When Pride and Prejudice begins, the intelligent and witty Charlotte Lucas is on the dreaded road to spinsterhood. Charlotte is worldly; a realist, not a romantic. Miss Lucas is the voice of reason in our idealist heroine, Elizabeth Bennet’s life. She challenges her best friend; she contradicts her too. Charlotte has things to say, which Elizabeth does not always agree with, but they discuss it all freely, amicably and with good humour. “…there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. In nine cases out of ten a women had better show more affection than she feels. Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly; but he may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on,” she tells Miss Bennet, who dislikes Bingley’s guardedness of his affection for Jane Bennet.
Charlotte, indeed, is a good best friend. I could spend pages here describing her dilemma in the story, but she does it so well in the 2005 film adaptation, that Miss Lucas has become the patron saint of millennials – “I’m 27 years old. I’ve no money and no prospects. I’m already a burden to my parents. And I’m frightened.”
Elizabeth might have been our one true love for many years, when we were her age. In early twenties, as we say today. Don’t we all want to be like her, headstrong, funny, intimidating to the rich Darcies of the world, and the ones to make them fall in love with us too? But, as we slide down the ropeway of our twenties, to no money and no prospects, when we are tipping the scales of becoming burdens to our parents, when we are frightened, our Lady Lucas comes to rescue.
Charlotte reminds Lizzie, and us, that love is a game. Love is a game and matrimony, an arrangement. Charlotte reveals to us the secrets all the romantic comedies had been keeping from us – that in trying to find partners, we might just be running around a circular zig zag of chairs, ready to stop at the nearest one when the music stops. And none of us wants to be left alone when the music stops.
Charlotte did that too, without the guilt of a hopeless romantic or a feminist begrudgingly accepting the realities of the world. She is not the diagonal opposite of Elizabeth that the reader expected to pity. Charlotte knew what she wanted and got it – a room of her own where she can sip tea in peace, and a house that she gets to manage. By marrying Mr. Collins, she got her freedom. At some cost, yes, but don’t we all incur that cost at some point? We always compromise when we fall in love, and some more when we marry.
There comes a time when one agrees to marry an insufferable clergyman who cannot stop talking about his furnishings, boiled potatoes and other excellent vegetables, and his patroness. He might practice and arrange little phrases of compliments acceptable to the ladies, in different tones and modulations, but he has a modest income. He might not understand that “no” means “no,” and does not, in fact, mean that a lady is just being a lady again. But then, he is an heir to a small estate.
When we make those little compromises, our patron saint Charlotte Lucas momentarily inhabits our souls and shuts off all who just do not understand, “Don’t you dare judge me!”
Ekta Rathore is the writer of the column “from love to matrimony in a moment,” a sojourn in the many worlds of Jane Austen.