Pride and Prejudice Read Online Free PDF Page A

than to More’s ideal of a ‘submissive temper’ and ‘forbearing spirit’. She demonstrates precisely that independence, after all, in rejecting Mr Collins – along with his stereotyped definition of her as a creature of ‘modesty’ and ‘economy’. At the end of their interview, as Mr Collins continues to insist that her refusal is due merely to conventional coquetry, Elizabeth makes a desperate plea to betaken seriously as a woman of integrity: ‘“Do not consider me now as an
elegant female
intending to plague you, but as a
rational creature
speaking the truth from her heart”’ (I, xix, my emphasis). The opposition between a false form of femininity and a strongly felt rational autonomy, like the phrase ‘rational creature’ itself, is straight out of Wollstonecraft.
    Similarly, when Elizabeth dashes across the countryside to Netherfield to be with Jane in her illness, we admire her for her concerned spontaneity, and for her unconcern about ‘blemishing the delicacy of [her] sex’. Other characters are less impressed by such unladylike exertion, and the whole event – crucial in so many ways to the development of the novel – dramatizes an important debate about what is and is not ‘proper’ behaviour. Mary Bennet, for example, who talks like a conduct book rather than a human being, primly intones the maxim that ‘“every impulse of feeling should be guided by reason”’ (I, vii); while Caroline Bingley rationalizes her jealousy by appealing to a more worldly, metropolitan view of propriety: ‘“It [i.e. walking several miles alone and getting ‘above her ancles in dirt’] seems to me to shew an abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country town indifference to decorum”’ (I, viii). Elizabeth’s liveliness, her ‘
active
sensibility’ – to take a phrase from one of Wollstonecraft’s novels 18 – secures our sympathy even more firmly through juxtaposition with such self-interested versions of conduct-book standards.
    But, though the characterization of Elizabeth suggests a tendency towards Wollstonecraft’s position rather than More’s, it would be unwise to identify Austen too neatly with Wollstonecraft’s gender radicalism. Austen’s (and her characters’) use of politicized terms is always strategic, contingent on particular circumstances, subject to adjustment in the wider context of their usage in the novel as a whole. In Elizabeth’s contrast between herself as a ‘rational creature’ and the image of the ‘elegant female’, for example, ‘elegant female’ is Mr Collins’s phrase, not her own. It suggests his conceited, but also class-based, ignorance of what real ‘elegance’ might be, rather than a fixed definition. A few chapters later, the authorial voice approvingly describes Mrs Gardiner – who is certainly rational– as ‘elegant’ (II, ii). (And, later still, we are told that Pemberley, representative of its owner, has ‘more real elegance’ than Rosings (III, i).) The two categories are not actually incompatible in Austen’s post-revolutionary scheme of things: the more conventionally feminine, and upper-class, attribute of elegance can coexist with the more contentious claim to rationality.
    The most important consequence of Elizabeth’s walk to Netherfield is its effect on Darcy. As Caroline Bingley recognizes only too well, Elizabeth’s ‘indifference to decorum’, her ‘impatient activity’, make her all the more attractive. When Elizabeth arrives, Darcy too is doubtful about the prudence of her solitary walk, but he is equally struck by ‘the brilliancy which exercise had given to her complexion’ (I, vii). Elizabeth’s stay at Netherfield gives Darcy plenty of opportunity to experience her intellectual as well as her physical attractions, and the visit is punctuated by their sexually charged sparring and by authorially directed glimpses into Darcy’s growing subjection: ‘Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman