Pemberley

This is the first in a series of entries about homes and the revelation of character.

“At that moment she felt that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!” 

         -Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice Vol III. Chapter 1

Jane Austen fans, like Austen’s heroine, Lizzie Bennet, thrill to the sight of Pemberley, the home of Pride and Prejudice’s Byronic hero, Fitzwilliam Darcy. Imposing enough in the book, in many of the visual adaptation the house swells to epic proportions, stilling the camera as it takes up the entire screen for seconds at a time. Austen is said to have based Pemberley on Chatsworth, the home of the Duke of Devonshire, and one of the most opulent stately homes in England, thus granting to her wealthy-but-untitled male protagonist home far in excess of his position. Contemporary adaptations, like Joe Wright’s 2005 film starring Kara Knightley, follow Austen into this real-estate fantasy, using Chatsworth itself as a setting.

Lizzy initially visits Pemberley wearing, as it were, three bonnets. As far as her uncle and aunt, who accompany her on the visit, are concerned, they are all simply sightseers, taking advantage of the early 19th-century practice of touring the grounds and sometimes the interiors of stately homes—a practice that endures today  although many such “homes” are now essentially museums owned by the National Trust or similar organizations. Unbeknownst to her relatives, however, Lizzy has also recently—and vehemently-- turned down Darcy’s proposals of marriage. She will cross his threshold in a potentially embarrassing collision of roles: tourist, antagonist, and—inevitably—potential bride.

All of those roles, all of those personas, carry with them the weight of their own kind of desire. As a tourist, Lizzy and her aunt and uncle are looking a house and grounds explicitly designed to inspire envy. If Darcy has followed the prescriptions of current landscape architecture in improving his estate--and the novel’s description of the house suggest that he has-- Darcy has hired a landscape architect like the historical Capability Brown or Humphrey Repton.  Such an architect would have installed a long winding driveway that builds visual suspense and suddenly reveals the full grandeur of the house, and would have played with elevation so the house would overwhelm visitors but not the setting. An estate like Pemberley would have incorporated in its “park” a complex interplay of nature and artifice, of openness and enclosure. The adaptations must fully visualize what the novel only sketches out: the twists and turns of a road that pauses at different key points of view, a herd of deer, the massive façade of the house itself.  It is no wonder, that Lizzy, usually so articulate, finds herself at loss for words: “to be mistress of Pemberley might be something.” 

 Inside the house, Lizzy and her middle-class relatives will again be confronted with the unfamiliar and the overwhelming:  a bewildering array of family portraits in a variety of historical styles; landscape paintings; sculpture and furniture imported from around the globe-- all set in rooms so large that, as the novel shows us, a walk around one of them will constitute exercise. In the adaptations, we see on the face of the actress playing Lizzy both disorientation and desire. The Wright film shows Lizzy encountering, presumably for the first time, massive sculptures of nude men and women. The camera pans the room from above Lizzy’s head, insisting that she view the marble bodies in their full and literally dizzying dimensionality. As viewers, we too experience through the movement of the camera the disorientation of this encounter.

And Lizzy’s is not the only desiring touristic gaze: as in the adaptations the camera follows Lizzy, and in the novel the narrative focalizes the scene to emphasize Lizzy’s point of view, viewers and readers become tourists as well. The adaptations in particular linger on furnishing and decoration, tapping into the bittersweet real-estate envy that has so many viewers—including no doubt, consumers of Pride and Prejudice adaptations--tuning into HGTV. As with shows like “Million Dollar Listing,” it is important, I think, that Pemberley be grand beyond the imaginations of most viewers; if Pemberley were to be just a little fancier than our own homes, our reaction might be simply aspirational, our envy simple resentment. It is important as viewers that we simply cannot imagine buying Pemberley, even, say, with a ruinous “jumbo mortgage.” A Pemberley just out of reach might be painful; this Pemberley, this Chatsworth, locks us into the position of sightseer. And we see most of sights through Lizzy’s famously “fine” eyes.

For those readers who identify with Lizzy—and they are legion--her second persona, as the one who rejected Darcy, is especially poignant. Once she sees Pemberley, Lizzy experiences what we might call non-buyer’s remorse, or in more dignified academic terms, the optative mode. The optative is a way of thinking about the past in terms of paths not taken: we all have experienced the poignancy of the optative about decisions we regret from the standpoint of present knowledge. “What if?” we ask ourselves, often leaving the question unfinished. Lizzy’s “what if” of course, has to do with her refusal of Darcy. As Darcy’s antagonist for most of the novel, even and especially when he declares his love for her, the Lizzy who appears in Pemberley as a tourist has already begun the slow process of revaluating her suitor. Everything she sees, everything she hears from the housekeeper who acts as a tour guide, suggests the entangled desirability of Darcy and his home—and reminds her that she has refused both. “And of this place,” she says, “I might have been mistress! With these rooms I might have been familiarly acquainted! Instead of viewing them as a stranger, I might have rejoiced in them as my own, and welcomed to them as visitors my uncle and aunt.” Lizzy allows herself—perhaps she cannot help it—to indulge in a counterfactual fantasy, in which she is transformed from “stranger” to mistress. It is like Lizzy, and like Jane Austen, who is always alert to the effect of the marriage of one woman on entire families, that Lizzy’s magical (optative) thinking includes the transformation of her relatives from tourists to “visitors.” 

Expert readers of marriage plot novels might be forgiven for not taking Lizzy’s melancholy mode too seriously—even while enjoying it as an excuse to linger over furniture, and vistas. Every one of my students—even those who have managed somehow to escape seeing Pride and Prejudice adaptations on late-night television—knows that Lizzy and Darcy will marry. We all understand that Lizzy has been transported to Pemberley for a reason, and that her tour will be interrupted by Darcy, whose presence will, after an awkward interlude, shift the meaning and genre of the visit, propelling Lizzy back into the marriage plot. And indeed, by the end of the Pemberley scene, Lizzy and the Gardiners are visitors; Lizzy will be invited to meet Darcy’s sister, Georgiana, and perhaps even more tellingly, Mr. Gardiner will be invited to fish in Pemberley’s trout stream. Darcy will even supply the fishing tackle. This transformation also requires a transformation of mode and tense: the “might have been” of Lizzy’s interior monologue becomes at this moment a simple and confident future tense. We know, Lizzy surely knows, that she will be mistress of Pemberley. And this of course takes us back to the original formulation that binds Lizzy’s desires for Darcy to the house and her desire for the house to Darcy: “to be mistress of Pemberley might be something.” If we turn from an emphasis on the “something” to an emphasis on “might be” we see that it is not in the optative mode. Unlike the “might have been” of Lizzy’s reflections as she tours the inside of the house, the “might be” of her interior monologue when she first sees Pemberley suggests possibility. Perhaps even at that moment in the novel, a part of Lizzy understands that she might become mistress of what she sees. Perhaps she knows that she is in—and indeed is the heroine of-- a marriage plot novel.

We have not yet touched for very long on “mistress.” In an eighteenth-century and Regency context especially, “mistress” would have had a primary sexual meaning, as when Austen writes, with her characteristic knowingness, to her sister Cassandra in 1801 of the 7th Lord Craven: “The little flaw of having a mistress now living with him at Ashdown Park seems to be the only unpleasing circumstance about him.” Harriette Wilson, although Lord Craven’ mistress, would not of course have been “mistress” of Ashdown Park. “Mistress” in Lizzy’s comment points us confidently away from the sexual to a more domestic meaning, sanctioned by the laws of marriage and property. Although in the novel, for a few terrible weeks, Lizzy’s younger sister Lydia is indeed the mistress of the man with whom she has eloped, as heroine Lizzy herself must be in no danger. And indeed, despite the fact that she, Lizzy, has flirted with the same man who runs off with Lydia, she is mysteriously protected from Wickham’s red-coated charms. If Lydia is rescued from being a mistress by Darcy’s money, it is Darcy’s property that assigns Lizzy an anodyne version of that title. Lizzy will be the mistress, not of a man, but of a house.

Of course, under the laws and practices of inheritance in early 1th-centiry England, being the mistress of a house does not mean that you own it. Should Darcy die before her, Lizzy might have a “life interest” in the house, which would pass to her children. More likely, Darcy’s demise would mean that she moved to a dower house on the estate grounds; her son and his wife would move into Pemberley. Mistress then, is as little about ownership as it is about illicit sex; it is instead about display and work. Lizzy would be able to wear (but not keep) wear any jewels associated with the family, would choose furniture, would visit the poor on the estate, would manage the servants in the house, including the housekeeper who served as a tour guide to Pemberley and to Darcy’s character. She would host dinners and house parties, redecorate the interior (although probably not on the grand scale of Darcy’s improvements); she would, in fact, represent the house, but differently from the way Darcy does. 

Let’s go back, one last time, to the “something” that ends Lizzy’s internal exclamation. At this point in history the word would have already accrued a variety of meanings, including two that are almost opposite to each other. “Something” could be a placeholder, an indication that Lizzy is not sure about all that would be involved in being mistress of such a large estate. That “something” is faithful to the astonishment she seems to feel at seeing the house, and to the great gulf between her social status and Darcy’s. “something,” though also has a more “emphatic” meaning as the OED puts it: “a thing, fact, person, etc. of some value, or regard.” That emphatic “something” makes sense as well, when we consider that Lizzy’s gaze is, “might” be, evaluative and future oriented. The two together suggest both innocence and knowledge, in proportions that depend on the emphasis, say, of an actor’s smile, or the proclivities of a reader or viewer. Viewers and readers might, then, give very different emphasis to Lizzy’s half (?)-joking comment to her sister Jane in response to the latter’s somewhat bewildered question when she is informed of Lizzy’s engagement to a man she has hated for some time and many pages. “’Will you tell me,’” asks Jane, “’how long you have loved him?’” Lizzy’s answer tells us all we need to know and nothing at all: “I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”