Austen posts, March (Tumblr)
May. 30th, 2019 03:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineI wasn't super Austen-ish that month, but I did talk about P&P a few times:
I screamed in the tags about this godawful post about how P&P is about Darcy getting over his toxic masculinity:
#i read this with increasing 'the fuck?' #also: all these takes seem blissfully oblivious to the fact that elizabeth is the main character of pride and prejudice #and the primary character development is /hers/ #half her virtuous call-out is objectively false and the exact center of the book and turning point #is her realization of how far astray /her/ pride and /her/ vanity has taken her #darcy's arc serves /hers/ #(darcy is my fave but C'MON) #also it's explicitly argued in the novel that elizabeth and darcy are /wrongly/ blaming themselves for wickham #they're not really convinced so you can argue either way - but it's certainly not unambiguous #also darcy has ALWAYS protected vulnerable people to some extent - that's why mrs reynolds's testimony is so important #AND his interference is not what changes elizabeth's mind about him #the letter is the first thing to change her mind and then their shared aesthetic tastes does a little more #and then there's mrs reynolds's account that hugely impacts her and then there's darcy's own behaviour at pemberley #and she explicitly realizes she loves him while being sleepless about him during lydiagate #and her discovery of what he did comes after all of that #it's important that she falls in love with him BEFORE he shells out a ton of money for her family #i just... #god
An anon promptly sent an ask:
God I'm so tired of 'toxic masculinity' being ascribed to Darcy
I replied:
Same, jfc. I don’t know if I’m more annoyed because a) it downplays how profoundly Elizabeth is influenced by Darcy’s apparent exploitation of lower-class men and later on, his treatment of servants and tenants as classes, b) it downplays Elizabeth’s own mistakes and character development, or c) it downplays the term itself.
In relation to the same post being reblogged onto my dash again, this time uncritically, I said:
Somehow I never imagined that “Elizabeth Bennet is the protagonist of Pride and Prejudice and it is fundamentally about her character arc” would be a particularly niche opinion.
The more you know, I guess.
(This is genuinely one of my greatest pet peeves in pretty much all P&P discourse. I strongly feel that any take based on Darcy's character arc is fundamentally wrong.)
On a different note, an anon asked:
What do you think happens when Mr. and Mrs. Bennett die and Mr. Collins and Charlotte come to Longbourn? If I remember right the book notes that Kitty was kept with either Jane or Elizabeth to try to improve her (while the parents were around), but Mary was the only daughter who stayed at home, with the implication that she didn't marry. What do you think happened to Mary after the Collinses came into the estate?
I replied:
Supposedly, Austen said that Kitty married a clergyman near Pemberley, while Mary married Mr Philips’s clerk and remained in Meryton. Seems about right to me.
I screamed in the tags about this godawful post about how P&P is about Darcy getting over his toxic masculinity:
#i read this with increasing 'the fuck?' #also: all these takes seem blissfully oblivious to the fact that elizabeth is the main character of pride and prejudice #and the primary character development is /hers/ #half her virtuous call-out is objectively false and the exact center of the book and turning point #is her realization of how far astray /her/ pride and /her/ vanity has taken her #darcy's arc serves /hers/ #(darcy is my fave but C'MON) #also it's explicitly argued in the novel that elizabeth and darcy are /wrongly/ blaming themselves for wickham #they're not really convinced so you can argue either way - but it's certainly not unambiguous #also darcy has ALWAYS protected vulnerable people to some extent - that's why mrs reynolds's testimony is so important #AND his interference is not what changes elizabeth's mind about him #the letter is the first thing to change her mind and then their shared aesthetic tastes does a little more #and then there's mrs reynolds's account that hugely impacts her and then there's darcy's own behaviour at pemberley #and she explicitly realizes she loves him while being sleepless about him during lydiagate #and her discovery of what he did comes after all of that #it's important that she falls in love with him BEFORE he shells out a ton of money for her family #i just... #god
An anon promptly sent an ask:
God I'm so tired of 'toxic masculinity' being ascribed to Darcy
I replied:
Same, jfc. I don’t know if I’m more annoyed because a) it downplays how profoundly Elizabeth is influenced by Darcy’s apparent exploitation of lower-class men and later on, his treatment of servants and tenants as classes, b) it downplays Elizabeth’s own mistakes and character development, or c) it downplays the term itself.
In relation to the same post being reblogged onto my dash again, this time uncritically, I said:
Somehow I never imagined that “Elizabeth Bennet is the protagonist of Pride and Prejudice and it is fundamentally about her character arc” would be a particularly niche opinion.
The more you know, I guess.
(This is genuinely one of my greatest pet peeves in pretty much all P&P discourse. I strongly feel that any take based on Darcy's character arc is fundamentally wrong.)
On a different note, an anon asked:
What do you think happens when Mr. and Mrs. Bennett die and Mr. Collins and Charlotte come to Longbourn? If I remember right the book notes that Kitty was kept with either Jane or Elizabeth to try to improve her (while the parents were around), but Mary was the only daughter who stayed at home, with the implication that she didn't marry. What do you think happened to Mary after the Collinses came into the estate?
I replied:
Supposedly, Austen said that Kitty married a clergyman near Pemberley, while Mary married Mr Philips’s clerk and remained in Meryton. Seems about right to me.