Pride and Prejudice Chapter Twelve.
Chapter twelve of Pride and Prejudice is largely about moving the pieces. There’s nothing more for Elizabeth and Darcy to do at Netherfield for now, and the narrative needs Elizabeth and Jane to return home in order to move forward. There is something familiar here in the way that everyone has gotten sick of each other the way that tends to happen at the end of a visit that has lasted a bit too long. For different reasons, everyone but Mr. Bingley and Mrs. Bennet wants Elizabeth and Jane to go home.
But what does Jane herself want? Jane has been curiously absent in the entire section at Netherfield, and when you notice that you notice that she has been largely absent in her entire courtship with Mr. Bingley. They have, to date, not shared a single exchange of dialogue. We know that Jane likes him. We know that he likes Jane. And that’s it. We don’t really know why, except that they’re both very nice and likable.
And that’s enough, for the most part. One layer of irony at work in P&P is that while all of the characters in Meryton are paying close attention to the love story of Jane and Bingley, either to promote it or stop it in its tracks, the narrative interest for readers is with Elizabeth and Darcy, whose romance happens beneath the notice of many of the people closest to them. Jane and Bingley are important, to us, for how they have an impact on Elizabeth and Darcy.
But Austen is too good to make these characters simple plot devices. It would be easy to see Jane as a mirror image of Bingley: friendly, easy-going, a little dim (has there ever been a compliment in literature more back-handed than “Bingley was by no means deficient?” Probably not). But Jane is not a female Bingley, and the end of the Netherfield visit gives us a subtle but clear hint as to how.
“Jane was firm where she felt herself to be right.” There is much that is suggestive in this sentence. Its immediate impact is to make us realize that Jane, too, wants to leave Netherfield; that she and Elizabeth are in accord. That is interesting; Jane is not, like Bingley, so far in love as to forget her sister’s discomfort and her own propriety. But what will reverberate through the rest of the novel is the word “firm.” Just a few chapters earlier we learned that Bingley’s defining trait is his susceptibility to persuasion. We also learn, crucially, that Darcy’s opinion of this is complex. He has a certain amount of contempt for men who are so easily swayed, one that Elizabeth notices, and she praises Bingley’s easy nature to a degree that suggests a desire to be contrary. But we know that Darcy likes Bingley for his good temper and easiness and Darcy will take advantage of this persuadable tendency.
Jane, however, is “firm where she felt herself to be right.” Jane is mild, but not easy. When she insists on leaving Netherfield, she is not simply yielding to Elizabeth rather than Bingley. Jane herself is insisting on her own decisions and her own principles. She is doing, very quietly, the very thing Bingley was found to not be able to do earlier in this Netherfield sequence: she has decided to leave, and she is holding to her decision despite her friend’s protests.
It is this difference that will cause the breakdown in their relationship. Bingley’s ease will allow Darcy to persuade him away from Jane. Jane’s lack of ease will lead Darcy to believe she is not even in love.