Mrs Bennet – A Bordello Mistress?

Middle-Class “Prostitution”: Mrs Bennet’s “Line of Girls” “For Sale” by George MacBliar

---

Audio Book

Mrs Bennet – A Bordello Mistress?

Professor John McLeod Ruminates

It was early in the morning in Manila, 2014. Professor John was lying in bed at the New World Hotel in Makati, lying beside one of the hostesses from the Gold Coast Bar in Ermita. As the fighting cocks of Manila began to crow and stray dogs answered in kind, John found his mind drifting — not to the geopolitical events of that turbulent year, but to a far more personal literary observation.

The previous evening he had visited the Gold Coast Bar and had been presented with a line of beautiful women from whom to choose. This prompted him to think of Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, who, some two hundred years earlier, had selected Elizabeth from another “line of girls” — namely, she and her four sisters.

Professor John had taught English literature for many years. The comparison between the Gold Coast Bar girls and the five Bennet sisters in Austen’s novel was, he thought, impossible to ignore. Mrs Bennet, he reflected, was effectively trying to “sell” her daughters to the highest bidder — making her, if one stretched the analogy for satirical purposes, not entirely unlike a bordello mistress. Darcy, the wealthy aristocrat, could likewise be viewed as the highest-paying client of Mrs Bennet’s “establishment.”

He had once made this observation to a lecture hall full of young Norwegian women at the Polar University — many of whom had thoroughly fallen in love with Colin Firth’s portrayal of Darcy in the 1995 BBC adaptation. He briefly suspected he might lose his job. Fortunately, he survived the lecture.

As this comforting thought crossed his mind, Angelica stirred, stretched lazily, and murmured: “Darling, make me a coffee.”

Read the rest of this darkly comic essay in the interactive flipbook below.

******