Hegel with Austen
Austen, not Austin: it is Jane Austen who is perhaps the only counterpart
to Hegel in literature: Pride and Prejudice is the literary Phenomenology of
Spirit; Mansfield Park the Sience of Logic and Emma the Encyclopaedia . . . No
wonder, then, that we find in Pride and Prejudice the perfect case of this
dialectic of truth arising from misrecognition. Although they belong to
different social classes – he is from an extremely rich aristocratic family,
she from the impoverished middle classes – Elizabeth and Darcy feel
a
strong mutual attraction. Because of his pride, his love appears to Darcy
as something unworthy; when he asks for Elizabeth's hand he confesses
openly his contempt for the world to which she belongs and expects her
to accept his proposition as an unheard-of honour. But because of her
prejudice, Elizabeth sees him as ostentatious, arrogant and vain: his
condescending proposal humiliates her, and she refuses him.
This double failure, this mutual misrecognition, possesses a s tructure
of a double movement ofcommunication where each subject receives from
the other its own message in the inverse form: Elizabeth wants to present
herself to Darcy as a young cultivated woman, fun of wit, and she gets
from him the message 'you are nothing but a poor empty-minded creature,
full off a false finesse; Darcy wants to present himselfto her as a proud gentleman, and he gets from her the message 'your pride is nothing but
contemptible arrogance'. After the break in their relationship each
discovers, through a series of accidents, the true nature of the other – she
the sensitive and tender nature ofDarcy, he her real dignity and wit – and
the novel ends as it should, with their marriage.
The theoretical interest of this story lies in the fact that the failure
of their firs t encounter, the double misrecognition concerning the real
nature ofthe other, functions as a positive condition ofthe final outcome:
we cannot go directly for the truth, we cannot say, 'If, from the very
beginning, she had recognized his real nature and he hers, their story
could have ended at once with their marriage.' Let us take as a comical
hypothesis that the first encounter of the future lovers. was a success
that Elizabeth had accep ted Darcy's first proposal. What would happen?
Instead ofbeing bound together in true love they would become a vulgar
everyday couple, a liaison of an arrogant, rich man and a pretentious,
empty-minded young girl. If we want to spare ourselves the painful
roundabout route through the misrecognition, we miss the Truth itself:
only the 'working-through' of the misrecognition allows us to accede
to the true nature of the other and at the same time to overcome our
own deficiency – for Darcy, to free himself of his false pride; for Elizabeth,
to get rid of her prejudices.
These two movements are interconnected because Elizabeth encounters, in Darcy's pride, the inverse image of her own prejudices; and Darcy,
in Elizabeth's vanity, the inverse image of his own false pride. In other
words, Darcy's pride is not a simple, positive state of things existing
independently of his relationship with Elizabeth, an immediate property
ofhis nature; it takes place, it appears, only from the perspective of the prejudices,
vice versa, Elizabeth is a pretentious empty-minded girl only in Darry's
arrogant view. To articulate things in Hegelian terms: in the perceived
deficiency of the other, each perceives- without knowing it the falsity of
his/her own subjective position; the deficiency of the other is simply an objectification of the distortion of our own point of view.
