View source for Accomplishment in Pride and Prejudice

==Progressive response to opportunity== 
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|A study of the progressive changes in Eliza’s thoughts and attitudes about Darcy reveal the full and characteristic pattern of human response to opportunities that lie far above a person’s present level of attainment. One of the most striking—and true to life—aspects of the entire story is the fact that it took until the very end for Eliza to fully realize how much she wanted and would be pleased by what Darcy had been seeking to offer almost from the time of their first meeting. Let us trace from beginning to end the steps that Elizabeth passes through leading to her ultimate accomplishment.  
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#Her first response to the approach of unprecedented opportunity is the typical response of people to what is far above their present level of accomplishment. She is completely unaware. She is meant to be mistress of Pemberley, and when the master of Pemberley walks into the room, she could care less. She is unconscious. Even when Charlotte points out that Darcy keeps staring at her, it makes no impression on her. Rather she suspects him of finding fault with her. She does not see what is coming toward her. 
# The second response is that she readily accepts the general resentment against Darcy. She is angry when he refuses to dance with her. At first, she is able to laugh, but she becomes angry because she is not able to acknowledge the difference in social status between them that the society affirms. Had she accepted his pride as natural because of his superior wealth and station or had she just resented it in bitter resignation, it would be a sign that she is not meant for that higher level. Her anger and the prejudice she develops against him are expressions of aspiration that does not accept the status quo or superiority of his position as right or inevitable. 
# The next response comes when Sir Lucas tries to get them to dance during the party at his house. She refuses, feels extremely embarrassed and walks away. 
# Then Darcy comes to her and asks her to dance while she is staying with Jane at Netherfield. She is sure his intention is to mock her and she refuses. She is still in the position of pushing away the opportunity that comes to her. The truth of the matter is that life is opening up higher possibilities for her and she is saying ‘no’.
# Next, she becomes attracted to Wickham and readily believes all of Wickham’s lies about Darcy. She is powerfully, magnetically attracted by a person with the very opposite character and consciousness of Darcy and fully identifies with him. Eliza seeks the false and low and shuns the good and high. While she cannot respond to Darcy, she can and does respond to Wickham’s pleasant attentions. Eliza is attracted to what is at her own level.
# She forges an intense negative relationship with Darcy. Now Darcy is becoming real to her, but only as an object of scorn. At the Netherfield ball when he again wants to dance with her, she wants to refuse, but she is taken by surprise and cannot gracefully decline. During the dance, she starts poking and provoking him. The resentment she feels inside expresses as a battle of wits. She smiles, is polite and tries to embarrass him. She starts to offend him. In fact, up until this time, Darcy has not done anything to intentionally offend her. He did offend her by refusing to dance at Meryton, but he did not know she was listening to what he told Bingley. But she intentionally tries to offend him here. She not only believes Wickham’s lies, she also spreads them. She becomes an active instrument for spreading lies about her future husband. A year later after accepting his marriage proposal, she has to plead with her family not to believe all the things she had said about him before!
# Eliza goes to Hunsford and stays at the parsonage. When Fitzwilliam and Darcy come to call on them, Charlotte comments that Darcy must have come to see Elizabeth. But Elizabeth is still completely oblivious. She is still not able to conceive that he could be attracted to her. It is not his behavior that deceives her, but her own mental conception of her social own position and possibilities. 
# When Darcy calls again at the parsonage and finds her alone and then returns a few days later to propose, she is totally surprised, shocked. When he proposes, the only thing she hears is that the man is insulting her. One of the wealthiest men in England comes and says, ''“Will you marry me?”'' Granted, he does it in a very crude way. But the only thing she hears is that the man came to abuse her. She has the self-restraint at this point not to be mean, which she did not have earlier when they danced. She tries to respect the man’s sentiments toward her. She is cool, polite, but there is nothing mean or negative. When he insists, ''“Is this all the response I am to have?”''  At that point, she gets an irresistible invitation from him and she cannot keep quiet. So she speaks her mind fully and talks about Wickham, Jane and Bingley. When he continues to prod her, she calls him ''“ungentlemanly.”'' She totally abuses him. Instead of asking whether she is justified in abusing him, look at the situation in terms of what she is offered and what she refuses. Regardless of her reason, she ends up abusing the man who offers her an opportunity to rise a few hundred times in monetary terms and she does not seem to be even conscious of his offer. Our purpose is not to judge either of them, but to understand the process. We can admire her sense of independence, her lack of mercenary motives, her boldness and her frankness, but that does not fully explain her action. The fact remains that she is still unable to conceive that an offer of this magnitude is coming to her for her consideration and she rejects it out of hand.
# After he leaves, she cries for half an hour. She is still bewildered by his proposal. There is no sense of accomplishment on her part, there is no perversity, no triumph. She is disturbed. The next day when she is walking in the beautiful spring weather, which shows the atmosphere, he comes up to her and gives her the letter. At first she is angry because she thinks about how he defended himself regarding Jane. But what most provoked her about his proposal was that he took it for granted that she would accept him. She wants to reject the letter when she reads what he writes about Wickham. In the course of reading the letter several times, she goes through the process of becoming conscious. We see at the end of that process her mental sincerity and honesty. She recognizes the truth in his words, even though she does not like it. She had the capacity to believe a falsehood from Wickham without questioning, because she liked him so much; but she also has the capacity to accept the truth from Darcy in spite of the fact that it is so unpleasant to her. That is a reversal. It is her first real reversal. She is able to see her own folly and blindness. More than that, she is able to feel ashamed of it. She feels ashamed of her family and sees they are responsible for Jane’s losing Bingley, not Darcy. Then she realizes that she should not even blame it on her family, but only on herself. She sees the folly and absurdity of her own behavior. She realizes that it is she who is vain, not Darcy. She says, ''“I never knew myself until this moment.”'' She has come to be confronted, not by Darcy’s personality, but by her own personality. She is forced to reevaluate her image of herself and understand what she is. And she is able to do it.  She mentally, not emotionally, recognizes that Darcy’s sense of superiority is justified. That is real mental sincerity, which qualifies her for any level of accomplishment. 
# Eliza returns to Herefordshire and as far as she is concerned, both Wickham and Darcy are now out of her life. She withdraws her emotions for Wickham. She is sure that Darcy could never possibly consider relating to her again and she is still not at all sure that she cares. Then she travels with the Gardiners to Derbyshire and is brought to Pemberley. Until this moment, she has never understood what Darcy offered her. Coming to Pemberley, walking through the house and seeing the magnificent place makes her physical consciousness understand. She might have been mistress of Pemberley. It is not a mercenary motive she feels. It is the physical consciousness becoming aware for the first time of what has been coming toward her. It feels very nice, and her being expands. 
# The moment she responds positively to Pemberley — not to Darcy — Darcy shows up. Then her response is embarrassment. Why is she embarrassed? Until now, Darcy was not a member of her society. As far as she was concerned, Darcy did not exist socially. Therefore, she could poke him and tease him, because his social position did not really matter. Now, having gone through all of this, suddenly she becomes intensely, acutely self-conscious that he will misunderstand her. She wants to physically run away from the place. When she sees his pleasant behavior to herself and the Gardiners, she is perplexed but also pleased. Her social personality is very pleased.  She feels gratitude to Darcy for loving her, yet she is still unable to discern her own feelings for him and she is unsure whether she can ever return his affection.
# The next response is important. Darcy had asked permission to introduce her to his sister Georgiana the following day and she had accepted. This is the first time she has responded positively to any proposal of his. She does not leave the inn the whole morning, to be sure she is available whenever they may come. She is becoming impatient. She has gone from indifference and negativity to becoming positive and interested. She definitely is interested. That impatience shows that she is not yet fully qualified. She is not yet capable of completing this accomplishment. She has her mother’s nerves and vital effervescent. Now that she is interested, she cannot be calm about it. Georgiana comes with her brother and Bingley, and Elizabeth is pleased. She comes to understand that she can be accepted into the superior society she once resented for its pride.
# Mr. Gardiner is invited for fishing the next day, and she and Mrs. Gardiner feel they should call on Georgiana at Pemberley. Caroline is there at Pemberley and when Elizabeth is sitting along with the ladies, she is not sure whether she wants Darcy to enter the room or not. After the day is over and she goes back to the inn, she feels gratitude to him for still loving her, but she still does not know how she feels about him or whether she wants to marry him. She is not even able to allow her mind to believe that he would propose to her again. Her mind is not willing to consent, and her emotions are not defined. 
# At that point Jane’s letter comes and Elizabeth breaks her formality by confessing to Darcy about the elopement. It is an act of feminine instinct. She positively bridges the distance between them. She shows all her weakness to express, cries in front of him, and confesses her tragedy. The moment he leaves, she is sure she is never going to see him again. Only then it dawns on her that she really wants him. Only when she feels sure that she has lost him forever because of her family’s disgrace, does she realize she wants to marry him. It is Lydia’s elopement that makes her conscious of what she wants. [[Sri Aurobindo]] describes the whole evolution as the Divine involved in matter, waking up and emerging in consciousness through the human being. At one point the human being awakens to a divine possibility. Everything leading up to that point is only the progression and preparation to make him conscious of his true being. In Elizabeth’s life, all the events in the story up to this point are only meant to awaken her to consciousness of her own higher possibilities. We understand those possibilities to be her marrying a rich aristocrat. But what she is really awakening to is her own possibility of higher character. What comes to her is not something external, but something in response to an inner progress which she has not yet fully made. All accomplished is a result of an inner accomplishment. All that has happened up until now is only to awaken her to her destiny. At the point when all seems lost, she realizes it. Even Darcy’s very gracious behavior has not done it. It did not make her conscious. It is only the elopement and the total disgrace of her family that awakens her fully. She is now sure that all her prospects are destroyed. 
# After that Elizabeth goes back to Longbourn, sees Jane, reads Lydia’s letter, and meets her father again. At this point, she accepts emotionally that the loss of Darcy is her own responsibility. She mentally understood from Darcy’s letter that he was not to blame for Jane’s break with Bingley, but only now when she is face to face with what her sister has done, her mother’s insistence on going to Brighton, her father’s refusal to exercise authority over his young daughter, her own refusal to speak out against Wickham, the family’s responsibility for their own misfortune becomes very clear to her. She genuinely feels that they have no one to blame for their misfortune but themselves. She feels that Darcy was quite right to despise them from the beginning. She no longer feels it with bitterness or resentment. Emotionally she accepts it and she is also reminded that Wickham is the man to which she was attracted. 
# Now she gives up hope and initiative. She gives up everything. Even when the news comes that Lydia is to be married, she has no thought of seeing Darcy again. Her inability to think about the possibility of Darcy coming to her again is a qualification for her accomplishment. Her thought has no power to elevate her to that level. The thing that can elevate her to his level is her character. She takes the attitude of fully acknowledging to herself what she is. The result is, Darcy saves Lydia. When Elizabeth is able to accept that she has a sister who can act in such a way, her sister is saved.  Mrs. Bennet is never willing to acknowledge any fault. But Elizabeth’s acknowledgement has the power to save the family from really being what she acknowledges. 
# Then Lydia discloses Darcy’s role in her marriage. Elizabeth is baffled and incapable of hoping that he would come back. When Bingley and Darcy ride up one day, she is speechless. Mrs. Bennet says someone has come and Elizabeth is drawn to the window to see who it is. She is drawn by Darcy, not knowing it is he. His coming draws her to the window. She sits through that meeting in which she cannot say anything. Tension is mounting in her nerves. At the end of the meeting, she wonders why he came if he did not mean to be friendly and talk to her.  She then feels that she does not want to see either of them again. ''“The first wish of my heart is never to be in the company of either of them again. Their society can afford no pleasure that will atone for such wretchedness as this! Let me never see either one or the other again''.”<ref>P&P, p.299</ref> She is still capable of feeling this way, even after knowing what he has done, knowing he has pardoned her, knowing he has mortified himself, and she says she doesn’t want to see him again. At that point, it is not anger expressing, it is her nerves which cannot bear the pressure of closing the last gap between them. This elevation is so high for her. Ten thousand pounds and Pemberley has a great weight that is felt physically on her nerves. She feels that great good fortune may be coming and elevating her two hundred times, but it is not what she needs for her survival. She was fine the way she was. The pressure to be better than she was, the self-discipline to qualify in her own eyes to be Darcy’s wife, is so much that she cannot bear it. Darcy goes away. Bingley proposes. Jane becomes engaged.
# After Jane’s engagement, her mind and heart are made up, but she does not dare to hope. The example of Jane’s engagement is the physical stimulus that finally compels her to cross the line and commit herself. She needed something to make her feel she should not miss the chance. 
# When Darcy comes back and she goes on a walk with him, she bursts out to tell Darcy that he must permit her to express her gratitude. On his previous visit, she remained quiet, wanting him to speak first. But life requires her to take the initiative to speak to him first, because the first time she refused him. Therefore, she has to reverse and close that final link. 
# Even when Darcy is humble enough to propose again and acknowledge the truth of all that she has spoken to him, she resents being reminded of her atrocious past behavior.