Why are Elizabeth and Jane Bennet so easily deceived

Elizabeth, bright young woman that she is, is completely convinced by Wickham of Darcy’s underhanded actions regarding the living Darcy’s father meant to bestow on Wickham. Similarly, Jane sees no only the good in Bingley’s sisters, unaware of their real opinion of her. Why are they so easily deceived?

I will ignore the obvious — that it is a necessary plot device — and wonder instead if I’m just looking at this through jaded eyes. By now I have seen in movies and read in books and observed in politicians so many instances of duplicity and underhandedness that I can’t help but suspect everyone’s motives. I am not a wide-eyed farm kid of the 1940s who moves to the big city.

But Elizabeth and Jane are residents of a village that boasts four and twenty families with whom they can dine. I live in a city (metro Denver) in which I can dine with hundreds of thousands of families, although in truth I dine with just a few families, and my definition of family includes a lot of single women. Elizabeth and Jane have never seen a movie or checked the veracity of a politician’s statement at politifact.com. They are, of course, well read and Shakespeare is a pretty good primer on the depravity of mankind, but I wonder if in their world you just had to accept things on face value.

Of course I cannot help but see Elizabeth as the gold standard of good sense and sound judgment and so I am all the more shaken that she should so misconstrue the situation between Wickham and Darcy. But I suppose the world is not any more evolved now. Watching CNN after the congresswoman’s shooting, the automatic assumption is that the hate-filled politics of the day had to have been a factor, and now we learn after sober consideration that it was probably just a young man with psychological problems. Maybe I should reserve my judgment on the naiveté of Elizabeth and Jane.