Pride and Prejudice takes place in a society where you’re not supposed to talk to/dance with/*cough*proposemarriagetocoughcough* anybody without first going through a highly formalized little “introduction” ritual. This can involve going to someone’s house and leaving your card, and then waiting for them to return the visit, which is what Mrs. Bennet is badgering Mr. Bennet to do re. Mr. Bingley in chapter one, or, if you’re out in public, say at a ball, you get a mutual acquaintance or master of ceremonies to do the honours and vouch for everybody’s good character. At the Meryton Assembly, Darcy refuses to be introduced to Elizabeth or anybody, because he’s a Grade A Snob. They’re all too low-ranking/provincial/unattractive to notice, and he doesn’t care who knows it. Seriously, bro, if you don’t want to dance, just go play cards in the other room with the geezers, or go home and put your grumpy ass to bed. Stop wallflowering and making a spectacle of your arrogance. You have options, here.
A few weeks later, after Darcy has maybe unbent a bit (read: decided Elizabeth is pretty), Sir William Lucas tries to introduce them again. But! Because Sir William is a country bumpkin, he goofs the phrasing in such a way as to imply Darcy is Elizabeth’s superior (“Mr. Darcy, allow me to present this lady…” instead of, “Miss Elizabeth Bennet, allow me to present this gentleman….” If a man and a woman are of equal rank, you’re supposed to introduce the gent to the lady.). Elizabeth doesn’t even let him finish. This time she declines the introduction and skedaddles, flat-out refusing to launch their acquaintanceship on any supposition of inequality.
After that, there’s really no non-mortifying way to remedy the situation, sooooo….these idiots spend the rest of the novel yammering awkwardly and irately at each other apparently without ever having been introduced, which is fucking hilarious and taboo as fuck.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Jane Austen was doing something VERY interesting here.
“The roof constitutes an introduction.”
All that business with Jane being taken ill and Elizabeth essentially inviting herself to stay at Netherfield – after that, Elizabeth is officially acquainted with everyone else who happened to be staying in the house at the time. All of them are now obligated to acknowledge each other’s correspondence and bow when they meet in public. They can quite properly converse.
The ladies at Netherfield start out imagining, and with good reason, that Elizabeth has come to ingratiate herself with them. But Elizabeth really is only there because she was worried about Jane. (In those days, it wasn’t all that unusual for a cough to turn into a corpse overnight.) Elizabeth makes a point of not intruding on her hosts at dinner, or at all, until Jane is well enough to boot Lizzie out of her room. Even after that, Elizabeth has to be pretty much begged to talk to the others there. From here in the 21st century it looks like Elizabeth just doesn’t like them much. From the Darcy/Bingley point of view, she is not presuming on their acquaintance. Elizabeth is signaling as hard as she can that, as far as she’s concerned, all of them can forget they ever met her the minute they leave Netherfield, and no hard feelings. She is not trying to turn her sister’s cold into an occasion for her own advancement.
Mr Darcy, being both shy and the constant target of opportunists of all stripes, is utterly smitten by Elizabeth’s insistence on not presuming or intruding.
Oh ho, I have lured a true geek out of the woodwork! Thank you; I stand corrected; I kind of wondered if that would happen. My source was Helena Kelly – a lecturer at Oxford who has published a decent amount of Austen scholarship – whom I hoped would have researched to hell and back before making such an audacious claim!
The Bennet women have already visited the Bingley sisters by the time Jane falls ill, so Elizabeth wouldn’t be out of bounds in showing up on their doorstep (early hour and her hair, Louisa! aside). So the piece Kelly missed is that as soon as Elizabeth spends the night at Netherfield, she’s acquainted by default with all the gentlemen too.
It’s worth noting that none of this has happened when Elizabeth first addresses Darcy. She notices him staring at Sir William’s party and cheekily demands an explanation before Charlotte dives in to extract her and hustle her off to the piano. So their relationship still begins with a bit of boundary-pushing. But your explanation of her behaviour at Netherfield is really cool, and applies neatly to both her initial appearances and that amazing bit in the garden where she refuses to “ruin the picturesque.”
Molly's Monsters 