[I wrote this piece in the late 1980's, when I was a high school English teacher.]

Not long ago, I was teaching Pride and Prejudice to a high school English class. At one point in the novel, Darcy comes into the house where Elizabeth Bennet is staying, not realizing that no one else is home. He makes idle conversation for a few minutes until someone comes in and then departs hurriedly. My students could not understand why he left. "Because he was embarrassed!" I exclaimed, as if it were obvious.

"But why?" they asked ingenuously. "They weren't doing anything, right?"

I found it next to impossible to explain Darcy's situation to them. No, they weren't "doing anything", but Darcy had no right, in the early nineteenth century, to be alone with a woman to whom he wasn't married. It just wasn't done.

Not surprisingly, my students laughed at the idea that Darcy and Elizabeth couldn't be alone together, especially since they didn't seem to even like each other.

Why couldn't my students understand nineteenth-century English morality? Clearly, to them, the point of separating Elizabeth and Darcy or chaperoning them was to keep them from having sex. That part they could understand; people go to great lengths to keep them from having sex, too. But if sex wasn't an issue, then why should the social rules hold? What did it mean that "it just wasn't done"?

I realized, after much consideration, that what "just isn't done" is what is unthinkable to a social group, in the same way that "unmentionables" are those things that simply cannot be discussed by civilized people. In my mother's day, "unmentionables" were underwear; in our society, underwear is hardly unmentionable. How can it be, when the newspapers run full-page advertisements for it, and major department stores dress mannequins in the little bits of lace once hidden even from husbands? I am reminded of a famous actress who said that in England, it would take her two years to invite someone into her home, while in Los Angeles, her hairdresser discusses gynecological problems with her. Society in 1990 refuses to admit that anything is unmentionable.

What, then, is unthinkable? Perhaps we no longer need to follow the guidelines of my grandmother's etiquette book for brides, which stated that "books by male authors should not be placed on the same shelves as books by female authors unless the authors are married." I would hope that we have transcended such silliness. But surely even we must have our limits, our outer boundaries, of behavior? Surely even we must have mores that define civilization and differentiate us from the wolves?

In her essay "On Morality" from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion gives an example of modern morality. Driving through the desert, a couple came upon a car which had turned over, leaving the driver dead and his girlfriend seriously injured. The man had stayed with the body while his wife drove the woman 185 miles to the nearest hospital. To leave the body for the coyotes, the wife concluded, would have been "immoral".

Didion concludes that, in our society, we do not abandon dead bodies to the animals; we either stay with them or have bad dreams — a reflection of our inner admission of guilt — of having violated the essential codes that bind society together. She further suggests that we must have at least what she calls "wagon train" morality. In short, we must at least have a sense of duty towards other people; we must bury our dead, not leave them for the coyotes.

Last weekend my husband was walking to the supermarket a few blocks away when he saw a car pulled over to the side of the road, just to the side of the freeway offramp near our house. The radiator was bone dry, and the driver, whose name was Alice, said that she'd been there for an hour and a half, hoping for a Highway Patrol car, but no one had stopped. My husband came home, filled two plastic milk jugs with water, and refilled her radiator. The car still wouldn't start, so he asked if she'd like to use our telephone to call the Auto Club or a relative. She did, and I was surprised to hear her tell her cousin incredulously that someone had stopped to help her.

That my husband's behavior did not surprise me, yet it obviously surprised Alice, frightens me. I can still remember my mother's voice explaining to me why she had spent money I knew we couldn't afford to buy groceries for a family several blocks away. "You can't just let them go hungry," she said. "It just isn't done." Other things "just weren't done," either, like letting somebody wait for hours for help changing a tire or allowing somebody to be cold when you had a spare blanket or knowing somebody's child stayed home from school because the family couldn't afford shoes that month. You gave them your child's old ones or you scraped together enough to buy a pair of cheap tennis shoes. It was unthinkable to do otherwise, for the act was always done with the sense that "there but for the grace of God go I." Everyone in my proletarian community understood that, no matter how hard you tried, you could fail and need for somebody to look after you, too.

In a world where my students are accosted daily by things my mother would have called "unthinkable", is it any wonder that my students don't understand the notion of what is "simply not done"? When television news shows them driveby shootings every night and the homeless beg them for food and they see pictures of people freezing to death, not in the third world, but in their own home towns, how can they believe that anything is unthinkable?

Somewhere along the line, we abdicated our duty to each other. In our quest for eternal youth and the American dream and escape from the whitewashed "Rock of Ages" morality of our grandparents, we threw up our hands and said "what am I supposed to do about it?" We pay our taxes and expect the Highway Patrol to help stranded motorists, the social agencies to feed the homeless, and the families to look after themselves.

Would I want to live in a world as repressed and repressive, as limiting to the individual, as that of Jane Austen? Certainly not. I value the ability, especially as a woman, to make my own decisions, to determine my own values and my own future. In my lifetime, the things that were "unthinkable" to Elizabeth and Darcy are laughable.

And yet I can admire Darcy and Elizabeth. I can value Elizabeth's sense of duty to her undeserving family. I can admire Darcy for feeling a personal responsibility to raise his sister, to see to it that Wickham marries Lydia, to behave in a "gentlemanly" fashion.

My students cannot understand Darcy and Elizabeth because they live in a world where social rules concern nuances of personal interaction, and duty is an unpleasant word smacking of Victorianism and repression. They can believe that feeling good about themselves is what life is all about because that is what they have been taught all their lives. The fact that Darcy could not feel good about himself if he did not honor his responsibilities to others, or that my mother would lie awake nights if she knowingly let someone go hungry, lies beyond their understanding.

Mores no longer hold for an entire society because no such society exists. We are a city, and a nation, of individuals, and the individual is God. To look, then, on the failed individual is to see the face of God failed, and we cannot bear to see it.