Pride-and-Prejudice

learn during their interview with the housekeeper. When, in response to her
sister Jane’s question concerning when she first started to love Darcy,
Elizabeth quips that “I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful
grounds at Pemberley” (p. 361), she is being ironic, but there is a part of her
that surely must have been swayed by seeing property that is not only
magnificent but graceful. If, in Darcy’s presence, she cannot see past what she
takes to be his inexcusable pride, she must recognize during her visit to his
well-ordered estate that he is a man of principles and generosity.
While country retirement may have been essential to the life of the worthy
gentleman, Austen also offers us a glimpse of the corrupt side of leisure and
its symptoms of moral dissolution—luxury and indolence. Despite his good
nature, Sir William Lucas demonstrates the affectation of the newly titled in
part by abandoning his commercial interests, the success of which had
resulted in his public prominence and his knighthood. He is raising a young
heir who promises to become as debauched as his father’s fortune will allow,
dreaming, as he does already at this tender age, of keeping foxhounds and
drinking a daily bottle of wine, should he ever find himself as wealthy as Mr.
Darcy. Austen turns her gentle wit on the pretensions of parvenu gentry, but
she frowns somewhat more severely upon the shortcomings of the aristocratic
matron. Although well established in her rank, Lady Catherine is too easily
flattered by Mr. Collins, and her behavior makes it clear that she lacks the
genuine good breeding and strength of character of her nephew, Mr. Darcy.
Unlike the understated elegance of Darcy’s Pemberley, Lady Catherine’s
solemn residence is designed to inspire a discomfiting sense of awe among
her visitors. That one of the drawing rooms boasts a “chimney-piece [that]
alone had cost eight hundred pounds” (p. 76) serves both to exemplify the
ostentation of Rosings Park and to make Mr. Collins’s behavior seem all the
more preposterous, for it is he who basks in the reflected glory of his patron’s
estate by savoring its every sumptuous detail, including this one.
If leisured society can be extravagant, it can also be lazy. For example, Mr.
Bingley’s brother-in-law, Mr. Hurst, “a man of more fashion than fortune” (p.
18), seems entirely incapable of any exertion except eating and playing cards,
a fact that Austen humorously establishes as evidence of his perfect lethargy.
At Netherfield, when Elizabeth Bennet chooses reading over a game of loo,
he is nonplussed. Lacking any interior life himself, Mr. Hurst cannot imagine
how one could take pleasure in an activity that is solitary and that might
require reflection. Austen’s character sketch reaches its ironic limit when,
upon finding the rest of his party unwilling to play cards, Mr. Hurst “had,
therefore, nothing to do, but to stretch himself on one of the sofas and go to