Pride and Prejudice, Goffman, and Strategic Interaction

Abstract

As everyone knows, Pride and Prejudice was first composed as an epistolary novel, and in that form, its title was First Impressions. It is the story of two protagonists who, through various shades of pride and prejudice, retain their first, inaccurate impressions of one another long after those initial judgments should have been adjusted or discarded. The best sociological analyst of first impressions is Erving Goffman, who addresses the topic in his first book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, where he observes that first impressions are not just important, but crucial: “When the interaction that is initiated by ‘first impressions’ is itself merely the initial interaction in an extended series of interactions involving the same participants, we speak of ‘getting off on the right foot’ and feel that it is crucial that we do so.”¹ If we get off on the wrong foot, as Elizabeth and Darcy certainly do, “all the participants may come to feel ill at ease, nonplussed, out of countenance, embarrassed, experiencing the kind of anomy that is generated when the minute social system of face-to-face interaction breaks down” (PS, 12). Such reactions characterize much of the first half of Pride and Prejudice, all the way through Darcy’s letter of explanation.

I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb. (PP, 91)