Um, no.
First of all, sorry everybody about the radio silence. I've been stuck with moving and midterms - yes, both, at the same time - but now I'm settled at St Helens (some of you may remember a bit of an explosion some twenty-nine years ago that darkened the sky, killed forests, sent ash around the whole globe and still had some left by the time it got back home, etc etc - yes, it's that St Helens) and I have Internet access, yay. So I can prattle here and I may actually get my chapter up, like, two weeks late. Apologies!
Anyway, I began this as a reply to tree's lj post about Elizabeth/Darcy here - tree.livejournal.com/448718.html - which itself was a reply to somebody else's. It stretched rather out of comment-proportion, so I'll post it here.
I checked out what's-her-name's post about Darcy/Elizabeth, and, um, totally missing the point. As tree pointed out, Darcy is equally ... cold? standoffish? superior? dismissive? - well, Darcyish - to everybody, unless he likes them.
In fact, now that I think about it, Darcy/Elizabeth works much better as a counter-argument. Between the insult and the proposal - that is, as he goes from contemptuous indifference to love - he spends nearly all their scenes together trying to engage with her intellectually. He's the only man in the whole book who seriously treats her as a 'rational creature.' Possibly the only person. Whatever his other faults, you don't get any crap about 'elegant females' from him. (Even Bingley goes off on that - and Darcy's all don't be an idiot, women should read. No wonder Mrs Gardiner liked his opinions.)
And, exactly contrary to what's-her-name's argument, his behaviour towards Elizabeth dramatically improves as he falls in love. 'Tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me' - ouch - to trying to talk about books at the Netherfield Ball to randomly going on about how lucky Mr Collins was to choose Charlotte (think about this one a moment - it would make no sense whatsoever if it weren't Collins, and so becomes a snide Darcy-compliment and totally right); not to mention the trajectory from the Letter - an even more serious expression of respect - to the Pemberley scenes.
Moreover, Austen carefully structures the novel so that Elizabeth discovers (1) he's not evil, (2) he's secretly kind, (3) now he's courteous (for various reasons, it turns out, and only sometimes, which should keep him safe from Studom but doesn't), (4) she likes him, (5) she loves him, (6) she'd accept the Hunsford proposal on the spot. Elizabeth has to know that he can at least try to be cordial before she ever considers accepting him; the fact that he behaved badly towards her, once, in a conversation with a third party, is so 'not okay' that it takes her half the novel to see past it. Love provides no excuse whatsoever.
This all is a weird inversion of typical romantic gender-dynamics, actually; she can only fall in love once she realises that he's virtuous, while he can only fall in love once he realises that she's clever. (He's treated as a sex object, too, much more than Elizabeth is. He draws the attention of an entire room just by walking into it, and men and women alike go on about his figure. It would be kind of bizarre if it weren't so awesome.) So, all in all, P&P is about the worst example of this ever. Except "Wuthering Heights" maybe.
End of rant-ramble-thingy.
Anyway, I began this as a reply to tree's lj post about Elizabeth/Darcy here - tree.livejournal.com/448718.html - which itself was a reply to somebody else's. It stretched rather out of comment-proportion, so I'll post it here.
I checked out what's-her-name's post about Darcy/Elizabeth, and, um, totally missing the point. As tree pointed out, Darcy is equally ... cold? standoffish? superior? dismissive? - well, Darcyish - to everybody, unless he likes them.
In fact, now that I think about it, Darcy/Elizabeth works much better as a counter-argument. Between the insult and the proposal - that is, as he goes from contemptuous indifference to love - he spends nearly all their scenes together trying to engage with her intellectually. He's the only man in the whole book who seriously treats her as a 'rational creature.' Possibly the only person. Whatever his other faults, you don't get any crap about 'elegant females' from him. (Even Bingley goes off on that - and Darcy's all don't be an idiot, women should read. No wonder Mrs Gardiner liked his opinions.)
And, exactly contrary to what's-her-name's argument, his behaviour towards Elizabeth dramatically improves as he falls in love. 'Tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me' - ouch - to trying to talk about books at the Netherfield Ball to randomly going on about how lucky Mr Collins was to choose Charlotte (think about this one a moment - it would make no sense whatsoever if it weren't Collins, and so becomes a snide Darcy-compliment and totally right); not to mention the trajectory from the Letter - an even more serious expression of respect - to the Pemberley scenes.
Moreover, Austen carefully structures the novel so that Elizabeth discovers (1) he's not evil, (2) he's secretly kind, (3) now he's courteous (for various reasons, it turns out, and only sometimes, which should keep him safe from Studom but doesn't), (4) she likes him, (5) she loves him, (6) she'd accept the Hunsford proposal on the spot. Elizabeth has to know that he can at least try to be cordial before she ever considers accepting him; the fact that he behaved badly towards her, once, in a conversation with a third party, is so 'not okay' that it takes her half the novel to see past it. Love provides no excuse whatsoever.
This all is a weird inversion of typical romantic gender-dynamics, actually; she can only fall in love once she realises that he's virtuous, while he can only fall in love once he realises that she's clever. (He's treated as a sex object, too, much more than Elizabeth is. He draws the attention of an entire room just by walking into it, and men and women alike go on about his figure. It would be kind of bizarre if it weren't so awesome.) So, all in all, P&P is about the worst example of this ever. Except "Wuthering Heights" maybe.
End of rant-ramble-thingy.