Elliot pride
Elliot pride is the dominant, corrosive trait of Sir Walter Elliot and his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, and the central obstacle to happiness and clear judgment within the family. It is a compound of vanity of person and vanity of situation, a conviction that birth and beauty confer an almost sacred superiority. This pride governs Sir Walter's every action, from his refusal to sell land to his disdain for the navy, and it isolates the Elliots from genuine connection, forcing Anne Elliot to find her own path toward a more generous and discerning standard of worth.
Identity and Manifestations
Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character: vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome in his youth and, at fifty-four, was still a very fine man; he considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy. This self-regard extended to his lineage: his favourite reading was the Baronetage, where he could contemplate his own history and the “limited remnant of the earliest patents.” He improved the printed entry with his own hand, adding the date of his wife's death and the marriage of his youngest daughter, Mary. The heir presumptive, William Walter Elliot, is recorded in Sir Walter's own finale. This pride made him unable to bear the idea of selling any part of the Kellynch estate; he would “never disgrace his name so far.” It also made him a harsh judge of others' appearances: he found Anne haggard, Mary coarse, and lamented the “rapid increase of the crow's foot about Lady Russell's temples.” He counted eighty-seven women go by in a Bond Street shop without a tolerable face among them, and declared that the worst of Bath was the number of its plain women. His own dressing-room at Kellynch Hall contained so many looking-glasses that Admiral Croft, the tenant, had to remove most of them, remarking that “there was no getting away from one's self.”
Effects on Family and Social Judgment
Elliot pride dictated the family's internal hierarchy. Anne, with her “elegance of mind and sweetness of character,” was “nobody with either father or sister; her word had no weight, her convenience was always to give way—she was only Anne.” Elizabeth, who was very handsome and very like her father, succeeded at sixteen to all that was possible of her mother's rights and consequence, and they went on together most happily. Mary had acquired a little artificial importance by becoming Mrs. Charles Musgrove, but Anne was valued by no one in her immediate family. This pride also shaped their social alliances. Elizabeth, though she had been disappointed by Mr. Elliot's marriage to a rich woman of inferior birth, could still see in him “a proper match for Sir Walter Elliot's eldest daughter”; there was not a baronet from A to Z whom her feelings could have so willingly acknowledged as an equal. When Mr. Elliot later spoke disrespectfully of the family, the offence was unpardonable. The same pride made Sir Walter scorn the navy: he objected to it as “the means of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction” and as a profession that “cuts up a man's youth and vigour most horribly.” He cited Admiral Baldwin, who at forty looked sixty, as a wretched example. When Anne defended sailors, saying they “work hard enough for their comforts,” Sir Walter replied that he would be sorry to see any friend of his belonging to the profession.
Contrast with Anne's Values and the Navy
Anne Elliot, though bearing the same name, is defined by her rejection of Elliot pride. She wanted her father to adopt “a much higher tone of indifference for everything but justice and equity” in his financial retrenchments. She felt that Kellynch Hall had passed into better hands than its owners', and she could not say to herself, “These rooms ought to belong only to us. Oh, how fallen in their destination! How unworthily occupied!”—except when she thought of her mother. The novel consistently contrasts Elliot pride with the openness, warmth, and genuine merit of the naval characters. Louisa Musgrove, in a moment of irritation, explicitly names “the Elliot pride” as the source of Mary's provoking nonsense and self-importance. Mary herself, when offered a seat in the Crofts' gig, was either offended by not being asked first or, as Louisa put it, “the Elliot pride could not endure to make a third in a one horse chaise.” Anne, by contrast, is described by Mr. Elliot as having “a better right to be fastidious than almost any other woman I know,” yet she is the one who values the company of “clever, well-informed people” over mere rank. She tells him, “I certainly am proud, too proud to enjoy a welcome which depends so entirely upon place.”
Thematic Significance and Critique
Elliot pride is the novel's primary example of a false and hollow standard of value. It leads Sir Walter into debt, forces the family to let Kellynch Hall, and blinds them to the worth of Anne and of Captain Wentworth. The pride that makes Sir Walter obsess over his appearance and his place in the Baronetage is the same pride that makes him a foolish, spendthrift baronet who “had not had principle or sense enough to maintain himself in the situation in which Providence had placed him.” The novel's resolution—Anne's marriage to Captain Wentworth—is a triumph over this pride. Sir Walter ultimately consents because Wentworth's five-and-twenty thousand pounds and his professional success make him “no longer nobody,” and because his personal appearance is striking. But the reader understands that Anne's choice is based on a truer scale of values: the steadiness of principle, the warmth of heart, and the genuine attachment that Elliot pride could never recognize. The pride of the Elliots is thus exposed as a brittle, self-defeating obsession, while the humility and discernment of Anne Elliot are vindicated as the path to lasting happiness.
