Mrs Bennett - Pride and Prejudice

[EllieHJ]

I always thought she was bonkers but she was just a menopausal woman with 5 girls. I now understand the poor woman. God knows how they coped with it back in the 1700s! Any other characters who you feel were misunderstood in literature? 😂

Which may be the case but Mrs Bennet might only be 37 or so ( Married at 15 Jane is 21). I think one's reading of P&P matures with you. As a 19 year old who think Elizabeth is brilliant and Charlotte is boring and Mrs Bennett mad. As a woman in her 30's one can understand Charlotte's pragmatism and start to have a modicum of sympathy for Mrs B/ exasperation at Mr Bennett. As the mother of a 19yo DD I can understand how frustrated and unheard she must feel.

Yes and actually he's just being polite and honourable by asking to marry Lizzy as she's the oldest one who is not yet attached. He just happens to also be very annoying!

I still don't have a lot of time for Mrs Bennet but over time my opinion of Mary Bennet and Caroline Bingley has flipped. Mary annoys me a lot more than she did when I was also a 16yo awkward teenager...

Doesn’t explain Mr Bennett’s total failure to ensure his widow and daughters would be provided for after his death. If he hadn’t been foolish he would have cultivated Mr Collins from a young age and moulded him into a decent man who would make a good husband for one of his daughters, thus ensuring his widow and any unmarried daughters wouldn’t be turfed out without a bean on his death.

But he didn’t. Just locked himself away in his study and sneered at the world. A useless husband and man.

Mrs Bennett is not 'bonkers', i.e. silly and ineffective - because she's menopausal. What an insult to women.

She was brought up in a society where she was told that her only purpose in life was to get married. She had barely any education and was encouraged from a young age to flirt and be charming as a way to secure a future for herself. Both Mr and Mrs Bennett suggest that she was a very pretty girl, and her looks and her clothes and so on were clearly a key part of her identity from a young age. In a world where all women were expected to do was marry well, it's no surprise that Mrs Bennett turns out as she does - boy crazy, vain, and lacking in much common sense. She is also married to a much older man who checks out of their marriage very early on, leaving her with no companionship other than that of her daughters and some local gossips. She's hardly got much opportunity to further her mind.

Mrs Bennett knows that her daughters will have nothing when their father dies, and neither will she. Their house will go to Mr Bennett's male heir when he dies (Mr Collins - who won't wait 5 minutes before kicking them out), and there is very little money to settle on the girls. Without the girls marrying well, they will all be destitute when Mr Bennett dies, and seeing as he is much older than Mrs Bennett, that will leave her with potentially 20 years of penury as a widow unless she gets a son in law to support her.

She is therefore far more sensible than Mr Bennett in recognising the importance of getting actively involved in ensuring the girls are put in front of eligible men. Yes, she lacks class and tact, but without her involvement, the girls would never have met Mr Bingley or Mr Darcy in the first place. Their father certainly wouldn't have lifted a finger to help them.

You’re completely ignoring the social context of the books, which was that women were the possessions of their male relations and entirely dependant on them for their lives, pretty much.

”Silly” Mrs Bennett understood that very well indeed, far more so than her useless husband who clearly couldn’t care less about his female relations, included his beloved Lizzy.

I also think Mrs Bennett’s “nerves” may stem from her having one job and having failed at it. She just had to produce one son who lived into adulthood to inherit from his father, and then be responsible for the care of his mother and any unmarried sisters.

But she produced girl after girl. She was presented as foolish, but she understood how precarious her daughters’ situation was. There’s a reference from Mr Bennett about that he should have saved but he assumed he’d have sons.

I would assume every sniffle her dh caught would be the cause of panic!

Hugely agree with your second paragraph.A large part of Lizzie's revelation about her own prejudice is that she absolutely does NOT want to end up like her father.
She had thought it was witty and wonderful to be scathing, to share his amused despair at the human frailties of many in their shared social sphere. But she realised how facile, cruel and irresponsible this attitude was. Unlike him, she grew out of it - not to become less humorous and sharp, but the leaven those characteristics with more depth of understanding and responsibility.

Mr Collins was very aware he could marry any of the girls, and it would ensure their security. He set his cap at Jane, was warned off by Mrs B because of her high hops of Mr Bingley.
Lizzie was the next, although she didn't like him at all. So Charlotte snaffling him after he was turned down by Lizzie- how very annoying for Mrs B- even more pressure on poor Jane.

I don't think Mrs B was menopausal. I think she was just a normal woman with 5 teen daughters, all of whom lived at home and needed to be married off. Pref oldest first! I have a teen dd. I can't imagine 5, and a dh who hides in his study.

I haven't missed the important of the entail or the social context of the books at all, the girls needed to marry and to marry well, they all knew that, Lizzie mentions it early on in the novel. My point is that Mrs Bennet wanted her girls married, she wasn't too fussed if the men were suitable, or if the girls even liked them, as long as they put a ring on their fingers. She was delighted with Wickham, even after he had dishonoured Lydia, and never spared a thought for how her young daughter, her favourite, would fare with such a man, or how they would maintain themselves, she was married, and that is all that mattered. Mr Collins was a good prospect for lots of reasons, but no mother with a modicum of sense would believe that Elizabeth would marry him, or have a moments happiness if she did.

But this is exactly the point - marriage at the time was nothing to do with love. It was a transaction. If you loved the person you were marrying, then that was a fortunate byproduct. Love and marriage was really a Victorian invention, and Austen was not a Victorian.

Most courtships and engagements in Austen's era lasted only a few weeks, certainly in the middle and upper classes. They therefore barely knew each other before they married. Even if you did like what you'd seen of your partner before marriage, chances are they would turn out to be a very different person after you'd said your vows.

Mrs Bennett would not have been unusual in having a wholly practical, end-game attitude towards marriage. Getting the ring on the finger, money in the bank and a roof over your daughter's head was the goal. If their husband was a nice bloke who would treat them decently, then that was a bonus.

I do have some sympathy with Mrs Bennet, five girls with limited options other than marriage in those days. A husband who has absolutely failed to offer them any financial support for when he dies. A marriage for one girl to Mr Collins making sense. She had a lot to deal with. I think she was always silly and over the top though, and Lydia is just like her!

There was no other option regarding Wickham, he had to marry Lydia otherwise she and the whole family would have been disgraced, so of course she was happy Wickham married Lydia. Yes - for a woman of their class, being married was all that mattered. And with Bingley in the bag, who the others married became less important (and even more so once Darcy was sorted). Mrs Bennet, Kitty and Mary were safe. And Darcy and Lizzie did what Mr Bennett should have done vis a vis Me Collins and took Kitty in hand.

a) she didn't
b) water was often not a safe option

Ah, like silly women want their daughters (and their sons) to go to Oxford and Cambridge nowadays.

Also remember that Alison Steadman does Mrs Bennett dirty. It is terribly funny and well-acted and very 1995, but it isn't quite true to the character as written.

And a husband who ridiculed her and his children.

Utterly - I reckon Mrs B was just like Lydia at the same age, and that's why she's her favourite - 'I remember the time when I liked a red coat myself very well - and indeed, so I do still at my heart' - it was probably a bit 'footballers' wife' to fancy soldiers at the time...

(Love the username, btw!) 😄

I don't believe menopause was earlier back then, but there would certainly have been more female infertility due to birth trauma and disease. Plus if people didn't want more children, they simply had to stop having sex. A man could easily be serviced elsewhere while the wife turned a blind eye.

Mr Bennett behaves in an utterly contemptible way to his daughters by doing nothing to help them find matches. He can leave nothing to his wife and daughters, so marrying some of them off is the only way they can stay out of poverty.

Yes, @HarryVanderspeigle - when you consider the five girls are aged about 15 - 22, Mr Bennett must have been trying to knock a son out of Mrs Bennett for as long as her reproductive system held out... 😠 And these were the successful pregnancies, and a real risk of death with each birth... It's amazing she was as sprightly as she was, considering...

marriage at the time was nothing to do with love.

The BBC R4 podcast says something very different, that Georgians (pre Austen) were very interested in romantic love. Of course there was contractual element, but it wasn't purely contractual situation at all.

I agree. Also it was the 1800s not the 1700s.

There’s a discussion Jane and Lizzie have in the 1995 version about marrying for love - not sure if it’s in the book. Jane says something like ‘but oh Lizzie, I should do like to marry for love’ and Lizzie says, ‘but you shall, only take care to make sure he’s also very rich’ - something like that.

It is surely wrong to suggest that Austen presents Mrs Bennett as a sensible matchmaker, properly attentive to what is important in forming marriages.

Lizzy and Jane are hugely embarrassed by their mother's approach to matchmaking. Although they entirely expect her to be trying to make a match for them that is financially protective of the family, they are mortified by how wrongly she does this.

Like many other Austen characters Lizzy and Jane are quite clear that, alongside the economic imperatives that are central to marriage, there is also a positive duty (in the code of their gentry class, as conveyed by Austen) NOT to marry a man that you can't at the very least respect. Mrs Bennett simply fails to understand this duty.

Lizzy is extremely hot on the 'honour' of the gentry class. We see this most clearly in her delicious take-down of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who, in her aristocratic vanity, disparages the untitled gentry. A large part of that honour revolves around the treasured fiction that money is less important than it really is. That's how the gentry distinguishes itself from 'trade' - the appalling 'new money' families.

So even when the need for financial security is desperate, it has to be pursued in accordance with certain caveats: You can't openly and nakedly offer up your daughters in return for wealth. You have to pay lip service (at the very least) to the idea that the marriage will allow your daughters to comply with the Church's requirement that they honour their husbands. And you have to pursue the marriage in a manner that makes it possible for everyone to pretend that money is not central.

Mrs Bennett is a clown and a liability to her daughters because she fails to see any of these niceties.

Mary seemed quite keen on Mr Collins! It's a shame she didn't get in there before Charlotte!