Charlotte Lucas's Choice in Pride and Prejudice

Charlotte Lucas's Choice

• Charlotte Lucas in "Pride and Prejudice"

  • Almost everyone in "Pride and Prejudice" gets the spouse they deserve, except for Charlotte.

  • Elizabeth's best friend, is a sensible, intelligent person, but because she isn’t young, pretty, or rich, she ends up married to the maddening and empty-headed Mr. Collins.

  • Lizzy calls him a “conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man.”

  • Charlotte’s marriage is like the tomb in that Poussin painting “Et in Arcadia ego.”

• Importance of Choice

  • The novel is about how we make choices.

  • Charlotte's story says the most about choices, their difficulty and meaning.

  • Charlotte doesn't have a choice but to marry Collins because she isn’t young, pretty, or rich, despite the fact that she’s “a sensible, intelligent person.”

  • Charlotte marries Collins because she is sensible and intelligent.

• Charlotte’s Code of Conduct

  • Charlotte’s been thinking about marriage for years, and she’s developed for herself a code of conduct for marriage, a set of rules that recognize the reality of her situation and direct her toward a solution.

  • She recognized that she was trapped in a social web and set about understanding it.

  • Charlotte’s father, Sir William Lucas, was once a tradesman; after becoming the mayor of his town, he was presented with a knighthood.

  • Charlotte is too wealthy, educated, and upper-class to marry a working man—that would be a kind of social demotion for her family—but too poor and average-looking to attract a truly wealthy one.

  • She can’t marry up or down—she can only marry sideways.

  • Collins, awful as he is, is actually her social equal.

  • He is stupid and horrible, but, like Charlotte, he occupies the very lowest rung on the ladder of social respectability.

• Lizzy's Reaction

  • When Charlotte first tells Lizzy, Lizzy thinks Charlotte is “disgracing herself”; she has “sacrificed every better feeling to worldly advantage”; it will be “impossible”for her to be happy.

  • Charlotte's life will consist entirely of “her home and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry.”

  • Lizzy hasn’t thought as carefully as Charlotte has about what “worldly advantage” might mean.

• Austen's Family

  • Austen’s father, George Austen, was an orphan; his father had been a surgeon.

  • George Austen would have learned a trade and become a workingman, but he had an uncle, Francis Austen, who was a solicitor, and who steered him away from the trades and into the Anglican church, where he could achieve a certain degree of gentility.

  • Francis paid George’s tuition until he could win a scholarship to Oxford.

  • George Austen was intelligent, charming, and attractive.

  • While at Oxford, he met Jane’s mother, Cassandra Leigh. She wasn’t rich, but she came from a well-educated and well-connected family.

  • Eventually, George was able to become a “pluralist”: a clergyman who oversaw two churches and had two incomes.

  • They added to that money by farming their land and selling the produce, as well as by taking on pupils in the parsonage.

  • George and Cassandra were able to raise a large family.

  • They had six sons and two daughters. Neither of the daughters married, but two of the sons became clergymen themselves, and two more became admirals in the navy. One son was adopted by a childless couple, and inherited a great deal of property from them.

• Social Mobility

  • The Austens lived with a degree of security and gentility that many people would have envied, and, in this, they followed one of the recognizable patterns of social mobility in the Georgian age.

  • It’s easy to imagine Charlotte hoping for a similar future.

  • She’s happy to have the chance for such a life.“At the age of twenty-seven,” Austen writes,“without having ever been handsome, she felt all the good luck of it.”

• Mr. Collins' Awfulness

  • If Mr. Collins were like George Austen, no one would find Charlotte’s marriage the least bit unsettling.

  • David Bamber played Collins for the BBC, in 1995. Bamber’s Collins isn’t merely dumb or silly; he’s aggressive, even slightly unhinged.

  • The idea of living with him, and of intimacy with him, is horrifying.

  • Collins isn’t quite a real person. He’s more like a villain.

  • Austen has to make Collins really terrible; and, by the same token, in order to make marriage to Collins even remotely plausible, she has to make Charlotte almost unbelievably pragmatic.

  • Charlotte, by her own reasoning, has no choice but to marry Collins; Collins, meanwhile, is so terrible that he makes you question the whole idea of being responsible in the first place.

• Austen's Proposal

  • Austen herself once received a proposal from a Collins-like man named Harris Bigg-Wither.

  • He wasn’t a catch, very plain in person—awkward, and even uncouth in manner.

  • He was, however, well-to-do; he owned several estates, and marrying him would have given Austen a family life of her own, as well as financial security not just for herself but also for her unmarried sister.

  • She accepted his proposal, and there was a celebration in the Austen house that evening. Then, the next morning, she announced that she had changed her mind.

  • Austen agreed to marry him because it made sense, and because she was the kind of person who did what was sensible. But, overnight she experienced a “revulsion of feeling.”

• Two Generations

  • There’s a sense in which, by writing about Lizzy and Charlotte, Austen was writing about two generations of her own family.

  • Charlotte’s marriage is animated by her parents’ hope but it’s made dangerous by her own experience.

  • She is taking two different stories, from two different moments in time, and placing them alongside one another, implicitly comparing the caution and constraint of an earlier generation with the individualistic freedom of a later one.

• Social Progress

  • Just as Austen herself had just enough security, just enough freedom, to reject Harris Bigg-Wither, so Lizzy can reject Collins: accepting his proposal, she can tell him, is “absolutely impossible.”

  • A few days later, when Charlotte tells Lizzy that she’s engaged to Collins, the same phrase slips out, in a moment of almost unforgivable rudeness: “Engaged to Mr. Collins! My dear Charlotte—impossible!”

  • For Charlotte, marrying Collins is the only possibility.

• D.W. Harding's Essay

  • In 1940, the critic D.W. Harding wrote an influential essay on Austen called “Regulated Hatred.”

  • Harding wanted to overturn a certain view of Austen.

  • For some readers, Austen’s novels are a kind of cathedral, within which certain ideals—vivacity, thoughtfulness, wit, affection, romance, and so on—are enshrined.

  • Harding, who had trained as both a literary critic and a psychologist, thought that this view of Austen missed what was most interesting about her.

  • To understand Austen, he thought, you had to think of her as a person living in a town, in a house, surrounded by friends and family.

  • Her novels were really for, about, and against the people she lived with everyday.

• Austen's Dissent

  • Charlotte’s marriage, more than any other episode in the novel, seems to me a coded expression of Austen’s own dissent.

  • In thinking about Charlotte, most people I know waver between acceptance and anger, between frustration and understanding.

  • Charlotte’s choice expresses some other, more surprising feelings. There’s anger, sadness, understanding, and all the rest of it. But there’s also a thirst for rebellion, a desire for risk, even a smidgen of relief, which Lizzy feels —a sense of being very lucky.

  • Charlotte’s marriage says: “Thank God I didn’t have to marry him. Thank God I had a choice, and could say no.”

  • Charlotte’s decision gives Austen a way to express everything that Lizzy and Darcy’s marriage can’t.

• Lizzy's Growth

  • Charlotte’s marriage pushes Lizzy “to rethink what she has been doing, to understand better those people who have not acted as she expected they would.”

  • Lizzy, before Charlotte’s choice, was a bit of a fantasist herself; after it, she grows more realistic.

  • Her own openness to Darcy derives, to a large degree, from her openness to Charlotte.

• Lessons from Charlotte

  • One lesson is that there are many kinds of happiness. Another, as Tave writes, is that “life is not a disorder to be ordered, a given mess on which those of tidy compulsions impose a tidiness. It is not a meaningless heap from which meaning is extracted…. Meaning is the first fact.”

  • From Charlotte, who will always live an imperfect life, Lizzy learns that imperfect things matter just as much as perfect ones.

  • Lizzy learns to trust in the sturdiness of individuals—in their ability to persist, to survive, even to thrive, through the most dramatic changes and upheavals.

• Change and Resilience

  • When Darcy proposes to Lizzy, he’s nervous, for the obvious reason that, over the past year, he’s offended her in a hundred different ways.

  • Lizzy reassures him “that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure, his present assurances.”

  • They could easily have given up—could have concluded, sensibly, that after all that had happened a future together would be impossible. It turns out, though, that people can change their minds, their circumstances, their opinions, their plans, their rules, their lives, without losing track of themselves.

  • There’s something miraculous in people—a resilience, an infiniteness—which can survive constraint, transformation, reversal, and anything else imaginable. The thread doesn’t have to be broken.

  • This never-ending pulse of personality is what gives Lizzy and Darcy the courage to change, and it’s what makes it possible, to hope for Charlotte’s happiness.

  • People are not so easily dominated by their own lives. Charlotte will always be a little apart from her circumstances. Her life will go on.