Pride and Prejudice
It is universally acknowledged that a single man, in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. (Iconic first line of Pride and Prejudice.)
It is also universally acknowledged that a self-proclaimed intellectual, in possession of taste, culture and working mental faculties, must be in love with a certain class of books. In other words, rating certain books less than 5 stars will make you, in the eyes of Goodreads society, an unsophisticated boor. Pride and Prejudice is one of them.
As (someone who pretends to be) an intellectual, I felt socially pressured to give this book 5 sta- Ok no, I actually liked it.
Let me start by narrating my introduction to Jane Austen. Someone once gifted me a very pretty collection of Jane Austen’s novels, with richly embellished coffee-colored covers, and delicate gilded pages. I immediately started fantasizing about the Instagram photo possibilities of the book- and the double appeal of looking intellectual and aesthetic in said photos (my lack of an Instagram account did not deter me whatsoever). However, my 11 year old self looked at the book itself slightly askance, wondering what appeal there could be in 200 year old love stories whose basic plots were structured around everyone misunderstanding everyone else’s feelings, where everybody talked to each other with such absolute formality as to make misunderstandings inevitable.
And though after much (much) procrastination, I took the person’s advice.
Well I read the book. Pride and Prejudice, is a 200 year old love story where the basic plot is structured around everyone misunderstanding everyone else’s feelings, where everyone talks to each other with such absolute formality to make misunderstandings inevitable. And where everybody keeps incessantly going to parties and visiting each other’s houses. And where there is absolutely no duels, fistfights, or even public takedowns, absolutely none of the drama we have been conditioned to expect by modern soaps. And I thereby say:
Keep your modern rom-coms. You liked the Hating Game? Well, Pride and prejudice invented the enemies to lovers trope. What higher praise can there be?
Yes, Pride and Prejudice is best known as a romance, for the enchanting love story between its main characters Elizabeth and Darcy. It is on the top of most Best Romances Lists, as well as most Best Novels Lists.
Enchanting is the only word that quite captures the feeling- it has an airy, beaten-gold lightness, some bizarre touch of fairy magic to it. There is some inexpressible pleasure in watching the Darcybeth ship set sail. (Unfortunately, Jane Austen failed to anticipate the struggles of the modern reader in creating a portmanteau for this couple, and we are forced to use this rather sorry moniker). Why?
Because of its characters, especially Elizabeth.
Elizabeth, is a fantastic, and indeed, a revolutionary character. She is firstly, incredibly witty and capable of roasting people thoroughly in previously mentioned overly-formal English.
Example:
( Scene: Darcy and Elizabeth chatting and Darcy generally being a snob)
Darcy: it has been the study of my life to avoid those weaknesses which often expose a strong understanding to ridicule.”
Elizabeth: “Such as vanity and pride.”
Burn…
Aside from her personality, importantly, she was from the lower strata of the aristocracy- a strange restriction. A class of society for who did not need to work, and considered it beneath them, but still struggled in their hierarchical world. Thus , the only way Elizabeth can live well is marry well- the source of the main conflict of the novel.
But, most memorably, she was one of the then-rare female characters who did not fall under the ingenue/femme fatale dichotomy. She is neither a naive do-gooder, nor an icy-hearted person. She sees the world clearly, she understands the conventions and the hierarchies of the era. Her clear vision enhances her best quality-her integrity. In spite of her understanding of the world’s workings, she still refuses to sacrifice her ideals of true love and companionship, for a ‘respectable marriage’- which was considered extremely important for women of the era.
Darcy is, a ‘gentleman’ in every sense of the word- frank and clever and incredibly wealthy. He is honest to the point of rudeness and incapable of hiding his feelings. Though less comfortable in social situations, he is certainly clever enough to appreciate Elizabeth’s wit and personality, and eve and this leads to their hilarious banter.
Despite Darcy and Elizabeth’s good qualities, they are also very much guilty of the titular flaws of the novel: Pride and Prejudice respectively
Darcy initially comes off as incredibly arrogant.
With Elizabeth- His sense of her inferiority—of its being a degradation—of the family obstacles which judgment had always opposed to inclination, were dwelt on with a warmth at the very moment he was trying to ask her to marry her. He goes on to say - “could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose condition in life is so decidedly below my own?”
(Romantic hero of the century, right?)
He dwells far too much on class standards, and the behaviour expected of him because of these class standards . He is almost, one of the class-obsessed side characters of the novel, almost willing to overlook Elizabeth’s personality for her family connections.
Elizabeth, on the other hand, forms quick judgements and is too stubborn to change them quickly. Her initial bad encounters, colours her views on his behaviour almost till the end of the novel. She makes judgements swiftly and confidently, and does not consider later behaviour and actions, and detrimental consequences ensued from her misjudgments of more than one character.
However, these flaws, humanise them, and they become better people for overcoming these flaws. The fact that they overcome these flaws for love makes their romance extremely emotionally satisfying, and adds to the appeal of their fantastic on-page chemistry and their witty banter.
Additionally, Pride and Prejudice is also a biting social satire.
Some, like me, might be under the impression that all things would be sweet and gentle in a romance like Pride and Prejudice. Alas , Jane Austen is an utterly merciless narrator.
Darcy and Elizabeth, perhaps Elizabeth’s friend Charlotte Lucas, and to a degree, her sister Jane and said sister’s husband Bingley, are the only ones spared her acidic commentary. They are the three-dimensional characters among a cast mostly consisting of absolute parodies. They add comic values often facepalms and laughs at their utter ridiculousness.
Here Austen is at her best- and worst. She gleefully pokes fun at these characters, so you cannot help but laugh, but only rather guiltily. Because these characters are, and were especially, somewhat rooted in reality, especially in Austen’s highly classist world.
Mrs Bennet is the Austenian equivalent of a helicopter parent. She flits around her daughters, chivvying, nagging and haranguing. She is bent on getting her daughters married, but almost tragically, her efforts to set her daughters up in society are militated by her lack of social graces. Mrs Bennet is the epitome of the gauche middle-class woman, perpetually thinking about social climbing. Lady Catherine de Bourgh is the portrait of the upper-class snob, wishing kept separate from the “low ties” of Elizabeth and her family. Mr Collins is a sycophant, slobbering over the boots of his upper-class patron Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Caroline Bingley is a gold digger, going against her intelligence and making a spectacle of herself in trying to get herself a rich husband.
They are mentally caged- unable to think of anything but reaching their ultimate goal - higher social status. Elizabeth, Darcy and Jane- the characters who put their integrity over the image they would like to have themselves portrayed as, they have character arcs they develop and change as the novel goes by. A character arc is the measure of how a character changes over the course of a novel. However, the rest of the characters remain static, in their relentless pursuit of a goal whose worth they never question. In contrast, they are almost a spectacle- amusing as cats trying to chase the light of a torch in futility.
Pride and Prejudice is also a story of four weddings and no funeral. Thus courtship is an omnipresent motif, the contrasts of which show some of the most important nuances of the novel.
Most important is the contrast between Elizabeth and Darcy’s courtship, and that of Charlotte Lucas and Mr Collins.
Charlotte Lucas’ was Elizabeth’s best friend. From even worse economic and social circumstances, she was even more unlikely to find a great marriage, the only available course to women of that era and economic class. So she chooses, to marry at the first opportunity to marry a respectable suitor, even to a man significantly intellectually inferior. And she does not suffer too much for it. Elizabeth, though initially shocked by her friends decision, eventually admits it was all ‘very well done’.
Charlotte Lucas, is a foil to Elizabeth, a woman of similar insight, wit and intelligence who makes a drastically different choice. In her marriage, Austen acknowledges some of her idealism, and the necessity and value of pragmatism. However, Lucas is clearly less happy than Elizabeth. In her fate, Austen comments on the limited options available to women of the era.
In the end, Austen makes you look down on people’s sheer pettiness of attaching moral rectitude to arbitrary class distinctions: they lack Elizabeth’s integrity, in refusing to sacrifice her belief to marry a rich man, or even Charlotte Lucas’ clarity, who, despite her acceptance social standards, does so only for pragmatic reasons.
That being said, Pride and Prejudice is not an entirely easy read.
One must tolerate excessively long sentences, of the likes of: The vague and unsettled suspicions which uncertainty had produced of what Mr. Darcy might have been doing to forward her sister’s match, which she had feared to encourage, as an exertion of goodness too great to be probable, and at the same time dreaded to be just, from the pain of obligation, were proved beyond their greatest extent to be true!
Jane Austen appear to have thought: Why say in short simple sentences, what you can say in one, long convoluted sentence? (Or whatever the long, convoluted 18th century equivalent of that thought was.”
Austen’s almost-contemporary, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is, in this aspect, much more considerate towards the sensibilities of the modern reader. Then again, considering Wuthering Heights was thought by literary critics of the time to be written “with an ill-mannered contempt for the decencies of language, and in a style which might resemble that of a Yorkshire farmer who should have endeavored to eradicate his provincialism by taking lessons of a London footman”, one understands why Jane Austen has subjected us to said excessively long sentences.
(One wonders what said literary critics would say of us today, with our texting shortcuts, slang and abbreviations. Austen’s era’s classism is showing….)
But these long sentences serve a greater purpose as well. The narrative style, free indirect discourse, which Jane Austen pioneered, is primed to show off Austen’s wit at its best. Free indirect discourse uses some of the characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech. Essentially, Pride and Prejudice is mainly told by both an omniscient narrator and the characters by turn.
This pulls and pushes at our emotions- we are almost assimilated with Elizabeth and her thoughts and feelings, but we maintain a haughty narrative distance from other characters who we are merely meant to take amusement from. Though we are occasionally pulled in enough to relate to and care about the characters, we are also kept at a suitable distance to appreciate Austen’s social commentary. Austen manipulates our emotions, stitches them together like a master seamstress.
The narrators voice weaves in and out out of the waters of the text- Austen’s commentary is omnipresent, but also takes a back-seat to the characters’ voices and thoughts when necessary.
And finally, there is a refreshing appeal to a love story where we don’t have to hear the play-by-play of everything characters do or say. Even the final proposal takes place behind the same long, convoluted sentences that pervade the whole book. Yet Austen’s true brilliance shows best in how Elizabeth and Darcy’s feelings for each other glimmer brightly, even as their words and actions are bound by these long convoluted sentences, and strict Victorian social conventions.
Finally I would like to share an excellent quote that Jane Austen once stated, and that I have seen ubiquitously on people’s statuses, people’s goodreads accounts., that utterly sums up the the entire theme of the novel:
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
I would also like to provide the full context.
Miss Bingley's attention was quite as much engaged in watching Mr. Darcy's progress through his book, as in reading her own; and she was perpetually either making some inquiry, or looking at his page. She could not win him, however, to any conversation; he merely answered her question, and read on. At length, quite exhausted by the attempt to be amused with her own book, which she had only chosen because it was the second volume of his, she gave a great yawn and said, “How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
As visible, society hasn’t changed too much. Ol’Jane would be pleased, I think. Her books would- and do sell just as well today.
An extremely clever book, it still wasn’t entirely my thing.- nah, I gave it 5 stars. One has an image to maintain.
Post Script: A discerning reader may point out certain discrepancies between the narrators expositions on conformity to societal pressures and the narrator’s behavior. However the narrator asks the reader to kindly believe that these incidents have been fabricated for ironic literary value, all in the pursuit of artistry. It's possibly true. Possibly.
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