If it's why I think she is, well, I've gotten the impression that she was pretty hot stuff in her day, but still...
"No, I don't like to cook, but I have a chicken in the icebox, and you're eating it."
I agree with you, Alicia. She's a farm wife, after all, and both she and Mr Bennet seem very "earthy". I also took it as a possibly flirtatious little scene between the two of them. She seemed pretty wild at the Netherfield ball...and not even drunk (I think)! That was probably what Darcy meant when he cruelly referred to the inappropriate "conduct" of Lizzie's mother, sisters "and on occasion, your father"! Bad choice of words there.
I followed all the rules...and you followed none of them. And they all loved you more.
She was supposed to be gentry, not a farmer's wife. Huge difference.
The portrayal of the Bennett family was pretty bad if we were to go by Austen's own book. The movie itself is a different beast entirely.
I don't know...she sure seemed like a farmer's wife to me! Did I miss something? They had animals. They raised them, killed them and ate them. Remember the huge ham hock on the table when Mr Collins proposes to Lizzie? Of course, they had servants and probably farm hands did most of the hard labor. Mr Bennet would be called a gentleman farmer and thus, Mrs Bennet is a farmer's wife. In those days, women's status was usually defined by the men they married. But they did live on a working farm. Nothing wrong with that.
And though they were a type of gentry, then why would Mr Darcy refer to "the inferiority" of Lizzie's birth? Yes, he has a much bigger house and much more land but unless I missed something, he's just landed gentry, not nobility. If the Bennets were the same status, then he would not have said that (especially during a marriage proposal!). Although, others have argued that Darcy merely imagines himself as superior. He has not inherited his aunt's title yet!
Not sure what you mean by the book's portrayal of the Bennets being "pretty bad". You mean Austen didn't like them? Or she was inaccurate? Could you elaborate?
I followed all the rules...and you followed none of them. And they all loved you more.
The Bennets were landed gentry, not farmers.
The difference is that farmers directly worked their lands. The gentry did not. They owned estates that consisted of multiple farms that were rented out to tenant farmers and collected the rent (usually on a quarterly basis). They were idle people by the standards of our day. Mr. Bennet spends his time reading. He does not directly oversee his own fields, even from a supervisory perspective (so you cannot call him a "gentleman farmer."). Mrs. Bennet spends her time socializing. The girls go to balls. They are never shown helping out with housework, let alone the animal side of the business (do not confuse the presence of animals with farming, as animals were a fact of life in rural England - you needed horses for the carriages, chickens were kept to supply you with eggs, pigs were kept to eat the scraps from the table, but all the work was handled by the servants).
There is a huge, enormous social difference between farmers and landed gentry (the closest Austen comes to this is in the novel Emma, where Emma, the daughter of gentry, has a protege in the young Harriett Smith, who later marries a local tenanted farmer and as such it's inevitable that they would no longer associate with one another). I am guessing you are American and America never developed the tradition of gentry estates so you don't understand the difference between the gentry and farmers. Another aspect of the Bennets' finances that may make current readers think they were poorer than they were is that their income is tied up in the estate - it's the revenues from the estate - but when Mr. B dies, the estate (and the revenues) goes to a distant cousin, not Mrs. B or her daughters, so despite their current prosperity, and it is a generous prosperity, they cannot rely on it for life.
Mr. Darcy was not titled, but he was the grandson of an earl and owned a very large estate. Mrs. Bennet herself commented that it was "as good as a lord." It's best to think of Darcy as untitled nobility, if that makes sense.
To give you an indication of the economic disparities of the day, Mr. Bennet had an income of 2,000 pounds a year at a time when the typical laborer made 50 pounds in a good year (and would support a family on that). A housemaid might make 12 pounds a year. A successful farmer's income would be a few hundred pounds. The Bennets were definitely well-to-do. They employed a butler and footman as well as cook and carriage drivers and a housekeeper and maids.
The difference between Darcy and the Bennets would not have been so noticeable to those outside the rarefied world of the upper classes as both were land based families. But within that rarefied world the difference was very keenly observed and felt. Not only was there a big difference financially but there was another big difference socially, as both Darcy and Lady C keenly point out. Mr. Bennet is a gentleman, but he is relatively unknown from no notable family. Mrs. B was the daughter of a local attorney. By contrast Darcy's family were established (huge) landowners for multiple generations, his uncle was a prominent senior judge, his mother was the daughter of an earl and so forth.
That is a very long dissertation! I'm not sure, given all of that, whether I would agree with all of your distinctions. I do get your point about regular versus gentleman farmers, however, but still would be inclined to see the Bennets as farmers, solely on the basis of their living on a farm. I think that there is a confusion between the book and film here, especially regarding Mr Bennet's income. In the film he seems quite put out by having to pay anything to induce Wickham to marry Lydia, and so lets her uncle (as far as he knows) assume the bulk of the payoff, even as he mutters that he must pay him back.
Those are good points about Mrs Bennet lounging around but you do see her doing housework--dyeing ribbons (the ever-present ribbons!) and working in the kitchen. Unlike Lady C's daughter, they do not always sit round listening to people play the pianoforte or idly wasting their afternoons like Caroline Bingley. The girls do seem to have more leisure than ordinary farm children would. And the point about the distinction in Emma between Harriet's status and that of the farmer she loves--that is a good one.
As for American "gentry", no, we did not have it in the same sense that England did, but don't forget that many traditions about gentry and land were carried over to the colonies and kept even after the War of Independence. Two good examples of what we would call "gentleman farmers" are Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. They were high status but could still live on and operate farms. Let's not forget that the concept of "gentry" itself was invented to reward knights and other up-and-coming families for loyalty to nobility. Although this did not evolve in America, the social and mental distinctions between gentry and commoners were quite real in both countries, even up until the turn of the 19th and 20th century.
Those last distinctions you made between Darcy and Mr Bennet and their "heritage" were clearly from the book, not the film. I think we should keep the two things separate. Trotting out all those fine points and lineage differences would have bogged down the film and so were rightly left out.
I followed all the rules...and you followed none of them. And they all loved you more.
I don't want to get into a long battle over terminology but the Bennets are not farmers. This is a flat out wrong assumption. Farmers are people who directly worked their lands. The Bennets do not. There is nothing in Pride and Prejudice to suggest this, in fact, if Mr. Bennet was riding his own fields supervising the farm laborers and the girls helping out on the "farm", they would not be landed gentry, nor would Mr. Bennet be a "gentleman" (as he is referred to in the book). You have to be very, very careful in making the assumption that the Bennets were farmers. Farmers do not, and never did, live in large manor houses and attended by fleets of servants, as the Bennets are (name me a real life farmer that had a butler and footman, both directly referenced in the book). If the Bennets had been "farmers," even more prosperous, gentlemanlike farmers who adopted some of the pretensions and affections of the gentry, they would not have been accepted by local gentry families and considered part of the gentry. This was a very socially divided society with a keenly felt difference between those who worked with their hands (this includes farmers) and the gentleman classes, who did not.
Mrs. Bennet has a cook and prides herself on keeping a good table. She does not cook. Why would she? She also has a housekeeper to supervise the cook and cooking. Mrs. Bennet would set the menus and place the orders for food to be supplied (via the housekeeper or servants dispatched to the markets).
The lesser/smaller gentry could and did take a slightly more involved role in their housekeeping, with the mistress of the house or her eldest daughters helping to supervise the cooking by the kitchen staff, especially of foodstuff that involved expensive ingredients. There is actually a reference to this in Pride and Prejudice, when Mrs. Bennet comments that Charlotte Lucas was needed home to help supervise the making of some cakes (which involved sugar, dried fruits and usually alcohol - the typical fruitcakes of the day - and all expensive ingredients that would have been locked up and required either the housekeeper or family members to dole out to the servants for the preparation - in Downton Abbey, for example, the housekeeper is the sole person with access to the locked pantry, not the cook). But Mrs. Bennet also pointedly comments that her girls have nothing to do with cooking, and this point also emphasizes the Bennets' greater prosperity relative to the still comfortably off Lucases.
FYI, anything related to clothing, especially for women, was acceptable for gentry women to be involved. Trimming hats, replacing older lace or trims with new ones on clothing, simple mending, making new simple dresses, was all acceptable for gentry women as part of the "gentle" arts for gentlewomen. It was one of the things they did to pass the time.
I'm aware of George Washington and the American plantation model where wealthy planters oversaw their own plantations and fields and laborers, but this is not America, but England, where standards were more rarefied. Labor was always much more expensive in America, so Americans had fewer servants. Few men were willing to be tenanted farmers in a place where having your own farm was readily possible, so the model of estates consisting of series of tenanted farms never really arose. The plantation model in the United States is not a duplication of the British gentry model despite the gentlemanlike affections adopted by American planters.
FYI, would have you called George Washington or Thomas Jefferson "farmers"? Even on the great American plantations the vast majority of the labor and chores were performed by the slaves, not the masters and mistresses and their children. Martha Washington supervised her slaves, she did not do the daily cooking or laundry or cleaning.
In short, if Mr. Bennet had merely been a prosperous farmer with some gentleman-like pretensions, his daughters would never have been in a position to meet Darcy or Bingley, let alone contemplate marriage with them.
Few men were willing to be tenanted farmers in a place where having your own farm was readily possible, so the model of estates consisting of series of tenanted farms never really arose.
I think that there is a confusion between the book and film here, especially regarding Mr Bennet's income. In the film he seems quite put out by having to pay anything to induce Wickham to marry Lydia, and so lets her uncle (as far as he knows) assume the bulk of the payoff, even as he mutters that he must pay him back.
Mr Bennet would be called a gentleman and Mrs. Bennet would be called a Gentleman's wife.
Darcy refers to Lizzy's "inferiority" because she has extended family in trade and he has extended family who are nobility. Connections were very important to people.
That was the funniest scene ever! As a chinese who was raised in germany i don t fully understand the different layers of society depicted but i had the feeling that either there must be a particular sentence in the book which led the filmmakers to create this weird but funny moment or - the pigs "stuff" was simply a hint to the moms calculating, pragmatic behaviour, a metaphor for it. Calculating and pragmatic bahaviour that is depicted as somewhat "shameless" by the bystanders
shareIt's not in the book.
Mrs. B in the book is quite different from Mrs. B in this production. The 1996 P&P as well as the earlier 1980s version are much more accurate.
If it's why I think she is
I guess I just have to ask, why do you think she is? I feel clueless but I still don't get why she was looking at the pig like that.