ology

Desire and Homosocial Relations in Pride and Prejudice and Moll Flanders
By Octavio R. Gonzalez

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders underscore the necessity of marriage for upper-middle-class and aspiring lower-class women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, investing in the marriage plot as the ultimate economic means to a comic end. Ironically, however, each novel circuits around this seemingly necessary trajectory, paradoxically reliant on the structure of desire and homosocial relations as the principal obstacle to and eventual means of fulfilling the female protagonist’s hopes for economic security and normative social positioning. In so doing, Defoe and Austen expose the formative influence of male and female homoerotic desire and homosocial bonds on the final resolution or dissolution of the marriage plot for their main characters. Both novels, however, privilege the power of homosocial desire to define female possibilities within the narrative of the marriage plot, and recuperate to varying degrees the symbolic claims of a patriarchal class-gender system.

Bingley’s “steady friendship” to Darcy, especially given how the former depends on the “highest judgment” of the latter, constitutes a powerful homosocial bond made visible from their first appearance at the ball in Meryton (Austen 10). Despite being Bingley’s social “superior,” Darcy is seemingly jealous of Bingley’s dancing with “the only handsome girl in the room” (6–7). Darcy’s indifference to other women at the ball, except the one that captivates his friend’s fancy, can hardly be coincidental. Jane is Darcy’s only desirable dance partner in the room precisely because she is Bingley’s favorite.

[I]n any erotic rivalry, the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved . . . the bonds of “rivalry” and “love,” differently as they are experienced, are equally powerful and in many cases equivalent. . . [There are] many examples in which the choice of the beloved is determined . . . not by the qualities of the beloved, but by the beloved’s already being the choice of the person who has been chosen as a rival. (Sedgwick, Between Men 21)

Darcy and Bingley’s erotic triangle, based on their “friendly” male rivalry, depends on positioning Jane between them as the female object mediating the two male characters’ current of homosocial desire. Thus, Darcy’s heterosexual desire may be to dance with Jane, in order to outdo his friend; alternatively, however, Darcy might perhaps wish he himself could dance with Bingley, rather than alongside him. Because both options are not feasible, Darcy’s desire is unmet in both regards. In order to save face, Darcy petulantly refuses to dance with anyone except Bingley’s sisters (who are individually as homosocially identical to Bingley as is possible for any woman to be) and deliberately spurns Elizabeth by refusing to “settle” for a dance with her: “I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men” (Austen 6–7; emphasis added). Feeling “slighted” for losing out to his friend’s superior heterosocial currency, Darcy demonstrates the attitude of a sore loser and exposes the underlying competitive logic of male homosocial desire, but only as an afterthought: a female object not sought-after by other men is clearly an undesirable commodity.

After the initial failure to triangulate homosocial desire by routing it through Bingley’s heterosexual object, Darcy understandably becomes the main obstacle to Bingley’s marrying Jane Bennet: “I have no wish of denying that I did everything in my power to separate my friend from your sister, or that I rejoice in my success” (130). How to explain the apparent contradiction in his dissuading Bingley from marrying into a family that Darcy himself proposes to marry into? While admitting that the Bennets’ “want of connection could not be so great an evil to my friend as to me,” Darcy successfully “preserve[s his] friend from . . . a most unhappy connection,” listing “other causes of repugnance”—namely, the “total want of propriety so frequently, so almost uniformly betrayed” by the Bennets, excepting Jane and Elizabeth herself (134–35). Darcy thus uses the alibi of championing “superior” social standards for his friend, in order to mask a likelier motivation—his possessive homosocial jealousy. If Darcy obstructs Bingley’s marriage, he may be able to keep him for himself: “[I]t was not till the evening of the dance at Netherfield that I had any apprehension of [Bingley’s] feeling any serious attachment.—I had often seen him in love before. . . .” (134; my emphasis). That Darcy deigns to reveal his possessive homosocial desire for Bingley to Elizabeth in writing, after she has refused his hand in marriage, suggests a radical departure from his previous opposition. Instead of blocking Bingley’s marriage to Jane, Darcy is the sole agent in making it possible; moreover, with that same gesture Darcy saves Lydia, and with her all the Bennet daughters, from the inability to marry and thus from certain social abjection (215–18).

With one stroke of his mighty “pen” (31), Darcy becomes everything that he was not at the beginning of the novel—the moral personification of his superior class status: “Darcy’s abstract and ex posteriori sense of responsibility . . . makes possible the social order established in the novel’s comic resolution” (Macpherson 12). Macpherson goes on:

Darcy saves Lydia not because he cares about Lydia, or about the Bennets—not even because he cares about Elizabeth. Elizabeth acknowledges that Darcy had “done this for a girl whom he could neither regard nor esteem” . . . . [But] it turns out that Darcy saves Lydia because he feels himself, without having “schem[ed] to do wrong,” to be accountable for Wickham. (16)

Despite disagreeing with her reading of Darcy’s emotionally uninvested intervention on behalf of the Bennet family (Darcy himself freely admits he did so while thinking “only of” Elizabeth), Macpherson is right in locating Wickham’s function in the novel as prime motivation for Darcy’s “deus ex machina” (Austen 246; Fraiman, qtd. in Macpherson 16). Wickham displaces Bingley’s privileged position in relation to Darcy; the two childhood friends’ resumed homosocial “competition” triangulates through the romantic object of Elizabeth Bennet (Austen 52, 55). Darcy thus relinquishes his obsessive erotic attachment to Bingley, thereby substituting his role in another erotic triangle, as rival to Wickham’s affections for Elizabeth. Darcy and Wickham’s reconfiguring of the male homosocial triangle, therefore, dislodges Bingley from Darcy’s possessive emotional claim, “permitting” Bingley to form his own heterosexual investment and reunite with Jane (Austen 250). By rehabilitating the Bennet clan Darcy asserts his mastery over Wickham’s position of homosocial (vis-à-vis Darcy) and heterosexual (vis-à-vis Lydia) blackmail, a scene that takes place at Darcy’s urging. This scene constitutes an economically fraught transaction of homosocial desire triangulated through the objects of Lydia and the other Bennet sisters—a scene curiously described and not directly represented (Austen 216).

By preventing Wickham’s and Lydia’s moral descent, Darcy becomes “accountable” for Wickham’s reprehensible actions and ultimately accepts responsibility for his former friend and rival. Darcy thus becomes the “better” man in homosocial competition with Wickham, and successfully routes his triangulated homosocial desire through the “heterosexual detour” of marriage in the novel’s curiously anticlimactic denouement (Sedgwick, Between Men 50).

Darcy was delighted with [Bingley and Jane’s] engagement; his friend had given him the earliest information of it.
“I must ask whether you were surprised?” said Elizabeth.
“Not at all. When I went away, I felt that it would soon happen.”
“That is to say, you had given your permission. . . .” And though he exclaimed at the term, she found that it had been pretty much the case.
“On the evening before my going to London,” said he, “I made a confession to him, which I believe I ought to have made long ago. I told him of all that had occurred to make my former interference in his affairs, absurd and impertinent.” (Austen 250)

Having successfully “detoured” his longstanding and competing homosocial investments in Wickham and Bingley by reviving the plot of Jane’s and Elizabeth’s marriages, Darcy ultimately positions himself as superior to the two men in conventionally heterosexual and homosocial terms: “In anticipating the happiness of Bingley, which of course was to be inferior only to his own . . .” (Ibid; emphasis added). Darcy’s desire thus rehabilitates his elevated class position. Drawing on aristocratic prestige “conspicuously lacking” in Mr. Bennet and Mr. Gardiner, the Bennets’ closest patriarchal figures, Darcy becomes the only male figure with social agency capable of resurrecting the marriages of Lydia, Jane, and Elizabeth (Fraiman, qtd. in Macpherson 16). Consequently, the structure of Darcy’s homosocial desire and his superior class position ultimately secure the Bennet sisters’ marriages, even as this social apparatus, as personified by Darcy, had threatened to foreclose the same possibility.

In similar fashion, the two brothers’ irreconcilable emotional investments in Moll Flanders as a sexual object define the terms of her possibilities, not only for romantic and sexual fulfillment, but also as a female subject in her own right. Caught in the homosocial tug-of-war between the two brothers’ sexual desire, Moll is in the impossible position of functioning purely as a sexual commodity. Addressing the elder brother, Moll protests:

If then I have yielded to the Importunities of my Affection; and if I have been perswaded [sic] to believe that I am really, and in the Essence of the Thing your Wife, shall I now give the Lye to all those Arguments, and call myself your Whore, or Mistress, which is the same thing? And will you Transfer me to your Brother? Can you Transfer my Affection? (Defoe 25; emphasis added)

Paid £500 for her silence and acquiescence, Moll is symbolically reduced to the form of sexual currency (36). Moll’s marriage to Robin thus constitutes a purely economic transaction, serving only to signify her subjection to a class-gender system as a symbolic object of exchange within the structure of male homosocial relations between the two brothers (Sedgwick, Between Men 54).

Of course, Moll is more than just a freshly minted coin of the sexual realm. As stated by Lévi-Strauss, “woman could never become just a sign and nothing more, since even in a man’s world she is still a person, and since insofar as she is defined as a sign she must be recognized as a generator of signs” (qtd. in Sedgwick, Between Men 50). Moll’s narrative exploits seem remarkable to this day, perhaps, due to her independent sense of aggressive self-determination following her first coerced marriage. Not surprisingly, Moll Flanders’ negotiated position vis-à-vis the exacting terms of the marriage economy, which promised to undo her early on in her career, is primarily due to her relatively short-lived independent economic status. Thus liberated “with a tolerable Fortune in [her] pocket,” Moll gives up her children to her late husband’s family and reenters the marriage market as a “pretty Widow,” understanding that her “Case was altered”: “I had Money in my Pocket, and had nothing to say to [these admirers]: I had been trick’d once by that Cheat call’d LOVE, but the Game was over; I was resolv’d now to be Married, or Nothing, and to be well Married, or not at all” (Defoe 40). Moll as an improbable female protagonist learns to play the “Game” of the marriage market on her own terms, bending the rules of the class-gender system to her advantage.

Moll Flanders, of course, has many feminine traits . . . . But . . . the essence of her character and actions is . . . essentially masculine. [I]t is at least certain that Moll accepts none of the disabilities of her sex . . . one cannot but feel . . . admiration for a heroine who so fully realised one of the ideals of feminism: freedom from any involuntary involvement in the feminine role. (Watt 113)

Watt reads Moll’s negotiated sexual agency, and her indifference to play the traditional female role of mother, as a sign of her “essentially masculine” character, perhaps demonstrating his uncritical reliance on a patriarchal system codetermining class and gender assignments as asymmetries of power between men and women (110; Sedgwick, Between Men 15). Money, combined with the social freedom of being a widow, are the material (“masculine”) means by which Moll earns a temporary reprieve from the strict terms of the marriage market as it governed women, through its equation of economic means and matrimonial possibility (Defoe 45–46).

Perhaps, then, it is less surprising that an intermittent reliance on female homosocial bonds facilitates Moll Flanders’s narrative mobility. Deracinated from traditional family structures, Moll creates her own (usually short-lived) units of social kinship, invariably mediated through female social arrangements. Inaugurated as a sexual commodity within the homosocial structure of the two brothers’ incompatible desire for her and their desire to preserve their family’s coherence, as a “pretty Widow” Moll Flanders auspiciously becomes a sexual “generator of signs.” Invariably, Moll depends on female homosocial relations to realize her sexual and economic desire for a successful marriage: she meets and marries her “Linnen-Draper” husband through her social connection with a “She Comrade”; likewise, Moll marries her “Lancashire” husband through her connection with her “Friend,” his “sister” (Defoe 41, 100). Moll Flanders’ strongest female homosocial bond, moreover, is with her “Governess,” who greatly facilitates Moll’s narrative movement in the second half of the novel (by taking away her unwanted child, supporting her decision to become a thief, and finally by assisting Moll’s resettlement in the American colonies [223–31]).

These female homosocial bonds, however, are fraught with self-interest and often prove detrimental to our protagonist, and are characteristically dissolved after their economic utility is past, with the exception of Moll’s long-term emotional and financial investments in the “Governess” as her adopted “mother” and only real friend (Defoe 205–6). Aside from her “friends’” setting her up with false expectations of the not-so-wealthy “Lancashire” husband, or matching her up with the “Captain,” who turns out to be Moll’s own brother, even Moll’s “Governess” encourages her thievery and discourages any attempt to break free from it despite “their” financial means being perfectly secure (108, 71, 150). Interestingly, Moll’s crisis as a female subject invariably positioned outside the social institution of a successful marriage has much to do with her complaint that she is alone in the world, as her friendships tend to dissolve from one marriage to the next, or from one episode to the other (204).

[W]hen a Woman is thus left desolate and void of Council, she is just like a Bag of Money, or a Jewel dropt on the Highway, which is a Prey to the next Comer; if a Man of Virtue and upright Principles happens to find it, he will have it cried, and the Owner may come to hear of it again; but how many times shall such a thing fall into Hands that will make no scruple of seizing it for their own, to once that it shall come into good Hands.
(90)

The irony of Moll Flanders assuming this position of helpless female commodity (“Bag of Money,” “Jewel dropt on the Highway”), as we have seen, directly contradicts her agentive desire to redefine the possibilities available to her as a lower-class woman by marrying well on her own terms and, in her own words, to “Deceive the Deceiver” (53). Moll’s inability to admit her calculated (Watt deems it “masculine”) desire for upward mobility and sexual self-determination can be read as psychological residue from her negotiated social position as both dependent on the patriarchal structure of marriage and transgressive of the normative class-gender distinctions of her time.

In contrast to Moll Flanders, wherein female social networks are narrowly contingent on the function of either facilitating or obstructing the female subject’s ultimate goals of making a secure marriage and attaining economic security, Pride and Prejudice goes beyond this alienated, bipolar view of homosocial female relations typically subordinated to a master narrative of heterosexual fulfillment. By highlighting the intimacy shared by Elizabeth and Jane Bennet, Austen portrays “intense female homosocial bonds” between the two sisters, depicting an intimacy that sometimes intrudes as desire itself—mobilized as narrative spectacle or homoerotically “vectored” romantic excess—uneasily reabsorbed into the novel’s thematic structure of “normal and normalizing” female sibling relationships and heterosexual courtship (Sedgwick, “Jane Austen” 114–15, 125):

Elizabeth, feeling really anxious, was determined to go to her, though the carriage was not to be had; and as she was no horse-woman, walking was her only alternative. She declared her resolution.
“How can you be so silly,” cried her mother, “as to think of such a thing, in all this dirt! You will not be fit to be seen when you get there.”
“I shall be very fit to see Jane—which is all I want.”
“Is this a hint to me, Lizzy,” said her father, “to send for the horses?”
“No, indeed. I do not wish to avoid the walk. The distance is nothing, when one has a motive; only three miles.” . . .
. . . Elizabeth continued her walk alone, crossing field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity, and finding herself at last within view of the house, with weary ancles [sic], dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of exercise. (Austen 21)

Elizabeth’s affection for Jane thus mobilizes her as an “essentially masculine” figure of narrative movement. Witness the female censure of her unladylike behavior and appearance leveled at Elizabeth by the Bingley sisters and Mrs. Bennet: “You will not be fit to be seen”; “I shall never forget her appearance this morning. She really looked almost wild”; “Very nonsensical to come at all! Why must she be scampering about the country, because her sister had a cold? Her hair so untidy, so blowsy!” (21–23; emphasis in original). The homoerotic excess thus generated by Elizabeth’s desire to see her sick sister is striking for the form it assumes, a gendered performance differing from the delicate domestic script of upper-middle-class female sociability espoused by Mrs. Bennet and the Bingley sisters. Notably slipping into a narrative of emotional and physical desire insistent of and ultimately achieving momentous fulfillment (“feeling really anxious,” “which is all I want,” “when one has motive,” “at last,” “face glowing”), this passage and its homoerotically “vectored” female social mobility would unquestionably be interpreted as a narrative of sexual desire if not for the alibi of sisterly love. Nevertheless, tracking the “unwavering but difficult love of a woman” for another woman, this passage illustrates Elizabeth’s homoerotic desire for Jane as its object and destination; her desire in turn differs from the “procreative or dynastic” paradigm of heterosexual courtship and yet nonetheless displays an intensity of feeling some critics find curiously lacking in either Jane’s or Elizabeth’s normative desire for their respective heterosexual love interests (Sedgwick, “Jane Austen” 118, 114–15; Morrison 339). Interestingly, Darcy’s approbation of what more traditionally positioned female characters deride as Elizabeth’s “excessive” sisterly concern can be read as an implicit indication of his own homoerotic inclination. Elizabeth’s romantic chivalry elevates her in the estimation of Bingley and Darcy as an independent person of noble character, but also renders her essentially unfeminine actions as “essentially masculine,” rendering Elizabeth more attractive in Darcy’s eyes as both an object of potential heterosexual “detour” and, paradoxically, of homoerotic investment (Austen 24).

Known as one of certain “culturally central, homosocially embedded women authors” in the English literary canon (Sedgwick, “Jane Austen” 115), Austen is thus acknowledged by some critics to represent “the experience behind the [heterosexual] relationships imagined by her in her novels” as an experience that privileges

relationships of blood, of which that between sisters is certainly the most deeply felt. . . . Marianne’s love for Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility [is] the most passionate thing in Jane Austen. . . . The involvement with one another of the sisters is the real central theme of the book, just as the relation of Elizabeth to her sisters is so vital a part of Pride and Prejudice. (Wilson, qtd. in Morrison 339)

From the scene of Elizabeth running through the mud to take care of sick Jane, we may interpret the role of female homosocial desire between the two sisters as more than a “vital part” of the novel. Elizabeth’s desire for Jane, in her “essentially masculine” efforts to secure Jane’s emotional and physical safety and, ultimately, to actualize Jane’s vision of heterosexual happiness, structures the novel’s narrative economy by determining the circuitous route through which the two sisters’ “procreative or dynastic” heterosexual attachments are made—not coincidentally, to that other deeply “homosocially embedded,” homoerotically magnetized pair, Darcy and Bingley.

           Throughout the novel, sweet, defenseless Jane seems to rely on Elizabeth’s strong self-possession as her passionate defender or “knight.” When Darcy proposes to her, Elizabeth’s reasons for rejecting him are strictly motivated by her sense of filial piety towards and homosocial identification her sister: Darcy’s cruel “interference” in separating Bingley from Jane, thereby ruining “every hope of happiness for the most affectionate, generous heart in the world,” and his treatment of his childhood friend Wickham (Austen 250, 127, 130). Despite their narrative excess and, paradoxically, their formative structuring of the marriage trajectory, the homosocial bonds between Jane and Elizabeth’s homoerotic sister act, like the corresponding “steady friendship” of its male counterpart, threatens to short-circuit the novel’s inevitable heterosexual romance. As in Moll Flanders, the energies and eroticism of homosocial investment prove to be unstable and sometimes counterproductive to the novel’s normative deployment of marriage as final heterosexual transaction and contract. Thus, Elizabeth and Jane’s family romance is necessarily “heterosexually expropriated” into the normative marriage plot—paired off, conveniently enough, to the corresponding homoerotic dyad of Darcy and Bingley, neatly drawing together, reconciling, and ultimately perpetuating the two sets of homosocial interests within a “normal and normalizing” heterosexual matrix (Sedgwick, “Jane Austen” 125). Consequently, Pride and Prejudice, and to a lesser extent Moll Flanders, represent an ambivalent narrative economy of homoerotic desire through formative female and male homosocial bonds, which lend repressive energy to the heterosexual plot by impeding its premature actualization, and which ultimately serve to facilitate the necessary aims of marriage and normative narrative closure.

            As a novel of social critique, it is perhaps too easy to admire Moll Flanders’s uncomplicated vision of a deracinated female individual left to defend her social interests in a Darwinian world defined by insecure economic positioning and amoral tropisms toward criminality (Watt 110). Defoe’s emphasis on the marriage system also clarifies the harsh terms of eighteenth-century English economic instability during a period of budding mercantilism and rapid commercialization, with its attendant deleterious effects of alienating the non-propertied individual from unviable family frameworks and a nonexistent social safety net, indicting the marriage economy in particular as it oppressed lower-class women. Pride and Prejudice, on the other hand, limits its social field to the upwardly mobile middle-class and renders the lower classes invisible. Thus, in terms of class-conscious feminist inquiry, readers invariably identify Austen as a conservative social critic. Her “emphasis is insistently and unapologetically upon the personal” and on a universal code of moral values accessible to all, by which characters must act regardless of social position (Morrison 341–2). Despite, or perhaps because of, women’s unequal social standing, Austen is either celebrated or disparaged according to interpretations of her accommodative “stance” regarding the social pressures and structures of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English patriarchy (337). Morrison’s unreconstructed essentialist reading hails Austen’s emphasis on the “personal” as a form of creating a woman-centric symbolic system, focusing more on “feminine truth” and less on the question of male systems of power, thereby delimiting the impact of masculine institutions within the privileged domestic spaces of Austen’s novels (344–6). Yet, by recuperating Austen’s narrative focus as conceptual of an essential, ahistorical “feminine truth,” Morrison reifies the culturally and historically constructed terms of sexual difference upon which are based patriarchal claims to naturalized gender hierarchy (342). Austen’s problematical negotiations within a normative class-gender system, therefore, are not easily co-opted by feminist critics without ignoring “Austen’s collusion with precisely these normative forces” (Quinn 321).

           In conclusion, Moll Flanders and Pride and Prejudice are novels that highlight the social and economic necessity of a successful marriage for women in eighteenth-century England, while representing to varying degrees of social critique the narrative structures of male and female desire and homosocial relations that define and are ultimately redefined by this problematic institution. Whereas Moll holds accountable the injustices borne by women under the mercantilist and patriarchal social regime of the marriage economy, Pride and Prejudice to a greater degree recuperates women’s social and economic insecurity within the modern class-gender system. Austen, unlike Defoe, locates her critique on the individual and not on social frameworks, mobilizing the apolitical theme of moral development of the upper-class individual within a naturalized value system as explanation for the qualified success of the marriage comedy. Moreover, while Moll Flanders persistently flouts gender conventions because of its protagonist’s hybrid and peripatetic social positionings, Pride and Prejudice is ironically more disruptive in its narrative departures from normative portrayals of socially embedded male and female characters. Austen maps complex trajectories of homoerotic desire that structure homosocial relations, which are paradoxically resistant to and ultimately assimilated within the plot of heterosexual romance. Both novels, however, share a narrative investment in exposing the material, social, and psychological insecurities of the female subject as an object of exchange within the sexual marketplace of patriarchal English society and the modern class-gender system.

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. Ed. Candace Ward. New York: Dover, 1995.

Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. 1722. Ed. Philip Smith. Mineola, New York: Dover, 1996.

Macpherson, Sandra. “Rent to Own; Or, What’s Entailed in Pride and Prejudice.”
       Representations 82 (2003): 1–23. EBSCO. Academic Search Premier. City U of New York
       Lib. Services, New York, NY. 15 May 2004 <http://search.epnet.com/>.

Morrison, Sarah R. “Of Woman Borne: Male Experience and Feminine Truth in Jane Austen’s
      Novels.” Studies in the Novel 26.4 (Winter 1994): 337–49. EBSCO.
       Academic Search Premier. City U of New York Lib. Services, New York, NY.
       18 May 2004 <http://search.epnet.com/>.

Quinn, Vincent. “Loose Reading? Sedgwick, Austen and Critical Practice.” Textual Practice 14.2
      (2000): 305–26. EBSCO. Academic Search Premier. City U of New York Lib. Services,
      New York, NY. 20 May 2004 <http://search.epnet.com/>.

Sedgwick, Eve K. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire.
      New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

---. “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.” Tendencies. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. 109–29.

Watt, Ian P. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. 1957.
      Berkeley: U of California P, 1971.

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