Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen | Jean Ferguson Carr (essay date 1991)
Jean Ferguson Carr (essay date 1991)
SOURCE: Carr, Jean Ferguson. “The Polemics of Incomprehension: Mother and Daughter in Pride and Prejudice.” In Tradition and the Talents of Women, edited by Florence Howe, pp. 68-86. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
[In the following essay, Carr analyzes the role of the mother in Pride and Prejudice, focusing on Mrs. Bennet's exclusion from the social world.]
She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper.
—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Stupidity (incomprehension) in the novel is always polemical: it interacts dialogically with an intelligence (a lofty pseudo intelligence) with which it polemicizes and whose mask it tears away … at its heart always lies a polemical failure to understand someone else's discourse, someone else's pathos-charged lie that has appropriated the world...
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