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Catherine is inevitable rather than revolutionary: traditional values in that form are no longer the target, as they were when Wollstonecraft attacked Burke. Darcy, on the other hand, is much less easy to overcome. He can appreciate, match and accommodate the potentially revolutionary qualities which differentiate Elizabeth from the likes of Caroline Bingley – because they rouse his desire. At the end of the novel, Elizabeth and Darcy indulge in the familiar lovers’ pleasure of confirming love by narrating its origin. Elizabeth, characteristically, speaks for Darcy:
    ‘The fact is, that you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking and looking, and thinking for
your
approbation alone. I roused, and interested you, because I was so unlike
them
. Had you not been really amiable you would have hated me for it; but in spite of the pains you took to disguise yourself, your feelings were always noble and just…really, all things considered, I begin to think it perfectly reasonable.’ (III, xviii)
    The tone is playful, flirtatious, ironic. It libidinizes the serious moral and political vocabulary of nobility, amiability, justice, reason and, in doing so, forges unobtrusive connections between private and public histories. Elizabeth’s loving retrospect rewrites Darcy’s insupportable snobbery as mere ‘disguise’;aristocratic culture is discovered to be essentially ‘amiable’ after all.
    In the previous chapter, Elizabeth tells Jane the story of how her own love developed: ‘“It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley”’ (III, xvii). From the moment the novel was published, criticism of Richardson’s
Pamela
turned on the possibility that Pamela’s ‘virtue’ was no more than mercenary self-interest masquerading as moral rectitude. Similar questions have been asked of Elizabeth’s motivation in
Pride and Prejudice
– usually reaching the comfortable conclusion that she is blamelessly free of any ignoble interest in Darcy’s wealth. But the novel is less complacent than some of its critics have been: Elizabeth’s ironic narrative of falling in love is properly selfconscious about the impossibility of easily distinguishing between disinterested motives and the attraction of material advantages. A conflation of morality, aesthetic pleasure and social power is at the very heart of the female-centred fiction of upward social mobility: middle- or lower-class heroines (and their readers) are seduced precisely by the prospect of ‘reforming’, and therefore participating in, the attractive power of the upper-class male. In
Pride and Prejudice
, the seduction is intellectual and aesthetic rather than physical, but that just makes it all the more effective. When Elizabeth sees Pemberley, what impresses her is the extent of Darcy’s influence:
    As a brother, a landlord, a master, she considered how many people’s happiness were in his guardianship! – How much of pleasure or pain it was in his power to bestow! – How much of good or evil must be done by him!…she thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever raised before; she remembered its warmth, and softened its impropriety of expression. (III, i)
    Elizabeth’s rational judgement is modified by the prospect of effective power; she is seduced out of her class-based indignation by the thought that, through marriage, she might have sharedthis position of influence over others’ happiness. And the romance plot immediately rewards her with Darcy himself, ‘strikingly altered’ in his manner towards her (III, i). At the personal level, confrontation gives way to the compromise which will make romantic fulfilment possible. At the public level, by implication, class antagonism settles for a mutually beneficial consensus.
    The effectiveness of