"Any Satisfactory Description"

"Not all that Mrs. Bennet, however, with the assistance of her five daughters, could ask on the subject was sufficient to draw from her husband any satisfactory description of Mr. Bingley. They attacked him in various ways; with barefaced questions, ingenious suppositions, and distant surmises; but he eluded the skill of them all . . . "*

My epigraph comes from the beginning of Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Bennet has met Mr. Bingley, but, to his wife and daughter's dismay, won't reveal anything about Mr. Bingley's looks. A bit later in the novel, as Mrs. Bennet is relating the events of the dance, "Mr. Bennet protested against any descriptions of finery."* Mr. Bennet doesn't want to hear his wife prattle about clothes, which may not be so surprising, but it is interesting that Austen refuses to provide such description in any case. As John Wiltshire notes, Austen work is characterized by a "restriction of the visual."  Her novels often "leav[e] it entirely up the reader to imagine or, rather not to imagine"** any description of setting, dress, or objects.

I like Wiltshire's essay--after all, I keep assigning it to my students! But I'm interested in, and more than a little worried about, what happens when we are told that a writer is leaving something for the "reader to imagine." Of course texts leave much of the interpretive process up the reader; a large body of scholarship, in fact, argues that it is only when a text is read that meaning is generated. But this can be a dangerous position to act upon--or to take too far. Does that mean we get to make up the meaning? Does that mean we let our imaginations run wild? Clearly, in some sense giving imagination free rein is a good thing--we would not have clever adaptations and loose interpretations (like The Bridget Jones's Diary or The Lizzie Bennet Diaries) without such imagination. I get worried though, when too much emphasis is placed on the reader and we neglect the words and worlds that writers actually create. The important part of Wiltshire's statement is that Austen might be allowing us "not to imagine." In other words, Austen leaves descriptions of things out not because she wants to imagine or make up those details, but because she wants us to direct our attention to other issues.

The attempts of the Bennet family to find out about Mr. Bingley's person are phrased as if a battle or a hunt were taking place. The women "attacked him" but Mr. Bennet "eluded the skill of them all." While his elusive maneuvers are in keeping with his character--this is the man who refused to acknowledge to his wife that he plans to make the acquaintance of a near neighbor--Mr Bennet's reserve here is not fully explained. We are left to wonder whether he is unobservant of physical traits or simply teasing his family. It is clear, however, that the daughters are enthusiastically--even aggressively--interested in Mr. Bingley's appearance (as he is in theirs).  To what extent does Austen judge this interest in appearance? Is she asking us to sympathize with the frustrated women, and with Mr. Bingley, who find personal traits so interesting and delighting? Or is she, through Mr. Bennet, perhaps, teaching us to place less importance upon personal appearance? Is Austen making fun of us for also being curious about personal appearance?

I would claim that Austen doesn't care about appearance; I can't fully support that claim here. I do want to emphasize, though, that whether we think Austen is making fun of human nature and our superficial interest in appearance, or whether we would argue that she is underscoring Mr. Bennet's odd relationship with his wife and daughters, the key is that her text should guide us--or at least be the first place we look--in making the argument.


*Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. Ed. Robert P. Levine (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002), 48, 52.

** John Wiltshire, 'Why Do We Read Jane Austen?" in A Truth Universally Acknowledged. ed. Susannah Carson (NY: Random House, 2009), 164.

Image: By C. E. Brock (Scans from the book at Pemberley.com) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons