Tumblr crosspost (1 August 2019)
Sep. 25th, 2019 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineAn anon asked:
i just reread pride & prejudice and noticed three separate times elizabeth reflects on "having something yet to wish for" or a situation not living up to her expectations - when lydia leaves for brighton and they have a little peace and quiet but she's still unhappy, when the trip to the lakes is abbreviated, and when she's engaged with her family's consent but her mom is still annoying. is this just a random theme? i don't see how it ties back into the central elizabeth/darcy relationship.
I said:
Oh, interesting! I’m not sure I’d say that it’s a random theme, but yes, I do think it flows pretty neatly into the more general theme of P&P. Things are rarely as simple and straightforward as we expect they are/will be. Almost everything has complicating factors that work against their overall thrust.
I would say that it’s especially present for Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship, because oversimplifying what’s going on around them and then getting confronted by more complex realities is … pretty central to their relationship, and imo to Elizabeth’s character development in particular.
It’s not that she doesn’t continue to form oversimplified expectations, because she totally does (it’s why she misunderstands Darcy right up to the end of the book, I think, not only up to Hunsford). But I feel that the importance of the pattern is perhaps more a matter of how she responds to the more complex realities she continually faces than whether she does.
That is, for much of the book, she tends to “lalala whatever” or “ALL IS IN RUINS” when things run counter to her expectations. But by the end, she’s grown to … neither laughing off complications nor being devastated by them. It’s more a matter of giving them appropriate perspective—taking them seriously, but proportionately. So we could see it as part of her character arc in particular, and Austen’s moral vision in P&P more generally.
i just reread pride & prejudice and noticed three separate times elizabeth reflects on "having something yet to wish for" or a situation not living up to her expectations - when lydia leaves for brighton and they have a little peace and quiet but she's still unhappy, when the trip to the lakes is abbreviated, and when she's engaged with her family's consent but her mom is still annoying. is this just a random theme? i don't see how it ties back into the central elizabeth/darcy relationship.
I said:
Oh, interesting! I’m not sure I’d say that it’s a random theme, but yes, I do think it flows pretty neatly into the more general theme of P&P. Things are rarely as simple and straightforward as we expect they are/will be. Almost everything has complicating factors that work against their overall thrust.
I would say that it’s especially present for Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship, because oversimplifying what’s going on around them and then getting confronted by more complex realities is … pretty central to their relationship, and imo to Elizabeth’s character development in particular.
It’s not that she doesn’t continue to form oversimplified expectations, because she totally does (it’s why she misunderstands Darcy right up to the end of the book, I think, not only up to Hunsford). But I feel that the importance of the pattern is perhaps more a matter of how she responds to the more complex realities she continually faces than whether she does.
That is, for much of the book, she tends to “lalala whatever” or “ALL IS IN RUINS” when things run counter to her expectations. But by the end, she’s grown to … neither laughing off complications nor being devastated by them. It’s more a matter of giving them appropriate perspective—taking them seriously, but proportionately. So we could see it as part of her character arc in particular, and Austen’s moral vision in P&P more generally.