ThunderReaders

I know, I know…it can’t get much more tedious than this section.  Jane rides a horse in a thunderstorm, catches a bad cold, and has to stay over at Bingley’s mansion for DAYS even though it would take half an hour in a carriage to get her home.  Her mother absolutely LOVES it; in fact, she planned for it to happen!!  For entertainment value for most of Austen’s audience at the time, she is providing the ultimate fantasy: I get to stay over at my boyfriend’s house, have him and his family wait on me hand and foot, and yet nobody will think that I’m being naughty.  And best of all, he’ll really get to know me and fantasize about what it would be like to have me living in his house ALL the time. 

Believe it or not, while Jane is titillating the “Mrs. Bennets” in her reading audience,  she has some serious metaphorical fish to fry in this section.  What if Jane, disabled and passive in her sick room, symbolizes the ultimate ideal of Victorian marriage?  In fact,  is her “convalescence” that much different than Miss Bingley’s and Mrs. Hurst every day life? 

Isn’t it amazing how shocked they are that Elizabeth would hike a whole three miles and get her stockings dirty to help her sister! What would they make of the many powerful and tough female athletes and activists of our time?

Does our society encourage some of the same kind of fantasies, or some of the same kind of passiveness in young women?  Or is the issue here more the idleness of the wealthy upperclass, whose money has resulted in a passive detachment from life?

In the “post party debriefing visit” in chapter 5 we get to know more of the young ladies better, including Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth’s best friend,  Mary Bennet, the scholarly little sister, and Jane, the young woman so beautiful and kind that even the puffed up Bingley sisters think she’s ”sweet” (code for not a threat to us).  Do each of the sisters portray a part of a feminine ideal, e.g., Jane is the prettiest and nicest, Elizabeth is assertive and aware, Mary is studious and smart, Kitty and Lydia are, well, you’ll see……or, is Elizabeth herself a new ideal being shaped by Jane Austen,  a new character being written who has something of all of her sisters in her and more?

My Double Entry Journal quote is from Mary’s distinction between vanity and pride on page 16. “Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what others think of us.” Why are the ladies of Longbourn and Meryton so much more susceptible to vanity than are the men of Netherfield, while the men are at greater risk of pride? Is there a clue so far as to why Elizabeth is least susceptible to the vanity that consumes her mother and most of the women of her society?

One of the neat things about Pride and Prejudice, like most great works of literature, is that everyone in it is a READER, just like us.  The characters “reading”, or interpreting each other’s words and actions are mirrors of those of us who are interpreting the pages.  Jane Austen hits us over the head with this idea in the quick, definitive and dismissive judgment made upon Mr. Darcy at the first ball. 

Mrs. Bennet and most of the women at the ball “read” the fact that Darcy doesn’t dance with anyone he doesn’t already know as a sign of what a stuck up and terrible person he is.  And in his withering comments about the girls at the dance (including herself) that Elizabeth overhears, we’re encouraged to make the same judgment about Darcy.  In your comment on this post, try out another interpretation of Darcy’s words and behavior.  Could you defend him, putting a positive “spin”, or “reading”, on his motives? Is there any other way to interpret Darcy’s behavior besides his being an arrogant snob?

The toughest part of this novel is getting started.  The English idioms that sound so odd to our American ears (”in want of”, “Netherfield Park is let”), Mrs. Bennet’s silly discourse, the quaint topic…they all seem to spell BOOORRRRRINGGG! But stick with it. The drama gets pretty dramatic, the dilemmas pretty deep, the characters increasingly attractive and familiar.

I’d like to start our conversation about the novel by asking you about the narrator’s tone. At the end of Chapter 1, the narrator describes Mr. Bennet as an “odd mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserve and caprice.”(3)  Sounds a lot like a mirror describing the narrative voice so far in the novel.

To what extent is the difficulty of the novel’s opening due to the possibility that the narrator is being as playful with us as Mr. Bennet is being with his wife?  Could she be testing us to see whether we are as dull and self-obsessed as Mrs. Bennet, or, whether we are more like Lizzy, “who has something more of quickness than her sisters”? How are you, as a reader, becoming implicated already in the “pride” and “prejudice” of the novel?