Servility and Self-Importance

Pride and Prejudice, chapter 13.

Something that Jane Austen loves doing, and did to perhaps to best and most sophisticated effect in Mansfield Park, is giving her reader a pair of doppelgangers. These paired characters are never twins, and rarely is their similarity explicitly highlighted by the text. Yet we are nevertheless expected to notice it. We understand Darcy better because he is not Bingley, and then he is not Wickham, and then he is not Mr. Bennet. He is something like each of them, but is not them, and his own character becomes clearer through the comparison. Likewise, Elizabeth is like, but not enough like, Jane, Miss Bingley, Miss Darcy, and Lydia. Noticing the way these people are like each other makes us notice how they are different, and why. It allows us to notice everything that could create that difference.

An unexpected, and subtle, pair of doppelgangers appears in chapter thirteen of P&P. What do Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Collins have in common? They are both stupid, of course, possibly the two stupidest characters in the book give or take a Lydia (who has an excuse, being a child). They are both very concerned, for different reasons, with the marriage prospects of the Bennet daughters. They will have a brief alliance regarding that matter beginning in the chapter after this one, as they clumsily seek to arrange a marriage between Mr. Collins and Elizabeth. But there is another important commonality that this chapter makes clear.

Mr. Bennet describes Mr. Collins, accurately, as having a “mixture of servility and self-importance,” and it’s something he might be able to say about his wife. She and Mr. Collins are the characters in Pride and Prejudice most concerned with their place in the middle of the social hierarchy. Lady Catherine might be most invested in preserving the hierarchy itself; Wickham might be most resentful of his lack of status. But Collins and Mrs. Bennet are people who have, in different ways, risen from where they started, and are determined to both maintain that risen status and rise further.

Mrs. Bennet was not born into the landed gentry; she married into it. Her fear for her daughters’ prospects is born out of that fact: she is terrified of her own class mobility being temporary. If her daughters do not make good marriages, she will not starve. She has a brother with what we can infer is considerable wealth; there is no reason to think he cannot or will not see her and her children provided for. But she will not be the lady of an estate anymore, and any comfort she has in that case will be at the largesse of that brother. She wants her daughters to have at least the comfort and security she enjoys in marriage: she wants them to be ladies of estates, too.

Her resentment of the entail does not, and never will, lead her to question the patriarchal system which ensures financial security for sons but not daughters. A Mrs. Bennet with a son would be perfectly satisfied with her situation. She is perfectly content to believe that people with more money or titles are above her and always will be, and she wants to ingratiate herself with those people - however much her attempts backfire.

Mr. Collins is similar, in that he is someone who has moved up: from a nobody, he is now a clergyman to an important, titled woman. He believes that woman’s title gives her a special importance, one he will never question. But his servility does not cancel out his self-importance. He is proud of himself for moving up, and is excited to move up further. But this points us to the important difference between Mr. Collins and Mrs. Bennet: he will move up, and she can’t. Even if her daughters marry very well (and two of them will), Mrs. Bennet herself will only ever be their widowed mother, dependent on their kindness. Mr. Collins will be the master of Longbourn, and so will his son if he has one.

Mr. Collins is no smarter, nicer, or more capable than Mrs. Bennet. But he gets what they both want, and she’s right to notice how unfair it is.