Mrs Bennet
Mrs Bennet (née Gardiner) is the middle-aged wife of her social superior, Mr Bennet, and the mother of their five daughters.
Mrs Bennet is described in the book as shameless, frivolous, and very "silly" ("[Mrs Bennet's] mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news' ... [Mr Bennet], captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humour, which youth and beauty generally give, had married a woman, whose weak understanding, and illiberal mind, had, very early in the marriage, put an end to any real affection for her").
She is susceptible to attacks of "tremors and palpitations", which occur whenever she is defensive or displeased. She is also prone to flights of fancy, flights of pique and melodrama, believing herself to regularly ill-used, talking loudly of it.
Her personal fortune inherited from her father amounted to £4,000 which was sufficient money for an individual of her condition, but it was not enough to support her children as well. In addition, she has a life interest in her marriage settlement of £5,000, invested in 4% funds, the capital for which is bound by the terms of the settlement to be distributed to her children at her death.
Her favourite daughter is her youngest, Lydia, who takes very much after her. After Lydia, her next favourite is her eldest, Jane, although she primarily values her for her great physical beauty, rarely considering Jane's feelings. Her least favourite daughter is Elizabeth (closely followed by Mary) whom she does not understand (or like) at all; when Mr Collins was directing his "enraptured heart" at Elizabeth, Mrs Bennet thought them both together a perfect match purely because she does not like either of them: Of having [Elizabeth] married to Mr. Collins, [Mrs. Bennet] thought with equal certainty, and with considerable, though not equal, pleasure. Elizabeth was the least dear to her of all her children; and though the man and the match were quite 'good enough' for her, the worth of each was eclipsed by Mr. Bingley and Netherfield.
Mrs Bennet's favourite pastimes are shopping and socialising. Of the Gardiner siblings, Mrs Bennet had the best wedding, since she married a member of the local gentry, owner of an estate with an income of £2000 annually. Mrs Bennet does not understand why her husband could do nothing to change the fate of the estate (despite it having been explained to her numerous times (she assumes that he simply won't change it on purpose to stress her "poor nerves")), since it clouded his future and that of his daughters, given that she and her husband were unable to have a boy. They had hoped for years, even after the birth of Lydia, for the son who would have allowed to put an end to the entail, but they only had girls.
Mrs Bennet sends Jane to Mr Bingley's Netherfield estate in the rain to make sure that through illness she must stay there, encourages Mr Collins to ask for the hand of Elizabeth, and rejoices loudly at Lydia's marriage ("No sentiment of shame gave a damp to her triumph" specifies the narrator), remaining indifferent to the dishonourable reasons which made it necessary (that a man had to be bribed to marry her favourite daughter), since it corresponds to the realisation of "her dearest wishes" to have her daughter "well married".
Her notion of stylish behaviour is summarised in what she said of Sir William: "He has always something to say to everybody. – That is my idea of good breeding". She behaves with embarrassing vulgarity and lack of tact, especially at Netherfield, where her pretentiousness, foolishness and "total lack of correction" are evident. For her, it is not the manners or behaviour that indicate belonging to a high rank, it is ostentatiousness and flaunting wealth, and the validity of a marriage is measured by the amount "of calico, muslin and cambric" to buy for the bride's trousseau.
Jane Austen has particularly charged the character of Mrs Bennett in negative terms. As Virginia Woolf wrote, "no excuse is found for [her fools] and no mercy shown them [...] Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to give [her] the supreme delight of slicing their heads off". In the tradition of the comedy of manners and didactic novel, she uses a caricatural and parodic character to mock some of her contemporaries.
Mrs Bennet is distinguished primarily by her propensity to logorrhea, a defect that Thomas Gisborne considers specifically feminine. She does not listen to any advice – especially if it comes from Elizabeth – makes redundant and repetitive speeches, chatters annoyingly, and makes speeches full of absurdities and inconsistencies, which she accompanies, when she is thwarted, with complaints and continual cantankerous remarks that her interlocutors are careful not to interrupt, knowing that it would only serve to prolong them. Even Jane finds her mother's complaints hard to bear, when Mrs Bennet manifests "a longer irritation than usual" about the absence of Mr Bingley, confessing to Elizabeth how much the lack of self-control of her mother revives her suffering ("Oh that my dear mother had more command over herself! she can have no idea of the pain she gives me by her continual reflections on him").
Another emphasised and ridiculed aspect of Mrs Bennet is her "nervous disease", or her tendency to use it to attract sympathy to herself, or else demanding that the family pay attention to her, but ultimately failing to make herself loved. There are characters particularly concerned about their health in all the novels of Jane Austen. These egocentric characters, who use their real or imagined ailments to reduce all to them, seem to be inspired by Mrs Austen, whose complaints about her health had the ability to irritate Jane, who speaks with certain ironic annoyance about it in her letters to her sister.
Some critics point out that it would be unfair to see only her faults. Her obsession is justified by the family's situation: the cynicism of Mr Bennet will not prevent Mr Collins from inheriting Longbourn. In an environment where there are many young ladies to be married and few interesting parties, she is much more attentive to the competition than her husband. She does not neglect her daughters, while he merely treats them mostly as "stupid and ignorant as all the girls".
The narrator does not forgive her stupidity, nor her awkward interferences, and finds her absurd remarks and pretensions inherently selfish. When Jane asks her to feel gratitude to her brother, who had paid a lot of money towards Lydia's wedding, she replied that "had he not had children, that she and her daughters will inherit all his property", and he has never been "really generous so far" ("If he had not had a family of his own, I and my children must have had all his money, you know; and it is the first time we have ever had anything from him, except a few presents"). Lydia's marriage does not satisfy her as much as she wanted, because her daughter did not stay long enough with her so that she could continue to parade with her. ("Lydia does not leave me because she is married, but only because her husband's regiment happens to be so far off. If that had been nearer, she would not have gone so soon"), and if she was able to happily "for all her maternal feelings [get] rid of her most deserving daughters".
Although Mrs. Bennet would like to see the girls married, she does not raise them to be good housekeepers to a future husband.
Thomas Gisborne theorized in An Enquiry Into the Duties of Men, published in 1794, and in An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, published in 1797, the idea of areas reserved for men and women. According to him, women are by nature destined to the domestic sphere, defined as the particular area where "their excellence deploys". Therefore, their role is to keep the house. Mrs Bennet openly mocks Charlotte Lucas when she is forced to go into the kitchen in order to supervise the tarts making, proudly saying that her "daughters are brought up differently"; also, she reacts with force when Mr Collins, on the day of his arrival, assumed that his cousins took part in the preparation of dinner.
