The True Villain of Pride and Prejudice (part 1)

Lads: whatever you do, don't be this guy

To kick off my series in Jane Austen, I am being a ginormous normie fan and going with Pride and Prejudice—partly because it is my favourite, and partly because it’s the one I re-read most recently. And watched the 1995 BBC adaptation. And watched the 2005 adaptation. And dwelt on how much more aggressively accurate the BBC version was, while noting how beautiful the 2005 film is (although considerably less accurate, and containing some serious misinterpretations of some of the characters. But I digress). If you’re new to Austen and haven’t time to read to the book, I recommend watching both adaptations—the BBC version will give you the full plot with plenty of detail, and the 2005 film will add some colour and some gorgeous locations into the mix.

However, if you can set aside some time to read the book, do. This novel is wildly popular for a reason, and is usually the first classic that readers embark on. As it happens, when I was 12 years old, it was mine.

During my latest re-read, I had in mind a lot of different topics to write about. I thought my imagination would be captured by the sexual politics of the time, or the gender relations, or the struggles of women against the ultimate regency bogeyman: male primogeniture. And it was—but oddly, I found myself fixated on one thing, and it wasn’t what I expected. It was one character, really.

I just couldn’t stop thinking about Mr Bennet.

Mistaken identities

The funny thing about this guy is that he is extremely hard to pin down. He’s a slippery little fish. The way he is presented in the TV and film adaptations is fascinating, and seems to imply that other readers have had similar problems deciding who the father of the Bennet girls really is.

Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation is frustratingly sentimental. The film presents Mr B as a slightly crotchety, long-suffering grandpa, who gets all misty-eyed when he hears of his daughter’s impending nuptials, and gazes at his completely bonkers wife with gentle humour and a twinkle in his Father-Christmas-like-eyes.

It’s a lovely portrayal. But is it canonical? Is it heck.

The BBC version is a little more accurate, keeping strictly to the dialogue found in the source text (you’ll find barely a line of his speech missed out); however, while the dialogue is there, the showrunners have decided to dodge Austen’s own descriptions of Mr B’s character in their portrayal. Rather, to make the old man more palatable, they have presented him as a kind of loveable old university academic type, with leather patches on his elbows and wire rimmed glasses perched on his nose, casually quipping and bringing levity to every situation—loved by all, and sort of cool in an old-man-with-mutton-chops sort of way.

In both instances, you are inclined to come away really, really liking this guy. You think to yourself, as you watch him have a bit of a laugh when everyone is falling apart, I’d like to be like that guy. He’s having fun. He’s down to earth. He’s got it all figured out.

Funnily enough, on the strength of BBC’s Benjamin Whitrow’s skillful portrayal, Mr Bennet was my father’s favourite character. I think he even imagined himself a little like old Mr B, with his daughters, his books, and his dry sense of humour. I don’t blame him—BBC Mr B has a first class ticket on the banterbus. But let me tell you, my lovely Dad, full of a strong sense of duty, protectiveness, hard work, and love for his family, is nothing whatsoever like Jane Austen’s Mr Bennet. In fact, I would venture to say that these two men are absolute polar opposites, and I’d be insulted if anyone dared compare my father to that guy.

Will the real Mr Bennet please stand up?

So, if Mr Bennet is not like either of these two popular adaptations, who on earth is he?

While neither adaptation is strictly accurate, there are grains of truth to each. Mr Bennet really does adore Lizzie in particular. He really does have some great lines, and is certainly the wittiest character in the novel. He is also often the calm one in the centre of all the drama—but perhaps not as consistently as the BBC adaptation would have us believe, and not as benevolently as the 2005 adaptation imagines. No, the Mr Bennet you’ll find in the pages of Pride and Prejudice is, shall we say, seasoned differently. When you read Austen’s descriptions of his character, his lines just ‘hit different’.

When reading the novel and thinking about Mr Bennet, the following David Foster Wallace quote about irony came to mind:

“Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.”

While this quote is actually about postmodernism, I actually think is encapsulates Mr B’s spirit exactly. Mr B is a man who, in not wanting to face up to his own mistakes and deficiencies or repent of sins that are staring him in the face, has created a protective fortress of cynicism around himself—and, over the years, that fortress appears to have become an impenetrable prison in which he is serving a life sentence. No one can get in, and Mr B is no longer able to get out by his own efforts. He is locked in.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. If you’ve only seen these adaptations, or only read the book once when you were 12 years old, you may not remember these ‘mistakes and deficiencies’—after all, is having a ruddy good laugh a crime? Who wouldn’t need a sense of humour if they were married to Mrs Bennet? To figure out why Mr B is the way he is, and why he deserves every scrap of criticism coming his way, we need to take a look at his origin story.

Mr Bennet’s origin story

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Bennet family is woefully poor. Mrs Bennet’s desperation to get her daughters married off, her regular exclamations about their doom once Mr Bennet passes away, and Lady Catherine and Miss Bingley’s comments about their lack of education and ‘accomplishments’ all seem to point in that direction. But this is not really the case.

The Bennets are actually members of the landed gentry, placing them firmly among the upper class. When Lizzie, on being cross-examined by Lady Catherine about her suitability as a match for her nephew, retorts that she is “the daughter of a gentleman” and insists that she and Mr Darcy are on equal footing, she is absolutely correct. No lies detected. Her father owns Longbourn and his family are entitled to the sum that the estate brings in, totalling £2,000 per year. This is in comparison to Mr Bingley who merely rents Netherfield (“Netherfield is let at last!”)—although, having inherited a large fortune, he does intend to buy, thereby elevating his social status. Where Bingley ‘marries up’ when he snags Jane (her poor fortune aside), Mr Bennet most certainly ‘married down’ when he got with Mrs Bennet—more on this shortly.

The problem lies in something called an ‘entail’, a bit of legal skullduggery that has landed Mr B and his family in hot water (a good article on this concept can be found here). Basically, if an estate is ‘entailed’, the way it is passed down to subsequent generations as inheritance is controlled by strict rules. Usually, the reasons families introduced such a legal measure was to secure the estate against any poor decision making on the part of their younger members—say, for instance, a son with a gambling problem. Often, as in the case of the Bennets, the entail would be a means of bypassing the female members of the family in favour of the males, in large part down to good ol’ sexism. The late 1800s were not a time of egalitarian poops and giggles, and the idea of a woman managing an estate judiciously and well would not often have occurred to the gentleman landowners of the day (Lady Catherine’s family being a notable exception).

So it is with the Bennets. And who made the decision to put this entail in place? Why, none other than Mr Bennet!

Now, to be fair on Mr B, there’s no reason to believe the entail was put in place due to sexism, his regular comments about his ‘silly’ daighters aside. Unfortunately, though, Mr B’s reason for allowing such a measure still doesn’t paint him in a great light. One of the most damning adjectives used to describe characters in the novel is ‘imprudent’—it is applied to Mr Wickham when his caddery and gamestering comes to light, and to Lydia when her crazy Gretna Green scheme is uncovered—and Mr Bennet’s embrace of the entail appears to be entirely down to an ‘imprudence’ of his own.

You see, one day, a young Mr B met a girl called Miss Gardiner, and he went wild for her. Disregarding the fact that he was a gentleman and she a member of the lowly middle classes (her father was an attorney, and not a landowner), he rushed to marry her. Why? Well, in part two of the novel, Austen tells us that:

“…captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humour, which youth and beauty generally give, [Mr Bennet] had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind, had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her.”

Basically, she was FOINE. She was a 10. She was a regulation hottie. But that hot young thing turned into the hot mess that is Mrs Bennet, and the marriage of the two became a mistake that Mr B would live to regret—but not just because of her ‘weak understanding’ and ‘illiberal mind’.

The thing is, what likely happened was, on seeing his son making an ‘imprudent’ match, Mr B’s father looked on and thought ‘NOPE’, and wanted to protect Longbourn from being mismanaged. So, when a young Mr B came knocking asking for his father to cough up the cash for a wedding between himself and the lovely Miss Gardiner—after all, gentlemen’s sons were dependent on their fathers for their fortunes, and relied on an allowance to get by—old Mr B was able to get that entail all firmed up. Not only did the entail mean that only sons could inherit, but it turned young Mr Bennet into a ‘tenant for life’, meaning that, while he was entitled to the proceeds of the estate (the 2 bags per year), he wasn’t technically the ‘owner’, unless he had a son and they agreed, together, to ‘cut off the entail’ (or, if the son came of age after Mr B’s death, he could simply do the job himself, thereby securing the estate in the immediate family).

In his hurry to marry his 10, Mr Bennet must have figured his odds of cutting off the entail were pretty good. 50%, to be exact. As stated in the novel:

“When first Mr Bennet had married, economy was held to be perfectly useless; for, of course, they were to have a son. This son was to join in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow and younger children would by that means be provided for.”

In short, Mr Bennet made sweet, sweet hay while the sun was shining, not bothering with little things like savings or prudence—how square would that be? So, imagine his surprise when, after years of getting jiggy, he and Mrs Bennet produced daughter, after daughter, after daughter. Egg on your face, amirite?

Regrets, I have a few

As the years rolled by, and new daughters kepts popping out to say ‘hello’, and as Mrs Bennet’s looks started to fade and her true nature sprang forth like a tiresome jack-in-a-box, Mr Bennet appears to have become a little cynical. The decisions of his youth are aging like a bottle of semi-skimmed in the garden in July, and he knows it. We are told that Mr Bennet ‘had often wished […] that, instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum, for the better provision of his children, and of his wife’—unfortunately, ‘wishes’ don’t put dinner on the table, or deposit any fat stacks into the bank. It probably didn’t help that his wife turned out to be a big spender, with ‘no turn for economy’, a fact that is obvious whenever she starts talking about wedding clothes or throwing dinner parties and celebrations.

It is also interesting to note that Mr Bennet hasn’t bothered to secure any formal education for his daughters. This fact is brought to light, rather bluntly, by Lady Catherine de Bourgh during her dinnertime interrogation of Lizzie during her visit to Rosings with the Collinses:

“Has your governess left you?”

“We never had any governess.”

“No governess! How was that possible? Five daughters brought up at home without a governess!—I never heard of such a thing. Your mother must have been quite a slave to your education […] Without a governess you must have been neglected.”

As vicious and snobby as Lady C undoubtedly is, she has a point here. Lizzie dutifully sticks up for her parent’s choices, insisting that they had access to ‘masters’ as necessary, and that ‘such of us as wished to learn, never wanted the means’. The point she very carefully misses out, of course, is that not all the sisters did wish to learn—see: Kitty and Lydia. Furthermore, their mother was not in any position to educate them herself, being a woman of ‘weak understanding’, and their father, while perfectly capable, appears to have preferred to have stayed holed up in his study, occasionally popping out to make derisive comments about his ‘silly and ignorant’ daughters and have a laugh at their expense. That Lizzie and Jane both turn out to be sensible intelligent girls is entirely the product of their own desire to learn, and no credit can be given to either parent. But given his class status and relative intelligence, blame must be laid at Mr Bennet’s door in particular—Lady C’s charge of neglect is pretty much spot on.

The Sluggard

However, while Mr Bennet has the sense to regret his foolish decisions when it came ot preparing his daughters for their futures both financial and otherwise, that regret does not lead him to take any action. Rather, he prefers to stand aloof, looking on and laughing at his family’s misfortunes and shortcomings as if they were nothing at all to do with him. In a particularly damning chapter where Elizabeth considers her father’s poor life choices, she reflects:

“To [Mr Bennet’s] wife he was very little indebted, than as her ignorane and folly contributed to his amusement […] the continual breach of conjugal obligation and decorum which, in exposing his wife to the contempt of her own children, was so highly reprehensible.”

Ouch. Instead of taking responsibility for the family he has created, and honouring the wife he chose (in spite of her myriad faults), he has decided merely to endlessly laugh at them all, finding enjoyment in the deficiencies and shortcomings that he is at least partially complicit in creating, fostering, or encouraging. As DFW says of the ironist, he is the prisoner who has found a way to love his cage.

In many ways, Mr Bennet, with all his debts, regrets, and cocky little quips, is like the Proverbial sluggard. When it comes to his finances and the protection of his family:

The sluggard does not plow in the autumn; he will seek at harvest and have nothing (Proverbs 20:4)

I passed by the field of a sluggard, by the vineyard of a man lacking sense, and behold, it was all overgrown with thorns….I looked and received instruction. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man (Proverbs 24:30-34)

And when it comes to his attitude, where he sits in judgement, laughing at those around him and taking no responsibility:

Do you see a man who is wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him….The sluggard is wiser in his own eyes than seven men who can answer sensibly (Proverbs 26:12, 16)

Sadly for Mr Bennet, the fun does, eventually, stop. In the final part of the novel, we see Mr Bennet forced to face some painful home truths—and we see his true colours, in all their hideousness.

To be continued…

Feeling generous?

If you are a-lookin’ at this post and a-likin’ this post, would you consider purchasing me a cheeky cappuccino? No pressure whatsoever—just remember that you would be kindly fuelling a very sleep-deprived new mum of a tiny mercurial infant!