The tragedy of Lydia—that a teenage girl cannot have fun, cannot in fact fuck around and find out without devastating and permanent consequences—that everyone knows Lydia’s flirtation and mild social recklessness are a material danger from the start of the book and everyone is afraid for her, and that fear comes to pass and there is no saving her, only mitigating the damage—is the emotional backdrop for Elizabeth and Jane’s happy ending. Lydia is what happens when a woman is a woman incorrectly. Jane is what happens when a woman is perfect; Elizabeth is what happens when a woman is subversive in very specific ways, ways that Austen identified with and wanted to celebrate and defend. In its treatment of Elizabeth the story is markedly feminist for its time. In its treatment of Lydia it is devastatingly misogynist; but even in all the slut-shaming and victim-blaming and the contempt with which the story treats Lydia there is a loving lament, a cry against the tragedy of a teenager whose worst sin was doing what teenagers do being taken advantage of and brutally punished for it. Cut out Lydia and you cut out everything. Adapt Lydia, and you have to choose to either slut-shame a contemporary character (in which case you are writing a bad story) or absolve her—take the blame off her back for whatever contemporary crisis you land her in for Darcy to save her from—and then again you miss the point. It’s not enough for Elizabeth’s kid sister to land in hot water and get fished out. She has to fall into a trap laid for her from birth. Her crisis has to be one designed especially for her, one she could never really have hoped to escape without sacrificing everything that makes her herself, one that everyone around her and even the story interprets as an irredeemable condemnation of what makes her herself, and the rescue, when it comes, has to be no true rescue at all.
And these things are essential to the romance, not just to Austen’s message about what it is to be a woman (although Austen’s messages about women are frankly much more interesting than the romances anyway) because Darcy’s rescue of Lydia is a necessary demonstration of his love for Elizabeth and his integrity of character precisely because he has himself slut-shamed Lydia, to Elizabeth’s face. “Saving” Lydia (from a total and irreversible fall from society, and her family from a damaging social disgrace) redeems his behavior during his first failed proposal, where he threw Lydia’s “impropriety” in Elizabeth’s face. He used the thing that scares Elizabeth and Jane the most in the world (because they have elder sister syndrome) as a justification for having broken Jane’s heart (read: destroying Jane’s financial future and the family’s economic salvation.)
In his first proposal Darcy unintentionally positions himself as Elizabeth’s enemy. By insulting her family, bringing up her class status, and blaming Lydia/Kitty/Mrs Bennett for his decision to wreck Jane’s life, he affiliates himself with every danger Elizabeth has been taught to fear and defend against. His rescue of Lydia rolls that back. Darcy pivots from the position of “Lydia’s behavior means your family of women should sink like a stone once your father dies” to “I am going to rescue your family from the consequences of Lydia’s behavior.” It’s that transition that finally makes him a truly viable romantic prospect. He demonstrates that he will leverage his wealth and maleness to help protect Elizabeth and her sisters from the brutal way their world treats women. That is when she understands that her only hope of long-term happiness is marrying him.
It’s a story about a world in which everyone is untenable and the circumstances are apalling and everyone just acts like that’s normal because it’s their life. Take that away and you take the whole story away.
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