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PRIDE_AND_PREJUDICE
November 6, 2020
All the girls were excited by the somewhat bland
and pleasant Bingley, but my money went down
early on the social awkward, arrogant Darcy, and
he is indeed male lead number one.
This remains part of the familiar formula to this
day: the male lead is a rude jerk, and the female
lead initially wants nothing to do with him.
The viewpoint character is a woman who is supposed
to have some intelligence and discernment, plus a
somewhat caustic wit-- the second female is her
sister, who is incredibly nicey-nice-- I mean,
*literally* incredible-- and unwilling to believe
ill of anyone-- and this one, I think is a
conventional figure that one would've hoped was
"Gone with the Wind".
What has not changed very much, is what the female
lead does to win over the male lead: absolutely
nothing. She just does her thing here and there, and
she gradually makes an impression without trying to.
She also becomes incredibly dense, refusing to
credit the obvious implication behind the fact
that he's hanging around her more-and-more often.
At one point, she's Told Things by a clearly
self-interested character, and she believes "Winter Sonata"
all of it uncritically without checking it.
That's a convention that *might* be dying "Skip Beat"
out now, but it was really tremendously
common: a manipulative third party poisons
some rather gullible minds with lies.
Unsurprisingly there are some objections to the
high born males getting it on with women who are
merely middle class, but the central objection
is not so much lack of status or money or some
issue with the woman's own behavior, but rather
the behavior of her family members. Both the
mother and youngest sister exhibit a "lack of
propriety", and the upper class males are
reluctant to adopt a family connection to them.
That was an angle of the story that I didn't see coming
at all, being an American raised in a hypothetically
egalitarianism society: I expect individuals to be
treated primarily as individuals.
There are some shifts in perception of character that
are interesting: the mother initially seems silly and
somewhat embarassing and not very intelligent, but she
gradually begins to seem positively delusional.
The youngest sisters seem flightly and amusing in their
obsession with the latest gossip about the officers in
locally stationed military, but eventually seem insanely
reckless.
The redemption of Darcy on the other hand strikes me as
rather prefunctory-- they go with the idea that he's been
concealing a streak of kindness (to servants and
animals-- which says it all about that era). That's
certainly not impossible, and possibly even believable,
but somehow not what I would expect from that character.
More likely would be something like a reputation for
being tough, but more-or-less fair (but you'd expect that
even that would be only grudgingly conceded).
"Pride an Prejudice" has a number of virtues:
The characters are mostly believable...
Even relatively minor characters, like, the adopted
poor relation who likes to spread damaging stories
seems psychological plausible-- perhaps to some extent
he psyches himself up to believe these smears?
The title suggests the main characters are to be taken
as studies in "pride"-- the secondary "prejudice" may be
the one I care about, the worries about lack of decorum
in the heroine's family...
I wonder if, to this day, the back-biting
whispering campaign remains a standard tool
of the normies to enforce normality.
The damning sin of "lack of propriety":
could it be it's making a come-back?
The guardians of normality may
still be with us, quitely ruling
the lands of corporate hiring...
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