Book Review: Pride & Prejudice

[osprey_archer]

I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time in high school, and hadn’t reread it until now. However, I’ve seen a bunch of adaptations, not least my beloved Lizzie Bennet Diaries, the modern-day vlog retelling over which I obsessed for a year. So it’s interesting to see how both the passage of time and the new light shed on the story by adaptations has changed my opinions over time.

Of course in some cases, I mean that my opinion has come full circle. In high school, I shared Elizabeth’s horror when her friend Charlotte agreed to marry that rat Mr. Collins. Later on, I grew more sympathetic to Charlotte: surely marrying Collins would be better than being a spinster in Regency England! (My recollection is that the 2005 adaptation makes this point with particular force.)

Rereading it now, it occurred to me that Jane Austen, Regency Spinster, probably has a better idea than I do what fates would be worse than being a Regency spinster, and she is absolutely right that being married to Mr. Collins would be on the list, at least for sensible, level-headed Charlotte Lucas. Moralistic Mary Bennet and Mr. Collins might have been well-suited, although they would have encouraged each other’s worst tendencies and become utterly unbearable to everyone else. Compare their reactions to Lydia’s elopement: Mary reflects piously how easily a woman’s precious reputation can be stained, while Mr. Collins writes to the Bennets to state that he’s shocked, shocked that they received Lydia at their house after the way she behaved! A match made in heaven. Pity Mr. Collins didn’t think of it.

Speaking of Lydia. Modern adaptations often seem troubled by Austen’s unsparing portrayal: she is gleefully unrepentant when she returns from her elopement with Wickham which would have destroyed her own reputation and severely injured her sisters’ future prospects, and continues just as “untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless” as ever.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, in particular, makes it one of its main projects to rehabilitate Lydia both with viewers and with her exasperated sister Lizzie. (And, let it be said, it succeeded, at least with me: Lydia is my favorite character in LBD, although it pains me to say so because I love them alllllll.) For the most part she displays that same noisy, unabashed character, although with a strain of vulnerability that Austen’s Lydia never shows… right up until the Wickham debacle, which in this version takes the form of a sex tape that Wickham intends to sell online for cash. LBD Lydia collapses like a house of cards.

Now of course this is an extremely understandable reaction, and given that aforementioned streak of vulnerability it follows naturally from Lydia’s character in the adaptation. But the adaptation would have been closer to the original if Lydia had yelled, “Woo hoo! If this sex tape goes well, I’m going to start a career as a camgirl, and then I’ll be financially independent LONG before Jane and Lizzie move out of the house!”

…actually that would be a fantastic adaptation choice, but it would definitely have alienated a lot of viewers (probably including my 2013 self) and therefore undermined LBD’s “reconcile the sisters” project.

Jane Austen hasn’t any intention of reconciling Lydia with her despairing elder sisters. She has no more sentimental investment in sisterhood than she has in marriage, or friendship, or parent-child relationships, or indeed any other human relationship that you can name. None of these relationships are either good or bad by nature: they are good or bad entirely as the individuals within them make them so. And from that point of view, there's no reason for Jane and Elizabeth to try to reconcile with Lydia: she is what she is and they are what they are, and the mere fact that they are sisters will not make them mix.

Comments

[osprey_archer]

At the end of the book, Lydia and Wickham are married, and Wickham has been posted away up north to get the happy couple away from (a) the ire of Wickham's former regiment - he fled on account of gambling debts, which Darcy has paid off, but people do bear grudges, and (b) the gossip of Lydia's neighborhood, which knows very well that Lydia and Wickham lived together for weeks before they were married.

There isn't a full-blown family estrangement, but it's clear that Elizabeth and Jane don't intend to keep in close touch with the Wickhams (partly because Wickham once almost eloped with Elizabeth's new husband's younger sister).

Perhaps I am unfair to my 2013 self, but I think that I (and, in fairness, many other viewers, both then and today) would have gone "LYDIA WHAT ARE YOU THINKING. DO NOT MAKE HOMEMADE PORN YOUR CAREER. WHAT WOULD YOUR MOTHER SAY?"

And, on a less sex-work-specific note, there *is* something alienating in the book about the fact that Lydia is so obnoxiously self-centered and utterly unaware of the misery that she's caused her family. While she was missing they were so worried that they barely ate and slept, and then she waltzes back in bragging about how she's the first in the family to get married, and move over, Jane! Now that I'm a *married woman*, I take the pride of place that was previously yours as eldest daughter!

[asakiyume]

Damn, how could I have forgotten they got married! Sheesh, that's right! And there's a marriage that's going to be miserable for both of them in five, four, three, two... now! But better than the alternative for Lydia.

She was very self-centered; I agree. And I think your 2013 self makes a good argument for not going in for a career in porn, though I guess I always feel conflicted, not about sex work (or at least, that's no where my thoughts are going right now), but on the self-fulfillment v. thinking about others question. I guess it's like so many other things and depends on what the person wants to do for self-fulfillment. Joining the Peace Corps despite daddy's wishes that you go into corporate law won't rile readers/viewers, but scamming widows out of their family fortunes meager savings despite your family's pleas that you Not Do That will.

[troisoiseaux]

But better than the alternative for Lydia.

I don't think the full significance of Lydia running away with Wickham really hit me until I watched the TV show Harlots, about sex workers in Georgian England— I can't remember if there was a character with an actually similar background or someone pointed out in a meta post that this was Lydia's other option - sex work, in a brothel if she was lucky - if Wickham hadn't been paid off to marry her, but it was like, OH. That's why she would have been Lost To Her Family Forever and Ruined Her Sisters' Chances At A Marriage.

Interestingly, there are actually two modern P&P adaptions that have gone for "sex tape" as an interpretation of the Lydia/Wickham plot— Fire Island did it as well.

[asakiyume]

Yeah, very grim :(

[osprey_archer]

One thing that I have been mulling over as I read these books is Jane Austen's vision of thinking about others, and how often it involves patient, repeated, almost daily interactions in which you never betray the fact that you are annoyed with Your Annoying Neighbor Who You Don't Like. Or in Sense and Sensibility, Marianne's over-sensibility shows in the fact that when she's unhappy, people can tell.

It's so at odds with what you might call the internet ideal of Cut Toxic People Out of Your Life - although I think it is an internet ideal partly because it's so much easier to practice on the internet... Very difficult to cut off Brad from accounting who is always talking about his bowling league for some reason. (Coworkers = the modern-day equivalent of Austen's neighbors? People who will inescapably have to interact with whether you want to or not...)

[asakiyume]

To be fair to the internet era, I think when people talk about toxic people, it's something more than just hard to put up with.

But maybe you're right, because maybe Austen kind of does expect that people should put up with even truly toxic people--thinking of Wickham, who so does not get the comeuppance he deserves (and is not cut out of people's lives).

Also I think you're right that coworkers are a good equivalent of Austen-period neighbors: people who you are going to be in contact with, willy-nilly, who you just have to deal with.

[osprey_archer]

Or you have Aunt Norris in Mansfield Park, who is constantly reminding Fanny that because she's a poor relation she's of no account, last and least wherever she goes, etc. etc. Aunt Norris ends up taking herself out of the picture at the end of the book by setting up housekeeping with the disgraced Maria, but until then there's clearly no alternative to putting up with her forever.

[landofnowhere]

As I recall, the the leverl of distancing isn't quite *that* strong -- I just looked it up:

Though Darcy could never receive him[Wickham] at Pemberley, yet, for Elizabeth’s sake, he assisted him further in his profession. Lydia was occasionally a visitor there, when her husband was gone to enjoy himself in London or Bath; and with the Bingleys they both of them frequently staid so long, that even Bingley’s good humour was overcome, and he proceeded so far as to talk of giving them a hint to be gone.

I think there's some amount of Jane and Lizzie still putting up with Lydia for the sake of family, even though they'd rather not. Sigh.

(I love LBD, because sister stories are my jam, but the Lydia there is a different character.)

[kore]

LOL damn, I thought I had checked to see if someone quoted the ending. It's totally IC with those dry updates Austen gives about how her villains are doing pretty well, and happy as far as they can be happy, being shallow superficial people &c &c.

Lydia's letter is one of those devastating indictments Austen loves to put in characters' own mouths, too. She's so great.

[osprey_archer]

Like Lucy Ferrars (nee Steele) and her husband getting the inheritance that would have been Edward's if he hadn't been disinherited for his engagement to that very same Lucy! Ice cold. Austen loves the irony.