“Pride and Prejudice”, as well as the other Jane Austen novels, can be appreciated for their sparkling dialogue and their vivid characters and the clear narrative lines that manage to balance off multiple characters, as well as for the very detailed portrayal of the world of the country gentry in Regency England. The truth, however, is that Jane Austen accomplishes much more than that. She provides an objective appraisal of the human condition that you will find nowhere else except in Shakespeare and in some of the books of the Old Testament, notably in “Genesis” and the story of David as told in “Samuel I and II”. Among other things, Austen takes a perfectly objective approach to her characters, explaining what they are with utmost clarity, warts and all, while most novelists, including Dickens, take sides, preferring their heroes to their villains, while Jane Austen is beyond that, and that in itself is very liberating as it calls forth in a reader the ability also to be beyond judgment. People are what they are. Deal with it. Emma, for one, is less talented, and more superficial, than others in the Jane Austen repertoire. Elizabeth Bennet, for example, must have been an insufferably awkward and outspoken young woman at the beginning of "Pride and Prejudice", just as Darcy thought her to be, but she also has appeal as an extremely intelligent and firm and deeply moral person, which also appealed to Darcy, who has to be given credit for seeing her as a diamond in the rough. All of Jane Austen's heroines as flawed but not unworthy just because of that. Their flaws could have made them into tragic heroines, as in Ibsen, but instead Austen gives life to each of them so that they become precious souls instead of doomed creatures.
The truth of this assertion lies in the fact that readers of her novels are always talking about the motivations of her characters, what they are truly like. That conversation goes on in book clubs and in films, of which there are many, where reference is made to one or another character, a male making himself to be a good and sensitive soul in “The Jane Austen Book Club” because he recognizes the complexities of the motivations of Austen characters. (It would be nice if all girls could use this as a test of whether potential boyfriends are worth it.)
Austen accomplishes her task of humanizing her characters through dialogue that is full of ambiguities and also by manipulating genres. She takes situations that might be turned to tragedy, such as might happen if Harriet Smith decided to kill herself because of all of her failed courtships, in which case Emma would have had to bear the burden of a great guilt, and instead turns the material into romantic comedy, Harriet understood as a bit boy crazy and ready to bounce back, and so more a figure of fun than of sadness. Austen treats her novels as comedies of character rather than as comedies of action. Comedies of character have their appeal as ways to make people seem merely human rather than either pathetic or tragic even if physical comedy did gave us Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. This difference between these two genres is the same one that "I Love Lucy" provides if you separate out the famous episode where Lucy is on the chocolate assembly line, which is physical comedy, from her more serious moments dealing with Ricky, which is when her character is made visible.
Austen is particularly liberating for her readers because all of her characters are rational. They exercise through their speech the ability to make judgements about their own lives. They learn what other people are and how to accommodate one another. This is true of both good and bad people. People are neither victims of their condition nor heroes who transcend their circumstances. That provides the Jane Austen reader with great delight and satisfaction, showing people making a difference in their own lives, and that being the greatest accomplishment of not only romantic comedy but of all comedy.
Reduce “Pride and Prejudice” to its simplest terms, which you are allowed to do because Jane Austen always had a thesis for her story to illustrate even if she would not be so crude as to spell it out in so many words because that might distract from the power of narrative fiction by penetrating the fourth wall, something that other novelists, including Joseph Fielding and Charles Dickens, are willing to do, inserting their own authorial comments on the proceedings. In the case of “Pride and Prejudice”, Jane Austen’s message is that people have a great deal of difficulty understanding one another and so the best most people can do is make room for one another in their own lives and carve out a space for themselves in the lives of others. This is clearly the case with the minor characters in “Pride and Prejudice”, that most easily recognized in the fact that Elizabeth’s friend Charlotte sets up her tearoom as her own domain within the house she shares with her insufferable husband, the minister Mr. Collins. This is a room that he rarely enters, either because he thinks a woman needs her own domain or that he somehow senses that he is indeed an obnoxious figure. Mr. Bennet, for his part, finds a way to retreat from his wife into his library, having come to terms with the fact that his is a mismatch, however much he might have fallen hard for what seemed her perky self when he was a young man. So people find places to go where they can be at peace. And Lydia Bennet does not understand how scheming and underhanded is Mr. Wickham, the man who seduced her and married her only when Darcy gave him no alternative. But it is understandable that Mr. Wickham is not easily understood. He fooled Elizabeth who, despite her perspicacity, befriended him, bought his lies, and even might have briefly considered him as a suitor.
Then there is the main couple, Elizabeth and Darcy who have a devil of a time connecting, whatever their early on attraction to one another, because both are haughty, each in their own way, and also separated by social class, which would be enough to dispel any thought of romance. What the two do is each find the other one increasingly charming to the point that they are always thinking of one another, which is the sign that a romance is underway, both then and now, and even more important and astonishing is the fact that they change for one another. They alter their characters and their views of life so as to accommodate one another. That is far more serious an undertaking than building a tearoom. Darcy is so shaken by his first rejection by Elizabeth that he comes to regard his past behavior as abominable, which means that he has given in to the romantic notion that a true love will know no impediments, including a vastly different social rank, while Elizabeth has come to see that even a wealthy man can have a soul, which is no easy task if one has been schooled, as was Elizabeth and Jane Austen herself, in her father’s library.
This fact is meaningful to a present day reader in all of those stories from not so long ago when racial lines (rather than class lines) were crossed in the name of love, or even more recently when the Royal Family accepted into their own half witted and low life family a divorced American Mulatto television star. Jane Austen would probably have rejected such a marriage for the same reason erst-while Liberal advice columnists objected to interracial marriages fifty years ago: marriage was complicated enough without introducing into it the strain of racial difference. My only explanation is that Meghan must have loved William a lot to put up with that family and the life that goes along with it. Jane Austen was always aware of how difficult life could be and so would advise people to avoid complications. Elizabeth’s sister Jane is allowed to marry the very rich Bingley because both of them are simple and good people, and so like an ideal rather than the way it is for most people. Remember that Darcy was the one who at first stood in the way of that marriage and his friend went along with it and then, when Darcy changed, he too reconsidered, which just showed that Bingley was not a romantic figure in that he did not go against the advice of a friend so as to heroically embrace the woman he loved but followed the advice of a friend and so rather than having the moment of courage that marks so many people in their love lives, he is just a bridegroom on the top of a wedding cake.
Not that Jane Austen is always exploring the ambiguities of relationships and what might be the possibly changing motivations that constitute their histories. As Stuart M. Tave points out in his charming and insightful book, “Some Words of Jane Austen”, Austen also uses images to spell out character as when, in many of her novels, a timepiece represents the ability of men to ground themselves in reality while women show themselves, sometimes, to be foolish, because they do not treat time as a parameter but simply an expression of their subjective disposition of the moment. That also is funny, a mild tease of women, and certainly an accurate account of the foible by which some people (both men and women) try to fashion time to their needs rather than treat it as objective. We are all a bit funny and even a bit foolish but nonetheless endearing for that fact, and so it is that Jane Austen is endearing to all of us because she turns what might be weighty drama, with everyone suffering through their lives, into lives filled with possibility and thoughts of romance. We would all like to live in Jane Austen’s world and we do.