Pride-and-Prejudice

from the personalities of Jane and Mr. Bingley, both of whose easy manners
and thorough failures to discriminate put a nearly permanent end to their
relationship. Early in the novel, Elizabeth finds Jane too self-effacing, too
good-natured, and not critical enough: “You are a great deal too apt, you
know, to like people in general. You never see a fault in any body. All the
world are good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a
human being in my life” (p. 16). This assessment may say as much about
Elizabeth’s own forcefulness of personality as it does about Jane’s easygoing
manners, but Elizabeth has a point. In this instance, Elizabeth is teasing, but
she also means what she says, especially when it becomes apparent that Jane
wrongly considers the Bingley sisters as agreeable as she does their brother. It
is this particular fault that nearly undoes Jane’s romance with Bingley, for the
Bingley sisters, her professed friends, have snubbed her long before she
realizes it; once she does, her mild manners prevent her from asserting her
own interests with their brother. Bingley, too, shows a “want of resolution” (p.
136) to protect his own affairs of the heart. When Darcy misconstrues Jane’s
quiet amiability as lack of sufficient interest in Bingley, he easily manipulates
his friend into leaving Netherfield and Jane’s presence.
One could argue that the presence of professional and commercial men and
women in the novel should militate against the easy acceptance not only of
pride and prejudice but of other characteristics of the gentry. Even though
members of professional and commercial society appear in the novel,
however, they aspire to the lifestyle of the gentry and adopt its values and
habits. We do not find Austen’s characters embracing those qualities that were
well established as virtues and self-consciously adopted among middle-class
reformers in her day—efficiency, frugality, punctuality, self-reliance, and the
work ethic—and that she herself may have prized. In fact, when we look at
the world of the novel, we see hardly any work being done or business being
transacted. Certainly, when a team of horses is unavailable to be harnessed to
the carriage that might convey Jane Bennet to Netherfield, we become
vaguely aware that Mr. Bennet is a gentleman farmer who oversees a working
farm. But Austen chooses not to introduce us to farmhands at work, as
novelists of social realism would do a generation after hers. We are also very
much aware of the presence of soldiers who presumably engage in training
exercises if not in actual warfare, but we see them only as dancers at the ball
and as romantic distractions for idle young ladies. We become acquainted
with the man of commerce Mr. Gardiner only when he is on a holiday tour,
and we never actually behold Mr. Collins ministering to his parishioners. In
fact, Mr. Collins’s identity as a clergyman is construed solely in terms of the
house and property the living brings him. Nor do we hear of commerce in