ABSTRACT
By focusing on Jane Austen’s explicit depiction of adolescent wildness, the reading of Pride and Prejudice makes possible an understanding of adolescence as an experiential life stage crucial to maturity—even for a character as seemingly adult as Elizabeth Bennet. By sympathetically recreating, indeed emphasizing, the very feelings and behaviors perceived as inimical to successful female adulthood, Austen’s novel legitimizes characters’ need to move through, rather than suppress, the powerful emotional and erotic components of adolescent experience. In the character of Lydia Bennet, Austen’s fiction accentuates the attributes of adolescence as a recognizable life stage and challenges the conventional arc of character reform by allowing the willful energies traditionally associated with youth to expand, rather than foreclosing or simply condemning them within the novel’s pages. A product of both physical nature and parental nurture, Lydia represents, in effect, a perfect adolescent storm. Lydia’s persistent need for attention and admiration reveals an emotional insecurity distinct from her uncontrolled behavior.
