More Pride, Less Prejudice: Charlotte of "Pride and Prejudice"

Although Jane Austen has been viewed as a writer of typical rom-coms and a chronicler of polite society, both Austen and her work have alternatively been characterized as queer. Beginning in the 1990s, a discussion known as “the Queer Austen debates” looked at Austen’s life and characters in light of various queer identities, above all homoeroticism between characters and the Austen sisters themselves.

Twentieth-century writers had laid the groundwork for queering Austen by observing that many of her characters defy gender norms and that her female characters have intense emotional relationships with other women. Even earlier, the Victorians recognized the gender-bending potential of her life and work, primarily in the theater, where the first women to play Jane and Cassandra on stage were lovers in real life and many actors “cross dressed” playing her characters. If you do a search titled “queer Jane Austen,” you’ll find additional references to essays, blogs, and scholarship as well as lists of the many queer retellings of her novels.

While the queering of Austen has revealed some crucial aspects of her work, it has been incomplete. With the exception of a handful of essays, blog posts, and internet discussions, asexual and aromantic identities have been largely ignored. But not by Austen! Charlotte Lucas of Pride and Prejudice fits the criteria for both identities: she is aroace, experiencing neither sexual desire for another nor a special warm, magnetic longing to be with someone that differs in quality even from close friendships.

Both identities are orientations, not lifestyle choices. They describe feelings rather than behavior: Asexuality is not celibacy. Neither identity is a phase and neither is pathological. Ace and aro people experience deep emotional bonds with others and the full gamut of basic emotions. They just don’t experience the feelings typically associated with intimate partnerships, which does not mean that they don’t form such partnerships. You can be ace or aro and in a domestic partnership or a marriage.

How do we know Charlotte is aroace? When she tells Elizabeth that she’s going to marry Mr. Collins, the foolish man Elizabeth herself has rejected, her friend’s tactless reaction— “Engaged to Mr. Collins! my dear Charlotte—Impossible!”—elicits a response that suggests this identity: “I see what you are feeling . . . you must be very surprised . . . But when you have had time to think it all over, I hope you will be satisfied with what I have done. I am not romantic, you know. I never was. I ask only a comfortable home." Which she had slim chances of obtaining: Charlotte is 27 years old, plain-looking, and lacking in family fortune, all rendering marriage unlikely. Yet marriage is the only way for her to avoid poverty, or the hardships and indignities of being a paid companion or governess, or being taken in by relatives out of pity. When Mr. Collins proposes, Charlotte readily accepts.

Elizabeth’s horror is not a response to Charlotte’s taking pragmatic factors into account in deciding to marry; such considerations were considered advisable. But marrying without any affection and for purely financial motives, although not uncommon, was not openly approved. It was considered ethical that partners should have some fondness for one another, but Charlotte admits that she accepts Mr. Collins because of what he can provide. What bothers Elizabeth is that Mr. Collins is “a conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man . . . the woman who marries him, cannot have a proper way of thinking.”

Elizabeth can’t say outright that Charlotte’s behavior is immoral, but the implication of misconduct inheres in her choice of words. “Proper” means “of good character or standing . . . decent, decorous, respectable, correct.” In Elizabeth’s view, intimacy with a man Charlotte knows is foolish and whose company she does her best to minimize once married, smacks of, if not prostitution, something a bit too close for comfort. But because Charlotte is aroace, incapable of feeling romantic or sexual desire, she will be exchanging her body for an establishment no matter who she marries. The limitations of opportunity for women inevitably place her in this “transgressive” position.

Moreover, her decision isn’t as simple as she herself describes. While Charlotte knows Mr. Collins’s deficits, she also appreciates his strengths. She tells Elizabeth that “considering Mr. Collins’s character, connections, and situation in life, I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair, as most people can boast on entering the marriage state.”

In a world that didn’t sanction queer identities, Austen once again defies norms of sex and gender, depicting a woman for whom choice of a spouse isn’t a problem, but rather marriage itself. She represents an identity that would have “dared not speak its name” if only it had a name, but which didn’t yet exist in the lexicon of queerness. Austen’s genius for understanding people manifests in her creation of a character whose sexual identity would find fuller expression and confirmation two centuries after she wrote.

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