The True Villain of Pride and Prejudice (part 3)

Like father, like daughter

Dear reader, you’ve made it! You have tramped in the foothills of my disdain for Mr Bennet, and are about to reach the apex. Clear your schedule, take a deep breath, and let’s land this plane of villainy and inadequate parenting once and for all!

The apple doesn’t fall far

Everyone seems to think that Lydia Bennet, the youngest of the Bennet daughters, takes after her mother—and to some extent, they’re right. The thing is, they’re only half right. Lydia only takes after her mother insofar as their interests and general unseriousness align; however, when it comes to temperament, choices, and behaviour, Lydia Bennet is every bit her father’s daughter. Yes, that’s right, Lydia is Mr Bennet’s dark reflection—and this fact may explain just why Mr Bennet is so hard on her.

But let’s back up a second and look at the facts. Why do I say Lydia is so like her father?

Firstly, they’re both gamblers. In Mr Bennet’s case, he has quite obviously rolled the dice with his family’s future, betting on a future son who never materialises. Lydia shows the same penchant for gambling when Austen highlights to us her interest in a game called ‘lottery tickets’:

Lydia talked incessantly of lottery tickets, of the fish she had lost and the fish she had won

Later, when Lydia decides to run off with Wickham, there is a sense that things weren’t quite thought through on her side. To say the least. Lydia will have, no doubt, known what societal censure would come her way (and all her sisters, too) if Wickham didn’t actually marry her, but she took the risk anyway. Like her father, she doesn’t think at all of her family, and assumes that the best outcome will materialise for her convenience. Her ‘dear Wickham’ is too much to resist, as are the subsequent poops and giggles.

Which brings me to my next point—Lydia and Mr Bennet are both wind-up merchants. By which I mean, they both love to have a bit of fun at the expense of others, particularly when something really quite serious has taken place, and everyone has their knickers in a twist. They love to see others squirm while seeming to rise above the panic themselves, laughing their way through life’s mishaps (particularly when those mishaps are their fault in the first place). Mr Bennet shows this tendency throughout the novel, something that Austen describes as a ‘philosophic composure’. His outlook is nicely summed up by a comment he makes to Lizzy:

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours and laugh at them in our turn?

In the same way, Lydia loves to laugh, and seems to always be blind to the distress of others, particular when she is the cause. Never is this tendency more obvious than in her attitude towards her ill-advised and infamous elopement with Wickham. In a letter to her friend, Mrs Forster, she gushes:

You will laugh when you know where I am gone, and I cannot help laughing myself at your surprise tomorrow morning, as soon as I am missed […] You need not send them word at Longbourn of my going, if you do not like it, for it will make the surprise the greater, when I write to them, and sign my name Lydia Wickham. What a good joke it will be!

Where might Lydia have learned this cavalier attitude to serious events? Who has she observed, over the years, laughing at every event that has befallen her family? Who loves to make jokes at the expense of others? It’s not her mother, that’s for sure. It’s not entirely clear that Mrs Bennet really has a sense of humour—but Mr Bennet does, and he loves to laugh and laugh, thoughtlessly, at the most inappropriate moments, just like his daughter.

Finally, both Mr Bennet and Lydia are imprudent. They are imprudent with their behaviour, imprudent with their future planning and, most importantly, both make imprudent matches. While Mr Bennet’s marriage to Miss Gardiner wasn’t a scandal in the way that Lydia’s elopement with Wickham was, he was still ‘marrying down’ by partnering with this pretty middle class girl—and ends up in an extremely unequal partnership with a woman who was simply not suited for life within the upper classes, lacking as she did the manners and the understanding. More on this later.

Fifth daughter syndrome

So, perhaps this dark resemblance is to blame for Mr Bennet’s complete and utter contempt for his youngest daughter. And this is really where we see Mr Bennet at his villainous worst: his treatment of Lydia is so beyond the pale, I found myself having to re-read certain passages to make sure I had understood properly his approach to raising this young woman. Why had I missed this terrible contempt when watching adaptations?

I think the fact that Lydia is unlikeable doesn’t help. She is irritating in her shallowness. She can be counted on to make the wrong call about people—every single time. Austen has even given her a distinctively annoying voice in the text, all exclamation marks and arrogance (captured particularly well, I must say, by Julia Sawalha’s portrayal), and her misguided smugness at being the first to marry is infuriatingly naive and silly. We are frustrated with her for her blindness, her lack of wisdom, and her air-headed ways. But we don’t always question why she is the way she is, and to ask ourselves whether it is really her fault—or whether it is even surprising.

There are a few things to remember about Lydia before you go on making judgements about her. She is very young at the start of the novel, only just fifteen years old, but she is already out in society—likely because her parents have decided she is no longer worth attempting to educate. So, given that young women who were ‘out’ in society were expected to marry soon, from the start of the novel we have to expect that Lydia will be on the lookout for a husband. How else is she to understand why she’s already out at such a young age? She must marry!

Lydia is also the youngest child in her family. Specifically, the youngest daughter. The fifth daughter. When you’re desperate for a son, one daughter is fine. Two or three daughters is a mild disappointment. Four daughters is a concern. Five daughters? Well, that’s a disaster—particularly as it appears that Mr and Mrs Bennet had already begun giving up hope by the time Lydia arrived on the scene. As Austen explains:

Five daughters successively entered the world, but yet the son was to come; and Mrs Bennet, for many years after Lydia’s birth, had been certain that he would. This even had a last been despaired of, but it was then too late to be saving.

So, Lydia’s life is marked by the disappointment that she is not a son—a fact that she cannot do anything to ameliorate.

Now, it just so happens that her mother adores her, perhaps because they are so simpatico in their interests, and it is perhaps Mrs Bennet’s indulgence that has led to Lydia’s outsized confidence. However, I think it far more likely that the driving force behind Lydia’s actions in the novel is a desire to prove herself, to elevate herself above her sisters—particularly Lizzy and Jane. After all, Wickham was originally Lizzy’s favourite, which could explain part of his particular appeal to a girl who flits from officer to officer as though they were interchangeable. And then when she famously moves to take Jane’s place at the table she says:

“Ah! Jane, I take your place now, and you must go lower, because I am a married woman.”

And, openly at that table, Lydia declares, in front of her whole family:

“I am sure my sisters must all envy me.”

Sure, she might be referring to Mary and Kitty as much as Lizzy and Jane; however, given that the expectation was that the eldest sisters would marry first, this barb is likely to be felt far more sharply by the eldest than the younger. They are far more exposed by the premature marriage of their teenage sister than the others.

Why might Lydia be in such a hurry to elevate herself above her sisters, then? Surely she has observed how Mr Bennet favours Lizzy and Jane above the others. Could it be that her father’s obvious disdain for her, and his obvious disappointment that his youngest is not of the male persuasion, has driven Lydia to prove herself just as worthy as the eldest girls? To prove to the old man, the man who is always putting her down and dismissing her as ‘silly and ignorant’, that she has something to offer, too?

Stranger things have happened.

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside

When it comes to ‘marrying down’, Lydia Bennet Did It Best. Where Mr Bennet merely married a woman of a slightly lower class who was ill prepared for gentry-life, risking some embarrassment and ostracism, Lydia Bennet went full throttle into a relationship with a lying, womanising, penniless loser—and threatened to take her entire family down with her. I mean, when it comes to the bad marriage Grand Prix, she screamed over the finish line to that champagne popping win. 10/10, no notes.

It is this terrible choice, this awful misjudgement, that tends to harvest a lot of hate for Lydia, and, as I mentioned previously, it’s not hard to see why. It is infuriating how she cannot see how stupid she’s been, and how she’s jeopardised not only her future, but all of her sisters’ futures too. But does she deserve this level of censure?

I’ve already laid out for you the way that Lydia and her sisters have been neglected by their parents by not being given a proper education. I say ‘their parents’, but it is really Mr Bennet who is ultimately to blame—being that he was born into the upper classes, and knew the rules of the whole gentrified game. I have also pointed out Mr Bennet’s personal laziness, retiring as he always inevitably does to his library, dismissing his daughters as though they were beneath his notice (Lizzy and Jane excepted). However, while these mistakes are grievous, they are not the worst. His worst moment comes when casually making a decision which will alter the course of the lives of all of his entire family forever—that is, whether to allow Lydia to go to Brighton with Mrs Forster.

Lydia has already talked out Mrs Forster more than enough to raise an eyebrow among her family members. When describing an afternoon with the Colonel and his wife, Lydia gushes to Lizzy and Jane about how they ‘dressed up Chamberlayne [one of the officers] in women’s clothes, on purpose to pass for a lady’ in order to trick the other men so that ‘they would not know him in the least’—an activity which pretty much sums up Lydia’s attitude to the preservation of social norms and customs, or any sense of propriety. Her relationship with Mrs Forster is clearly one best described as ‘enabling’, or, to put it more frankly, ‘partners in crime’. Is it possible that these stories never reached Mr Bennet’s ears, or that he hadn’t clocked the kind of people his daughter was mixing with? Perhaps. However, when Lizzy entreats her father to restrain Lydia from trotting off to the seaside, Austen tells us that she explained:

‘…the little advantage she could derive from the friendship of such a woman as Mrs Forster, and the probability of her being yet more imprudent with such a companion at Brighton, where temptations must be greater than at home.’

Of course, this wise advice falls on deaf ears. Rather than listening to Lizzy’s extremely sensible points and being concerned about his youngest, wildest daughter being let loose in a camp of soldiers, miles away from home, in the company of another girl who has already shown herself to be a bit suss, Mr Bennet goes in another direction. In response to Lizzy, he says:

‘Lydia will never be easy till she has exposed herself in some public place or other, and we can never expect her to do it with so little expense or inconvenience to her family as under present circumstances.’

And then again, after Lizzy all but begs him to reconsider, explaining the dire consequences for herself and the other girls if Lydia really does ‘expose herself’, he responds:

‘We shall have no peace at Longbourn if Lydia does not go to Brighton […] At Brighton she will be of less importance even as a common flirt than she has been here. The officers will find women better worth their notice. Let us hope, therefore, that her being there may teach her her own insignificance.’

There’s actually a fair amount in these two quotes that might shock a reader, given what does end up happening—but I have highlighted two phrases for a reason, as they betray the attitude which lies beneath Mr Bennet’s decision making. The reason he allows Lydia to go to Brighton is for ease, and for peace. He says ‘we’ in the second quote, but given how aereated Lizzy is already getting in that scene at the prospect of Lydia’s trip, and how upset Kitty is at being left out of the invitation, we can assume Mr Bennet really means ‘me’. He wants peace. He wants an easy life.

It is as if he is viewing this trip as a ‘teachable moment’, one where he doesn’t need to lift a finger, but which will somehow, magically, reform his daughter. Why break the habit of a lifetime and start parenting now when the town of Brighton is apparently able to step in and do the job for you? The truly scary thing, though, are the lessons that Mr Bennet expects his daughter to benefit from in Brighton—that is, to be brought into an understanding of her own insignificance, and, worse still, to be allowed to ‘expose herself’. What on earth does that mean?

I suspect Mr Bennet is using the term in a similar way to Lizzy when she dwells upon the embarrassing behaviour of her family at the Netherfield ball earlier in the novel and worries that their actions might have jeopardised Jane’s chances with Bingley:

To Elizabeth it appeared, that had her family made an agreement to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, […] and happy did she think it for Bingley and her sister that some of the exhibition had escaped his notice, and that his feelings were not of a sort to be much distressed by the folly which he must have witnessed.

So, I suppose what Mr Bennet is hoping for is a ‘humbling’ of sorts—that the spirited, wild, confident Lydia might come back from Brighton, cowed and muted, ready to take a sensible, bookish husband and take up knitting or something. He believes this will happen due to the fact that Lydia has no money—she is ‘luckily too poor to be an object of prey to any body’—but he fails to realise the basic fact that Lydia might not need to become ‘prey’ in order to get into trouble.

Exposure

Perhaps it really is that Mr Bennet merely means Lydia to be humiliated in Brighton after being outshone by other young women; however, he must realise that he is exposing Lydia to more than just embarrassment and disappointment. He doesn’t consider the possibility that Lydia might just stride straight into the eye of the tornado herself just, y’know, for the yuks. Or because she meets a hot guy. Or both. And if she did meet a guy, as inevitably she does, Mr Bennet must have understood what the consequences might be, how grave and how intractable.

During this period, there were really only a few ways that ‘fallen women’ (i.e. young women whose sexual virtue had come into question) would have been dealt with. Assuming the man she had been connected with had refused to marry her, her parents could take her back into the family home, but, in doing so, they would inevitably take a big reputation hit, harming the marriage prospects of any other young women within the household. Alternatively, they could send her away to a distant relation, that crazy old aunt who raises snakes or that musty great uncle who always has Werthers Originals in his linty old pocketw, in the hopes that everyone would just forget about her, feigning temporary deafness whenever she is mentioned and carefully tipexing her name from any family trees etc, and she could just crack on with the depressing business of being an eternal spinster. Or, if neither of these charming options appealed to the family or the girl in question, she could always go with the wild card option: she could ‘come upon the town’.

This option is mentioned by Austen when she satirises the reaction of the townsfolk within Meryton to Lydia’s interesting life choices:

The good news spread quickly through the house, and with proportionate speed through the neighbourhood. […] To be sure, it would have been more for the advantage of conversation had Miss Lydia Bennet come upon the town; or, as the happiest alternative, been secluded from the world, in some distant farmhouse.

Why do the gossips of Meryton suppose that Lydia’s coming upon the town would be ‘more for the advantage of conversation’? Well, to ‘come upon the town’ was a euphemism for prostitution—and in the lesser-known Gossips’ Hierarchy of Needs, a fifteen-year-old neighbour being forced to go on the game is, depressingly, pretty much as good as it gets.

Given that Mr Bennet is so implacably angry with Lydia after her Great Wickham Adventure, stating that he would not encourage ‘the impudence of '[Lydia and Wickham] by receiving them at Longbourn’, it is unlikely he would have taken her back home again had Wickham persisted in refusing to marry her. Furthermore, it’s not clear that the Bennet’s had any relations of any use to them—the Gardiners excepted—and is uncertain whether they’d have anywhere to send Lydia. Nor is it clear that Lydia would be docile enough to agree to a respectable, quiet life with a relation, and likely never marry or have any future relationships with men, officers or otherwise. We also know that Mr Bennet didn’t have the means to pay Mr Wickham to marry Lydia, and that the deed had to be done by a conveniently love-struck Mr Darcy, so what path would Lydia have most likely taken?

A moment of clarity?

Fortunately, Lydia sidesteps her worst case scenario, and is able to enter safely into a marriage instead. The problem is, she has ended up married to an awful, awful man. Like, he really is awful. Lovely Adrian Lukis makes Wickham seem sort of charming and pleasantly coiffed with his neat little mutton chops, but the real Wickham is a rotten old piece of work. In a sad passage towards the end of the novel, Lizzy reflects:

‘But how little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue, she could easily conjecture.’

So it is with Lydia. Just like her father, she has ended up in a painful and destitute marriage simply because her passions led her that way. With no education, no refinement, no positive attention from her father, is it any wonder this happened? And with her mother’s anxieties that her daughters should be married ASAP ringing in her ears, and understanding that her father would not lift a finger to address their financial worries obvious to everyone, don’t her misguided actions make complete sense? Aren’t they truly, authentically, the actions of a fifteen-year-old girl?

To give Mr Bennet his due, when discussing his failed excursion into London to bring back Lydia with Lizzy, he does appear to have a moment of clarity:

‘Who should suffer but myself? It has been my own doing, and I ought to feel it. […] No, Lizzy, let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame. I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression.’

But then, true to form, he quips:

‘It will pass away soon enough.’

And that’s the end of that. It is this scene, in particular, which makes me feel rather sad, as it reminds me of the Parable of the Sower. Mr Bennet appear to be like the seed that falls on the path, where the birds quickly flock and peck the seed away. The path was so hard, there was no chance that this seed, this good seed, would germinate, and the birds were lying in wait to gobble up any opportunity for something to flourish. When explaining the parable to his followers, Jesus tells them:

When anyone hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in their heart. This is the seed sown along the path.

At this point, Mr Bennet has spent too many hours, too many days and months and years, retiring to his library rather than caring for his family, that he has become so hard hearted as to be willing to expose his youngest daughter to a life of infamy and prostitution. What started as sarcastic fun and put-downs towards his wife and daughters has become something truly, exceedingly dark. He has an inkling that he needs to repent, to turn away from his current treatment of his family, but the hardness of his own heart, and the birds of bitterness and pride that have roosted within him for so long, have made it impossible for him to change.

And, sadly for him, he is too far gone to care.

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!