Pride March and Prejudice

In previous essayistic excursions for the Daily Sceptic, I suggested that contemporary Britain can often be understood more clearly through fictional worlds. Literature has always illuminated the societies from which it emerges, but its best works reach beyond their own time. They capture the manners, assumptions and habits of an age while showing how little the people themselves change.

Although Jane Austen wrote within the conventions of her own time, her characters remain readily recognisable two centuries later. Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, takes us into a world of country houses, assemblies, social calls, entailments and marriage prospects. Beneath the manners and conventions are the ordinary complications of human life: status and reputation, social approval, fashionable opinion, money and marriage. People mistake confidence for wisdom and appearance for character; vanity distorts judgement, prejudice passes for discernment, and self-interest readily finds respectable reasons for itself.

That capacity to speak across time has not always commended Austen to the modern university. Yeonmi Park, who escaped from North Korea with her family at the age of 13, endured a harrowing passage through China and eventually reached the United States, where an enthusiasm for Western literature took her to the humanities programme at Columbia University. There, she recalled being scolded for admiring Austen, whose novels she was told embodied racism, bigotry and oppression.

She had expected an expensive university education to teach her how to think, only to discover that “they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think”. She went on: “I realised, ‘Wow, this is insane’. I thought America was different, but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.” “It was chaos”. “It felt like the regression of civilisation.” “Even North Korea is not this nuts. North Korea is pretty crazy but not this crazy”.

Yeonmi arrived at Columbia expecting to read Jane Austen and other classics. By way of literary restitution, let us transport her back to Austen’s Hertfordshire: to Longbourn and Meryton, to country houses, assembly rooms and country lanes, where fortunes were counted in thousands a year, eligible gentlemen arrived unexpectedly in the neighbourhood, and the great disturbances of life might still begin with an invitation to dance.

New ideas at Longbourn

At Longbourn, the principal difficulty remained much as Austen had left it. Mr and Mrs Bennet had five daughters, no son, and an estate destined to pass upon Mr Bennet’s death to a distant male relation. Mrs Bennet therefore approached matrimony with an urgency that combined maternal concern, financial prudence and an inexhaustible interest in other people’s business. The arrival at Netherfield Park of a young, unmarried gentleman with four or five thousand pounds a year was accordingly received less as a piece of neighbourhood news than as a possible solution.

Mr Bennet was less easily excited. Having long ago discovered that domestic life became more tolerable when treated as a source of entertainment, he regarded his wife’s campaigns with the detached interest of a man who had no intention of commanding them. Elizabeth shared something of his amusement; Jane preferred to think well of everybody, Lydia and Kitty were chiefly interested in military officers, preferably handsome ones, while Mary devoted herself to serious improvement.

One evening, Mary offered to play for the family. Seating herself at the pianoforte, she announced ‘A Hymn to Universal Concord, Occasioned by the Passage of a Steam Carriage upon the Stockton and Darlington Railway’, a composition by the lately fashionable Caractacus Stevens which she thought possessed considerable moral feeling.

“I thought Mr Stevens had joined the Mohammedians,” said Lydia.

Mary said that this was no reason to neglect his music.

Mrs Bennet, who had little interest in either music or Mohammedians, returned to the more pressing question of Netherfield. Mr Bingley was young, handsome and, most importantly, unmarried. Four or five thousand a year presented possibilities which even Mr Bennet could not entirely dispute.

The possibilities offered by Netherfield improved when Mr Bingley appeared at the assembly at Meryton. He was handsome, agreeable and disposed to dance, qualities which recommended him immediately to Mrs Bennet and soon to Jane. His friend Mr Darcy presented a more complicated prospect. Ten thousand pounds a year commanded attention, but his manners soon exhausted much of the credit afforded by his income.

Darcy was handsome, reserved and conscious of his position. He danced only when obliged to do so and appeared persuaded that the company offered little reason to regret the omission. When Bingley urged him to dance with Elizabeth, Darcy declined. She was “tolerable”, he observed, “but not handsome enough to tempt me”.

Elizabeth heard the remark and, possessing wit and a lively sense of the ridiculous, was more amused than wounded. Mrs Bennet possessed neither advantage. By the end of the evening, Darcy’s ten thousand a year had ceased to compensate for the insult to one of her daughters.

Mary, who seldom allowed an incident to pass without extracting some general principle from it, thought Darcy’s remark deserving of further consideration. It had lately occurred to her that standards of beauty were less natural than people supposed, and that the authority to establish them deserved examination.

Mr Bennet, when the matter was reported to him, thought Darcy’s principal error had been to express an opinion commonly exercised in private.

Elizabeth laughed.

For the moment, the matter rested there.

A few days later, another gentleman appeared at Netherfield. An Italian acquaintance of Bingley’s, Count Antonio Gramsci, had come to England. His title, education and strikingly handsome appearance ensured that he did not pass unnoticed in the neighbourhood. Mrs Bennet was gratified to learn that he was unmarried. Lydia thought him very handsome, and regretted only that he was not an officer. Mary discovered that he had written a good deal.

The Count had views on society. He had observed that many arrangements regarded as natural had long been explained as such by those who benefited from them. Rank, property and education therefore interested him less as possessions than as sources of authority. Even the conventions governing relations between men and women, he suggested, owed something to general agreement that they ought to endure.

Mary found this extremely interesting. Her reflections upon Mr Darcy’s conduct at Meryton had already led her to wonder whether standards of beauty deserved closer examination. The Count suggested that she had not yet carried the thought far enough. Who, after all, had decided what constituted beauty? An opinion which appeared entirely personal could owe more than its owner supposed to the opinions of everybody else.

Elizabeth was less certain. Darcy had behaved badly because he was proud and disagreeable; she saw no obvious need for a theory to establish the point. She nevertheless found the Count intelligent and his argument sufficiently plausible to be worth hearing. Lydia, who had never previously shown much interest in the foundations of social convention, discovered that she was strongly in favour of examining them.

Mr Bennet received news of these discussions with interest. He had spent much of his married life observing the absurdities by which respectable society conducted itself and was pleased to learn that the discovery now possessed an Italian authority.

Mrs Bennet remained chiefly concerned with the Count’s income.

Lived experience in Meryton

The arrival in Meryton of Mr George Wickham gave Mary further occasion for reflection. Wickham was an officer, agreeable in manner and exceptionally handsome, which ensured that Lydia and Kitty required no theoretical grounds for taking an interest in him. Elizabeth was scarcely immune.

Wickham also had a history. He had grown up under the patronage of Darcy’s father, who had intended to provide him with a valuable church living. Darcy, he explained, had subsequently denied him the position. The particulars were complicated, but the contrast between the two gentlemen was easily understood: on one side stood a wealthy landowner with ten thousand pounds a year; on the other, a young officer with little fortune, deprived of an inheritance he believed had been promised to him.

Elizabeth found the account entirely consistent with what she already knew of Darcy’s character. Mary found it instructive for another reason. Wickham, she explained, was speaking from lived experience. His account ought therefore to be considered with proper regard for the disparity in wealth and social position between the two men.

The Count had already observed that power could influence whose account was believed. Mary now perceived the usefulness of the principle. If Wickham’s testimony could simply be overruled by Darcy, then the advantages of wealth and position extended to deciding which version of events prevailed. Lydia thought it monstrous that anybody should doubt such a handsome officer.

Wickham proved an attentive student. He had previously understood himself to have been badly treated. He was gratified to discover that the disadvantages under which he had so long believed himself to labour entitled him to consider himself considerably more marginalised than he had hitherto supposed.

Darcy’s position was less satisfactory. A denial merely placed the word of a wealthy landowner against that of the man claiming injury at his hands; silence looked scarcely better. Elizabeth, already disposed to believe the worst of him, found that her prejudice had acquired the reassuring appearance of principle.

The improvement of Hertfordshire

Mr Collins arrived at Longbourn shortly afterwards. As the distant male relation destined to inherit the estate, he posed an awkward test of several principles lately gaining favour in the neighbourhood. Mrs Bennet had long regarded the entail as an injustice. The Count agreed. Collins expressed his sympathy with the position of the Bennet women and acknowledged that his inheritance bestowed advantages upon him which they could never enjoy.

He did not offer to relinquish it.

Collins was a clergyman by profession and an administrator by temperament. Having discovered that established arrangements might perpetuate inequality, he immediately perceived the need for guidance. Mary supplied the principles; Collins considered how they might best be communicated. Within a short time, matters previously governed by judgement and manners had acquired principles, guidance and approved forms of expression.

His admiration for Lady Catherine de Bourgh proved no impediment. Although the Count’s opinions cast doubt upon inherited rank, Collins saw no contradiction between questioning established hierarchies and consulting Lady Catherine about how this should properly be done. Her Ladyship, he assured Mary, possessed unusually enlightened views upon the responsibilities attaching to social advantage.

The matter acquired a new delicacy when Collins proposed marriage to Elizabeth. Her refusal initially caused him little concern. Young ladies, he explained, customarily rejected a gentleman they secretly intended to accept. Elizabeth refused again. Only when Mary observed that interpreting a woman’s refusal as consent rested upon precisely the assumptions they had lately learned to question did Collins appreciate the seriousness of his error.

He apologised at considerable length.

Thereafter, no one in the parish was more attentive to the importance of consent than Mr Collins.

Elizabeth remained unmarried, but not Collins. Charlotte Lucas, twenty-seven, sensible and possessing little fortune, accepted him. Mary wondered whether a marriage undertaken for economic security could ever be entirely free of coercion.

Charlotte thought it could provide a house.

The entail remained unchanged.

Darcy eventually complicated matters himself. His proposal of marriage to Elizabeth was received less favourably than he had expected. Her refusal obliged him to confront the unpleasant possibility that wealth, rank and good intentions did not excuse arrogance. His letter to Elizabeth did something increasingly unfashionable: it supplied particulars. Wickham had indeed been favoured by Darcy’s father but had exchanged the promised church living for three thousand pounds, spent the money, subsequently demanded the living after all, and later attempted to elope with Darcy’s fifteen-year-old sister for her fortune.

Elizabeth read the letter more than once. She compared Darcy’s account with Wickham’s, recalled inconsistencies she had previously overlooked and confronted the uncomfortable possibility that a story could be sincerely heard, sympathetically received and still be false.

Mary thought Darcy’s letter centred Darcy’s perspective.

Elizabeth continued reading.

Mary considered Darcy’s subsequent change of manner encouraging. A gentleman possessing ten thousand pounds a year, a large estate and most of the other advantages society could confer had at least begun to acknowledge his privilege.

Privilege was proving a more complicated matter than Mary had first supposed. The Count had explained that advantage and disadvantage could reside in the same person and that neither was always apparent to the observer. Darcy’s wealth, property and position appeared to place his advantages beyond serious dispute. There remained, however, aspects of identity which could not safely be inferred from appearances.

Darcy now occasioned some surprise by making it known that, although hitherto generally understood to be a gentleman, he understood himself to be a woman.

Mary regarded the disclosure as further evidence that inherited classifications could not be allowed to determine individual identity. Mrs Bennet, having been instructed that such matters were intensely personal, declared herself entirely supportive. Only after considering the implications for Elizabeth did she discover reservations. Ten thousand pounds a year was about to disappear from the available supply of husbands in Hertfordshire.

Mary reminded her that understandings of sex had changed before. The novelist George Eliot, she observed, had been born a woman but subsequently became a man for literary purposes.

Mrs Bennet said she had never trusted novelists.

Elizabeth’s difficulty with Darcy was of another kind. She had first misjudged Darcy because appearance, wounded vanity and Wickham’s account had stood in place of knowledge of his character. Having corrected that error, she was reluctant to begin judging him again according to categories. Mary possessed an increasingly sophisticated account of what Darcy was. Elizabeth had acquired a rather better understanding of who he was.

Lydia presented a less theoretical difficulty. The restraints governing relations between young men and women had lately been exposed to criticism, and Lydia required little encouragement to disregard them. Her departure from Brighton with Wickham was pronounced by Mary an exercise of agency. It was also the departure of a reckless fifteen-year-old in the company of an older man of doubtful character. The two descriptions proved inconveniently capable of being true at the same time.

Unfortunately, Wickham had no intention of marrying her.

The difficulty was no longer one of terminology. Whatever disadvantages Wickham had suffered in comparison with Darcy did little to improve his conduct towards Lydia. Mr Bennet was obliged to confront his own negligence; Mrs Bennet discovered that reputation retained an inconvenient capacity to produce consequences even after everybody had agreed to disapprove of it.

Darcy did something less theoretically interesting. He found Wickham, paid his debts and arranged the marriage, taking care that Elizabeth should not know of his involvement. Wickham, whose lived experience had once commanded moral authority, had to be paid to take responsibility for his own conduct.

There was still the question of Pemberley, Darcy’s great estate in Derbyshire. Its inherited wealth, extensive lands and accumulated privilege invited serious objections in principle. They became somewhat less pressing when Elizabeth saw the place. Austen had already allowed her to reflect that “to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!”

Mrs Bennet thought this the most sensible observation anybody had made for some time.

The further improvement of Meryton

Lady Catherine de Bourgh entered these controversies with the confidence of someone who had never doubted her right to settle the affairs of other people. The new doctrines presented little difficulty. Her views on hierarchy remained robust, but she readily accepted that privilege carried the responsibility of instructing those less well placed to understand their own interests.

Mr Collins was delighted.

News that Elizabeth might still marry Darcy brought Lady Catherine to Longbourn. She had once expected Darcy to marry her daughter and considered Elizabeth an unsuitable connection. Such objections now required more careful expression. Her concern, she explained, was no longer one of rank. She wished only to know whether Elizabeth, in persisting in her attachment to Darcy, had given sufficient consideration to his identity and to the assumptions upon which their courtship had proceeded.

Elizabeth replied that she had reflected upon Darcy and preferred to form her opinion of him herself.

Lady Catherine found this disappointingly individualistic.

By then, Meryton had embraced the new manners with enthusiasm. Mr Collins proposed a Procession for the Public Celebration of Inclusive Affections, Mary supplied its intellectual justification, and Bingley offered to meet the expenses. Lydia thought a procession an excellent idea. Kitty agreed. Lady Catherine consented to lend her patronage. It was generally acknowledged to have been the first occasion of its kind in the neighbourhood.

Mrs Bennet attended in a state of mounting alarm. What had begun as a commendable desire to be supportive now appeared to threaten the principal object of her adult life. With five daughters and an entailed estate, she had no objection to diversity in principle but considered the continued existence of gentlemen willing to marry women a matter of some practical importance.

She had become, without intending it, the last defender of heteronormativity in Hertfordshire.

The Count had intended to address the gathering, but Mr Collins explained that the programme was already full. The movement had progressed beyond him.

The marriages proceeded. Jane married Bingley. Lydia remained married to Wickham. Charlotte remained comfortably established with Collins. Elizabeth and Darcy, having each discovered the dangers of judging too quickly, arrived finally at an understanding founded less upon social classification than upon the more difficult business of knowing one another.

The neighbourhood was generally satisfied with the progress it had made. Rank had been questioned, convention exposed, inherited assumptions challenged and prejudice subjected to relentless examination. There remained, naturally, a lively interest in who married whom, who possessed what, who was invited where, whose opinions were acceptable and what everybody else thought about it.

Mrs Bennet was satisfied. Her daughters were married.

Miss Park eventually took her leave of Hertfordshire and returned to Columbia with a renewed appreciation of Jane Austen.

Her tutors received her warmly. They were gratified to discover that her excursion had enabled her at last to perceive the structures of power, privilege and exclusion in Austen which they had previously endeavoured to explain to her.

Miss Park listened with attention.

Shortly afterwards, she began making discreet inquiries about flights to Pyongyang.

Michael Rainsborough is Professor of Strategic Theory and Director of the Centre for Future Defence and National Security in Canberra. He failed his English Literature A-level, where Frederick Forsyth and Sven Hassel were regrettably absent from the syllabus.