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February 7, 2013

On Charlotte Lucas’s Choice


In honor of the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of “Pride and Prejudice” this year, we’re running a series of pieces on Jane Austen and her legacy.



* * *

It’s often said that, from a material point of view, Charlotte has “no choice” but to marry Collins. I myself talked this way just now, when I said that Charlotte ends up marrying Collins “because she isn’t young, pretty, or rich,” despite the fact that she’s “a sensible, intelligent person.” But that’s actually to misstate, or reverse, Charlotte’s situation. It’s certainly true that she isn’t young, pretty, or rich, and that those facts set the stage for her marriage. But it’s also true that Charlotte marries Collins because she is sensible and intelligent. It’s actually her sensibleness that gives her no choice but to do it. What really compels her to marry him is her thoughtfulness.

Charlotte’s been thinking about marriage for years, and she’s developed for herself a code of conduct for marriage, a set of rules that recognize the reality of her situation and direct her toward a solution. Long ago, she recognized that she was trapped in a social web; rather than ignoring her predicament, she set about understanding it. Charlotte’s father, Sir William Lucas, was once a tradesman; after becoming the mayor of his town, he was presented with a knighthood. He retired, and is now a not-very-rich knight. Charlotte, therefore, is too wealthy, educated, and upper-class to marry a working man—that would be a kind of social demotion for her family—but too poor and average-looking to attract a truly wealthy one. She can’t marry up or down—she can only marry sideways. She knows and understands all of this. Collins, awful as he is, is actually her social equal. He is stupid and horrible (or “neither sensible nor agreeable,” as Charlotte thinks), but, like Charlotte, he occupies the very lowest rung on the ladder of social respectability. For her whole life Charlotte has probably known that she would end up marrying someone like him: a clergyman, probably with some education and the prospect of a growing income in the future. She’s always known that there wouldn’t be a lot of men to choose from.

Charlotte knows, moreover, that she has to marry someone; it’s part of her responsibility to herself. When Charlotte first tells Lizzy about her decision, Lizzy is unequivocal in her response: Charlotte, she thinks, is “disgracing herself”; she has “sacrificed every better feeling to worldly advantage”; it will be, she thinks, “impossible” for her to be happy. To Lizzy, and to us, it can seem as though Charlotte has chosen a kind of oblivion, or spiritual suffocation. Charlotte’s life, as Lizzy sees it, will consist entirely of “her home and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry.” But Lizzy, when she thinks these things, hasn’t thought as carefully as Charlotte has about what “worldly advantage” might mean.

Almost certainly, Charlotte has a finely textured idea of the future she is choosing—she’s spent a long time thinking not just about her present situation but also about what the future might hold. You can get a sense of the sort of future Charlotte might be hoping for by looking to Austen’s own family. Austen’s father, George Austen, was an orphan; his father had been a surgeon (a good job, but not a “respectable” one). In all likelihood, George, too, would have learned a trade and become a workingman, but he had an uncle, Francis Austen, who was a solicitor, and who steered him away from the trades and into the Anglican church, where he could achieve a certain degree of gentility. A clergyman could never become an aristocrat, of course. But he could live a respectable life because his income derived from tithe rather than trade; eventually, he might even achieve some measure of political power by becoming, say, a justice of the peace. With this in mind, Francis paid George’s tuition until he could win a scholarship to Oxford. Unlike Mr. Collins, George Austen was intelligent, charming, and attractive. (One of Jane Austen’s nieces, Anne Lefroy, wrote that he was “considered extremely handsome… it was a beauty which stood by him all his life.” In particular, she remembered his hair, remarkable for its perfect “milk-whiteness,” “very beautiful, with short curls about the ears,” and his eyes, “not large, but of a peculiar and bright hazel”; Aunt Jane, she thought, had inherited them.) While at Oxford, he met Jane’s mother, Cassandra Leigh. She wasn’t rich, but she came from a well-educated and well-connected family; one of her ancestors had been the Lord Mayor of London.

Eventually, George was able to become what was known as a “pluralist”: a clergyman who oversaw two churches and had two incomes. They added to that money by farming their land and selling the produce, as well as by taking on pupils in the parsonage. With all of that combined, George and Cassandra were able to raise a large family. They had six sons and two daughters. Neither of the daughters married, but two of the sons became clergymen themselves, and two more became admirals in the navy. One son was adopted by a childless couple, and inherited a great deal of property from them.

The Austens struggled; they weren’t rich. But they did live with a degree of security and gentility that many people would have envied, and, in this, they followed one of the recognizable patterns of social mobility in the Georgian age. It’s easy to imagine Charlotte hoping for a similar future. In the best of all possible worlds, she and Collins might build a life like the Austens’. That possibility isn’t something that, in good conscience, Charlotte could set aside. She’s happy to have the chance for such a life. “At the age of twenty-seven,” Austen writes, “without having ever been handsome, she felt all the good luck of it.”

* * *

If Mr. Collins were like George Austen, of course, no one would find Charlotte’s marriage the least bit unsettling. Unfortunately, he’s heart-stoppingly awful. My favorite televisual Collins is David Bamber, who played him for the BBC, in 1995. Bamber’s Collins isn’t merely dumb or silly; he’s aggressive, even slightly unhinged, the Cujo of suitors, a mentally shambling matrimonial zombie. (“Almost as soon as I entered the house,” he tells Lizzy , “I singled you out as the companion of my future life.”) The idea of living with him, and of intimacy with him, is horrifying.

Collins, you might feel, isn’t quite a real person. He’s more like a villain: so awful that he makes you wonder whether Charlotte’s sensible, intelligent plan might be a mistake. In an odd way, Collins’s awfulness and Charlotte’s pragmatism take the measure of one another: in order to make Charlotte’s pragmatism feel problematic, Austen has to make Collins really terrible; and, by the same token, in order to make marriage to Collins even remotely plausible, she has to make Charlotte almost unbelievably pragmatic. But the result, at any rate, is an almost perfect puzzle for readers. Charlotte, by her own reasoning, has no choice but to marry Collins; Collins, meanwhile, is so terrible that he makes you question the whole idea of being responsible in the first place. Maybe, you think, Charlotte should toss everything out. Do something crazy. Decide, in a Dostoyevskian grand gesture, that it would be better to be alone than to be with him.

Austen herself once received a proposal—her only proposal, in fact—from a Collins-like man. His name was Harris Bigg-Wither, and she had known him since childhood. He wasn’t a catch. (Caroline Austen, another of Jane’s nieces, recalled him this way: “Very plain in person—awkward, and even uncouth in manner—nothing but his size to recommend him—he was a fine big man—but one need not look about for secret reasons to account for a young lady’s not loving him.”) He was, however, well-to-do; he owned several estates, and marrying him would have given Austen a family life of her own, as well as financial security not just for herself but also for her unmarried sister. She accepted his proposal, and there was a celebration in the Austen house that evening. Then, the next morning, she announced that she had changed her mind. Austen, I imagine, agreed to marry him because it made sense, and because she was the kind of person who did what was sensible. But, as Fanny Lefroy, one of her nieces, wrote, overnight she experienced a “revulsion of feeling.” By and large, this has been seen as a wise decision, rather than a disaster. (“We would naturally rather have ‘Mansfield Park’ and ‘Emma,’” the Austen biographer Claire Tomalin writes, a little venomously, “than the Bigg-Wither baby Jane Austen might have given the world.”) All this happened in early December, 1802, a few weeks before Jane turned twenty-seven—Charlotte’s age.

Thinking about George and Cassandra, Charlotte and Collins, and Jane and Harris, I’ve often been struck by the way their stories overlap. There’s a sense in which, by writing about Lizzy and Charlotte, Austen was writing about two generations of her own family. Charlotte’s marriage is animated by her parents’ hope but it’s made dangerous by her own experience. She is taking two different stories, from two different moments in time, and placing them alongside one another, implicitly comparing the caution and constraint of an earlier generation with the individualistic freedom of a later one. Family history, I find, is an interesting lens through which to think about the marriages in “Pride and Prejudice.” I come from an immigrant family, and, when I contemplate its history, I often think about how lucky we’ve all been. My parents and grandparents came, pretty much, from nothing, but were blessed with intelligence and character, and favored, on an unknowably vast number of occasions, by chance. If things had been slightly different, who knows where we might’ve ended up?

I’m the beneficiary of all their good fortune; I’ve had to make fewer compromises and accept fewer hard realities than my parents or grandparents. Perhaps Austen had similar thoughts and, in writing Charlotte and Collins, tried to correct for the sample bias created by her parents’ luck and success. Just as Austen herself had just enough security, just enough freedom, to reject Harris Bigg-Wither, so Lizzy can reject Collins: accepting his proposal, she can tell him, is “absolutely impossible.” But that impossibility, we know, is just a matter of chance—just a matter of where you happen to be located along the path of social progress. A few days later, when Charlotte tells Lizzy that she’s engaged to Collins, the same phrase slips out, in a moment of almost unforgivable rudeness: “Engaged to Mr. Collins! My dear Charlotte—impossible!” It’s now a cruel thing to say. For Charlotte, marrying Collins is the only possibility. In fact, it’s not marrying Collins that’s impossible.

* * *

In 1940, the critic D. W. Harding wrote an influential essay on Austen called “Regulated Hatred.” Harding wanted to overturn a certain view of Austen. For some readers, Austen’s novels are a kind of cathedral, within which certain ideals—vivacity, thoughtfulness, wit, affection, romance, and so on—are enshrined. To them, Austen seems like a philosopher, a romantic rationalist; you go to her books when you want to be reminded of what’s great and good. Harding, who had trained as both a literary critic and a psychologist, thought that this view of Austen missed what was most interesting about her. To understand Austen, he thought, you had to think of her as a person living in a town, in a house, surrounded by friends and family. Her novels, he argued, were really for, about, and against the people she lived with everyday. How did Austen feel about the people around her? She loved her family and friends, and “had a deep need of their affection and a genuine respect for the ordered, decent civilisation that they upheld.” But, at the same time, she “was sensitive to their crudenesses and complacencies, and knew that her real existence depended on resisting many of the values they implied.” She wanted to express her resistance, to declare her spiritual, if not practical, independence. She needed to share her interior life, her deep convictions and feelings. What she needed was a way to do this without transgressing the bounds of decorum, of propriety, of good taste, of sound judgment, fairness, and equanimity. “The novels,” Harding wrote,

gave her a way out of this dilemma. This, rather than the ambition of entertaining a posterity of urbane gentlemen, was her motive force in writing…. Part of her aim was to find the means for unobtrusive spiritual survival, without open conflict with the friendly people around her whose standards in simpler things she could accept and whose affection she greatly needed.

Few critics today are as openly therapeutic as Harding. Even so, I like the way he thinks about Austen. I admire the philosophical aspects of her novels, the way they’re like perfectly organized little worlds—French gardens planted in English soil. But I love Harding’s Austen more: the Expressionist Austen, the modern, emotional, psychological one, the writer trying to say something, in a gentle, “regulated” way, to them—her friends and family. Charlotte’s marriage, more than any other episode in the novel, seems to me a coded expression of Austen’s own dissent. In thinking about Charlotte, most people I know waver between acceptance and anger, between frustration and understanding. Like Lizzy, they pace back and forth between “How could she marry that man?” and “Of course, she had to”; between “What a sad case!” and “Lots of people do it.” Maybe that’s how Austen felt about her own disappointing, insufficient proposal. And Charlotte’s choice expresses some other, more surprising feelings. There’s anger, sadness, understanding, and all the rest of it. But there’s also a thirst for rebellion, a desire for risk, even a smidgen of relief, which Lizzy feels—a sense of being very lucky. Among other things, Charlotte’s marriage says: “Thank God I didn’t have to marry him. Thank God I had a choice, and could say no.” Charlotte’s decision gives Austen a way to express everything that Lizzy and Darcy’s marriage can’t.

* * *

It goes without saying, too, that Charlotte’s marriage doesn’t just sit there, inert; it plays a role in the plot. The critic Stuart Tave, in a classic essay on Austen called “Limitations and Definitions,” describes the way it affects Lizzy. Charlotte’s marriage, he writes, pushes Lizzy “to rethink what she has been doing, to understand better those people who have not acted as she expected they would.”

There was a time when she would not, for the sake of one individual, “change the meaning” of principle and integrity or blur the line between selfishness and prudence in matrimonial affairs. Now she is asking cynically what the difference is between the mercenary and the prudent motive, and where does discretion end and avarice begin.

Lizzy, before Charlotte’s choice, was a bit of a fantasist herself; after it, she grows more realistic. Her own openness to Darcy derives, to a large degree, from her openness to Charlotte. It’s because of Charlotte that Lizzy permits herself that famous thought, when she looks across the valley at Darcy’s estate: “To be mistress of Pemberley might be something!” And Charlotte’s choice teaches Lizzy other, more abstract lessons. One lesson is that there are many kinds of happiness. Another, as Tave writes, is that “life is not a disorder to be ordered, a given mess on which those of tidy compulsions impose a tidiness. It is not a meaningless heap from which meaning is extracted…. Meaning is the first fact.” From Charlotte, who will always live an imperfect life, Lizzy learns that imperfect things matter just as much as perfect ones.

And Lizzy learns to trust in the sturdiness of individuals—in their ability to persist, to survive, even to thrive, through the most dramatic changes and upheavals. It seems impossible that Lizzy’s friendship with Charlotte should be able to survive Mr. Collins, and yet they remain friends. Charlotte is still Charlotte. This lends Lizzy a certain confidence. The core of a person isn’t so easily changed; and, conversely, a person can change a great deal, can navigate her way through extreme circumstances, and still remain herself. That, really, is the most remarkable aspect of Lizzy’s relationship with Darcy. It’s a wildly changeable relationship. They’ve argued and flirted, offended, admired, disdained, respected, hated, and loved one another. They’ve said all sorts of outrageous and unforgivable things—starting, of course, with Darcy’s muttered verdict about Elizabeth, “Tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.” At some point, you’d think, a line would’ve been crossed; something would have been said that couldn’t be unsaid; a commitment to animosity would’ve been made that couldn’t be dissolved, an opinion formed that couldn’t be reversed. It never happens. When Darcy proposes to Lizzy, he’s nervous, for the obvious reason that, over the past year, he’s offended her in a hundred different ways. But Lizzy, Austen writes, reassures him “that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure, his present assurances.” It’s a miracle, he knows. His behavior, he tells her, was “unpardonable”; the letter he wrote, he says, contained “expressions which might justly make you hate me.” “The feelings of the person who wrote, and the person who received it,” Lizzy says, “are now so widely different from what they were then, that every unpleasant circumstance attending it must be forgotten.” A little later, Lizzy comes home and tells Jane the good news.

At night she opened her heart to Jane. Though suspicion was very far from Miss Bennet’s general habits, she was absolutely incredulous here. “You are joking, Lizzy. This cannot be!—engaged to Mr. Darcy! No, you shall not deceive me. I know it to be impossible.”

You can’t blame Jane for her skepticism. And her skepticism must be only a shadow of what Lizzy and Darcy themselves felt once they had examined their feelings and recognized them for what they were. They could easily have given up—could have concluded, sensibly, that after all that had happened a future together would be impossible.

It turns out, though, that people can change their minds, their circumstances, their opinions, their plans, their rules, their lives, without losing track of themselves. There’s something miraculous in people—a resilience, an infiniteness—which can survive constraint, transformation, reversal, and anything else imaginable. The thread doesn’t have to be broken. This never-ending pulse of personality is what gives Lizzy and Darcy the courage to change, and it’s what makes it possible, I think, to hope for Charlotte’s happiness. People, Austen seems to say, are not so easily dominated by their own lives. Charlotte will always be a little apart from her circumstances. Her life will go on.

Previous pieces in this series included William Deresiewicz’s “Happy Birthday, Pride and Prejudice!” and Rebecca Mead on George Eliot and Jane Austen.

Illustration by Barry Blitt.

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