Thoughts on reading Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin.

Pride and Prejudice takes place in a time of great class inequality, telling the social dramas of Great Britain’s upper class. Wealth is a motivating force in this reality, its influence most personified by the actions of Ms. Bennet. Of course, Ms. Bennet is not portrayed favorably: she is stuck-up, self-conscious, and unsatisfiable in public. She is the quintessential (modern) stereotype of the undue confidence money can afford. Her marital, and philosophical, counterpart, Mr. Bennet, may have flaws of the same magnitude, but not of the same scope. He is best described as an aloof character, always seeming to balance out the excessive actions of his wife with reserved indifference.

These characteristics, though easily conflated with personal faults, create Mr. Bennet into a very endearing character. Though he may be distant from the action, that distance seems to grant him a certain sense of self-awareness, an attribute sorely lacked by the novel’s other protagonists. This sense of self-awareness leads to some important, and more often than not, humorous critiques of the motives of his peers. No such moment better encapsulates this phenomena than his response to Mr. Collins letter regarding Lydia’s engagement.

Upon hearing the termination of Lydia’s elopement with Mr. Wickham and their subsequent engagement Mr. Collins, being the ever involved cousin that he is, commented on the affairs in a letter to Mr. Bennet:

You ought certainly to forgive them as a christian, but never to admit them into your sight, or allow their names to be mentioned in your hearing.

This, of course, is an absurd notion of forgiveness, which Mr. Bennet promptly points out to Elizabeth, whom he shares the letter with, exclaiming:

That is his notion of christian forgiveness! (343).

Besides the innate hilarity of the remark, Mr. Bennet’s response is important because it is a rebuke to a type of sentiment held by those with wealth. It is always a luxury, and more often than not a necessity, for someone like Mr. Collins to display outward politeness to those for whom hate is harbored within. In a world of immense relative wealth, where labor is not required to put food on the table, status becomes a pseudo-currency. This is something internally understood by Mr. Collins, and by Ms. Bennet for that matter, thought she is at times woefully and ironically unaware of the degree of social detriment her brashness causes. This is too understood by Mr. Bennet, though from the vantage point of onlooker, not a primary actor. Thus, Mr. Bennet is free to comment on the absurdity of it all, modeling the proper response as that of a humorous inclination. For what else is there to do, really, in a world where money eradicates all serious consequences, but to laught?