Pride & Prejudice, even more than Jane Austen’s
other novels, is a kind of encyclopedia of dramatized interpersonal dynamics
and personality theory---or, as Jane Austen put it, the study of character.
Pride, prejudice, vanity, reputation, prudence, and numerous other intertwined psychological
traits are enacted, foregrounded, and minutely examined via explicit dialogue
and narration, all of which invites and challenges readers to (re)consider our
own opinions on these psychological and moral subjects, which of course are the stuff of our own lives as
well.
The special
genius of P&P in this regard is that JA makes this study so witty,
entertaining and moving at the same time, that it must be a very stupid reader
indeed who does not get hooked into coming back to the same scenes over and
over again in never-ending rereading----not because we’re coerced, but because
we’re seduced, to do so. We see JA’s brilliant didactic strategy in action. She
demonstrates her great skill at teaching what is worth knowing about human
nature and morality, not by tedious, sententious, sexist lectures, a la Fordyce’s
sermons, but by a stream of teasing provocations of the reader toward subversive
autodidactic exploration of complexity beyond simplistic maxims. And Jane
Austen book clubs and societies like JASNA are, we can see in hindsight, the
natural evolutionary endpoint of this process, as the greatest pleasure is to
share that exploration in the best company of like-minded lovers of her
writing.
One
of the less obvious examples in P&P of this provocation to knowledge, is
the subject of boasting. I hope to tempt you to give this topic fresh
consideration that you may not have previously given to it. The scene that
comes to mind first for Janeites regarding boasting is surely the lively
exchange in Chapter 10 in the Netherfield drawing-room, which begins when
Bingley attempts to explain away his haphazard method of letter-writing, and
Darcy pounces, attacking him with cold, incisive logic:
"My
ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them—by which means my
letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents."
"Your
humility, Mr. Bingley," said Elizabeth, "must disarm reproof."
"Nothing
is more deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of humility. It
is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect BOAST."
"And
which of the two do you call my little recent piece of modesty?"
"The
indirect BOAST; for you are really proud of your defects in writing, because
you consider them as proceeding from a rapidity of thought and carelessness of
execution, which, if not estimable, you think at least highly interesting. The
power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor,
and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance. When
you told Mrs. Bennet this morning that if you ever resolved upon quitting
Netherfield you should be gone in five minutes, you meant it to be a sort of
panegyric, of compliment to yourself—and yet what is there so very laudable in
a precipitance which must leave very necessary business undone, and can be of
no real advantage to yourself or anyone else?"
An
hour could be profitably and enjoyably spent just discussing the pros and cons
of Darcy’s lawyer-like analysis, and of his companions’s responses—especially Eliza’s
“Your humility, Mr. Bingley, must disarm reproof”, a witty, poetic epigram
Shakespeare himself would have been proud to have composed---but today I will
instead draw your attention to the surprisingly large number of other passages in P&P, in which boasting
is either explicitly or implicitly presented, and to show that many of them
were skillfully written by JA so as to subliminally echo and reignite the
debate explicitly initiated by Darcy in the above-quoted famous passage.
The
first one I find is actually an earlier scene in the Netherfield drawing room,
in Chapter 8, when Darcy, curmudgeonly mounting one of his other hobby horses,
takes aim at the sacred cow of female “accomplishment” posed by Miss Bingley.
"Your
list of the common extent of accomplishments," said Darcy, "has too
much truth. The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no otherwise
than by netting a purse or covering a screen. But I am very far from agreeing
with you in your estimation of ladies in general. I cannot BOAST of knowing
more than half-a-dozen, in the whole range of my acquaintance, that are really
accomplished.”
It
only occurred to me for the first time today, that Darcy is actually guilty
here of the very sort of indirect boast
that he accuses Bingley of two chapters later! He adopts a rhetorical stance of
false humility, when he says he “cannot boast” of knowing more than six really
accomplished women, according to his exalted standards. To her great credit,
Elizabeth quickly and brilliantly exposes and punctures Dardy’s self-inflating
indirect boast as follows:
"I
am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I
rather wonder now at your knowing any."
"Are
you so severe upon your own sex as to doubt the possibility of all this?"
"I
never saw such a woman. I never saw such capacity, and taste, and application,
and elegance, as you describe united."
So,
isn’t it wonderful that when we view the famous Chapter 10 scene through the
lens of this Chapter 8 scene, it becomes clear that Darcy suffered embarrassment—indeed,
a narcissistic injury--when Lizzy exposed his indirect boast, which he couldn’t
get out of his mind, and so that is
why Darcy seized the moment when Bingley rationalized his own lack of
accomplishment in letter-writing, and then Elizabeth let Bingley completely off
the hook --- it was as if Darcy childishly wanted to say to Eliza, “Hey, no
fair! If you won’t let me get away with an indirect boast, then you must do the
same to Bingley!”
This
must be the umpteenth example of the utter mastery of hidden structure in
P&P, where a keyword (in this case “boast”) turns out to be the key that
opens the door to an interconnection between two or more scenes in the novel,
which turns out to give startling new explanation for the behavior of the
characters.
And
it’s only just the first variation on this theme of Darcy’s own indirect
boasting. Only one chapter after he accuses Bingley of doing what he himself
did not long before, Darcy repeats this same offense in Chapter 11 in the
following famous passage:
"No,"
said Darcy, "I have made no such pretension. I have faults enough, but
they are not, I hope, of understanding. My temper I dare not vouch for. It is,
I believe, too little yielding—certainly too little for the convenience of the
world. I cannot forget the follies and vices of others so soon as I ought, nor
their offenses against myself. My feelings are not puffed about with every
attempt to move them. My temper would perhaps be called resentful. My good
opinion once lost, is lost forever."
"That
is a failing indeed!" cried Elizabeth. "Implacable resentment is
a shade in a character. But you have chosen your fault well. I really cannot laugh
at it. You are safe from me."
Once
again, he starts out by seeming to confess to having “faults enough”, in
particular his resentful unforgiving temper, only to undo his confession by
justifying and in effect boasting about this very same trait, his resentful
character. And JA gives an extra hint that she has put these phony words into
Darcy’s mouth, when Eliza, in Chapter 16, recalls this very speech of Darcy’s to
Wickham as yet another indirect boast on Darcy’s part:
"I
do remember his BOASTING one day,
at Netherfield, of the implacability of his resentments, of his having an
unforgiving temper. His disposition must be dreadful."
I
just checked and saw that I was preceded in this catch by Mary Waldron in 1999 (who
was then echoed, without attribution, by David Shapard in his 2013 annotated
P&P), who described that same speech of Darcy’s very similarly to mine,
above:
“…we
find that far from modifying Elizabeth’s spontaneity, [Darcy] renders himself
extremely vulnerable to it, ending by informing the company of his faults in a
way he has seen fit to reprove Bingley about earlier…In his conversation with
Elizabeth at the end of chapter 11, he has to resort to the indirect boast
himself, after Elizabeth has expressed herself ‘perfectly convinced that Mr.
Darcy has no defect. He owns it himself without disguise.”…There is a sense of
self-defence here---Darcy has been boxed into a corner…His remarks are not, as
Marilyn Butler has described them, ‘careful, scrupulous, truthful’, but
pretentious and intended to inhibit discussion which might put him at a
disadvantage…”
So,
here we have three passages in pretty quick succession, which collectively
present a veiled portrait of Darcy as an unconscious stone-throwing hypocrite,
who fails to realize that Pemberley is a proverbial glass house, so to speak.
But
that’s still only the tip of the iceberg of the “boasting” theme in P&P. In
the remainder of this post, I will quickly identify and parse the other passages
in P&P I see as part of this “boasting” matrix:
First,
in Chapter 9, we have Mrs. Bennet engaging in her typical sort of VERY thinly
veiled indirect boasting about Jane’s beauty:
"Oh! dear, yes; but you must own she is
very plain. Lady Lucas herself has often said so, and envied me Jane's beauty.
I DO NOT LIKE TO BOAST of my own child, but to be sure, Jane—one does not often
see anybody better looking. It is what everybody says. I do not trust my own
partiality. When she was only fifteen, there was a man at my brother Gardiner's
in town so much in love with her that my sister-in-law was sure he would make
her an offer before we came away. But, however, he did not. Perhaps he thought
her too young. However, he wrote some verses on her, and very pretty they
were."
But,
as I’ve asserted on a number of occasions, the further irony here is that the
unnamed versifier six years earlier was that indirect boaster himself, Darcy, who
is there listening to Mrs. Bennet!
In
Chapter 31, we first get Lady Catherine’s absurd direct boast about the
delightful quality of her daughter’s
purely hypothetical musical performance, which is however followed shortly by another
indirect boast by Darcy, this time rationalizing his deficient social skills as
beyond his own control, which Lizzy once again rises to the occasion and
deflates, this time so brilliantly that even Darcy in effect must smile and say
“Touche”:
"…but
I am ill-qualified to recommend myself to strangers."
"Shall
we ask your cousin the reason of this?" said Elizabeth, still addressing
Colonel Fitzwilliam. "Shall we ask him why a man of sense and education,
and who has lived in the world, is ill qualified to recommend himself to
strangers?"
"I
can answer your question," said Fitzwilliam, "without applying to
him. It is because he will not give himself the trouble."
"I
certainly have not the talent which some people possess," said Darcy,
"of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch
their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often
see done."
"My
fingers," said Elizabeth, "do not move over this instrument in the
masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or
rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always
supposed it to be my own fault—because I will not take the trouble of
practising. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any
other woman's of superior execution."
Darcy
smiled and said, "You are perfectly right. You have employed your time
much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you can think anything
wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers."
And
then it’s a short further leap ahead to the passages I’ve recently written
about in relation to Darcy’s “triumph” in separating Bingley from Jane. After Fitzwilliam
tells Eliza of Darcy’s exultation, and she confronts Darcy, we get a very dark
version of an indirect boast from Darcy when he sneers:
"I have no wish of denying that I did
everything in my power to separate my friend from your sister, or that I
rejoice in my success. Towards him I have been kinder than towards
myself."
As
Eliza reflects on this very point while reading Darcy’s letter, that word “boast”
pops into her head one more time:
“Elizabeth
noticed every sentence conveying the idea of uneasiness, with an attention
which it had hardly received on the first perusal. Mr. Darcy's shameful BOAST
of what misery he had been able to inflict, gave her a keener sense of her
sister's sufferings. It was some consolation to think that his visit to Rosings
was to end on the day after the next—and, a still greater, that in less than a
fortnight she should herself be with Jane again, and enabled to contribute to
the recovery of her spirits, by all that affection could do.”
There
are several other passages which P&P boasts (sorry, I couldn’t resist)
which, while they don’t relate to Darcy, are nonetheless part of the same semantic
matrix, so I urge you to find them and see if you can discern the Austenian
irony and wit they also embody. And finally, for a 2012 post of mine about Jane
Austen’s own deliberate, playful indirect boasts, I give you:
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment