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.

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.