The Charlotte Lucas question...

[lady_schrapnell]

For sartorias, but a bit later than planned, due to an unexpected after-hours visit to the doctor (in the hospital, but only because this group use the Out-Patient facilities when not in hospital use). With Older Daughter, who got an intense pain in her side, which 2 ibuprofen and 2 paracetamol tablets only dimmed down for about 20 minutes, leaving her nauseated and white with pain. Not a kidney stone or infection, but the doc earned serious disapproval [at this point, while I was trying to correct the misspelling of 'disapproval' - I'm really tired! - stupid Xjournal went and posted...] by saying that she had 'a little pain in her tummy'. As I said to her, it's a pity such condescending jerkery is only encountered when you feel like death, as he should have been seriously reprimanded for saying that to an intelligent 20 year-old.

Anyway, the discussion at steepholm's mother's somehow got to Charlotte's decision to marry Mr Collins, and he and his mother both said she was just pragmatic and not hopeful of better. I agreed with that, and that her choices were much more limited than those of Jane or Elizabeth, but felt that though her decision was treated sympathetically it was nonetheless meant to be seen as morally inadequate. I quoted too! And then found and read out the passages I'd remembered (fairly accurately, on this occasion, at least*). Steepholm's mother said the voice of Elizabeth couldn't be equated with that of the narrator/Jane Austen, which is also correct, of course. 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. The snobbery of Bingley's sisters is wrong. And when the author uses her favourite free indirect speech to show Elizabeth, feeling betrayed by Charlotte, turning even more to Jane , who is never anything but good, the reader is to see that judgment to be correct. Of course she's rather more intemperate in her earlier shock at Charlotte's acceptance of him than she is later, but I think her response to Charlotte's advice on how to catch a man - 'You make me laugh, Charlotte, but it is not sound' - sums up the author's attitude as well.

I still think, as I eloquently put it to C. after his mum had gone to bed: Jane Austen acknowledges that life sucks for women like Charlotte, but that doesn't really excuse doing something like marrying a man you can't have an ounce of respect for.

No opinions were changed, but a good time was had by all! Anyone disagreeing with me should feel free to jump in with why this is all rubbish.

* I asked for the copy to look up the remembered scenes, having been scarred by an occasion when I was studying P&P several years ago. A friend and I were having a long (also enjoyable) argument by email about Georgiana's saying that her brother could never be mistaken. Both of us had avoided watching the TV series (which we both had on video) for the whole academic year, to avoid confusion, and it still took about 3 emails on each side of discussion, before I went to check a minor detail of this scene and discovered no such thing was actually said in the book... Scary.

Comments

[emmaco.livejournal.com]

So you don't know what the pain was? I hope she's feeling better!

I haven't read P&P in far too long so can only remember my own feelings rather than Elizabeth's/Jane's. I thought it was clear that Charlotte didn't expect much different so it wasn't so unsound a decision for her. But I have had so many prompts to re-read this book that I actually need to go do it :)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I think the telling line in the Charlotte Question is somewhere further along when Elizabeth notes that Charlotte is enjoying her own home, poultry, etc =while she still can=. So she's just a shade over into the red on the morality question. Though I wonder if Charlotte's decision really isn't more amoral. But it's definitely rationally made.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

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?