In a
continuation of the thread set forth in my immediately preceding post, there
was further discussion in Austen-L and Janeites regarding the thorny question
of who is good and who is bad, as between Wickham and Darcy.
First Ellen
Moody responded: "Wickham is the one we are to reprobate but in some
previous version the second half was more complicated than what we have.
Then Nancy
Mayer chimed in: "In the version we have of P & P, Wickham seduces
Lydia away with promises of marriage -- which he has no plans to offer--.In the
first half he lies to Elizabeth. If Elizabeth hadn't been ticked off by Darcy's
snub towards her she wouldn't have paid so much attention to Wickham. She knew
it was bad manners to disclose such history to a stranger at first meeting. His
behaviour wasn't at all well bred. He doesn't reform. His character doesn't
change.
I then offered
an outside the box new perspective. Apropos the point they were discussing, we
all know by heart the following exchange between Elizabeth and Jane right after
the Hunsford/Rosings episode:
"Most
earnestly did [Jane] labour to prove the probability of error, and seek to
clear the one [Wickham] without involving the other [Darcy].
“This
will not do,” said Elizabeth; “you never will be able to make both of them good
for anything. Take your choice, but you must be satisfied with only one. There
is but such a quantity of merit between them; just enough to make one good sort
of man; and of late it has been shifting about pretty much. For my part, I am
inclined to believe it all Darcy’s; but you shall do as you choose.”
It was
some time, however, before a smile could be extorted from Jane...."
I long
ago recognized that this was another one of those many passages scattered
throughout all of JA’s novels, which I’ve been steadily collecting over the
years, in which JA hides a giant hint at an alternative interpretation of what
happens in the story. JA perfected this art, by having the hint be expressed by
an unreliable character – unreliable, that is, in the eyes of the fallible
heroine, and therefore ignored at the expense of the accuracy of the heroine’s
understanding.
Here’s
the hint – in so many words, Elizabeth, beneath her playful tone, is unwittingly
revealing the zero-sum assumption upon which she is basing her opinions about
Darcy and Wickham: i.e., that, as between these two main romantic interests of
hers, if one is good, the other must be bad. The only question she believes she
must answer is, who is the good guy, and who the bad?
But
note the context in which Elizabeth makes this pronouncement to Jane—although
it is often overlooked, it is crucial. Elizabeth makes this claim in specific rebuttal
to Jane’s attempt to assess Wickham and Darcy in a very different way—i.e., as separate,
independent persons – which, if you think about it, is exactly the way we ought
to judge any other two people we meet.
That
Elizabeth conflates Darcy and Wickham in her mind, almost as if they were
conjoined twins, is a kind of “prejudice” which impedes her ability to judge
their respective characters accurately. She finds both Darcy and Wickham
attractive, and so she can’t quite separate them in her mind. And Jane Austen even
gives us a clever foreshadowing of Elizabeth’s confusion, and the ambiguity of
the presentation of Wickham and Darcy in the novel, when Wickham first appears,
in Chapter 15:
“Mr.
Darcy…was beginning to determine not to fix his eyes on Elizabeth, when they
were suddenly arrested by the sight of the stranger [Wickham], and Elizabeth
happening to see the countenance of both as they looked at each other, was all
astonishment at the effect of the meeting. Both changed colour, one looked
white, the other red. Mr. Wickham, after a few moments, touched his hat—a
salutation which Mr. Darcy just deigned to return. What could be the meaning of
it? It was impossible to imagine; it was impossible not to long to know.”
As I’ve
written in the past, there is absolutely no way for the reader to ascertain
from the above passage who turned white and who turned red—and, even more importantly
than that superficial ambiguity, there is no way the reader can determine
whether turning white was a sign of anger, fear, and/or surprise, and similarly
regarding turning red. That moment is a microcosm of Elizabeth’s conflation of
Darcy and Wickham in her mind, and of the ambiguity that is everywhere in the
epistemological treatise disguised as a novel that is Pride & Prejudice.
But, back
to the question of who is good and who is bad, generations of readers have been
so deeply enmeshed in, and charmed by, Elizabeth’s endlessly light, bright, and
sparkling speeches, that precious few have been able to step back and realize
that Jane is not a foolish Pollyanna in this instance, that is just how
Elizabeth sees her. Jane can actually be plausibly viewed by the reader as the clear-eyed
“studier of character” of the two eldest sisters, the one who understands that
there are no simple dichotomies in human personality. Whereas Elizabeth, with her
inflated sense of her own psychological acuity, is the fantasist, the poor
student of character, who reduces everything to black and white—or rather, as
the above passage suggests, to red and
white.
And so,
with all that as introduction, now I am going to actually follow the above-quoted
hint that JA put in Jane Bennet’s mouth, and suggest to you that what JA is
hinting at is that there are actually (at least) TWO plausible possibilities
regarding relative goodness and badness, as between Darcy and Wickham:
ONE: That
Wickham is a bad man who tells lies about Darcy, who is a good man
who tells the truth about Wickham. That of course is the view that
Elizabeth arrives at eventually, and is therefore also the view of almost all
readers of P&P. But I claim that this is only what happens in the overt
story of P&P, one of the two parallel fictional universes that Jane Austen
deliberately created.
TWO:
Wickham is a bad man who however does tell the truth about Darcy, who is also a
bad man and who however does also tell the truth about Wickham. That is a view
that I believe I am currently alone in holding, and I claim that this is exactly
what happens in the shadow story of P&P.
If you
think about it, it’s really obvious that Elizabeth is not stating an objective
fact about Wickham and Darcy to Jane, all she’s revealing is her own subjective
and very confused point of view. How many times in human history, on both the
personal and the national level, have there been situations in which two
persons or groups are in conflict with each other, and both are bad, but in
different ways. Just think Hitler and Stalin. The battles in life are not
always between good and evil, sometimes they’re between Evil #1 and Evil #2.
And haven’t
we seen this same pattern presented many times in literature as well? Sibling
rivalries in the Bible are not all clearcut battles of good vs. bad, nor are
they in Shakespeare, to name two huge examples. And that brings me to my final
point, which is that perhaps most aptly to Wickham and Darcy, we have the War
of the Roses as depicted in Shakespeare’s Henry
VI trilogy and Richard III. That
scene about Darcy and Wickham turning red and white turns out to also be a
giant hint by Jane Austen suggesting the sublminal allusive presence of the
long bloody conflict between the Red Rose and the White Rose.
I’ve
previously written about various aspects of Shakespeare’s tetralogy dramatizing
the conflict between the Yorkist and the Lancastrian branches of the
Plantagenet family, as I believe they were alluded to by Jane Austen in Pride & Prejudice: “Henry
VI, Part 2: The first thing we do, let’s kill….Lady Catherine! (in Cheapside)” http://tinyurl.com/q5pl4tg
But I
believe this is the first time I’m explicitly stating that Wickham and Darcy
have part of their origins in Shakespeare’s warring cousins. And the allusion
fits so well, because there are no clearcut good guys and bad guys in
Shakespeare’s complex fictional universe. It’s pretty clear that Shakespeare
spread the blame for the horrors of that war, in which (as Henry VI realizes as
he watches the battle from his molehill) killing was a family affair, very
generously between both sides, who take turns committing atrocities, each
believing themselves justified by an ever spiraling cycle of revenge.
And of
course, Jane Austen could not putting one final hint at that conflict in the
mouth of Mrs. Bennet, as she sneers at Elizabeth who has just rejected Mr.
Collins’s proposal:
“Aye,
there she comes,” continued Mrs. Bennet, “looking as unconcerned as may be, and
caring no more for us than if we were at YORK, provided she can have her own
way.”
York
indeed!
All of
which tells me that JA, from her radical feminist perspective, with clear-eyed
objectivity, catalogued many varieties of male no-goodness, and, to those who
could discern her double stories, was in effect imagining what the dying Mercutio,
who got caught in the crossfire between Montagues and Capulets, might’ve said about
Wickham and Darcy: “A plague on BOTH their houses!”
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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