Key Quote
“"You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion for my poor nerves"”
Mrs Bennet · Chapter 1
Focus: “poor nerves”
Mrs Bennet's famous complaint about her 'nerves' — a comic catchphrase that reveals the hyperbolic, self-dramatising nature of her character and the dysfunctional Bennet marriage.
Technique 1 — HYPERBOLE & SOMATISATION
Mrs Bennet externalises her anxiety through her body — her 'poor nerves' become a separate entity requiring pity. This somatisation (expressing emotional distress through physical symptoms) allows her to avoid examining her real fears: financial ruin and social failure. The adjective 'poor' personifies her nerves as suffering victims, shifting blame onto Mr Bennet for causing her physical distress.
The accusation 'You take delight' is hyperbolic (wildly exaggerated) — Mr Bennet is dry, not malicious. But Mrs Bennet's exaggeration reveals a real grievance: she feels unheard and unsupported by a husband who uses wit as a defence mechanism rather than engaging with her genuine concerns.
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RAD — STAGNATE
The 'nerves' refrain recurs throughout the novel without development — Mrs Bennet is always anxious, always blaming others, never reflecting. Her emotional vocabulary is limited to complaint and exclamation. She functions as a comic constant: while Elizabeth and Darcy grow in self-knowledge, Mrs Bennet remains trapped in the same patterns.
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Technique 2 — THE BENNET MARRIAGE AS FOIL
This exchange reveals the dysfunctional Bennet marriage — Mr Bennet provokes his wife for entertainment, she responds with theatrical distress. Their relationship functions as a cautionary foil to Elizabeth and Darcy's: it shows what happens when a clever man marries a foolish woman for beauty alone. Mr Bennet retreated into irony; Mrs Bennet retreated into nerves.
Austen uses the repeated 'nerves' motif to expose gender imbalance in Regency marriage: Mrs Bennet has no real power, so she deploys emotional manipulation (conscious or unconscious) as her only available tool. Her 'nerves' are simultaneously comic and a genuine expression of a woman with no other form of influence.
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Context (AO3)
NERVES & FEMININITY
In the 18th and 19th centuries, 'nerves' were associated with female sensibility — women were believed to have more delicate nervous systems than men. Mrs Bennet's complaint draws on this gendered medical discourse: she claims physical fragility as a form of feminine authority. The irony is that she is actually one of the most robust (resilient) characters in the novel.
COMIC OPENING
Austen opens with dialogue — an unusual narrative choice that immediately dramatises the Bennet marriage dynamic. Mrs Bennet exists primarily through her speech, and her speech is characterised by complaint, exclamation, and hyperbole. Austen trusts readers to form judgments through direct observation rather than authorial instruction.
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WOW — FREUD'S HYSTERIA
Freud's early work on hysteria argued that physical symptoms without organic cause (like Mrs Bennet's 'nerves') were expressions of repressed psychological distress. Mrs Bennet cannot articulate her real fears — the entail, poverty, social failure — so they emerge as physical complaints. Austen creates a pre-Freudian case study: a woman whose body speaks what her society forbids her mind to say directly. The comedy of Mrs Bennet's nerves conceals a psychosomatic truth about the cost of living within a system that offers women anxiety without agency.
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