I know, I know…it can’t get much more tedious than this section.  Jane rides a horse in a thunderstorm, catches a bad cold, and has to stay over at Bingley’s mansion for DAYS even though it would take half an hour in a carriage to get her home.  Her mother absolutely LOVES it; in fact, she planned for it to happen!!  For entertainment value for most of Austen’s audience at the time, she is providing the ultimate fantasy: I get to stay over at my boyfriend’s house, have him and his family wait on me hand and foot, and yet nobody will think that I’m being naughty.  And best of all, he’ll really get to know me and fantasize about what it would be like to have me living in his house ALL the time. 

Believe it or not, while Jane is titillating the “Mrs. Bennets” in her reading audience,  she has some serious metaphorical fish to fry in this section.  What if Jane, disabled and passive in her sick room, symbolizes the ultimate ideal of Victorian marriage?  In fact,  is her “convalescence” that much different than Miss Bingley’s and Mrs. Hurst every day life? 

Isn’t it amazing how shocked they are that Elizabeth would hike a whole three miles and get her stockings dirty to help her sister! What would they make of the many powerful and tough female athletes and activists of our time?

Does our society encourage some of the same kind of fantasies, or some of the same kind of passiveness in young women?  Or is the issue here more the idleness of the wealthy upperclass, whose money has resulted in a passive detachment from life?