Pride and Prejudice

[Blackdog19]

Just watching the awesome Colin Firth P&P adaptation. When I first watched it as a teenager, I thought Mrs Bennett was the annoying ridiculous one. It took reading something for me to realise that Mr Bennett was as bad in his own way saving no money and leaving Mrs Bennett with the possibility of 5 unmarried daughters and no home. If I had read the book in Jane Austen’s do you think we’d have more initial sympathy with Mrs Bennett?

I agree, Mr Bennett was completely negligent and did nothing to secure his daughters' future. Admittedly, Mrs B did not go about it the right way but they should have worked together. Marriage was the only possible means of security for most women then.

She was trying to get Mr Collins to want to marry one of them, and he did. She basically did her bit there. Lizzy turned Mr Collins down, he married her friend Charlotte.

@CaptainMyCaptain

She was trying to get Mr Collins to want to marry one of them, and he did. She basically did her bit there. Lizzy turned Mr Collins down, he married her friend Charlotte.

Yes. But that's not something Mrs B was in a position to control, given that Mr B backed Lizzie up too. All she could do was try and facilitate the proposal. Which she did.

Mary would have been a better match!

She was trying to get Mr Collins to want to marry one of them, and he did
Sorry, I thought you meant he did marry one of them.

@Beamur

Mary would have been a better match!

She definitely would! I always thought that reading the text, and then in the 95 version they seemed to be trying to make it look like she was a bit interested in him. However, he seemed to want the prettiest, so I guess that meant Lizzie after Jane.

I see what you mean captain. Probably I could've been clearer. What I mean is, Mrs B actually was quite successful in respect of the things she was in a position to control about the Mr Collins situation. She was aiming at him proposing to one of them and he did.

@OpenlyGayExOlympicFencer

Yeah, aside from Lydia being too young for it, she's actually doing what makes sense in getting the older ones out and seen in company while they're still young and have enough money for nice clothes etc. Speculate to accumulate. She's just pretty crass about it. But there's no doubt that with the long term aim being marrying them off, she was being perfectly sensible in socialising a lot with the officers. And of course Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy. Those opportunities were potentially time limited too, since the regiment could be moved at any time and Mr B was only renting. So the problem is more the execution than the actions themselves.

It's also, I think, overlooked that to some degree, her tactics worked. She was trying to get Mr Collins to want to marry one of them, and he did. She basically did her bit there.

Absolutely to this. Though I do assume that Mr Bennet always intends, for instance, to visit Bingley, and is just teasing his wife by pretending otherwise so it's not that he's actually opposed to his wife's marital projects, more that he can't bear the amount of self-reproach he would call up if he actually thought properly about how precarious his family's financial position is after his death, because of his own lack of planning and saving. In fact, he can't be opposed to them, as there is literally no other way of them facing a future that is anything other than essentially the reduced circumstances of Miss and Mrs Bates in Emma a couple of rooms above a shop, a maid of all work.

I think it's why Mr Bennet is also lazily relieved that Mr Collins is such a twit, and can be dismissed as a fool -- if Mr C were a sensible man, it would have been much harder for Mr B not to sponsor a plan to marry him to one of his daughters. But of course he has a wife who is all over the slightest marital opportunity, so he had the luxury of appearing to ridicule it all.

Really, Charlotte Lucas's plot is a more likely one for the Bennet girls than anything more fairytale -- it's only their looks and them being slightly younger than Charlotte that differentiate them, and JA's determination to provide a happy marital ending. Without Darcy acting as a kind of Deux ex machina in the Lydia/Wickham plot, Lydia's disgrace would have meant that Jane and Lizzie were debarred from even marrying Mr Collinses.

Oh yeah he was always going to visit Bingley, I think that's pretty clear in the text. Which is why winding his wife up so much over it was a pretty dick move, reading it as an adult. It seemed a lot funnier 20 years ago.

As an adult my view of Mr Collins has changed. He was a fool but he did try to do the right thing. If he had married one of the Bennet sisters the whole family would have had a degree of security. There was no guarantee that any of them would make a good match.
The Bennet family are as guilty of pride as any character. Only Mrs Bennet seemed truly aware of how precarious their social status was, possibly because she came from a lower status family and knew how few respectable options were available to impoverished gentlewomen.

I reckon a lot of us on here were probably at an impressionable age when we saw the 95 version, and perhaps read the book after seeing it. I did. So I was influenced by David Bamber's admittedly brilliant portrayal of him as almost a grotesque. It was superbly done, but arguably went beyond what was actually there in the text.

That's a good point about Mrs B and pride. She has the advantage of nowhere near as much class privilege as the rest of them do!

@ImAncient

Love this thread. IIRC Mr Bennet & Colonel Brandon both have £2000 a year. Yet Brandon is given out as being a rich man & the Bennets are poor. Possibly because they’ve never saved.

Bennet is supporting a family of 7, Brandon is a single man.

£2000 is a lot when you’re only spending it on yourself.

And an awful lot when you’re looking from the perspective of £150 a year or whatever Marianne had.

The point about the entail was not just that Longbourn would go to Mr Collins but also that Mr Bennet can’t sell off any of the estate to provide security for his children. The estate must remain intact, he only has use of it while he’s alive. It’s not “his”.

@OpenlyGayExOlympicFencer

I reckon a lot of us on here were probably at an impressionable age when we saw the 95 version, and perhaps read the book after seeing it. I did. So I was influenced by David Bamber's admittedly brilliant portrayal of him as almost a grotesque. It was superbly done, but arguably went beyond what was actually there in the text.

That's a good point about Mrs B and pride. She has the advantage of nowhere near as much class privilege as the rest of them do!

Yes, and Mrs Bennet's two sisters show how much difference a good or indifferent/bad marriage made in the life of a woman of Mrs B's class -- Mrs Phillips married one of her father's clerks and is definitely downmarket of the Bennetts by some way, judging by their style of living and entertaining, and Mrs Gardener has married well, even though it's into 'trade', and leads a much more genteel existence, despite her large family. Elizabeth expects Darcy to be surprised that she has such genteel relatives when they meet at Pemberley.

And yes, David Bamber's (brilliant) portrayal took Collins over the edge into grotesquerie -- JA's Collins is a heavy, awkward, pompous Uriah Heepish young man, but not an entirely ridiculous monster. Charlotte makes a canny decision. In a world of Wickhams, Willoughbys, General Tilneys etc, she's managed (with no looks or fortune, and at the advanced age of 27) to bag a respectable husband who isn't cruel or despotic, or liable to impregnate the servants, whose behaviour she can manage and mitigate, and who will come into a sizeable estate when Mr Bennet dies.

There was an entail - so the house HAD to go through the male line, and it was Mr Bennett's fault (as a genetics thing) that he only had girls. So unfortunately, as was common in those days, the house went to the next in line on the male side of the lineage (which would also have meant through Mr Bennett's family line, and not including Mrs Bennett's extended male family).

Many DCs died in childhood in those days, so married couples had both no contraception, but also a need to ensure male heirs who would survive into adulthood - so kept having DCs. The Bennetts were just unlucky (in a way) that they only had girls and ALSO that those girls all survived the illnesses and accidents of the era into adulthood (or at least, were of an age where they could be married, even if that was just short of 16 as in Lydia's case).

And Mr Bennett did not have a large fortune, and did not manage it carefully when he was younger. So they were genteel but poor. And earning a living was frowned upon if you were a gentleman - even a profession such as lawyer or accountant was not a good thing. Those who earned money through trade (with the West Indies or Far East for example) were definitely looked down upon. And women had far less standing in society so had even less opportunity to work. Unless they became a nanny or companion (as many poorer daughters had to do to survive) and were very much looked down on. But also were then very unlikely to change from being "a spinster" to ever have a chance to marry.

Charlotte makes a sensible choice. Collins is a bit of a figure of fun, but isn't a horrible person. They're well suited in many ways and equally conscious that their prosperity depends on other people. He often wants to do the right think but has very little self awareness which is ironic considering how closely he observes social minutae.
One of the many reasons why Lizzie remains likeable as a character is that she isn't perfect, she has painful lessons to learn about herself and others as the story unfolds and is essentially a modern heroine - she values herself and her autonomy even at material cost. She would rather be poor than compromised.
Mr Bennett teases his family but I think he is deeply embarrassed at the prospect of hawking his daughters around every eligible male.
Jane Austen uses hubris to excellent effect on so many of her characters.
Almost everyone is changed in some way by the end of the story and people generally get what they deserve.

Yes, embarrassment is a good description. Mr B hasn't really reconciled himself to the relative weakness of his family's position. He thinks he's better than it, essentially. Mrs B knows she isn't.

Again I think her less illustrious background makes the difference here. It helps that she's socially climbed, whereas he's essentially socially fallen. He would have expected to have a son and all the security that went with it, and bearing in mind that Mrs B could well be quite young and probably is about 46 or 47 max (is the stuff about her nerves and health a hint at being menopausal?) he probably only gave up on the idea relatively recently. Maybe not enough time to fully get used to the new reality. In his own way, he's more 'all fur coat and no knickers' than she is.

Personally, having read the book many times, I thought Alison Steadman was great as Mrs B. She’s supposed to be ridiculous and embarrassing - it’s very pertinent to the plot.

I just wish the otherwise brilliant Beeb version had included her ‘Lord bless me!’ etc. monologue, just after Lizzy tells her she’s going to marry Mr D. Not only hilarious, but entirely in accord with the OTT character that Jane evidently intended.

I think he's embarrassed chiefly because the girls have no dowries, though, and that his daughters are, financially-speaking, poor matches for the kind of men they might expect to marry in purely social terms.

There's a kind of lightly-touched in (and admittedly joky) self-satisfaction in the scene near the end where Bingley and Darcy have proposed, and where he says if anyone comes to ask for his permission to marry Mary or Kitty, he'll be in his library and quite at leisure to see them. It's as though it restores him slightly to something of his sense of the way things should have been, had there been a Bennet son and hence money to make the girls better prospects on the marriage market, and him a proper paterfamilias of eligible daughters.

I think Mary would have been a terrible match for Mr Collins, because she is quite forthright - there’s no way she would have refrained from answering Lady Catherine back every 5 minutes!

I think it is Mr Gardiner (not Mrs) who is Mrs B's sibling?

Anyway, just came on to see if anyone else caught Lost in Austen a few years ago. It has a lot of fun with all sorts of "what ifs". And Mrs Bennet is identified by the main character as a ball-breaker when it comes to her daughters' prospects, and agrees!

Jane Austen's heroines always have dead, absent or incompetent parents/parent figures and have to sort themselves out; it's her formula. They have to parent themselves or decide whose guidance is trustworthy.

Yes!! I watched Lost in Austen. Loved it!

Completely derailing, does anyone have any sympathy for Mr and Mrs Braddock, parents of the feckless, selfish dick-brained Benjamin, in The Graduate?

For another perspective on Pride and Prejudice I'd like to recommend Longbourne by Jo Baker which is written from the servants' point of view.

Rogue e crept in there, its Longbourn.

I researched the BBC series over the weekend, it really is well done.

I remember watching at as a teenager and being slightly enthralled by Lydia and having a soft spot for the evil Mr W.

Now I feel dreadfully sorry for Lydia. Mr W, and Lydia was the second child he had targeted. At 15, she would be forced to spend the rest of her life with a man who did not love her.

As a teen I didn't see any of this.

I think Mrs Bennet would have had trouble directing Mr Collins towards Mary. The expected norm, in marriages of convenience/ arrangement, was that the daughters should get married in order of age. Jane only escapes by being courted by Mr Bingley. It's one of the reasons Lady Catherine, who is the figure in the book of keeping up the old traditions (as opposed to the Bingleys, who are new money), is shocked at all 5 Bennet girls being out at once. She even says something along the lives of 'What, the younger out before the older are married?!'

Mrs Bennet, in order to direct Mr Collins towards Mary, would have to make up something socially acceptable that was wrong with Lizzie. Tough going for a woman of her mental capacities. And that's even if she understood enough of their respective characters to see why Mary would be the better choice.