Tumblr crosspost (16 November 2020)
Mar. 6th, 2024 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineAn anon said (in response to this post):
A thing that annoys me too about that P&P is that, well, in that scene, he’s right. She *has* been willfully misunderstanding him, basing her opinion of him around “mean gossip” and accounts of biased people. But people kind of act like Darcy is the only one who has to change his behavior in P&P and it’s :/
I replied:
Hmm. At that point, I don’t think her judgment is skewed by other people so much as by her own pride; the scene happens before she meets Wickham, say. But she’s still hearing and perceiving everything Darcy does through a heavy filter, and while he doesn’t fully understand it, I agree that he is fundamentally right in that moment.
That is, I think that Elizabeth tends to class people into types that she can make generalizations about, usually in the service of her self-assurance, rather than accounting for the individual qualities that she would have been perfectly capable of perceiving if not for, well, willfully misunderstanding people. It is her core flaw, and I agree that it’s often overlooked in the uneven treatment of their characters.
And yeah, I think changing Darcy’s delivery from a smiling rebuttal to angry UST obscures that. It’s easy to see him as just being an asshole and frustrated by the interchange, rather than genuinely and intelligently interested in a philosophical discussion of human and individual nature.
(As a side note, that debate was a particularly major point of dispute at the time. Many of the topics he brings up are tied to major contemporary debates that he seems to be trying to draw her into.)
A thing that annoys me too about that P&P is that, well, in that scene, he’s right. She *has* been willfully misunderstanding him, basing her opinion of him around “mean gossip” and accounts of biased people. But people kind of act like Darcy is the only one who has to change his behavior in P&P and it’s :/
I replied:
Hmm. At that point, I don’t think her judgment is skewed by other people so much as by her own pride; the scene happens before she meets Wickham, say. But she’s still hearing and perceiving everything Darcy does through a heavy filter, and while he doesn’t fully understand it, I agree that he is fundamentally right in that moment.
That is, I think that Elizabeth tends to class people into types that she can make generalizations about, usually in the service of her self-assurance, rather than accounting for the individual qualities that she would have been perfectly capable of perceiving if not for, well, willfully misunderstanding people. It is her core flaw, and I agree that it’s often overlooked in the uneven treatment of their characters.
And yeah, I think changing Darcy’s delivery from a smiling rebuttal to angry UST obscures that. It’s easy to see him as just being an asshole and frustrated by the interchange, rather than genuinely and intelligently interested in a philosophical discussion of human and individual nature.
(As a side note, that debate was a particularly major point of dispute at the time. Many of the topics he brings up are tied to major contemporary debates that he seems to be trying to draw her into.)