By Ariel Cheng, VI form

Editor’s Note: The Coleman Prize in English is awarded to the student, who, in the judgment of the English Department, has submitted the most outstanding essay during the academic year. 

In Pride and Prejudice, Austen synthesizes the Romantic and Enlightenment ideals of truth by arguing that love requires passion tempered by reason. Elizabeth Bennet, the novel’s protagonist, embodies the Enlightenment ideal of truth; a “rational creature”, she strives to judge other characters through careful thought and active deliberation (Austen 106). In stark contrast to this portrait of reason stands Fitzwilliam Darcy, a symbol of the Romantic ideal of truth. Unlike Elizabeth, Darcy judges others based on his feelings and intuitions. In the world that Austen crafts, no character is completely correct: neither perspective is sufficient for making accurate judgements. The Romantic passion of Darcy’s proposal is not enough for Elizabeth to change her mind; likewise, Elizabeth’s use of logical reasoning leads her to misjudge Darcy’s character. Indeed, the turning point of the novel occurs when both characters acknowledge the ideological perspective they have ignored – Elizabeth appreciates the Romantic ideal of truth after she visits Pemberley, and Darcy recognizes the importance of reason as he hands Elizabeth his letter. In this way, Austen presents love as a form of knowledge: to love another is to truthfully understand their character by exercising both passion and reason.

Before introducing either reason or passion as ways of arriving at truth, Austen justifies the necessity of following these approaches. Austen’s characters do not have ready access to the truth – instead, they make do with information transmitted through conversation, colored by social standing and perspective, transmuted by the biased worldviews of individuals. This social warping of reality – symbolized by free indirect discourse – gives rise to a struggle for truth that every character must resolve. This dilemma is so central to the novel that Austen introduces it from the very beginning. The first line of Pride and Prejudice reads: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (Austen 1). At first glance, the tone of this opening line reads like a statement of fact, confident almost to the point of arrogance; however, a closer examination reveals a surprising layer of nuance. Here, the author does not claim that the narrator’s statement is universally true, but that it is “universally acknowledged”; Austen is not making a brass ontological claim about what exists in reality, but an epistemological one about what is believed “in the minds of the surrounding families” (Austen 1). This blurring of lines between what exists in the minds of others (beliefs) and what exists in reality (ontological truth) is not an accidental imprecision, but a comment on the difficulty of knowing accurate information in Regency England. To access ontological reality, individuals must pierce this veil of constructed truth – represented by free indirect discourse – propped up by society through exercising reason, passion, or a combination of both.

Having set up this struggle for truth, Austen proposes a solution in the character of Elizabeth Bennet. This character represents the Enlightenment ideal of truth, serving as a symbol of reason and rationality. Seemingly free of social pressures, Elizabeth runs to Netherfield Park in a muddy dress when Jane is sick; she even rejects the proposals of both Darcy and Mr. Collins, a radical act for a woman at that time. In both of these pivotal scenes, Elizabeth’s blatant disregard for societal convention enables her to actively deliberate and reason. But for all of Elizabeth’s rationality, she still misjudges the characters of Darcy and Wickham. Austen points out that this failure is due to her refusal to acknowledge the Romantic idea of certain truths as transcendent and unknowable. In continuing to judge both Darcy and Wickham based on their first impressions, Elizabeth commits the same error as Laplace and Newton by thinking that humans act predictably. The social world, Austen contends, is not a clockwork universe that steadily ticks forward according to a consistent set of rules: individuals are unpredictable, flawed, and should not be judged through pure reason alone. Indeed, Elizabeth only starts judging Darcy accurately after she visits the Pemberley estate; overcome by the “natural beauty”, the passion she feels in this scene serves as a signal that Darcy is a good match for her (Austen 235). This new knowledge did not come from a cognitive source, but a deeper, emotional one. It is important to note here that Austen is not unequivocally advocating for the Romantic perspective, but rather a synthesis of the Romantic approach with the Enlightenment approach. Elizabeth starts to change her mind about Darcy after she reads his letter, a wholly rational act; however, to complete this process and confirm her conclusions, she also becomes a Romantic by trusting her emotions as a source of knowledge. Like Kant, Austen acknowledges that there are limits to what truths pure reason can deliver. To overcome these limitations, she argues that it is necessary to respect some truths as unknowable and fundamentally emotional in nature. In this way, the ultimate cause of Elizabeth’s attainment of truth is rooted in both Romantic and Enlightenment ideals.

If Elizabeth represents the thesis that truth can be reached through rationality, then Fitzwilliam Darcy represents the antithesis that truth can be reached through passion. Where Elizabeth favors logic and reason as epistemological instruments, Darcy uses his emotions to judge others; for example, without any concrete information or evidence, he separates Jane and Mr. Bingley based on an intuition that Jane was not truly in love. His over-reliance on subjective feelings as a source of knowledge even led to his initial misjudgment of Elizabeth. Unimpressed and unmoved by her physical beauty, he declares that she is “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt [him]” and refuses to dance with her (Austen 13). Indeed, it is only after he sees beyond Elizabeth’s physical appearance and comes to appreciate the “liveliness of [her] mind” that he falls in love with her (Austen 359). This act in itself is a partial capitulation to the Enlightenment mode of thought; however, an aesthetic appreciation of Elizabeth’s logic is different to applying logic as a tool for attaining truth. Indeed, Darcy continues to misjudge reality throughout Elizabeth’s time at Rosings. His attempts at reaching out to her – waiting for her on her favorite paths, visiting her with Colonel Fitzwilliam, his proposal of marriage – fail due to the inherent subjectivity of his approach to truth. The Romantic conception of truth proclaims that “you create your own version of the universe”; truth is thus inherently subjective, and a particular truth is inextricable from the individual for whom that fact is true (Berlin 121). Austen’s characterization of Darcy’s awkward attempts to connect with Elizabeth can thus be read as a critique targeting the impractical subjectivity for which Romantic truth advocates. To Darcy, it is unequivocally true that he is in love with Elizabeth; he does not think it is necessary to rationally justify these subjective feelings to Elizabeth, and thus is unable to see that she is annoyed by his attempts to connect until she angrily rejects his proposal. Darcy giving Elizabeth his letter represents his realization that objective truth is important, and that reason combined with emotion is necessary for reaching accurate beliefs. By explaining his reasons and justifications for his actions to Elizabeth, Darcy grounds his “version of the universe” in the objective frame of ontological reality; the process of deliberation involved in writing the letter also makes him realize that some of his past judgments (such as his view that Jane was not in love with Mr. Bingley) are too illogical and not based enough in reason. In this sense, Darcy’s ability to make accurate judgments by the end of the novel is also a synthesis of Romantic and Enlightenment ideals.

Throughout the novel, the epistemological journeys of Darcy and Elizabeth parallel the development of their romance – Darcy only acts on his love for Elizabeth after he hands her the letter (his first use of reason to reach truth), and Elizabeth only falls in love with Darcy after she visits Pemberley (her first use of passion to reach truth). Austen uses this characterization of Darcy and Elizabeth to argue that both reason and passion combined are necessary to reach truth. This synthesis of Romantic and Enlightenment ideals aside, Austen has a larger point to make: she reframes love as an epistemological activity. For Austen’s characters, love functionally acts as a form of knowledge because knowing someone’s character is a necessary – even sufficient – condition for romance. Darcy falls for Elizabeth as soon as he fully understands her intellectual character; likewise, Elizabeth starts feeling affection for Darcy after she comes to appreciate his kindness. In this way, Pride and Prejudice also reveals that sometimes, the search for ontological truth and the search for romantic love are one and the same.

Ariel Cheng is a VI Former. She wrote this essay in her V form year as part of an English assignment.