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AFIRST READING OF PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is likely to arouse admiration for the perceptive and witty Mr. Bennet, contrasted as he is with his dim and inept wife. But in later readings (thanks partly to a generation of feminist scholarship) his stock is likely to fall (Drabble x). Mr. Bennet troubles himself hardly at all about the needs of his daughters, especially their precarious situation under the entail; he lives almost entirely for his own present pleasures. In this essay I will suggest that he was a good father to Jane and Elizabeth in their early years, but he treats Mary as a nonperson, having probably done so from the outset. As a result, he misses an opportunity to secure at one stroke her future and perhaps that of the other girls as well. His neglect together with her own choices causes Mary to become almost completely dehumanized. Though she makes one attempt at real communication in response to Lydia’s elopement, it fails, and she returns to being a walking book.
Mr. Bennet’s failure has its roots in the past. Regrettably for the reader, Longbourn has not really been given a past, nor Elizabeth (and her sisters) a childhood (Auerbach 340). We are given a few scraps of knowledge: Carried away by his future wife’s lively youthfulness and beauty, Mr. Bennet married knowing little of her character (Austen 236). He had counted on having a son to defeat the entail, and thus he (and his wife) failed to save money to provide for the future of a widowed Mrs. Bennet and daughters (308). The daughters had teachers but no regular governess, were encouraged to read, and were allowed to be idle if they chose (164-65). Little enough information. However, there are enough hints in their affinities and disaffinities to their father and mother that one may risk a few speculations about early parent-child dynamics. Doris T. Robin suggests that initially Mr. Bennet was an actively involved father, drawn to little Jane by her beauty, serene benevolence, and self-discipline (conspicuously like and unlike her mother), and drawn even more to little Elizabeth by her quick intelligence (very like his own). The motivation for his attentions would have been self-gratification. In the early days, he would also...