Ah, man. What a great post. *ties ballsack tightly with a hemp rope* TAKE IT FROM HERE DELORES! *Delores the amazon dressed in tight leather puts on a pair of spiked high heels. She starts stomping the sack* Oh! Ow! Oh god! Fuck yeah in the sack! Thats my sack! Oof! Oh! The sack baby, OHH!
This is unnecessarily long, but: I was just thinking about Wickham's predation on fifteen-year-old Georgiana Darcy and then, almost exactly a year later, Wickham's predation on sixteen-year-old Lydia Bennet.
There are obvious parallels between the two incidents. In fact, they're so obvious that I think the incidents are sometimes treated as equivalent, with the consequences only differing by happenstance. I don't think that's true, personally.
There are some mechanistic sort of differences—Wickham put a lot more effort and planning into the Georgiana situation. He wanted to marry her for her money and to make her brother suffer. She had to be isolated from people who would look out for her interests, he had Mrs Younge in place, he had known Georgiana as a child and was able to exploit his own previous kindness to her as her father's godson, etc.
And Georgiana, despite all of this, and despite being swept away by a teenage infatuation with an extremely attractive man, was still uncomfortable with it. She was worried about disappointing a brother who raised her and whom she deeply loves and admires. When her brother actually showed up by surprise, she decided to tell him everything; Darcy takes pains to give her credit for this. Adaptations generally downplay Georgiana's active decision-making here, but the only element of chance is Darcy deciding to go to Ramsgate at all. He insists that he was only able to act because Georgiana chose to tell him what was going on.
This isn't meant to be an indictment of Lydia, though. Does she admire the parents who raised her? No. But why would she? Especially why would she admire a father who treats her mother and sisters and herself with profound contempt and no sense of responsibility? Why would she ever confide in him?
It's not like Lydia doesn't confide in anyone. In fact, she too confides in an older sibling, her sister Kitty. And in one sense, her trust in Kitty is not undeserved. Kitty does keep the secret. Presumably, she does this because, despite her occasional annoyance with Lydia, she is very much under her influence and goes along with whatever Lydia does. Regardless, she is trustworthy in that sense. Moreover, we see at the end of the book that Kitty is easily improved by being placed in better environments and taught how to behave. She just didn't know better.
How was she going to judge Lydia's situation correctly? Who was teaching her to judge anything correctly? Certainly not their parents.
If Mr Bennet had bothered to interest himself in his younger daughters and try and influence them for the better, impressionable Kitty is probably the one who would have benefited the most. The whole Lydia/Wickham thing would have fallen apart before it went anywhere if all the girls had been been properly raised, even if Lydia did exactly the same things.
And Lydia likely wouldn't do the same things if she'd been brought up properly and, you know, treated with a baseline of respect rather than being openly mocked by her father, the person most able to affect her development. Instead, at barely sixteen, she's been continually rejected by her father, over-indulged by her mother, and flattered by adult men (28-y-o Darcy says he and Wickham are nearly the same age). And she still tells someone what's going on, even though she doesn't care about her parents' opinions or the consequences of her actions. And she was under the protection of a colonel and his wife at the time, who also could have told someone or acted, and didn't.
It's not that nobody could have done anything about the Lydia/Wickham situation. It's that nobody did until Darcy found out and tried to extract her. But it was, in one sense, too late. To Lydia, he's just some unfun acquaintance who says boring things like "go home to your family and I'll do what I can to cover for you." That is, he tries to do what he did for Georgiana.
But Lydia is not Georgiana—she did not choose to tell him about any of this. She did not want to be extracted because she didn't know and couldn't be quickly made to understand what marriage to Wickham would mean in the long term. And she didn't care what her family thought because she had no reason to, pragmatically or psychologically.
Georgiana, otoh, did care about her family's welfare and the good opinion and affection of the head of her family. But despite their radical differences in personality, the most fundamental difference between the girls IMO is that Georgiana had every reason to believe that disappointing Darcy and losing his respect would be a change from the norm.
Normally he is affectionate and attentive towards her. They write each other long letters, he defends her to other family members, and praises her frequently. Georgiana, quiet and intimidated though she may be, talks more when he's around. Disappointing him had actual stakes for her.
Put another way, the potential loss of his good opinion mattered to her because he's gone to the trouble of raising her as well as he can and forming a good relationship with her. She chose to tell Darcy the whole thing because he had earned her affection and trust in a way that Mr Bennet has utterly failed to do. Even Darcy happening to visit Georgiana at Ramsgate comes from his affection and attention to Georgiana's welfare, even if he couldn't have known what would follow from checking on his sister at that particular moment.
Chance is always part of life, and it's part of the novel and these situations. But a lot of how these scenarios wound out was not determined by chance but by long-existing patterns in these girls' educations and relationships.
Excellent points. Mr Darcy is a better pseudo-parent to his little sister than Mr Bennet is to his actual daughter. Darcy actually talks to Georgiana, and listens to her when she talks. Even though he might not have expected in advance that what a 15 year old had to say would turn out to be objectively important.
And yes, exactly! Darcy foils the elopement more or less by accident. He goes to see Georgiana and Mrs Younge at Ramsgate, because he wants to surprise her with a visit. So yeah, it’s partly random chance that he happened to be there. But it also occurred to him to pay her that unexpected visit, thought it would be fun for both of them to see each other. He probably missed her. Mr Bennet did not seem to miss Lydia.
We also see Darcy, when his sister is not around, write letters to her and brag about her accomplishments to his friends. She may be just a kid, but he’s proud of her.
Thank you, and yup! And he also sticks up for her to Lady Catherine, also when Georgiana isn't even there; he's not intimidated by Ly C, but one can only imagine how overwhelming she'd be to a timid, impressionable, still deeply shaken teenage girl if he let that nonsense pass unchecked.
There's a very stark contrast with Elizabeth desperately trying to get Mr Bennet to do literally anything to guide and protect Lydia, and him refusing, vs 27-y-o Darcy independently going to Ramsgate just to see Georgiana, it appears for no greater reason than affection and wanting to check up on her welfare in person.
Neither Mr Bennet nor Darcy knew what the consequences would be, but I think each decision represents each man's habitual conduct as a father figure that have shaped Georgiana's / Lydia's lives and upbringing for years, so the consequences very much track with the overall dynamics they've built with each girl. Lydia would have told Mr Bennet nothing even if he had gone to Brighton to make sure everything was fine; she has no reason to confide in him. Georgiana at 15 was essentially incapable of not spilling the beans to Darcy when he walked into the room.
Mrs Hill certainly could not say that Mr Bennet would do anything for any of his daughters (even Elizabeth) the way that Mrs Reynolds casually remarks, "there is nothing he [Darcy] would not do for her [Georgiana]."
It's all the more glaring because Mr Bennet has total authority and responsibility with regard to Lydia's welfare, but Colonel Fitzwilliam is quick to point out that Darcy doesn't have this with Georgiana and shares her guardianship with him. Darcy and Fitzwilliam are bffs, of course, so functionally this doesn't prevent Darcy from being the primary parental figure in her adolescent life, but in theory he doesn't even have as much responsibility for Georgiana as Mr Bennet does for his daughters.
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I've talked about this before but being a gay woman in slash fandoms always feels a little like anthropology. Every couple years fandom picks a new man they claim is so hot that he transcends sexual orientation. And he never does.
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