Rebuttal number whatever though, is that Elizabeth is wrong in her judgments, but is not actually morally incorrect: if Darcy had done any of the things she mistakenly believed him to have done, then he would have been a bad, bad man indeed.
Charlotte Lucas aside, I’m not sure I’d go along with this the whole way. In a way JA makes it easy for Elizabeth (and us) by revealing Wickham to be such an out-and-out cad, Collins such a morally insipid toady, and Lady Catherine so snobbish and impossible in her demands.* EB’s big moral judgements are vindicated (which isn’t the same as saying that she’s always right, as you point out); but I think we also see her sense of, shall we call it social morality, being changed by getting to know Darcy. I hope I’m not just channelling Andrew Davies when I say that by seeing her family and friends through Darcy’s eyes she gains access to a level of perception which in him may issue in unhealthy and dismissive pride, but in her becomes a kind of pained awareness of (for example) her father’s moral indolence, something she hadn’t really been very conscious of before. And it’s a better and more subtle book for that, than it would be if all she had to learn was not to leap to conclusions.
* I wonder whether JA came to feel that this was a bit of a cop-out, in fact, and whether a book like Mansfield Park, in its depiction of the Crawfords, was an attempt to show how real life situations are less clear cut, and moral decisions nicer (in the Tilneyan sense, of course!). I supplementarily wonder if JA, like Woody Allen, ever got bugged by people asking her to do another of her ‘early, funny ones’. Was Northanger Abbey her Sleeper? Is Mansfield Park her Stardust Memories?
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Charlotte Lucas aside, I’m not sure I’d go along with this the whole way. In a way JA makes it easy for Elizabeth (and us) by revealing Wickham to be such an out-and-out cad, Collins such a morally insipid toady, and Lady Catherine so snobbish and impossible in her demands.* EB’s big moral judgements are vindicated (which isn’t the same as saying that she’s always right, as you point out); but I think we also see her sense of, shall we call it social morality, being changed by getting to know Darcy. I hope I’m not just channelling Andrew Davies when I say that by seeing her family and friends through Darcy’s eyes she gains access to a level of perception which in him may issue in unhealthy and dismissive pride, but in her becomes a kind of pained awareness of (for example) her father’s moral indolence, something she hadn’t really been very conscious of before. And it’s a better and more subtle book for that, than it would be if all she had to learn was not to leap to conclusions.
* I wonder whether JA came to feel that this was a bit of a cop-out, in fact, and whether a book like Mansfield Park, in its depiction of the Crawfords, was an attempt to show how real life situations are less clear cut, and moral decisions nicer (in the Tilneyan sense, of course!). I supplementarily wonder if JA, like Woody Allen, ever got bugged by people asking her to do another of her ‘early, funny ones’. Was Northanger Abbey her Sleeper? Is Mansfield Park her Stardust Memories?