The keen feeling of hazard and loss that attends Elizabeth’s point of view—the caution Jane gives her that Elizabeth’s habit of interpretation will “ruin [her] happiness”—is lost in a critical interpretation that celebrates her character as a representative of either social progress, cultural conservation or aesthetic consolidation.

Charlotte knows her views and states them without ambiguity, rendering Austen’s great formal innovation, free indirect speech, notably irrelevant.

Charlotte’s short speech is punctuated with terms of finality—“entirely,” “in the least,” “always”—even as it loosely follows a couple from “beforehand,” through marriage, to the horizon of having “passed your life.”

This “Jane Austen,” the author of a body of texts that circulated across four continents within decades of their publication in England, has a less obvious relationship to the western ideal of the liberal autonomous individual

Charlotte Lucas poses this question to Austen studies and to a liberal feminist critical agenda: what if you choose less, choose safety, and choose constraint; choose, in Elizabeth Bennet’s words, a “humiliating picture” for yourself but nonetheless expect to be happy? Charlotte is largely overlooked in Austen criticism except to shadow Elizabeth Bennet, the “most modern and liberated” of Austen’s characters.50 Charlotte models a form of subjectivity that thus far has been temporalized into a version of the premodern that Austen was eager to transcend. Yet the relevance that she has for feminism today is acute, as we expand our focus to a global context that encompasses modes of female agency and fulfillment that are not oriented toward resistance or autonomy. Taking the relationship between Charlotte and Elizabeth not as a dynamic of oppression and liberation, but as an agonistic exchange that produces multiple forms of female subjec-tivity allows Austen’s fiction to become a richer and more productive site for imagining feminism’s multiplicity. Charlotte and Elizabeth’s differing expectations about conjugal intimacy suggest the multiplicity of roles marriage can have in mediating between self and society. In particular, Charlotte’s long overlooked perspective points toward the possibility of human flourishing in situations of restraint and of attaching significance to self-discipline and to submission to social expectations. We can recognize the significance of Charlotte’s presence in Austen’s narrative and her own claim “to be . . . happy” only when we no longer assume that emancipatory self-expansion exhausts the possibilities of empowered conjugality.

More recently, some feminist criticism has turned away from describing female subjectivity as normatively governed by a will to resist. In looking to describe modes of female subjectivity outside a subversion/complicity duality and identify how women attached significance to inhabiting norms, as Charlotte Lucas did, this critical approach broadens our understanding of the multiple forms that subjectivity and agency take in the early novel.

subjective orientation toward freedom, progress, and self-growth that is so clearly formative for Elizabeth Bennet is not taken for granted by Austen as normative for all women. Charlotte Lucas marries Mr. Collins and expects to live a fulfilling life with him. Conscious of Elizabeth’s differing views, Charlotte anticipates being hurt by her friend’s disapprobation, but makes no excuses for her marriage as an act martyrdom or of submis-sion to crushing necessity

reframe Pride and Prejudice as a confrontation between alternative modes of female subjectivity, some of which, like Charlotte’s, suggest the possibility of an alternative genealogy for Austen’s relevance to contemporary feminists

feminist critics tended to work within a liberal framework for evaluating individual agency as the pursuit of freedom

While the varieties of couples and companions demonstrate Austen’s interest in multiple modes of intimacy, for Elizabeth, Charlotte’s deviancy from “proper” intimacy in one area of her life disqualifies her in another.

One of the most powerful effects of Austen’s novel is to show how attitudes toward marriage provide overriding norms that dictate forms of intimacy outside those cultivated within the conjugal couple.

Elizabeth empties the ritualistic forms of her friendship with Charlotte of real feeling

Elizabeth treats Charlotte’s marriage as a form of moral deviancy

Elizabeth, as we have seen, understands marriage as progressive, parallel to and inextricable from internal growth; Charlotte, by contrast, regards her internal narrative of growth and her social life as a single and then married woman as two separate strands: people are as likely to grow apart as grow together

Charlotte’s marginalization highlights the limitations that Elizabeth’s views about intimacy place on her emotional and intel-lectual curiosity.43 Austen reminds us of the lack of communication between the two former friends by having Elizabeth hypothesize at the end of her visit that she knows Charlotte’s real feelings, though they go unvoiced: “Poor Charlotte!—it was melancholy to leave her to such society!—But she had chosen it with her eyes open; and though evidently regretting that her visitors were to go, she did not seem to ask for compassion” (P, 233). Though Woloch argues that Elizabeth, by this point in the novel (after visiting Rosings and having read Darcy’s revealing letter) “has become the consciousness around which the novel—as a totality—is oriented,” Elizabeth’s parting interpretation of Charlotte’s inner life offers another example of Elizabeth reading social situations aslant: she is confident Charlotte is “evidently regret-ting” her departure, but perplexed that not only does Charlotte not ask for compassion, but she does not even seem to.

By portraying Charlotte as a superior helpmeet who is more than Mr. Collins deserves, Austen hints that the distinction Elizabeth makes between full, scripted banality and empty, untrammelled elegance is a false one

a happy married future can hold more of the same, not the wholesale change Elizabeth anticipates

Are these scenes meant to be savored or overcome? They might be evidence of Austen’s “zest for the small concerns,

Time was full for Charlotte, though “not yet” weighing on her, while Elizabeth imagines her own as promisingly empty

free indirect speech translates the internal contradictions of Austen’s characters to her readers.36 Charlotte is granted by Austen that formal device which critics have long agreed mediates the complexity of her characters at other moments—when her motives shift from relieving Elizabeth of Mr. Collins’s irksome companionship to thinking about the benefits of securing him as her own husband, for example—but here, when Charlotte wants to make clear to her friend that she has not chosen an unhappy life, she is articu-lately straightforward. Charlotte’s mode of communication only adds to Elizabeth’s discomfort about her friend’s attitude toward intimacy.

But, Charlotte’s cathexis of marriage as an institution stands in striking comparison to Elizabeth’s acute surprise at her own hidden internal depths and her sudden discovery of a change of heart about the object of her affection. Charlotte does not experience a sudden change of heart, nor does she acknowledge that fear of approaching middle age prompted her sudden engagement, since I think we are supposed to believe her (Elizabeth certainly does), when she reveals “marriage has always been [her] object.”

Charlotte seems to inhabit the worst of both worlds; even in the domestic sphere her movements, conversation, and enjoy-ment are all checked.

From Charlotte’s perspective, personal fulfillment, growth, and happiness progress (or regress) with equal precariousness inside or outside the couple, and a loving marriage appears to her as an external, only occasionally relevant condition of her future internal well-being. Marriage is a tolerable constraint within which her flour-ishing does not have to be seriously curtailed.

She severs the moral and conceptual bonds linking marriage to progress, conjugal harmony to personal growth, and future happiness to the judgment of character, all of which Elizabeth teaches herself throughout the novel to see as natural and necessary.

Charlotte detaches marriage from a timeline of improvement. She has no easy hopefulness about marriage and progress, couples adapting together, happiness augmenting in time, or self-growth and marriage working in tandem.

Homely and 27

Her expectations that individual flourishing takes the form of unconstraint form a striking contrast to the role that self-discipline and the repetitious practices of everyday existence promise to play in Charlotte’s married life.

Defending her future against the claims of the present (her embarrassing family, her disappointing friend), means that the future expands, freed of its current burdens, to accommodate a future self who will have grown with “greater importance” and a future couple whose mutual progress demands a marital space purified of all intrusions.

The recognition of mediocrity exchanged by two characters, whom nineteenth-century readers recognized as “of superior order” to common novel characters, transfigures their self-consciously lacking public performances—his bad manners, her mediocre piano playing—into performances of intimacy, rather than class allegiance or simple dilettantism

By doing just what she ought, Charlotte falls short of what Elizabeth would have a self-respecting woman do: surpass expectations by getting the more pedestrian ones wrong. She later gets Darcy to admit that his attraction flourished under her practice of not trying to please. Much of the flirtation between Darcy and Elizabeth draws on a mutual desire not to meet expectations

Elizabeth’s process of self-realization through discovering how wrong she was is consistent with her more general practice of negatively inhabiting social expectations. Her course of self-affirmation through negation is opposite to that of Charlotte Lucas, who, despite her age and appearance, surprises and overjoys her family by doing just what young ladies are supposed to do and what everyone supposed she would fail to do: marry.

The intensity and dogmatism with which Elizabeth discovers—and relishes—how wrong she was, how mistaken she is capable of being, shines with a characteristically Austenian comic effect. The mirror of self-scrutiny reveals to her not only that she misjudged Wickham and shortchanged Darcy, but, more pleasurably, a portrait of a woman who makes and moves past mistakes

An ideal man is an incomplete catalog of qualities waiting to be augmented, and in an ideal couple, each participant accrues from the partner precisely that which their relationship demonstrates each lacks alone. By this logic, falling in love catalyzes recognition of one’s short-comings, even as it promises to compensate for them.

Understanding social forms as the moral fabric created by so many individual participants helps explain how Elizabeth can imagine herself personally affected by actions not directed at her.29 Actions must be sincerely felt so that social norms, like marriage, can be naturalized as self-expression. She would like Charlotte to feel secretly repulsed by her marriage or to discover that her friend’s equanimity disguised feeling oppressed by the circumstances that cornered her into marrying without love. It is Charlotte’s equanimity in the face of marrying Mr. Collins that most disturbs Elizabeth and helps her clarify her own expectation that a woman’s internal well-being should be either jeop-ardized or affirmed by marriage

her policing throughout the novel of a “proper way of thinking” with regard to actions in general and marriage in particular

Elizabeth’s discontent stems from the way that she grafts individual choice onto social forms. Marriage, for Elizabeth, should not be defined by its being an omnipresent social form; it should be made meaningful by the intentions behind it.

older woman reminds Elizabeth, that to call such ubiquitous events injurious is to place mistaken emphasis on what is merely ordinary

Identifying her own suffering with Jane’s, she tells Mrs. Gardiner, “We do not suffer by accident,” by which she expresses how Bingley’s abandon-ment and Charlotte’s betrayal painfully revealed to her that persons whom she had thought were “independent” were in fact “slave[s]” to material comfort, the opinions of friends, or the easiest social path.

Elizabeth’s confidence that “independent” young men with “indepen-dent” fortunes always act freely is undercut at several points by the sly Austenian voice, who lauds “the fire and independence of [Mr. Collins’s] character”

interpreting action as intention involves quite a bit of circumstantial squinting, but that making claims about injury also involves taking responsibility for one’s own interpretive position—a mandate, as we shall see, it is not clear Elizabeth fulfills when she judges Charlotte (P, 167). (That Elizabeth’s intentionalist thinking has irreparable consequences for her regard for Charlotte is anomalous in a narrative about misjudgment and repentance.

styles of judgment, with the often surprising suggestion that a critical reading of others’ behavior is not necessarily more incisive—especially because detachment is difficult to maintain with regard to marriage.

Jane’s willingness to construe everyone’s actions so as to think well of them is a narrative resource that Austen wields adeptly; who better to narrate with absolute surprise Lydia’s elopement and the revelation of Wickham’s character (“‘A gamester!’ she cried. ‘This is wholly unexpected. I had not an idea of it’”) (P, 305). Yet, Jane’s will-fully generous interpretive habits are more than comic; they contrast with the tendencies of other more sharp-tongued, detached critics whose predictive accuracy, it turns out, is not more reliable.

The multiple styles of making judgments in Pride and Prejudiceare filtered through conjugality because marriage is action with the highest stakes.

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Austen’s work might instead be interpreted as the scene of agonistic coexistence in which the discus-sions between Elizabeth and Charlotte and the deterioration of their friendship animate competing conceptions of self, moral agency, and modes of affective living

Charlotte Lucas offers a compelling point of departure for bringing the critical perspective of “multiple [ / ] modernities” into eighteenth-century novel studies.

development of modern subjectivity, where the modern subject is assumed to be oriented toward freedom and inner-directed action, overlooks some of the most intriguing aspects of disagreements among women in Austen’s novels and foregoes an opportunity, which becomes more pertinent to feminists every day, to make the novel relevant to subjects and especially to female subjectivities whose self-cultivation takes the form of perseverance, self-discipline, and the daily prac-tice of living in accordance with social practices that do not appear germane to liberation. Charlotte Lucas presents conceptual challenges to feminist theorists and gender analysts because her expectations do not fit those of a romantic plot.

By focusing on Charlotte Lucas, I aim to show that heterogeneous ways of thinking and feeling about marriage, about the decisions of other people (and of women, especially) are not only imaginable, but of interest to Austen.

Yet, grounding Austen’s development of female subjectivity in novel studies has the unintended consequence of limiting the modes of female subjectivity recovered to those that fit the liberal paradigm of private, inner, autonomous selves screened off from (though foundational to) the public activities of communication, exercise of reason, and pursuit of freedom. This mode of proceeding makes subjects like Charlotte Lucas irrelevant and a hindrance to the consolidation of the novel form

Austen develops heroines like Elizabeth Bennet to be ambassadors for novelistic generic acceptance at the same time that they are agents of social reform. The marriage plot is the exemplary union of both, carried forward by Elizabeth Bennet as the upwardly mobile bourgeois female subject who becomes responsible for the modernization of aristocratic culture into which she is accepted.

In the tradition of feminist criticism I’ve been discussing, the Austenian heroine and her romantic choices are exemplary not only of the modern individual, but also the novel genre, so that the interaction between genre and indi-vidual agency unfolds through the marriage plot

Austen’s novels were diagnostic of her social world and conservative in the sense that they offered social compromises rather than fractious challenges to the uncertain social future of her moment.

The agency of the critic is exemplified in discovering and naming the overlooked agency of Austen’s female subjects, who in themselves demonstrate Austen’s attentiveness to the limits of patriarchal norms and her willingness to transgress.

been to emphasize Austen’s overlooked expansive subtexts and allu-sions, her wide, even global appeal and relevance.

Through both analysis and prescription, paying attention to how women can take powerful stances, even from positions of weaknes

Austen exposed the patriarchal conditions of her historical moment and the way romantic conventions coded for power and wealth, while simultaneously using the constraints of her provincial and domestic settings to her advantage, demonstrating the duplicitous aptitude of romantic narratives to make those conditions visible

determined by recent feminist literary critics’ efforts to revise the long history of Austen scholarship

I will argue that the agonistic relationship between Elizabeth and Charlotte exemplifies competing claims about the development of the person through conjugal intimacy. Ultimately, marriage in Pride and Prejudicebecomes a divisive lens for imagining future selves as well as justifying current happiness.

My focus on Charlotte Lucas resonates with recent critical trends that depart from the assumption that the novel’s telos, particularly as revealed in the courtship plot, is the representation of personhood through characterological depth and interiority

Sandra Macpherson, whose reconceptualization of the individual as “matter in motion”

Charlotte embodies the precariousness of self-realization and well being in a world with limited goods.7

Narratives have limited resources—formal development, narrative attention, and thematic social goods—that are unequally distributed between protagonists and minor characters. In the process of being “minored,” the many clarify the one; in Pride and Prejudice, minor characters “contribut[e] to the development of Elizabeth’s consciousness.”5 As Elizabeth’s close friend and, in many ways, catalyst for her development, Charlotte is both a minor character par excel-lence and a register of the costs of such a system of individuation

Charlotte’s views seem “not sound” to Elizabeth because they are anachronistic to developing standards of mutual regard that govern modern hetero-sexuality

Ruth Perry characterizes Charlotte as a “vestigial figure,” whose attitude toward marriage stands within Austen’s novel for a receding premodern eighteenth century.2

narrative of cultural modernizatio

Yet, Charlotte’s stance is important to think through two hundred years later as a reminder of the multiplicity of attitudes toward intimacy, conjugality, and self-fulfillment in Austen’s fiction. This multiplicity remains unstudied by a tradition of Austen criticism that too often remains bound, even in contemporary feminist forms, to the analytic and prescriptive parameters of liberal personhood as those are under-stood to have emerged at the end of the eighteenth century.

Because of Charlotte’s disgraceful attitude toward marriage, “all the comfort of intimacy was over” for the two women (P, 174).

anxiety about her economic future and a conviction that marriage was a social necessity for young women

MELINA MOE