Elizabeth’s lively, outspoken personality shocks and surprises many of the characters around her. She is, of course, accused of being an ‘obstinate, headstrong girl!’ by Lady Catherine de Bourgh, after her Ladyship had already observed that she ‘gives her opinion very decidedly’ for such a young lady. In the 1995 BBC TV series, Lady Catherine seems to be shocked every time Elizabeth utters a syllable.
By contrast, Mr Darcy’s admiration and love for Elizabeth is ignited by her wonderfully independent mind and spirit. We might take such a trait to be obviously attractive, but if you read the extract we posted from Fordyce’s Sermons, you’ll have seen that this wasn’t considered the case at the time.
Rousseau's 'Emile or On Education'
Fordyce’s widely read Sermons for Young Women recommended that women avoid being witty around their husbands, for fear of scaring them away to the local tavern. There, they would drink away the sorrows suffered at the hands of their terrifying spouses. His work was informed by the hugely influential Emile (1762), a treatise on education by the Romantic philosopher Jean-jacques Rousseau. Here is Rousseau’s view on the role of women and how they should conduct themselves:
Woman was made specially to please man; if the latter must please her in turn, it is less a direct necessity; his merit consists in his strength, he pleases by that fact alone. This is not the law of love I grant; but it is the law of nature, which is antecedent even to love. If woman is formed to please and live in subjection, she must render herself agreeable to man instead of provoking his wrath; her strength lies in her charms.
If all of this has you reaching for a bucket, then consider Rousseau’s warning:
Women do wrong to complain of the inequality of man-made laws; this inequality is not of man’s making, or at any rate it is not the result of mere prejudice, but of reason.
You are just being unreasonable!
As is obvious from the book, Darcy, who was a very powerful man from a traditional, established family, was being quite unconventional in choosing an outspoken wife like Elizabeth. Indeed, Mary Russel Mitford, a novelist writing in 1814, even went so far as to suggest that Darcy should have married Jane! Elizabeth, she wrote, suffering from an ‘entire want of taste’ was only fit for Wickham!
This is what our poor Lizzy was up against.
