Pride-and-Prejudice

have borrowed it most immediately from the closing pages of Frances
Burney’s novel Cecilia. (In addition to reading the Bible and Shakespeare,
Austen inherited a formidable tradition of eighteenth-century works, and the
novels of Burney and Samuel Richardson appear to have influenced her
considerably; she also turned to popular didactic tales and moral essays for
her subject matter and was especially fond of the writings of Dr. Johnson.)
With good reason, scholars have typically viewed pride and prejudice in
Austen’s novel as distinctly unfavorable qualities, for when the narrator and
principal characters evoke “pride” and “prejudice,” the terms have primarily
unfavorable connotations, as they do in the world at large. To be sure, Austen
assails family pride and social prejudice through the merciless portraits of
self-centered individuals. By exposing Mrs. Bennet’s tribalism and Lady
Catherine’s snobbery, she offers an amusing indictment of polite society. It
should give us pause, however, that Elizabeth Bennet’s overly bookish sister,
Mary, pontificates against pride by imitating the trite morality of conduct
manuals. (What a shame that Mr. Collins hadn’t thought to marry her.) That
is, if Austen calls undue pride and prejudice into question, she also regards
shallow pieties about those qualities with irony.
Moreover, for an author whose comic closure depends upon an affirmation
of the values of the gentry and aristocracy, pride is not simply arrogance.
Rather, it marks a legitimate sense that one’s exalted position in society
makes one accountable to uphold those values and to behave in a manner
worthy of one’s rank. Under a gentleman’s code of honor, the vestiges of
which still existed in Austen’s day, pride is closely affiliated with valor and
strength of character. Prejudice, too, does not always signify a tendency to
make careless, hasty, or harmful judgments. Writing in 1790 on the revolution
in France he so deplored, Edmund Burke regarded prejudice as a protection of
time-honored custom and the consensus of generations of wise and noble
minds, while the revolutionary individual’s so-called reason, by contrast, is
prone to error and narrow self-interest. “Prejudice,” Burke wrote, “renders a
man’s virtue his habit… . Through just prejudice, his duty becomes part of his
nature” (Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 76). Burke’s appeal to
virtue, duty, and tradition would have resonated with Austen’s society in the
early nineteenth century, when the revolutionary language of Britain’s radical
thinkers of the previous generation, considered seditious in the 1790s, was
still regarded with suspicion. The notion of affirming pride and prejudice,
even in moderation, may be difficult for today’s readers to accept, but Austen
did not live in a democratic society, where pride and prejudice surely thrive
but where they are not usually regarded as necessary components of political