find great enjoyment in occasionally professing opinions which in fact are not your own."

At this picture of herself Elizabeth laughs heartily--with a little shock of self-recognition. For all his grandeur and supposed haughtiness, Darcy has done what no other man in Elizabeth's life has even tried to do: he's made her laugh at herself!

In their spirited conversations with each other, Darcy and Elizabeth gradually lay the foundation of a love not founded on impulse or wild passion, but rather on rational grounds: on mutual respect, admiration, and affection. Insofar as this novel communicates a message about marriage--and it certainly does--its message is that to be happy, marriage requires not just financial security but a real compatibility of hearts and minds, a spirit of mutual understanding. This is not something that comes all at once, like love at first sight. It must grow in time, and it may have to make its way through a thicket of misunderstandings, resentment, and prejudice before it can generate a lasting relationship.

When Darcy first proposes to Elizabeth, she scornfully rejects him for what she calls "your arrogance, your conceit, your selfish disdain for the feelings of others. . . . I had not known you a month," she says, "before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry." Here is Elizabeth at her most heroic. Offered a life of luxury with a grand and handsome man on his magnificent estate, she says no--because she will not sacrifice her self-respect. However much Darcy may love her, she will not marry a man who fails to respect her, who offers his hand as if he were hoisting her up out of the mud.

But if this is Elizabeth at her most heroic, her most resolutely self-assertive, it is also Elizabeth at her most prejudiced. She and Darcy both have a lot to learn about themselves and each other. When Darcy sends her a long letter after she rejects him, she gradually sees her prejudice. She discovers that she was wrong to believe Wickham's story about Darcy, that she had misunderstood his motives for separating Bingley from Jane, and that she herself had been "blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd."

At the same time, Elizabeth's rejection of Darcy shocks him into shedding his arrogance, softening the edge of his pride, and showing Elizabeth how considerately and sensitively he can treat both her and her family. In short, she learns from him how to overcome her prejudice, and he learns from her how to overcome his pride. As a result, his second proposal wins her acceptance.

So what should we make of this ending? I have argued that Pride and Prejudice radically revises the plot of romance in favor of realism, of an unsentimental picture of the business of match-making. And a great deal of this novel is in fact anti-romantic, or at least unsentimental--just like its heroine. Yet it just so happens that this playful, skeptical, irreverent, unsentimental young woman ends up with a dream come true, the modern counterpart of the fairy tale prince. Listen to Mrs. Bennet's reaction to the news of Elizabeth's engagement to Darcy: "Oh! my sweetest Lizzy! how rich and how great you will be! What pin-money, what jewels, what carriages you will have! . . . A house in town! Every thing that is charming!" You can laugh at Mrs. Bennet's dizzy delight, but as is so often the case, she speaks a good deal of truth: this is a fairy tale ending, or the kind of ending we typically get in romantic comedy.

Consider too what Darcy says of himself at the end. I was proud and selfish, he says to Elizabeth: "by you, I was properly humbled." Now this is music to Elizabeth's ears, and perhaps to the ears of all women, but the music we hear is the music of romance. Darcy is not only the perfect mate for Elizabeth; he could have been the perfect mate for Jane Austen herself. He's the ideal man she never found in her life, and as Robert Polhemus argues, he's the realization of a woman's fantasy: the fantasy that love gives her redemptive power over a man and thus over the world. Proud as he is, Darcy humbly bows to Elizabeth's redemptive power and makes it clear that he will cherish her for precisely what makes her distinctive: her lively mind, her sportive, irreverent wit. No wonder Jane Austen thought of this novel as her "darling child," as she told her sister Cassandra, and of Elizabeth "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print." In Elizabeth she re-creates her twenty-year-old self, and then creates a man who can finally gratify all of her needs. For all the realism of this novel, for all its unsentimental focus on the business of marriage-making, it nonetheless ends on a resoundingly romantic note.

But the most fantastic thing about this whole ending--what makes it pure fantasy--is that before she marries Darcy, Elizabeth succeeds in reforming him. She turns this arrogant man into a supremely sensitive and considerate partner who perfectly understands what she needs. And no grand estate, no piece of perfect property, no treasure chest of jewels, no team of horses, no splendid carriage, could possibly gratify the wants of Elizabeth as much as a man she has already reformed to her complete satisfaction.