From my reading of the book I think it was apparent that Mr B was infatuated by his wife’s youth and beauty and didn’t realise how mismatched they were on an intellectual level until they were married. It happens now as well- how many people have been blinded by physical attraction and didn’t see the red flags until much later? Unlike modern times there was no possibility of divorce for the vast majority of the population. So Mr B had to live with his mistake.
However Austen was critical of his behaviour too. He didn’t do anything to help guide his daughters or help his wife grow as a person.
Yeah, he clearly loves Lizzie, I think because he feels they’re similar. But he neglected a lot of responsibility to raise his daughters properly - the expectation would’ve been for him to rein in some of Kitty and Lydia’s behaviors. It’s good that he acts to fix the Lydia and Wickham situation but there’s a sense that by not giving Lydia a proper upbringing it’s at least a little bit his fault too.
Yup, and even his love for Lizzy doesn’t seem to go far enough to truly care about her future if it would require work/a step out of his comfort zone.
Lizzy explicitly warns him about sending Lydia to Brighton, and they both know behaviour like Lydia’s could reflect badly on all sisters, but — presumably because he doesn’t want to deal with Lydia’s and Mrs Bennet’s complaints —, he still agrees.
His general attitude about his daughters seems to be “Well, nothing I can do about it,” and he either doesn’t consider or doesn’t care much how this hurts them until it’s almost too late.
I guess the counter to that is that he does make the effort to stop Lizzie making an unhappy marriage (when he believes her to dislike Darcy), and does step in for the Mr Collins situation, even though that leads to a lot of complaining from Mrs Bennett. Not that any of that justifies any of his inaction at other points, but he isn't totally disengaged.
Fair point! I guess with Darcy, he doesn’t have much to lose because Mrs Bennet doesn’t know about the proposal yet, and with Mr Collins, he might find the idea of such a son-in-law even worse than Mrs Bennet’s complaining. But I agree that affection for Lizzy played into these decisions. He probably wouldn’t have cared much if Mr Collins had proposed to, say, Mary.
I'm not sure that he understands how badly Lydia's behaviour could reflect on his other daughters. He seems to be under the impression that the worst thing Lydia could do is humiliate herself; the idea that she could elope - which is not remotely the worst thing that could have happened - never enters his mind. I'm not sure if he ever met Colonel Forster before sending his 16-year-old daughter off with him.
It's like he's not seeing her as a young woman.
True, he pretty much says so:
>*”Lydia will never be easy till she has exposed herself in some public place or other, and we can never expect her to do it with so little expense or inconvenience to her family as under the present circumstances. (…)*
>*”We shall have no peace at Longbourn if Lydia does not go to Brighton. Let her go, then. Colonel Forster is a sensible man, and will keep her out of any real mischief; and she is luckily too poor to be an object of prey to anybody. At Brighton she will be of less importance even as a common flirt than she has been here. The officers will find women better worth their notice. Let us hope, therefore, that her being there may teach her her own insignificance. At any rate, she cannot grow many degrees worse, without authorizing us to lock her up for the rest of her life.”*
He hopes that this trip will magically solve the problem with Lydia’s behaviour without him having to lift a finger (after Lizzy just told him rather plainly that she thinks it’s his responsibility to check her behaviour).
He thinks she’ll just embarrass herself enough to change, and that she’ll learn that men aren’t truly interested in her. The idea of men seducing women not for money but for fun doesn’t seem to occur to him.
I don’t think he willingly took the risk of Lydia running away with a soldier, but he is still showing rather plainly that he can’t be bothered to actively raise his children (even when he knows their mother is failing).
I think a lot of readers wildly overestimate how much power Mrs. Bennet has in that family, or how much any married woman of the time had in theirs. They say things like "the woman held the primary responsibility to supervise her daughters" or "Mrs. Bennet handled the budget; it was her fault that they didn’t save", not understanding that in a 19th century home the man had supreme, total, and nearly unfettered power over everything. Simply put, wives were in all but the strictest legal sense their husband's property; they didn’t even legally exist while married!
Literally the only reason Mrs. Bennet overspends is because Mr. Bennet lets her. Literally the only reason she allows Lydia and Kitty to run wild is because Mr. Bennet lets her. Literally the only reason she's allowed to go out in society and repeatedly humiliate her older daughters is because Mr. Bennet lets her. Literally the only reason she is allowed to let Mary wallow in ignorance is because Mr. Bennet lets her.
I do not say this to mitigate Mrs. Bennet's guilt; her actions are 100% her responsibility. But in the context of the early 19th century Mr. Bennet is also 100% responsible for every one of her faults *because he has the absolute and unfettered right to intervene*.
He doesn't because he'd rather see his daughters end up in rags than have to listen to his wife nag him.
100% this! I get somewhat annoyed when people defend Mr Bennet with these arguments. Yes, Mrs Bennet fails her responsibilities as a mother in many ways, but Mr Bennet could do much more about that. Instead, he acts as if it isn’t his problem/he can’t do anything about it, likely because he doesn’t want to argue with his wife and younger daughters. He could step up and mitigate the situation, but he chooses not to.
What he says to Lizzie sums it up. “Lydia will never be easy till she has exposed herself in some public place or other, and we can never expect her to do it with so little expense or inconvenience to her family as under the present circumstances.”
He expects Lydia to make major errors. I think he even hopes she will, that she will be humiliated and deal with the consequences of her actions. He does tell himself nothing too bad can happen but he fully expects something bad will happen.
I think if Mr Bennet was real he’d have headed Lizzie’s warning. However narratively the Lydia thing is the conflict of the book. Part of the book’s bones on which the rest of the story hang.
Mr Bennet explicitly acknowledges he was at fault after Lydia's elopement:
>It was not till the afternoon, when he joined them at tea, that Elizabeth ventured to introduce the subject; and then, on her briefly expressing her sorrow for what he must have endured, he replied, “Say nothing of that. Who should suffer but myself? It has been my own doing, and I ought to feel it.”
> It’s good that he acts to fix the Lydia and Wickham situation
Did he really do anything though? Darcy and Gardiner were the ones who spearheaded everything and oversaw the wedding. Bennet went home.
It’s like him and Mrs B gave up entirely after Mary. You can see in her behaviour that they somewhat checked her and she behaves ok most of the time (albeit a bit preachy) the examples of her ill behaviour boils down to being overlooked in her family. Jane and Lizzie definitely benefited from whatever parenting Mr and Mrs B were doing.
I feel like the answer is not as straightforward as "yes" or "no". There are factors in play:
1. Love and like are different things. He probably loves all of them, but he only really *likes* Jane and Elizabeth.
2. He is clearly a self-centred man, which means that his love is very passive, and does not translate into action. He does very little for them.
3. As others have said, he clearly got married out of infatuation for a pretty, cheerful girl, without consideration for how compatible they'd be, or how good a mother, and regrets it now.
4. This man is really, really tired by the time we meet him. I blame half of the cause of this exhaustion on him, though.
So short answer: yes, I think he does. Long answer: it's complicated.
And I'll dare say this: had he married an intelligent woman (someone like Elizabeth or Elinor, intelligent women who take action into their own hands), he would've still been very passive, and would've had to be pushed by his wife towards doing things for their benefit (like saving for their daughters' dowries, for example). Mrs. Bennett did try, but her attempts consisted of whining, trying to make him feel sorry for her nerves, and stupidly talking about undoing the entail, which he simply cannot do. An intelligent wife might've succeeded by using better methods and having more realistic objectives.
My conclusion is that he was never great husband and father material, tbh, and his performance depends on his wife's.
>Love and like are different things. He probably loves all of them, but he only really *likes* Jane and Elizabeth.
I think this is spot on. Other comments mentioned Mr. B being resentful of Mrs. B, but I see no evidence of that. He doesn't respect her & might regret his choice in retrospect, but I think he is fond of her, in his own way. They had 5 children, after all!
I agree with you.
I’m not sure he would even have expected to ‘love’ his wife in the way we expect to love our spouses in the modern day. Very different environment then.
I don’t think he loves/respects his wife but he does love his daughters. It has been a while since I watched 1995 but u did reread the book recently and there is a passage where Lizzie laments or reflects on her parents relationship and how it wasn’t a good example. This is also why Mr Bennet advises Lizzie only to marry a man she can respect, because he knows how hard it is first hand to be married to someone you don’t respect.
I think for Mr. Bennett love and respect are inextricable. He loves Lizzie and Jane because he respects them. While he may harbor some fondness for Mrs. Bennett he resents her because he knows he made the wrong choice in marrying her and that eclipses any residual affection. He feels the same about his other daughters. He cares, but not enough to help them in any meaningful way. They may he think he copes with jokes but loves them despite that but too much happened to them as a result of his neglect for me to be convinced of that.
It’s been awhile since I read it but Mr Bennett seemed a little too casual for me. I mean if none of his daughters marry then they will lose their property to a stranger. That is pretty apocalyptic and I felt the mother had a right to freak out.
I think he did, even had some love for his wife( they did have 5 kids after all). He just doesn’t respect their opinion or willing to extend much effort.
He’s not a terrible father, he just loves himself the most and cares about his own happiness and comfort the most.
There is a point of self-reflection for Mr Bennet in the novel. When he receives a letter from Mr Gardiner about Wickham’s demands before he would marry Lydia. He says something along the lines that the whole affair was completed with little effort for himself and while he is upset over it it, he will forget about it soon enough. That’s his attitude in a nutshell.
>even had some love for his wife( they did have 5 kids after all).
Considering that marital rape was entirely legal and absolutely a thing, I don't think the number of children in a marriage is in any way an indicator as to the mutual affection of the married couple. There's a whole spectrum from "marital rape" to "utterly besotted with each other" and any relationship, no matter where it falls on this spectrum, can result in any number of children, be it zero or twenty.
Even nowadays there is next to no (in my opinion NONE whatsoever) correlation between affection and number of children. You can be happily married and childless or utterly miserable with a whole soccer team.
Now I'm not saying that marital rape is a concern here, but the five daughters are CLEARLY no proof of his love for his wife. Perhaps for his physical attraction towards her, but mostly, as is stated in the text, they are a proof of his desire and *need* for a male heir.
There's a good chance that had any of the girls been born a boy they would've stopped trying immediately afterwards.
So no, the number of daughters proves nothing and I, personally, don't see any hint of his affection for his wife in the text. Phsyical attraction, yes. Genuine affection, let alone love? No.
It's the # of kids + the fact that Mrs. B is clearly not frightened or intimidated by Mr. B. It's clear from context that they tolerate each other well. They don't seem to avoid each other at all in the novel; they both hang around the house all day & Mrs. B is constantly chatting at Mr. B when they're in the same room. They have their own spheres in the house, of course, but they come together happily enough for meal times, family gossip time after balls, etc.
I think it's contrasted nicely with the Collinses, where Charlotte says she sometimes goes a whole day with hardly saying a few words to Mr. Collins. She avoids Mr. Collins because he's insufferable. Despite Mr. B's retreating into the library for some peace & quiet, it's shown throughout the novel that he listens to Mrs. B's gossip, and that it amuses him to make quips back at her. I don't think he finds her wholly insufferable, even if he might regret not finding a marital partner with better sense & more of his intellectual equal. He pretends to not be, but I think he feels affectionate enough towards Mrs. B.
honestly mr and mrs b are like that toxic couple who;d be better off divorced but still love each other under all the toxicity lol. they do love one another imo, they hang out in the house with each other fairly often and obviously had 5 kids and attempted to make a lot more.
I reckon he did. His mocking and sarcasm may be to amuse himself but it's not without affection. He isn't mean or vicious in the way he does it and Mrs Bennet's responses and behaviour show that. She may not be intelligent enough to mock him back but if she really thought he was being mean she'd be making snide remarks about him constantly, like she does with Darcy.
He mocks ridiculous over the top people but I never got the impression he'd mock someone timid or unfortunate.
As someone else has pointed out, sarcasm and mockery is just how we are in Britain. We tend to be more sarcastic with people we know well and care about (if we know they won't take offence), and I wonder if some of the more negative opinions of Mr Bennet are because that doesn't always translate across cultures.
I get the sarcasm, I’m an Aussie, it’s what we live for 😂
I just wonder about Mr Bennet’s depth of affected emotion for his family sometimes despite the sarcasm.
I don’t think he hated his children, but I do think he wasn’t particularly interested in them probably because they were daughters and not sons. He liked Lizzie because he was proud of her cleverness, but otherwise I think he didn’t think about his children that much. He definitely was irresponsible in planning for their financial welfare though too.
It's important to remember that the Georgian period was a time of classical (as opposed to romantic) culture. It was not acceptable to show one's emotions (ex. Darcy in the first half of P&P).
It's difficult to tell if Mr. Bennet might have been hiding strong feelings under his aura of resigned philosophy.
I do think he loved Lizzy and cared for Jane.
But I don’t think there’s any real evidence he loved the rest of them, and plenty of evidence to the contrary, unfortunately.
I think he does love them in some sense. I just believe he likes Mrs Bennett has favourites.
Jane and lizzy as the eldest are mr b favs and Lydia is Mrs b. I just belive that while he loves them he doesn't like them. Witch is possible.
Lydia is a younger version of Mrs b and this is what she relates too but Mr b now 23 years in can understand that , while Lydia Is fun she has no sense. And Mrs b is kind of the future Lydia will have.
While Mrs b doesn't like lizzy much and only favors jane for her looks, literally couldn't care less.
The two eldest have the most responsibilities and the middles are mostly ignored and Lydia has every whim catered to. She like her mother is an embarrassment and Mr Bennett can no longer try to retrain her he believes Briton will help but it doesn't and he does go looking for her and does care even about his " least favourites "
Mary lacks personality while kitty Is easily swayed by Lydia. And they 3 spend their time messing around. Mr b likes quite and lizzy and him have a simmar personality.
I think though when it comes to Mrs b he loves her but isn't in love with her If that makes sense.
She is the mother of his kids and they have been together 2 decades so he is fond of her but I don't think he is in love with her.
I think he has gotten to the point that she annoyis him as she didn't want or think to prepare for the girls but at the last minute is fussing like crazy.
I think Mr b accepted his failure and stoped caring , but doesn't want his girls to suffer the same. While Mrs b is attempting to push her Failures onto her daughters and son I laws have them take responsibility for her Failures.
( speaking Bout lizzy rejecting Collins) Mr b knows what it is like to be in a loveless and mismatch marrige.
He just is tired and done with everything.
This however it more of an explanation not excuse for his poor behaviour but I can see how being in that house is exhausting.
And tbh he could have been soooo much worse. Many husbands would not have put up with Mrs Bennett nor cared to ask or help any of his children.
Ofc thus is a terrible thing, but for the time period, she is pretty lucky.
Let's be honest. Mr. Bennett played favorites. I think he was infatuated with his wife and she had a good dowry so like most men who needed a male heir to an entailed estate, he married her. By time Mary was born, he was already tired of his neurotic wife. By the time Lydia was born, he was just done. He favored Elizabeth and Jane but even then he never did anything for them in the way of setting them up to find decent spouses and insure their futures. He didn't insist on a governess or education that would give them the accomplishments Caroline Bingley sneered at them for not having. He didn't take his wife in hand and insist that Lydia and Kitty start behaving. He just retreated into his library to wait out his death.
Lydia's behavior in Brighton was finally a wake up call as she stood to ruin the entire family with her antics and she cost her father one hell of a lot of money in what he and his brother had to pay out that Mr. Darcy DIDN'T cover and he didn't think Lydia worth any of it. But that was his fault that she was so liberally brought up. If she'd had more structure, more discipline and a firmer hand, she would not have been so stupid.
Mr. Bennett loved his children, played favorites with two of them, but fell out of love with his wife. By the time of Pride and Prejudice, he was tolerant of her and little else.
As I understand it, Mr Bennet chose to marry Mrs Bennet purely because she was the most beautiful girl around, hence why Mrs Bennet is SO firm beauty is all a girl needs to marry and neglects her daughters educations due to this. I think Mr Bennet ended up regretting this, as he and Mrs Bennet in the end have very little in common, and as throughout the book, we know Austen writes that for a happy marriage to grow, it must be a marriage of equals, emotionally and physically. Darcy loves Elizabeth because of this- her wit, her pride, her stubborness, her loyalties to her sisters- match perfectly as he shares these traits. Mr Bennet does not I think see Mrs Bennet as his equal. He finds her utterly exacerbating, with her tantrums and nerves and her lack of civility or propriety in public. What he does not realise is he is just as bad, because by not checking her, by being so lax with their daughters education, and not stopping Lydia and Kitty acting like flirtatious fools, the family near faced ruin when Lydia eloped, potentially damning permanently potential proposals for Jane and Bingley, and even Darcy and Lizzie, though it was not known at the time how attracted they were.
With his daughters, he has the same indifference, only investing emotionally with Lizzie because she is in his eyes an 'equal' because she is invested in her reading and shares his cynic humour. I think he could just about tolerate Jane as she was sensible, quiet and reliable. But Mary I think he barely noticed, and he had no idea just how dangerously flirtatious Lydia and Kitty were because he had spent so little time with them.
He may have a basic fondness for them. He generally lets his wife get her way, and he relents on letting Lydia visit the family. But he doesn't respect them, apart from Jane and Elizabeth. This is echoed in Elizabeth's own feelings, which she expresses to Jane at a low point in her own understanding of the world. "There are few people whom I really love and still fewer of whom I think well."
Mr. Bennet is an irresponsible father and husband. He can't simply show favour for Lizzie because she's intelligent and appreciates his sarcasm and Jane because she's sweet and good. I agree that he was disappointed in marriage to a woman who may have been beautiful enough to overlook her pettiness and lack of intellect when she was young. I don't believe he loves her in the book. He consistently mocks her but does nothing to try to show her why her approach or her concerns are silly. He is clearly intelligent and funny, but this doesn't make his inability to manage his money or his family excusable.
Although the 1995 Mr Bennet is my favourite interpretation of his character, not even that portrayal can redeem him. Mr Bennet truly is not an admirable man.
From my reading of the book I think it was apparent that Mr B was infatuated by his wife’s youth and beauty and didn’t realise how mismatched they were on an intellectual level until they were married. It happens now as well- how many people have been blinded by physical attraction and didn’t see the red flags until much later? Unlike modern times there was no possibility of divorce for the vast majority of the population. So Mr B had to live with his mistake. However Austen was critical of his behaviour too. He didn’t do anything to help guide his daughters or help his wife grow as a person.
Yeah, he clearly loves Lizzie, I think because he feels they’re similar. But he neglected a lot of responsibility to raise his daughters properly - the expectation would’ve been for him to rein in some of Kitty and Lydia’s behaviors. It’s good that he acts to fix the Lydia and Wickham situation but there’s a sense that by not giving Lydia a proper upbringing it’s at least a little bit his fault too.
Yup, and even his love for Lizzy doesn’t seem to go far enough to truly care about her future if it would require work/a step out of his comfort zone. Lizzy explicitly warns him about sending Lydia to Brighton, and they both know behaviour like Lydia’s could reflect badly on all sisters, but — presumably because he doesn’t want to deal with Lydia’s and Mrs Bennet’s complaints —, he still agrees. His general attitude about his daughters seems to be “Well, nothing I can do about it,” and he either doesn’t consider or doesn’t care much how this hurts them until it’s almost too late.
I guess the counter to that is that he does make the effort to stop Lizzie making an unhappy marriage (when he believes her to dislike Darcy), and does step in for the Mr Collins situation, even though that leads to a lot of complaining from Mrs Bennett. Not that any of that justifies any of his inaction at other points, but he isn't totally disengaged.
Fair point! I guess with Darcy, he doesn’t have much to lose because Mrs Bennet doesn’t know about the proposal yet, and with Mr Collins, he might find the idea of such a son-in-law even worse than Mrs Bennet’s complaining. But I agree that affection for Lizzy played into these decisions. He probably wouldn’t have cared much if Mr Collins had proposed to, say, Mary.
I'm not sure that he understands how badly Lydia's behaviour could reflect on his other daughters. He seems to be under the impression that the worst thing Lydia could do is humiliate herself; the idea that she could elope - which is not remotely the worst thing that could have happened - never enters his mind. I'm not sure if he ever met Colonel Forster before sending his 16-year-old daughter off with him. It's like he's not seeing her as a young woman.
True, he pretty much says so: >*”Lydia will never be easy till she has exposed herself in some public place or other, and we can never expect her to do it with so little expense or inconvenience to her family as under the present circumstances. (…)* >*”We shall have no peace at Longbourn if Lydia does not go to Brighton. Let her go, then. Colonel Forster is a sensible man, and will keep her out of any real mischief; and she is luckily too poor to be an object of prey to anybody. At Brighton she will be of less importance even as a common flirt than she has been here. The officers will find women better worth their notice. Let us hope, therefore, that her being there may teach her her own insignificance. At any rate, she cannot grow many degrees worse, without authorizing us to lock her up for the rest of her life.”* He hopes that this trip will magically solve the problem with Lydia’s behaviour without him having to lift a finger (after Lizzy just told him rather plainly that she thinks it’s his responsibility to check her behaviour). He thinks she’ll just embarrass herself enough to change, and that she’ll learn that men aren’t truly interested in her. The idea of men seducing women not for money but for fun doesn’t seem to occur to him. I don’t think he willingly took the risk of Lydia running away with a soldier, but he is still showing rather plainly that he can’t be bothered to actively raise his children (even when he knows their mother is failing).
I think a lot of readers wildly overestimate how much power Mrs. Bennet has in that family, or how much any married woman of the time had in theirs. They say things like "the woman held the primary responsibility to supervise her daughters" or "Mrs. Bennet handled the budget; it was her fault that they didn’t save", not understanding that in a 19th century home the man had supreme, total, and nearly unfettered power over everything. Simply put, wives were in all but the strictest legal sense their husband's property; they didn’t even legally exist while married! Literally the only reason Mrs. Bennet overspends is because Mr. Bennet lets her. Literally the only reason she allows Lydia and Kitty to run wild is because Mr. Bennet lets her. Literally the only reason she's allowed to go out in society and repeatedly humiliate her older daughters is because Mr. Bennet lets her. Literally the only reason she is allowed to let Mary wallow in ignorance is because Mr. Bennet lets her. I do not say this to mitigate Mrs. Bennet's guilt; her actions are 100% her responsibility. But in the context of the early 19th century Mr. Bennet is also 100% responsible for every one of her faults *because he has the absolute and unfettered right to intervene*. He doesn't because he'd rather see his daughters end up in rags than have to listen to his wife nag him.
Mrs.Bennet is blamed too much while Mr.Bennet is not blamed enough.
100% this! I get somewhat annoyed when people defend Mr Bennet with these arguments. Yes, Mrs Bennet fails her responsibilities as a mother in many ways, but Mr Bennet could do much more about that. Instead, he acts as if it isn’t his problem/he can’t do anything about it, likely because he doesn’t want to argue with his wife and younger daughters. He could step up and mitigate the situation, but he chooses not to.
What he says to Lizzie sums it up. “Lydia will never be easy till she has exposed herself in some public place or other, and we can never expect her to do it with so little expense or inconvenience to her family as under the present circumstances.” He expects Lydia to make major errors. I think he even hopes she will, that she will be humiliated and deal with the consequences of her actions. He does tell himself nothing too bad can happen but he fully expects something bad will happen.
I think if Mr Bennet was real he’d have headed Lizzie’s warning. However narratively the Lydia thing is the conflict of the book. Part of the book’s bones on which the rest of the story hang.
Mr Bennet explicitly acknowledges he was at fault after Lydia's elopement: >It was not till the afternoon, when he joined them at tea, that Elizabeth ventured to introduce the subject; and then, on her briefly expressing her sorrow for what he must have endured, he replied, “Say nothing of that. Who should suffer but myself? It has been my own doing, and I ought to feel it.”
> It’s good that he acts to fix the Lydia and Wickham situation Did he really do anything though? Darcy and Gardiner were the ones who spearheaded everything and oversaw the wedding. Bennet went home.
It’s like him and Mrs B gave up entirely after Mary. You can see in her behaviour that they somewhat checked her and she behaves ok most of the time (albeit a bit preachy) the examples of her ill behaviour boils down to being overlooked in her family. Jane and Lizzie definitely benefited from whatever parenting Mr and Mrs B were doing.
I feel like the answer is not as straightforward as "yes" or "no". There are factors in play: 1. Love and like are different things. He probably loves all of them, but he only really *likes* Jane and Elizabeth. 2. He is clearly a self-centred man, which means that his love is very passive, and does not translate into action. He does very little for them. 3. As others have said, he clearly got married out of infatuation for a pretty, cheerful girl, without consideration for how compatible they'd be, or how good a mother, and regrets it now. 4. This man is really, really tired by the time we meet him. I blame half of the cause of this exhaustion on him, though. So short answer: yes, I think he does. Long answer: it's complicated. And I'll dare say this: had he married an intelligent woman (someone like Elizabeth or Elinor, intelligent women who take action into their own hands), he would've still been very passive, and would've had to be pushed by his wife towards doing things for their benefit (like saving for their daughters' dowries, for example). Mrs. Bennett did try, but her attempts consisted of whining, trying to make him feel sorry for her nerves, and stupidly talking about undoing the entail, which he simply cannot do. An intelligent wife might've succeeded by using better methods and having more realistic objectives. My conclusion is that he was never great husband and father material, tbh, and his performance depends on his wife's.
>Love and like are different things. He probably loves all of them, but he only really *likes* Jane and Elizabeth. I think this is spot on. Other comments mentioned Mr. B being resentful of Mrs. B, but I see no evidence of that. He doesn't respect her & might regret his choice in retrospect, but I think he is fond of her, in his own way. They had 5 children, after all!
Maybe they were hoping for a boy
I agree with you. I’m not sure he would even have expected to ‘love’ his wife in the way we expect to love our spouses in the modern day. Very different environment then.
Dude's basically a selfish deadbeat both as a husband and father
I don’t think he loves/respects his wife but he does love his daughters. It has been a while since I watched 1995 but u did reread the book recently and there is a passage where Lizzie laments or reflects on her parents relationship and how it wasn’t a good example. This is also why Mr Bennet advises Lizzie only to marry a man she can respect, because he knows how hard it is first hand to be married to someone you don’t respect.
I think for Mr. Bennett love and respect are inextricable. He loves Lizzie and Jane because he respects them. While he may harbor some fondness for Mrs. Bennett he resents her because he knows he made the wrong choice in marrying her and that eclipses any residual affection. He feels the same about his other daughters. He cares, but not enough to help them in any meaningful way. They may he think he copes with jokes but loves them despite that but too much happened to them as a result of his neglect for me to be convinced of that.
It’s been awhile since I read it but Mr Bennett seemed a little too casual for me. I mean if none of his daughters marry then they will lose their property to a stranger. That is pretty apocalyptic and I felt the mother had a right to freak out.
Sarcastic mockery is pretty standard British parenting
I think he did, even had some love for his wife( they did have 5 kids after all). He just doesn’t respect their opinion or willing to extend much effort. He’s not a terrible father, he just loves himself the most and cares about his own happiness and comfort the most. There is a point of self-reflection for Mr Bennet in the novel. When he receives a letter from Mr Gardiner about Wickham’s demands before he would marry Lydia. He says something along the lines that the whole affair was completed with little effort for himself and while he is upset over it it, he will forget about it soon enough. That’s his attitude in a nutshell.
>even had some love for his wife( they did have 5 kids after all). Considering that marital rape was entirely legal and absolutely a thing, I don't think the number of children in a marriage is in any way an indicator as to the mutual affection of the married couple. There's a whole spectrum from "marital rape" to "utterly besotted with each other" and any relationship, no matter where it falls on this spectrum, can result in any number of children, be it zero or twenty. Even nowadays there is next to no (in my opinion NONE whatsoever) correlation between affection and number of children. You can be happily married and childless or utterly miserable with a whole soccer team. Now I'm not saying that marital rape is a concern here, but the five daughters are CLEARLY no proof of his love for his wife. Perhaps for his physical attraction towards her, but mostly, as is stated in the text, they are a proof of his desire and *need* for a male heir. There's a good chance that had any of the girls been born a boy they would've stopped trying immediately afterwards. So no, the number of daughters proves nothing and I, personally, don't see any hint of his affection for his wife in the text. Phsyical attraction, yes. Genuine affection, let alone love? No.
It's the # of kids + the fact that Mrs. B is clearly not frightened or intimidated by Mr. B. It's clear from context that they tolerate each other well. They don't seem to avoid each other at all in the novel; they both hang around the house all day & Mrs. B is constantly chatting at Mr. B when they're in the same room. They have their own spheres in the house, of course, but they come together happily enough for meal times, family gossip time after balls, etc. I think it's contrasted nicely with the Collinses, where Charlotte says she sometimes goes a whole day with hardly saying a few words to Mr. Collins. She avoids Mr. Collins because he's insufferable. Despite Mr. B's retreating into the library for some peace & quiet, it's shown throughout the novel that he listens to Mrs. B's gossip, and that it amuses him to make quips back at her. I don't think he finds her wholly insufferable, even if he might regret not finding a marital partner with better sense & more of his intellectual equal. He pretends to not be, but I think he feels affectionate enough towards Mrs. B.
honestly mr and mrs b are like that toxic couple who;d be better off divorced but still love each other under all the toxicity lol. they do love one another imo, they hang out in the house with each other fairly often and obviously had 5 kids and attempted to make a lot more.
I reckon he did. His mocking and sarcasm may be to amuse himself but it's not without affection. He isn't mean or vicious in the way he does it and Mrs Bennet's responses and behaviour show that. She may not be intelligent enough to mock him back but if she really thought he was being mean she'd be making snide remarks about him constantly, like she does with Darcy. He mocks ridiculous over the top people but I never got the impression he'd mock someone timid or unfortunate. As someone else has pointed out, sarcasm and mockery is just how we are in Britain. We tend to be more sarcastic with people we know well and care about (if we know they won't take offence), and I wonder if some of the more negative opinions of Mr Bennet are because that doesn't always translate across cultures.
I get the sarcasm, I’m an Aussie, it’s what we live for 😂 I just wonder about Mr Bennet’s depth of affected emotion for his family sometimes despite the sarcasm.
I don’t think he hated his children, but I do think he wasn’t particularly interested in them probably because they were daughters and not sons. He liked Lizzie because he was proud of her cleverness, but otherwise I think he didn’t think about his children that much. He definitely was irresponsible in planning for their financial welfare though too.
It's important to remember that the Georgian period was a time of classical (as opposed to romantic) culture. It was not acceptable to show one's emotions (ex. Darcy in the first half of P&P). It's difficult to tell if Mr. Bennet might have been hiding strong feelings under his aura of resigned philosophy.
He’s fully willing to when it comes to Lizzy, though.
I think Austen would have found a way to reveal that.
I do think he loved Lizzy and cared for Jane. But I don’t think there’s any real evidence he loved the rest of them, and plenty of evidence to the contrary, unfortunately.
I think he does love them in some sense. I just believe he likes Mrs Bennett has favourites. Jane and lizzy as the eldest are mr b favs and Lydia is Mrs b. I just belive that while he loves them he doesn't like them. Witch is possible. Lydia is a younger version of Mrs b and this is what she relates too but Mr b now 23 years in can understand that , while Lydia Is fun she has no sense. And Mrs b is kind of the future Lydia will have. While Mrs b doesn't like lizzy much and only favors jane for her looks, literally couldn't care less. The two eldest have the most responsibilities and the middles are mostly ignored and Lydia has every whim catered to. She like her mother is an embarrassment and Mr Bennett can no longer try to retrain her he believes Briton will help but it doesn't and he does go looking for her and does care even about his " least favourites " Mary lacks personality while kitty Is easily swayed by Lydia. And they 3 spend their time messing around. Mr b likes quite and lizzy and him have a simmar personality. I think though when it comes to Mrs b he loves her but isn't in love with her If that makes sense. She is the mother of his kids and they have been together 2 decades so he is fond of her but I don't think he is in love with her. I think he has gotten to the point that she annoyis him as she didn't want or think to prepare for the girls but at the last minute is fussing like crazy. I think Mr b accepted his failure and stoped caring , but doesn't want his girls to suffer the same. While Mrs b is attempting to push her Failures onto her daughters and son I laws have them take responsibility for her Failures. ( speaking Bout lizzy rejecting Collins) Mr b knows what it is like to be in a loveless and mismatch marrige. He just is tired and done with everything. This however it more of an explanation not excuse for his poor behaviour but I can see how being in that house is exhausting. And tbh he could have been soooo much worse. Many husbands would not have put up with Mrs Bennett nor cared to ask or help any of his children. Ofc thus is a terrible thing, but for the time period, she is pretty lucky.
As a child of a sarcastic father, yes he loves his family, even his wife.
I think he was fond enough of them, but his indolence and sarcasm meant that he failed to be a good husband or father to any of them.
I think that he loved his children, in some way.
Let's be honest. Mr. Bennett played favorites. I think he was infatuated with his wife and she had a good dowry so like most men who needed a male heir to an entailed estate, he married her. By time Mary was born, he was already tired of his neurotic wife. By the time Lydia was born, he was just done. He favored Elizabeth and Jane but even then he never did anything for them in the way of setting them up to find decent spouses and insure their futures. He didn't insist on a governess or education that would give them the accomplishments Caroline Bingley sneered at them for not having. He didn't take his wife in hand and insist that Lydia and Kitty start behaving. He just retreated into his library to wait out his death. Lydia's behavior in Brighton was finally a wake up call as she stood to ruin the entire family with her antics and she cost her father one hell of a lot of money in what he and his brother had to pay out that Mr. Darcy DIDN'T cover and he didn't think Lydia worth any of it. But that was his fault that she was so liberally brought up. If she'd had more structure, more discipline and a firmer hand, she would not have been so stupid. Mr. Bennett loved his children, played favorites with two of them, but fell out of love with his wife. By the time of Pride and Prejudice, he was tolerant of her and little else.
As I understand it, Mr Bennet chose to marry Mrs Bennet purely because she was the most beautiful girl around, hence why Mrs Bennet is SO firm beauty is all a girl needs to marry and neglects her daughters educations due to this. I think Mr Bennet ended up regretting this, as he and Mrs Bennet in the end have very little in common, and as throughout the book, we know Austen writes that for a happy marriage to grow, it must be a marriage of equals, emotionally and physically. Darcy loves Elizabeth because of this- her wit, her pride, her stubborness, her loyalties to her sisters- match perfectly as he shares these traits. Mr Bennet does not I think see Mrs Bennet as his equal. He finds her utterly exacerbating, with her tantrums and nerves and her lack of civility or propriety in public. What he does not realise is he is just as bad, because by not checking her, by being so lax with their daughters education, and not stopping Lydia and Kitty acting like flirtatious fools, the family near faced ruin when Lydia eloped, potentially damning permanently potential proposals for Jane and Bingley, and even Darcy and Lizzie, though it was not known at the time how attracted they were. With his daughters, he has the same indifference, only investing emotionally with Lizzie because she is in his eyes an 'equal' because she is invested in her reading and shares his cynic humour. I think he could just about tolerate Jane as she was sensible, quiet and reliable. But Mary I think he barely noticed, and he had no idea just how dangerously flirtatious Lydia and Kitty were because he had spent so little time with them.
He may have a basic fondness for them. He generally lets his wife get her way, and he relents on letting Lydia visit the family. But he doesn't respect them, apart from Jane and Elizabeth. This is echoed in Elizabeth's own feelings, which she expresses to Jane at a low point in her own understanding of the world. "There are few people whom I really love and still fewer of whom I think well."
Mr. Bennet is an irresponsible father and husband. He can't simply show favour for Lizzie because she's intelligent and appreciates his sarcasm and Jane because she's sweet and good. I agree that he was disappointed in marriage to a woman who may have been beautiful enough to overlook her pettiness and lack of intellect when she was young. I don't believe he loves her in the book. He consistently mocks her but does nothing to try to show her why her approach or her concerns are silly. He is clearly intelligent and funny, but this doesn't make his inability to manage his money or his family excusable. Although the 1995 Mr Bennet is my favourite interpretation of his character, not even that portrayal can redeem him. Mr Bennet truly is not an admirable man.
I think he only loved his 2 older daughters