This year is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, so I finally decided I'd put this off long enough, that it was finally time to hunker down and read it. But frankly, this first reading felt like a re-reading, for it's a story I've already encountered in so many other formats, (the BBC version I watched with Mom after my drama teacher, sick and tired of high schoolers mimicking Monty Python, said she'd only let me do a British accent if I got the "proper" prestige Mr. Darcy accent; the Kira Knightly one I prefer cause it's shorter; the Bollywood version a girlfriend made me watch, and is exactly what it sounds like; the Zombies version which I will fist-fight anyone who doesn't like it; etc and etc), that it's just in the cultural air we breath.
It's like the time I showed the original Star Wars trilogy to a Japanese friend--she'd never seen it before, but she already recognized half the lines and the entire story, just from having lived in America.
I'd put off Pride and Prejudice for so long in part because not only did I already know the story backwards and forwards, but because I had to read Sense and Sensibility twice in college (both as an undergrad and grad), and liked it precisely neither time. Moreover, the stuffiness of regency England always felt so stultifying, so suffocating, that the only reason I could think of for reading about it was to remember why America declared independence in the first place.
But I really did enjoy Pride and Prejudice once I finally encountered it on its own terms. It was a relief to realize that Austen finds regency England as insufferable as I do--and she's the poor woman who actually had to live through it!
Austen is surprisingly sarcastic--well, I type "surprisingly," but really, her satire is obvious. I'm frankly left scratching my head as to why her sarcasm is so often missed. For example, no less an intellect than Ralph Waldo Emerson once said of Austen's novels, "Never was life so pinched and narrow...suicide is preferable", somehow missing that that's the whole point, that these women's only options were marriage or death! When Charlotte marries Mr. Collins, it isn't to not die alone, but to not die of starvation! Jane Austen ironically agrees with Emerson, except that Austen did not choose suicide--rather, she chose to mock that "pinched and narrow" life through novels. She laughed, because otherwise she would've despaired. How could Emerson miss that obvious point?
But then, I can't get too mad Emerson, for Austen's own fans seem to repeatedly miss the point! I can't count the number of girls I met who've said, "Ooh, Mr. Darcy could insult my class standing any day he wants!" or who straight-up romanticize the regency world of Jane Austen, pining for a time when women were the helpless possessions of dashing men, as though that wasn't the world that Jane Austen relentlessly mocked! How can so many people love Pride and Prejudice while so thoroughly missing its point?
I explained as politely as I could that if Elizabeth "just accepted whatever life gave her," then she would've married Mr. Collins--or married Mr. Darcy while he was still being a condescending jerk. Really, Elizabeth Bennett is every bit as uncompromising and unyielding as Madam Bovary, if not more. In fact, the whole point of Austen, her entire raison d'etre, is to show women that they can exercise real agency, that they can control their own destinies in even the most restricted circumstances, and not just accept whatever's given them. That's why she still resonates, 200 years and three solid waves of feminism later--or at least, so I assumed!
(All images from the webcomic "Hark, a Vagrant!")
Have you ever studied hermeneutics? If you haven't already taken a course on the psychology of writing, I'd recommend finding one if you can. I took one a couple years ago, and it changed my life.
ReplyDeleteOh, hermeneutics is all we do in English! Do we read this text as a Marxist, as a Feminist, as a Post-Structuralist, etc. But you're right, the base assumptions and genre expectations that many of these Jane Austen "super-fans" are bringing to these texts often supersede the texts themselves.
ReplyDeleteI think the movies are a big part of the problem, since they tend to focus only on the basic romantic plots of her works and not on all of the surrounding satirical observations that make Austen Austen. Have you read Northanger Abbey? It's pretty enjoyable if you've read the type of book she's satirizing. Here's the first paragraph:
ReplyDelete"No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard—and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence besides two good livings—and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on—lived to have six children more—to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself. A family of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are heads and arms and legs enough for the number; but the Morlands had little other right to the word, for they were in general very plain, and Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features—so much for her person; and not less unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of all boy's plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush. Indeed she had no taste for a garden; and if she gathered flowers at all, it was chiefly for the pleasure of mischief—at least so it was conjectured from her always preferring those which she was forbidden to take. Such were her propensities—her abilities were quite as extraordinary. She never could learn or understand anything before she was taught; and sometimes not even then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid. Her mother was three months in teaching her only to repeat the "Beggar's Petition"; and after all, her next sister, Sally, could say it better than she did. Not that Catherine was always stupid—by no means; she learnt the fable of "The Hare and Many Friends" as quickly as any girl in England. Her mother wished her to learn music; and Catherine was sure she should like it, for she was very fond of tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinnet; so, at eight years old she began. She learnt a year, and could not bear it; and Mrs. Morland, who did not insist on her daughters being accomplished in spite of incapacity or distaste, allowed her to leave off. The day which dismissed the music-master was one of the happiest of Catherine's life. Her taste for drawing was not superior; though whenever she could obtain the outside of a letter from her mother or seize upon any other odd piece of paper, she did what she could in that way, by drawing houses and trees, hens and chickens, all very much like one another. Writing and accounts she was taught by her father; French by her mother: her proficiency in either was not remarkable, and she shirked her lessons in both whenever she could. What a strange, unaccountable character!—for with all these symptoms of profligacy at ten years old, she had neither a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome, and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions of tyranny; she was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house."