Lydia Bennet: Feminist Heroine?

Arguments For and Against

For this month’s Jane Austen character review, I have picked Lydia Bennet, the youngest of Pride and Prejudice’s Bennet sisters. Few characters are met with as much irritation by readers as Lydia. She’s rash, overconfident, vapid, and loves attention to a fault. She’s also met with nothing but love and support from her mother, our beloved (if silly) Mrs. Bennet, no matter how inappropriately she behaves.

And yet, more recently readers (although to be honest, mostly literary critics) have made attempts to recover Lydia’s character. She has been turned into somewhat of a feminist icon. If you’re baffled by the idea, let me explain. In a sexually repressive society like Regency England, Lydia’s choice to love who she wishes and when she wishes, regardless of the consequences, is a feminist statement. Lydia escapes the strictures of her time in her bold choice to run away with Wickham; she knows she is flouting convention, but she doesn’t care, because she’s a ‘strong, independent woman’, much like her sister Elizabeth or Charlotte Bronte’s beloved character Jane Eyre.

First of all, there is the fact that Lydia’s behaviour is entirely impulsive, and seemingly has nothing to do with any intellectual realisation that women are oppressed or that moral rules are unjust in her society. But even if that were the case, we still don’t have to accept the contemporary liberal feminist view that sex without commitment is empowering. I won’t go into this at length here, as many sex-realist feminist (Mary Harrington, Louise Perry, and Erika Bachiochi amongst others) have written on this extensively. What I’ll say is that Lydia’s passion for Wickham is strong, but fleeting. ‘As for Wickham and Lydia, their characters suffered no revolution from the marriage of her sisters.’, the last chapter of Pride and Prejudice tells us, and they soon grow tired of each other: ‘His affection for her soon sunk into indifference: hers lasted a little longer’. Lydia finds herself bound to a man with whom moral growth is impossible, as they bring out their worst faults. Their love is quickly abated by their constant moving around and need for more money than Wickham earns. She remains stubborn, thoughtless, and impulsive. There is nothing liberatory about Lydia’s character arc which sees her married to an equally reckless man at the age of fifteen. If Lydia’s parents were tyrannical or overbearing, one would at least feel compassion for her, and understand her choice to run away with the first man who showed her kindness if it meant escaping her home. But Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are permissive (to a fault), loving (if naive and a bit absent-minded), and generous. Lydia has four sisters who also love and cherish her in spite of her embarrassing behaviour. Lydia’s conduct is entirely of her own choosing.