Content area
Full text
ALTHOUGH JANE AUSTEN'S PRIDE AND PREJUDICE follows the education of both its hero and heroine through to a happy ending, it traces the progression of development in Elizabeth Bennet with incremental care. Perhaps part of the reason for this partiality resides in Austen’s better insight into the female mind or her choice of an ideal and distant Grandisonian male figure for her hero. Darcy, albeit a humanized and fallible version of Richardson’s paragon of masculinity, 1 remains rather inaccessible to the reader who is tempted to rely on Elizabeth’s own reading of him for information. If this happens, the experience of reading Pride and Prejudice can become one of verisimilitude, a movement toward recognition of Darcy as a good man and abandonment of prejudice against him on the part of the reader that mirrors Elizabeth’s own awakening. However, Austen does offer subtle signals of Darcy’s development throughout her novel; by comparing him so closely to his childhood companion, Wickham, Austen creates opposing models of manhood that her readers would equate with other well-known narratives of fraternal and familial conflict, including the Biblical account of Esau and Jacob and the contemporary blockbuster, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters.
The novel’s early bias toward Elizabeth’s point-of-view derives in part from its emphasis on her tte-à-tte conversations with her confidantes, Jane, Charlotte, and Mrs. Gardiner. Isobel Armstrong notes that after nearly every large-scale public scene, Austen inserts a private dialogue between her heroine and a close advisor that traces their responses to the conversational exchanges, pointed affronts, and conciliatory gestures that have recently taken place (xvii). For Austen’s main male character, however, interiority must be probed in a different way, since the author carefully preserves her premise that Darcy is a reserved man who is reluctant to enter into conversation about himself. Instead of resounding his thoughts against those of a close friend, such as Mr. Bingley or Colonel Fitzwilliam, Austen uses a different mode of comparison to develop his character. In pairing Darcy with the foil of Wickham, she draws upon both biblical and contemporary standards of appropriate behavior to delineate the differences between the two men. Thus, while her primary women characters develop through personal discussion, her main male characters develop by allusion to well-known outside standards.
Nonetheless,...