“Pride and Prejudice” Jane Austen

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours,
and laugh at them in our turn?"

This is a reread, but it is only the second time I have read “Pride and Prejudice,” as opposed to others who read it perennially. I am not as infatuated with Mr. Darcy and the love story as some. I have seen the movie with Colin Firth only once, and wasn’t particularly taken with it.

Popular culture has gone “P&P” crazy, and it is hard to avoid. While amused by the idea of Elizabeth Bennet juxtaposed with Zombies, I don’t think I’ll go there. I tried to read “The Jane Austen Book Club,” but had to force myself to finish it.

The only two bits of “P&P” craziness that I have enjoyed are the biopic “Becoming Jane” and a time-travel-made-for-British-TV series called “Lost in Austen.” In fact, I found the latter so entertaining I have seen it 4 times lately despite it being more than 3 hours long. The premise is that Amanda Price, a woman from modern-day London, is transported to the Longbourn through a time portal in her bathroom. She is stuck in this fictional past while Elizabeth Bennet is happily working as a nanny in the present. Having read “P&P” so often, Miss Price is able to communicate with the characters well enough, but in an effort to keep the story on track, she inadvertently starts mucking it up. It was seeing this video that made me want to reread Austen. I suspected that much of the dialog was taken from the book, and I wanted to see how the story lines fit together.

I had purchased a 4-book-set of Austen books from the Quality Paperback Book Club back in 1996. Hesitantly, I read the shortest of the three, “Persuasion,” first. I was charmed more than I thought I would be, and finished “Emma,” “Sense and Sensibility” and “P&P” in short order.

When I picked up “P&P” to reread the other day, I was surprised that the prose was sometime difficult to understand. The reference to each of Jane and Elizabeth as Miss Bennet caused problems for me, and not being well-versed in the manners of the time led me to interpret actions through my own standards and not catch all the subtleties. I had tried to read Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Cranford” a year or so ago, and was not comfortable with the prose. In this reading of “P&P” my comfort came and went.

I am also working through the “Norton Anthology of Literature by Women” and am precisely at the time when “P&P” was written. The images of women at the time, an 18th Century view of the education of women solely to please men and the aspiration to delicacy, are apparent in Austen. In some ways I equate Elizabeth Bennet with Jo March from “Little Women,” but Elizabeth is far frm being a tomboy. I was surprised that the subject of sex out of wedlock is not eschewed and at the ease in which the characters are able to get over the impropriety after Lydia is properly married. Ruin is not so much a permanent state as an opportunity to gossip.

I have yet to like Mr. Darcy in book or movie form. Like for Heathcliff from Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights,” I don't see the attraction. I also miss the moral of the story, that one may be unduly prejudiced against another. Darcy is a boor at the beginning, and his remarkable transformation is what? – infatuation with Elizabeth? Who is to say that when the honeymoon is over, so to speak, he will not return to his boorish ways? Is he really going to accept Mrs. Bennet and the three younger Bennet sisters as in-laws? Well, I guess it is these questions that partly fuel the current “P&P” mania.

As for the “Lost in Austen” TV series, the value is in the acting, the romance, the situational comedy and the cinematography, but not in the accuracy when compared to Austen’s book. To be honest, “Lost” played on the unknowns of the book, like making Mr. Collins to be a nasty character rather than simply socially inept and showing Mrs. Bennet’s cagy, conniving side that is hidden by her pretended nervousness in the book. As most adaptations do, the story is altered to fit the screen play, but “Lost” takes that one step further to see what would happen in an alternate telling of the story.

So, rereading “P&P” falls under the same category as rereading “Wicked,” that is, in order to compare the play, either screen or stage, to the original. This means that next I might have to reread “To Kill a Mockingbird” to compare to the community theatre production we saw the other night. But probably not since I actually have read “To Kill a Mockingbird” many, many times. While some people are addicted to Georgian and Victorian literature, I am drawn to 20th Century literature of the South instead.