Pride and Prejudice Read Online Free PDF

as he was by [Elizabeth]’; ‘He began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention’; ‘She attracted him more than he liked’ (I, x; xi; xii). Darcy’s ‘divided’ responses point up a conflict in which a spontaneous female individuality wins out over feminine propriety and social status. And it does so because it’s a source of sexual power. Where Wollstonecraft urged women to seek other objects, Austen returns the new femininity to the more familiar pleasures of romantic fiction. Those privileged moments of access to Darcy’s private feelings play strategically on romance expectations: reading from Elizabeth’s point of view, we take pleasure in her power, fully confident that Darcy’s pride will have to fall before the charms of a woman with ‘independence of mind’.
    For the romance to be fulfilled, that independence of mind also has to be adjusted, however: Elizabeth’s prejudice has to fall with Darcy’s pride. Like a good reader of More’s
Strictures
, it would seem, Elizabeth has to learn to ‘distrust [her] own judgment’, to recognize the error of her first impressions. After reading Darcy’s letter, Elizabeth fiercely castigates herself for wilfully misjudging both Darcy and Wickham:
    ‘Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly. – Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.’ (II, xiii)
    And later, when she has to convince her father that Darcy is the man who will make her happy, Elizabeth earnestly wishes ‘that her former opinions had been more
reasonable
, her expressions more
moderate
’ (III, xvii, my emphasis). Elizabeth comes close here to a More-like regret at the lack of ‘a steady and gentle curb on [her] tempers and passions’, and the language of painful self-knowledge recalls those anti-revolutionary novels of female education, which dramatize the disciplinary advice of conduct literature. Had she been the heroine in a standard anti-revolutionary novel, Elizabeth’s misjudgement of men would have been based on a foolish romantic attachment, and might well have caused her downfall. But in
Pride and Prejudice
it is Lydia, not the heroine, who enacts the conventional melodrama of mistaken and self-indulgent passion. If Elizabeth is in love, it is with her individuality, not the wrong man. She prides herself on being above the usual female obsession with men and marriage (just as, when the trip to the Lake District is planned, she distinguishes herself from ‘the generality of travellers’ (II, iv)). The shock of remorse includes the recognition that she has been as ‘wretchedly blind’ as the generality of heroines, and the punishment for courting ‘prepossession and ignorance’ is to fall in love, like them. In fact, Elizabeth is made to suffer what she at one point describes to Charlotte as ‘“the greatest misfortune of all! – To find a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate!”’ (I, xviii).
    The wit of Austen’s romantic plot makes it very difficult to read
Pride and Prejudice
(
Sense and Sensibility
or
Mansfield Park
may be another matter) as a novel advocating punitive control – or even the resigned compromise that More articulates:
    this world is not a stage for the display of superficial or even of shiningtalents, but for the sober exercise of fortitude, temperance, meekness, diligence, and self-denial;…life is not a splendid romance…[but] a true history, many pages of which will be dull, obscure, and uninteresting. 19
    Such circumscribed expectations describe the attitude and experience of Charlotte Lucas, rather than Elizabeth Bennet, for whom life does turn out to be ‘a splendid romance’. For Charlotte, marriage is women’s ‘pleasantest preservative