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 and aspires to conceptualize it, a polemical failure to understand generally accepted, canonized, inveterately false languages with their lofty labels for things and events.

—Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”

My first epigraph depicts the fictional mother, Mrs. Bennet in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), who is identified by her exclusion from the realms of sense and power, and is contained within her comic role.¹ As such, she stands in uneasy relationship to her daughter, Elizabeth, who both shares her mother's exclusion and seeks to dissociate herself from her devalued position by being knowing and witty where her mother is merely foolish.

My second epigraph, from Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination, raises questions about the social functions and effects of what is perceived as knowing discourse and what is perceived as meaningless babble.² What is usually identified as intelligence is the force that constructs the social order, creates canons, names names, and decides what is acceptable. It is central, focal, organizing. This “authoritative word,” what Bakhtin terms “the word of the fathers,” “permits no play with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no spontaneously creative stylizing variants on it. … One cannot divide it up—agree with one part, accept but not completely another part, reject utterly a third part” (pp. 342-43). Stupidity appears as a weakness that has no place in this proper order, that does the wrong thing and uses the wrong words, is unacceptable or embarrassing. Judged by the unity of the father's word, it seems incoherent or unproductive. Yet such “stupidity (incomprehension) in the novel is always polemical” (p. 403), interacting dialogically with authoritative discourse to disrupt its proper names and categories.

Incomprehension exposes the father's words to play, to jokes. The prototypical literary character who deploys such incomprehension is the fool, whose nonsense reveals gaps in the seamless authority of the father's word, for “by his very uncomprehending presence he makes strange the world of social conventionality” (p. 404). Yet as Freud argues in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, the naïve's “effect” depends on our conviction that he is unaware of (in Freud's terms, “it is not present in him” or he “does not possess”) the inhibitions that govern most social discourse, or else he will be judged “not naïve but impudent.” If we are not so convinced, “we do not laugh at him but are indignant at him.”³ The fool is a professional who plays the part of a naïve. His power is instrumental, defined not in terms of what he can “possess” for himself but by the effect he has on those in power. Fools exemplify what Freud calls a “misleading [misverständlich] naïveté,” representing “themselves as naïve, so as to enjoy a liberty that they would not otherwise be granted” (Jokes, p. 184). As long as liberty is something that is “granted,” as long as fools do not expect to be made kings, the power of the father remains fundamentally intact.

Yet there is a type of incomprehension whose polemical effects are not finally so easily contained. Its social and literary prototype is the figure of the mother, who shares her child's exclusion from the languages of adulthood and power, and who has an interest in exposing the restraints imposed by patriarchy. A mother like Mrs. Bennet of Pride and Prejudice is not in a position to understand the polemics of her incomprehension. In the patriarchal culture in which Austen wrote, such an exposure must be indirect and guarded, or even unaware of its own threat and seriousness. The mother cannot afford to get her own jokes, nor can others accept the implications of her comedy. Her comedy hovers uncomfortably between unawareness and impudence, between triviality and threat. Unlike the fool, her “stupidity (incomprehension)” may not be sanctioned by the novel's explicit directives. It is often understood as simply ridiculous, even by the novel's other outsiders.

It is a critical commonplace to laud a fool's ability to “teach” authoritative speakers to laugh at their rigidity or to expose the faults and follies of a society's discourse.⁴ But Mrs. Bennet is primarily defined not in such a direct relationship with authoritative speakers, not as “wife” who challenges “husband,” but in her displaced role of mother who guides and restrains her children according to conventions that she herself need not comprehend and has not authorized. Her comedy is constrained by this dual role, by the effect of her foolishness on the children who must grow up under patriarchy. Yet stupidity is always polemical even when it is not explicitly understood, even when it is not incorporated into the novel's thematic designs. It may function not as a local challenge to individual failures of perception but as a sign of a general ideological confusion. The mother's position can be neither dismissed nor acknowledged. She persists at the margins of the novel as an irritating, troublesome, and yet indispensable figure.

In Pride and Prejudice, as in many nineteenth-century novels, the mother's function is misleadingly represented. Mrs. Bennet is a “woman of men understanding, little information, and uncertain temper,” but this representation serves complex interests. To accept her as merely a figure of ridicule is to prevent any investigation of those interests, to ignore the ways in which this novel, in Pierre Macherey's words, is “haunted” by what it cannot say. We must, instead, conduct a double reading, attending not only to what Macherey describes as “that which is formally accounted for, expressed, and even concluded” but also to what is left unspoken or implicit.⁵ We need to attend to the novel's resistances, to what is produced only to be quickly dismissed. We thus “make strange” not only the ideology figured in the novel's social world but the ideology guiding the author's representations of social relations and conventions. We thereby consider tensions that remain tacit, that are neither authorized nor expunged, but that make the novel's resolution of social conflicts unfinished or overdetermined. Such a double reading extends our literary interests outside of the novel's social world to the exchanges between the novel and its formative culture. By reading doubly we question the insistence with which cues are delivered and the ways in which constructions are buttressed. We consider what is at stake when certain details are treated as error or as slips of the pen.

Mrs. Bennet is denied the prerogatives of a comic literary tradition: she does not win pleasure for her comedic scenes, forgiveness for her foibles, or credit for her effect on the social world. With an energy that seems excessive, given her slight role in the narrative, she is ridiculed both by powerful characters and the narrator. She is harshly criticized for a role she does not fulfill, for serious effects she does not achieve. She marks a lack of adult feminine power in the culture, a lack felt strongly by the young women she is supposed to educate and protect, and she is blamed for the excesses of the patriarchal culture. This essay explores what unspoken interests produce such a contradictory role for Mrs. Bennet. What interests are served by novelistic insistence that this character does not matter, that she is one-dimensional, that she has no effect? And how does such insistence coexist with the nagging, unsettling effect of the “trivial” character, with the threat she seems to pose to the social world of the novel, to her husband and daughters, to the possibility of women's discourse? Why should Mrs. Bennet's outbursts be found intolerable rather than humorous or socially productive?

Adrienne Rich calls the relationship between mothers and daughters in nineteenth-century fiction “the great unwritten story.”⁶ Mothers are thoroughly erased from these novels—rejected by their daughters, who wish to distance themselves from the socially conforming and repressed circumstances of their mothers, and disposed of by authors, who write them out of the story by imagining them as dead, bedridden, or left behind while the daughter journeys to Bath. They are, all too often, dismissed or ignored by critics who accept their marginalized status. The few mothers who do appear vanish into narrow stereotypes, both social and fictional. They are either dutiful and selfless or silly and self-indulgent, more likely to humiliate their daughters than to become role models or friends. They are not even given the dubious recognition afforded in twentieth-century fiction of being powerful, damaging adversaries.⁷ Mothers are treated as wayward children, likely to say embarrassing things in front of company, needing to be cajoled and pampered, but not a very serious force—for good or ill.

As Nina Auerbach has argued, most nineteenth-century heroines strive to escape the “community of women,” which “may suggest less the honor of fellowship than an antisociety, an austere banishment from both social power and biological rewards” (p. 3). They reject the more confined social world their mothers occupy to challenge the expectations of their fathers, brothers, or lovers. The great plot concerns not mothers and daughters but courtship,⁸ which leads the heroine away from her mother and ends, conveniently, before marriage or childbirth, before the heroine must find a way to reconcile herself to that woman's world she earlier rejected. Through the ritual of courtship the heroine demonstrates her difference from her parents, especially her mother, whose concern with social rules, respectability, or safety is challenged, if not rejected. Yet the liberation of young, unmarried heroines leaves other women subject to patriarchy. The heroine (or the woman writer) is understood as the one woman who can negotiate the perils of the patriarchal world.

In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the “absence of enlightened maternal affection” in Austen's novels, which produces mothers “who fail in their nurturing of daughters” and daughters who are “literally or figuratively motherless.” The relationship of mother and daughter is defined by “matrophobia—fear of becoming one's mother” (pp. 125-26). As a result, a mythical “mother-goddess” replaces the problematic social mother and becomes the figure of a feminine tradition that has been “dismembered, dis-remembered, disintegrated” under patriarchy (p. 98).⁹ To “remember” and “become a member” of this “shattered tradition that is her matrilineal heritage” (p. 98), the nineteenth-century woman writer/heroine must “kill” the images imposed by patriarchy, the social mothers whom the dutiful daughter is supposed to reflect and reproduce.¹⁰

One of the ways the daughter seeks to liberate herself is through sharing the male characters' perception of the mother as comic. The situation could have been presented as tragic or wasteful—for the mother, who has no relationship with those around her, and for the daughter, who suffers from the lack of a significant guide. Imagining the mother as a “joke” seems to mitigate this loss and allows the daughter to move beyond what her mother desired or imagined. Yet Freud warns that there is no such thing as an innocent joke, that all jokes are tendentious.¹¹ Certainly the representation of the mother as comic is tendentious, ultimately working against the daughter's own interests. However much she gains by differentiating herself from a ridiculous mother, she cannot afford to trivialize the position she herself may occupy. Her own possibilities are finally implicated in the mother's position.

Mrs. Bennet occupies just such an uncomfortable position in her culture and in relation to her daughter Elizabeth. She is repeatedly characterized as trivial, static, or uninfluential, the antithesis of Lizzie's complexity and change. Modern readers have willingly accepted such cues and seen her as a dehistoricized trope, as “simply unformed matter,” “the embodiment of the unthinking life-force that works through women,” or “a transparently scheming boor” who, “like the life force, will persist, as foolishly as ever.”¹² Mrs. Bennet holds none of the valued positions of mothers in her culture: she has little influence over the domestic realm and is absent from her daughters' scenes of confession and self-discovery. Elizabeth can “hardly help smiling” at Lady Catherine's concern that Mrs. Bennet has been “quite a slave to your education” (p. 199). Although Mrs. Bennet seems inescapable, constantly interrupting conversations and intruding where she is least wanted, she is ignored and countermanded by her husband and elder daughters. The narrator concludes the first chapter with an invitation to dismiss her as a static character of little interest. Having introduced Mr. Bennet as “so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three and twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character,” the narrator adds: “Her mind was less difficult to develope. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news” (p. 53). Although Mrs. Bennet is dismissed (p. 262) as a woman whose “weak understanding and illiberal mind” have lost her the “respect, esteem, and confidence” of her husband—and, by implication, of her daughter, the narrator, and readers—she is a constant enough force in the novel to evoke such strong criticism.¹³ She is a serious handicap to her eldest daughters' romances and a serious instigator of her youngest daughters' folly.

Like Dickens's Mrs. Nickleby, who spoke “to nobody in particular … until her breath was exhausted,”¹⁴ Mrs. Bennet's language reveals her self-absorbed inattention to her family's needs. She invariably misconstrues her effect on listeners, imagining specific insult from Darcy's general views about the country and city (p. 89) and missing the contempt with which the Netherfield ladies greet her comments (pp. 90, 144). She dwells in a land of “delightful persuasion” (p. 144), where she alone chooses how to interpret others' behavior. As when she bursts forth with her “exuberance” about Lydia's last-minute marriage, she cannot be shamed nor can her present feelings be disrupted with concern about the past or future.¹⁵ Her well-rehearsed discourse on her “poor nerves” preempts her daughters' chances to complain or suffer publicly. After Lizzie rejects Mr. Collins, Mrs. Bennet recasts the entire episode as an attack on her. She does not imagine what the unpleasant scene may have cost Lizzie, nor does she consider how her daughter may have felt in rejecting a man her mother supports. Her complaints admit no cosufferers and need no audience: “nobody is on my side, nobody takes part with me, I am cruelly used, nobody feels for my poor nerves” (p. 153). Although she vows never to speak to her “undutiful children” again, she babbles on, lost in a self-contained grievance: “Not that I have much pleasure indeed in talking to any body. People who suffer as I do from nervous complaints can have no great inclination for talking. Nobody can tell what I suffer!—But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.” Her complaints earn her no pity from her daughters, who “listened in silence to this effusion, sensible that any attempt to reason with or sooth her would only increase the irritation” (p. 154).

Although Lizzie is in some ways allied with her mother in a struggle with patriarchal powers, she does not willingly admit the allegiance. Embarrassed by her mother's failures and inadequacies, she can neither laugh her off as comic nor fully dissociate herself. Lizzie never speaks her criticism to her mother, treating her as someone beyond conversation or reform, beyond the improvement of sensibility evoked in the novel. Yet she clearly feels the burden of the association and struggles to convince others of their differences. Her mother has a surprising power to silence the heroine, who speaks out in every other situation. At Netherfield, in front of the critical audience of Darcy and Miss Bingley, Lizzie trembles “lest her mother should be exposing herself again. She longed to speak, but could think of nothing to say” (p. 90). She is all too aware of how powerful and final the response to such exposure can be; it is after such an outburst in front of the Netherfield set that “the mother was found to be intolerable” (p. 68). Physical distance does not shelter her from her identity as daughter of “such a mother” (p. 187),¹⁶ and she suffers from the disturbing effects of Miss Bingley's reminders of their “dear friend's vulgar relations” (p. 83). It does not require her mother's presence, but only the “thought of her mother,” to make her lose “confidence” in an argument with Darcy (p. 219). Lizzie's concern about exposure—her mother's and, more to the point, her own—shows her tenuous social position, her vulnerability to being judged by her rank or family rather than by her words, her fear that even her words will prove too daring, too revealing.

Lizzie's intense discomfort around her mother seems reciprocal: she is the “least dear” (p. 145) of Mrs. Bennet's children, the one chosen by Mr. Bennet to confound his opinion of women as “silly and ignorant” (p. 52). Such comments suggest that Lizzie has risen above the devalued position of her mother, both personally and socially. Yet Lizzie shares more with her mother than her father or the narrator acknowledges or than she herself can recognize. Her disvalued fictional role allows Mrs. Bennet to voice more radical discontents than can the heroine of the novel. She is “beyond the reach of reason” in her diatribe against entailing an estate away from her daughters “in favour of a man whom nobody cared anything about” (pp. 106-7)—a complaint Elizabeth Bennet might well make if she were not too rational, too worldly wise. Lizzie shares her mother's shock at Charlotte's engagement to Mr. Collins, although she “recollected herself” (p. 165) in time to address her friend with guarded politeness. Like her mother, Lizzie allows herself “agreeable reflections” about what it would mean for Jane to marry Bingley, but whereas Lizzie keeps her dreams private, her mother speaks “freely, openly” (p. 140), causing her daughter to try “in vain … to check the rapidity of her mother's words, or persuade her to describe her felicity in a less audible whisper” (p. 141). Although Elizabeth has claimed she does not care what Darcy thinks of her, she “blushed and blushed again with shame and vexation” (p. 141) in watching his contempt for her mother's expressed social expectations. The aspiration of rising through marriage is thus displaced onto her mother's vulgarity, although Lizzie too has imagined Jane marrying into a fine house: “she saw her in idea settled in that very house in all the felicity which a marriage of true affection could bestow” (p. 140). Nor can Lizzie openly support her mother's eagerness to arrange for dinners or balls, contrivances necessary to promote the futures of five dependent girls. The calculation needed to achieve a secure marriage cannot be articulated except as comically disvalued speech.¹⁷

Mrs. Bennet, whose outbursts are a constant source of anxiety for her elder daughters, is regularly interrupted by her husband, her priorities ridiculed or diverted. Irked at her long tale about a ball and dancing partners, Mr. Bennet dismisses his wife's story and its mode of telling as designed only to irritate him (p. 60). That his daughters' futures depend on such slight details as who dances with whom and in what order, that they too must learn to read minute social signs, is of no concern to Mr. Bennet. As Nina Auerbach has argued, it is Mrs. Bennet who “forges her family's liaison with the outside world of marriage, morals, and money that eligible men embody. … While the mother builds connections, the father retreats from the business of marriage to his library” (p. 36).

Such nonchalance, such silence is the prerogative of the powerful, and in Pride and Prejudice it is permissible only for propertied men. Mr. Bennet regularly gains the upper hand by not answering his wife's addresses, and Darcy similarly maddens the importunate Miss Bingley. Mr. Bennet teases his family by postponing word that he has visited the new bachelors in town, and Darcy chooses when and how to impart the information he controls about Wickham and Georgiana. But when Jane or Lizzie is silent, the unusual behavior is noted and has serious consequences, causing Darcy, for one, to conclude that Jane is cold or Lizzie hostile. In her chapter on women's conversation in The Women of England (1838), Sarah Stickney Ellis codifies the “uses of being silent” for women, suggesting that a woman's silence and speech are alike secondary, functioning “rather to lead others out into animated and intelligent communications, than to be intent upon making communications from the resources of her own mind.”¹⁸ Woman's silence is thus very different from the silence of authority which, as the inverse of Bakhtin's “word of the fathers,” need not be repeated to make itself felt. The women in Pride and Prejudice work to fill up silences, to repair the suggestion that they have no purpose, no presence. At Netherfield, the ladies, whose “powers of conversation were considerable” when the men were out of the room, are reduced to nervous stratagems to persuade the men to break the silence they instill (pp. 99-102). The struggle is described as a contest, and Miss Bingley's failure to “win” Darcy “to any conversation” shows the imbalance between men and women speakers. Lizzie comments on this contest, suggesting that “our surest way of disappointing him, will be to ask nothing about it.” She thus appears to control the situation, to have seen through and assumed for herself the power of silence that Miss Bingley, described as “incapable of disappointing Mr Darcy in any thing,” cannot manage.

But Lizzie's silence is only an imitation of Darcy's power to withhold his words, since she must explain that she is doing it and must perform the very role in the scene she hopes to evade, that of speaker who waits for Darcy's response. When Darcy is “surprise[d] at her silence,” Lizzie tries to validate her silence as something she has determined to enact, not merely a product of her social position. She does so with a complicated speech that she expects will “affront him”: “Oh! … I heard you before; but I could not immediately determine what to say in reply. You wanted me, I know, to say ‘Yes,’ that you might have the pleasure of despising my taste; but I always delight in overthrowing those kind of schemes, and cheating a person of their premeditated contempt. I have therefore made up my mind to tell you, that I do not want to dance a reel at all—and now despise me if you dare” (p. 96). Lizzie claims her silence as a powerful privilege, affording her time in which to determine, know, delight, and make up her mind. Yet she must speak to defend her silence, and her actions all respond to expectations that are beyond her control to change. She can refuse to dance, but she cannot alter the nature of dancing and conversing, nor can she alter her position as one who must first be invited, who can only startle “in reply.” The social discourse is preconstituted.

The less powerful speakers in such scenes are regularly marked as “crying” out their speech, as breaking the decorum of a scene in which Darcy's words need only be “said” to have impact and to gain attention. Women are thus required to speak in excess if they are to be heard at all, but such excess marks their speech as negligible. Mrs. Bennet is described by the narrator as “sharp” in defense of her five daughters, as indulging in “raptures” and “exaggeration.” Although her words are necessary to safeguard a minimal social and economic standard for the Bennet girls, she must “rail bitterly” to make her point. And Lizzie has constantly before her the warning of Lydia, whose energies to procure her own desires are described by the narrator as “put[ting] herself forward,” as full of “high animal spirits, and a sort of natural self-consequence,” full of “assurance” that makes her “insist” rather than “cry,” and “very equal therefore to address Mr Bingley on the subject of the ball, and abruptly remind[ing] him of his promise” (p. 91).

Lizzie can only differentiate herself from these censured women by explaining at length how her words are to be taken. She does not have Darcy's luxury of silence or her father's indulgence of privacy. As she experiences in her painful encounters with Lady Catherine and Mr. Collins, she is drawn into public discourse despite every attempt at resistance. When Mr. Collins dismisses her careful rejection of his proposal as “merely words of course,” the “usual practice of elegant females,” Lizzie cannot extricate herself from the social construction he has imposed. “I know not how to express my refusal in such a way as may convince you of its being one,” she says. “Can I speak plainer?” Her only recourse is to refer him to her father, “whose negative might be uttered in such a manner as must be decisive” (pp. 148-50). Similarly, although she struggles to mark off some prerogatives for herself in her conversations with Lady Catherine (telling her, “You may ask questions which I shall not choose to answer”), she cannot end the scene. She can deny that Lady Catherine is “entitled” to know her mind and can refuse to be “explicit,” but she must continue to speak to reject further attacks. Even as she insists, “I have nothing farther to say,” she is provoked into a string of defensive replies (“I will make no promise of the kind”; “I must beg, therefore, to be importuned no farther on the subject”; “I have said no such thing”). Her defeated reaction afterward—“to acknowledge the substance of their conversation was impossible”—reflects more than an unwillingness to confide in her mother; it also suggests how powerless she is to control the “substance” of conversations (pp. 364-68).

Lizzie has been warned about the limits on women's discourse by an offhanded remark of Miss Bingley's. When Lizzie recommends that they “punish” Darcy by teasing or laughing at him, Miss Bingley protests that laughter would only serve to “expose ourselves … by attempting to laugh without a subject” (pp. 101-2). Lizzie rejects such an “uncommon advantage” for her male peer, refusing to allow him to conceal himself from the considerable power of her laughter. Yet, although Lizzie “wins” this scene by appearing to reject the conventions of male-female difference, Miss Bingley's comment raises a disturbing problem about women's discourse in Austen's realm. Lizzie's power to laugh depends on having a “subject”; without it her humor will seem as absurd and self-absorbed as her mother's. Although she seems more in control than her mother, Lizzie can neither end nor begin a scene of her own volition. If Darcy does not raise objections for her to correct or mock, her laughter will be seen as having no substance, no social effect; it will emerge not as valiant independence but, like her mother's, as ignorant blindness of serious realities.

The treatment of her mother as comic allows Lizzie, and Austen, to displace the implicit challenge against social limitations with a parental battle that is simpler to fight. The daughter challenges restrictions voiced by a mother who has had no role in creating those rules. Her resentment toward her mother suggests an inability to confront her father's authority and responsibility, but it also gives her the chance to practice rebellion in a less threatening context.¹⁹ Mrs. Bennet's embarrassing outbreaks concern Lizzie partially because they proclaim what she must conceal and partially because the reception of these remarks shows Lizzie the contradictory proscriptions for women. Her mother has warned Lizzie (with a “cry”) to “remember where you are, and do not run on in the wild manner that you are suffered to do at home” (p. 88). But Lizzie is caught in a bind: she must be guarded in her words and tactful in her wit if she is to win Darcy (she must always remember she is not “at home”), yet she can win him only by seeming independent and daring (by not allowing him to determine where her home shall be). She vacillates between an astute political analysis and a repression of such insights. When, for example, Darcy confesses he has been attracted by the “liveliness” of her mind, she suggests it might more accurately be termed “impertinence” (p. 388). But she is careful to teach her prospective sister-in-law how “impertinence” gets translated into a permitted or even valued quality: “[Georgiana's] mind received knowledge which had never before fallen in her way. By Elizabeth's instructions she began to comprehend that a woman may take liberties with her husband, which a brother will not always allow in a sister more than ten years younger than himself” (p. 395). Lizzie instructs Georgiana in a mild, affectionate version of sexual politics, but even such casual reminders indicate how careful women must be in determining what is allowed and what will be censured. Lizzie does not presume that Darcy's fondness raises her to a permanent position of “liberty”; even after they have declared their love, she is guarded in her speech, “check[ing]” her “long[ing]” to tease him by remembering “that he had yet to learn to be laught at, and it was rather too early to begin” (p. 380).

Lizzie is also cautious about making explicit the power relations between men and women. She counters her sister Jane's belief that “women fancy admiration means more than it does” with a caustic “and men take care that they should.” But when Jane pursues the issue of what is “designedly done,” Lizzie demurs from the extremity of her views—“without scheming to do wrong, or to make others unhappy, there may be error, and there may be misery”—and finally offers to be silent before she offends by “saying what I think of persons you esteem. Stop me whilst you can” (pp. 174-75). In the very next chapter, however, she rearticulates the political awareness to her aunt Gardener, who has attributed the failure of Jane's romance to “accident.” “These things happen so often!” her aunt has concluded, and Lizzie sharply responds: “An excellent consolation in its way, but it will not do for us. We do not suffer by accident” (p. 178). She ultimately admits her father's complicity in Mrs. Bennet's ridiculed position, but even a private acknowledgment of this insight seems dangerous and must be carefully contained. Although she “had never been blind to the impropriety of her father's behavior as a husband” and “had always seen it with pain,” she “endeavoured to forget what she could not overlook, and to banish [it] from her thoughts.” It is only the public disaster of Lydia's seduction that allows her to blame her father as well as her mother for the “disadvantages which must attend the children of so unsuitable a marriage” (p. 262).

Lizzie is trapped between the equally unpleasant expectations of the “good” and “bad” daughter. The fall of Lydia, the bad daughter who is her mother's favorite, is instructive, since it reminds Lizzie of the danger of being judged as “fanciful” or “wayward.” Mrs. Gardiner has warned Lizzie to be a good daughter, not of her mother but of her father: “you must not let your fancy run away with you. You have sense and we all expect you to use it. Your father would depend on your resolution and good conduct, I am sure. You must not disappoint your father” (p. 181). But Lizzie can see what society's “good sense” wins, what a good daughter can expect for herself. She is greatly unsettled by Charlotte's “sensible” marriage and has little sympathy with the “composure” with which both Jane and Charlotte repress their desires and observations. She also has the example of Miss Bingley, who has constructed herself as the perfect product of social rules, as exceedingly careful to do whatever it takes to win herself a powerful husband and house. In the fabulous world of Pride and Prejudice, it is Lizzie, the “bad” daughter, who succeeds and is allowed to laugh at her competitor and to outrank her sensible friend and sister. The happy ending rewrites the historically more likely outcome, the coopted marriage of Charlotte or the ridiculed position of her mother.²⁰ The heroine wins propriety and wealth through daring and rebellion made palatable to her world through her partial adherence to its rules. She succeeds by publicly being a “bad daughter” to her unworthy mother, but she also succeeds by evading the sense and directives of patriarchal culture.

Pride and Prejudice marks the beginning of a time, as Judith Lowder Newton has argued, of “general ideological crisis, a crisis of confidence over the status, the proper work, and the power of middle-class women” (p. 1). The ambivalent role of the mother, who in Austen's novel is both powerful and negligible, becomes a more conventional trope as it is codified and rationalized by a proliferation of advice books, novels about women's struggles, and treatises on the Woman Question. It is, therefore, productive to compare how the “foolish mother” is positioned in a novel in which the role is still implicit and how that position is solidified in a novel like Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891). By the end of the century, in Tess, Hardy presents a daughter passionately condemning her foolish mother, blaming the mother for the daughter's tragedy. Such a scene is unmentionable in Austen, and not only because of the differing conventions of polite discourse.

By 1891 it was relatively uncontroversial to represent the mother as scapegoat for cultural disorder. When Tess discovers that there is “danger in men-folk,” it is her “poor foolish mother” she blames for not having warned her.²¹ The mother's failure in the personal realm is given broad-ranging cultural implications. Tess's mother has seen their fall from “nobility” as merely a “passing accident” rather than the “haunting episode” that ruins her child's expectations (p. 162). Her foolishness thus becomes a historical emblem—of the peasantry's failure to understand the threat of the aristocracy and of the urban world, of the failure of the “past” to understand the demands of “the modern age,” of the failure of seeing “accident” or “nature” as a sufficient cultural explanation. And it apparently makes sense to trace all these powerful failures to a mother who has not taken her responsibilities seriously enough: “‘O mother, my mother!’ cried the agonized girl, turning passionately upon her parent as if her poor heart would break. ‘How could I be expected to know? … Why didn't you warn me? Ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance o' learning in that way, and you did not help me!’ Her mother was subdued.”

The implication is that ladies have an undue advantage over the daughter of a “poor foolish mother,” an advantage which Tess sees as literary but which could more accurately be seen as the advantage of wealth and class. The mother's “simple vanity” becomes the focus for her daughter's anger, which cannot find its more appropriate targets, both individual and cultural. But when the novel has Tess blame her mother for not “telling” her of worldly dangers, and when such an accusation “subdues” the mother into a proper acceptance of guilt, there has been an important ideological manipulation of the role of mother. It is contradictory to locate the fault in not “telling”—in words—rather than in the “wrong doing” of men or the class inequities that make ladies better prepared to negotiate the perils of adult life. Tess thus provides a scapegoat for the powerful social transformations that affect the lives of women, for which daughters must be prepared. The mother, who is at best a commentator on the social realm, has taken the place of initiator, guardian, or betrayer.

Mid-nineteenth-century advice books, like the influential series by Mrs. Ellis—Wives of England, Daughters of England, and Women of England—similarly imply that mothers are the source of broad cultural changes that disrupt the family and the lives of their daughters. They charge women with the responsibility for correcting and upholding moral standards for man, who is “confused by the many voices, which in the mart, the exchange, or the public assembly, have addressed themselves to his inborn selfishness or his worldly pride [and …] stands corrected before the clear eye of woman, as it looked directly to the naked truth, and detected the lurking evil of the specious act he was about to commit” (The Women of England, p. 42). The blame for continued “selfishness” or confusion, for worldly pride or lurking evil, then rests not on the “confused” man but on the woman who fails to oppose him, to provide him with a “clear eye” in which to see his faults. In an 1832 essay on the “Education of Daughters,” Lydia Maria Child cites as a “true, and therefore an old remark, that the situation and prospects of a country may be justly estimated by the character of its women” and stresses the important transmission of such influence from mother to daughter.²² Such pronouncements suggest a cultural concern over what is perceived as women's and, more explicitly, mothers' responsibilities and failures. They also stress the narrow range of possibilities afforded mothers, in which the mother's behavior is always a failure, incapable of satisfying incommensurable demands. Deborah Gorham describes the mother-daughter relationships figured in Victorian literature and art as inevitably producing two outcomes: “one in which the mother fulfilled her maternal functions, and one in which she would not or could not do so” (p. 47). To be a “good” mother according to the culture's proscriptions was to be a failure in her daughter's eyes. But to be a “bad” mother was also to be a failure, to embarrass or commit her daughter to living outside the system of social rewards and approval only the father could bestow.

By working to institutionalize the “proper” discourses of women, to teach the emergent middle class how to be “good” mothers and “dutiful” daughters, nineteenth-century advice books suggest that the relationship between mother and daughter was not seen as “natural” or as the province of individuals, but as requiring considerable institutional support and guidance. The aim was not to create self-fulfilled individuals but to acquire facility in approved social functions. In Women of England, Mrs. Ellis warned against encouraging young women to be too “striking” or to stray from their proper “station” as “relative creatures”: “If, therefore, they are endowed only with such faculties, as render them striking and distinguished in themselves, without the faculty of instrumentality, they are only as dead letters in the volume of human life, filling what would otherwise be a blank space, but doing nothing more” (p. 108). To be part of social discourse, to avoid the marginality of being a “dead letter,” a “blank space” in the “volume of human life,” young girls must learn to function in predetermined ways, to fulfill the “instrumentality” established as their role and use in culture. Like their mothers, like Freud's child, they must learn to accept what is “granted” to them by an authority they work to uphold. It would be difficult for a mother to speak from such a proscribed position, and it would be painful for a daughter to hear such words. Austen's Mrs. Bennet makes the position and its restrictions visible and laughable; she “fails” to become an appropriate function and thus remains outside approved social practices. Her daughter “succeeds,” but she too is implicated in her mother's exclusion from the social world. The novel “forgets” the bleakness of women's prospects in its exuberant ending, but at the cost of banning the mother from its view and of suspending the objections she voiced.

Notes

1. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813 (New York: Penguin, 1972), p. 53.

2. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 403.

3. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 1905, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), p. 182. Freud wrote: “weil eine solche bei ihm nicht vorhanden ist,” “er besitze diese Hemmung nicht,” and “lachen nicht über ihn, sondern sind über ihn entrüstet” (Sigmund Freud, Der Witz und Seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten [Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1905], p. 156).

4. Bakhtin locates the effect of incomprehension, not within the novel or in any specific character's ability to “teach” others, but in the novelist's awareness of multiple discourses: “A failure to understand languages that are otherwise generally accepted and that have the appearance of being universal teaches the novelist how to perceive them physically as objects, to see their relativity, to externalize them, to feel out their boundaries, that is, it teaches him how to expose and structure images of social languages” (The Dialogic Imagination, p. 404).

5. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (1966; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 80, 83. Macherey argues that such a double reading seeks “the inscription of an otherness in the work, through which it maintains a relationship with that which it is not, that which happens at its margins” (p. 79).

6. In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), her influential analysis of American cultural attitudes toward motherhood, Rich claims: “This cathexis between mother and daughter—essential, distorted, misused—is the great unwritten story” (p. 225). See also Signe Hammer, Daughters and Mothers: Mothers and Daughters (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1975); and Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). In her review essay on “Mothers and Daughters” (Signs 7 [1981], 200-222), Marianne Hirsch discusses the reasons for the historical “silence” and “the subsequent centrality of the mother-daughter relationship at this particular point in feminist scholarship” (p. 201). Her essay provides an extremely useful survey of recent studies that are “attempts to prove that the story of mother-daughter relationships has been written even if it has not been read, that it constitutes the hidden subtext of many texts” (p. 214). See also The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, ed. E. M. Broner and Cathy N. Davidson (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), a collection of essays on this issue. Studies that discuss the nineteenth-century scene in particular are: Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Avon Books, 1972); Françoise Basch, Relative Creatures (New York: Schocken Books, 1974); Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976); Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Lynne Agress, The Feminine Irony (New York: University Press of America, 1978); Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Judith Lowder Newton, Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981; rpt. London: Methuen, 1986); and Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).

7. In “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1 (1975), 1-29, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg suggests that “taboos against female aggression and hostility” may have been “sufficiently strong to repress even that between mothers and their adolescent daughters” (p. 17). But she also challenges the modern assumption that hostility between generations, “today considered almost inevitable to an adolescent's struggle for autonomy and self-identity,” is an essential, ahistorical fact. Patricia Spacks explains the omission of mothers as a stylistic version of an unchanging resentment: “In nineteenth-century novels women express hostility toward their mothers by eliminating them from the narrative; twentieth-century fiction dramatizes the conflict” (The Female Imagination, p. 191).

8. Ellen Moers calls courtship “a dreadful word” in Austen, “for it implies something a man does to a woman, and can include adultery.” She prefers “marriageship,” and argues Austen saw marriage as “the only act of choice in a woman's life” (Literary Women, p. 70). Gilbert and Gubar concur that marriage is “the only accessible form of self-definition for girls in [Austen's] society” (Madwoman in the Attic, p. 127).

9. See Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, pp. 97-104. Moers describes women writers as “an undercurrent” literary tradition (Literary Women, p. 42); Showalter discusses the “covert solidarity that sometimes amounted to a genteel conspiracy” between women novelists and readers in the nineteenth century (A Literature of Their Own, pp. 15-16).

10. Showalter discusses the “remarkable frequency” with which nineteenth-century women writers identified with the father at the “loss of, or alienation from, the mother” (ibid., p. 61). “[M]ost mothers in middle-class families were more narrow-minded and conventional than the fathers, who had the advantages of education and mobility. … The daughter's nonconformity would increase the strains in her relationship with her mother and lead her to make greater demands upon her father for love and attention” (p. 62). Susan Peck MacDonald argues that the “absence of mothers” in Austen's novels derives “not from the impotence or unimportance of mothers, but from the almost excessive power of motherhood.” The mother's power to “shield her daughter from the process of maturation” must be met by a “psychological rift” with the mother (“Jane Austen and the Tradition of the Absent Mother,” in The Lost Tradition, ed. Broner and Davidson, pp. 58, 64). See also my discussion of Louisa Gradgrind's negotiation of her father's system and her mother's ineffectual resistance, in Jean Ferguson Carr, “Writing as a Woman: Dickens, Hard Times, and Feminine Discourses,” Dickens Studies Annual 18 (1989), 159-76.

11. “Jokes, even if the thought contained in them is non-tendentious and thus only serves theoretical intellectual interests, are in fact never non-tendentious. They pursue the second aim: to promote the thought by augmenting it and guarding it against criticism. Here they are once again expressing their original nature by setting themselves up against an inhibiting and restricting power—which is now the critical judgment” (Freud, Jokes, pp. 132-33). See also Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, 1924, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Washington Square, 1952), in which he discusses slips of the tongue and other comical errors: “They are not accidents; they are serious mental acts; they have their meaning” (p. 48).

12. The first two depictions are by Douglas Bush in his 1956 article “Mrs. Bennet and the Dark Gods: The Truth about Jane Austen,” rpt. in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Pride and Prejudice, ed. E. Rubenstein (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 113, and the last two by Mark Schorer in his introduction to Pride and Prejudice (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), pp. xiii, xxi.

13. Nina Auerbach argues for the “equivocal” nature of Austen's discussion of “direct female power” and cites Harriet Martineau's “oblique apology” in Society and America (1837) that English girls would obey such a “foolish mother” (Communities of Women, p. 50).

14. Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (London, 1838-39), ch. 11.

15. On Lydia's return, Austen describes Mrs. Bennet as “disturbed by no fear for her felicity, nor humbled by any remembrance of her misconduct” (p. 320). Nina Auerbach discusses Mrs. Bennet as curiously vague about the details of domestic life, but sees Lizzie as “beyond a certain point devoid of memory”: “if she shares nothing else with her mother, her faculty of nonremembrance confirms Mrs. Bennet's perception of the nonlife they have had together” (Communities of Women, p. 43).

16. In her essay on Charlotte's prospects, “Why Marry Mr. Collins?” in Sex, Class, and Culture (1978; rpt. London: Methuen, 1986), Lillian Robinson discusses Lady Catherine's harsh reminder that although Lizzie's father is a gentleman she is not “the daughter of a gentlewoman as well” (p. 185).

17. Judith Lowder Newton discusses Pride and Prejudice's subversion of the issue of economic concerns by its association with Mrs. Bennet, “a woman whose worries we are not allowed to take seriously because they are continually undermined by their link with the comic and the absurd” (Women, Power, and Subversion, p. 70). See also Lillian Robinson's discussion of the economic difference the heroines would experience as daughters and as wives (Sex, Class, and Culture, p. 198).

18. In The Women of England, Their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits (London, 1838; rpt. Philadelphia: Herman Hooker, 1841), Mrs. Ellis begins her chapter on “the uses of conversation” with what she admits is the “somewhat paradoxical” discussion of silence, the “peculiar province of a woman” which derives “from her position in society” (p. 101). In The Wives of England: Their Relative Duties, Domestic Influence, and Social Obligations (London, 1843; rpt. New York: D. Appleton, 1843), she provides a fitting example of the authority of men's silence and the contingency of woman's speech. She advises men to leave the discipline of servants and children to their wives “because the master of a family with whom it rests to exercise real authority cannot so well unbend, and make himself familiar with the young people under his direction, the claims of this part of the community are strong upon the wives of England” (p. 235). The husband retains “real” power by being silent but allows his wife to “unbend” in speech; her exercise of domestic power is granted on the condition that she make herself “familiar” to a “part of the community” that remains “under” the “master.”

19. A sociolinguistic study of mother-daughter relationships comments on the use of “indirection” by mothers to signal “to their children that a directive is meant more seriously than its surface structure suggests.” They cite the view that “indirection occurs because mothers are less willing to demonstrate power openly than are fathers. They see in the mother's use of indirect means in controlling her children evidence of her discontent with the superordinate position of power which is available to her as a mother, but not elsewhere in her life.” Their study suggests that such a doubled discourse both acknowledges and attempts to circumvent the disparity in social power of men and women, and its use arises from the mother's inexperience with power and her unwillingness to claim it openly. See Ruth Wodak and Muriel Schulz, The Language of Love and Guilt: Mother-Daughter Relationships from a Cross-Cultural Perspective (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1986), pp. 35-36. Wodak and Schulz discuss indirect means of control or instruction as a sign of the mother's need to domesticate her authority, to make it appear less intrusive or insistent, less like a usurpation of male prerogatives, but they also cite it as a manipulative practice which preserves the mother's power in a realm beyond critique, “because indirection denies the child a chance to respond” (p. 37). As is evident in the interviews, the mother's linguistic claim to power often arises from her borrowing of patriarchal languages. The signal to serious portent, or to powerful command, is achieved by moving outside the language used by mothers to children, by using those social discourses that remain the province of fathers—logic, proper language, or an approved state language. They provide many examples of such “metaphorical code switching (a switch from one register to another)”: for example, American mothers' attempt to “convey seriousness by switching from a diminutive name to the child's full name” or Norwegian mothers' movement “from their local dialect into Standard Norwegian to emphasize a command” (p. 36).

20. See Lillian Robinson's discussion of the ending as improbable, “outside the realm of [Lizzie's] own and Jane Austen's imaginings” (Sex, Class, and Culture, p. 188).

21. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), pp. 69-70.

22. Lydia Maria Child, “Hints to Persons of Moderate Fortune,” in The American Frugal Housewife: Dedicated to Those Who Are Not Ashamed of Economy (Boston, 1832; rpt. Worthington, Ohio: Worthington Historical Society, 1965), p. 1.

This essay is dedicated, with love and admiration, to my mother, Mary Anne Heyward Ferguson, who, unlike Mrs. Bennet, has been a wise comprehender and a supportive instigator of her daughters' efforts. An early version of this essay was presented at a Wellesley College symposium, “Mothers and Daughters in Literature,” in February 1982.