Pride and Prejudice Charlotte Lucas views on marriage

Eventually, George was able to become what was known as 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. With all of that combined, 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.

The Austens struggled; they weren’t rich. But they did live 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. In the best of all possible worlds, she and Collins might build a life like the Austens’. That possibility isn’t something that, in good conscience, Charlotte could set aside. 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.”

If Mr. Collins were like George Austen, of course, no one would find Charlotte’s marriage the least bit unsettling. Unfortunately, he’s heart-stoppingly awful. My favorite televisual Collins is David Bamber, who played him for the BBC, in 1995. Bamber’s Collins isn’t merely dumb or silly; he’s aggressive, even slightly unhinged, the Cujo of suitors, a mentally shambling matrimonial zombie. (“Almost as soon as I entered the house,” he tells Lizzy , “I singled you out as the companion of my future life.”) The idea of living with him, and of intimacy with him, is horrifying.

Collins, you might feel, isn’t quite a real person. He’s more like a villain: so awful that he makes you wonder whether Charlotte’s sensible, intelligent plan might be a mistake. In an odd way, Collins’s awfulness and Charlotte’s pragmatism take the measure of one another: in order to make Charlotte’s pragmatism feel problematic, 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. But the result, at any rate, is an almost perfect puzzle for readers. 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. Maybe, you think, Charlotte should toss everything out. Do something crazy. Decide, in a Dostoyevskian grand gesture, that it would be better to be alone than to be with him.

Austen herself once received a proposal—her only proposal, in fact—from a Collins-like man. His name was Harris Bigg-Wither, and she had known him since childhood. He wasn’t a catch. (Caroline Austen, another of Jane’s nieces, recalled him this way: “Very plain in person—awkward, and even uncouth in manner—nothing but his size to recommend him—he was a fine big man—but one need not look about for secret reasons to account for a young lady’s not loving him.”) 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, I imagine, agreed to marry him because it made sense, and because she was the kind of person who did what was sensible. But, as Fanny Lefroy, one of her nieces, wrote, overnight she experienced a “revulsion of feeling.” By and large, this has been seen as a wise decision, rather than a disaster. (“We would naturally rather have ‘Mansfield Park’ and ‘Emma,’” the Austen biographer Claire Tomalin writes, a little venomously, “than the Bigg-Wither baby Jane Austen might have given the world.”) All this happened in early December, 1802, a few weeks before Jane turned twenty-seven—Charlotte’s age.

Thinking about George and Cassandra, Charlotte and Collins, and Jane and Harris, I’ve often been struck by the way their stories overlap. 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. Family history, I find, is an interesting lens through which to think about the marriages in “Pride and Prejudice.” I come from an immigrant family, and, when I contemplate its history, I often think about how lucky we’ve all been. My parents and grandparents came, pretty much, from nothing, but were blessed with intelligence and character, and favored, on an unknowably vast number of occasions, by chance. If things had been slightly different, who knows where we might’ve ended up?

I’m the beneficiary of all their good fortune; I’ve had to make fewer compromises and accept fewer hard realities than my parents or grandparents. Perhaps Austen had similar thoughts and, in writing Charlotte and Collins, tried to correct for the sample bias created by her parents’ luck and success. 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.” But that impossibility, we know, is just a matter of chance—just a matter of where you happen to be located along the path of social progress. 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!” It’s now a cruel thing to say. For Charlotte, marrying Collins is the only possibility. In fact, it’s not marrying Collins that’s impossible.

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. To them, Austen seems like a philosopher, a romantic rationalist; you go to her books when you want to be reminded of what’s great and good. 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, he argued, were really for, about, and against the people she lived with everyday. How did Austen feel about the people around her? She loved her family and friends, and “had a deep need of their affection and a genuine respect for the ordered, decent civilisation that they upheld.” But, at the same time, she “was sensitive to their crudenesses and complacencies, and knew that her real existence depended on resisting many of the values they implied.” She wanted to express her resistance, to declare her spiritual, if not practical, independence. She needed to share her interior life, her deep convictions and feelings. What she needed was a way to do this without transgressing the bounds of decorum, of propriety, of good taste, of sound judgment, fairness, and equanimity. “The novels,” Harding wrote,

How does Charlotte view of marriage differ from Elizabeth?

Why does Charlotte Lucas choose to marry?

Why does Charlotte believe that Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance?

What does Charlotte Lucas represent?