Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Bennet (marriage)

The marriage of Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Bennet is the novel's most consequential domestic failure, a union entered for superficial attractions that long ago exhausted its slender stock of real affection. Their life together at Longbourn provides the emotional and social atmosphere in which their five daughters are raised, and the defects of that atmosphere—the father's indolent mockery, the mother's obsessive matchmaking and utter lack of discretion—directly shape the romantic crises of Jane, Elizabeth, Lydia, and the family's standing in the neighbourhood. The marriage stands as a living counterexample to every ideal of conjugal felicity the novel entertains, and its lessons are absorbed with particular pain by Elizabeth, who must reckon with what her parents' example means for her own choices.

Origins and Character of the Union

Mr. Bennet married young, captivated by youth, beauty, and that appearance of good humour which youth and beauty generally give. His wife, a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper, brought him a fortune of four thousand pounds from her father, an attorney in Meryton. The match was imprudent from the start: Mr. Bennet's quick parts, sarcastic humour, and love of reading found no counterpart in a woman whose mind was less difficult to develop and whose business in life was to get her daughters married. Very early in their marriage, all real affection for her ended; respect, esteem, and confidence vanished forever, and all his views of domestic happiness were overthrown. He sought comfort not in the usual consolations of the unfortunate but in the country and in books, and from his wife's ignorance and folly he derived his principal amusement. This is not the sort of happiness a man would in general wish to owe to his wife, but where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.

Daily Dynamics and Family Consequences

The Bennet marriage is conducted as a running comedy of mutual incomprehension, with Mr. Bennet perpetually teasing and Mrs. Bennet perpetually missing the irony. When she announces the letting of Netherfield Park and the arrival of a single man of large fortune, he feigns indifference, then reveals he has already paid the visit, leaving her to exclaim that she knew she would persuade him at last. After three-and-twenty years, she still cannot understand his character; he, in turn, has long since given up expecting anything from her but nervous complaints and matrimonial schemes. Their daughters grow up in this atmosphere of parental disunion. Elizabeth, who respects her father's abilities and is grateful for his affectionate treatment of herself, has never been blind to the impropriety of his behaviour as a husband. She has always seen it with pain, endeavouring to forget what she cannot overlook—that continual breach of conjugal obligation and decorum which, in exposing his wife to the contempt of her own children, is so highly reprehensible. The disadvantages attending the children of so unsuitable a marriage become painfully clear to her as she watches Lydia's wildness go unchecked and her mother's vulgarity drive away the very connections the family needs.

The Marriage as a Cautionary Example

Elizabeth's own understanding of what marriage should be is formed in direct reaction to her parents' example. When she refuses Mr. Collins, she does so knowing that her mother considers her headstrong and foolish, but she also knows that a marriage without respect is a kind of living death. When she later refuses Darcy's first proposal, she cites his arrogance and his role in separating Jane and Bingley, but the deeper ground of her resistance is her determination not to repeat her mother's fate—to marry a man she cannot esteem. The novel makes the parallel explicit: Darcy, like Mr. Bennet, is a man of superior understanding and pride; Elizabeth, unlike her mother, possesses the intelligence and force of character to meet him as an equal. The Bennet marriage thus functions as a negative template against which the successful unions of the novel—Jane and Bingley, Elizabeth and Darcy—are measured. Where Mr. Bennet retreated into his library and his irony, Darcy is forced by Elizabeth's reproof to examine his own character and change. Where Mrs. Bennet's folly was never corrected, Elizabeth's liveliness is tempered by principle.

The Marriage's Enduring Shape

Nothing in the novel suggests that the Bennet marriage improves. Mr. Bennet continues to find his chief domestic pleasure in laughing at his wife, and she continues to be occasionally nervous and invariably silly. After Jane's engagement to Bingley, Mrs. Bennet's transports of joy are as excessive and undignified as her earlier lamentations; after Elizabeth's engagement to Darcy, she can think of nothing but pin-money, jewels, carriages, and ten thousand a year. Mr. Bennet, for his part, tells Elizabeth that he has given his consent to Darcy because he would never dare refuse anything to such a man, and that he admires all three of his sons-in-law—Wickham perhaps his favourite. The marriage endures, but it is not transformed. The novel's final verdict is that it was perhaps lucky for Mr. Bennet that his wife still was occasionally nervous and invariably silly, for he might not have relished domestic felicity in so unusual a form. The Bennet marriage remains what it has always been: a settled disappointment, borne with wit on one side and obliviousness on the other, and a permanent warning to their daughters of what happens when a woman marries without esteem and a man marries without judgement.