Relationship Spotlight: Fitzwilliam Darcy & Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice)

Lizzy and Darcy aren’t my immediate be-all end-all of Jane Austen couples.  I love so many of Austen’s pairs – the beautiful, wistful romance of Anne and Wentworth, the fun and cuteness of Catherine and Tilney, the lovely history behind Emma and Knightley – that, while I love Lizzy and Darcy too, they’re not my guaranteed number one.  Like I said, though, there’s still plenty to love about them, and Pride and Prejudice is certainly Austen’s most beloved book for a reason (some spoilers.)

In some ways, Lizzy and Darcy can seem at first blush to be a Regency-era version of the archetypal love-hate match (which, was that even a thing before Pride and Prejudice?  Did Austen invent this trope?)  I mean, they instantly get on one another’s bad sides, with Darcy snubbing Lizzy rather scornfully and she assuming she has his number as an insufferable snob.  Soon, though, he finds himself taken by her spirit, a turn of events that flabbergasts her, but slowly, gradually, she begins to fall for him as well.  That’s all true, and it makes them sound really simplistic, but for me, it doesn’t begin to approach the richness of this pairing.

Because it’s this richness in the writing that really makes Lizzy and Darcy come alive, I think.  I love that they’re not just a simple love-hate match, or an opposites-attract match, or a Cinderella-story match.  It’s much more than all of that.  With the title, there can be a tendency to separate the two by pride (Darcy) and prejudice (Lizzy,) but the truth is, both of them are proud and both of them are prejudiced.  Both are wrong, both are misunderstood, and both go through a quite a shift in their estimation of the other.

When Darcy snubs Lizzy at the ball that night, she takes it as evidence of his pride; she’d already found him overly haughty, and this encounter cements it.  That’s her impression of him going forward, and it’s what allows her to so easily believe the worst of him when Wickham comes along spinning his tales.  As he starts to fall in love with her, she can’t conceive it, and when she makes any sense of his behavior toward her, it’s usually operating under the assumption that he’s just trying to set her up to knock her down.  However, she’s not seeing the whole story.  It’s true that he can be proud, but it’s also true that he’s uneasy with strangers and that influences how he acts at the ball.  And her swiftness to determine his character based on that encounter means she can’t see how quickly he changes his mind about her and is working to prove that, in part because of how her own pride is wounded by his early dismissal of her.

Just as Lizzy’s first assessment of Darcy is incomplete, his pursuit of her is hampered by external noise that gets in his way.  His first proposal to her is a disaster, in no small part because he tells her how hard he’s tried not love her due to her less-than-stellar connections.  For Darcy, any potential relationship with Lizzy is tied up with her abrasive mother, her wild younger sisters, and her middle-class relations on her mother’s side (she has an uncle who’s in trade, for god’s sake, who lives in Cheapside – the horrors!)  In order to have any opportunity to be with her, he has to step outside his comfort zone, to make more of an effort with people that wouldn’t normally enter his sphere.

Both have to change.  They have to reexamine the previous judgments they’ve made and the reasons they made them.  They have to see one another in new ways and look more closely at themselves.  It makes for a tremendous story, and that’s why I love them.