Jane Austen at the Mall

Though she could not have known it at the time, Jane Austen offered, in "Pride and Prejudice", a pungent criticism of modern middle-class American life.

Reading the novel from a modern day American perspective, one can't help but be struck by how familiar the character of Lydia, youngest of the five Bennet sisters, seems to us today. We know this girl. We cross paths with her every day. This morning she checked out our groceries at the supermarket. She lives right here in our town, perhaps---God help us!---in our own homes. She is the American teenaged girl in the early years of the twenty-first century.

Or to put it another way, Lydia is almost an amalgam of the worst aspects of modern-day American adolescence---female variety. (The boys are just as bad, but they are a different story).

It is easy to see what makes Lydia so familiar to us today. In her boldness and flirtatiousness, her obsession with boys and trivial gossip, her bursting-out sexuality and unrestrained consumerism ("I bought my bonnet…only for the fun of having another bandbox"), her general ignorance and, above all, the utter vacuousness of her personality, Lydia seems the one character in Pride and Prejudice who would feel most at home in modern day America. She has friends here. If it were possible to propel her forward in time two-hundred years to any middle-class suburb in America, I’m sure that,, allowing for some adjustment to modern technology (cell phones, MySpace.com.), she would fit in very nicely with her mall-hopping sisters of the 21st Century.

Now, anyone who has read Pride and Prejudice knows that Elizabeth Bennet, the novel’s heroine, almost violently disapproves (disapprobates?) of her youngest sister. Attempting to convince her father to intervene and forbid Lydia from accepting a friend’s invitation to follow the regiment to Brighton, Elizabeth describes her erstwhile sibling as "A flirt in the worst and meanest degree of flirtation, without any attraction beyond youth and a tolerable person", and further laments the "ignorance and emptiness of her mind". And I think that this is one case where we can trace a character’s opinion back and state confidently that the author’s thoughts on the subject correspond one hundred percent. Put simply, Jane Austen doesn’t like Lydia any more than Eliza does.

Another example of the timelessness and universality of all true Art.

As is happens, of course, Elizabeth is proven right with regard to her errant sister. Lydia 'elopes' with the scoundrel Wickham. Returning home with her new husband, Lydia cruelly gloats to her eldest sister Jane that she has usurped her rightful place as the first sister to marry---ignorant of course, of the fact that Wickham had to be bribed into marrying her and that only through the efforts (and financial help) of Darcy is she saved from the tragic fate of a 'fallen' woman.

On second thought, I don't know if 'tragic' is the appropriate designation. I am not sure that anything that happens to Lydia can be considered 'tragic', except in the most general sense of the word. Her life may indeed turn out to be lousy, but in literature, "Tragedy" requires a certain degree of self-awareness, and Lydia is certainly one of the stupidest characters in all of fiction. She lacks the depth of understanding and feeling needed to experience real tragedy.
One thing we can conclude from all of this is that Miss Jane Austen surely did not like silly, frivolous women. Not only Lydia, but the sisters Steele in "Sense and Sensibility" are prime examples of the type of young women who earned Austen’s disapprobation.

What is interesting in all this is that Jane Austen is often proclaimed to have been ‘ahead of her time’, meaning by this that she was one of "us" and not one of "them", "them" being the close-minded, unliberated British gentry of the 18th Century. But somehow, I do not think that our modern world and lifestyle would have suited Jane Austen at all.