I read Pride and Prejudice again… and now I get why Kitty
So two things always bothered me about Pride and Prejudice:
1. Jane Austen seemed weirdly cruel to Lydia and
2. Why Kitty? Like, in a novel so tightly, so expertly plotted and cast, what was the point of this seemingly superfluous character?
For ages my answer to those two questions was:
1. Well, progressive, proto-feminist though Austen was, she was not immune to the standards of her time, sadly
2. She needed someone for Lydia to interact with I guess?
I didn’t love those answers but it’s all I had. After re-reading P&P again though…epiphany! I get it! And these two outlying problems are actually connected!
Okay, so hear me out (and possibly laugh at me for not realising this sooner).
Lydia is a flibberty-gibbet. Yes, she’s badly brought up by a silly mother and an indifferent, indolent father, but she’s also naturally not particularly thoughtful, not contemplative or serious, she’s outgoing, flirty, superficial and flighty. She’s good-humoured, she likes to have fun, she’s boy-crazy. She’s a teenager.
Upon first reading, her story seems a typical cautionary tale of its time. It seems to say: listen up teenage flibberty-gibbets! If you go about Lydia Benneting, you’ll end up ruined or married to George Wickham! It seems like Austen has no sympathy for Lydia, who is written as irredeemably stupid and deserving of her punishment… except Kitty.
See, Kitty is just as bad as Lydia. She is like a poor copy of her younger sister. She’s like Lydia in every way except less successful at Lydia Benneting. She also runs after officers, flirts, laughs and seems to entertain no serious thoughts at all. But she does not end up punished. Nothing bad happens to her at all. In fact, in the end she’s taken under Elizabeth’s wing, and there matures, improves and grows out of flibberty-gibbetdom.
And that’s the point. That’s the real moral to Lydia’s story. That’s what should have been Lydia’s arc if Lydia had had better luck!
You might think: no, Lydia needed better guardians. But to rebut this I give you Georgiana.
Here we are presented with a girl whose character we have no reason to fault, and whose guardians are attentive, loving and careful. She still falls for the same trick Lydia does. What does that tell us? Of course it tells us that Jane Austen thinks the moral of Lydia’s story isn’t: don’t be a teenage flibberty-gibbet and don’t let your teenage daughter be one. It’s really: the only reason your teenage daughter or sister escaped being taken advantage of by a predator isn’t high morals on her part (or that she wasn’t wearing a mini skirt and make up) or that you’re such a super parent, but the fact that a skilled predator has simply not taken the trouble.
That’s what Kitty is for. Kitty is what Lydia would have been if she had not attracted a predator. Austen wasn’t cruel to Lydia. She was sorry for Lydia.
I guess ultimately we can see what she really thought of Lydia through Darcy: he thinks her annoying and vulgar, yes, but when he finds her with Wickham, he doesn’t want to rush her to the altar to be rid of her as a problem. His first desire is to return her to her family, so she can finish growing up. He understands that primarily she is not a misbehaving child who needs to be punished or controlled. Primarily, she’s a victim. He’s powerless to help in the end, and so Lydia’s tragedy is complete.
I should have trusted my old friend, Jane. She’s no slut-shamer. What she’s really doing with Lydia’s story is destroying the “but what was she wearing” argument. And Pride and Prejudice has proven itself to be, once again, far ahead of its time.
