The Psychology of Lydia Bennet | Pride & Prejudice

hi guys olive here here today to try to take a gander at what was going on inside the mind of the incredibly frustrating youngest Bennet sister in Pride and Prejudice Lydia Lizzie Bennet is unquestionably the star of the show in Pride and Prejudice and Jane is very much the supporting actress to her lead role so much of the book is focused on the literal and figurative dance between Darcy and Lizzy and then to a lesser extent we're also watching the hot and cold routine going on with Jane and Bingley with so much focus on the oldest two daughters we can sometimes forget there are three other sisters and the Bennet family there is Mary Kitty and the star of this video Lydia if you've read Pride and Prejudice which I highly recommend you do just in general but also before continuing with this video since spoilers lie ahead then you'll know that Lydia has no trouble kicking up some of her own drama but before she goes on to complicate the lives of pretty much everyone around her Austen characterizes her as a precocious 15 going on sixteen-year-old flirt Austen tells us that Lydia had high animal spirits and a sort of natural self consequence which the attentions of the officers to whom her uncle's good dinners and her own easy manners recommended her had increased into assurance Austen also tells us that Lydia is her mother's favorite daughter out of the five and she's more than a little spoiled by her I think this is evidenced by the fact that Lydia is openly coquettish with any man that she finds attractive which her mother doesn't reprimand and her father also detests but he doesn't actually speak up about it so I guess you can say she's spoiled by both of them this is definitely foreshadowing on Austin's part because as readers of the book will know Lydia when she is officially 16 years old runs off with the lying scoundrel Wickham and it takes mr. Darcy's intervention to prevent the family name for being completely tarnished now it seems on the surface at least that Lydia is a pretty straightforward character she is a spoiled kitna sh little brat who runs off with a man who told her all the right things she most definitely slept with him and she shows no interest in were even awareness of the situation that puts her family in so she's both annoying and dangerous and it seems to be the phone of her parents my question to you is this if mr. and mrs. Bennet are bad parents then why aren't all of their daughters like this in fact just to start off with why are they all so different from one another now of course people from the same family can still have wildly different personalities don't we all know and suffer format fact but for five girls who were raised in such close proximity at Longbourn they're remarkably unique first you have the witty Lizzy her father's favorite then there's the beauty of the family the gentle Jane next is the pious and overly serious Mary after that there is the grumpy nonentity kitty only to be followed by her own heroine in this video the playful Lydia the thing I want to underline in what I just said is where Lydia comes in the family she's the youngest of five the first thing I would like to note about that fact is that Lydia was 15 not even 16 years old when this book opens let us all take a moment and mentally revisit ourselves when we were 15 years old weren't you just the worst probably I sure was but the second and more important thing that I would like to note requires an intro a couple of years back I read a nonfiction book called originals how nonconformists moved the world by Adam grants it was an extremely interesting book but as is the case with a lot of books I read one chapter in particular has really stuck with me grant starts off this chapter by looking at a study that was conducted by two different researchers and in the study they were looking to see whether or not there was any connection between risk-taking behavior in athletes and where that athlete fell in the birth order meaning were they the firstborn to their parents were they born later on they discovered that later borns or even last forints were far more likely to be risk takers and other studies have looked at this tendency as well one of them looked at birth order and career success in his book originals grant summarizes the findings of that study saying the eldest child in the family is typically set up for success benefiting from the undivided attention time and energy of fawning parents evidence shows that firstborns are more likely to win the Nobel Prize in science become US Congressmen and win local and national elections in the Netherlands it also appears that they're more likely to rise to the top of corporations one analysis of more than 1,500 CEOs revealed that 43% were first worn but later borns have faster salary growth because they are willing to switch to better paying jobs sooner and more often he quotes the Economist running the study by saying first Born's are more risk-averse than later borns and then he concludes it all by saying hundreds of studies point to the same conclusion although firstborns tend to be more dominant conscientious and ambitious later borns are more open to taking risks and embracing original ideas first ones tend to defend the status quo later boards are inclined to challenge it now why on earth would this be the case it seems pretty bonkers to imply that there's something different about the genetic makeup of earlier borns that somehow makes them more responsible what are we saying they inherited all the good sense from their parents leaving none left for the siblings that come behind them of course not the difference is as one of those quotes implied that earlier born children are parented differently than later born children in that exact same chapter of originals grant also discusses a theory that children within a family carve out their own niches and once one kid occupies that niche it is occupied and the other kids have to find their own and buy niches here of course we don't mean wetlands we're talking about the roles they play in the family the theory goes that the older children have a whole world of possibilities in front of them and they fall into the more traditional roles completely subconsciously but they're thinking am i the good student am i the musician where is my role in this family but again once that role is taken the younger children who come next have to subconsciously look for their own niche to fill why do kids do this well because especially as more children are added to the mix there is an unspoken but still very present competition for their parents attention a limited resource younger children have a tendency to pursue the creative the difference the off-the-wall type of roles because the more traditional ways of garnering attention are taken it's not all upside to being an earlier born because older children tend to have a more responsibilities within a family they more easily slip into that second parent mode there's a lot more expected of them so they don't really have the freedom that the later borns do to be those creative types of people but also when there are a lot of kids in a family the younger kids just kind of by default get less parenting than their older siblings dead by the time the younger kids come around the parents or even parent singular might not have the time or certainly not have the energy to give them the attention and structure that the older kids got when there simply were fewer kids so all of these collective theories basically boil down to two major facts that I would like for us to keep in mind as we talk about Lydia the first one is that younger siblings tend to act differently they tend to act a little bit out of the box because there's an undercurrent of competition for their parents attention and the second thing is that younger siblings are often given far more freedom than their older siblings simply because of a lack of resources now let's start to apply all of this to Lydia Bennet because in terms of niches within the Bennet family Lizzie definitely has the smart one Jane is the prettiest and I would say the most likeable Mary is the studious and most religious and that leaves Kitty and Lydia with dwindling options this isn't a video about Kitty Bennet but I would actually argue that kitty is so bad-tempered because she never found her niche she never established herself within this family and so she feels forgotten her just barely younger sister takes seemingly what's left of the niches which is mother's favorite and as we said earlier Lydia is her mother's favorite why because Lydia is the most similar to her mother but there's something I've been wondering about Lydia especially in light of all the theories we were just talking about is Lydia the most inherently like her mother are they actually similar people or earlier in her childhood did she accidentally discover that when she mimicked her mother's behavior as children tend to do that she got more attention from her mother more praise my guess is that again completely subconsciously she made being like her mother her niche and it was effective and I don't blame her for even subconsciously trying to find a way to get more attention from her parents because we can clearly see in this book that she wasn't parented very much she is not kept on any kind of a leash at all her parents let her act like a complete fool in public where the Oder girls Lizzie and Jane and even Mary wouldn't dream of acting like she does I think this is the case because Jane and Lizzie the first and second born and to a certain extent marry the third born were much more closely parented when the Bennett's had one two or three children not five and this next part is really important when there was still a possibility that there would be a son as readers of Pride and Prejudice know the Longbourn estate where the Bennett family lives is entailed away to a close male relative an odious one but that's not the topic of conversation today they would have needed to have a son in order to inherit the estate but they just kept on having daughters it seems to me that after the fifth try when Lydia was yet another daughter the Bennett's realized that there would be no more children trying for another probably wasn't even an option mrs. Bennett was getting up there in age but they probably also knew that if they tried for a son again and had another girl it would only worsen the existing financial condition of the house and I think that was the moment when they really gave up and I think at a very deep level mr. and mrs. Bennett reacted to Lydia being a girl in different ways I think mrs. Bennett realized I'm having no more babies so I am going to cherish this one and I think there is a part of mr. Bennett's that resented Lydia for being a girl so after facing the cold hard realization that there would be no male heir to inherit the estate mrs. Bennett's attention shifts entirely to getting these girls married off she lets them know in no uncertain terms that they will have to marry well because they will not be provided for she's annoying about it in the book but she's not wrong so what does a Mama's girl like Lydia do she tries her best to attract men and when she feels that she has succeeded in snagging one doing right by her mother but lack the good common sense that parenting provides she runs off with him like he asks thinking that he's going to marry her I think Lydia running off with Wickham is attention-seeking behavior at its finest with her two oldest sisters getting all of this attention one of them from Wickham himself she's thinking to herself how do I claim the spotlight away from them and her answer is by beating them all to marriage she thinks that is winning because it's what her mother wants for them and the funniest thing is despite all of the drama she succeeds in her goal she thinks that she won she has no idea what kind of a life she just condemned herself to so while Lydia Bennet is the most annoying of teenagers and causes headaches for readers of and characters within this novel alike I don't know about you but considering the forces that made her the way she is made me feel a touch more sympathy toward her so that was my theory on what makes Miss Lydia Bennet or should we say Miss Lydia Wickham tick I would love to hear what you think of my theory or what you think of Lydia down in the comment section below but if you would like to chat with me elsewhere I am on a variety of different places on social media and I will put links to all of my profiles in the description box below thank you so much for watching I hope you're having a wonderful day and I will see you in the next video bye [Music]

Channel: abookolive

Views: 88,188

Keywords: books, booktube, adult booktubers, booktubers who read nonfiction, nonfiction booktubers, pride and prejudice, pride and prejudice jane austen, lydia bennet, lydia bennett, psychology literary heroines, jane austen, jane austen book reviews, booktubers who read jane austen, literary booktubers

Id: sfQRgiBx5qk

Length: 12min 42sec (762 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 09 2020