Chapter Thirteen
I guess, where Ch. 12 was a wrapping-up chapter, this is kind of an introduction to Mr. Collins. Now things are going to start humming along. You do have to kind of adjust your head each time Austen starts a new section, though, because just when you're starting to get into one piece, a new piece takes the spotlight. Don't worry--we'll be back to Bingley and Darcy soon enough.
Chapter Fourteen
Oof, now you've gotten a real taste of Mr. Collins. Imagine the most dull, pedantic, socially awkward person you know, and then crank the dial up to 11. Anyway, Collins is awful, but the saving grace of this chapter I think is how much fun Mr. Bennet is having messing with him. And just wait until you meet Lady Catherine!
Chapter Fifteen
I think some of the notes at the beginning about Mr. Collins and his education are interesting. As best I can tell from this and other old books I've read, men of a certain class were generally expected to go to university, which was easy to get into (for men of that class) and where they sometimes stayed for years and years, playing pool, making friends, and taking the occasional class. You did need academic credentials for some professions, but mostly college connected you with other men of your class (or if you were lucky, men slightly above your class) who would prove useful to you later in life. Mr. Collins, we are told, kind of missed the point and stayed just long enough to get the degree he needed to become a clergyman. This never occurred to me before, but he has no male friends that we know of. Even Mr. Bennet is friendly with Sir Lucas and probably other local guys.
Also: enter Mr. Wickham! Hooray! The story is firing on all cylinders now--what is up with Wickham and Darcy? Wait till you find out...
Chapter Sixteen
Here we get some backstory on Wickham and Darcy. First of all, a "living", which comes up a lot in Austen, is a position as a clergyman. For example, Lady Catherine gave Mr. Collins a living on her estate. He is a rector, which means he gets to collect the tithes (money people in his parish give to the church) in his area. He makes a living from this, hence, "a living". Whoever owns the estate also owns all the livings (some estates were very large and might need multiple clergymen). So Mr. Darcy, Sr. promised Wickham a profitable living, but Mr. Darcy, Jr. (our Mr. Darcy) did not give it to him. This is the gist of the story Wickham tells Lizzie, and the reason he is enlisting in the militia, which is lower-status and lower-paid. Elizabeth is justifiably shocked because taking away the living is a really awful thing to do to someone, and she thought Mr. Darcy was just your garden-variety jerk.
Chapter Seventeen
Another Jane and Lizzie tete-a-tete to start us off; sweet Jane trying not to blame either Darcy or Wickham and feisty Lizzie laughing at her. The big event is the announcement of the ball and Mr. Collins asking Elizabeth for the first two dances (ugh). It was pretty typical for guys to ask for specific dances ahead of time, and unfortunately there was not a great way to say no as long as all rules of propriety were followed. But here we are, plowing forward into the ball...I know I've already said this about several other scenes (and I will say it again), but chapter 18 is one of my favorites.
Chapter Eighteen
Poor, poor Lizzy. Wickham in town, dancing with Collins AND Darcy, embarrassed by both parents and Mary...this ball is painful. You'll find later that this ball and the awful Bennet behavior have a lot of impact on the rest of the story. I'm sure this is an experience many of us have had, yes? "My family is actually the worst right now and I want to sink into the ground?" I know I've been there (LOVE YOU MOM.)
Sunday, January 3, 2016
Chapters 7-12
Chapter Seven:
Ok, two big things here--the officers, and Mrs. Bennet's terrible idea to make Jane ride to Netherfield on a horse in the rain. You'll see more about the officers later, but I think it's worth mentioning that for all the notes go out of their way to explain the historical significance of girls liking men in uniform, not much has changed on that front. I'm certain that single folks who live near military bases know where to find the soldiers on their nights off. So, that's all that is.
Mrs. Bennet, Mrs. Bennet, what have you done? The notes point out a few things--one, that at this time a cold could easily turn into something much more serious. Remember, antibiotics haven't been invented yet, so if those sniffles turn into a sinus infection, or an ear infection, or pneumonia? Your chances really weren't that great. I mean, it's not like everyone who got the sniffles keeled over dead, but it was kind of a big deal for Jane to get sick. Which is how Elizabeth justified going all that way alone.This is one of those things you pick up if you read enough old and/or historical fiction: if a young woman was alone outdoors for too long, people basically decided they had the right to assume she was *gasp* with a man, doing scandalous, horrible things. (Kissing? Showing some ankle?) I mean, my mother still gets anxious if she knows I'm outside alone anytime after 8pm, but this was a whole other level. If your "honor" (read: chastity) was compromised, or even if people thought it could have been, suddenly your marriage prospects diminished greatly. And remember, it all comes back to marriage for the Bennet girls (we heard more about their family situation at the beginning of this chapter.)
Chapter Eight:
Ok, this chapter is a bit tricky in terms of being pretty dated. The main thing that's happening is that Mr. Bingley's sisters (Mrs. Hurst, the married one, and Miss Bingley, the unmarried one who is trying really, really hard to get Mr. Darcy to notice her) are trying to make Elizabeth look bad in front of the men. First they make fun of her some more for walking to Netherfield, and then when she comes into the drawing room after dinner, they try to show off. When Miss Bingley asks after Miss Darcy (Mr. Darcy's younger sister) it's really a way of saying, "Look, Miss Elizabeth Bennet, I know Mr. Darcy better than you. See? I even know his family!" Then, in that whole long discussion of "accomplished ladies", Miss Bingley basically lists off the things she knows how to do (playing the piano, singing, dancing, drawing, etc.) and calls that accomplished. She went to a very fancy girls' boarding school, which was very expensive, and taught her almost nothing that we would consider a core subject today.
This was just when the old tradition of teaching girls things to make them pretty and entertaining was starting to get some pushback from people who thought girls should learn real subjects, but that was a fairly controversial idea. Elizabeth, as we see, is a reader, but has not had the benefit of a fancy education in all those traditionally girly things. So it's sort of infuriating to Miss Bingley when Mr. Darcy says, "Sure, ok, screen-embroidering and dancing are great, but if a woman isn't well-read, then what's the point?" And Elizabeth just rolls her eyes at the whole thing--really, there are girls out there who have had time to learn all those arts and crafts AND read
extensively?--which winds up winning the conversation for her. Of course Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst badmouth her as soon as she leaves, but it's clear who looks better at the end of Ch. 8.
Chapter Nine:
Another argument that can best be summed up as "No, I'm fancier!" This time, though, Mrs. Bennet is playing, and so there can be no winners because everyone involved has to talk to Mrs. Bennet or in fact be Mrs. Bennet. The takeaway here is that Mrs. Bennet is so provincial (meaning literally "from the provinces", but the usual
connotation is someone who hasn't had much life experience and doesn't think that anything they haven't seen is worth seeing) that she can't help but embarrass herself in front of the worldly (opposite of provincial) Bingleys and Mr. Darcy. It's like someone from one of the upstate New York cow towns near where I grew up bragging to someone from the city about how many people they see in a day. (Also, as you may have noticed, they call London "town"--"We'll send a messenger to town to fetch the physician,"--the way people within a hundred-mile radius of NYC call it "the city".) So you can imagine Elizabeth's horror when, after her mother has finally finished looking like a total rube, her younger sister gets in Mr. Bingley's face and demands a ball.
Chapter Ten:
I kind of love this chapter. The arguments between Darcy and Elizabeth are some of the best parts of the book, in my opinion, and they're at their best when the jealous Miss Bingley is there trying to get a word in. She's like a fly that Darcy keeps having to swat away. Just look at the dialogue on p. 98--he's just trying to write his letter and she can't shut up. All the things he and Elizabeth argue over are sort of based on the values of the time, and while their
respective sides do reveal bits of their personalities, what's most important is that they are really starting to enjoy bickering and bantering.
Chapter Eleven:
I think this drawing room scene would appear in many "Top 5 Scenes From Pride and Prejudice" lists. It's similar to what we've seen before, where Elizabeth and Darcy bicker and Miss Bingley is jealous, except that it also contains this weird, great moment where Mr. Darcy makes what passed for kind of a dirty joke back then. When Miss Bingley is sick of being out-talked and decides to strut her stuff by taking a walk around the room, she realizes Darcy isn't paying any attention. In what may be her cleverest move of the whole book, she gets Elizabeth to walk with her, knowing that will get Darcy's attention. But when she invites Darcy to join in, he tells her that would defeat the purpose of the whole walking thing. Elizabeth know better than to ask for the punchline to his mysterious remark, but Miss Bingley can't help herself, and Mr. Darcy explains that either they're walking together to share secrets, in which case he would be in the way, or they're walking to show off their figures--their bodies--and in that case, he's got a better view from where he's sitting. This is practically the Regency era equivalent of a guy sitting back in his chair and yelling, "Oh yeah! Smokin'! Back that thing up, baby!" So while Miss Bingley exaggerates her reaction, as usual, it's still actually kind of scandalous. I find it to be such an interesting moment for Darcy because it's so out of character--is he overwhelmed by how beautiful and unattainable Elizabeth is proving to be? Is he just so annoyed with Miss Bingley that he's hoping to shock her into shutting up? Or is this just his true sense of humor--clever and a little bit wicked--coming through?
Chapter Twelve:
It feels like this is just a quick wrap-up chapter--the "Bennets at Netherfield" section comes to an end, and a big new chunk starts with Ch. 13. Mr. Darcy's feelings are interesting--he wants Elizabeth to leave because she's too poor and her family is too low-status for him to fall for, and yet, he can feel it happening. One thing Austen does really well is showing what a character is thinking and then what she/her narrator thinks of that character's thoughts. The sentence that starts with the words, "He wisely resolved..." is a good example--clearly, he's really full of himself for thinking that Lizzy has any feelings for him or designs on him that must be "crushed", so the word "wisely" gives the whole thing a sarcastic tone.
Ok, two big things here--the officers, and Mrs. Bennet's terrible idea to make Jane ride to Netherfield on a horse in the rain. You'll see more about the officers later, but I think it's worth mentioning that for all the notes go out of their way to explain the historical significance of girls liking men in uniform, not much has changed on that front. I'm certain that single folks who live near military bases know where to find the soldiers on their nights off. So, that's all that is.
Mrs. Bennet, Mrs. Bennet, what have you done? The notes point out a few things--one, that at this time a cold could easily turn into something much more serious. Remember, antibiotics haven't been invented yet, so if those sniffles turn into a sinus infection, or an ear infection, or pneumonia? Your chances really weren't that great. I mean, it's not like everyone who got the sniffles keeled over dead, but it was kind of a big deal for Jane to get sick. Which is how Elizabeth justified going all that way alone.This is one of those things you pick up if you read enough old and/or historical fiction: if a young woman was alone outdoors for too long, people basically decided they had the right to assume she was *gasp* with a man, doing scandalous, horrible things. (Kissing? Showing some ankle?) I mean, my mother still gets anxious if she knows I'm outside alone anytime after 8pm, but this was a whole other level. If your "honor" (read: chastity) was compromised, or even if people thought it could have been, suddenly your marriage prospects diminished greatly. And remember, it all comes back to marriage for the Bennet girls (we heard more about their family situation at the beginning of this chapter.)
Chapter Eight:
Ok, this chapter is a bit tricky in terms of being pretty dated. The main thing that's happening is that Mr. Bingley's sisters (Mrs. Hurst, the married one, and Miss Bingley, the unmarried one who is trying really, really hard to get Mr. Darcy to notice her) are trying to make Elizabeth look bad in front of the men. First they make fun of her some more for walking to Netherfield, and then when she comes into the drawing room after dinner, they try to show off. When Miss Bingley asks after Miss Darcy (Mr. Darcy's younger sister) it's really a way of saying, "Look, Miss Elizabeth Bennet, I know Mr. Darcy better than you. See? I even know his family!" Then, in that whole long discussion of "accomplished ladies", Miss Bingley basically lists off the things she knows how to do (playing the piano, singing, dancing, drawing, etc.) and calls that accomplished. She went to a very fancy girls' boarding school, which was very expensive, and taught her almost nothing that we would consider a core subject today.
This was just when the old tradition of teaching girls things to make them pretty and entertaining was starting to get some pushback from people who thought girls should learn real subjects, but that was a fairly controversial idea. Elizabeth, as we see, is a reader, but has not had the benefit of a fancy education in all those traditionally girly things. So it's sort of infuriating to Miss Bingley when Mr. Darcy says, "Sure, ok, screen-embroidering and dancing are great, but if a woman isn't well-read, then what's the point?" And Elizabeth just rolls her eyes at the whole thing--really, there are girls out there who have had time to learn all those arts and crafts AND read
extensively?--which winds up winning the conversation for her. Of course Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst badmouth her as soon as she leaves, but it's clear who looks better at the end of Ch. 8.
Chapter Nine:
Another argument that can best be summed up as "No, I'm fancier!" This time, though, Mrs. Bennet is playing, and so there can be no winners because everyone involved has to talk to Mrs. Bennet or in fact be Mrs. Bennet. The takeaway here is that Mrs. Bennet is so provincial (meaning literally "from the provinces", but the usual
connotation is someone who hasn't had much life experience and doesn't think that anything they haven't seen is worth seeing) that she can't help but embarrass herself in front of the worldly (opposite of provincial) Bingleys and Mr. Darcy. It's like someone from one of the upstate New York cow towns near where I grew up bragging to someone from the city about how many people they see in a day. (Also, as you may have noticed, they call London "town"--"We'll send a messenger to town to fetch the physician,"--the way people within a hundred-mile radius of NYC call it "the city".) So you can imagine Elizabeth's horror when, after her mother has finally finished looking like a total rube, her younger sister gets in Mr. Bingley's face and demands a ball.
Chapter Ten:
I kind of love this chapter. The arguments between Darcy and Elizabeth are some of the best parts of the book, in my opinion, and they're at their best when the jealous Miss Bingley is there trying to get a word in. She's like a fly that Darcy keeps having to swat away. Just look at the dialogue on p. 98--he's just trying to write his letter and she can't shut up. All the things he and Elizabeth argue over are sort of based on the values of the time, and while their
respective sides do reveal bits of their personalities, what's most important is that they are really starting to enjoy bickering and bantering.
Chapter Eleven:
I think this drawing room scene would appear in many "Top 5 Scenes From Pride and Prejudice" lists. It's similar to what we've seen before, where Elizabeth and Darcy bicker and Miss Bingley is jealous, except that it also contains this weird, great moment where Mr. Darcy makes what passed for kind of a dirty joke back then. When Miss Bingley is sick of being out-talked and decides to strut her stuff by taking a walk around the room, she realizes Darcy isn't paying any attention. In what may be her cleverest move of the whole book, she gets Elizabeth to walk with her, knowing that will get Darcy's attention. But when she invites Darcy to join in, he tells her that would defeat the purpose of the whole walking thing. Elizabeth know better than to ask for the punchline to his mysterious remark, but Miss Bingley can't help herself, and Mr. Darcy explains that either they're walking together to share secrets, in which case he would be in the way, or they're walking to show off their figures--their bodies--and in that case, he's got a better view from where he's sitting. This is practically the Regency era equivalent of a guy sitting back in his chair and yelling, "Oh yeah! Smokin'! Back that thing up, baby!" So while Miss Bingley exaggerates her reaction, as usual, it's still actually kind of scandalous. I find it to be such an interesting moment for Darcy because it's so out of character--is he overwhelmed by how beautiful and unattainable Elizabeth is proving to be? Is he just so annoyed with Miss Bingley that he's hoping to shock her into shutting up? Or is this just his true sense of humor--clever and a little bit wicked--coming through?
Chapter Twelve:
It feels like this is just a quick wrap-up chapter--the "Bennets at Netherfield" section comes to an end, and a big new chunk starts with Ch. 13. Mr. Darcy's feelings are interesting--he wants Elizabeth to leave because she's too poor and her family is too low-status for him to fall for, and yet, he can feel it happening. One thing Austen does really well is showing what a character is thinking and then what she/her narrator thinks of that character's thoughts. The sentence that starts with the words, "He wisely resolved..." is a good example--clearly, he's really full of himself for thinking that Lizzy has any feelings for him or designs on him that must be "crushed", so the word "wisely" gives the whole thing a sarcastic tone.
Chapters 2-6
Chapter Two
I love the Bennets here. Mr. Bennet reminds me a little of my dad--he'll ask a question that sounds serious, and I'll be listening to him like he's serious, and then all of a sudden there's a punchline and I realize the whole thing has been a big joke. It's both fun and occasionally frustrating, which I think is how most of the Bennet women feel about Mr. B.
Also, Ch. 2 has a great example of Austen's sense of humor. In the middle of p. 10, when Mr. Bennet is teasing Mary about the big books she's always reading, there's a one-sentence paragraph:
"Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how."
I sometimes think Austen was a screenwriter before the screen was invented. Pieces of the novel read more like a screenplay with really great stage directions than a novel, and this is one of those times. This line, dropped in as its own paragraph, makes me stop and picture what it would look like--how would I show that if I were directing the movie version? I imagine Mary looking pretty silly. (The novel is not kind to Mary--and the miniseries is even less so.)
Chapter Three
Dunh dunh dunh...Mr. Darcy! Man, what a jerk he is in this chapter. This whole chapter starts to feel very high-school-ish (which makes sense when you realize the Bennet girls range from what would be a high school sophomore to a college senior today). From early on when it talks about the girls looking out the upstairs window at Mr. Bingley to see how he's dressed to the awful comments Mr. Darcy makes at the ball, it's easy to imagine all of this taking place in a modern high school.
Are you following all the business about introductions and manners and everything? That's definitely a piece that you need to kind of assimilate to. The biggest rule is basically that women need to be introduced to new people or they can't talk to them without it being really scandalous.
Chapter Four
I love the chat between Lizzy and Jane. Their relationship is really great, because it's so sweet but not sickly sweet. Austen uses an interesting trick to designate Lizzy as our protagonist even as Jane is such a dear: for all everyone is always talking about how sweet and pretty Jane is, we actually get to see examples of Elizabeth being pretty cool (laughing off Mr. Darcy's insult and making fun of the guys Jane likes.) For me, the specifics win out--I would guess that Austen did that on purpose, to make the reader like Elizabeth the best while still feeling a sort of generic warmth toward Jane.
I also think it's interesting that there is a bit more narration than we've had so far in order to give us some real info about the men. Up until this point, everything we've heard about them has come from other characters, sometimes third- or fourth-hand, and is often biased at best and plain wrong at worst (like the news about how many people Bingley was bringing to that dance!) It's considered poor form in literary analysis to assume that the narrator is one and the same with the author, but I have a hard time separating Austen's narrators from her own real personality in my head, because she writes like she's telling a friend about things and just making some witty/sarcastic observations as she does.
Chapter Five
In which we start to see the failings of several of the Bennet women. First of all: Thanks, Mary, for spewing out that paragraph about pride and vanity. Do you remember those Bing commercials where someone asks their friend a question and the friend just starts saying random pieces of information about one of the words in the sentence while the person who asked the question just stands there shaking their head? Yeah. Mary is kind of like that. And second of all, the chapter ends with a "Would not!"/"Would too!" argument between Mrs. B and a little boy. Yikes. And in the mean time, Jane tries to find the good in even the insufferable Mr. Darcy. Dear, sweet Jane. Sometimes, a jerk is just a jerk. (Of course, this being the mother of all romantic comedies, you can probably guess that we have not heard the last of Mr. Darcy, but for now, all signs point to "Ugh.")
Oh, and Charlotte Lucas shows up. I like her a lot. She's 27, which makes her pretty washed up in terms of marriage prospects. She's cynical and jaded in a way that Elizabeth isn't, but she's not bitter. This is her saving grace. She calls it like she sees it but doesn't waste any time feeling sorry for herself. I guess it's kind of freeing, being so dreadfully old and still unmarried.
Chapter Six
One of the big crowd scenes. There are a lot of these--try to keep track of who's insulting whom. The standouts here are Sir William Lucas, who thinks quite highly of himself because he managed to get knighted (a bump up in society, since he made his money in trade, which was looked down upon) and Miss Bingley, who appears at the end just to be obnoxious to Mr. Darcy. I picture Sir William as one of those people who is always putting his foot in it--making things awkward for everyone around him and being totally oblivious to it, as he does here trying to get Elizabeth to dance with Mr. Darcy. (Having him for a dad must have helped Charlotte Lucas become so cynical and resigned..she's always having to deal with his awkward messes.) And Miss Bingley is fun because she's so totally the mean girl who is desperate to get the cutest guy in school to notice her. Hence her reaction when Darcy says he likes Elizabeth's eyes--basically "Have a nice life with Mrs. Bennet as your mother-in-law!" (If you haven't noticed by now, Mrs. B does have a tendency to go on and on and on, and exaggerate, and generally freak out at the drop of a hat. This is not that pleasant now and was not then, as well as being somewhat less than genteel.)
I love the Bennets here. Mr. Bennet reminds me a little of my dad--he'll ask a question that sounds serious, and I'll be listening to him like he's serious, and then all of a sudden there's a punchline and I realize the whole thing has been a big joke. It's both fun and occasionally frustrating, which I think is how most of the Bennet women feel about Mr. B.
Also, Ch. 2 has a great example of Austen's sense of humor. In the middle of p. 10, when Mr. Bennet is teasing Mary about the big books she's always reading, there's a one-sentence paragraph:
"Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how."
I sometimes think Austen was a screenwriter before the screen was invented. Pieces of the novel read more like a screenplay with really great stage directions than a novel, and this is one of those times. This line, dropped in as its own paragraph, makes me stop and picture what it would look like--how would I show that if I were directing the movie version? I imagine Mary looking pretty silly. (The novel is not kind to Mary--and the miniseries is even less so.)
Chapter Three
Dunh dunh dunh...Mr. Darcy! Man, what a jerk he is in this chapter. This whole chapter starts to feel very high-school-ish (which makes sense when you realize the Bennet girls range from what would be a high school sophomore to a college senior today). From early on when it talks about the girls looking out the upstairs window at Mr. Bingley to see how he's dressed to the awful comments Mr. Darcy makes at the ball, it's easy to imagine all of this taking place in a modern high school.
Are you following all the business about introductions and manners and everything? That's definitely a piece that you need to kind of assimilate to. The biggest rule is basically that women need to be introduced to new people or they can't talk to them without it being really scandalous.
Chapter Four
I love the chat between Lizzy and Jane. Their relationship is really great, because it's so sweet but not sickly sweet. Austen uses an interesting trick to designate Lizzy as our protagonist even as Jane is such a dear: for all everyone is always talking about how sweet and pretty Jane is, we actually get to see examples of Elizabeth being pretty cool (laughing off Mr. Darcy's insult and making fun of the guys Jane likes.) For me, the specifics win out--I would guess that Austen did that on purpose, to make the reader like Elizabeth the best while still feeling a sort of generic warmth toward Jane.
I also think it's interesting that there is a bit more narration than we've had so far in order to give us some real info about the men. Up until this point, everything we've heard about them has come from other characters, sometimes third- or fourth-hand, and is often biased at best and plain wrong at worst (like the news about how many people Bingley was bringing to that dance!) It's considered poor form in literary analysis to assume that the narrator is one and the same with the author, but I have a hard time separating Austen's narrators from her own real personality in my head, because she writes like she's telling a friend about things and just making some witty/sarcastic observations as she does.
Chapter Five
In which we start to see the failings of several of the Bennet women. First of all: Thanks, Mary, for spewing out that paragraph about pride and vanity. Do you remember those Bing commercials where someone asks their friend a question and the friend just starts saying random pieces of information about one of the words in the sentence while the person who asked the question just stands there shaking their head? Yeah. Mary is kind of like that. And second of all, the chapter ends with a "Would not!"/"Would too!" argument between Mrs. B and a little boy. Yikes. And in the mean time, Jane tries to find the good in even the insufferable Mr. Darcy. Dear, sweet Jane. Sometimes, a jerk is just a jerk. (Of course, this being the mother of all romantic comedies, you can probably guess that we have not heard the last of Mr. Darcy, but for now, all signs point to "Ugh.")
Oh, and Charlotte Lucas shows up. I like her a lot. She's 27, which makes her pretty washed up in terms of marriage prospects. She's cynical and jaded in a way that Elizabeth isn't, but she's not bitter. This is her saving grace. She calls it like she sees it but doesn't waste any time feeling sorry for herself. I guess it's kind of freeing, being so dreadfully old and still unmarried.
Chapter Six
One of the big crowd scenes. There are a lot of these--try to keep track of who's insulting whom. The standouts here are Sir William Lucas, who thinks quite highly of himself because he managed to get knighted (a bump up in society, since he made his money in trade, which was looked down upon) and Miss Bingley, who appears at the end just to be obnoxious to Mr. Darcy. I picture Sir William as one of those people who is always putting his foot in it--making things awkward for everyone around him and being totally oblivious to it, as he does here trying to get Elizabeth to dance with Mr. Darcy. (Having him for a dad must have helped Charlotte Lucas become so cynical and resigned..she's always having to deal with his awkward messes.) And Miss Bingley is fun because she's so totally the mean girl who is desperate to get the cutest guy in school to notice her. Hence her reaction when Darcy says he likes Elizabeth's eyes--basically "Have a nice life with Mrs. Bennet as your mother-in-law!" (If you haven't noticed by now, Mrs. B does have a tendency to go on and on and on, and exaggerate, and generally freak out at the drop of a hat. This is not that pleasant now and was not then, as well as being somewhat less than genteel.)
Introduction: A Few Big Issues to set up Chapter One
Why was everyone so nuts about getting married?
This can be boiled down, rather cynically, to the answer "Money", or a little less cynically to "Survival". The Bennets and the people they associated with were part of this awkward piece of British society called "Gentry"--not royalty or aristocrats, but with almost as many rules and standards. Being considered gentry was a little more flexible than the higher ranks, but basically you had to come from a "good"/old family, or be very wealthy and then behave in certain ways like buying land. If you owned a nice house, or a decent estate (plot of land, usually with a home and gardens but sometimes including a small town with farmers and a church) you were gentry. If your family used to, and you still have good manners and follow the right rules, then you're gentry even if you somehow lost your money and/or land. If your family got money through business (like being a trader or shopkeeper), well, it's not ideal, but if you play your cards right and buy the right home and act the right way, you can work your way in (but people might still look down on you).
Essentially, it was one of those things that is really, really complicated to explain, but that everyone just knew back in Regency times (that's the era we're talking about, by the way, which roughly translates to "the earlyish 1800s"). Think about celebrities now. There's a difference between Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts and Lindsay Lohan, right? They're all, broadly speaking, actresses. And I, for one, would have a hard time explaining to someone from a different culture exactly why I would go see Meryl Streep play Lady Macbeth, but probably neither of the other two. Characters in Jane Austen novels make those kinds of distinctions based on family/wealth/manners/etc.
So anyway, if you're the Bennets, you have certain standards of living to uphold. Girls from families like theirs were not expected to ever work for money. The worst case scenario, for one of them, would be to go be a governess, living with a family from their class but slightly richer, and teaching/chaperoning the girls in that family. To be a governess, if you came from a family like the Bennets, would be relatively disgraceful. (If you came from a poor family but had managed to get an education, being a governess was a great job. It's like how people thought it was a strange choice for Meryl Streep to do Mamma Mia, but everyone was really proud of Lindsay Lohan for holding it together long enough to make Herbie Fully Loaded.)
If you can't work, you better hope you've got money coming in from somewhere. If you were lucky, your dad had plenty of money to leave you after he died, which usually came in the form of funds that produced interest--one big lump sum could be left in the bank and you'd just take out the interest each year and live on that, so the money never dried up. This was definitely the simplest way to get money if you were a lady back in this era. The other, of course, was to get married.
Sounds simple, right? But, surprise surprise, all the rich folks tended to marry each other. Someone like a Bennet sister, who stood to inherit not quite a thousand pounds, would be at a disadvantage when competing for eligible bachelors. (Although, a note about the money: that would be a great inheritance in today's dollars, translated for the passage of time and the conversion to American money. Using the very rough metric of "multiply by 50", that's close to 50,000 pounds or around $80,000. If you're a modern woman with a career, $80,000 is fantastic. If it's what you have to live on for the rest of your life, not so much.)
And then there is the matter of the entailment. This is what really fouls things up for the Bennet girls. An entailment is this thing in British law that let men (who did all the property owning) leave their property not only to specific members of the next generation, but also the one after that. So, whichever guy in the extended Bennet family owned Longbourn (the family estate) before Mr. Bennet (let's call him Grandpa Bennet) decided to create an entailment. And Grandpa Bennet decreed, "Longbourn shall pass down the generations of my family through the male line," which meant, "You better hope you have boys or your wife and daughters will get kicked out when you die." So, when Mr. Bennet dies, Longbourn goes to the next male in line, who happens to be this cousin Mr. Collins. The less said about him the better, except that he is probably not inclined to give up this nice place to live out of the goodness of his heart after Mr. Bennet dies.
To make a very long story short: since the five Bennet girls (and Mrs. Bennet!) need to be provided for after Mr. Bennet's death but CAN'T inherit the family home, the girls really, really need to marry well. Or at least one or two of them do, and they can provide for the rest.
So when Austen opens with the line: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife," she's throwing the reader right into this screwy, cynical world where men have all the power and money, and women have all the desperation. (When a cute new kid comes to school: He or she MUST need a boyfriend/girlfriend!) (Also: memorize that line, or get pretty close. It's one people will throw around and it's good to have it in your back pocket.
This can be boiled down, rather cynically, to the answer "Money", or a little less cynically to "Survival". The Bennets and the people they associated with were part of this awkward piece of British society called "Gentry"--not royalty or aristocrats, but with almost as many rules and standards. Being considered gentry was a little more flexible than the higher ranks, but basically you had to come from a "good"/old family, or be very wealthy and then behave in certain ways like buying land. If you owned a nice house, or a decent estate (plot of land, usually with a home and gardens but sometimes including a small town with farmers and a church) you were gentry. If your family used to, and you still have good manners and follow the right rules, then you're gentry even if you somehow lost your money and/or land. If your family got money through business (like being a trader or shopkeeper), well, it's not ideal, but if you play your cards right and buy the right home and act the right way, you can work your way in (but people might still look down on you).
Essentially, it was one of those things that is really, really complicated to explain, but that everyone just knew back in Regency times (that's the era we're talking about, by the way, which roughly translates to "the earlyish 1800s"). Think about celebrities now. There's a difference between Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts and Lindsay Lohan, right? They're all, broadly speaking, actresses. And I, for one, would have a hard time explaining to someone from a different culture exactly why I would go see Meryl Streep play Lady Macbeth, but probably neither of the other two. Characters in Jane Austen novels make those kinds of distinctions based on family/wealth/manners/etc.
So anyway, if you're the Bennets, you have certain standards of living to uphold. Girls from families like theirs were not expected to ever work for money. The worst case scenario, for one of them, would be to go be a governess, living with a family from their class but slightly richer, and teaching/chaperoning the girls in that family. To be a governess, if you came from a family like the Bennets, would be relatively disgraceful. (If you came from a poor family but had managed to get an education, being a governess was a great job. It's like how people thought it was a strange choice for Meryl Streep to do Mamma Mia, but everyone was really proud of Lindsay Lohan for holding it together long enough to make Herbie Fully Loaded.)
If you can't work, you better hope you've got money coming in from somewhere. If you were lucky, your dad had plenty of money to leave you after he died, which usually came in the form of funds that produced interest--one big lump sum could be left in the bank and you'd just take out the interest each year and live on that, so the money never dried up. This was definitely the simplest way to get money if you were a lady back in this era. The other, of course, was to get married.
Sounds simple, right? But, surprise surprise, all the rich folks tended to marry each other. Someone like a Bennet sister, who stood to inherit not quite a thousand pounds, would be at a disadvantage when competing for eligible bachelors. (Although, a note about the money: that would be a great inheritance in today's dollars, translated for the passage of time and the conversion to American money. Using the very rough metric of "multiply by 50", that's close to 50,000 pounds or around $80,000. If you're a modern woman with a career, $80,000 is fantastic. If it's what you have to live on for the rest of your life, not so much.)
And then there is the matter of the entailment. This is what really fouls things up for the Bennet girls. An entailment is this thing in British law that let men (who did all the property owning) leave their property not only to specific members of the next generation, but also the one after that. So, whichever guy in the extended Bennet family owned Longbourn (the family estate) before Mr. Bennet (let's call him Grandpa Bennet) decided to create an entailment. And Grandpa Bennet decreed, "Longbourn shall pass down the generations of my family through the male line," which meant, "You better hope you have boys or your wife and daughters will get kicked out when you die." So, when Mr. Bennet dies, Longbourn goes to the next male in line, who happens to be this cousin Mr. Collins. The less said about him the better, except that he is probably not inclined to give up this nice place to live out of the goodness of his heart after Mr. Bennet dies.
To make a very long story short: since the five Bennet girls (and Mrs. Bennet!) need to be provided for after Mr. Bennet's death but CAN'T inherit the family home, the girls really, really need to marry well. Or at least one or two of them do, and they can provide for the rest.
So when Austen opens with the line: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife," she's throwing the reader right into this screwy, cynical world where men have all the power and money, and women have all the desperation. (When a cute new kid comes to school: He or she MUST need a boyfriend/girlfriend!) (Also: memorize that line, or get pretty close. It's one people will throw around and it's good to have it in your back pocket.
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