The Trouble with Mr Bennet | A Conversation with Maria Grace

There's a surprising commonality I've been noticing in some Austenesque authors Pride & Prejudice retellings, wherein Mr Bennet transforms from this passive, sarcastic, mostly-in-the-background guy to one of the main obstacles to be overcome, if not a downright villain. In some works I've read, he's even given Lady Catherine a run for her money. And I've noticed this nowhere more strongly than in some of the works of Maria Grace, who often gives grittier, darker takes on the tales — a trait that is thanks in no small part to Mr B.
So I asked Maria if she'd mind sitting down with me and letting me pick her brain on the story and psychology behind all of this. I've very curious to hear what all of you think, as I've always considered Mr Bennet to be pretty universally liked, even while his flaws are well-recognized, but I've come to realize he's a much more divisive character than I ever imagined him to be. . .

I was thinking that it'd be interesting to talk about your darker tones and general treatment of Mr Bennet, who is often more adversarial (in some of your books, and others I’ve read) than I think most people would expect from having only read P&P and being new to adaptations. Most readers consider him sort of funny and witty and mildly (or more than mildly) neglectful and lazy as a parent/husband, but never downright cruel or a bad guy, especially where Lizzie - his favorite daughter, and arguable favorite person - is concerned. But often in your books, he's more malicious and something for Lizzie to overcome.

MARIA: Oddly enough I was just thinking about doing a blog post on why Mr. Bennet was a truly dreadful father, so maybe I'm channeling your wavelength.

Great minds, and all that.
So let's start there: you think Bennet was a truly dreadful father? Not just lazy, not just clueless, but downright terrible?

MARIA: Yes, I do. He was definitely lazy and passive which meant that he failed to attend to his responsibility to his wife and daughters. AND he recognized he was doing that. In a conversation with Elizabeth he said that he had meant to lay by a sum by which he could 'bribe worthless young men to marry his daughters." That tells us not only did he know what he should do, and failed in his duty, but reveals his thoroughly rotten attitude toward doing it. 

I have to give him a little slack here, for two reasons: 1) he's sarcastic and facetious in conversation nearly 100% of the time -- we can see that he doesn't actually want his kids to end up with worthless young men (he's pretty mad at Lizzie when he thinks she's marrying someone she won't be able to respect).

MARIA: See, I take this to mean that he sees young men who would consider a woman's dowry when choosing marriage worthless--and I assume that is because it would cost Mr. Bennet. So he denigrates young men acting in the culturally/period expected way because it is inconvenient for him. There you go, make it someone else’s responsibility because he can't be troubled to do better for his family. Not an appealing character trait to me. And it's a bit ironic in that he probably did just the same thing himself when he married...

I can see that. And to be fair, he does certainly settle and try to put the best (or funniest) face on things when he has no choice, ie Wickham. 2) Not doing what he knew needed doing seems like a very human failing to me, and though it's horrible because they have no other real recourse, it also just seems so realistic to certain personality types (most personality types?)-- to always think you can start doing the thing tomorrow, or that things will somehow work themselves out -- that I can't think of him as thoroughly bad for it.

MARIA: We'll have to agree to disagree on this one. It's one thing to say you'll help your kid with their science project and not get to it until the night before (or not at all). It is entirely another to take that same attitude with something that could land your children homeless and forced into prostitution. You may think I'm exaggerating here, but
women had NO CAREER track. Even if they were educated enough to become a governess, guess what, governesses frequently were expected to serve the master of the house as much as the children. Brutal reality of the era.

Fair point. It certainly wasn't a pretty life for women, as is true of much of human history, unfortunately.

MARIA: With all the romance and beauty in Austen's writing, it is easy to forget the very harsh realities of life in that era. I'm sorry but I just can't think of a man who couldn't motivate himself to make sure his daughters don't have to sell themselves on the street as not thoroughly bad. Even if he couldn't have roused himself to stay on a budget, he could have seen them educated properly and introduced into society properly to increase their chances of a good match. But nope, not even that.
A dowry was a means of protecting and insuring a young woman's future. His wife had a dowry of five thousand pounds! He well understood the advantage of a good dowry and refused to be bothered with that for his own daughters, knowing full well what that would mean for them.
Beyond that, he did nothing to see to their education (acquiring the necessary female accomplishments) which would have aided them in making a suitable match. Nor did he do anything to assist them in meeting the right kind of potential matches! It's critical to remember here, that in that era the ONLY way a woman had position and security was through marriage. Society just didn't know what to do with unmarried woman.

That’s true. And people give Mrs Bennet a lot of flack for having a one-track mind where her daughters were concerned (marriage! marriage! marriage!), but really, what else could she do? What else would have protected and provided for them, and for her, in the eventuality that her husband dies before she does?

MARIA: So if he couldn't or wouldn't provide suitable dowries for his daughters, then the least he could have done was to ensure that they had the skills necessary to attract marriage partners for husbands who could provide for them. But he didn't, and it seems he didn't make much of an effort to. Elizabeth says that there were masters for those of the girls who were interested in something, but that is hardly the same thing as making sure that they got the education they needed.
Then, when Lydia got herself in trouble because he could not be bothered to check her behavior, although he did confess he had been in error, he also said that those feelings of guilt would pass soon enough. He realized he was actively responsible for the ruination of his daughters' reputations (because after Lydia's antics, there was a very real chance, all the sisters would be tainted) and in the same breath acknowledges that its not going to bother him for very long. Really? Seriously? What kind of decent father would feel that way?

Maybe I just give him too much credit, but same as before, I see him as someone who says things facetiously, that aren't necessarily all that indicative of his actual internal thoughts. He presents himself as untouched by things, but I don't think he is...

MARIA: Yeah, I do think you're giving him too much credit. There's no evidence to suggest he's touched. His words are consistent with his behavior, he doesn't act differently because of what has happened, so what evidence is there to believe it? I think this is a place you really have to go to the text and see what it says, not what we hope or want it to say.

If that wasn't enough, he actively mocked and criticized his wife and daughters to their faces. The whole sequence about not going to visit Mr. Bingley, then doing it anyway was just one example of the backhanded way he treated his wife's concerns. While Mrs. Bennet makes me nuts, and I don't like her as a character, her underlying concerns were very, very real. She and her daughters were in a very precarious position with the estate being entailed to Mr. Collins. Should anything have happened to Mr. Bennet, Collins would have inherited immediately and had no obligation toward Mrs. Bennet or her daughters.  They would have been out of their home, reduced from an income of 2000 pounds a year to 250 a year (assuming they followed the standard practice of setting up a jointure (annuity) equal to Mrs. Bennet's dowry.) That's a pretty serious reduction in circumstances and definitely worth worrying about! And Mr. Bennet mocked her for it. Afterall, he would be dead and gone and it wouldn't trouble him, right?

Maybe it's just that he reminds me of people I know, including my own dad, honestly -- people who I know do care, but will do their utmost to not show it in any serious way, and will cover everything in a veneer of untouched joking. Eh, I dunno. It’s certainly not a trait I like, but I’m familiar enough with this sort of mild antagonism and facetious bullshittery to not really find it malicious, I guess?

MARIA: I guess for me it come down to actions. If Mr. Bennet had talked one way but then acted in a caring and responsible manner, then I would give him some slack. But he did neither. Sigh. Taken together, that isn't what I consider a lazy and clueless, but rather willfully neglectful, irresponsible, and even bordering on abusive.

And do you think he's representative of a Regency father, or better, or worse?

MARIA: I don't think he was representative of a typical father then just as I don't think he's representative of a typical father today. Fathers of the era typically were not close with their daughters, but that didn't mean they neglected their duties toward them.

Did you feel that way when you first read it, or did the sense build on you? Because I think most people find him funny/charming, but also a little frustrating - but not necessarily villain material, as he often becomes in your hands.

MARIA: My first take on him was definitely colored by the movie portrayals that play him as loveable and funny. As I ready Austen more deeply, and perhaps more importantly, studied the history of the period, I realized just how precarious a position he had put his daughters and wife in and how very real Mrs.Bennet's concerns were, I slowly changed my mind. Bennet went from being benign and lazy to neglectful, mean-spirited and uncaring husband and father who couldn't be bothered to see that the people he expected to care for him in his old age (should he live that long) would be likewise cared for. That just doesn't seem particularly loveable to me.

I've noticed you’re not the only one who portrays him in a much more negative light than I think Austen portrayed him (by this I mean, you're not the only one that makes him downright a villain at times, outwardly cruel rather than just wryly neglectful), and I do find it interesting. I've always felt that you could kind of tell Austen's opinions on people / personality types by her treatment of their flaws and foibles, and though I think she is making somewhat of a statement with Bennet, she also treats him fairly gently. He's absolutely at fault for not setting his daughters up better, and he put them at real risk; there's no debating that. But I can't seem to see ill-intent in it, even knowing how much at risk he put them, and how much their lives could have changed. I just don't read maliciousness in him, though he's certainly reckless.

MARIA: Austen said ' “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.” She doesn't like to delve heavily into all those icky things. She avoided it with Wickham, Willoughby (in Sense and Sensibility) and most of the real icky villians in her other works. Why would she dwell on Mr. Bennet? It wasn't what she wanted to write about (her words), so she treated him gently and moved on the the more fun stuff to write about. To me that doesn't mean he was less bad than Wickham in his own way.

It is a fair point that Austen sometimes avoided the "icky" things, to be sure, but she also didn't shy from painting people -- especially parents -- as troublesome, loathsome, malicious, capricious, cruel... She may not get nitty gritty, but she doesn't entirely hold back, either. But then, there are people that I abhor, that other people make excuses and justifications for, so I guess it’s really in the eyes of the reader, and what pushes our individual buttons!

Do you ever make any excuses for him? Do you harbor any little soft spot for him somewhere, or does he disgust you?

MARIA: As Austen wrote him, I'm sorry, I can't make excuses and I don't have a soft spot for him. He is a selfish, neglectful man who would blame others for his problems and makes no effort to make things right when he knows what he has done. I just don't find anything sympathetic in that sort of character.
Now, I did reform him in one book, Remember the Past. I made him a second son who didn't inherit the estate and packed him off into the navy. Now that had a redeeming effect on his character... ;)


Ha! Aside from Remember the Past, your Bennet goes from the "passive bad" do-nothing father he is in P&P to what is often an active bad (angry, abusive, malicious, etc.). Do you feel you're doing this to drive home to readers to look at him differently? Dialing up his flaws, or flaws you think would manifest in him in different scenarios? Are you punishing him? Is it an intentional tear-down of his character, or subconscious loathing that spills over?

MARIA: No I'm not really writing with any particular agenda. To some degree, the characters just kind of come out as they choose to in the writing process. Honestly, when I wrote Mistaking Her Character my plan all along had been that Mrs. Bennet was the abusive character and Mr. Bennet was far more sympathetic to Elizabeth. Hard to believe right, since that is so not the way the story turned. There is certainly a level of the subconscious involved, a lot of writing works that way. But when I look at everything I've written, I think only about half the time does he end up really awful, the rest he's just basically the passive-type. So, I don't think I'm running an intentional smear campaign against Mr. Bennet. :) LOL

I mean, you’ve certainly given me a lot to think about, and I think that’s what I love most about reading JAFF and doing Austen in August – things I would have never considered, or would have thought to be pretty much set in stone (Mr Bennet is lazy and sarcastic, but everybody loves him), I’m able to see from new perspectives, and writers are able to explore from new perspectives, in ways that give these old stories new life. There’s always something fresh to consider. Thanks for joining me for this! I’m very curious to see what other readers have to say about Mr B. after this discussion!

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about Maria Grace:

Though Maria Grace has been writing fiction since she was ten years old, those early efforts happily reside in a file drawer and are unlikely to see the light of day again, for which many are grateful. After penning five file-drawer novels in high school, she took a break from writing to pursue college and earn her doctorate in Educational Psychology. After 16 years of university teaching, she returned to her first love, fiction writing.

She has one husband and one grandson, two graduate degrees and two black belts, three sons, four undergraduate majors, five nieces, is starting her sixth year blogging on Random Bits of Fascination, has built seven websites, attended eight English country dance balls, sewn nine Regency era costumes, and shared her life with ten cats.

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