Pride-and-Prejudice

sister Jane at Netherfield during the latter’s illness. Elizabeth’s fortitude in
walking, a consequence of her concern for her sister’s health, has the
unintended effect of invigorating the torpid company at Netherfield, if only
because her activity seems so brazen to them. Her animation captivates Mr.
Darcy and rankles Caroline Bingley, who takes Elizabeth’s brief adventure “to
show an abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country-town
indifference to decorum” (p. 37). Still, Elizabeth is no romantic heroine of the
sort who would be fashioned by Charlotte Brontë several decades later. The
sphere of action in Austen’s novel of manners is circumscribed enough so that
it would be shocking indeed were Elizabeth, like Brontë’s Jane Eyre, to
wander despondently about the English countryside, exhausted and starving.
Elizabeth’s own burst of romantic enthusiasm—“What are men to rocks and
mountains?” (p. 154)—subsides quickly enough.
If Austen’s attention to the culture of leisure serves to call into question the
values of the landed elite even as it reinforces them, the marriage plot
complicates the outlook of the novel further still. With respect to social class,
the hero and heroine are worlds apart—or so they appear in Darcy’s
estimation. At Netherfield, Darcy finds that Elizabeth has “attracted him more
than he liked” (p. 60), and he thus resolves to regulate his feelings toward her.
Elizabeth’s station in life and the “total want of propriety” (p. 196) among her
family members make the match ill-advised, if not untenable, as Darcy
callously points out in proposing marriage to her against his better judgment.
He is astounded not only that Elizabeth rejects him—in that respect he is no
better than Mr. Collins, whose earlier proposal is made with equal confidence
in her acceptance—but that his explanation of his initial reluctance has caused
offense. That Darcy fails to consider that Elizabeth might actually be offended
by a proposal that opens with the suitor’s expression of his disdain for her
inferior social connections and his efforts to overcome his love for her
suggests that the insuperable gulf he perceives between them seems to him
perfectly natural. For her part, Elizabeth knows full well the subtle
distinctions that define rank in her society, and it is more his tactlessness than
his pointing out an obvious fact of social hierarchy that infuriates her.
It is also the case that Elizabeth has a healthy sense of her own entitlement.
As she proudly remarks to Lady Catherine, Mr. Darcy “is a gentleman; I am a
gentleman’s daughter; so far we are equal” (p. 331). At Rosings, when Sir
William Lucas and his daughter Maria are daunted by the prospect of their
encounter with the redoubtable Lady Catherine, we find that Elizabeth, by
contrast, “had heard nothing of Lady Catherine that spoke her awful from any
extraordinary talents or miraculous virtue, and the mere stateliness of money