The third volume of Pride and Prejudice has frequently been regarded as not merely different from but also inferior to the previous two volumes. Marvin Mudrick sees it “diminish suddenly in intensity and orginality,”¹ and Reuben A. Brower argues that the perfect harmony achieved between the ironic dialogue and the movement toward the climactic scenes ceases when Elizabeth arrives at a new view of Darcy. Brower writes, “once we have reached the scenes in which the promise of the introduction is fulfilled, the literary design both ironic and dramatic is complete. Thereafter Pride and Prejudice is not quite the same sort of book.”² Such a view derives from a misconception of the book's literary design and its overall thematic and dramatic structure.³ The misconception also leads to adverse aesthetic judgments of Volume III. If Austen had intended to compose a novel, in which, as Tony Tanner puts it, “the most important events are the fact that a man changes his manners and a lady changes her mind,”⁴ then the literary design would have been complete by the middle of the Pemberley section. By then, these two events have occurred, and a happy reconciliation is clearly in the offing. Instead of a proposal, Chapter IV of the third volume brings Jane's letters informing Elizabeth of Lydia's elopement. The happy end is delayed for a third of the novel, not through a need on Austen's part to conform to the fashionable demand for a triple-decker novel, but because in Austen's literary design, a rapprochement between Elizabeth and Darcy would have been premature and facile. The novel has been so structured that by the end a reversal has taken place.

Such a reversal is an integral part of most of Austen's novels, but does not always take the same form. The kind discernible in Pride and Prejudice, and also in Emma, occurs when a crucial event (or series of events) in the first part of the novel is virtually repeated in the last part, with the significant difference that the reactions, emotions, or attitudes of the protagonists are the opposite of what they were previously. The reversal also entails punishment for serious error, involves suffering, and yet allows for a happy resolution.

In Pride and Prejudice the reversal is so systematic and pronounced that it can be regarded as the major shaping principle of the novel. The novel falls into two perfect halves.⁵ The first traces the chain of errors and misunderstandings that drives Elizabeth and Darcy apart and extends up to Elizabeth's first reading of Darcy's letter of explanation (Vol.II.,chap.xiii). Elizabeth's second reading (of the same letter) is the turning point, and is followed by a reversal for the characters. It has two phases: first a period of “re-cognition”⁶ and then a painful ordeal. In Austen's books error always results from wrong reasoning. Austen is not, however, a pessimistic Christian, as Marian Butler would have it,⁷ for her protagonists are capable of learning: they are not incorrigible. They learn to employ reason rightly and gain a clear sight and unimpaired judgment. With the possible exception of Mansfield Park⁸ Austen's works are definitely rationalistic. But she is a Christian rationalist.⁹ That is why acknowledgement of error is insufficient without suitable penance, and why that penance characterizes the protagonist's ordeals. The ordeal is a suffering, a testing, a way of paying and earning happiness once the lovers have been properly chastened. This process is not normally viewed as comedy, and is certainly not the “pure” comedy of the first two volumes. Perhaps this explains why the third volume jars on certain readers who sense it is different. They feel let down and, as a consequence, disparage this volume and label it melodrama. It is not. But to get a better appreciation of this volume we must see it as an indispensable part of the novel's reversal structure.

The Darcy that Elizabeth meets at Pemberley, in the first chapter of the third volume, has already completed the re-cognition phase, and is, consequently, capable of making a fresh start with Elizabeth. For the first time in the novel our hero, no longer automatically assuming he enjoys Elizabeth's esteem, is anxiously bent on courting her and on winning her approval. The great courtesy, warm hospitality, and attentions showered on Elizabeth and the Gardiners are clear evidence that Darcy has taken to heart Elizabeth's strictures regarding his presumptuous, ungentleman-like behaviour. But what is not always sufficiently heeded is the nature and extent of the change Darcy must still undergo, the need for which has sharply manifested itself in his attitude to Elizabeth. Though he started to fall in love with her after their second or third encounter, all his efforts were directed to conquering that love, which, as Elizabeth trenchantly remarked, he regarded as an unworthy passion, “against … [his] will, against … [his] reasons, even against … [his] character.”¹⁰ Stronger proof, therefore, has to be given that Darcy is indeed a changed man with a very different apprehension of the world and a different set of values. In Austen's scheme, the Lydia-Wickham elopement provides the ideal opportunity for this proof and at the same time exacts a full retribution for all Darcy's former sins of pride. The Pemberley section is thus not an end so much as a beginning, allowing Darcy to put right the errors of the past, a singular demonstration of the reversibility of error in the world of comedy.

The reversal in Elizabeth's case, though similar to Darcy's, possesses subtle differences. The first phase of re-cognition, for instance, is not over by the time Elizabeth comes to Pemberley, for even after Darcy's letter of explanation removes the substance of her ill-opinion, she is still not favourably disposed towards him.¹¹ She has not forgiven him the insolence of his address; moreover, chagrin at her own conduct and her family's as well prevents her from ever wishing to see him again. For a better appreciation of him, Elizabeth must see Pemberley, hear the housekeeper and discover a new Darcy.¹² Elizabeth is Austen's only heroine actually seen falling in love with a man she has long known and cared nothing for. Were such a radical emotional change to occur only in a brief coda, it would be as unconvincing as Marianna's change toward Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. Austen's finer artistic sense in this later novel dictated that an entire second phase be devoted to this interesting development. Love is to be quickened by suffering. Elizabeth must therefore be submitted to an ordeal, but unlike Darcy's active testing, hers is a passive trial. This is just since Darcy's actions drove them apart in the first half, while Elizabeth's emotional and mental responses and not her actions spoilt her relationship with Darcy. For the sin of a willed dislike she must be punished, and suffering instructs her into the true nature of her feelings.

This then is the rationale for a third volume and for the elopement which does double duty by serving as the device for both the hero and heroine's ordeals. Volume III, chapter iv begins the ordeals for both protagonists. Elizabeth's suffering begins when Darcy's is eased. His suffering began when he believed his intolerable pride had lost him Elizabeth and his hope is only kindled during the meetings at Pemberley and strengthened by his opportunity to serve her. She, on the other hand, can only suffer on his account when it is her turn to be placed in a situation where she believes he is lost to her. Her disclosure to him of the news of the elopement will, she fears, have this result. Yet her willingness to tell him of such a shameful family matter is a measure both of her confidence in him and of the new intimacy that has sprung up between them. The same proneness to mutual misunderstanding that characterized the entire relationship is manifested here too, but the causes have changed. Elizabeth observes Darcy standing, rapt in thought, meditating the best course to reclaim Lydia, and misinterprets his silence:

Her power was sinking; everything must sink under such a proof of family weakness, such an assurance of deepest disgrace. She could neither wonder nor condemn, but the belief of his self-conquest brought nothing consolatory to her bosom, afforded no paliation to her distress. It was on the contrary, exactly calculated to make her understand her own wishes; and never had she so honestly felt that she could love him, as now, when all love must be vain.

(pp.189-190)

It is a brilliantly graphic stroke in the ironic pattern that Darcy's silence should, as at Hunsford,¹³ be a pregnant source of misunderstanding. He, as usual, says too little, but whereas before his silence sprang from insensitive complacency and concern with family consequence, now it springs solely from consideration for Elizabeth's distress. A delicacy of obtruding himself on her thoughts at this painful juncture, and too great a humility to imagine himself of sufficient importance to her, testify not only to self-forgetfulness but also to the distance he has come since he proposed to her.

An equally significant change is observable in Elizabeth. Instead of her former indifference¹⁴ now she is concerned above all else about his feelings for her. An exchange of sensibilities has occurred: ironically, when Darcy ceases to be bothered about the degradation of such a family alliance, she is not only positive he must be entertaining such considerations, but admits the justice of such claims and thinks much less of her own as a person.

Chapter four contains echoes of previous encounters between Elizabeth and Darcy, and Elizabeth is even shown “throwing a retrospective glance over their whole relationship.” She reflects on how “full of contradictions and varieties” it has been, as she sighs “at the perverseness of those feelings which would now have promoted its continuance, and would formerly have rejoiced in its termination” (p.190).

Her ordeal imposes penance for the past feelings, and it is only after the most recent set of contradictions and varieties has satisfactorily resolved itself, that the design of the novel is complete. And this can only happen after the Lydia-Wickham elopement has been taken care of. Once we perceive how neatly that elopement fulfils the various functions of reversal we may stop complaining about its being a threadbare, hand-me-down literary device¹⁵ and laud instead the economy and resourcefulness of Austen's art. The elopement is more than a demonstration of the hero's impeccability. It subtly tests out and confirms Darcy's realization of the sovereignty of individual human worth. It is not, as Wiesenfarth argues, that the problem posed in the first part of the novel and resolved in the last third is Darcy's acceptance of the Bennet family.¹⁶ The question is not one of acceptance but of Darcy's discovering that love of the right lady knows no impediments. He who prevented the marriage of one sister on the grounds of its imprudence for Bingley, now brings about the marriage of another sister which must add disgrace to an alliance with his own family. And if this were not enough, he who was successful in frustrating Wickham's marrying Georgina for her share of the Darcy fortune (as well as out of spite at Darcy's refusal of his outrageous suit for the living), now has to undergo the humiliation of seeking out, pleading with, and bribing Wickham to become his brother-in-law. This is indeed a nemesis of reversal!

The Lydia-Wickham elopement, moreover, closes the gap between the previously diverse outlooks of the protagonists, for as we have already seen it leads to an equally drastic shift in Elizabeth's views regarding the relative importance of family and the individual. Elizabeth's acute embarrassment at her family's exhibition of itself at the Netherfield ball had, as Mary Lascelles has observed, every appearance of its being the first time she had been so sensitive,¹⁷ and the reason is clearly Elizabeth's perception of the scene through Darcy's eyes. Yet at Hunsford she had allowed herself to forget the Bennets' total want of propriety, and it was only after her second reading of Darcy's letter that she understood that Jane's disappointment had been “the work of her nearest relations” (p.144). Understanding then how materially Jane's credit and her own must suffer from their family's conduct, she had attempted to dissuade her father from permitting Lydia's trip to Brighton. But even at this stage she did not yet grasp the true nature of the dangers inherent in Lydia's impropriety. Elizabeth was still primarily concerned with ill-breeding, with breaches of decorum, with relatives for whom she had to blush, that is, with society's opinion. Thus at Pemberley, Elizabeth could revel in the good breeding of the Gardiners and “glory in every expression, every sentence of her uncle which marked his intelligence, his taste, or his good manners” (p.174).

But it takes Lydia's elopement to reveal to Elizabeth the full impropriety of her family's behaviour, and realize the causes which have made such an elopement, if not inevitable, at least a likely consequence of her family's life-style. Only then does she recognize all the implications of her family's irresponsible attitudes.¹⁸ Her strictures regarding her father, coming from a daughter so attached to Mr. Bennet as Elizabeth, are harsh indeed. As she explains to the Gardiners, Wickham need not have feared her father's intervention: “[Wickham] might imagine from his indolence and the little attention he has ever seemed to give his family, that he would do as little, and think as little, about it, as any father could do in such a matter” (p.193). She now perceives that Lydia's never having been taught to “think on serious subjects, but allowed to dispose of her time in the most idle and frivolous manner and to adopt any opinions that came in her way” (p.193), is a failure in upbringing. For Elizabeth, as for her author, the elopement is thus not merely a matter for conventional moral condemnation,¹⁹ but is to be seen within a framework of cause and effect. Frivolity and idleness are conducive to lack of principle and to reprehensible behaviour.

Austen not only exploits the device of an elopement as a vehicle for the structural and thematic elements of reversal, but has also treated it in a far more imaginative and rich manner than has usually been appreciated. The focus is never on the external action—elopement, chase, hasty wedding—but always on Elizabeth: her first learning about the elopement, her fears, conjectures and conclusions, her reactions to the various letters containing information about the events transpiring, her anxieties and regrets, and her response to the newlyweds. The essential action takes place, as it does in all the mature Austen novels “in the intimate and subtle chambers of her heroine's mind.”²⁰ And what censorious critics may have failed to notice is that Volume III, even more insistently than the previous volumes, is presented almost throughout from Elizabeth's point of view. Everything is filtered through her consciousness. The main narrative technique is not dialogue but free indirect speech, and what should be stressed is the marvelously convincing rendering of the heroine's consciousness as she lives through this most severe crisis of her life.

The sensitive reader has a vivid sense of the way in which Elizabeth's growing apprehension of the moral and social implications of her sister's conduct is made all the more painful by her belief that it must sever her forever from Darcy. She reflects that “had she known nothing of Darcy, she could have borne the dread of Lydia's infamy somewhat better. It would have spared her, she thought, one sleepless night out of two” (p.205). Elizabeth is not yielding here or in other passages temporarily to a kind of hopeless “moralizing on Lydia's disgrace,” nor is the term “infamy” evidence of the author's “inability to assimilate extra-marital sex to her unifying irony” (p.119). Elizabeth's moral judgments are not irrelevant, but as an involved and suffering person, she responds to and reflects on her family's conduct in a new and more mature manner. Her awareness of the price she is paying colors almost every thought and feeling. Instead of a happy marriage which could “teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was” (p.214), she has to live with the bleak prospect of life without Darcy, a prospect all the more dismal now that her own view of her family is so depressing. Furthermore, it is a time of regrets, of reflection on the might-have-beens and should-have-beens resulting from her own folly.

No sooner, for example, does Elizabeth learn that Lydia is to marry Wickham than she regrets having disclosed the truth to Darcy. Second thoughts tell her it can make little difference as Darcy must shrink from any such family connection, and the thoughts which follow these illuminate the nemesis which is now overtaking her.

She was humbled, she was grieved; she repented though she hardly knew of what. She became jealous of his esteem, when she could no longer hope to be benefited by it. She wanted to hear of him, when there seemed the least chance of gaining intelligence. She was convinced that she could have been happy with him; when it was no longer likely they should meet.

(p.181)

She is convinced Darcy must be feeling triumph not because she attributes to him less than noble thoughts, but because she now quarrels with herself. She has been living with the memory of “the petulance and acrimony in her manner of rejecting him and all the unjust accusations that accompanied her rejection” (p.181), and it continues to be a source of constant vexation, as we see from her later apology to Darcy for “having abused … [him] so abominably to … [his] face” (p.253). But this is not all. What Elizabeth is also repenting, even if she is not as yet fully conscious of it, is her previously fostered dislike and wilful misconstructions. Some such thoughts clearly plague her, for these are her laments when she receives her aunt's letter informing her of Darcy's role in bringing about Lydia's marriage: “Oh how heartily did she grieve over every ungracious sensation she had ever encouraged, every saucy speech she had directed towards him” (p.224). And as she puts it later to Darcy, she has realized that she never “spoke to … [him] without rather wishing to give … [him] pain than not” (p.262). The censorious Elizabeth, previously so unfair to Darcy, is now no kinder to herself, and regrets having been the playful, satirical girl enjoying herself at Darcy's expense.

The reversal in Elizabeth's situation, is re-inforced by the structual device of a second letter received, perused, and re-perused. The first letter (the one she received from Darcy at the end of the first half of the novel) was opened with the certainty that it could offer no excuse for Darcy's base conduct, but the second is torn open with the anticipation of an account of an “exertion of goodness too great to be probable” (p.242). As marked a contrast exists in her response after perusal of each letter. Even after several readings of the first Elizabeth could only begrudgingly allow him “capable of some amiable feeling” (p.141). Now on rereading, even her aunt's warm recommendations do not appear to her to do him sufficient justice for she credits him with the greatest disinterested goodness.

Insufficient attention to the narrative perspective gives rise to the notion that there is a deterioration in the quality of writing in these chapters. There has been no suspension of the “author's characteristic response of comic irony” (p.112), nor is there any sign that she “must truncate, flatten, falsify, and disapprove” (p.101). The visit of the newly-weds to Longbourn, singled out in particular for criticsm by Mudrick, is a perfect instance of the danger of confusing Austen with Elizabeth. The visit is a further turning of the screw for our heroine. The sight of the young couple and her mother conducting themselves without the slightest trace of embarrassment makes Elizabeth run out of the room. For those responsible for her unhappiness blandly to ignore the wrong they have done is unendurable. A reader should surely appreciate the naturalness of such feelings of indignation and resentment. It would hardly be credible for a person in Elizabeth's situation to have the equanimity and capacity for a distanced, objective, ironic stance. It is more psychologically convincing that she over-reacts. But it is not Austen who has suspended her irony. Austen is, for the most part silent as Mudrick himself remarks (p.112), and while the author holds virtually the same moral position towards Lydia's conduct as Elizabeth, it is Austen who remarks: “Lydia was Lydia still, untamed, unabashed, wild and fearless” (p.216). It is Austen who is making precisely the point that Mudrick labours—that Lydia is merely “behaving true to character, and that the irony lies in her powerlessness to change, in the incongruity between her conviction of vitality and lack of choice” (pp.111-12). Elizabeth's efforts to shame Lydia are, of course, fruitless, and they are ill-tempered. Mudrick is correct, she should have known better, but it is a perceptive and accurate depiction of Elizabeth that she does try. She is acting in character, for she has shown herself, when provoked, perfectly capable of resentment, acrimony, and sarcasm.

While every person acts in character, our perception of them has undergone a substantial change. Our response, for instance, to Mrs. Bennet's lamentations and subsequent raptures is very different form the ear we turned, so much earlier in the novel, to her complaints about the entail, her nerves, and Elizabeth's refusal of Mr. Collins. She is no longer an object of fun, of broad satire, as Brower would have it.²¹ We are no longer amused. Every word she now utters grates as we understand the serious implications not of a mean intelligence but of a moral vacuity, a complete incomprehension of all questions of right and wrong. She is not, for example, the least troubled that her brother may have pledged himself to assist Mr. Wickham with money:

Well … it is all very right; who should do it but her own uncle? If he had not a family of his own, I and my children must have had all his money you know … Well! I am so happy. In a short time, I shall have a daughter married. Mrs. Wickham! how well it sounds, and she was only sixteen last June.

We have been made painfully conscious of what it must be like for a sensitive individual to live at Longbourn, and to be “ambushed by an imbecility,”²² but it is an awareness that we gain primarily in this last part of the novel.

On the other hand, while identifying with Elizabeth and sharing her changed apprehension, we are by no means limited to seeing, feeling, and reacting only as she does. We are in the privileged position of enjoying the author's perspective, which is not, as Brower asserts, that of a world which is suddenly simpler than the rest of the novel “where outright judgments of good and bad or happy and unhappy are in place.”²³ It is a perspective which allows for a much more complex comprehension and discrimination than Brower notices or than Mudrick appears to require when he insists on the value of the aloof vision of the ironist. This perspective enables the reader to perceive that Elizabeth is not the playful, satirical, lively girl of the previous volumes, and it is perfectly right psychologically, thematically, and structurally that she should not be. Only after her ordeal comes to an end do her captivating wit and liveliness reemerge.

If the novel is the art of preparations, as Henry James affirmed, then Pride and Prejudice is an instance of such art. The holding off of the rapproachement of the two lovers till they have given every proof of being completely ready for each other is an integral part of Austen's design and a perennial source of satisfaction for the novel's constant readers.

The build-up to a second proposal scene, paralleling the climax of the first half of the novel but its ironic antithesis, completes the counter-movement of reversal in the second half. Elizabeth's reaction to the insolent and presumptuous interference, not of Mr. Darcy in her sister's affairs, but of his aunt in her own, paves the way to the opposite conclusion; Darcy's needing his aunt's report to summon up enough courage to speak to Elizabeth is a telling touch of irony that highlights not only his great diffidence but also his better understanding of Elizabeth. The scene of two hesitant lovers fearful that their dearest wishes may not be fulfilled replaces the earlier one where an unwarranted confidence in themselves and in their knowledge of the other had transformed a proposal into a direct and nasty collision. This summation of the chastening process has been subtly effected by a third volume without which, I submit, the novel would have been inestimably the poorer.

Notes

1. Marvin Mudrick, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968), p. 119.

2. Reuben A. Brower, “Light and Bright Sparkling: Irony and Fiction in Pride and Prejudice,” reprinted in The Fields of Light: An Experiment in Reading (New York: Oxford Press, 1968), p. 180.

3. Cf. J. Wiesenfarth, F.S.C., The Errand of Form (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1967), p. 61 and A. Walton Litz, Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 110-111.

4. Tony Tanner, Introd., Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 7.

5. Cf. E. Halliday, “Narrative Perspective in Pride and Prejudice,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 15 (1961), 68.

6. Tony Tanner, p. 26.

7. Marian Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 212.

8. Mansfield Park is perhaps the exception because three important, central characters, Henry and Mary Crawford and Maria Bertram, prove incorrigible. They show themselves to be incapable of learning even when given ample opportunity. Yet they are none of them unintelligent. Austen would thus appear to be entertaining very grave doubts in this novel as to the possibility of re-educating the vision when wrong reasoning springs from deeply ingrained false values. See my article “The Inefficacy of Lovers' Vows,” ELH, 50 (1983), 531-540.

9. Butler is correct that Austen is no rationalist as Maria Edgeworth in Belinda for Austen is sceptical about intelligence in a way Edgeworth is not. See also Alistair M. Duckworth for the view that Austen's novels are informed by the traditions of Christian rationalism. In “Prospects and Retrospects,” in Jane Austen Today, ed. Joel Weinsheimer (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1975), p. 21.

10. All quotations from the novel are from the Norton Critical Edition, ed. D. J. Gray (New York: Norton, 1966), p. 132.

11. See Vol.II., Chap. xiv.

12. The significance of Pemberley for Elizabeth's understanding of Darcy has been variously discussed. See Dorothy van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Harper & Row), pp. 107-8, Litz, p. 111, and Wiesenfarth, p. 67.

13. Pride and Prejudice, p. 126.

14. Pride and Prejudice, p. 125.

15. The critic who comes down most severely on Austen for resorting to literary “grooves prepared … by hundreds of novels of sentiment and sensibility” is Mudrick, p. 120.

16. Wiesenfarth, p. 162. Samuel Kliger, on the other hand, would have it that this section shows Elizabeth learning to take class into account. In fact, Elizabeth from the outset takes class into account, but it is never a matter of major importance to her and her attitude does not alter. This section shows Elizabeth changing her view, not about the class her family belongs to, but about her family's impropriety. See Samuel Kliger “Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in the Eighteenth Century Mode” in University of Toronto Quarterly, 16 (1945-6), 57-371.

17. Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and her Art (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), p. 162.

18. Butler, pp. 209-210. Yet while I agree with her that Elizabeth is in some respects like her father, and that we may attribute to his upbringing the fostering of her satirical disposition and consequent complacency, I see no evidence of Elizabeth's ever being in the least culpable of “irresponsible detachment” (p. 209).

19. See Mudrick, p. 120.

20. E. Halliday, p. 68.

21. Brower, p. 75.

22. Van Ghent, p. 111.

23. Brower, p. 75.