We all love Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Bennet, don’t we? He stands up for Elizabeth when she refuses to marry Mr. Collins. He’s clever. He watches on as everyone around him acts ridiculously. But is he actually a good father?
So far, I’ve written posts about Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Collins, two characters who are considered to be very silly (with good reason!) but whom I attempted to defend, at least a little bit. It seemed only natural to move on to Mr. Bennet, a character who, on the other hand, most readers sympathise with and admire. My own perception of him has changed drastically from the time I first read Pride and Prejudice as a teenager, to now, over ten years later, as a reader who also happens to be a mother of two. When I was fourteen, I thought Mr. Bennet was the best a parent could ever be. He was supportive; he encouraged Elizabeth’s individuality; he laughed at Mrs. Bennet’s silliness and stood out as the intellectual of the family, uniting Mary’s bookishness with Elizabeth’s wit. I liked how permissive and encouraging he is. I saw his parenting style as ‘modern’ and egalitarian rather than authoritarian and tyrannical. More than that, I thought of him as a good parent compared to Mrs. Bennet, because while he is rational, she is emotional.
I am now ashamed to admit how long it took me to notice all of Mr. Bennet’s flaws! We see him through Elizabeth’s eyes, that’s true, and so it’s easy for him to be endeared to us. But his parental failures are obvious and even emphasised by Austen. His permissiveness, which is laudable when he opposes Mrs. Bennet’s insistence that Elizabeth marry Mr. Collins, a man she does not love, is not laudable when he fails to stop Lydia from following the militia to Brighton. In that instance, permissiveness becomes laxity, even to the point of neglect. I used to blame Mrs. Bennet for raising Lydia to be silly and irresponsible, but Mr. Bennet, by refusing to become involved in his own daughters’ lives, is just as much to blame. By refusing to intervene, he’s effectively pushing Lydia into making bad decisions. He’s also surprisingly unobservant for someone who sees himself as the world’s spectator. By the end of the novel, he still has absolutely no clue that his own beloved daughter Elizabeth, whom he favours over the rest and whose judgement he respects, has been in love with Mr. Darcy the whole time!
I think it’s interesting how often the description of Mrs. Bennet at the end of chapter one is quoted as an example of Austen portraying her as a bad mother. Austen describes her as: ‘a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper’; hardly praise, right? But what doesn’t get quoted as much, or gets quoted but is misunderstood, is the description of Mr. Bennet that precedes it:
Mr. Bennet was 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 word that stands out to me here is ‘caprice’. We’re used to thinking of Mrs. Bennet as capricious and volatile, but Austen is warning us, in the very first chapter of the novel, that Mr. Bennet can be like that, too. In fact, what seems to differentiate him from his wife is not that he is rational and she is emotional as I used to think, but rather that, while both spouses are ‘of uncertain temper’, he is reserved and intelligent, while she is loud and ‘of mean understanding’. But is it really surprising that Mrs. Bennet is not as well-read, when her education, compared to her husband’s, would have consisted much more substantially of accomplishments like singing and embroidery? That’s perhaps no excuse, but neither is it a great virtue on Mr. Bennet’s part to be better-read and more well-educated than his wife. No, though their flaws may differ, they can often be equally inept at parenthood.
But before you tell me I’m being too harsh, I also want to defend Mr. Bennet, just as I defended Mrs. Bennet a while ago. They are both overly permissive parents, that’s certain. However, that’s in some ways preferable to Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s overbearing parenting style. And Mr. Bennet does learn his mistakes after all. After Lydia’s disastrous elopement with Wickham, he resolves to be much more involved in the lives of his unmarried daughters, Mary and Kitty, especially wishing to prevent Kitty from following in Lydia’s footsteps. He also regularly visits Jane and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth, after they’re married. He’s not by any means a neglectful father, as he had been in the past. He’s clearly always loved his daughters, but in the course of the novel he has to learn to be less in his own world, and more present and active as a parent. And if I had to choose between him or Mr. Collins as a father, I know whom I’d choose, in spite of Mr. Bennet’s flaws!
Which Pride and Prejudice character would you like me to discuss next? Let me know in the comments!
Nice profile of Mr. B! I've always felt he was hiding behind his books to avoid difficult parenting interventions.
Charlotte Lucas is a very interesting character. Her views on marriage and whether love is a necessity to it, are central to the book.