Elizabeth Bennett and the Ideal of the "Accomplished Young Lady"

It is a commonplace to praise Jane Austen for her insight into the "manners" of the society of her time. I have to admit that, as is so often the case with the received wisdom about literary figures of that standing, I found myself a skeptic. Certainly I recognized that Austen has been a font of information about the life of provincial English gentry (I think, for example, of how Thomas Piketty made good use of Sense and Sensibility to explain matters of income, wealth and inequality in Capital in the Twenty-First Century), but her outlook generally struck me as extremely conventional--as tends to be the case with those writers who get to be so exalted, perhaps in the Anglosphere more than elsewhere. (More than the great continental traditions of which I know, for example, those writers occupying the highest pedestals in the English-speaking world tend to be "Establishment poets," with the esteem for Austen in particular oft-noted as a matter of the nostalgia many of the hyper-privileged have for a genteel hierarchical society in which the lower orders are scarcely seen, still less often heard, and even less often mentioned, at least so far as the never very observant elite notices.)

Still, the dialogue about the idea of the "accomplished young lady" in Pride and Prejudice made me rethink that posiiton. Said dialogue began with Mr. Bingley's remarking with characteristic credulousness how it is beyond him that "young ladies can have patience to be so very accomplished as they all are," for he is "sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time, without being informed that she was very accomplished." Of course, his sister and Mr. Darcy proceed to correct his misapprehension, setting a clear standard for what they think ought to merit recognition as "accomplishment," according to which the truly accomplished young lady "must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages," while improving her mind continuously "by extensive reading," and besides this "possess[ing] a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions."

The point made Darcy remarks that he has only met six women in his life who meet this standard of accomplishment--at which declaration Elizabeth Bennett expresses surprise that, with the bar set so high, he can actually ever have met any, for she "never saw such a woman . . . such capacity, and taste, and application, and elegance, as you describe, united'" in a single person.

Predictably Elizabeth's remark did not go over well with that stuffed-shirt Darcy, and a little unpleasantness later the conversation is at an end. Still, as I said, it resonated with me--because of what this "accomplishment" signifies, namely the attainment of a certain leisure-class ideal of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, testifying to great wealth at the disposal of oneself or one's family. After all, where was one to get the time, the money, to become so accomplished, especially without any sort of practical use for all the skills and knowledge acquired so laboriously and expensively in mind? Only a very, very few had all that--such that they were a way of advertising how privileged one was, and gulling the simple into feeling deeply inferior. Moreover, because even the few who have the time and money are not necessarily going to find the actual business of acquiring all the elements of "accomplishment" to their taste, one was unlikely to meet anyone who had it "all," or even came close--while easily encountering a great many pretenders looking to impress simpletons.

That admiration for "accomplishment" of this kind, accomplishment which screams upper-class privilege not in spite of but because of its lack of usefulness; and the belief that such people are in some deep way going far beyond life's wildly unequal distribution of opportunity "superior"; remains very much with us. As much as ever I am struck by how Hollywood hacks, ever the raging conformists no matter how much culture warriors condemn their alleged "liberalism," strive to impress on us the idea that some character--because they are wealthy and of "the elite"--is superior to us in the audience, and to do it in the exact same ways that Bingley and Darcy talked about, like advertising implausible musical or linguistic skills (they always play the piano beautifully, they are always polyglots), or past reading (able to recite literary classics from their invariably photographic memories). Meanwhile, any number of people lie about those things--like their musical knowledge, the number of languages they speak, the reading they have done.

Alas, I suspect very few recognize the soundness of Austen's instincts when she expresses irony toward this fantasy of "accomplished" gentility--and fewer still have the benefit of equally sound instincts as they look at the drivel splashed across the screen today.