Wherever You Go, There You Are: On Setting and Society in Pride and Prejuduce

In Pride & Prejudice , neighborhood comes first—literally. It’s the first character introduced, the establishing shot for the world that Austen creates, and the defining order of the relations within it. We, along with the Netherfield players, join the story by moving into it. “Place” in Pride and Prejudice isn’t set dressing, but an ecosystem of social bonds, individual relationships, and physical space. It refers to both the diffuse network of individuals within a specific territory (what Austen might call “society”), and the physical sites themselves (which can offer reprieve from that same society). To be seen in society is to be seen by society, and accordingly read and fixed into one’s rightful (social) place. But social bodies are never still. As characters move between “places” and disjoin from their known society, their perceived character destabilizes, creating possibilities for reassessment and reconciliation, enough to make themselves legible to and by each other. Austen’s representation of space is highly personal. Character is wedded to geography from the start. When Bingley removes from Netherfield to fetch the rest of his party, Mrs. Bennet reads in it the possibility “that he might always be flying about from one place to another, and never settled.” Darcy’s behavior at the ball sets him as “above his company” and apart from the others in the neighborhood, who then pronounce “his character…decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world, and everybody hoped that he would never come there again.” By contrast, Wickham seeks to immediately establish himself as a neighbor, “speaking of the [society] especially, with gentle but very intelligible gallantry.” What makes a body likable and “intelligible” is the ability to be read and absorbed into the community. Bingley and Wickham play ball; Darcy, resolute in his character, refuses, and so is maligned and condemned to stand outside it. For Darcy, the country presents a “very confined and unvarying society,” one defined by its wildness and lack of conformity to social decorum. When Caroline criticizes Elizabeth for walking to Netherfield, she finds it “an abominable sort of conceited independence” that shows a […]

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