Pride & Prejudice, ch. 19: [CRINGE]

Theory: Mr. Collins prefers talking to older women more than younger women, or perhaps most people in general. Evidence: Lady Catherine, Mrs. Bennet, and Mrs. Aunt Pittypat have all been the target of his, um, charms, and all three were won over. He does not have the same track record when it comes to men. Evidence specific to this chapter: he asks Mrs. Bennet for some alone time with Lizzy, despite Lizzy being right there in the room with him.

I suppose it’s also the proper course of action—by addressing Mrs. Bennet, the parent (rather than Elizabeth, the daughter), he is showing deference, which is his favorite thing to do as long as it doesn’t make him feel inferior. That being said, it really serves to illustrate how wrong he is for Lizzy that he pays his respects to her mother, who is in so many ways not on Team Elizabeth. 

On thinking it through, Lizzy, while “divided between distress and diversion,” decides that the sooner she hears him out, the sooner she can shut him down. I award her +10 in maturity points.

Mr. Collins takes her resignation as proof of her “modesty” and “natural delicacy” (gag me) and announces his proposal. And then he proceeds to list the reasons why he wants a wife in the first place … which doesn’t seem to be a necessary component of proposing. One could argue that the proposal itself would be enough to indicate that you want to get married. Even if you aren’t marrying for love (which appears to be a common theme in Austen books and, I assume, common in the reality of Regency English society), your potential partner wouldn’t require much in the way of additional explanations. Men and women married for convenience, money, family, infatuation, fondness, social ladder-climbing, and possibly a combination of many of these. 

However, it appears that our poor dum-dum here has decided that Lizzy needs to hear him speechify about the damn thing. Much like at the Netherfield ball, there’s hardly any structure or organization to his speech here. He even admits that he should have mentioned Lady Catherine’s so-called advice first instead of third. His primary reasons are all about him and his needs (as a clergyman, he must “set the example of matrimony” … because), which honestly is the most forgivable part of the speech. I mean, we as readers have come to expect this from him, and so presumably has Lizzy. He knows his desires a lot better than he knows hers, and it’s almost like he’s acknowledging it in a subtle way.

I said “almost.”

Mr. Collins’ expectation that Lizzy’s “wit and vivacity” will be “tempered with the silence and respect which [Lady Catherine’s] rank will inevitably excite” is ludicrous and infuriating in its dismissal of Lizzy’s agency. Not the least because it shows that he actually recognizes Lizzy’s talent—and in the same breath assumes that she’ll know better than to display it in front of his patroness. And my God, only Mr. Collins would think to describe a “temper[ing]” as something that will be “excite[d]” into being. Forget speech class—this guy needs vocabulary flashcards.

Equally depressing is his on-the-nose assessment of Lizzy’s inheritance of “one thousand pounds in the 4 percents” as totally not a factor in his decision to marry her and is definitely not something he thinks about. That this comes after his declaration to express “in the most animated language of the violence of [his] affection” is mind-boggling. Apparently he believes that the most romantic thing he could possibly say to her is that he doesn’t mind (much) that she’s kind of poor? I mean, it’s romantic in the Marianne Dashwood sense, but this is Mr. Collins we’re talking about. Is that really what he imagines Lizzy, or any woman, regards as the pinnacle of romantic gestures? It certainly reveals a lot about how he views the world.

Lizzy takes the opportunity (maybe he’s pausing to take a deep breath) to graciously and briefly turn him down. He doesn’t take it seriously, explaining that he has “learn[ed] that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept.” 

So … there’s a lot to unpack here.

I’ve been thinking more and more about the pros and cons of interpreting Mr. Collins as a caricature versus a character. For the most part, he’s so over-the-top that not many readers seem to be inclined to take him seriously, which is fair. But it’s moments like this that pull me over to the other side of the argument. Where did he “learn” this? How much experience does he have with “young ladies”? I have already mused that he’s more comfortable around older, married women, quite possibly because he thinks they’re easier to impress (and let’s face it, so far all the married women we’ve met here aren’t exactly of the highest intelligence). Could he have gotten the impression from either Lady Catherine or the married women in his community that younger women play silly, coquettish courtship games?

It could also mean that he’s pulling this out of his ass just to save face. I’m just spitballing.

Lizzy sticks to her guns, defends her fellow women, and appeals to Mr. Collins’ deference to Lady Catherine in a strong rebuttal. This is a girl who would be in a Speech III course by now. She also underlines the strong probability that neither of them would make the other one happy, putting his happiness on the same level as her own—in other words, making them equal. “You must give me leave to judge for myself,” she asserts. (We know that our Lizzy doesn’t really need anyone’s permission to start judging other people, though.)

Mr. Collins, however, reasserts his belief that “the established custom of [her] sex [is] to reject a man on the first application” and again I must ask, where is he getting his information about courtships? From context clues and a quick study, I can believe that Fordyce’s Sermons would have a lot to say about “the true delicacy of the female character,” but even those books were meant for young women to read, not for men to use as a reference for courtship protocol. Right? 

Why is he even pretending that they’re in love, for that matter?

Lizzy’s frustration is a perfect reflection of my own. Without getting into the whole no means no of it all, her pointing out that he’s making it impossible for her to be taken seriously has some weird implications, at least as far as relationship dynamics go. Mr. Collins makes his first rational point when he reminds her that his “establishment [and] connections” make him something of a catch. (He will be proven correct a couple chapters later on). But because he quickly returns to the idea of Lizzy being a coquette, she is more than able to dismiss his argument and shoot him down for the third time. When he refuses to let it go, she exits with the rather depressing idea that once he hears the “no” from her father (that is, another man), Mr. Collins will finally have to accept reality.

Chapter the next: We get to relive the whole damn thing from the perspectives of a demanding mother and an emotionally detached father. Oh, joy.