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Tumblr crosspost (21 December 2019)
I’ve been thinking about P&P, and … one of my favourite things about it is just how ambiguous the first half is, without necessarily appearing to be so.
Almost every interaction between Darcy and Elizabeth can be read in multiple ways, depending on how you’re approaching the novel and how you align yourselves with the characters. And those readings can lead to very different senses of what’s going on; people who wholly align themselves with Elizabeth are often reading a very different book from people who are mostly reading with an eye to Darcy/Elizabeth, say.
That first half builds smoothly towards Darcy’s first proposal, Elizabeth’s rejection, the letter, and Elizabeth’s epiphany. They can feel inevitable. Or one or more of those things can come as total shocks. There are solid reasons to read from the different perspectives—it depends on what you prioritize and how you filter. But virtually everything can be read multiple ways while appearing perfectly self-evident. And the arc of the novel holds together equally well regardless of what you’re registering that arc as.
I mean, it’s not that you’re reading the book wrongly if you recognize that Darcy is the love interest and interpret him more favourably than Elizabeth does; Austen gives you plenty of opportunities to do that and insights into what’s going on with him that Elizabeth doesn’t have access to. But it’s also not reading against the grain to identify with the protagonist and see things through her perception, which is also frequently bolstered by the novel.
I see people saying that you’re “supposed” to read it one way or another and … nah. Personally, I think P&P is quite deliberately structured and written so that substantially different experiences of what’s going on are not only possible but probable.
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(I was frustrated by a lot of criticism that seemed to promote the idea of a unitary experience of that first half, when my experience is that different people read it very differently. It was so satisfying to read Wiltshire's essay that ... I don't remember the title of any more. It had a lot of psychoanalytic crap, but once he gets through that, there's some great discussion of how the novel can be read and experienced very differently depending on how you align yourself with the characters. This is always true to some extent, but P&P is written in a way to make it particularly rewarding.)
Almost every interaction between Darcy and Elizabeth can be read in multiple ways, depending on how you’re approaching the novel and how you align yourselves with the characters. And those readings can lead to very different senses of what’s going on; people who wholly align themselves with Elizabeth are often reading a very different book from people who are mostly reading with an eye to Darcy/Elizabeth, say.
That first half builds smoothly towards Darcy’s first proposal, Elizabeth’s rejection, the letter, and Elizabeth’s epiphany. They can feel inevitable. Or one or more of those things can come as total shocks. There are solid reasons to read from the different perspectives—it depends on what you prioritize and how you filter. But virtually everything can be read multiple ways while appearing perfectly self-evident. And the arc of the novel holds together equally well regardless of what you’re registering that arc as.
I mean, it’s not that you’re reading the book wrongly if you recognize that Darcy is the love interest and interpret him more favourably than Elizabeth does; Austen gives you plenty of opportunities to do that and insights into what’s going on with him that Elizabeth doesn’t have access to. But it’s also not reading against the grain to identify with the protagonist and see things through her perception, which is also frequently bolstered by the novel.
I see people saying that you’re “supposed” to read it one way or another and … nah. Personally, I think P&P is quite deliberately structured and written so that substantially different experiences of what’s going on are not only possible but probable.
-
(I was frustrated by a lot of criticism that seemed to promote the idea of a unitary experience of that first half, when my experience is that different people read it very differently. It was so satisfying to read Wiltshire's essay that ... I don't remember the title of any more. It had a lot of psychoanalytic crap, but once he gets through that, there's some great discussion of how the novel can be read and experienced very differently depending on how you align yourself with the characters. This is always true to some extent, but P&P is written in a way to make it particularly rewarding.)