Elena's blog

03. Elizabeth Bennet

25 marzo, 2013

Elizabeth Bennet is considered one of the heroines of literature. She is a really intelligent woman with a strong temperament that crashes with the other women’s quiet and obedient personality. «»I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine»» (Austen, Jane. p. 220). It is a complex character and we can observe a great evolution during the novel. At the beginning, she  is obstinate and disagrees with the society and with the women’s behaviour who wanted to marry a good gentleman. She criticizes arranged marriages and she firmly defends that she will not get married if she is not in love with her future husband. She is so stubborn that she does not change her mind and she does not accept Mr Collins’ proposal although it would benefit her family.  She also rejects Mr Darcy the first time due to her prejudices and because she blames him of Jane’s unhappiness and she has decided she hates him. That is a really important fact because Mr Darcy is a very rich man and he could offer a more than comfortable life to a woman in Elizabeth’s situation. Rejecting him requires a really strong and pig-headed character and in that moment, Elizabeth shows that she is not like the other women. Pride and Prejudice – Darcy proposal

However, during the novel, Elizabeth Bennet becomes more mature, her personality mellows throughout the novel and her opinion about Mr Darcy improves «She respected, she esteemed, she was grateful to him, she felt a real interest in his welfare; and she only wanted to know how far she wished that welfare to depend upon herself, and how far it would be for the happiness of both that she should employ the power, which her fancy told her she still possessed, of bringing on the renewal of his addresses» (Austen, Jane. p. 353) till she accepts Mr Darcy’s second proposal. Pride & Prejudice – Your Hands are Cold – One of the last scenes.

This has generated different opinions. John Wiltshire, in Recreating Jane Austen, collects some of them and we can read this:

“In his politically ‘radical’ reading of the novel, Edward Neill has recently argued indeed that the relation of Darcy and Elizabeth is conducted always within ‘the master– slave dialectic’. ‘We never leave the terms of the master– slave relationship (whichever way things happen to tilt)’ he writes.⁴⁶ He understands Darcy as enjoying his power over Elizabeth, and ‘succumbing to his desire to master her’.⁴⁷ Several acute contemporary feminist critics besides Neill also read the second half of the narrative as the story of Elizabeth’s subjugation by or surrender to Darcy’s wealth, authority and superior judgement. They see this, and the happy marriage with which the novel ends, as registering Austen’s own, if temporary, capitulation to that patriarchal system which invests all males with more power than females. They see Elizabeth as dwindling into a wife.⁴⁸ Susan Fraiman, whose chapter on the novel is called ‘The Humiliation of Elizabeth Bennet’, argues that the introduced as reliable, is re-presented, in the context of her marriageability, as prejudiced, ‘her true identity’ drowned out by the social world.⁴⁹ Maaja Stewart too suggests that its action shows Elizabeth making a transition from witty woman to sentimental and vulnerable one, bashful before Darcy like a Burney heroine.” (p. 119)

John Wiltshire also says that Edward Neill, Susan Fraiman and Maaja Steward criticize Jane Austen because she hides a conservative ideology in the novel that is shown at the end, when Elizabeth Bennet accepts Mr Darcy’s hand. But later, he reminds us of Elizabeth’s confrontation with Lady Catherine, that restores Elizabeth’s authority.  (p. 119)

John Wiltshire, at the same time, declares that “It cannot be disputed that the novel is, from one point of view, a conservative romance, but one should not confuse social ‘domination’ with psychological domination.” (p. 121)

About Elizabeth Bennet we can also read in Regulated Hatred: And Other Essays on Jane Austen that “The social world may have material power over her, enough to make her unhappy, but it hasn’t the power that comes from having created or molded her, and it can claim no credit for her being what she is. In this sense the heroine is independent of those about her and isolated from them. She has only to be herself.” (Pages 17 and 18)

If we pay attention to Elizabeth Bennet’s evolution throughout the novel, we may see that, although it is true that Jane Austen was forward-thinking because she created complex characters and she focused on women’s psychology, she could not help belonging to the Georgian society. Elizabeth Bennet, finally, moderates her personality, falls in love with Mr Darcy and marries him, as it was expected in a society in which marriage played such an important role.

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