Austen and Weinstein, continued, or, A Revisionist View of Pride and Prejudice

Upon further reflection, I find Paula Marantz Cohen's identification of Mr. Collins with sexual harassers even more objectionable.  (That column wasn't behind a paywall yesterday!  Boo!)  His intention was not to harm or objectify Elizabeth; on the contrary, his entire purpose in proposing marriage to one of the Bennet girls was to rectify the harm done them by the existence of the entail.

To modern sensibilities, the solution to the Bennets' problem is simple: If Mr. Collins were anything but a selfish cad, he would simply sign Longbourn over to Mrs. Bennet and go his own way, never to darken their doorstop again.  However, that is a course of action not legally available to him.  An entail was not subject to dissolution, and every inheritor was not so much an owner as a tenant-for-life, holding the estate intact for the next male heir.

In lieu of options not at his disposal, Mr. Collins in fact sets out to do the very best thing for the Bennets he is capable of: marrying one of Bennet girls.  As Mrs. Collins, his bride would be mistress of Longbourn after Mr. Bennet's death, and the estate could continue to be the home of her widowed mother and any unmarried sisters.  Mr. Collins is under no constraint to marry a Bennet at all, as a casual reading might construe the intentions of his proposal as having something to do with increasing his inheritance or strengthening his claim to the estate.  He thus shows himself considerably kinder and more compassionate than John Dashwood, who in truth has a closer obligation to his stepmother and half-sisters than Mr. Collins has to the Bennets, distant relations whom he has never met.

We must keep in mind as well that Mr. Collins is a man of neither property nor wealth and is, at present, dependent for his room and board on Lady Catherine de Bourgh, whose support is bought at the price of obsequious fawning.  A different novel might well feature Mr. Collins as the hero who is rewarded for his enforced humiliation with an inheritance from a distant relation of a chance at independence, and Elizabeth as the woman who rejects the hero out of snobbery to her own ultimate disadvantage and regret; that is, from a different point of view, Mr. Collins could have been Marianne, and Lizzy could have been Willoughby.

In recompense for his act of charity in seeking to marry a Bennet girl and allow the family to stay in their home, Mr. Collins is immortalized as a buffoon and a boor, his attempts to do right by the women harmed by the entail made a mockery.  If Jane Austen meant anything halfway serious when she wrote to Cassandra that Pride and Prejudice was "too light, and bright, and sparkling," she may well have meant the way in which she made Elizabeth, despite her explicitly representing the "prejudice" of the title, so likable that every judgment she makes, even those that are uncharitable, appears reasonable and even praiseworthy to the besotted reader.  It won't be until Mr. Knightley tells off Emma Woodhouse for mocking Miss Bates that an Austen heroine is truly held accountable for believing herself the sharpest knife in the drawer.