Reading the novel today, one is struck by how modern and familiar the character of Lydia, youngest of the Bennett sisters, seems. We know this girl. She lives in our neighborhood, down our street, even---God help us!---in our own home!
She is the American teenager in the year 2010. Or any other recent year.
Put another way, Lydia is almost an amalgam of the worst aspects of modern-day American adolesence---female variety. (The boys are just as bad, but they are another story).
It is easy to see what makes Lydia so familiar to us today. There is her boldness and flirtatiousness, her obession with boys and trivial gossip, her bursting-out sexuality. Of course she is the perfect product of an unconstrained consumer culture ("I bought my bonnet...only for the fun of having another bandbox"). And there is her general ignorance and, above all, the utter vacuousness of her personality. For all these reasons, Lydia seems the one character who would feel most at home in modern day America. She has friends here. If you could somehow propel her forward in time two-hundred years to any middle-class suburb in America, I'm sure that, allowing for some adjustment to modern technology (cell phones, Facebook), she would fit in very nicely with her mall-hopping sisters of the 21st Century.
Now anyone who has read Pride and Prejudice knows that Elizabeth Bennett, the novel's heroine (and Austen stand-in) almost violently disapproves (disapprobates?) of her youngest sister. Attempting to convince her father to intervene and forbid Lydia from accepting a friend's invitation to follow the regiment to Brighton, Elizabeth describes her erstwhile sibling as "a flirt in the worst and meanest degree of flirtation, without any attraction beyond youth and a tolerable person", and further laments the 'ignorance and empitiness of her mind"
As it happens, of course, Elizabeth is proven right with regard to her errant sister. Lydia elopes with the scoundrel Wickham. Retruning home with her new husband, Lydia creuelly gloats to her eldest sister Jane that she has usurped her rightful place as the first sister to marry---ignorant, of course, of the fact that Wickham had to be bribed into marrying her and that only through the efforts (and financial help) of Darcy is she saved from the tragic fate of a 'fallen' woman.
On second thought, I don't know if 'tragic' is the appropriate term here. I am not sure that anything that happens to Lydia can be considered 'tragic' except in the most general sense of the word. Her life may indeed turn out to be lousy, but in literature 'tragedy' requires a certain degree of self-awareness, and Lydia is certainly one of the stupidest characters in all of fiction. She lacks the depth of understanding and feeling needed to experiece real tragedy.
One thing we can conclude from all of this is that Jane Austen surely did not like silly, frivolous women. What is interestng to consider here is that Austen is often proclaimed to have been 'ahead' of her time', meaning by this that she was one of 'us' and not one of 'them'---'them' being the closed-minded, unliberated British gentry of the 18th Century. But somehow, I don't think that our modern world and lifestyle would have suited Jane Austen at all.
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