crosspost: individual and social claims (again)

[anghraine]

An anon on Tumblr asked (in reference to a post I don't remember):

"(It’s not invariable, but most often, Elizabeth tends to argue for adherence to social mores and accepted generalities, while Darcy insists on attention to individuality and specific circumstances.)" Do you mean in canon or in fic?

 

Canon. 

Darcy cares about propriety, but tends to process it through individual qualities and what is justified by specific circumstances (as determined by Fitzwilliam Darcy, of course!). For himself, he admits outright that he doesn’t fit societal expectations and isn’t comfortable with them, but /shrug. 

Elizabeth cares about propriety too, but in a vaguer sense that she applies globally: what people should do instead of specific individuals. Her ideas about how people should behave are much less strict than Darcy’s—general values applied widely—but also less negotiable, less inclined to make exceptions or allowances.

Jane explicitly points it out, but it also crops up in a lot of Darcy and Elizabeth’s arguments. I talked a bit about that here.

This is very definitely not the case in fic/adaptations. Even though Elizabeth’s high value for social norms and tendency to collapse individual traits into general assumptions causes a lot of her problems, she’s often presented as this fierce individualist revolting against social convention.

The reverse causes a lot of Darcy’s problems, too! That is, both Darcy and Elizabeth have underlying assumptions that they don’t think about reconsidering even in the face of contrary evidence. But it’s in very different ways: Elizabeth filters out the details that don’t fit her preconceptions, while Darcy recognizes those details but doesn’t connect them to his preconceptions.

He’d like Bingley to marry Georgiana even though he’s (probably) the son of a tradesman, because he’d make such a good husband—Bingley, specifically, is gentle and nice, so w/e. Darcy can (just) get himself past Elizabeth’s connections in trade because she’s special and he loves her, and Jane is pretty much flawless so clearly another exception, and Charlotte’s father may be an appropriately embarrassing former tradesman but Collins is very lucky to have happened into marrying her, she’s different, and—ad infinitum. He can quickly see the value of people his snobbery should reject, and exempt them from it, but the snobbery itself goes unquestioned.

When Elizabeth actually grasps that there’s a truth contrary to her worldview, by contrast, she does reconsider her worldview and her entire character. The trouble is getting there.

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[kungfunurse]

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