"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Monday, March 16, 2020

Favorite Characters: Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice)


You absolutely can’t go wrong with Lizzy.  Whether on the page or onscreen, she’s a character that simply dazzles with personality.  She’s completely awesome and decidedly flawed, and there’s no question that I love her to pieces (if you need a spoiler warning for a 200-year-old book, here it is.)

The second-oldest of five daughters living on borrowed time at an entailed-away estate, Lizzy is a curious mix of sentimental and cynical.  She’s well-aware of her family’s situation and lets the air out of Jane’s romantic notions of marrying for love by suggesting to take care she falls in love with a rich man, but she herself can’t seriously entertain the thought of marrying someone she doesn’t love.  She’s sure enough of herself that she doesn’t let Mr. Darcy’s slight of her lie, not being blinded by his wealth and status, but she also tiptoes deftly through appropriate social decorum, for the most part maintaining an ironic civility with him that would be above general reproach.  Similarly, she’s fully cognizant of the bad name her younger sisters and mother stand to give her family and is embarrassed by how they behave in company, especially with their social superiors like Darcy and the Bingleys.

This is partly because of Lizzy’s well-bred manners, but it’s also a question of pride.  Because she isn’t enamored of Darcy or Mr. Bingley’s sisters (again, despite their position,) she can’t bear to think of them looking down their noses at her or her family for any “legitimate” reason.  When they’re dismissive of the Bennets due to their comparatively meager prospects or “undesirable” family connections, it’s easy for Lizzy to write them off as snobs.  But when their disdain is rooted in Mrs. Bennet’s loudmouth gossiping or Kitty and Lydia’s wild behavior, when there’s truth in the idea that members of her family aren’t in step with good society, that’s when Lizzy really can’t stand it, because she doesn’t want even the smallest part of them to be “right.”

It’s also Lizzy’s pride that keeps Darcy out of her good opinion for so long.  No lie – Darcy can, at times, be the worst, especially early in the book – but Lizzy wouldn’t be so entirely against him, so thoroughly prepared to believe the terrible things Mr. Wickham says about him, if he hadn’t wounded her pride at their first meeting.  This is important, because it’s a blind spot of Lizzy’s.  She regards herself as having good judgment, and for the most part, she really does; she’s right on the money with Bingley’s sisters and Lady Catherine, and her sharp insights allow her to really hit Darcy where it hurts.  But when it comes to Darcy (and, in turn, Wickham,) she gets a lot of it wrong.  Again, not to let Darcy off the hook, because he’s not in the right at that first ball, but Lizzy lets her disapproval of him stretch and magnify, just as Wickham’s attentions to her help conceal his shadiness.

It’s to her credit that, when Darcy finally sets the record straight about what went down between him and Wickham, Lizzy spends very little time in denial about it.  When the facts are laid out, she’s able to reason through what Darcy says and the evidence he gives enough to realize he’s almost certainly telling the truth.  It allows her to look back over her interactions with both men and see where her estimations were skewed, and I really like that Lizzy takes this erring to heart in the way that she does.  She’s truly angry with herself, both for getting it wrong in the first place and for the realization that it was her pride getting in the way, and she does some serious self-examination over it.  I enjoy seeing her work through this and come out the other side a stronger character for having confronted her own disappointment with herself.

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