Pride and Prejudice and rereads
I'm currently rereading Pride and Prejudice (thanks, Project Gutenberg!) and I've been struck by a few things in this reread.
1. Mr. Bennet really is an awful person. I always liked him because he has many of the funniest lines and thought that his flaws just made him human but as I reread I cannot help but feel like his flaws go too far. Maybe now that I am married and have a child I have a different perspective but I cannot excuse his failures as a husband and father--which ought to be his priority in life. He not only fails to check and correct the weaknesses of his family members, but goes beyond that failure to encourage them in their vanity, foolishness, impulsivity, and imprudence, so as to have more material to mock. He not only mocks within his own family circle, but goes beyond that to at best fail to shield, and at worst outright expose them to public shame. He openly shows favoritism and doesn't even pretend to have the barest affection for his younger daughters. He seems close to having a breakthrough later in the book, but then due to another character's riding to the rescue, he reverts back to his old self. I have to find him contemptible.
2. Everyone is way younger than we think. I think the miniseries and film are only partly responsible for this. Consider Mrs. Gardiner. According to the text, she was last in Lambton "10 or 12 years ago, before her marriage" (emphasis mine) and her oldest child (from textual clues) is certainly no more than 9. (Edit: Got further in the reread and the oldest child is 8.) Given average marriage ages for her class, she surely cannot be older than 35, and could potentially be as young as 28 or 30! This would make her much more on par with an older sister to Jane and Elizabeth, rather than a surrogate mother, and rereading the paragraphs of interaction with that age gap in mind, I was struck immediately that this is exactly the tone that Mrs. Gardiner takes towards Elizabeth--worldly wise older sister, NOT mother figure. Yet in the miniseries she was played by an actress of 48, and (incredibly) in the 2005 film she was played by an actress of 59!
I think a big reason for this is that people used to act older sooner, or rather, that people nowadays act "young" (young = fun, sexy and carefree) for as long as they can possibly get away with it, making textual cues of dress, lifestyle choice and behavior cause us to guess that people are much older than they are. It is hard for us to imagine nowadays that the coldly correct, societal arbiter "matrons" who were the patronesses of Almack's had an average age of about 27. No 27-year-old today would want to be described by herself or by anyone as a matron. Hardly any woman of 50 would want to be described as a matron! Nowadays there are people in their sixties lamenting that they feel too young to be grandparents. My mother said that when her grandmother was 50, she seemed completely ancient, wore "old lady" clothes, and considered herself an old lady. My mother is nearly 70 and I don't think there's an item in her closet that would be described as "old ladyish". The 80 and 90 year olds of my acquaintance dress and act younger than many of the 50 year olds in old books.
My mother feels this is a great thing. I'm not so sure that it is.
3. Elizabeth really does act like an idiot in the first passages with Wickham. It's not just a hindsight thing--it should be obvious at first hearing that [Spoiler (click to open)]he is blatantly contradicting himself by exposing (to a near total stranger, this is only their second conversation ever) Mr. Darcy's supposed evil deeds in one breath and in the very next claiming that he would never expose Mr. Darcy publicly out of respect for his father. He is a double-talker from the very beginning and this is obvious. She truly is blinded by her prejudice and eagerness to believe wrong of Mr. Darcy. This actually makes me happier with Elizabeth though because I kind of thought she was too hard on herself in her reaction to The Letter on prior reads. Now I see that she really was justly criticizing herself, and that means that she was able to change herself.
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I'm feeling too wiped out--party last night was very fun but we didn't get home until 1am and Pippa did not fall asleep until she was in the carseat for the ride home--after midnight, or approximately FOUR HOURS past her bedtime. She was definitely hard to handle for those last four hours. We were all playing Trivial Pursuit and to be honest I really wanted to go home but some others seemed to really really really want to finish the game so towards the end I was just like "WHATEVER, ANSWER, ROLL, LET'S MOVE ON."
The Husband and I won--our nearest competitor had only four pie pieces as I recall--I don't think our winning was ever really in doubt which kind of made it extra frustrating because I felt internal pressure to win to end the game (whereas normally I'm not competitive about these kinds of games). There were five teams so going through a single round took foreverrrrrr. If Pippa hadn't been on constant meltdown-verge, it would have been pure fun, and it still WAS fun, but worry about her made it a bit less fun.
Over all though the party was really great. :)
1. Mr. Bennet really is an awful person. I always liked him because he has many of the funniest lines and thought that his flaws just made him human but as I reread I cannot help but feel like his flaws go too far. Maybe now that I am married and have a child I have a different perspective but I cannot excuse his failures as a husband and father--which ought to be his priority in life. He not only fails to check and correct the weaknesses of his family members, but goes beyond that failure to encourage them in their vanity, foolishness, impulsivity, and imprudence, so as to have more material to mock. He not only mocks within his own family circle, but goes beyond that to at best fail to shield, and at worst outright expose them to public shame. He openly shows favoritism and doesn't even pretend to have the barest affection for his younger daughters. He seems close to having a breakthrough later in the book, but then due to another character's riding to the rescue, he reverts back to his old self. I have to find him contemptible.
2. Everyone is way younger than we think. I think the miniseries and film are only partly responsible for this. Consider Mrs. Gardiner. According to the text, she was last in Lambton "10 or 12 years ago, before her marriage" (emphasis mine) and her oldest child (from textual clues) is certainly no more than 9. (Edit: Got further in the reread and the oldest child is 8.) Given average marriage ages for her class, she surely cannot be older than 35, and could potentially be as young as 28 or 30! This would make her much more on par with an older sister to Jane and Elizabeth, rather than a surrogate mother, and rereading the paragraphs of interaction with that age gap in mind, I was struck immediately that this is exactly the tone that Mrs. Gardiner takes towards Elizabeth--worldly wise older sister, NOT mother figure. Yet in the miniseries she was played by an actress of 48, and (incredibly) in the 2005 film she was played by an actress of 59!
I think a big reason for this is that people used to act older sooner, or rather, that people nowadays act "young" (young = fun, sexy and carefree) for as long as they can possibly get away with it, making textual cues of dress, lifestyle choice and behavior cause us to guess that people are much older than they are. It is hard for us to imagine nowadays that the coldly correct, societal arbiter "matrons" who were the patronesses of Almack's had an average age of about 27. No 27-year-old today would want to be described by herself or by anyone as a matron. Hardly any woman of 50 would want to be described as a matron! Nowadays there are people in their sixties lamenting that they feel too young to be grandparents. My mother said that when her grandmother was 50, she seemed completely ancient, wore "old lady" clothes, and considered herself an old lady. My mother is nearly 70 and I don't think there's an item in her closet that would be described as "old ladyish". The 80 and 90 year olds of my acquaintance dress and act younger than many of the 50 year olds in old books.
My mother feels this is a great thing. I'm not so sure that it is.
3. Elizabeth really does act like an idiot in the first passages with Wickham. It's not just a hindsight thing--it should be obvious at first hearing that [Spoiler (click to open)]he is blatantly contradicting himself by exposing (to a near total stranger, this is only their second conversation ever) Mr. Darcy's supposed evil deeds in one breath and in the very next claiming that he would never expose Mr. Darcy publicly out of respect for his father. He is a double-talker from the very beginning and this is obvious. She truly is blinded by her prejudice and eagerness to believe wrong of Mr. Darcy. This actually makes me happier with Elizabeth though because I kind of thought she was too hard on herself in her reaction to The Letter on prior reads. Now I see that she really was justly criticizing herself, and that means that she was able to change herself.
---
I'm feeling too wiped out--party last night was very fun but we didn't get home until 1am and Pippa did not fall asleep until she was in the carseat for the ride home--after midnight, or approximately FOUR HOURS past her bedtime. She was definitely hard to handle for those last four hours. We were all playing Trivial Pursuit and to be honest I really wanted to go home but some others seemed to really really really want to finish the game so towards the end I was just like "WHATEVER, ANSWER, ROLL, LET'S MOVE ON."
The Husband and I won--our nearest competitor had only four pie pieces as I recall--I don't think our winning was ever really in doubt which kind of made it extra frustrating because I felt internal pressure to win to end the game (whereas normally I'm not competitive about these kinds of games). There were five teams so going through a single round took foreverrrrrr. If Pippa hadn't been on constant meltdown-verge, it would have been pure fun, and it still WAS fun, but worry about her made it a bit less fun.
Over all though the party was really great. :)