Why is seeing “Pride and Prejudice” as Jane Austen saw it so important? The answer is simple enough. She knows the work better than anyone else.
Jane Austen might be the greatest of all women novelists. Certainly, there are few others who can reasonably be said to deserve such an accolade. One thinks perhaps of the great Norwegian novelist, Sigrid Undset, who justifiably won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but, with that one possible exception, who else can realistically be said to rival the literary brilliance and profound perspicacity of the indomitable Miss Austen?
One proof of her brilliance is the enduring popularity of her works. Each of her six novels continues to be read and taught, with Pride and Prejudice proving the most popular with readers, finishing second only to The Lord of the Rings in a national poll conducted in Britain in 1997. The poll was published by the Folio Society, an organization of bibliophiles, which had asked its fifty thousand members to name their ten favourite books of all time. More than ten thousand members voted. The Lord of the Rings topped the poll with 3,270 votes; Pride and Prejudice was a close second, polling 3,212 votes; and David Copperfield was third with 3,070 votes. It is clear, therefore, that Pride and Prejudice is one of the greatest and most popular novels ever written.
What is it about this particular novel that makes it stand out as one of the greatest of all time? To answer this question, we need to be able to read it through the eyes of the woman who wrote it, as far as this is possible.
Why is seeing Pride and Prejudice as Jane Austen saw it so important? The answer is simple enough. She knows the work better than anyone else.
Broadly speaking, there are only two ways of reading a book as there are only two ways of seeing reality. We can try to read and see objectively, or we can be content with reading and seeing subjectively. The first way of reading or seeing is an effort to see something as it really is; the second way is being happy to see it as we think it is. The first way requires seeing through the eyes of authoritative others; the second way is seeing through our own eyes only, ignoring the perspective of others. The first is a humble and selfless approach to seeing things; the second is a prideful and selfish (egocentric) way of seeing things. The first gets us closer to seeing things as they are; the second prevents us from seeing things as they are because we only see what we think we see or want to see. In other words, pride is inseparable from prejudice!
If we accept that the author knows a work of literature better than anyone else, we need to have the humility to respect the author’s authority. We need to try to see the work as the author sees it.
How can we do this?
First and foremost, we should get to know the author. We need to know who the author is, what he or she believes, and what he or she is trying to achieve in their works. We should also know the times in which the author lived, which provides the historical and cultural context. Since this is so, let’s get to know Jane Austen a little better so that we can know Pride and Prejudice a little better.
Jane Austen was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, the seventh of his eight children, and grew up in a staunchly and erudite Christian home. It is evident that she remained a devout Christian throughout her life, a fact that is equally evident from the moral and philosophical perspectives informing her novels.
Born on December 16, 1775, she entered a world ripe for, and rife with, revolution. Two years to the very day before she was born, on December 16, 1773, the Boston Tea Party sparked the American Revolution. On July 4, 1776, a few months after her birth, the signing of the Declaration of Independence ushered in a new kind of nation, bereft of both monarchy and aristocracy. Then, in 1789, the French Revolution brought down the monarchy and aristocracy in France, replacing the ancient régime with an anti-Christian secularist tyranny which set the murderous precedent for future communist tyrannies. Against these new ideas, Edmund Burke sounded a sagacious and cautionary note, especially in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published at the end of 1790. Jane Austen was almost fifteen years old when Burke’s book appeared and it seems that she read it and agreed with it. Many of Burke’s views are voiced by the character of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park and it is tempting to suggest that Miss Austen was offering a deferential nod to the wisdom of Edmund Burke in her naming of Edmund Bertram as the hero of Mansfield Park. Bertram serves as a mentor to Miss Price in much the same way, perhaps, as Burke had served as a mentor to Miss Austen.
Apart from its being an age or revolution, Jane Austen entered a world that was ripe for, and would soon be rife with, romanticism. Since the ideas of this literary and philosophical movement would influence Miss Austen’s novels, it would be good to know a little about it.
The Collins Dictionary of Philosophy defines romanticism as “a style of thinking and looking at the world that dominated nineteenth century Europe”. Having its roots in mediaeval culture, it referred originally to tales in the Romance languages about courtly love and other sentimental topics, as distinct from works in classical Latin. From the beginning, therefore, “romanticism” stood in contra-distinction to “classicism”. The former referred to an outlook marked by refined and responsive feelings and thus could be said to be introspective, subjective, “sensitive” and given to noble dreams; the latter is marked by objective measurement, empiricism, faith in the physical sciences, and could be said to be outward-looking. Understood in this context, the literary and philosophical romanticism emerging at the end of the eighteenth century was a reaction against the philosophical materialism of the Enlightenment, which had dominated the previous two centuries.
As a Christian, Jane Austen did not subscribe to the philosophical materialism of the Enlightenment, but neither did she sympathize with the irrational tenets of romanticism, which emphasized emotion and the feelings of the heart over the reasoning of the head. From her earliest juvenile writings, such as Love and Freindship (sic), written in 1790, to her mature novels of more than twenty years later, she satirizes the sort of romantic novels in which women are depicted as irrational beings, weak-willed and weak-minded. Whereas her own novels contain such women, who commit the folly of following feeling in defiance of the demands of moral responsibility, Lydia and Kitty come to mind in Pride and Prejudice, her heroines subject themselves as eminently rational creatures to the goodness of virtue and the objectivity of truth.
In all her novels, to some extent, Miss Austen wrestles with the conflict between the calculated “sense” of the Enlightenment, in which the coldness of the head vanquishes the warmth of the heart, and the impulsive emotional “sensibility” of romanticism, in which the heated passion of the heart overrules the cool reasoning of the head. In thus reflecting the philosophical approach to virtue found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Jane Austen has been called an Aristotelian, quite correctly; yet she could also be described as a Thomist, a follower of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, insofar as she accepted and embraced Christian realism, or Christian Aristotelianism, in an age of embryonic relativism. She is, therefore, a very reliable guide as a moral philosopher, in addition to her genius as a storyteller and her perspicacity as an observer of the human condition.
In the same manner in which the title of Miss Austen’s novel, Sense and Sensibility, manifests the novel’s central theme, the title of Pride and Prejudice similarly encapsulates the novel’s overarching theme. The novel is all about pride, especially the pride of the two principle protagonist-antagonists, Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, and the way in which their respective pride leads to prejudice, especially prejudiced presumptions about each other. It is only when they attain humility, through healthy humiliation, that they can see the truth about each other. Elizabeth is “absolutely ashamed of herself” when she finally realizes that she had been “blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd” in allowing her passionate disdain for Mr. Darcy to colour her judgment, leaving her gullible and susceptible to Mr. Wickham’s lies. It is only when she sees the truth about Mr. Darcy that she comes to know the truth about herself: “Till this moment, I never knew myself.” Mr. Darcy, on the other hand, needs to learn true condescension. He must cease looking down upon the comparatively low-born Elizabeth and needs to descend from his high horse, not merely in order to meet her eye-to-eye, as equals, but to descend further, onto his knees, that he might look up to her in reverence and with a love that knows it is not worthy. Such a sense of unworthiness animates his confession to Elizabeth of his earlier ill-treatment of her: “The recollection of what I then said, of my conduct, my manners, my expressions during the whole of it, is now, and has been many months, inexpressibly painful to me. Your reproof, so well applied.… You know not, you can scarcely conceive, how they have tortured me; – though it was some time, I confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow their justice.”
Ironically, but keeping with Miss Austen’s Aristotelian and Thomistic understanding, it is only when Elizabeth and Darcy know the other as they truly are, dispassionately, that they are able to emerge from the passionate prejudice that had blinded them. It is only when reason is restored that they are able to love one another. They both need to become “reasonable enough” to pass beyond pride and prejudice to a humble acknowledgment of the truth about themselves and each other. It is only then that we see their moral transformation: conversion from prideful ignorance and arrogance to humble acceptance of their own faults; confession of those faults to the other; and forgiveness of the suffering they had caused each other. Conversion, confession and forgiveness. It is this redemptive and virtuous trinity, this triumph of moral goodness, which holds the key to our understanding the perennial popularity of Pride and Prejudice.
As for the incomparable Miss Austen’s final assessment of her best-loved work, we need look no further than the words of an evening prayer that she composed, presumably for her own use, in which she asks God to “save us from deceiving ourselves by Pride or Vanity”. In the case of Miss Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, this prayer is answered.
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The featured image is “The “Rice Portrait,” perhaps of the young Jane Austen (though this has been highly disputed, with some experts saying that the clothing styles belong to a period ten years later, when Austen would have been in her mid-20s — not a young teenager). This work is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.