Blogging The Reef: Things Elizabeth Bennett Wouldn't Do

(To read all posts about The Reef click here.)


It may seem to some that I am being too easy on George Darrow and, if you are one of those people, it will shortly seem like I am being too hard on Anna Leath. I don't want to paint George as an angel, he most certainly isn't, but I also think we need to avoid making dismissive assessments of characters. I've written about this before: the tendency of some commentators to assess a character and then right them off as worthless.

And George Darrow is not worthless. He is an interesting and attractive character even if we would wish him better. And he provides a foil for Anna Leath and, in so doing, allows us to see some cracks in what might initially seem a faultless facade. This one for example:

Often she told herself that any silly girl who had waltzed through a season would know better than she how to attract a man and hold him ...

And "silly girl" here is not as abstract as it might sound; there is a specific silly girl.

Then one day, at a dinner, she saw him sitting next to one of the silly girls in question: the heroine of the elopement which had shaken West Fifty-fifth Street to its base. The young lady had come back from her adventure no less silly than when she went ...

And here is how young Anna Summers thinks about it:

All night she lay awake and wondered: "What was she saying to him? How shall I learn to say such things?" and she decided that her heart would tell her--that the next time they were alone together the irresistible word would spring to her lips.

Okay, let's think about Pride and Prejudice. I pick it because I assume everyone has read it. There is a moment in that novel that somewhat resembles this. Think of when Lydia (a silly girl if ever there was one) and George come to the Bennett house as a couple after having eloped. So here is the question, can you imagine Elizabeth Bennett looking at her sister Lydia and feeling like there must be something the young Lydia knows that she, Elizabeth, does not and feeling inadequate as a result?

The answer is never. It couldn't happen.

Here is how Anna Summers felt (with added emhasis):

She perceived, indeed, that other girls, leading outwardly the same life as herself, and seemingly unaware of her world of hidden beauty, were yet possessed of some vital secret which escaped her. There seemed to be a kind of freemasonry between them; they were wider awake than she, more alert, and surer of their wants if not of their opinions. She supposed they were "cleverer", and accepted her inferiority good-humouredly, half aware, within herself, of a reserve of unused power which the others gave no sign of possessing.

And what is the thing that they know they want and poor Anna doesn't? In a word: sex. Here she is with George during their first courtship:

She liked to hear his voice almost as much as to listen to what he was saying, and to listen to what he was saying almost as much as to feel that he was looking at her; but he wanted to kiss her, and she wanted to talk to him about books and pictures, and have him insinuate the eternal theme of their love into every subject they discussed.

But he wanted to kiss her! It isn't that she doesn't feel the desire. It's the getting over the stumbling block that stands between the place where speech ends and kissing starts. Something stops her from wanting to do that. What is the Reef between her and the ability to connect sexually with a man? That is something new and modern in fiction.

Let's revisit how Anna thought about things after becoming jealous at the sight of George and Kitty together:

All night she lay awake and wondered: "What was she saying to him? How shall I learn to say such things?" and she decided that her heart would tell her--that the next time they were alone together the irresistible word would spring to her lips.

Notice that the only solution Anna can think of is more talk. What shall she say? She doesn't have a clue what to do.

There is a great scene in the magnificent film 8 Femmes (Eight Women) where a spinster played by Isabelle Huppert confronts a maid who has seduced her employer and says, "How do you do that?" And the maid says the equivalent of, "Oh, you know.' The point being, "If you have to ask ..." But poor Anna does have to ask.

This partly consoled her for missing so much of what made their "good time"; but the resulting sense of exclusion, of being somehow laughingly but firmly debarred from a share of their privileges, threw her back on herself and deepened the reserve which made envious mothers cite her as a model of ladylike repression. Love, she told herself, would one day release her from this spell of unreality.

But it didn't.