Pride and Prejudice, chapter seventeen
“Horny has killed more people than all the volcanoes on earth combined” - dril
Our girl is smart. Elizabeth Bennet is, probably, one of the most intelligent characters in English literature, and one of the impressive things about her intelligence is the fact that Austen never really belabors the point about it. Elizabeth isn’t necessarily an intellectual; she reads, but professes not to be a great reader. She isn’t like her sister Mary, who is more studious but not clever at all. She has not received much of an education. But she is quick; “quickness” is the quality her adoring father credits her with above everything else.
Elizabeth’s intelligence mostly manifests as an impressive dexterity at assessing the emotional and social dynamics of a situation, and quickly identifying the role she has to play in that situation.This description may seem like damning with faint praise, until you realize that most of the other characters do not possess this skill. Darcy has pretty sound judgement of things and people, perhaps sounder than Elizabeth’s, but he is ruminative, not quick. He tends to take his time, and he tends to forget his own place within a group dynamic, such that he can’t foresee how his own choices and actions have influenced others. While Elizabeth is fully aware of her own place within a network of relationships, Darcy seems to believe himself to be floating above things, observing and influencing as he sees fit.
Mr. Bennet is similar to his daughter in his quickness, and he is like her too in taking some pleasure in the folly of others. He is, however, much more shortsighted than her. He can work out the social dynamics at play in front of him, and see the absurdities in them, but he only does so to poke fun and cause trouble. Mr. Bennet never sees the social cost of making fun of people, while Elizabeth does. It’s easy to forget how much of the novel Elizabeth spends being embarrassed by her family and attempting to steer them, socially, around their own ineptitude. You would never catch Mr. Bennet doing something similar; his primary amusement in life is winding his wife up so he can watch her embarrass herself.
Charlotte Lucas comes closest to matching Elizabeth's skill, though it’s easy to miss as she is not quite as funny as Elizabeth, and shares her observations less easily. She is very socially intelligent, and tends to assess things correctly more often than any other character in the novel. This perhaps explains their close friendship – and the weakening of it will come when, for perhaps the first time, Charlotte cannot make herself understood to Elizabeth.
In this chapter we see Elizabeth at her best in this regard. She very quickly figures out what Mr. Collins is up to, and quickly figures out what she is going to do about it: nothing. One of Elizabeth’s most admirable tendencies is her pointed refusal to worry about things she can’t do anything about. Mr. Collins is a bridge she will cross when she comes to it; she will deal with him when she has to and not before. It’s important that there is a moment in this chapter where we can appreciate Elizabeth’s good qualities, because she spends most of the chapter acting like an idiot.
“I can much more easily believe Mr. Bingley’s being imposed on than that Mr. Wickham should invent such a history of himself as he gave me last night; names, facts, everything mentioned without ceremony. If it be not so, let Mr. Darcy contradict it. Besides, there was truth in his looks.”
Elizabeth. Girl. “There was truth in his looks?” Girl.
It’s funnier, I suppose, when you know the book already and know what’s coming, but this really is beneath her. Elizabeth’s insistence that the Wickham’s possession of names and facts proves his honesty is especially hilarious – it reminds me of nothing so much as the victims of contemporary phone scams who will tell you that no, of course it wasn’t a scammer, it couldn’t have been, he knew my name and the name of my bank. Truly, con-artists are the same as they have always been, and their victims are too. “There was truth in his looks” is the kind of thing you say when you actually have no idea why you’re trusting someone; you can argue that on some level Elizabeth knows she’s falling for a handsome bullshitter.
And Wickham is handsome, as we know, so we can forgive Elizabeth a bit. She’s young – she’s so verbally sophisticated and knowing that it’s easy to remember she’s just twenty years old, barely out of her teens. A hot guy is paying special attention to her and telling her what she wants to hear. Vanity is Elizabeth’s chief fault, as she will acknowledge by the end of the novel. She is not in love with Wickham, really, but she enjoys his attention and what she thinks it signifies about her. She has met the guy all of once, but he has already chosen her as a special confidant, and she enjoys knowing that she knows something about Darcy without his own knowledge or permission.
Darcy is more central to Elizabeth’s thoughts and behavior here than she would acknowledge at the moment. Wickham’s attention seems to almost cancel out Darcy’s initial slight – it’s proof that Darcy can’t be right about her, that she is more than just tolerable. Darcy has a way of occupying Elizabeth’s thoughts in a way she does not seem to consciously notice; she looks forward to dancing with Wickham at the Netherfield ball, but equally looks forward to examining Darcy’s “look and behavior.” Her interest in Wickham was piqued in the first place by his interaction with Darcy, in addition to the handsomeness that made everyone interested in him. It all does come back to Darcy, though at this point Elizabeth would never admit it.
Nor would she admit how similar she is acting to her younger sisters in this chapter, but we should notice it. Austen makes a point of noting that Kitty and Lydia are like Elizabeth in wanting to dance “half the evening” with Wickham. Elizabeth wants to believe that any attraction Wickham feels for her is a sign of his goodness, but Austen is careful to tell us that any attraction Elizabeth feels for him is not a sign of good judgement on her part: everybody is interested in him, most especially the two silliest of the Bennet girls. Every time Elizabeth is grouped with them in interest or action, we’re being told that she is not being her best self. This time is no different. She will work that out herself before long.