Pride & Prejudice, ch. 22: Pawn Takes Bishop

So let’s talk about Charlotte Lucas.

For a character who has what turns out to be a huge impact on the plot (getting Elizabeth to Hunsford, home of Lady Catherine), she’s only slightly more sketched out than a character like Bingley. She’s plain, practical, and funny. She’s Lizzy’s ally in mocking the absurd. Previously, I proposed a hypothetical backstory for her that I found compelling, though a lot of you (very politely!) disagreed. I acknowledge that the observations you put forth were more thoughtful than mine.

So I re-directed my ideas about Charlotte, and I realized: There is an air of caution around her. She moves out of the spotlight and gives it to Lizzy. She advises her friend to show proper respect to a man of higher rank than her crush, Wickham. This caution reflects her groundedness. She believes that marriage is a job and love is a luxury, as demonstrated by her advice concerning Jingley. As we see in this chapter, Charlotte herself abides by that philosophy, implying a strength of character that not many in this novel possess: she practices what she preaches. Even more impressively, she is taking control of her own narrative (the third example of a woman kicking the plot into motion).

It’s just that her narrative really, really, really,

REALLY

sucks.

Over the course of a few days, and with the assist of Mr. Collins’s eagerness and a well-timed look out of a second-floor window, Charlotte succeeds in garnering a proposal that secures her future. After all, marriage is “the only honorable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservation from want.” Yes, dear readers, we must interrupt this jaunty romance of opposites attracting to pull you briefly back into the drudgery of real-life husband-catching. Much has been said of how Austen portrays Charlotte sympathetically (the narrator is more understanding than Lizzy is, which we’ll get to below). It’s funny that in a work of fiction, Austen uses the foolish character to make a point about women’s limited options and the absurdity of love as a pretext for what amounts to a transaction. That Mr. Collins’s professions of love “must be imaginary” also carries some sorrow, though admittedly it’s more of a sad clown vibe than anything else. 

Speak of the devil, Mr. Collins does a pretty decent job of reining in his more problematic traits. He honors Charlotte’s request that he keep their engagement a secret so she can tell Lizzy first, which you’d think he’d be tempted to let *cough* slip *cough*. Maybe he is, but in any case he doesn’t. His decision to propose to another woman mere days after getting rejected by the previous one is either a sign of his bloated ego, desperation, or sheer resilience. Hell, it could be all three. I kind of hate that Charlotte—Lizzy’s best friend—ends up being the one that proves the point he made during his proposal to Lizzy: Charlotte does indeed “[feel] all the good luck of it.” Austen wields irony with a vengeance.

The Bennets can’t figure out why Mr. Collins accepts their perfunctory invitation to visit again, leading to a great back-and-forth with an increasingly desperate Mr. Bennet trying to talk him out of it (you know, at least you have your library, Mr. B). Mr. Collins gets in a passive-aggressive dig at Lizzy that shows that his good will has its limits. Ma Bennet thinks middle sister (sigh) Mary is into him, or at least that Mr. Collins could be into her. Mary indeed thinks she can “improve” him with the right summer reading list. I am sincerely curious as to what this suggests about Mary’s character: she thinks she’s smarter than him (which she may be, if she can recognize along with her older sister that he’s a bit slow) and she assumes that she can take the lead in the relationship—at least in terms of “improving” his mind. As dynamics go, it’s rather compelling. Don’t know if it would translate to a happy marriage, though.

Alas, ‘tis not to be, as Charlotte breaks the news to an aghast Lizzy. After stumbling, Lizzy does her best to assure her friend “that the prospect of the relationship was highly grateful to her, and that she wished her all imaginable happiness.” That “grateful” bit sticks out to me. Is Lizzy grateful that Mr. Collins won’t be knocking on her door any more? That Charlotte found a husband? Charlotte, who by now is at the top of my list of Most Intelligent Character, sees how Lizzy truly feels. “I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast among entering the marriage state,” she surmises/placates. Sigh … 

Though Charlotte’s choice is perfectly valid as well as practical given the severe constraints on women at the time, Lizzy’s feelings about the match are also valid. But she directs her disappointment not at their similar situations, but at Charlotte herself: “[Elizabeth] had always felt that Charlotte’s opinion of matrimony was not exactly like her own, but she could not have supposed it possible that when called into action, she would have sacrificed every better feeling to worldly advantage.” Oof! Lizzy’s thinking of the disgrace and humiliation of being the wife of a pompous dotard and what it means for Charlotte’s integrity and happiness, and rather carelessly throws around descriptors like “worldly” that make Charlotte sound heartless and materialistic. Unfortunately, she can’t see that Charlotte’s relief at finding a home and security is, at least for Charlotte, a pretty decent substitute for personal happiness. You could even argue that those are necessary for such happiness to exist in the first place. I wonder if Lizzy would agree?

Next time: The engagement news goes public, radio silence from the Bingley party, and Mrs. Bennet indulges in one of her favorite past-times—fretting.