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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