Mrs Bennet's Secret: Did Austen hint at a secret vice?

Pride and Prejudice has traditionally been critical of Mrs Bennet. Silly and ignorant, she has married above her station. She comes from trade, whereas Mr Bennet is a gentleman. Mrs Bennet often finds herself woefully out of her social and intellectual depth and often acts inappropriately. Mr Bennet holds her in contempt, and her daughters are frequently embarrassed by her. She is a figure of classic pathos. The narrator of Pride and Prejudice tells us all this through examples, comments and descriptions. However, what if the narrative voice of the novel were to be regarded just like any other character in the text as partial,  opinionated and not necessarily honest? What if the narrator is controlling rather than showing us “reality”, and what if this act of suppression stresses the narrative structure of the text such that it affords alternate readings of character to emerge from the fault lines or cracks produced by this pressure?

Mrs Bennet is not a “fool” in the simple sense of the word, blindly lurching through the novel as comic relief, a source of excruciating humiliation for her daughters. Her “fool” status was revised somewhat by Rachel Bollinger of the Jane Austen Society of North America and turned more towards a classic anthropological interpretation in which she was interpreted as occupying a more privileged position in society, someone freely able to speak naked truths. In this sense, she is perhaps a little like the “ fool” in Shakespeare's King Lear and ought therefore to be taken more seriously. Despite this, Mrs Bennet is nevertheless fuelled by something more substantial than anthropology; she is a drunk. Worse than this, she is unhappy, desperate and angry. Neither is she stupid, which makes her situation an existential living hell.

This argument requires background information in the same way as Helena Kelly's book  Jane Austen: The Secret Radical, which uses historical facts to establish deeper meanings in Pride and Prejudice. Very often, valuable information is hidden in plain sight in historic literature. This is because it is often assumed by the author to have been so obvious to contemporary audiences that no explanation for certain conditions or circumstances was necessary. Over time, therefore, successive generations of readers can become disconnected from a novel as a purely “historic” phenomenon, and meanings can be lost. An amended historical context for a novel can reinvigorate a text dramatically. For example, the ritualised practise of "introductions” as identified by Dr Kelly in and throughout Austen's writing, changes the nature of our understanding of interpersonal politics in the early nineteenth century society dramatically. Significantly, none of these protocols is ever explained in Pride and Prejudice itself are demonstrated vividly, however, take Lady Catherine de Bourgh's visit to Elizabeth in chapter 56, compared to the countless “silent” introductions that populate the action of the novel as a whole.

This means that when we read Austen, we might be required to bring with us background information in order to “ fill in ” some of the historical gaps generated by changes in taste and fashion.   Creating a context, therefore, is about the accumulation of information in order to be able to “read” between the lines and the spaces of a given text in order to discern what has, in fact, not been written because it has been assumed.   Mrs Bennet generates an opportunity for this approach. She is a literary iceberg of hidden intertextual content.  

To begin with context, Jane Austen said the following about her own relationship with  alcohol:

”I believe I drank too much wine last night...I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand today... You will kindly make allowance therefore for any indistinctness of my writing, by attributing it to this venal error.” (Letter to Cassandra, 20/11/1800) 

“Let me know when you begin the new  tea, and have a new white wine. My present elegances have not yet made me indifferent to such matters. I am still a cat if I see a mouse.” (23/9/1800)

“In being a sort of chaperon...I am put on the sofa near the fire and can drink as much wine as I like.”  (06/11/1813)

 As such, we can reasonably infer that Austen had an appreciation of alcohol and its effects and knew that it was subject to abuse.  It is widely acknowledged today that alcohol was consumed more freely during Austen's lifetime because of the shortage of safe drinking water, although the advent of tea drinking did mitigate this slightly because drinking tea required boiled water.    

Nevertheless, an examination of Austen's Juvenilia (1788-1791), with particular reference to a short story called Jack and Alice, indicates that alcohol was a subject that influenced Austen's writing from a very early age. The story is comic but basically revolves around drinking and its ill effects: characters become argumentative, embarrassing, forgetful and simply rude. There is open acknowledgement of vice, “The Johnsons were a family of love and though a little addicted to the bottle and the dice, had many good qualities”; “The company advanced to the gaming table...(each with a bottle in their hand)”. There is more: One evening, Alice, finding herself somewhat heated by wine (a not very uncommon case), determined to seek relief. Sometimes the characters make no sense: "Preserve yourself from a first love and you need not fear a second”. Sometimes, however, they do: "When a person is in liquor, there is no answering for what they may do."

The idea of an unspoken alcoholic theme in Pride and Prejudice can be taken from its explicit use in the early story Jack and Alice, and its potential transference and adaptation, much later, to a more accomplished context where it need not exist so blatantly and where it forms part of the author's contrary playfulness. 

Similarly, Samuel Johnson's edition of the Rambler (No.115), which was also read by Austen, had an analogous effect. It spoke openly of the marriage industry “procuring ... wives and husbands." (”procuring” suggests here a connotation with material gain and so equates the marriage “business” with prostitution). It continues to predicate marriage upon notions of increasing one's fortune and status. It is not surprising, therefore, that much later, Austen opened her most famous novel with an idea she had gleaned years before from this article: “ It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Here, it is possible to recognise a consistency within Austen's early reading and her later writing. Arguably, it is equally possible to notice a more integrated relationship within Austen's writing as a whole.  Ideas, for example, tend to overlap with each other and are not necessarily the sole product of the novel in which they are deployed. Often, we may regard such patterns as themes,  and as such, they are not directly visible through a simple reading but require a sensitive and discerning approach in order to reveal the prevailing moods and attitudes of characters. This obviously also includes the attitudes of the narrator and/or the author. The intertextual life of Jane Austen's work, or the product of its narration, is therefore key to this argument.   Mrs Bennet can be viewed differently, and we may be able to recast her as angry instead of stupid, worried instead of hysterical and sometimes drunk instead of sober.   

Mrs Bennet is cast as a woman of mean understanding, and that is demonstrated nowhere more than by her total failure to understand the immovable aspects of the law of entail and Mr Bennet's inability to do anything about it. She states to Mr Bennet, “I do think it is the hardest thing in the world, that your estate should be entailed away from your own children; and I am sure, if I had been you, I should have tried long ago to do something about it.” Mrs Bennet's outburst is in vain: or is it? Maybe there are options.   In Persuasion, for example, Sir Walter Elliot finds himself financially compromised and, upon the advice of his friend, decides to "retrench” his position by leasing his large home and moving to a smaller one to make up his losses. Persuasion was published later than Pride and Prejudice, but the idea of financial "retrenching” was not a new idea exclusive to Austen's last completed novel. As such, couldn't Mr Bennet have leased his existing home, taken a smaller one, then saved the capital for his family to provide for them after his death, which could have been years away anyway (he is a gentleman and does not work after all)? Or could he not have sought much earlier to raise a capital sum and come to an arrangement with Mr Collins regarding the entail, essentially to purchase it back?

These options have to fail, of course, otherwise we would have no story. However, they exist in the background, and they allow Mrs Bennet's phrase, “If I had been you, I should have tried long ago to do something or other about it,” to sound less ridiculous and even credible. Her anger, under these circumstances, is not just focused upon her negligent husband but against a patriarchal system that prevents female agency altogether. Mrs Bennet, despite possibly being conscious of potential solutions to her family's situation, is forced, therefore, into a position of impotence which can only make her wish angrily that she too were male, “If I had been you...”. The drinking arguably follows then from a profound sense of frustration and anxiety. Mrs Bennet demands to be taken more seriously.  

Mrs Bennet's “uncertain temper” is not then entirely unexpected nor is the state of her nerves and perhaps as such, she is not a character to be played or read all on the same simple note, “indeed you must go [to visit Bingley] for it will be impossible for us to visit him if you do not,” could be read traditionally as pathetic and helpless, pleading. It might also, however, be simple and angry exasperation; another product of Mr Bennet's passive-aggressive attitude towards his wife, which has persisted for the past twenty years. Likewise Mrs Bennet's simple comment upon her past rudeness to Mr Darcy, “ Oh, dear Lizzy! Pray apologise for my having disliked him so much before. I hope he will overlook it”  is so off hand, so seemingly pathological, that it reeks not of stupidity, but of a thoroughly pragmatic and Machiavellian approach towards the entire “business” of marriage. Mrs Bennet's stock comedy “scenes” may very well be predicated upon the core emotions of frustration and desperation.   They are also driven at times by a subtextual excess of alcohol that often emboldens her to display erratic and publicly embarrassing behaviour. The source of this embarrassment, however, is not derived from nonsense but truth.  

Gary Williamson lives in London and has written for the Dickensian and other journals. He is working on an article based on an eighteenth-century rake called George Soane. This will be published soon.

Works cited  

• “I Hope He Will Overlook It”: Mrs Bennet As Ironic Clown, by Rachel Bollinger, Jane Austen Society  Of North America, Volume 43, No 1-Winter 2022  

• The Juvenilia Of Jane Austen And Charlotte Brontë,  Published By Penguin Classics 1986 (Ed) Frances Beer  

• Jane Austen: The Secret Radical, by Helena Kelly, Icon Books 2024  

• The Sequel To Hymenaeus's Courtship, by Samuel Johnson. The Rambler, No. 115, 23/April/1751, 2nd  Paragraph  

• Pride And Prejudice, by Jane Austen. Published By Penguin 1985, (Ed) Tony Tanner  

• Persuasion, by Jane Austen, Published By Penguin 2003, (Ed) Judith Terry