In her essay, “Pemberly Previsited,” novelist Allegra Goodman, writing about Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice, says on rereading books: “I think unfolding is what rereading is all about...The text reveals different parts of its pattern at different times...And yet every time ...the reader adds new wrinkles. Memory and experience press themselves into each reading so that each encounter informs the next” (983).
I agree with Goodman. When I was young I tried to read as many different new books as possible to improve my education, but now I read fewer new books, while I often reread the ones I have in my library. Pride and Prejudice is among my two or three favorite books.
Imagine you are Winston Churchill. You are the prime minister of England, a nation under siege by Nazi Germany during World War II. You are trying to recover from pneumonia. What book would you have chosen to inspire you? Not the Bible or Shakespeare, but Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, a novel some consider a “chick flick” and a light comedy.
At first sight the content seems the stuff of a typical romantic comedy. It is the story of a family, the Bennets, which stands to lose its property because it is entailed to the male line. At the father's death the mother and the five daughters will not inherit their home,. They risk ending up in the street. In the late 1700 it was not considered proper for educated women to hold a job, and it was easy to exclude them from owning property. In the story, the most obvious solution is for the sisters to marry well so they can save the family from future economic want.
Elizabeth, the second of the Bennet sisters and the protagonist of the story, is an intelligent and strong willed woman, reluctant to lose her integrity and to adulate a man just because he owns property and is an eligible match. After surpassing many obstacles caused in part by social conventions and in part by the protagonists' misunderstandings, Elizabeth will marry the wealthy, good looking, and honest Mr. Darcy. All characters end up in good circumstances. As critics have noted, “no one dies in Pride and Prejudice.”
Although Churchill derived great comfort from this novel, he was critical of its lightheartedness. In his memoir, World War Two, he says, “What calm lives they had, those people! No worries about the French Revolution or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars” (780). But, if Churchill wanted a lofty epic on the Napoleonic Wars, why didn't he choose to read War and Peace instead?
As a high school student I did not want to read Jane Austen or the other female writers of the period. High school in Europe is very demanding, and I, like most teenagers, considered myself too serious to be reading a “novel for women.” In Italy this British novel was not required reading.
At a time of no Internet and very limited television, I decided the best way to learn about other cultures was to read novels. I equated Tolstoy to a reporter for National Geographic. I was fascinated with his novel, War and Peace, and wished I had been born in Russia, where in my mind sophisticated people must be spending all their time pondering important existential questions. Then I went on an organized trip to Russia and saw that life there had nothing in common with War and Peace. The mental image I had garnered from books, or the image the writer had in mind, were not “reality.”
This is also the discovery made by Elizabeth Bennet, the protagonist of Pride and Prejudice, of which the original title was, aptly, First Impressions. At first Elizabeth believes Mr. Darcy unjust. She bases herself on what she thinks are rational observations; but in reality her opinion is affected by her wounded pride. Elizabeth dislikes Darcy because when they first met at a ball, she heard him declare that she was not “handsome enough to tempt [him]” (Austen 7). Darcy has prejudices of his own, which he also will have to dispel before he can win Elizabeth's esteem and affections.
When Elizabeth and Darcy admit that they are not infallible, they learn to exercise more introspection and more understanding for other people in their society. Elizabeth goes from the declaration, “the more I see of the world, the more I am dissatisfied with it” (Austen 104), to an understanding that her biases influence how she sees the world: “Till this moment, I never knew myself” (Austen 159). Looking back on my life as a teenager I realize how much I was like Elizabeth. I had pride in my intellect, and I certainly had opinions, and not very flattering ones, about everybody. Like Elizabeth, I changed.
I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time when I was in my forties. I had moved to the United States and, like most middle class people, I was happy with what was happening in the country. During the Clinton administration we experienced a stunning economic boom, and we believed all the rules: if we studied hard and worked hard, we would have employment for the rest of our life, and we would be able to buy our own house. No economic worries would disrupt our marriage – divorce was something that happened to someone else. I also had accomplished a great deal; I had bought a house with my salary as a computer programmer, and I was happily married.
Likewise, in Pride and Prejudice all goes well. The two eldest Bennet sisters marry two wealthy nice men, with whom they are truly in love. The family is reassured that it will be provided for in the event of the father's death. Even Lydia, the young flirting sister, and Charlotte, Elizabeth's plain friend, will have a decent marriage, although not a fairy-tale one. As William Deresiewicz wrote in New Yorker Magazine on occasion of the recent bicentennial of the novel, “In many of [Jane Austen's] novels, there is something troubling about the way that things work out. But not in Pride and Prejudice. Here she gives us everything we want.”
The fact that we believed we were as fortunate as the protagonists explains not only the popularity of Austen's book, but also the cult-like success of its British television adaptation, made in 1995 by BBC in six episodes. Every detail is perfect in that movie. Colin Firth, the handsome actor playing Mr. Darcy, became a star. The characters, such as the pompous Mr. Collins who is expected inherit the Bennet estate, or the imperious Lady Catherine De Bourgh, who tries to prevent Elizabeth from marrying above her station, are as unforgettable as those in a Shakespearean comedy, and were played by British actors who seemed to have been born to impersonate them.
I loved the score, although I am not a classical music buff. Some of the music was original, but most of it was from the great classical composers of Austen's time. The choreography of the country dances prominent in the novel was reconstructed from period teaching manuals, and splendidly performed. The series was filmed on site in England, in beautiful palaces and country estates. It seemed that the England of the story, as the U.S. of the Clinton presidency, was nothing but glamorous.
But it did not last. As I entered my late forties it was clear that the Great Recession started in the U.S. during the Bush presidency was here to stay. The unemployment rate and losses faced by the middle class were due to structural problems, not a temporary fluke. We became discouraged about the validity of our creeds and about the possibility to change anything. Jane Austen could have told us not to hope too much in changes of fortune. In Pride and Prejudice she mentions the end of the Napoleonic Wars only in passing, to comment on the fact that Lydia Bennet's imprudent lifestyle did not become more settled after the war was over.
In hard times I returned to my Pride and Prejudice video, and I kept the book at my bedside when, after losing my job, I could not sleep. I did not know why I reread this book – I only knew that it cheered me up. However, I now realize that the background of the novel is similar to what we are experiencing in the United States. We as the middle class had played by the rules, by getting an education and by being careful not to overspend our income, and yet we were losing our jobs and homes – this fate was not supposed to happen to us.
In the novel this situation is echoed by the economic problems of the Bennet family and of most of the educated women in Austen's times. The Bennets had not done anything to cause their property to be entailed to a stranger. Only because of a whim and an unjust law, all their possessions were going to be taken by a male distant relative. Having an education and a good brain would not prevent women from descending into poverty. Like us, middle class women in Austen's times had no economic security.
Also, the war on terror in the U.S. in the 2000 has similarities with the situation experienced by England during the Napoleonic Wars at the end of the 1700. Both countries were engaged in war abroad, but had the constant preoccupation that their homeland could be attacked. Jane Austen was aware of this climate in her country as she was writing her books. Her father, a parson, was in a precarious financial situation, and Austen, as a woman, had difficulty selling her books to make a living. She also died relatively young, at 41, of an illness, and this resonated with me because I also have been ill, and I know an increasing number of people who have cancer. Now, like in Austen's time, incurable illness has become common.
Yet Jane Austen's novel is not heavy with denunciations of social problems. People survive, and experience an interior life and personal concerns apart from public ones. The characters are not overwhelmed by their circumstances. For this reason Joshua Rothman, in his article on The New Yorker, notes, “Growing older involves making compromises, and I suppose that [the story] has something to do with it. But I’ve also become more familiar with the importance, in life, of choice. In a lot of ways, that’s what Pride and Prejudice is about: how we make choices.” To me it is evident that this novel was written during the Enlightenment: it reminds us in dire moments we are still allowed some ability to choose, if we can keep our rational mind.
Fiona Stafford, a professor at Oxford University, in her introduction to the Oxford Library version of Pride and Prejudice says, “[The] tendency to treat matters of national concern with humor or silence [can be interpreted as a sign of] courageous defiance.” She talks about Austen's “ irrepressible resilience,” and says that “the novel emerges triumphantly from the gloomiest surrounding.” I agree with her. Only a person of great courage and wisdom could face the problems of her time and of her personal life with a sense of humor, and teach us how to face problems in our lives. Great works of art can be deceptively simple.
Works Cited
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice.
New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. Print.
Churchill, Winston. Memoirs of the Second World War.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1959. Print.
Deresiewicz, William. “Happy Two-Hundredth Birthday, 'Pride and Prejudice.'”
The New Yorker. Conde' Nast, 28 Jan. 2013. Web. 6 May 2013.
Goodman, Allegra. “Pemberly Previsited.” The Norton Reader. 13th ed.
Ed. Linda Peterson et al. New York: Norton, 2011. 978-983. Print.
Rothman, Joshua. “On Charlotte Lucas's Choice.”
The New Yorker. Conde' Nast, 7 Feb. 2013. Web. 6 May 2013.
Stafford, Fiona. Introduction. Pride and Prejudice. By Jane Austen.
New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment