Pride and Prejudice — themes & analysis

The novel was written under the title First Impressions, and the argument it was making under that title is the same argument it makes as Pride and Prejudice. Austen's central interest is the question of how reliable our initial readings of other people actually are, and what kinds of people make what kinds of mistakes. Elizabeth Bennet is a strikingly intelligent young woman with quick judgment, a sharp eye, and a confidence in her own perceptiveness that is mostly justified by experience. She forms her impression of Mr. Darcy at the first ball — proud, cold, contemptuous — and the impression is immediately confirmed by Darcy's own remark that she is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt him. She forms her impression of Wickham, a few weeks later, by an evening's conversation at her aunt's house — open, charming, ill-used by Darcy — and the impression is again confirmed by what seems to be Wickham's own modest reluctance to dwell on his grievances.

Both impressions, the novel will eventually demonstrate, are wrong. Both have been formed on inadequate evidence by a woman whose vanity, lightly disguised as discernment, has flattered her into trusting the rapid judgments her quick mind produces. The genius of the novel is that it allows the reader to share Elizabeth's misreadings completely. Most first-time readers come away from the early chapters convinced that Darcy is a snob and Wickham a victim, just as Elizabeth does.

The slow work of the second volume is the work of revision — of the same evidence read in a new light, the same conversations remembered with a different inflection, the same characters seen for the first time. Austen is making an argument about how knowledge of other people actually accumulates, and the argument is unsentimental: it accumulates slowly, against the resistance of our first quick reading, and the people who do it best are those who have learned to suspect the very confidence that quick judgment produces in them.

Elizabeth's growth across the novel is not into a different person but into a person who has learned this about herself. Her acknowledgment in Chapter 36, alone with Darcy's letter, that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, and absurd — about Wickham, about Darcy, about herself — is one of the great moments of self-recognition in any English novel. The marriage at the end is presented as the reward of that growth rather than its cause.

Where to follow it: Ch 3 (Darcy at the Meryton ball), Ch 16 (Wickham's story), Ch 35 (Darcy's letter), Ch 36 (Elizabeth rereads the letter).

Austen never lets the reader forget that the courtship plot is also an economic plot. The Bennet family is gentry but not wealthy, and the estate at Longbourn is entailed — it can pass only to a male heir, and in the absence of a son will go on Mr. Bennet's death to his cousin Mr. Collins, leaving the five daughters with no inheritance and no home. They must marry, or they will become dependent relations or governesses.

Mrs. Bennet's monomania about her daughters' marriages, often played for comedy, is also the only honest response a woman in her position could have to her family's actual situation. Charlotte Lucas, twenty-seven, plain, intelligent, and clear-eyed, accepts a proposal from the ridiculous Mr. Collins on the explicit ground that she is not romantic, has never been, has nowhere else to go, and will get from this marriage the comfortable home and respectable position she could not get by any other available means. Elizabeth is appalled, and the novel mostly endorses her appallment, but Austen is also careful to show that Charlotte's calculation is not contemptible — it is sad, and it is also realistic.

The contrast with the Lydia–Wickham marriage, contracted in scandal and sustained by Darcy's silent payment of Wickham's debts, makes the same point in another key. And Darcy's financial details are reported with a precision that has more in common with realist fiction than with the romance the courtship plot superficially resembles: his ten thousand a year, Bingley's five, Wickham's none, Mr. Collins's modest living. Austen's romantic heroines do, eventually, marry for love. But the novel never pretends that love alone would be enough.

The marriage market is not background to the story; it is the condition under which the story takes place. Every character's behavior makes sense only when you understand the economic structure underneath it — the entail, the lack of female inheritance, the narrow range of occupations available to a gentry woman who does not marry. Austen understands all of this and trusts her reader to understand it too.

Where to follow it: Ch 1 (the opening truth), Ch 19 (Collins proposes), Ch 22 (Charlotte accepts), Ch 50 (the Lydia settlement).

Austen is one of the inventors of the technique modern criticism has named free indirect style — the prose mode in which a third-person narrator slips, sentence by sentence, in and out of a character's consciousness, so that the narrator's voice and the character's mind become indistinguishable for stretches at a time. The technique allows Austen to keep the formal distance and ironic poise of an external narrator while also giving the reader full access to Elizabeth Bennet's mind from the inside.

The most famous extended example is Chapter 36, in which Elizabeth, alone after reading Darcy's long letter explaining what really happened with Wickham and Jane and Bingley, paces through Hunsford parsonage rereading the letter sentence by sentence and revising her entire history. Austen tracks the rereading with extraordinary precision — the first reading in indignation; the second, more careful, finding too much that fits; the third, in growing humiliation, recognising what her vanity had been doing; the final acknowledgment. We are inside Elizabeth's mind for pages, and yet we are also somehow outside her — Austen's ironic poise is maintained, the gentle exposure of her vanity continues, the reader is asked to perceive things Elizabeth herself does not yet quite perceive.

The technique had existed before Austen, but she refined it to a precision that made it the foundation of nineteenth-century literary realism. Flaubert, George Eliot, Henry James — all of them working through what Austen had already done. The modern novel of consciousness, the stream-of-consciousness writing that follows Joyce and Woolf, is in many ways the long working-out of the formal possibilities Pride and Prejudice opened up.

You can feel the technique on every page. The famous opening sentence — "It is a truth universally acknowledged" — is narrated by someone who does not quite believe it, expressing the beliefs of people who do. That's free indirect style at one word. Chapter 36 is free indirect style at twelve pages. The distance between those two scales is the measure of what Austen could do.

Where to follow it: Ch 1 (the opening sentence), Ch 36 (Elizabeth reads the letter), Ch 46 (the news from Longbourn), Ch 58 (the second proposal).

Austen's comic apparatus is one of the most efficient in English fiction. She does not give her ridiculous characters long set-piece speeches in which they expose themselves; she gives them sentences. Mr. Collins, the obsequious clergyman who proposes to Elizabeth in the most extraordinary proposal in the novel, is one of the most fully constructed comic figures in the language, and the construction is done in a few hundred sentences, each precisely calibrated to demonstrate at once his pomposity, his stupidity, and his genuine dependence on the social system that has produced him.

Mrs. Bennet is a sustained comic note throughout the novel — anxious, obtuse, inappropriate, voluble — and the comedy is again carried by her actual sentences rather than by the narrator's commentary on her. Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Darcy's aunt, is the most concentrated piece of social satire in the book, and her scene with Elizabeth in Chapter 56 — in which she travels from Rosings to Longbourn to demand that Elizabeth promise never to marry Darcy — is delivered almost entirely through Lady Catherine's own outraged dialogue.

What the comic method does is allow Austen to maintain a tight formal control over the novel's tone. The book is consistently funny — sometimes savagely so — but the comedy never sits at the surface and announces itself. It runs through almost every paragraph as an inflection of voice, an ironic precision in word choice, an unflattering exactness in the description of people who, Austen implies without saying, do not deserve any more flattery than the careful sentence is giving them.

The comic figures are also doing thematic work. Mr. Collins is what the entail produces when it produces a clergyman. Mrs. Bennet is what the marriage market looks like from below, stripped of all romanticism. Lady Catherine is what the social hierarchy looks like from above, stripped of all perspective. Together they form the comic skeleton that holds the romantic plot in the right relationship to the social world it is actually operating inside.

Where to follow it: Ch 13 (Collins arrives), Ch 19 (Collins proposes), Ch 29 (Lady Catherine at Rosings), Ch 56 (Lady Catherine visits Longbourn).

It is conventional to say that Pride and Prejudice is the story of how Elizabeth Bennet learns to see Mr. Darcy as he is, but the novel is also, more subtly, the story of how Mr. Darcy learns to see himself as Elizabeth had been seeing him. The doubled growth is part of why the book has lasted. Darcy's first proposal in Chapter 34 is one of the most disastrous proposals in English fiction. He has been struggling against his attachment to Elizabeth for months, and when he finally speaks he opens with a long description of how unsuitable her family is, how socially beneath him she stands, how strenuously he has tried not to love her — and expects, on the basis of his fortune and standing, that she will accept anyway.

She refuses with an indignation that has no precedent in his experience. She tells him not only that she will not marry him but that the manner of his proposal has confirmed every bad impression she had formed of him and added new ones. He returns to his rooms shaken; he writes the long letter the next morning explaining what he can about Wickham and Jane and Bingley; and from that point in the novel he is changed.

The change is gradual and shown rather than declared. By the time Elizabeth meets him again at Pemberley in Volume 3, his manner with her, with her aunt and uncle, and with his own staff is perceptibly different. He has not become a different person; he has softened the manner in which he occupies the position that birth and fortune have given him.

The second proposal, near the end of the novel, is one of the most carefully written reverse-images of the first in any English novel: same man, same woman, same fundamental matter at stake, every other element different. Darcy's reformation is the male counterpart to Elizabeth's growth, and the novel's quiet doctrine is that adult love between intelligent people requires both — neither can do it without the other doing the corresponding work.

Where to follow it: Ch 34 (the first proposal), Ch 35 (Darcy's letter), Ch 43 (Pemberley), Ch 58 (the second proposal).