Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Into the open with Catherine Morland
- 2 Elinor Dashwood and concealment
- 3 Elizabeth's memory and Mr Darcy's smile
- 4 The religion of Aunt Norris
- 5 The story of Fanny Price
- 6 Emma's overhearing
- 7 Anne Elliot and the ambient world
- Bibliography
- Notes
- Index
3 - Elizabeth's memory and Mr Darcy's smile
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Into the open with Catherine Morland
- 2 Elinor Dashwood and concealment
- 3 Elizabeth's memory and Mr Darcy's smile
- 4 The religion of Aunt Norris
- 5 The story of Fanny Price
- 6 Emma's overhearing
- 7 Anne Elliot and the ambient world
- Bibliography
- Notes
- Index
Summary
At Pemberley, Elizabeth Bennet encounters a picture of Mr Darcy:
In the gallery there were many family portraits, but they could have little to fix the attention of a stranger. Elizabeth walked on in quest of the only face whose features would be known to her. At last it arrested her — and she beheld a striking resemblance of Mr. Darcy, with such a smile over the face, as she remembered to have sometimes seen, when he looked at her. She stood several minutes before the picture in earnest contemplation, and returned to it again before they quitted the gallery. Mrs. Reynolds informed them, that it had been taken in his father's life time.
(iii: 1, 277)What smiles of Mr Darcy does Elizabeth remember? One of Austen's most perspicacious critics captures a reader's difficulty at this point. ‘In Pemberley before Darcy's portrait Elizabeth trusts a likeness even over her own experience, or rather she invests this likeness with reordered memory’, Janet Todd writes. The smile on Darcy's face doesn't correspond to anything that, as far as the reader knows, Elizabeth has previously known about him, and she has to rethink her experience to recognise it. Elizabeth projects onto the portrait, Todd suggests, what she herself feels at this moment, recalling smiles that are ‘rather at odds’ with what the reader has previously understood about Darcy. Indeed, her ‘remembering’ of Darcy's smile is surprising because, though the novel has once or twice shown Elizabeth noticing a smile on his face, the reader has up to this point been left to assume that this merely confirms her long-established opinion that he is an ill-tempered man, and that these smiles are condescending, or worse. Yet here the implication clearly is that Darcy's smile is warm and attractive.
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- Information
- The Hidden Jane Austen , pp. 51 - 71Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014