Heterosexual Plots and Ill Narratives in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Angry at Fitzwilliam Darcy for his role in disrupting her sister's courtship, Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice (1813) looks on his alleged intended with a sarcastic bite in her voice: "I like her appearance. … She looks sickly and cross.—Yes, she will do for him very well. She will make him a proper wife."¹ The "sickly and cross" woman is Anne de Bourgh, cousin of Darcy and daughter of the overbearing Lady Catherine de Bourgh. In the context of Pride and Prejudice's primary marriage plot, Anne is Elizabeth's most direct structural foil: both are imagined as potential future wives for Darcy. Yet Anne is not a real obstacle to Elizabeth's ultimate success; she exists in the narrative primarily to delineate the difference between the marriage of interest (in which Darcy marries Anne to consolidate his wealth) and the companionate marriage, or marriage for love (in which Darcy and Elizabeth enter into a partnership based on mutual esteem and compatible personalities). The novel's critique of aristocratic greed and the marriage of interest is figured through Anne's under-defined illness; her elitism and her illness are conflated, as though "sickly" and "cross" are synonymous. This essay concerns the roles of sickness and health in the construction of Pride and Prejudice's heterosexual marriage plot. My title pays homage to Marilyn Farwell's work of queer feminist narratology, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives, in which Farwell argues that normative narrative structure "encode[s] heterosexuality … in its very mechanics."² I will suggest that the mechanics of Austen's most influential marriage plot operate by deploying an idealized femininity that is essentially healthy and by defining ill femininity as narratively unviable.

We are generally accustomed to a gendered ideology that understands dependency, passivity, and femininity to be interlocking terms that are set against self-sufficiency, agency, and masculinity. It is not, therefore, surprising that a propensity towards illness has often been conceived of as a feminine trait. Symptoms of specific illnesses, like consumption, intersect with norms of feminine beauty, and sentimental literature often represents acute or fatal illness in the wake of trauma as indicative of feminine virtue.³ However, by the end of the eighteenth century, feminist critiques of sentimental femininity were becoming prevalent, and these critiques were often framed in terms of illness and illness's effect on companionate heterosexuality. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, indicted a system of sentimental education designed to keep upper-class white women weak, beautiful, and essentially ill. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft argues that due to "inattention to health during infancy … dependence of body naturally produces dependence of mind; and how can she be a good wife or mother, the greater part of whose time is employed to guard against or endure sickliness?"⁴ Wollstonecraft and Austen are often cast as political foils, but Pride and Prejudice manifests Vindication's pathologizing strategy to critique sentimental, aristocratic femininity, with the result that it paints healthy and resilient femininity as essential to the companionate marriage plot.

All of Austen's novels are invested in exploring the lines between health and illness, and between illness and character flaw.⁵ I focus on Pride and Prejudice in this essay because the relationship between the healthy heroine and the ill foil is so stark and so central to the plot itself and because it is perhaps the most influential of Austen's novels, insofar as it provided both plot and character types that have become ubiquitous in Anglo-American culture. If we accept that Pride and Prejudice has had an outsized role in the replication of what we now call the romantic comedy, the fact that Austen understood narrative structure through the lens of health and illness matters. While Austen's novels do not evince uncomplicated relationships to their own marriage plots, it is the narrative and characterological structures—often flattened out or simplified—that have made their way through the centuries in many forms. These structures have impacted our modern assumptions about the role of health and wellness in happy...